What Daddy Did (27 page)

By the time I met Ian, Robert and I had been separated for 11 years, yet we were still legally married as neither of us had pursued a divorce. I continued to use his name – to be honest, I had never really wanted to divorce him. I suppose, subconsciously, I always hoped that we would get back together.

I'll be upfront and admit that I really don't have anything nice to say about Ian now that we are apart. He hurt me and scared my children, but I have since tried to make sense of why I allowed him into my life in the first place. I had spent all of my adult life trying to avoid people who would cause me pain and anguish or who would in any way threaten my children, yet here I was not only getting involved with someone who was aggressive and controlling, I had taken it a step further and chosen to marry him. I was clinging to something I thought I was being offered; I didn't want to be on my own at this time; but I still feel so guilty that I chose this man.

He said that we had to move out of the beautiful North Berwick house, and he was really insistent about it. He promised me so much. He said that a new house in which we could start together would be so much better – better for him as it would be in his name and cost half as much as the one I was renting. And it would be further away from Christine. He found us a cottage in Dirleton, north of where I had been living, and it was horrific. The place was a complete mess and I had to gut it.

One day I went there on my own to try and get a room organised for Saoirse. I spent all day in my element, cleaning and stripping it before painting murals on the wall and turning it into a wonderland for my little girl who was only five at the time. It was beautiful and I was really proud to be channelling myself into something positive and loving like that. That night, I took Ian up to see it. I held his hand as we went in and got him to close his eyes so that it would all be a surprise. We walked down the corridor and when we got there, I peeled his hands away from his eyes to show him my handiwork.

He went ballistic.

'You stupid bitch!' he shouted at me. 'What the fuck did you do that for? You can't paint – you've made a fucking mess of the place! How stupid, just how stupid can a person be?' he shouted at me over and over again. Ian was a big man, much, much bigger than me, and as he hollered, he towered over me, terrifying me with his physical presence.

I'd never heard him shout before but I should have heard something else – alarm bells.

I was so upset, and he quickly became apologetic in an overthetop way, saying that he was sure I wouldn't marry him now and that he had ruined everything. All I saw was this big man in tears, saying that he was sorry over and over again.

I fell for it.

Another problem was that Ian had a big issue with my older children, Paul and Claire. He had a number of sons with his exwives and partners. In fact, he was even a granddad by this time. Nevertheless, he saw fit to tell me how to raise mine. I am enormously proud of my children and always have been. They are good, kind, generous, hardworking people with strong values and a horror of even the thought of any kind of violence, given that I never subjected them to it at any point of their young lives, but Ian was obsessed with telling me that I needed to discipline them. I don't know why, because they never did anything wrong (not that I would have hit them if they had), but he went on and on about it, saying that I was too soft, always trying to drive a wedge between us. I'd never smacked my kids, but one day he slapped Paul, hard, right across the face in front of the others and I saw the looks pass between them. They hated it. They hated him. And I couldn't do anything; I was so scared of him.

I felt powerless because of where I was at. I was going through the motions. I started feeling about Ian the way I felt about Helen. The minute I started having flashbacks, I went off sex completely, and I couldn't stand the feeling of vulnerability when I was naked. He loved having parties, which clearly brought back horrible emotions for me. They were never normal, happy events – they had too much drinking, too much arguing, too much dope. For the first time I had let my barriers down and this was how I had been rewarded.

Ian never really tried to compensate for the awful times. Even on special, symbolic occasions, he didn't make the effort. I don't believe that you need to throw a lot of cash about to make things nice, but it doesn't take much to make someone feel special. For most of my children's lives, I've been skint, yet I've always taken the time and made the effort to make things wonderful for them. Even with Ian, I tried to make things fantastic. I painted his guitar case with a beautiful Celtic design; I bought him a bodhrán and painted that too. I looked after him, cooking and cleaning for him, and I listened to him. I spent money on clothes and holidays for him and, most importantly, I was always there, always there for him.

It wasn't reciprocated. He took all the words that I had told him hurt me so badly when Helen had used them, and he repeated them over and over again. I couldn't work by this time as I was so incapacitated by the stress and anxiety involved in deciding to co-operate with the police, and he threw that at me whenever he could.

There was always an agenda with Ian. To him, everything was always because of one of my 'problems'.

So, I did it.

I married him.

I know that I was vulnerable. I know now that the warning signs were all there, yet I continued the relationship. I know so much now that it's over.

I would spend time listening to his stories of how bad his life had been, and how people had been so horrible to him. I really, really believed I could change him, like so many women believe they can change so many men. When he said he loved me I believed him, even though there were many incidents of him being involved with other women while we were together, before and after we married. I believed him when he said he was sorry after he had terrified me with his aggression and bullying. I was spiralling into my past and I needed love, support and protection more than at any other time in my adult life, yet here I was faced with a man who offered me the exact opposite. As I've said, I misread all the signals and I chose to marry him.

I was fed up of relationships not working. I didn't want to be on my own any longer, and I did feel a link to him at the start. But this wedding? This wedding would be so very different from my first and I could feel my heart breaking from the start.

On the night before the wedding, I stayed at the home of my dear friend Christine and her husband, Stuart. We got married on the August bank holiday in 2002. That suited Ian as it meant all of his English friends could be there. I was late. Thirty minutes before it was due to start, I still hadn't done my hair and I was sewing my dress together. Christine and Stuart had tried to make it special for me. Stuart wrote me a beautiful letter and drove me there; Christine was by my side the whole time, even though she had previously warned me that Ian would never change.

We got married in the garden of a pub in Dunbar that had been Ian's local, and everything was done on a very tight budget. I designed and made my own dress; and we had mince and potatoes for our meal with a grand dessert of spotted dick and custard. We went home on the coach back to North Berwick with all the people who came to the wedding, and then we went back to the house we were living in. I had a very heavy heart that day because I knew instinctively it was all wrong, but by then I'd gone too far down the road to turn around. Unlike the happiness and joy of my first wedding, I was miserable.

Christine had offered to look after the children for me so that Ian and I could get a bit of a honeymoon. The day after the wedding, however, I was incapacitated by a terrible virus. I lost my voice and was too ill to even move.

We were together but there was no romance, no wonderful moments for me to recall later, and Ian was angry with me all the time because sex was the last thing on my mind. All the time that I was with him, he never once took me out for a nice meal or a romantic date. I let him become part of my life and my children's lives, and he stamped on all of it.

It would be so easy to blame what I was going through for the troubles we had throughout this relationship. However, when I had later dealt with most of my past and was coming out the other side, I devoted a great deal of time and energy into trying to resolve what Ian called my 'issues'. I attended six sessions at Relate where I spoke at length about what we had been going through, and I accepted that some of this may have been directly related to my past – but I knew also that a great deal of it had to do with the person he was. On the seventh session, Ian came along to allow me to face him in a safe environment but it was disastrous. Neither of us went back to Relate. There was no point. I just needed to get out.

L
EAVING
I
AN WASN'T EASY
.

I had often thought about it but it always seemed such an enormous task. I moved with him to his home town 300 miles away from Edinburgh, thinking that if we got away from everything, we might have a chance to repair our damaged relationship. I also thought that the move might give him a chance to develop bonds with the sons he'd had with other women, and that this might make him more receptive to my children. In reality, I ended up exactly where he wanted me – isolated and, to begin with, without a single friend to call on. I kept trying to make it work between us, although my heart was always heavy and I didn't trust him. Ironically, the final catalyst for our split came about through Ian's own doing.