I first found out my husband was having an affair when his location flashed up on my iPad. I was on holiday in Cornwall with my two children from my first marriage and some friends. He was supposed to be coming but called at the last minute saying something had come up at work and he wouldn’t be able to join us.
This wasn’t new. He had a demanding job with an international bank and quite often would bail out of arrangements at the 11th hour.
Since finding out about his affair, I’ve wondered whether any of his excuses were true – but at this point I believed him unquestioningly and told him how sorry I was and that I would miss him.
Then I went and opened some wine and had a lovely evening with my friends.
When I went to bed slightly tipsy, I rang him but there was no answer. A bit later, he texted me and said he’d decided to go and spend the weekend at his mother’s house in Kent. He felt lonely. Cornwall was too far given the pressures of work, but Kent was much easier, and his mother was looking forward to him coming to stay. I texted him back to say how sweet and kind he was, and then went to sleep thinking of him. I loved him very much and congratulated myself for marrying a man who was such a good son.
Indeed, he was devoted to his mum, who was on her own, and got down to see her at least once a month. ‘You don’t want to traipse down every time,’ he’d say to me. ‘She won’t be here for ever, but I feel bad if I don’t see her for weeks on end.’ Nothing about his absence from our Cornish holiday rang any alarm bells.
The next day, however, something strange happened. While teeing up a film with the kids on our new iPad, my husband’s location flashed up on the screen. And he was nowhere near Kent.
We’d never had any location-sharing apps switched on before, but – having had a lot of time to think about this – I suspect he unwittingly synched the new iPad with his phone when he set it up. He was never very good with tech.
Since finding out about his affair, I’ve wondered whether any of his excuses were true – but at this point I believed him unquestioningly and told him how sorry I was and that I would miss him
He had been seeing his old flame all along, and his mother had helped cover his tracks throughout
So no, my sweet husband wasn’t with his dear old mother, but in West London, on a certain road in Chiswick – and as soon as I saw it, I knew exactly who he was really with.
A former flame, someone I had always been slightly suspicious of. She was the ex before me, the one who got away.
When we first met, he often talked about her in glowing terms. I knew that they’d kept in touch at the start of our relationship – which is why I knew where she lived. Back then it felt as if part of him was still mildly obsessed with her.
Yet now we were married. We were happy and in love. I didn’t think he’d seen her for a decade, and of course hadn’t been involved romantically for more than 15 years, since we met in our mid-30s.
In fact, he hadn’t actually mentioned her name in a very long time. I look back at that now and I wonder if it should have been a red flag.
Yet there he was. In her street.
In that moment my entire world began to fall apart, like a cliff crumbling into the sea. At first I didn’t believe it. Could there be some sort of mistake? A bizarre coincidence? Could his phone have been stolen? Could he have gone to visit her (but why was he visiting her?) and then left his phone there before driving to his mother’s? I rang him and rang him, but of course his phone kept going to voicemail. Then it was switched off.
So I rang his mother, my mother-in-law, instead.
I’d like to say she sounded nervous when she picked up the phone but she really didn’t.
‘Hello,’ I said, trying to keep my voice even and normal. ‘I know that Chris has come to visit you for the weekend. I wonder if I could speak to him because I can’t get hold of him on his phone?’
There wasn’t even a moment’s pause.
‘I’m afraid he’s just nipped out to the shop to get me my Sunday newspaper,’ she said. She’d ask him to ring when he got back, but he might not be able to because they were going out for lunch. ‘You know how the mobile phone reception is here,’ she said. Then she rang off.
I was dumbstruck. For a very brief moment, I felt elated – it was a mistake, after all. Mobile reception was bad in her little Kent cul-de-sac in her chocolate box village – could Chris’s phone somehow appear in Chiswick when it wasn’t really there?
Because she wouldn’t lie. Would she?
I almost called her straight back to laughingly explain my mistake. Yet half a minute’s reflection – and another look at Chris’s location, now frozen because he’d turned his phone off, but very much at his old flame’s flat – convinced me that both of them were indeed deceiving me.
And that, I think, is when my heart really broke. The truth was clear. He was at that very moment in bed with his lover. The image of this man whom I loved so much, whom I totally trusted, being intimate with another woman in the same way he was with me made me want to throw up. I imagined them having coffee, going out for walks, holding hands. It was excruciating.
I must have been crying so loudly that my friend came into the bedroom, and I told her everything. ‘So your husband has been having an affair,’ she said sadly. And then with rising incredulity: ‘And his mother is covering for him?’
Because that was the bit no one could believe. The bit that made the hurt sting even more. Of course the affair was his fault, but why on earth would a woman – his mother – facilitate it by lying for him?
The reality could not have been worse. It turned out he’d been seeing his old flame all along. When he switched his phone back on and answered, he blustered and cried and swore blind it was all a mistake, but I found an inner steel and told him I didn’t believe him.
In the end, back in London days later, he confessed that, yes, he’d never stopped seeing his ex-girlfriend and – woe was him! – he was now in love with two women. Just before our wedding and throughout our marriage, he had been with his ex-girlfriend ‘on and off’.
‘And has your mother known all along?’ I asked him. That question was met with a resounding silence.
The fallout was bruising and inevitably led to our divorce. But what I found almost harder to get over was the double betrayal – not only him, but his mother. Not just that she knew, but that she was actively aiding and abetting his infidelity.
I found out they would often meet at her house with his ex-girlfriend coming down from London so they could spend the weekend together. They would use the double bed in my mother-in-law’s spare room which we’d also slept in. The three of them would often have dinner together. Apparently they became quite a jolly little fixture in the local village pub.
Once my husband started telling me what happened, I found myself unable to stop picking away at it. The flower deliveries I’d spotted on his bank statement, which he said were for his mum? They were for the Other Woman too. But his mum knew to cover in case I ever asked.
Once or twice, he’d taken his lover to the coast for the weekend but left his mobile phone actually at his mother’s so that if I rang she could pick it up and say he’d popped out. The level of subterfuge was absolutely shocking.
And I found it incredibly difficult to understand. This was my mother-in-law, the woman who had sat on the top table as I married her son. Had she sat there wishing I was the other woman instead? Why did she seem to hate me so much?
Because it did feel like a hateful thing to do. I had never really felt that she especially liked me, certainly not like a daughter, but I had not thought she would work against my happiness like this. That she would actively seek to bring me down.
Like my then-husband, she talked a lot about the ex-girlfriend. It wasn’t just tactless but upsetting, and I remember telling my husband to ask her to stop. He did – but she didn’t respond well, telling him she had the right to talk about whatever she liked.
For my part, I had tried really hard to be a good daughter-in-law to her, especially at first. When she had a hip operation, I visited and did her washing and cleaned the house. I bought her books I thought she’d like and tried to foster the kind of relationship where we could both talk like friends. But the effort was never reciprocated.
While my own mother bought Christmas presents for my husband, I didn’t get a thing from my mother-in-law. I don’t think she even remembered my birthday and she certainly never celebrated our anniversary, although she was quite happy to come and eat food at our table.
Revealingly perhaps, my children never warmed to her, though to be fair they were the part of my life she showed most interest in. They were primary school-aged when I married her son, and in those early years we went down to see her often as a family. Later as teens, they never wanted to visit her, and I had my own elderly mother to look after, so the regular visits petered out. My husband seemed fine with going to see her alone – of course I now know why.
Later, I wondered if she resented me because I already had children. Did she want biological grandchildren so badly, she was willing to break up her son’s marriage? And yet his Other Woman was older than me, so there was little prospect of grandchildren from that quarter either.
Was she simply too weak to stand up to him and tell him that what he was doing was wrong?
The irony is that the one thing my husband wasn’t lying about was how close he was to his mother. She was important to him – possibly too important, looking back. He often talked about her petty complaints and visits to the doctor, and when he wasn’t going to see her, chatted to her on the phone every night.
After the divorce, when the pain of it all had subsided and I could look at it all with a clear eye, I finally realised what her motive was.
She didn’t really want him to be happy. That’s what I think now. Rather than embracing his marriage to me and being glad he was in a loving, stable relationship, she wanted his private life to be a mess, his loyalties unhappily divided. Because that way, she kept him emotionally dependent on her. She kept him close. He was her spoiled son and she wanted him for herself.
There are no words for what I feel about her now. For the way she gaslit me, lied to me, sat next to me and all the time knew her son was cheating on me.
For the fact she provided a bed in her own house for him and her.
In the end, I would have liked an apology. Oh, he apologised. Profusely, emotionally, through waves of tears.
But her? Nothing.
I didn’t confront her – I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of knowing how much emotional devastation she and her son had caused me, and I’m not a believer in drama for the sake of it.
But I would have liked some recognition of her role in it all.
All I can do is to know that I would never ever hurt someone that way. And hope that she regrets it.
Of course, the complete irony is that he didn’t even end up with the woman he was having the affair with.
Once we’d broken up, he said he’d ‘come to his senses’ and professed undying love to me and me alone, but it was far too late. Sometimes I hear about him on the grapevine.
His mother is still alive and in her 90s now. I hope they’re happy together.
- Names have been changed to protect identities
