If You Love Me: Part 2 of 3: True love. True terror. True story.

Certain details in this story, including names, places and dates, have been changed to protect the family’s privacy.

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First published by HarperElement 2017

FIRST EDITION

© Alice Keale and Jane Smith 2017

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Source ISBN: 9780008205256

Ebook Edition © January 2017 ISBN: 9780008214937

Version: 2016-12-20

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Moving Memoirs eNewsletter

About the Publisher

One day, Joe told me to write a list of things I could do for him and gifts I could buy that would prove how much I loved him. ‘They have to be unusual and original,’ he said. ‘It shouldn’t be difficult to think of things, unless, of course, you don’t really know me at all.’ But it was difficult, as it always is to come up with ideas for imaginative presents for anyone, even someone you know well. And it was particularly stressful trying to do it under pressure.

In the brief happy weeks of our relationship before the discovery, Joe and I often talked about countries we’d never been to and would like to visit, and others we wanted to go to again, together. One of the places that fell into the former category was Mexico, and taking Joe on holiday there was one of the few items on that first list of which he approved.

Joe’s constant, remorseless questioning, which kept us awake for up to twenty hours every day, wasn’t just driving me to the limits of my mental and physical endurance. It was making him ill too. There didn’t seem to be any answer I could give to any question he asked me that would satisfy him. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, I think he was searching for something he was never going to find, something that probably didn’t really have anything to do with me specifically, with the affair I’d had with a married man, or with the fact that I wasn’t ‘the perfect woman’ he’d told himself I was when we first started seeing each other.

Without the prospect of any other source of light at the end of the long, dark tunnel my deceit had forced us into, it did seem possible that a holiday might be a good idea. I paid for it, for our flights to Mexico City, the hotel we stayed in for the next ten nights, almost every meal we ate and every taxi we took. Using the money I’d saved for a deposit on a flat to try to make Joe happy was all part of proving I loved him and that I was prepared to do anything to make our relationship work. I paid it willingly too, because I was desperate not to lose him and because any price seemed a small one to pay for something that might make him realise how sorry I truly was. What I didn’t realise, however, was that eventually, as my own savings were depleted, I would become financially, as well as emotionally, dependent on Joe, and then his control over me would be complete.

On the flight from London to Mexico City, I almost dared to believe that it was going to work. Joe talked about normal things in a normal voice, the way he used to do when we fell in love. But then, for no apparent reason, he suddenly started firing questions at me that would have been embarrassing even if they hadn’t been asked loudly enough for the people around us to hear. He did lower his voice a bit when some of the other passengers began to look in our direction, although no one actually told him to pipe down when he shouted at me or asked if I was all right, not even any of the cabin crew.

It was a non-stop flight, which took about twelve hours, but seemed to last for an eternity, and although we did sleep for a few hours when we got to our hotel it wasn’t long enough to make anything seem any better.

It was stupid to have hoped things might be better if we went on holiday: it was like leaving London with a broken leg and hoping to arrive in Mexico City to find that the shattered bone was whole again. There were times during the ten days we were there when we’d be in a beautiful old square or an art gallery or museum – places I’d read about and had always wanted to visit – and I’d think, ‘I ought to be happy here.’ But the reality was that, wherever we’d gone and whatever we’d been doing, I would have been too exhausted to take anything in, and Joe would still have been standing beside me, asking me questions about the past that made it impossible to focus on the present.