So off we go to the bathroom. I hand you your toothbrush and you start to brush your teeth. Damn, how could I have been so stupid? I take it gently from you and put toothpaste on it. You let me, you’re not angry. All the time I am saying reassuring things. You let me help you, even with the most intimate things. In fact, you’re grateful. Thank God. I couldn’t handle it if you kept getting angry with me.
I tuck you into bed like a caring parent. I return to the bathroom, content to have just a minute or two on my own. Last night I looked at myself long and hard in the mirror. Sad face. John the lover now John the carer. I force a theatrical smile. Make it as wide as I can. God it makes me look stupid, but it makes me laugh for a moment. I get into bed and we have a peck of a goodnight kiss. As always, my mind starts to roll back the years, but fortunately I am asleep before I become too miserable.
I cursed myself for having wasted five hours sleeping in that hotel room. Five hours of unconsciousness. Stupid boy! I wake you gently, and without opening your eyes you are smiling and we are joined again, from our lips down to our toes.
You get up and make me a cup of tea. I remember you walked across the end of the bed. You wore the towelling robe, and on your head was a white towelling turban. You turned to me and you were smiling. ‘I must look silly,’ you said. Silly? Silly? I had never seen anything so beautiful in my life.
We lingered over breakfast in the room and I reluctantly began to turn my attention to the day’s filming. I had a story to shoot. I knew I could knock it off in a couple of hours and get back to the hotel. As I left the room, I turned back for a last look. Bon was sitting up in bed, still in the robe and turban. It took me a moment to realise that what I thought was a towel she was holding to her face was, in fact, the shirt I had been wearing the day before.
I linked up with my camera crew and explained that we would have a trawl down Fifth Avenue and film Brits shopping. My cameraman asked me what stores I had arranged this with. I said I hadn’t made any prior arrangements, we would just suck it and see. He raised an eyebrow. It won’t be that straightforward, he said. You can’t just walk in with cameras and expect to start filming. I told him not to be silly. This was America. You could film anything you liked, anywhere you liked.
Turned out he was right. By lunchtime we hadn’t shot a foot of film. Never mind, let’s go to one of the electronic shops. That’s where we’ll find the Brits. We found the shop all right, but the moment we walked in with our camera gear the manager came straight over waving his hands. You can’t film in here, he said. What was going on, I wondered? He explained that the shop had a strict policy of privacy towards its customers—we couldn’t film anyone in the act of buying. I protested—free country, free press, what if the customer agreed, and so on. Ever tried arguing with a New Yorker? Doesn’t work.
I was beginning to get just the inklings of a certain feeling of anxiety. My arguing turned to pleading. Finally the manager made a small concession. We could film the goods in the shop, as long as we did not identify the shop, and he would give me an interview saying that he had noticed an increase in British shoppers in the previous few weeks. Phew, I thought, at least that will give me a story.
By late afternoon that was all we had. Not much of a story, said my cameraman. I was satisfied. I knew we had enough. We shot some footage of anonymous people window shopping, walking in and out of the big stores. I added a piece to camera, me strolling along Fifth Avenue saying how Brits were taking advantage of the strong pound and the lower prices here, making it worth coming to shop in New York even with the cost of an airfare. By six o’clock I was back in the Harley with my Bonnie.
That evening I said I wanted to take her out to dinner. She wore a dark chiffon dress with large colourful flowers, belted at the waist, pleated at the front. Another of my favourites. Under it, oh yes, stockings and suspenders. Naturally. Those cream combs held back her lovely hair. I smiled when I saw them. I knew you would like that, she said. Had I ever been happier? I don’t think so.
I took her by the arm and walked her to a restaurant I knew. The manager sat us at a table in the window with Bon facing out to the street and me facing into the restaurant. The cold air was coming through the glass, and so we moved to a table further in. The manager came over, arms out, and asked in a voice that passes for polite in New York, ‘So what did you do that for?’ I said defensively, ‘Er, it’s a little cold by the window. It’s warmer here. Is that ok?’ ‘So now the pretty lady cannot be seen from the street. Sheesh!’ and he walked away in disgust. He’d wanted her to be seen from the street because it would be good for business!
I laughed out loud and she laughed in an embarrassed way. For many years thereafter, whenever we went into a restaurant, I would imitate that manager in an exaggerated New York accent.
The next morning had to come, there was no way of stopping it. I wanted divine powers so that I could make time stand still. Sadly my urgent pleas with any deity there might be up there went unanswered.
Breakfast in the room the next morning was a subdued affair. I can remember exactly what I said to her. ‘We’ve lived together for the last two days. I know what it is like now to live with you. It’s what I want for the rest of my life. This is a turning point. After New York things can never be the same for me.’ She looked at me with a serious face. ‘It’s what I want too,’ she said.
As for my ace report on Brits shopping in New York, I satellited it to London but it never made News at Ten. The foreign editor told me it was one of the weakest pieces he had ever seen. Still I didn’t see the warning signs.
I get up from the breakfast table and walk across the kitchen to the cupboards, instantly forgetting why.
‘What have I come here for?’ Silence. ‘Why have I come here, my Bonnie?’
‘I don’t know, and I don’t care.’
Her words sting. ‘Oh darling, don’t say that. It hurts.’
‘Well, everyone else is doing it, so why shouldn’t I?’
We spoke transatlantically several times over the coming months, often for two hours or more. Finally we made a pact. We would both tell our spouses we were leaving them.
We knew that what we were doing was wrong. We were married, me with three boys, she with two. We were breaking up our families. There would be hurt and pain. Morally it was indefensible. But we could not be stopped. It sounds melodramatic, and I can hardly believe I am about to write a sentence more suited to a bodice-ripping novel. We truly could no longer imagine life without each other.
Life with Bonnie, I knew, would be calm. I had known it for a long time: the New York sojourn simply confirmed it. I knew something else too. It would be very different to the life I was currently living with my wife. Bonnie was even-tempered, wise and kind. Where Moya and I seemed to disagree on everything, in the short time Bonnie and I had spent together we discovered that we liked exactly the same things, in whatever field. There were no arguments. I also found, to my obvious delight, that if I expressed an opinion on whatever subject, Bonnie would nod and agree. It was not something I was used to, and I liked it.
Relations between Moya and me were worsening, our differences becoming more pronounced, not least because I was being slightly less acquiescent. There were other reasons. She’d wanted me to take the Washington posting, yet once we were there she wasn’t happy. The ITN house, which we had visited a couple of months before on a familiarisation trip and which she had liked very much, was now suddenly unacceptable and she insisted that we move. My bosses at ITN were a bit shocked. She picked holes in everything I did, anything I said, and I no longer gave in quite so easily, which didn’t help.
Bonnie had given me a little present in New York, a small book with deep red velvet covers entitled Love: a celebration. It was an anthology of love poems. Inside she had written, ‘For my Poodle, with all my love Bonnie’. The book is sitting alongside my laptop now. In January 1983, there was a massive snowfall in Washington and I couldn’t get home. I stayed the night in the Mayflower Hotel. I had the little book with me. I read the poems. One, in particular,