Woman with a Secret Page 17

  I asked if we could maybe speak on the phone. He said no; he didn’t want me to hear his voice. He didn’t like his voice, he said.

  One day, an anonymous parcel arrived for me. It was a copy of what he’d told me was his favorite book—Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. In it he’d written, “For Nicki—we must have naked lunch together one day. KE7 x.” I was touched but scared. I told him not to send anything to the house again. He never did.

  The lack of real-world physical contact wasn’t the only thing that bothered me; I was starting to feel that a weird inequality was undermining our closeness. King Edward knew almost everything about me, past and present, but he didn’t seem nearly so willing to discuss himself and his life or past. He would write at length about his feelings and his ideas—so it wasn’t as if he was ungenerously refusing to share himself with me—but I started to have this sense of him as a soul that was kind of detached from any sort of reality. He revealed the bare-minimum details about his life, whereas he knew almost as much about mine as I did.

  I tried to explain to him that I felt there was an imbalance between us. He was horrified to think he might have done anything to offend me, and I did my best to make it clear that I wasn’t offended, but that I felt he was keeping secrets from me, rather than with me. I asked him if he’d send me a photo, or tell me his first name at least, since he’d known my full name for a while, as well as the names of my husband and children. He said I had every right to ask, and apologized for his fears and his caginess. He kept saying, “Just give me a bit longer to get my head around it. I just need another few days. It’s a big step.”

  I tried to be patient. I was in no doubt that he loved me—that helped. Adam loved me too, but he wasn’t obsessed in the way King Edward quite clearly was. Adam has never been obsessed with me in that way. He’s more of a stable, low-key kind of person, not one to go over the top emotionally about anything. King Edward was the opposite. He wrote more than once that he would die for me without a second thought. I know I should have been firmer with him and insisted on seeing a photo and knowing his name, but I was bowled over by him in every way. His obvious hunger for me—limited though it was—had obliterated all my defenses.

  Of course, he could have sent me any photo, couldn’t he? He could have told me any name. And, eventually, he did.

  I was thrilled and relieved when, in October 2011, he finally said he’d decided he wanted to be more open with me. He’d hidden his identity, he told me, because he was famous. He was someone I would know of, someone I might not have entirely positive feelings about. It was this, he confessed, rather than any worries about his looks, that had made him reluctant to allow me any closer. I teased him, saying things like “Are you a famous mass murderer?” and “Are you George Osborne?” No, he said, he was none of those, but he was as unpopular in certain quarters as “George Osborne at a Socialist Worker Party rally.” After a bit more cat-and-mouse teasing of this sort, he finally told me: he was Damon Blundy, Daily Herald columnist—loudmouth, rabble-rouser, troublemaker.

  I’d read one or two of Damon Blundy’s columns in the past, and I certainly didn’t hate him. I didn’t have any opinion about him. I’d always assumed that most newspaper columnists say any old thing that comes into their heads to provoke a bit of controversy, whether they really believe it or not.

  As soon as King Edward revealed that he was Damon Blundy, I did my homework, and very soon it was Damon I was in love with. Or rather, it was both Damon Blundy and King Edward, except in my mind I’d joined them up to make one person: a man I now knew was absolutely gorgeous, apart from anything else. This new knowledge reenergized my correspondence with King Edward. Since he’d told me who he was, I saw no reason why we shouldn’t meet. So I asked him. And he refused.

  Looking back, it’s clear why he had to say no. King Edward wasn’t Damon Blundy, and if we met, I would notice that he wasn’t. Of course, he couldn’t admit that was the reason, having lied about his identity, so he came up with some nonsense about not being able to live with himself if he cheated on his partner. I Googled him and could find nothing about any partner anywhere. He said they hadn’t gone public yet. All this time, we were emailing constantly, with him telling me in great detail what I meant to him and how much he loved me. He’d become my whole world—I barely noticed Adam and the children when they passed me in the house. My real offline life was like a shadow around me that I couldn’t see clearly. Deep down, I knew I ought to be worried about this, but I was too much in love with King Edward to care.

  Then, in early December 2011, Damon Blundy wrote a column in which he mentioned getting engaged to a psychotherapist called Hannah. He’d never said explicitly, but I’d assumed he was already married, like me, and was gallantly not mentioning his wife in the way that I tried not to mention too often that I had a husband, even though he knew I did. I thought it was a courtesy thing—an unspoken agreement between us. I was shocked to the point of physical sickness to discover he was unmarried and at the beginning of an exciting new relationship with this Hannah person. I emailed him—King Edward—and demanded to know how he could have failed to mention to me that he was about to get married. He said he hadn’t told me because he didn’t want to upset me. I was already married to Adam, he said, so what was the big deal? I asked if he was really so naive as to imagine that I wasn’t an avid reader of his column. I’d started to make my own little contributions, in the comments sections. He claimed he never read the comments and therefore hadn’t noticed.

  Unbelievably, we managed to get past all this. I’d have forgiven him anything, I think, because he was so amazing in so many ways. He seemed to understand everything I said and felt in a way that no one else ever had. He was certainly more interested in me than anyone ever had been before. Every single issue or topic, he wanted to know what I thought about it, in detail. But he still wouldn’t agree to meet.

  And then one day he confessed to me that, crazy though he knew it was, he believed cheating in the flesh was much worse than cheating only via emails. He said he wasn’t sure his moral code would allow him to go to the obvious next stage.

  I laughed when I read that, before the anger took over. I just couldn’t see it. We were spending all our days and evenings, pretty much, obsessively writing to one another. I’m amazed Adam didn’t notice. A less secure, more needy husband would have done, I’m sure, but Adam was happy to spend most evenings watching TV in the living room while I emailed King Edward from the computer upstairs, pretending to be on Facebook.

  King Edward—Damon, as I thought at the time—admitted that his “line in the sand” as he called it, was spurious and hypocritical, but he said he couldn’t help the way he felt. Right or wrong, that was his “code.” I couldn’t reconcile the Damon I knew from our emails with the Damon Blundy I encountered in the Daily Herald—the one who said outrageous things on Question Time, like “A high-speed rail link between Manchester and London would completely ruin the North-South Divide,” and laughed when people booed him. Damon Blundy the famous columnist seemed to have no problem with adultery, and a huge problem with moral hypocrisy. He wasn’t scared of anything, whereas the Damon I was emailing seemed to shrink nervously away every time I brashly suggested making our cyber affair a real-world affair.

  I challenged King Edward about his apparently split personality. He said that Damon the columnist wasn’t the real him, though he contained aspects of the real him. But mainly, Famous Damon was a fictional character, designed to provoke and entertain. I believed this. It confirmed my assumptions about newspaper columnists.

  King Edward’s reluctance to meet went on and on. I went through several phases of reaction. I thought about ending it, breaking off email contact. I thought about turning up at his house unannounced to see how he’d react. Irate people he’d offended occasionally posted his address on Twitter and encouraged other people to join them in a vigilante mob on his doorstep, so I knew exactly where he lived, and considered doorsteppi
ng him—a lovesick vigilante mob of one.

  Neither ending it nor gatecrashing Damon Blundy’s life felt like a genuine possibility. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing him. By email he was still being so loving and attentive, and, crude though it sounds, his words were still providing me with more sexual satisfaction than any man’s physical touch ever had. He was the person I wanted to share everything with—stupid funny things that happened, annoying things.

  Eventually, I resigned myself to never having a real physical relationship with him. I told myself I must think of it the same way I would if he were paralyzed from the neck down, or in a high-security prison. I knew that it wasn’t lack of enthusiasm that was preventing him from meeting me, and I did my best to make allowances.

  Then, in August 2012, he wrote to me to say that his wife was going away for a week in February 2013, abroad, and that during this phase while she was away he might feel it was safe enough for us to meet. It would have to be somewhere that was nowhere near his home, he said. The whole email had a reverential urgency about it that made me love him even more. He suggested a hotel: the Chancery Hotel in Bloomsbury. Would I agree to spend that week with him there in February next year?

  A whole week together . . .

  I experienced almost superhuman levels of bliss. And the sudden burst of unexpected joy into my life inspired me to do something crazy: relocate my family from London to Spilling. Even if King Edward and I could only meet in person every couple of years, I wanted to be closer to him all the time. I asked him about it before suggesting it to Adam, and he agreed it was the best idea ever: he would feel so much happier also, he said, knowing I was close by.

  He said this while pretending to be Damon Blundy.

  I moved to Spilling in December last year on a cloud of euphoria, thinking that in February King Edward and I—Damon and I—would finally consummate our relationship. I’ll never forget his email in response to mine saying, “Hooray—we’re in! I now live just a short drive away from you!” He wrote back immediately, saying he could feel my presence, and how it was going to enhance his life so much just knowing I was nearby, that Spilling had a new magic ingredient added to it now that I was there.

  All lies. It wasn’t Damon Blundy who wrote those words. I don’t know where King Edward lives because I don’t know who he is, but it’s unlikely that he lives in Spilling, I think.

  Our correspondence fizzed with new passion and energy for the rest of December and the first half of January, in anticipation of our prearranged week in February. And then, in late January, I got a two-line email from King Edward—the shortest one he’d ever sent me—saying, “Nicki, I have to ask you something. If we do meet at the Chancery Hotel in February, will you be very disappointed if I can’t make love to you?” I felt dizzy with horror when I read those words. Why was he saying “if” when our week together was a firm arrangement we’d made, one that had been in the diary for months? I wrote back and asked what the hell he meant. He replied saying he might not be able to “go too far” with me. Go too far? I thought. This was a grown man, for Christ’s sake! What was wrong with him?

  I should have told him to get lost and stop messing me around. I should have spotted that something was very much amiss. Nothing I was reading in King Edward’s emails sounded anything like the confident, promiscuous Damon Blundy I was reading in the Daily Herald every week. I told myself the confident womanizer tone was a front, needed precisely because the real Damon was sexually timid and insecure.

  I’d cure him of his shyness and his doubts, I told myself.

  The day before we were due to meet at the Chancery, he emailed me and said, “Nicki, I’m so sorry. I don’t think I can go through with it.” I thought he was canceling on me and I lost my cool. Not that I have much in the way of cool, in any situation ever; it’s not my strong suit. I sent King Edward an outpouring of horrified hysteria by way of reply. He wrote back and said, “Go to the Chancery as planned. Take your phone or a laptop so that we can keep in touch. I will do my very best to get myself there.”

  I told Adam I was going on vacation with some old school friends—a reunion—and I went to London. Adam had to take the week off work. He didn’t mind, but I felt sick with guilt every time I thought about him and the kids at home together, keeping each other company and being a normal happy family while I did what I was doing at the other end of the normality spectrum.

  I sat in a characterless hotel room in Bloomsbury, containing a bed, a chair, a desk and a built-in wardrobe, and I waited. The first day and night, the second day and night, King Edward didn’t come. We emailed each other constantly—him saying how guilty he felt knowing he was letting me down, what a useless coward he was; me saying he mustn’t be too hard on himself, and please come, and if he doesn’t want to be unfaithful to his wife, we can just talk. No, he said—he couldn’t bear to be in the room with me and not touch me. Crazily, I suggested he book the room next door to mine, so that we wouldn’t even need to see each other. We could talk on the phone, maybe, instead. I would have settled for anything—any tiny morsel that would have allowed me to feel that we were moving forward. I’d have settled for knowing that the man I loved was on the other side of a wall in the Chancery Hotel.

  Yes, I do hate myself rather a lot—thanks for asking.

  Halfway through my third day of sitting alone in an uninspiring red and grey hotel room, crying and never quite managing to muster sufficient dignity to draw a line under this ghastly experience and go home early, an email arrived from King Edward with the subject heading “A possible plan.” My heart leaped sky-high. Everything might be OK, I thought; everything might be saved.

  King Edward’s plan was an odd one—one no sane woman would agree to, I’m sure. Luckily, he suggested it to the only deluded fool on the planet who was deranged enough to say yes. Which I did.

  He said he’d thought of a way that would make it possible for him to come and meet me. We would agree on a time in advance for the following day. I would, in the meantime, get hold of a blindfold. I would leave a key for him at reception, with instructions for the receptionist to give it to him when he arrived. At the agreed time, I would make sure I was in bed, wearing nothing but the blindfold. He would then let himself into the room. Neither of us would utter a single word throughout: no voices—this was very important to him. He would do what he wanted with me. (I was more surprised by this than by anything else, I think, because up until this point he had seemed so solicitous and caring about what I wanted.) With no words spoken, he would communicate his orders, using touch and movement only. I would obey those orders. I wasn’t to remove the blindfold at any point. We would make love, and then he would let himself out of the room and leave, without my having seen him at all.

  I agreed to all of it. Yes, it was strange, but I told myself it might be fun too. Erotic. I tried to think of it as a fun, kinky thing, not alarming craziness.

  The arrangements were made.

  I had no idea where to get a blindfold, so I went to Accessorize at King’s Cross Station and bought a long black silky scarf that I could wind twice around my head.

  The next day was the day we’d agreed to meet. He didn’t let me down—not then, anyway. He arrived at the agreed time. I couldn’t see anything because of the blindfold, and I desperately wished that I could see him, but not being able to was exciting too, in its own way. Maybe even more exciting. All my other senses were on overdrive. I breathed in the smell of him when he lay down next to me. Touching him, tasting him, feeling his bare skin against mine—I’ve never experienced anything like it, before or since. Which is what makes it so much worse, given what happened next: that he was my best ever.

  I can’t let myself think too much about that, or I start to go a bit crazy, and I’m crazy enough already.

  He used his mouth and his fingers to give me so much pleasure, but I was aching to feel him inside me, and after several hours, I started to wonder when that would happen. I assumed he was working
up to it—deliberately withholding what he knew I wanted for as long as possible, saving it up . . .

  And then, without warning, it was all over. His skin was no longer touching mine. At all—not anywhere on my body. I heard the rustle of clothing, the metallic jingle of a belt buckle. I opened my mouth to speak and he clapped his hand over it, enforcing his no-talking rule. And then he left, slamming the door behind him.

  Within fifteen minutes I was emailing him: “What the hell happened then? Why did you run off?”

  No reply.

  I emailed over and over again, all evening, all night. Nothing.

  The next morning, I wrote several more times. My emails became progressively more hysterical. In the Daily Herald that day, Damon Blundy pulverized supporters of abortion rights who were against the death penalty, and supporters of the death penalty who were anti-abortion—“It’s either acceptable to end a life for a truly excellent reason or it isn’t”—but King Edward remained silent. In desperation, I nearly posted a comment in response to Damon’s abortion/death-penalty rant, saying, “Why the fuck are you ignoring me?” Thank God I didn’t, since he wouldn’t have had a clue who I was or what I was talking about.

  I stayed in the Chancery Hotel for the full week, checking my email inbox every three seconds. King Edward didn’t get in touch. I wept a lot. Then, when my time alone ran out, I went home and tried to pretend I was OK, though I was far from it. So many times I nearly collapsed in a sobbing heap on the floor. I told Adam I was feeling sick and that I was probably coming down with a bug. He believed me and was sympathetic. I felt like a repulsive zombie who had somehow infiltrated a lovely, respectable middle-class family.

  Three days after I returned home, I got an email from King Edward—Damon, as I still believed he was, since by now he had been signing his emails “Damon” for more than six months. He apologized for his silence. It was unforgivable, he knew. The reason for it was guilt. I wrote him back a long email explaining why he mustn’t feel guilty—true love was true love and should never be denied, all that kind of rubbish.