spouse’s infidelity – yell, scream, throw things, storm out. Yet for many of us the only course of action is no action, just an immediate paralysis, a wall of denial and disbelief that springs up around the heart to protect it from cracking right down the middle. Keith Rodrigues stood rooted to the spot. It couldn’t be true. Surely she wouldn’t do that to him; what about the children, too? What about the family they’d so carefully and so lovingly built up? Would Lorna really want to jeopardise all that? In shock he scrolled through the message again and again. There was no mistake, there could be no innocent explanation: his wife was having an affair.
Keith Rodrigues loved his wife; he adored her, in fact. Sure they’d had their problems over the years but what couple hadn’t? He never imagined she would have betrayed him like this and with someone they both knew. It was a real kick in the teeth for the unassuming family man. What had he done that was so wrong that it sent her running into another man’s arms? Hadn’t he been enough for her?
Any spouse discovering infidelity feels inadequate. Men in particular can feel like sexual failures, as if they haven’t been man enough to please their wives. They become haunted by visions of their spouse in bed with someone else, so-called ‘mind movies’ of the lovers having sex play incessantly through their heads as if on continuous loop. Everyone reacts in different ways. Some are angry, some disbelieving, others just broken but all they want the same result: they want it to stop.
When a trembling Keith Rodrigues confronted his wife in December 2001, deep down he knew what he wanted. More than anything he wanted Paul Salmon off the scene and his family to stay together. The couple talked long into the night. Keith was adamant Rena should know what had been going on for she was as much betrayed as he was. She had a right to be told, to know what kind of man she was living with. Plus, once Rena knew, she’d be able to keep an eye on what Paul was getting up to and maybe he’d start to leave Lorna alone.
Keith was all for telling Rena right away but Lorna managed to convince him to hold off. It was December, Christmas was round the corner and Rena wasn’t the kind of woman who’d be able to hide her feelings. What kind of festive season were the four children involved going to have if the adults around them were constantly rowing and crying? What sort of holiday was Rena herself going to have? This news was going to rip the very heart out of her carefully constructed family life. Surely he could find it in himself to give her the greatest gift of all – peace of mind – even if it was all a temporary illusion?
In the end kind-hearted Keith Rodrigues agreed to postpone dropping the bombshell – but not for long. In January 2002 he gave Rena and Paul’s daughter a lift home from school and he came in to see Rena for a chat. Taking a deep breath, he told her as gently as he could: ‘Lorna’s having an affair.’ Rena was immediately sympathetic. The poor man. She could see how upset and broken he was. ‘It’ll be all right,’ she reassured Keith, putting her arms around him. He in turn put his arms around her waist, knowing that what he was about to say would shatter her world.
‘It’s not the worst bit,’ he told her. ‘It’s Paul.’ At that moment Rena felt like she couldn’t breathe: Paul was cheating on her and with one of her closest friends. She couldn’t take it in. Yes, she’d known her marriage was shaky but she’d told herself they’d get through it. Every couple had bad patches, didn’t they? She and Paul were a team: they had two amazing children, they’d built up a great life for themselves. He wasn’t about to throw all that away, was he? Until now Rena managed to plaster over the cracks in her crumbling marriage but Keith Rodrigues’ news took a sledgehammer to all that.
‘I don’t believe it,’ she gasped. If someone had physically punched her in the stomach she couldn’t have felt more pain than she did now. It was as if a hand had seized hold of her insides and was twisting them cruelly round and round. Not Paul, not Lorna – it couldn’t be true.
Suddenly all the years fell away and once again she was the child no one wanted; the one who’d never been attractive enough or good enough; the one who’d learned to expect rejection as her birthright. She was the dark-skinned, dark-haired girl whose mother had made her feel ugly and who’d grown up feeling less worthy, less loveable than the blue-eyed, fair-skinned children all around her. Blue eyed like Lorna, fair skinned like Lorna. Trembling, her emotions rushing through her like an unstoppable force, she picked up the phone and dialled her husband’s mobile.
Paul Salmon was sitting at his desk at work when the phone rang. As soon as he answered, he knew something was very wrong. Rena’s voice was raw with grief and rage; also a hysterical venom. ‘You bastard!’ she screamed. ‘You cheating, lying bastard! You’ll never see your kids again!’ Undeterred, Paul told his wife he’d fallen in love with Lorna and wasn’t about to give her up.
Knowledge of infidelity does strange things to the mind. You start relentlessly re-examining the past and in the brutal light of this new discovery, nothing now looks the same. Events that were happy in retrospect seem to be hollow at the core. Loving words once spoken are now stripped of all meaning. The happy family picture has a dark shadow hanging over it. Even logical, well-balanced people can go dangerously off the rails confronted with a spouse’s affair. What hope then for a fragile and emotionally abused woman such as Rena?
For both couples it was a terrible time. The recriminations were endless, every conversation punctuated by ‘How could you?’ There were tears and arguments; doors were slammed and voices raised. In the end the Rodrigues made a drastic decision: they would move to Australia and start life afresh away from this mess. They’d work on being a family again, just as they had before. Keith was convinced he could make Lorna happy just as long as she was as far away as possible from Paul Salmon.
In January 2002 the Rodrigues family left for their new life and that should have been the end of the matter. But anyone who has ever been involved in an illicit love affair will tell you that sometimes the emotional high it produces is stronger than any drug and breaking contact is like breaking with an addiction, an addiction thousands of miles can’t cure.
Lorna and Paul never quite managed to break free of one another. By this stage they probably didn’t want to. Each had found in the other something missing in their marriage. Now they’d found it, they didn’t want to lose it again. Before long they were speaking on the phone.
‘Right country, wrong man,’ Lorna told Paul in one call.
Just months after setting out for her new life in Perth, she was back in the UK – alone.
Rena thought she’d rid herself of the threat that hung over her marriage. For a short while she’d allowed herself to breathe freely again, to buy a paper in the local shop without worrying about who she might bump into. But now Lorna had returned and without her husband by her side, she was more of a threat than ever.
At first Lorna moved back to Great Shefford and it wasn’t long before everyone knew that she and Paul had started their affair back up right where they’d left off. Small villages – even picturesque aga-saga ones such as this one – are a hotbed for gossip. Soon neighbours were once again looking at Rena with pity in their eyes.
‘That poor woman,’ they’d whisper. ‘Right under her nose, too.’
Rena hated the well-intentioned pity, just as she’d loathed it when she was a neglected child. She didn’t want sympathy; she wanted her marriage back. She’d put everything into that man and now he was throwing it all back in her face.
But Paul did little to reassure his distraught wife. By that stage he’d decided his marriage was well and truly over. He no longer cared about Rena or about what she might feel. He and Lorna seemed to go out of their way to rub her nose in it, once leaving empty champagne bottles and massage oil stains in the marital bed of the Salmons’ holiday home in Dorset. Paul reckoned she would just have to get used to it. They were finished and that was that. Now it was only a question of sorting out the details, the finances and the divorce.
Any mention of the ‘d’ word sent Rena into a complete tailspin. She couldn’t, wouldn’t accept it. This was her man, her life. What gave this woman the right to steal it out from under her? Things had been all