They Thought I Was Dead: Sandy’s Story

3 26 July 2007

I’m on the M23, heading north, and the slip road to Gatwick Airport is coming up a mile ahead. If I take it, I guess that will be the point of no return. How does a relationship get to the point of no return? I have often asked myself if there is a way back to our once blissful marriage. But it is like a broken glass: however brilliantly it gets repaired, there will always be cracks. Roy might call them tiny fractures, but for me they are significant.

Of course, the heat of that first passion can’t last, however much we fantasize it will. We go through stages with any ‘significant other’. First, we fall in lust, then we fall in love, then we hitch our wagons together and steadily rumble and bounce along Reality Road. Whether we have kids or not, some are destined to end up in some form of compromised state of contentment. Acceptance of our lot. And that is fine for many people. But I want more. I’ve always wanted more. I need more. I just feel the compromises I have to make are too many.

That may seem selfish, given my husband is not a bad person, but it’s the only way out I can see. I think it will damage Roy less if I disappear than if I have to tell him what I have become and what I have done. It would ruin his career having a wife who has got into this situation and I can’t help feeling that I would, forever after, be an embarrassment to him. The proverbial albatross around his neck.

All I can say is that it isn’t easy for me. I dislike myself entirely. I hate what I have become. I wish, desperately, it hadn’t got to this.

I like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s description of love as not gazing into each other’s eyes, but looking in the same direction together. I think he got that from Dickens, who was always mentioning people sitting in ‘companionable silences’. But wasn’t that because they had nothing else to do in his day? No internet, no computer games, no Amazon to browse, no Sky Sports.

So when does that oh so subtle change in your relationship start? The first night that you share a bed and don’t make love? The first morning you leave home forgetting to say I love you? The first time you don’t notice your significant other’s new hairstyle? The day you forget the anniversary of when you met? The day you realize, for whatever reason, you no longer come first in your significant other’s life?

Tick that last box for me.

The reality of being married to an ambitious Major Crime detective is that you will often come second — sometimes to a corpse.

The more I go over and over this in my head, the more I realize that whatever I now do, even if I somehow sort out this mess, too much has happened for our relationship to continue. I’d always carry the lies and live in fear of Roy finding out about my sordid other life. I have to leave.

Selfishly, it is easier for me if I pass on some blame to him, so I consume myself with thoughts of what he could’ve done to prevent me getting into this mess: maybe he did prioritize his job over me, maybe he didn’t love me enough. That I’m just an appendage, the person who makes the bed, who does the shopping, who cooks, that he doesn’t care for my career or any of my ambitions to use my interior design skills, so long as I turn up to functions on his arm. But deep down, if I let myself go there, I’m just trying to ease my guilt.

He’s actually a bloody good guy. I should find his dedication to his job a positive thing, but I use it against him. I’m a disgrace. He’s better off without me.

Just over a year ago. Our wedding anniversary. He never forgets any significant dates and he’d booked a restaurant as a surprise — our favourite seafood restaurant in the Brighton Lanes — where we had gone on one of our very first dates. He’d sorted a taxi so we could both have a drink, and he’d given me a beautiful present, a white gold eternity ring. I felt bad because I hadn’t given him anything special.

This was the evening when I made a terrible decision.