Woman with a Secret (21 page)

Conversations with him, on any topic, glimmered with unpredictability. He was more interested in the contents of my mind than anyone has ever been, before or since—totally absorbed in me. He wanted to know absolutely every detail about everything and everyone I mentioned. He had fascinating, unpredictable views on whatever topic came up, and he wrote really well: long, thoughtful emails. I had the impression that he was devoting all his attention to me, to the point of neglecting the rest of his life. After a while, he said he
was curious to know more about me, and to know what I looked like, so I told him as much as I could without revealing my identity. He said he was falling in love with me—more strongly than he’d ever fallen for anyone before. I sent him a head-and-shoulders photo of myself. He replied saying he wouldn’t have minded whatever I looked like but that he was glad I was as beautiful as my emails. I loved that—the idea that my emails were attractive.

At that point, our correspondence became overtly romantic. We started to write to each other more erotically—nothing too graphic, but we talked a lot about love. And even when we tried to talk about other things, it always came back to love. He’d become my significant other: the only person in the world that I wanted to share anything with. I’d never experienced such an intense connection before. I was living with Adam, Sophie and Ethan, but there was no doubt that King Edward had taken over as my “significant other.” I couldn’t wait to get away from my family, any chance I got, so that I could read his latest email and reply to it.

We discussed the possibility of meeting, but by the time we got around to discussing it, I was terrified of putting it into practice. He admitted he was too. What we had seemed so perfect; we both feared we’d endanger it if we subjected it to the reality test. So we continued with the emailing—which was passionate and amazing and didn’t really feel like “not enough” in any way—for several more months.

I became discontented before King Edward did. In July 2011, after I’d known him just over a year and with only his emails and my fantasies to represent his presence in my life, I started to crave real-world physical contact with him, and I told him so. I was scared things might start to become a little less urgent and exciting between us if we didn’t take them to the next level soon. King Edward said he felt the same, but that, having seen a photo of me and knowing how stunning I was, he’d be too scared of rejection to meet me in person. He said he wasn’t anywhere near as good-looking for a man as I was for a woman. I told him, truthfully, that I honestly couldn’t care less
what he looked like. I’ve never fancied men for their looks—it’s always their attitudes, and personalities, and I knew I loved King Edward’s. To me, the idea of me rejecting him in person was unthinkable, to the point where I couldn’t quite understand why he was so worried about it.

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 doorstepping 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?