The Half a Million Pounds Wife

If happiness has a price, in any currency, it’s zero.

The author at 33, in the marital home. Note the ‘rescue me’ eyes.

A friend’s death shocked me into leaving my first husband. Adrian was a seemingly healthy man in his early thirties, recently engaged to another friend who invented the best banana cake recipe in all human history. A few weeks before their wedding, he unexpectedly collapsed while walking their dog on Eastbourne seafront. Rushed to hospital in an ambulance, he was told he had an undiagnosed heart condition and would need an angiogram to discover exactly what was going on. This involved injecting dye into an artery, something normally done under local anaesthetic. Adrian had a needle phobia, so he asked for a general, and they obliged.

He never surfaced. His funeral was held at the church where they would have been married. Their reception venue hosted the wake. All the men wore cartoon ties at his fiancée’s request.

Standing in the church pew singing a funeral hymn next to the husband I no longer loved, I suddenly realised I, too, could die anytime. And if I checked out at the age of 32, I’d have nothing to show for my adult life but misery. That’s when I knew I would have to leave my husband.

Extricating myself from the marriage had several stages.

1. There was the year we spent going to Relate, where I desperately hoped the counsellor, with her professional experience and insight, would diagnose that we were utterly incompatible and unfixable, and help him come to terms with losing me. Instead she listened to him insisting it was all about not having enough sex (read: not having any sex, because I was now repulsed by him), or ‘intimacy’ as she liked to call it. She gave us unbearable ‘homework’ utterly unsuitable to a situation of coercive control.

2. There was the time I told him straight that I thought for the best of everyone (including the children) we should separate, and he roared at me for an hour until I was curled up in a little ball on the old church pew in the kitchen, with one of my children, also under the blast of his roaring, trying to comfort me.

3. There was the indelible “If you ever leave me you won’t live very long, and if you ever get a boyfriend he won’t live very long either.”

4. There were the months of illness and hospitalisation as the stress of staying in a toxic relationship began to wreak havoc on my body, during which time — because of my physical vulnerability - he ramped up his cruelty.

5. There was the moment where I stood at a hotel window, calculating whether the drop was high enough to kill me outright because it looked like a blessed relief.

But between stages 2 and 3 — let’s call it 2a — there was the time he asked if I would stay married to him in return for half a million pounds.

This photo makes me think of a magnificent tiger in a tiny, filthy cage.