When his daughter was born in London at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, Neil whispered into his wife Serena’s ear: ‘You are quite, quite brilliant. I love you to distraction.’
But what he said was a lie. As his wife lay in labour, Neil was six months into an affair with Magdalena, the Polish nanny of one of their neighbours.
Shocking, upsetting, revolting even, but not unusual. Men, having impregnated their partners, may find another woman during this time. Two patients have come to me during their partners’ pregnancies, mid-affair.
Then in his mid-50s, Neil was at the very peak of his career. He was divorced from his first wife, and he and Serena, a much younger high-flier from the Bank of England with a first-class Cambridge degree, had been together for five years. Neil was a rainmaker, the most senior partner in a Magic Circle firm of lawyers and, in the words of a female legal journalist, abounding in ‘magnetic charisma’.
In the labour ward, as his baby was born, Neil looked quickly at the clock on the wall, wondering how long it would take him to get to the flat he paid to rent for Magdalena.
‘You get some rest,’ he’d said to his exhausted wife after she had given birth to the tiny girl.
He felt tremendously sad about what he knew was going to happen. But he could not stop himself.
Arriving at Magdalena’s flat 40 minutes later, she began to kiss him at the door. She looked spectacular, naked but for one of his shirts. She was less than half his age, eight years younger than Serena. The sex minutes later was rushed, explicit and noisy.
His plan was to tell Magdalena by phone in a couple of days that he felt they should give their relationship a rest. But it didn’t happen. The affair would continue for several more years, with Magdalena even sometimes working as their nanny.
He still loved Serena more than anyone. But after Magdalena there was Isobel, a fellow student on a history of art course he attended. He told me there had been two other significant relationships.
There were only a few women where it was just about sex. A barrister working on a deal visited his office and he ended up making love to her on the boardroom table. There was a German woman, a hedge-fund manager’s wife he’d got to know during a resort holiday with Serena and their children. They had met this couple at dinner, then he ended up having sex with the wife late at night on the beach after Serena had gone to bed.
Psychotherapist Juliet Rosenfeld’s Affairs is set to be the book of 2025
Neil called his attitude to women an addiction. I thought it was also compulsive.
I had a sense of a man who could never be in anything but ‘a threesome’, and for whom a couple was not possible in any ordinary sense. So, why was Neil doing what he was doing?
A few weeks into therapy, Neil’s mother died. He was not upset, but felt numb. The morning after the cremation, he started to talk about his childhood, something he had found impossible until then. He recalled one particular moment when he was about six, at his parents’ cramped house in Coventry.
‘Tell me, is there a little boy called Graham in your class?’ his mother had asked. He nodded.
‘You must not talk to that Graham, ever. Do you understand?’
His mother told him that Graham’s father was a man he had already met in their sitting room before Neil went to bed. It now dawned on Neil that he had held on to this lie for six decades. He did not tell anyone about the strange noises he could hear in his mother’s bedroom. In the morning, he could hear a man’s voice, leaving. He said there were many men’s voices over the years.
As they cleared his mother’s house after her death, his sister reminded him of something else. When Neil was a baby and she was 18 months old, their parents had taken them to Canada in search of a better life.
But things hadn’t worked out, and after a year Neil and his sister were left in the care of a Canadian childminder while his parents returned to Britain to seek work and a family home.
Neil did not remember this, but he did know that contact with the childminder stopped after the family was reunited back in Britain. He found out afterwards that she had written to his sister some years later, but that his mother had forbidden any contact. This woman, who had been his sole carer as he learned to crawl, sit, stand, walk and talk, had simply vanished. His parents split up shortly after they came home.
‘When I was very young, my mother wasn’t always in control of herself,’ Neil said. ‘She was nude round the house, and sometimes she would get into bed with me. She hugged me and cuddled me. She didn’t touch me or anything like that, but it was very disconcerting, especially when my body began changing.’
Neil does not recall events, but he remembers the feelings that, all his life, he has tried to push away. He was abandoned by his mother, and shortly afterwards seemingly abandoned by his caregiver.
Sad and terrible though it is, his resentment endured in his vile treatment of women. His anger with his mother remained on tap and, so, he had often left women in tears or distressed.
Having constant affairs preserved a safe space for Neil. It meant he didn’t have to be dependent on a whole woman. He was dependent on part of Serena, but only part of her. He protected himself from totally relying on her and he preserved his safety by always having two women, not one.
Taken from Affairs by Juliet Rosenfeld, published by Pan Macmillan, £20, on 27 March. To pre-order a copy for £17 until 7 April, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25
All names have been changed.
