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The day I was thrown in a police cell after my cheating husband accused me of assault, by the long-time editor of Good Housekeeping LINDSAY NICHOLSON
The TV is on — but my husband Mark is fiddling with his phone and not watching. Is he texting her?
I know he is having an affair because four days ago I saw an email from a woman planning dinner with him.
When I confronted him, though he refused to admit her existence, my husband of 12 years said he wanted a divorce on the grounds we were 'living separate lives'.
Nevertheless, here we are sitting in the same room, with the TV on, in the 'forever home' in Hertfordshire we spent eight months refurbishing. My life is in utter turmoil — we have both contacted solicitors — but I am trying desperately to keep up an appearance of normality, going to work at the offices of the magazine Good Housekeeping, where I have been editor for 18 years, and watching TV afterwards in my living room.
Frankly, I am clinging to my sanity by my fingertips. And now he is texting someone. I walk over to where he is sitting and ask him for his phone. 'It's private.'
Long-time editor of Good Housekeeping Lindsay Nicholson spent a night in a police cell when her husband accused her of assault after they both struggled for a phone and it fell to the floor
Then I do something I'll regret for the rest of my life — I make a grab for it.
Oddly, he lets me have it at first, and I see enough in that brief moment, when the phone is in my hands, to know he is texting the woman who sent the email.
Then he stands up and attempts to grab the phone back out of my hand again. I hang on to it momentarily — I want this evidence — before thinking better of it and letting go.
He lets go at the same time. The phone flies through the air, landing with a crash and breaking in two, on the pale grey poured resin floor we spent a small fortune installing.
We both lunge to retrieve the pieces nearest us, so we are standing a metre apart, each holding a part of the broken phone. My heart is pounding and I am gasping for breath. This is not what I expected. I still think he will admit his guilt. I think he will apologise. But what happens next astonishes me even more.
'You just assaulted me,' my husband says evenly. 'I'm calling 999.'
When I met Mark I wasn't sure I could ever love again. My first husband, the investigative journalist John Merritt, died of the blood cancer leukaemia in 1992, 11 years after we married. And then — as if to prove there is no limit to the cruelty life can inflict — my eldest daughter Ellie died of the same disease, leukaemia, in 1998, at the age of nine.
I once described the years of grieving for John and Ellie as like living on the seabed, so deep below the ocean's surface that no sunlight could reach me. But then, in 2003, deciding to move into a secondary school catchment area for my younger daughter Hope (with whom I was pregnant when John died), I opened the door to the estate agent and saw a very tall man, 6 ft 3 or 4, with conker-brown hair.
Over the next few months, I fell deeply, passionately, headlong in love with him and we were married the very next year.
Mark helped me swim to the surface, to breathe air again. He is strong enough for both of us.
But now the undertow has caught me. The one person I thought would help me, his mighty arms cleaving through the waves, is holding my head underwater, and I must surely drown.
We will never agree on what happened that evening in February 2017. His retelling of it was, and remains, fundamentally very different from mine.
There are, however, some facts that are independently verifiable.
At around 8.20pm, a male called the emergency services and said his wife had broken his mobile phone and attacked him with one of the pieces.
Lindsay says she fell 'deeply, passionately, head-long in love' with Mark and married him the very next year
Two police cars attended the scene. They found a woman waiting for them by the front door; they noted she was very quiet and acquiescent. There were no signs of a disturbance other than a broken mobile phone.
No knives in the vicinity, only in their usual drawer in the kitchen, some distance away in this large house. No one appeared injured. The man gave a statement to the officers at the scene. The woman was arrested on suspicion of criminal damage and common assault.
I am put in the back of a police car — me, the 60-year-old, award-winning editor of a lifestyle magazine many women regard as a best friend and national treasure; an ambassador for a well-known charity; a fixture on the prime minister's Christmas card list — and driven the half an hour to Hatfield police station.
I have no idea what will happen next, only that I didn't hit my husband nor intentionally break his phone. I feel as if I am trapped inside a plastic dry-cleaning bag and, every time I try to breathe, the thin membrane is sucked further inside me, suffocating me.
I am scared. I can't think about my 24-year-old daughter or my elderly mother, because their inevitable disappointment in me is too painful to bear.
Later, restlessly reflecting on my arrest, I discover a 2009 paper by Professor Marianne Hester of the University of Bristol, which suggests that although the vast majority of perpetrators of domestic violence are men — 92 per cent — it is women who are more likely to be arrested if police are called.
In Professor Hester's study, women were arrested in three out of ten recorded incidents and men in only one out of ten. Hardly any of these women were ever charged and fewer still found guilty in court. Violence by anyone is appalling, of course, but violence by females is very rare in all societies — so why are all these women being arrested?
At the police station, I'm called forward to the desk and surrender my handbag. My purse is emptied, the cash counted: £80 in notes plus change. I take off my Tag Heuer watch; my Tiffany bracelet; my diamond earrings and antique gold necklace.
They are all sealed in a plastic bag that I sign for. (I removed my wedding and engagement rings and put them in the safe at home the night I discovered the incriminating email.)
Lindsay with her daughters Hope and Ellie. Her eldest daughter Ellie died of leukaemia in 1998, at the age of nine
I also sign over my iPhone and my iPad. A pack of my osteoporosis drugs is inspected and Googled to check it is for the condition I claim.
I am allowed one phone call and decide to ring one of my oldest and dearest friends Alastair Campbell — Tony Blair's former spin doctor — whom I have known for 40 years after meeting at journalism college. I know he won't be judgmental and trust that he will know what to do.
But, in the way of things, the battery on my phone is flat and I can't remember his landline. The only number I can recall off the top of my head is my daughter's mobile. It goes straight to voicemail.
Then I am 'processed'. I am body-searched by a female officer wearing blue surgical gloves. I have swabs taken for DNA; facial recognition photos are taken — the classic mug shots — then my fingerprints are recorded.
I dissociate, a response to trauma that allows me to float off in my head away from what is happening to me.
'Number 27,' the desk sergeant says. And I am led to the cells.
With no phone or watch I have no idea how much time passes. I have never been in this situation before — outside of a flotation tank at a health spa. It is utterly disorientating.
A bubble of panic rises in my throat and suddenly I start to remember the things I spend my life fighting so hard not to. Hammersmith Hospital, where John was in the last days of his fight against cancer. His emaciated figure, covered in tubes.
And then Ellie — in her red dressing gown with matching slippers running down the corridor at Great Ormond Street, laughing like any nine-year-old child.
Before I can stop them, the visions flood my brain, exploding out into the jail cell. Her nails are painted pink, her favourite colour, because that is how we spend the long hospital days.
As her father was, she too is now bald from the relentless chemo. She wears a little cloth cap to cover where her glorious red hair used to be.
Time loses all meaning as I whipsaw between flashbacks of hospital and the present of the police cell all through the night.
Twelve hours before this, I was at a photographic shoot with one of Good Housekeeping's most popular celebrity interviewees. A woman every bit as warm and friendly in real life as when she appears on TV.
Lindsay says the grief from the loss of her first husband John and daughter Ellie transmuted into workaholism. The long hours and deadlines became her sanctuary
As editor of the magazine, I was in charge of everything — the clothes, the colours, the angle of the camera — and had 21 people hanging on my every decision... Now the camera I am looking at is part of a police CCTV system.
Despite it, I cannot avoid peeing all night, as discreetly as I can. Pulling my cashmere jumper down to cover me, I squat over the stainless-steel bowl, wondering who is watching me. Afterwards, I wash my hands in the tiny basin, then dry them on the legs of my Donna Karan leggings.
Later that night (I am not sure how much later), my demons recede and instead, sitting in that cell, I am flooded with the cool balm of clarity.
I still don't have a clue when my 12-year marriage to Mark started to go wrong. But it is dawning on me that my remorseless determination to curate the perfect magazine-worthy life blinded me to the reality of what was happening to it.
My grief for John and Ellie transmuted into workaholism. The long hours and constant deadlines became my sanctuary. I was exhausted but I couldn't sleep. In our grand house refurb, we had the architect draw up plans for not one but two master bedrooms. His and hers suites, to manage my chronic insomnia.
And I know: 'Never have separate bedrooms,' my grandmothers used to intone, as they racked up ruby and golden wedding anniversaries. But I never had any patience for their little nuggets of wisdom.
Nothing about my life bore any resemblance to the lives of the women who came before me. No one in my family had ever lived a life like mine. I was the first to go to university, then all the other firsts — good and, yes, tragic — that followed after.
There was never anyone to say: 'This is what worked for me, this is what helps.'
I spent 16 hours a day at work, greedy for the emotional validation as well as the financial rewards, and I ignored the effect it was having on Mark. I see now that in the wake of what happened to John and Ellie, the PTSD was constantly bubbling under the surface, too, erupting at times of stress.
My shame at still being alive when they were not emerged as constant irritation with the living — storms of unreasonable weeping, temper tantrums. Put like that it sounds like a lot, too much maybe, for any marriage to bear.
And now this police cell.
Eventually, I hear footsteps approach the door and the key clanging in the lock. I am taken to an interview room for questioning by an officer from the Domestic Abuse Unit, the duty solicitor sitting next to me, just like in Line Of Duty. The officer reads from my husband's statement and then gives me the opportunity to confirm or deny each paragraph.
I ask permission to stand up and demonstrate how we both struggled for the phone and it fell to the floor. I point out it was not in my interests to break it. I was desperate for evidence of the affair, now lost. And I categorically deny the alleged assault. My husband is nine years younger than me and eight inches taller.
'So, why do you think he has made this serious accusation against you?' The police officer's face is impassive.
My shoulders sag with exhaustion. 'I am finally realising,' I say, 'that I have had no idea what my husband has been thinking or doing for some considerable time now.'
After 45 minutes of questioning along these lines, I am taken back to my cell. Hours later, keys jangle again, the door unlocks.
'You're free to go. No Further Action.' Someone has decided there is no case to answer, and no record will be kept of the allegations Mark has made against me. I have been incarcerated for more than 16 hours.
There is no distinction in law between the cheater and the cheated-upon, and though morally most people would say the innocent party should not have to move out, that is not how it works.
While I stay with my elderly mother, my husband determinedly carries on with life in our home in Hertfordshire for all the world as if our break-up had been mutual and amicable.
He goes everywhere with his new love: shopping in Waitrose, drinking in the pubs we used to frequent. He introduces her to the neighbours and stops for a chat with our dog-walker on the tow path.
He also changes the locks.
That the editor of Good Housekeeping was to prove so bad at holding on to her home was ironic — very Bad Housekeeping as it turned out. And yet it was also the beginning of the rest of my life.
For a while — a long while — that night in the police cell left a lingering fear. What it told me was that I, who had created an edifice around myself of power and control, was in fact — and had always been — as helpless as a bird fallen out of a nest or a mouse caught in a cat's paw.
And then I realised how far I had strayed from what truly made me happy. I picked myself up, dusted myself down, and started a new chapter, quite literally, of my life.
Adapted from Perfect Bound by Lindsay Nicholson (£20, Mudlark) out July 18 © Lindsay Nicholson 2024. To order a copy for £18 (offer valid to 31/07/24; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.