In January 2008 we went on a family holiday to Kenya. I flew out first with Leah and her fiancé, Jack, as Ronnie had to stay in London for the launch of Martin Scorsese’s Stones film, Shine a Light. I was excited about returning to Kenya: we had first visited after my dad had died, a wonderful holiday during which Lize ran off with our safari guide and ended up living in Africa for six months with a pet bush-baby. This holiday was going to be a particularly special one, though, as it was the last I would be taking with my daughter before she and Jack got married in June.
When I’d been there for a few days, I called Ronnie to see how he was getting on. When he answered the phone I could hear loud music and voices in the background. He explained he was staying in a hotel in London.
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘We only live in Kingston.’
‘I’m with Jimmy White,’ he said, dodging the question. ‘Man, we’ve been out drinking for days . . .’
I felt a horrible, twitchy anxiety in the pit of my stomach. What was he up to? But I knew from experience that there was no point in giving him the third degree, so I just told him I was looking forward to seeing him in a few days and left him to it – whatever it was.
Ronnie flew to Kenya with Jamie, who was still working as his manager and had proved himself the best of the lot. His business instinct was always spot-on: in a few years he’d turned Ronnie into the biggest-selling print artist in the US. When the pair of them got off the speedboat at the resort, my first thought was that Ronnie looked awful. His skin had a grey tinge and he had an infection in one eye, which was swollen and weeping. I settled him into a hammock near our little hut on the beach where he promptly fell asleep, then went back and started his unpacking. Jamie appeared at the door.
‘Mum,’ he said, quietly. ‘Do yourself a favour and break the Sim card in Dad’s phone.’
‘Why?’
‘I can’t tell you,’ he said. ‘But make sure you do it, or you’re not going to enjoy your holiday.’
Jamie flatly refused to give me any other details but he clearly felt it was important, so I promised to do as I was told. Ronnie usually clung to his phone for dear life, but I noticed the charger was plugged into a socket in our room so I followed the lead to a pocket of one of his shirts that was hanging on the back of a chair with a pile of towels covering it. I retrieved the phone (I admit I thought about sneaking a look at his texts but was worried he’d wake up), took out the Sim card, gently snapped it, then quickly put everything back the way I’d found it.
Ronnie started to stir. ‘Hi, honey!’ I said. ‘How are you doing? Good sleep?’
‘Oh . . . yeah . . . hi . . .’
‘I’m going up to the restaurant for lunch,’ I said. ‘Shall I see you there?’
Some 10 minutes later Ronnie appeared at the table, absolutely furious.
‘What the fuck is wrong with this phone?’ He held it out to me, his face like thunder.
‘Ooh, goodness, don’t ask me. I’m useless with things like that,’ I said. ‘You could always use my phone or the landline?’
He spent the rest of that afternoon trying to work out what was wrong with it, but I’d snapped the Sim in such a way that you couldn’t tell it had been tampered with. His terrible mood lasted a few days, but eventually he calmed down and we had a lovely-ish holiday, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind.
We had been back in London for a week when I was woken at 4 a.m. by the beep of Ronnie’s phone, which was now working. He was snoring away, totally oblivious (and I was still curious about what Jamie had asked to do me in Kenya), so I reached over and looked at the screen. It was a text: ‘Hi Ronnie. Not been working. Keeping myself to myself. Please send money. E.’
I stared at the message. What the hell was that about? And who was ‘E’? I took down the number and then, in a panic at being discovered snooping, pressed delete.
When Ronnie woke the next morning I told him I’d picked up his phone in the night to stop it beeping and thought I might possibly have deleted a text by accident. He went absolutely mental–‘Don’t you ever fucking touch my phone again!’–and stormed out, but later that day I overheard him asking our housekeeper, Jenny, to get him some cash. The twitchiness in my stomach got worse.
In the months before Leah’s wedding, Ronnie’s behaviour grew even shiftier than usual. He went to Ireland for a few days, then phoned to tell me he was back in London and had checked into a hotel – but when I got to the hotel he wasn’t there. Then, suddenly, he acquired another phone, which he said had been given to him by Steve Bing, the producer of Shine a Light (and father of Liz Hurley’s son). I didn’t want to think about his reasons for needing two phones.
Leah had told Ronnie that she didn’t want him walking her down the aisle if he’d been drinking, so to my relief he agreed to go back to the Priory in preparation for the wedding. As usual, I thought the booze had been to blame for his weirdness.
A few days into his stay, the Priory called the house to ask if Ronnie was there.
‘Of course he’s not,’ I said. ‘He’s with you.’
‘I’m afraid he’s disappeared,’ they said. ‘We can’t find him, so we assumed he must have gone home. We can’t reach him on his phone. I’m sorry, Mrs Wood, but we don’t know where he is.’
Frantic with worry, I kept trying his phone and eventually he answered.
‘Ronnie, where the hell are you?’
‘Oh, I couldn’t take the Priory any more,’ he said. I could tell he was drunk. ‘I’ve checked into a hotel in Richmond.’
‘But Richmond is five minutes away from here!’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you just come home?’
‘Look, I’m coming home now, all right?’
He appeared at the door with a weird mark on his cheek, clearly wrecked. I fixed him up, but soon after that he disappeared again – just walked out and didn’t come home for days. It was such a stressful time. If I hadn’t had the preparations for Leah’s wedding to keep me busy I would have had so many sleepless nights.
I was at a promotional event in Fenwick’s, the department store, for the launch of my new product range, Jo Wood Everyday, when my close friend, Fran Cutler, rang.
‘Jo, can you talk? There’s something I think you should know.’
I’d first met Fran back in the nineties at one of Mick and Jerry’s parties and we’d instantly felt like we’d known each other for years. She’s one of my best girlfriends and I trust her totally. Fran told me she had been at a gig in Hammersmith and had seen Ronnie there with another woman. My initial thought was that the girl would have been one of a group of his mates and I told Fran as much, but she was adamant there was more to it than that.
‘I promise you, Jo, everyone in London knows what’s going on,’ she said. ‘You’re the only one who doesn’t. I’m so sorry.’
‘Come on, Fran, don’t do this to me.’
I was standing in the middle of the beauty hall in Fenwick’s, people hovering nearby, waiting to talk to me, and my friend was basically telling me – what? That my husband was having an affair? I’d learnt a long time ago not to listen to rumours, so I told her not to worry and that I’d call her later.
But when I got home to discover that Ronnie had disappeared again, I found it impossible to get what Fran had told me out of my mind, and when I noticed that Ronnie had left the Steve Bing mobile behind I had an idea. I dug out the number I’d copied down from the text message from ‘E’ and rang it from his phone.
‘Hello?’ A girl’s voice, but in the background I heard a man say, ‘Who’s that, then? Another of your boyfriends?’ It was Ronnie.
‘Put him on the phone,’ I said, as calmly as I could.
‘What?’
‘I know Ronnie’s with you. Put him on the phone right now.’
She hung up, so I called Ronnie straight back on his mobile.
‘What’s going on, Ronnie?’
‘Listen, she’s just my drinking buddy,’ he said. ‘She’s a really sweet girl – you’d like her.’
‘Well, if she’s a really sweet girl, why don’t you bring her home? Let’s all meet this new drinking buddy!’
And, an hour later, that was exactly what he did.
The pair of them fell out of the taxi onto our drive in a drunken heap. The girl – who couldn’t have been more than 18 or 19–seemed totally wrecked. As she picked herself up, I was staring at her, thinking, Surely my husband’s not sleeping with this . . . child? Fran must have got the wrong end of the stick. They must be drinking buddies, like Ronnie said. They can’t possibly be having sex . . .
I led them into the kitchen, where Ty, Leah and Jack, who had been at home and knew what was going on, were waiting around the table.
‘This is Katia,’ said Ronnie, beaming at us.
The girl slumped at the table and started fumbling with a packet of cigarettes.
‘What are you doing hanging out with our dad?’ said Ty. ‘He’s old enough to be your grandfather.’
‘Age makes no difference to me,’ she slurred, sticking a cigarette into her mouth, then going to the stove and lighting the hob.
Oh, go right ahead! I thought. You’ve taken my husband – why not help yourself to my gas?
She bent down to light her cigarette and–whoosh! The front of her hair went up in flames. Quickly (perhaps a little too quickly, with hindsight) I grabbed a dishcloth and damped it out. I’m not sure she’d noticed she’d caught fire.
‘Hey, let’s watch the Eurovision Song Contest!’ she suddenly said.
This was turning into the most surreal encounter of my life.
As we walked to the living room she tripped and fell, then staggered to her feet and plonked herself on my couch.
‘Ain’t she funny, Jo?’ Ronnie was looking at her fondly. ‘She reminds me of you when you were young.’
‘She does?’ Oh, God . . .
And then she passed out, swiftly followed by Ronnie.
I went back to the kitchen. ‘Jack, let’s call a cab and get her out of here,’ I said, wearily. I went up to bed, utterly exhausted.
The next day all my attempts to talk to Ronnie about the girl were met with the same response: drinking buddy, drinking buddy, drinking buddy.
A few weeks before the wedding, Ronnie and I went to the Myar clinic, a health farm in Austria, for a bit of R and R – and, considering I drank nothing but herbal tea and ate only dry bread and sheep’s milk yogurt, I’m definitely not talking Rock ’n’ Roll.
We arrived in our room and were unpacking when Ronnie pulled out a stuffed owl from his suitcase and laid it tenderly on our bed.
‘Ronnie, what’s that?’
‘This? Just my little owl.’
‘I can see that,’ I said. ‘But why on earth have you got it with you?’
It wasn’t even a nice stuffed owl – it looked cheap and highly flammable.
‘Oh, it’s just from some fan.’ He shrugged.
‘Ronnie, you’re nearly sixty-two. Why would you bring a stuffed toy on holiday? It’s just weird.’
He eventually agreed to put it back in his suitcase, and we had a nice week together – until the last day. I strolled back to our room in a relaxed haze after a wonderful massage and walked in to find Ronnie sitting with our dinner and, to my astonishment, a large neat vodka.
‘I just got this as a little treat for us!’ he said.
Quite how he’d found vodka at a health farm I have no idea.
Sunday, 1 June, was Ronnie’s 62nd birthday. The whole family was there: all the kids and their kids. In the morning, Ronnie and I dug up new potatoes and picked cabbage from the garden, then Jack and I cooked roast lamb and chicken. When we’d finished eating, the grandkids crowded around Ronnie at his end of the table and led the chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’. All the next week, the two of us hung around Holmwood together. I was finishing decorating one of the rooms; Ronnie was watching TV, sketching, playing the guitar – with not a single sip of booze, a single line of cocaine. Please, I kept telling myself, just keep it up . . .
It was the night before Leah’s wedding and the house was full. My siblings and their families were all staying; my best friend Lorraine had flown in from New York with her kids; there were people camped out in every room. The reception was going to be held in a huge bamboo marquee in our garden, where we would be hosting an organic dinner for 150 and an after-party for at least double that number. I was so excited about our daughter’s wedding day, and preoccupied with everything I still had to organize, that I didn’t really have time to worry about my strong suspicion that Ronnie was drinking again. At least he wasn’t visibly drunk. That evening I cooked a huge dinner for everyone, then slept with Leah in her bed. It was lovely to be able to cuddle up with my daughter on her last night as a single woman.
I was up early the next morning to deal with the invasion of caterers, florists, makeup artists and hairdressers. There still seemed to be an awful lot to do and I was standing in the garden deciding exactly where a gorgeous display of lilac, white and orange flowers should go when Mum came bustling over.
‘Josephine, I need to speak to you.’
‘Not now, Mum, please.’
‘It’s important. It can’t wait.’
I sighed. She wasn’t going to give up. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Well, I came downstairs last night at about two to get a cup of tea, and as I walked past the breakfast room I could hear Ronnie on the phone.’
‘Yes?’
‘He was saying, “Don’t worry, darling, just wait until the wedding’s over. Then everything will be sorted and we can be together.”’
My first thought was: Katia. Oh, God, I really didn’t have time to deal with this now . . . Perhaps Mum had made a mistake. Besides, whatever had been going on with that girl, I was pretty sure it hadn’t been some big romance. The thought of a teenager going out with a man of Ronnie’s age was too ridiculous.
‘Mum, I’m sure you misheard. Don’t worry.’ And I left it at that.
It was a beautiful service at Southwark Cathedral and the reception was a huge success, but although I’d had a wonderful day, I felt weirdly unsettled. Maybe it was because of what Mum had said to me, or perhaps because I’d had to rush to get ready and didn’t feel confident about how I looked in my orange vintage dress. But there was also a strange feeling in the air, a sense that something was ending. Jimmy White had come over to me at one point and put his arm round me. ‘I just want you to know, Jo,’ he said, ‘that you are and always will be a really good friend of mine.’ Later, when I’d asked Ty if he’d seen Ronnie (who had, unsurprisingly, disappeared), he had said, ‘Mum, you know I’ll stand by you whatever happens.’ I was confused, tipsy and emotional, but it was Leah’s day and there were hundreds of guests to entertain, so once again I put my fears to one side and partied until 6 a.m.
The following day we had a family lunch at the hotel where Leah and Jack had spent the night, then everyone came back to Holmwood for a swim. Ronnie was on great form, sitting in the Jacuzzi and entertaining everyone with funny stories. I struggled up to bed around 9 p.m. and was deeply asleep when Ronnie came in, gently prodded me awake and said, ‘I’m going out. To see Damien Hirst.’
‘But it’s so late, Ronnie,’ I said, looking at the clock. ‘Damien doesn’t even drink – why would a sober guy be going out at this time of night?’
‘I’m going out,’ he said again.
In that moment, all the stresses and fears and frustrations of the past few months combined into a fireball of fury and I just exploded. I screamed at him, told him all this craziness and lying had to end. Finally, Ronnie admitted he was going to see ‘Kat’. He said he had to see her, to ‘call it off with her’, and tell her she couldn’t ‘nag’ him into leaving me and our family. He showed me a text message from her, calling him a ‘mad dog’. And he stayed.
The following afternoon Ronnie went to see a new counsellor – he’d seen dozens over the last few years to help with alcoholism – and sent me a text telling me he’d be home for dinner. By nine o’ clock he hadn’t turned up.
Here we go again . . .
I kept calling his mobile until he finally picked up.
‘Where are you?’
‘Oh, hey, Jo, I’m at a Spanish bar in Beauchamp Place.’
‘Fine. I’ll come and have a drink with you.’
I jumped into my car and drove straight to Knightsbridge. My patience had finally run out. I wasn’t prepared to put up with the lies and games for a moment longer. But when I got to Beauchamp Place – no Spanish bar!
I phoned him. No answer. I kept ringing and ringing until eventually he picked up.
‘Ronnie, there is no Spanish bar in Beauchamp Place.’
‘So I lied,’ he said, his voice flat and emotionless. ‘I’m in the Haymarket, at a bar, not sure which one.’
By this point I was in a desperate state. I had to know what was going on, even though I was sure I wouldn’t like it. Ronnie was clearly just going to lie and lie, so I had to confront the situation head on: it was the only way I was going to find out the truth – and bring it to an end, I suppose, one way or another.
As I was driving into the West End, I remembered that I had met Ronnie at a hotel bar on the Haymarket about a year ago, so I parked my car and went to check it out. Sure enough, when I walked in there, they were in the corner.
‘I knew I’d find you,’ I said to Ronnie, with a weary smile – and then I looked at Katia. ‘And I knew you’d be here.’
‘Hey, Jo, have a drink!’ He was acting totally normally, as if the situation wasn’t remotely weird. So typically Ronnie.
I ordered a vodka and tonic. Katia was very coy, always directing everything she said to Ronnie. I tried asking her about what she did for a living, but she wouldn’t tell me. I later found out that Ronnie had told Jamie on the plane to Kenya that he’d met a girl who worked in a ‘lap-dancing’ club and that they were having sex. Can you imagine telling that to your wife’s son?
We’d had a few drinks in the bar and had gone outside for a fag break when I looked at my watch. It was well past midnight.
‘Ronnie, I’m tired,’ I said. ‘Shall we go home?’
He took a long drag on his cigarette, then turned to me. ‘Nah. I want to be with my baby,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave it up to you to work out who that is.’
I felt like the air had been punched out of me. I couldn’t believe what he had said. I had always been his baby! I just stood there, stunned, my eyes starting to pool with tears.
Then Katia piped up: ‘Listen, do you mind if I just have a private word with Ronnie?’
I looked at her in disbelief. ‘A private word with Ronnie?’ I said, weakly. ‘My husband?’
‘Yeah.’
And I was standing there, thinking, You’ve got to leave now, Jo. Just go. You’ve got your proof. Get out of here with whatever dignity you have left. But I couldn’t walk away because my husband, the man I had known and loved so completely for 30 years, was effectively telling me he didn’t want me any more, and it was just a huge, horrible shock.
‘Come on, Jo,’ said Ronnie. ‘Just go and stand over there a minute. Let me see what she wants.’
So, like an idiot, I did what he said. In a daze I turned and walked away, leaving the pair of them whispering together. It wasn’t until I saw him put his arm around her – his baby–that something in me finally snapped.
‘You know what?’ I said. ‘Enjoy your life, Ronnie. I’m going home.’
I ran back to my car, trying to hold it together, but as I got ready to drive away, my phone rang. It was Ronnie.
‘Jo,’ he said. ‘Come back. Please. I’m at the front of the hotel.’
Despite everything, my heart leapt. I knew he wouldn’t have been able to just throw away our lives together – we’d been through too much. As I drove round the block I started to think about how we could rebuild our marriage. Maybe we could go for counselling. Perhaps, in time, this would even make us stronger.
I pulled up outside the hotel, but instead of opening the door Ronnie motioned for me to put the window down. Then he leant in and said, ‘You’ve been drinking – you should get a taxi.’
So that was it. That was why he wanted me to come back: not to tell me he’d made a huge mistake, that I was still his baby, and beg my forgiveness, but to caution me against drink-driving.
‘Fuck you, Ronnie,’ I said.
I slammed my foot down and drove away.