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.
A lot of people have to deal with bad situations in their lives, and the things that had gone wrong for me before I met Joe weren’t really that bad at all, in the greater scheme of things.
The first time there was any indication that something might be wrong was during my second year at university. I’d had glandular fever, so for a while I thought that was why I was tearful and felt so low. But when all the other symptoms finally cleared up and I was still miserable for no apparent reason, the doctor diagnosed depression.
Fortunately, the antidepressants I was given worked well. So well, in fact, that I eventually decided it had just been an isolated incident and I stopped taking them. And then, of course, the depression came back. It was disappointing to have to face the fact that it hadn’t been ‘cured’ after all, and it was frustrating every time it recurred over the next few years. I was lucky, though, because it wasn’t ever bad enough to interfere with my life to any significant extent and I never had to be hospitalised.
I was doing a degree in the history of art when I had the first episode of depression, and I was lucky again in that it didn’t disrupt my studies and I was able to go on to finish my course. After my BA, I did a Masters degree, then worked as a temp for a while, before doing an internship at an auction house and eventually getting a job in an art gallery. A couple of years later, I was promoted within the same company and started earning a reasonable salary, which enabled me to pay to see a psychiatrist privately every few months, for reassurance as much as anything else.
I had all the usual insecurities and doubts most young people have about being ‘good enough’, but I had a good social life, was doing a job I enjoyed and, thanks largely to the tablets and to some cognitive behavioural therapy – which I found really useful – rarely had to take a day off work because of depression. So, apart from my family and the close friends who knew about my experience at university, no one was aware that there had ever been anything wrong with me at all.
The company I was working for had galleries and offices in numerous cities around the UK and abroad, and I was moved around a bit for the first couple of years after I was promoted, although only ever to places in England. By the time I started working on a more permanent basis in London, I’d been going out with my boyfriend Jack for almost four years.
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