eyes when he laughed. ‘I just want to go to sleep knowing you’ll be there when I wake up. I know it sounds crazy, but I think I want to spend the rest of my life with you, Alice. I’ve never felt this way before.’
And maybe it would have sounded crazy to anyone who might have been listening in the bar that night. But it sounded perfectly sane to me, and it didn’t even cross my mind to say anything other than, ‘Yes, I will go home with you. I feel exactly the same way. I can’t explain it, but I feel as though I’ve known you for years, not just a few hours. I …’ I can’t remember now what I was going to say before Joe kissed me again and pushed every thought out of my head.
Agreeing to go home with Joe that night was completely out of character for me. That might sound unlikely in view of the fact that, of the few things you already know about me, one is that I was having an affair with a married man. But it’s true. It was something I wouldn’t even have dreamed of doing in normal circumstances, or if it hadn’t felt as though everything in my life suddenly made sense.
Sitting in the bar that night with a nice, uncomplicated, charismatic, interesting single man with a good job and a great sense of humour, it felt as though I might find love in my love life after all. Even more important, perhaps, was the fact that, by the end of the evening, I didn’t despise myself as much as I had done until then, because if someone like Joe could like me, there might be hope for me after all.
Sitting there with Joe that evening just felt right somehow. I’d met a lot of sleazy execs over the previous few years, the sort of creepy guys who prey on junior colleagues – people like Anthony, in fact, although I didn’t realise that at the time. But it was clear that Joe wasn’t the sort of person to take advantage of anyone. I’d heard people at work talking about how he’d helped a colleague who was going through a difficult time in his personal life and how if it hadn’t been for Joe’s intervention the man would have lost his job. ‘He stuck his neck out for Barry when he didn’t have to,’ someone said. ‘It’s the sort of thing he does.’ Everyone seemed to like him. And now, apparently, this genuine, kind, intelligent person liked me.
One of the many things Joe told me about himself that first evening was that he was married, although he and his wife had been separated for more years than they’d been together. ‘We got married too young,’ he told me. ‘We didn’t have any children and there wasn’t any property to be divided up – we both have jobs that enable us to support ourselves more than adequately financially. So although we haven’t seen each other for five or six years, we just never got around to divorcing.’
Then I told him about Jack – the boyfriend I’d lived with for several years after I left university and who had broken my heart – but not about Anthony, because I didn’t want him to judge me or change his mind about liking me. In fact, by the end of that first evening Joe liking me was so important that I lied to him and said there hadn’t been anyone since Jack. That’s the trouble with doing something you know is wrong: you end up doing more wrong things – like lying, for example – because you don’t want people to find out about it.
When we left the bar, we took a taxi back to Joe’s immaculate terraced house in a tree-lined street in an expensive part of south-west London. We didn’t have sex, as agreed. We just talked and talked into the early hours of the morning, more than I’d ever talked with anyone in my life before. And the more we talked, the more we found we had in common, and the more I felt as though I’d known Joe for years, which is the way he said he felt about me, too.
I don’t believe the happy-ever-after love stories of Hollywood movies. But I did start to wonder that night if maybe sometimes they weren’t as far-fetched as I’d always thought they were.
The next morning, Joe drove me to work, where I spent the rest of the day trying to concentrate on what I was supposed to be doing. And when sex was added to the agenda that evening, it was as perfect as every other aspect of our new relationship seemed to be.
For the next two weeks, we spent almost every night together. I was supposed to be flat hunting, which was why I’d been staying in my friend Cara’s flat since the day of the riots, when I first spoke to Joe. So I didn’t have much more than a suitcase full of clothes to transport when I moved in with him a couple of weeks after our first date at the bar. It sounds crazy now, to have taken such a major step after knowing him for such a short period of time. But it just felt right. Whatever we tell ourselves, I think most of us do hope we’ve got a soul mate out there somewhere and that one day we’ll find each other and live happily ever after. So when you think you’ve actually met your soul mate, why would you wait?
Although Jack and I had been together for years and I did love him, at no time during the course of our relationship did I ever feel what I felt with Joe almost from day one. When Jack and I split up, I’d got involved with Anthony almost by accident, because I was hurt and lonely and had begun to wonder if anyone would ever care about me again. For the last couple of years before I met Joe, and particularly after Jack dumped me, I hadn’t wanted to feel anything. Joe and I didn’t tell people at work that we were seeing each other. But that was our choice – at least, I think it was ours, rather than his, although I can’t really remember now. I did tell my friends, though, and was touched by how happy they were for me.
When I met Joe, it felt as though I’d been swept up by a whirlwind and that, suddenly, I had a future again. When we were together in the evenings we talked almost incessantly, and about everything, including when and where we would get married – ‘I know the perfect place for our wedding,’ Joe told me – where we would live, and how many children we would have.
The ‘perfect place for our wedding’ turned out to be a small town in France Joe had visited with his wife a couple of years after they’d got married. He described to me how he had stood on the steps of a church there one day during their holiday, looking out towards the mountains, and felt a sense of peace he’d never experienced before or since. ‘I can’t wait for you to see it,’ he said. And I told him I couldn’t wait either, while silently berating myself for wishing we could get married somewhere he hadn’t already visited with the wife he would first have to divorce.
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