I was due to have a laparoscopy – keyhole surgery, as it’s sometimes called – which involved a relatively mild general anaesthetic and meant I wouldn’t have to stay in hospital overnight. Normally, I hate anything to do with hospitals, and being admitted for an operation would have been high on my list of things I never wanted to experience. But I might have been the only person undergoing surgery that day who desperately wanted to stay in overnight. In fact, though, Joe seemed genuinely concerned as he drove me to the hospital that morning. Then the questioning began again, and by the time I was given the anaesthetic injection I didn’t care what happened to me.
When I woke up in the recovery room, my first thought was that I didn’t want to go back to the day ward, where Joe would be waiting for me. ‘He’s been really worried,’ one of the nurses told me. ‘Just pacing up and down the whole time you were in theatre. Poor man.’ She was trying to be nice, telling me, in effect, that my boyfriend loved me. But he seemed to have got over his anxiety by the time I did go back down to the ward.
It was another four hours before I was allowed to go home, during which time I was tempted to pretend I felt ill, so that I could stay and get a peaceful night’s sleep. In the end, though, Joe was so desperate to take me home that I allowed myself to believe everything would be okay. And in fact he wasn’t violent that evening, although he did keep me awake for most of the night with his questions.
Sometimes, on the days when Joe went into work, I would drop him off in the morning and then pick up a latte and an almond croissant from the bakery on my way home. I lived for those moments when I was sitting alone in the living room of Joe’s empty, silent house, drinking my coffee and eating my croissant. They only ever lasted for a few minutes – certainly never more than half an hour – before Joe phoned or texted me and I’d start doing the cleaning and whatever other chores had to be completed before he came home.
Every day that Joe went to work I had the same routine. I’d get up when he did, wash with him, make coffee for us both, get dressed when he did, drive him to work, and collect him at the end of the day, or at whatever time he decided he wanted to come home. Sometimes he only went into the office for an hour, and I would have just got back to the house when he’d phone and I’d have to go out again to pick him up. And sometimes he’d make me wait for him, sitting in the car outside his office, listening to the radio and trying not to resent the fact that I had been robbed of a few precious hours of relative peace and quiet, that would only have been interrupted by his regular texts and phone calls.
When Joe wasn’t with me I could look at whatever I wanted to look at without being afraid that he’d accuse me of staring at someone in some unacceptable way. I could listen to whatever I wanted to listen to on the radio and not have to worry in case someone said something that, in Joe’s mind, had some ridiculously tenuous link to ‘the married man’. Essentially, I could pretend that I was living a normal life, in which everything was the way it used to be and nobody asked me to do things that couldn’t be done. It was that pretence and those brief periods of time I spent on my own that kept me sane – or, at least, as sane as I was.
It turned out that, by the time my family became aware that something more serious was going on between me and Joe than simply him trying to come to terms with my affair with a married man, he had changed his landline number. So they had no way of contacting me except via my mobile phone, which he monitored very closely. Occasionally, he dictated a text message that was supposed to be from me to my mother or sister, but was usually phrased in a way that didn’t sound like me at all. Sometimes the messages would include some critical comment about my mother: that I thought her attitude to my relationship with Anthony was ridiculous, for example, and that this was why I wasn’t going home. As outgoing calls on Joe’s landline were itemised, and I didn’t dare make any phone calls or send any texts on my mobile that he hadn’t approved, I couldn’t do anything to counteract the impression he was giving to my family. I did sometimes call my sister on a payphone while he was at work, but even then I was cautious about what I told her.
Then one day, when I was so worn down by Joe’s abuse that I just wanted someone to know what was going on, I phoned Lucy and told her I was going to leave my phone on in my handbag when he got home from work, because I knew it wouldn’t be long before he kicked off about something. ‘Whatever you hear,’ I told her, ‘don’t call me back. And try not to worry.’ It was an awful position to put my sister in, but I was close to being at the end of my tether and I didn’t know what else to do.
On that particular occasion Joe started yelling almost as soon as he walked into the house, as he often did. Lucy told me later that she could barely believe what she was hearing and was really frightened for me. She tried to record it, and was furious with herself afterwards because she didn’t manage to do so. But she did tell my mother what she’d heard and then phoned my psychiatrist, who advised her to contact the police. And that’s why, a couple of days later, after I’d dropped Joe at work and was sitting in the living room, sipping my cup of coffee and listening to the quietness of the house, the doorbell rang.
No one ever called at the house. In fact, the only contact we had with any of the neighbours by that time was when they told us that if they heard me screaming again they were going to phone the police. It was a threat that had been made on two or three occasions, by different neighbours, and it sent Joe into a rage. He was always very polite and charming to the neighbours themselves, of course, apologising for having disturbed them and explaining that I wasn’t very well, mentally, and that it was sometimes difficult to contain my ‘episodes’. Then, as soon as they’d gone, he would put his hand over my mouth and push me up against the wall, pressing his arm across my throat so that I couldn’t breathe as he hissed in my face, ‘Are you trying to get me into trouble, Alice? Is that why you make all that noise? So that the neighbours will hear you and phone the police?’ And I would apologise and deny that it had been my intention, not that it would have mattered anyway, as none of the neighbours had ever knocked on the door when Joe was at work and asked if I was all right.
So my immediate thought that morning was that Joe must have waited for me to drive away from the office and then got a taxi back to the house, in the hope of catching me out doing something I shouldn’t be doing – which, in his eyes, would include what I was doing, which was basically nothing.
From where I was sitting I could see the front door through the living-room window, and the man and woman who were standing there could see me. So there was no point pretending not to be in, as I would normally have done.
‘Are you Alice Keale?’ the woman asked as soon as I opened the door.
‘Yes.’ I raised my eyebrows quizzically.
‘We’re from the Metropolitan Police,’ the woman said. ‘The Domestic Abuse Unit. Your family and a friend of yours contacted us. They’re all extremely concerned about you and we’d like to have a word. Can we come in?’
Someone once told me that if you ask a question that could equally well have the answer yes or no, you have to be prepared for either response. It was good advice, but I got the impression on this occasion that ‘Can we come in?’ wasn’t really a question at all and that I didn’t have much choice. It wasn’t police officers themselves I was afraid of, however, but what Joe would say when he found out that they’d been to the house. I’d have to tell him, and when I did he’d go crazy. I could feel my heart racing at the very thought of it.
I knew my family and best friend were worried about me. At times when I felt as though I couldn’t take it any more, I’d started to let slip little bits of information to my sister – about Joe cutting my hair, and about him making me take long train rides almost-home, sometimes as often as two or three times a week. My worry now, however, was what they might have told the police.
I