The Good Divorce Guide
Cristina Odone
To my parents, and to Edward and Claudia, for trying to make theirs a civilised divorce.
Table of Contents
Five steps to take if you suspect your husband is having an affair.
1 Check the paper trail. If he told you that he was going to Woking for a conference on hair-regeneration therapy from the 9th to the 12th, but you found a Stansted-Venice boarding pass stub for the 11th-12th in his suit pocket, beware.
2 Study his reactions. ‘You’ll never believe this.’ I stood in the bathroom, brushing my hair and watching my husband in the mirror as I spoke. ‘Remember the Pearsons?’ ‘Doug and Ginnie?’ Jonathan continued methodically polishing his shoes. ‘Yup. She’s found out he’s been sleeping with their children’s French tutor!’ Jonathan looked up, surprised—but I could see no sign of a guilty conscience. ‘Poor Ginnie,’ I went on, eyes on my husband. Jonathan shrugged: ‘Yeah, she’s a sweetheart. Never liked HIM much.’
3 Provoke him. Saturday morning over breakfast: ‘Oh no, not another marriage quiz!’ I rolled my eyes, The Times in my hand. ‘OK, let’s see how we measure up. “On a scale of one to ten, how annoying is your spouse’s worst habit?”’ I studied my husband over the paper. Jonathan roared with laughter: ‘You’re not the one with annoying habits. I am.’
4 Make unexpected changes to your routine. Arrive home in the middle of the day. Pretend the film you were supposed to see was sold out and you came home early. Announce you’re off for a haircut but come back after a drive around the neighbourhood. If he gives any sign of irritation or alarm, you’re on to something.
5 Finally, taking a step I had promised never to take, a last resort I regarded as the stereotypical first resort of the paranoid wife, I check his BlackBerry for compromising messages. Even the most cunning man leaves some clues—like the ‘I wnt U2. Lst nght = hotvolcanicsex XXX’ that I found in the message inbox on Jonathan’s BlackBerry when it slipped out of his jacket pocket. I look at the sender: ‘L’. Who is ‘L’? Or is L for lover? lust? LOVE?
There he is, asleep on the sofa, The Lancet trembling on his chest, Newsnight on the telly. Here I am, standing beside him, wondering how to survive this revelation.
Jonathan, my husband of twelve years, is having an affair. After months of suspicion and covert investigation, I’ve found him out. I stand quite still as the answers to a hundred questions whirl around me: so this is why he’s had so many business trips recently. This is why he jumped when I walked in on him whispering to his BlackBerry last week. This explains his personal trainer, his new interest in what he wears, his locking his desk drawers. I want to cry, I want to scream, I want to smash his framed photo of the 1989 University Challenge team, from which he smiles, bright-eyed and long-haired.
Yet even now I cannot quite believe it. An affair. Sneaking, cheating, lying, faking…Can this be true of my solid, steady, scientist husband? I feel as if I’ve stepped out of the house on an errand, and come back to find it burgled and vandalised. Nothing is how it should be any more. How can Jonathan be having sex with someone else when only two days ago we had a fabulous marital moment that had him whistling ‘Love is in the Air’ afterwards in the shower? How can he betray me when he told me only last Saturday that we should go out for supper, a film, anything, to have some ‘us’ time? How can he cheat on me, the woman with whom he’d once said he was sleeplessly in love? I’m not saying our marriage is perfect. We can be boring, tense, uncommunicative; but we’ve never, in a dozen years, lied to each other. ‘You’re the only person I can be one hundred per cent honest with,’ Jonathan used to repeat to me. Until now.
I don’t know where we go from here. Do I play dumb and let the affair take its course? Do I confront him? Do I fight for my husband?
Worst of all is the thought of the children. Kat, twelve, and Freddy, nine, were never to have a worry in the world. Jonathan and I were as one on that score, always: we wanted the best for them, no matter what