If You Love Me: Part 3 of 3: True love. True terror. True story.

We were in Sardinia, on the last holiday I was going to be able to afford before my savings ran out, and I could hardly believe how well things had been going – ‘well’ for us, at least. On the third day we were there, there was a period of maybe two hours when Joe didn’t ask me a single question about the past.

We had hired a small open boat with an outboard motor to explore the isolated coves and bays along the coast, mooring it offshore so that we could swim in the crystal-clear water. After we’d swum, we would lie on the pebbly beach, letting the warmth of the sun soak into our bones. On this particular day Joe was lying at one end of the boat with his back to me, reading, while I was sitting at the other end, sketching the bay and an old villa that could just be seen among the trees on the cliff above it.

As I sat there, listening to the sound of the birds gliding through the cloudless sky above our heads, I felt almost happy. I rarely daydreamed since the discovery; I was always too anxious, miserable and exhausted to think about anything beyond the confines of my life with Joe. But I found myself wondering what it would be like to live in a house like the one I was drawing, and to wake up every morning to the sound of the waves lapping gently on the shore.

It was late afternoon, but the sun was still very hot, and when I glanced up from my sketchpad I could see that the skin on Joe’s back was starting to burn. ‘I should tell him,’ I thought. ‘So that he can put on some more sun cream.’ But that would mean breaking the rare tranquillity of the moment and risk setting him off again, demanding answers to his crazy questions and shattering the silence with accusations and abuse.

So I didn’t say anything, and it wasn’t until we were finishing our dinner in a restaurant that evening that he started again. He wasn’t drunk, but he’d been drinking, and alcohol always seemed to make it worse. As soon as he spat the first question at me, I could feel the tears filling my eyes, because I knew I’d been stupid to have allowed myself to hope that night might be different from any other, and because I also knew that, if I gave up hoping, there would be nothing left.

‘Why didn’t you say something?’ Joe asked me angrily.

‘What do you mean?’ I replied, confused by the question and desperately searching my mind for something that might have triggered it, something I’d done wrong or had failed to anticipate.

‘Are you telling me you didn’t even notice the family who’ve just left?’ he demanded, nodding his head towards the now empty table next to ours and speaking so loudly that several people at other tables glanced warily in our direction.

‘Yes, I … I saw them as we sat down. But what about them?’ I whispered. My heart was racing as I tried to remember if I’d looked at them in some unguarded moment in a way that Joe could misinterpret.

This had happened before, in a restaurant in London one night. I hadn’t even been consciously aware of any of the people at other tables on that occasion, and Joe hadn’t said anything until we got back to the house, when he suddenly lost it and started screaming at me, ‘You know what you did.’

‘I don’t know, Joe,’ I kept telling him. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. What did I do?’

‘You tell me,’ he’d insisted, grabbing me around the throat and pushing me with such force against the wall that I could almost feel the bruise spreading across my windpipe. ‘You tell me what you did wrong. Don’t pretend that you don’t know.’

But I didn’t know what I’d done on that night in London any more than I knew now, in the restaurant in Sardinia, and I was afraid to guess in case I said something that gave him an excuse to blame me for something else too. In the end he told me that, as we walked into the restaurant, I’d looked at the two men sitting at the table next to ours – ‘flirtatiously’, Joe said. The accusation was ludicrous. If I ever had been prone to looking at men flirtatiously – which I don’t believe I was – those days were long gone. In fact, most of the time I barely noticed my surroundings at all, and I certainly hadn’t been consciously aware of any of the people sitting at any of the tables in that London restaurant. Maybe I did look in the direction of the two men when we walked in. Or maybe it was all in Joe’s imagination. But whatever he believed I had done, I didn’t deserve his vicious attack that night, or the bruises and bite marks that were its legacy the next morning.

So now, as we sat in the restaurant in Sardinia, I tried desperately to guess what heinous crime Joe might be accusing me of.

‘The girl,’ he said at last. ‘Don’t tell me you didn’t notice the girl. She must have been about the same age as the daughter of the married man.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I stuttered, resisting the sudden urge I felt to lay my head on the table and sob until I fell asleep. ‘I should have paid more attention. I didn’t notice her. I wish I could take back what I did. You know how sorry I am.’

I hated hearing myself speak in that pathetic, obsequious ‘victim’s’ voice. But it was as if I’d become conditioned to being servile and submissive, accepting blame without question for anything and everything Joe accused me of, however unlikely or absurd it actually was.

‘How could you do it? It’s disgusting.’ He was shouting now. ‘You’ve ruined that girl’s life forever. You’re a fucking whore.’

In fact, Joe always swore at me when he was angry. He had a way of saying certain words that made them sound particularly harsh and ugly. But I haven’t normally included them here, mostly because I find it so upsetting to remember the expression on his face when he said them.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said again, while silently, in my head, I was pleading with him: ‘Please don’t do this. I can’t take it any more. It’s madness. The way you behave is crazy. And I’m crazy too, for trying, over and over again, to find the key that will make everything the way it used to be, when the rational side of me knows that will never happen and I should simply walk away.’