Playing Nice

“When was the last time,” Annette said sternly, “that you buried your face in Maddie’s hair and inhaled the scent of her?”

“Well…” Pete made an attempt to look as if he was counting back the days.

“Tell me how you flirt with her,” Annette said. “Show me how you sizzle.”

Pete blinked.

“The reason women don’t have sex with men is because men aren’t prepared to put the effort into making women want to have sex with them,” Annette announced firmly. “I want you to woo Maddie, Pete. Excite her. Make her fall in lust with you all over again. When you say goodbye to her, don’t peck her cheek. Wrap your arms around her and press your body against hers. When you’re away from her, send her sexy texts. Make her feel desired.”

“We do have date nights,” Pete said hopefully. “And we cuddle.”

“Cuddling,” Annette said witheringly, “is the enemy of arousal. When you cuddle, you’re leaching all the passion out of your partner’s touch.”

“Oh,” Pete said.

“Which is why I’m going to put the two of you on a sex ban,” she added.

Pete looked slightly shocked. After all, ending the sex drought was the main reason he was there in the first place.

“You are going to start touching each other,” Annette continued. “Preferably naked. Preferably by candlelight. Massage each other. Arouse each other, if you feel like it. But you are not, repeat not, to have intercourse. Or, God help us, any other kind of sex. I want you to rediscover the pleasure of anticipation.” She consulted her pad. “And I’ll see you again in three weeks.”

To be fair, Pete went along with Annette’s instructions. And gradually, I discovered that the combination of relaxing massage and intimate touching without any pressure to have sex was arousing, to an extent. Unlike Pete’s attempts to woo me with flirtatious texts. It was bad enough to be interrupted in a fraught meeting by a text saying Can you pick up supper?, but when it was followed by What are you wearing, sexy? it was downright irritating.

You know what I’m wearing. You watched me fish my dirty knickers out of the laundry basket at 7 this morning.

And very erotic it was too, you dirty slut.

Ugh. Pete, not sexy. Takeaway or ready meal?

And when a session of touching finally became too much and I pulled Pete inside me with a moan of pleasure, there was the illicit thrill of knowing we were defying Annette’s sex ban. At the next session we sat in front of her like two naughty teenagers and confessed what we’d done.

“Well, of course,” Annette said, nodding. “You’ve learned to excite each other.”

She sent us away with more “homework,” as she called it—Pete was to surprise me every week with a romantic gift; I was to surprise him with some sexy underwear—and an instruction to come back if things tailed off again. Which they did, but somehow we didn’t return. It was just too much of an effort when Theo and work were taking up so much of our time and energy.

The therapy did have one lasting benefit, though. Learning to articulate our problems in front of a stranger had, perversely, made us better at articulating how we felt to each other in private. The problems hadn’t gone away, but they felt more like shared problems.

At least, they did back then. But I know it’s all too easy to confuse the frankness with which we talked about our sex life with genuine openness. After all, it’s not as if I’d shared the not-so-little matter of my own slipups. But on the plus side, neither had I slipped up again. When, on a shoot in Prague, the good-looking director dropped a large hint in my direction—“What happens on location stays on location, right?”—I’d replied firmly that nothing did happen on location. And it didn’t.

Has Pete been choosing not to talk about certain matters, too? Are there things he’s done that remain as deep-buried as my own secrets are?

I try not to think about that too much, because if I do, everything starts to feel hopeless.

* * *

—

“I WANT TO KNOW why a woman would marry a psychopath,” I tell Annette when I’m sitting in her yellow-painted consulting room.

She raises an eyebrow. “Are you not with Pete anymore?”

“Oh—this isn’t about me and Pete. Not directly, anyway.” Briefly I explain about Miles and Lucy. I include Miles groping me as we left the courtroom.

“And how do you feel about all this?” Annette asks—the classic therapist’s opener.

“Right now, angry. But when I don’t feel angry…” I hesitate. “Sometimes, I just feel the deepest, blackest despair.”

Annette nods. “Both are very understandable reactions. And in answer to your question, psychopaths are very easy to fall in love with. For one thing, they know how to charm people. Typically, they throw themselves into the courtship with total commitment—showering their target with gifts, using lines from movies, telling you you’re the most beautiful, amazing thing that’s ever happened to them. And although it’s partly a game to them, it isn’t all fake. They’re intoxicated by the excitement and the chase, but it’s also important to them that they can get you to fall in love with them—they can’t rest until they’ve sealed the deal and hooked you. It’s also typical that they’ll propose quickly, while the rush is still there. Again, it’s because they crave more and bigger excitement, but they probably know on some level that they can’t sustain this sort of intimacy for long. The same applies to getting their partner pregnant. You could meet a psychopath and be married and a mother within a year.”

“Because that’s the ultimate sealing of the deal?”

“Exactly. And because that’s what wives do, so his wife has to do it faster and better than anyone else. She’s no longer Emma or Clare or whoever, she’s ‘my darling wife.’ He might even enjoy playing the family guy or doting dad—for a brief scene or two. Then it’s on to his next thrill.” She hesitates. “I had a psychopath come to therapy once, with his wife. He loved it—it was an hour all about him. And he was brilliant at it—at playing it like a game, I mean. I could see him sucking up everything I was doing, using my techniques to become even more charming and deflective and self-justifying. It’s the only time I’ve ever terminated therapy. I told his wife she should get out of the relationship, fast, but the last I heard they were still together.”

“But why?” I ask. “If he can’t sustain the fa?ade, why would a woman stay with someone like that?”

“Hmm.” Annette considers. “Well, based on that couple, I can see how the initial love-bombing and attention could become a kind of drug, particularly if the woman’s quite insecure in the first place. Even though the psychopath can’t keep it up, he only has to offer her an occasional tiny drop of it to keep the addiction going. And psychopaths are controlling—not least because they think, with some justification, that they’re better decision makers than anyone else around them. It’s a vicious circle: The more the psychopath makes the decisions, the more the partner believes she’s incapable, so the more she lets him make the decisions. Eventually, she just has no confidence left.”

That makes sense. I think how different Lucy seemed when we first met in the NICU. Despite the stress of having a premature baby, she’d been engaging and outgoing, a far cry from the vague, anxious creature she is now. I also recall how, the first time we went to the Lamberts’, Miles had been so quick to correct her—first when she mixed up who out of Pete and me took milk, and then when she’d failed to pick up that Pete was the primary carer. Tiny, tiny things—at the time I’d taken them for alpha-male protectiveness, but now that I come to think of it, Pete would never have pounced on my mistakes so quickly, or corrected me in quite such a paternalistic way.

“And is there any chance she could become psychopathic herself?” I ask. “That she could, on her own initiative, do something as callous as swapping two babies to get a malpractice payout?”

“You can never completely rule anything out,” Annette says cautiously. “Certainly not without talking to the person concerned. But based on what you’ve told me, I’d say it’s unlikely. You’re describing someone who’s so lacking in confidence she can’t even make a cup of tea. The idea that she’s capable of making a spur-of-the-moment decision, one with long-lasting consequences, on her husband’s behalf, without first securing his permission…It just doesn’t stack up. Quite apart from anything else, it would force her to confront the reality of her situation—that she’s married to a monster. And while there certainly have been psychopathic couples—Bonnie and Clyde, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley—that doesn’t sound like the dynamic you’re describing. Frankly, I think it’s much more likely that the babies got swapped by accident, and you were just unlucky enough to end up with the child of someone you’d normally go a very long way to avoid.”

87

Case no. 12675/PU78B65, Exhibit 46. Extract from CAFCASS Section 7 report to the family court’s second hearing regarding Theo Riley, compiled by Lyn Edwards, Family Court Adviser.