Part 1 – Rich Livingston

I remember the night I met Clarissa McDonald. I was at a wedding for a college friend, James Dupree. He was marrying the girl he’d been shacking up with the whole time we’d been in college, keeping it quiet from his parents, since they would never have approved of him being in a relationship with an Indian girl. Quite why, no one really knew. It’s not like his parents were well off or hoity-toity or anything. They were just your garden variety unspoken and quiet racists, guilty of never having really been anywhere or expanded their world view beyond Bolton, where he came from. They had a little money, - his father managed a bunch of betting shops for a wealthy family who were rumored to be in some slightly dodgy business relationships, but you know what gossip is, particularly at the college level. No one really knows anything, but everyone likes to pretend they do.

Anyway, James had been a friend to me and for a year, he pretended to live with me. Well, he sort of did anyway. He maintained a room in the house I was living in but he was never there, unless The Parents were in town. Most of the time he was round Patricia’s house, ‘shagging the arse off her’, as he put it. Patricia was a lovely dusky Indian girl, Manchester-born and raised, complete with accent. Initially, it was a bit disconcerting, hearing a Mancs accent coming out of a girl in a sari, but once you got past that, she was quite lovely. Friendly, outgoing, not at all ashamed of who she was, where she came from, or anything really. We were all a little bit in love with her I suppose, at one point or another. But she only had eyes for James.

Annnnyway. Yeah, so they were marrying. A relatively big do, in Manchester, and I was invited. It was, oh, three years from graduation? I think we’d have all been around twenty-five or twenty-six or something. Something like that.

I was living in London by then, starting my career as a financial analyst, on the ground floor. It was tough going; London is a wonderful city, full of exciting things going on and it’s terrific, if you’ve got money. If you don’t, well, it’s like a buffet full of amazing stuff to eat that you can’t touch. I was living in a ground floor flat in East London, just off the East Ham tube station. Very Indian area, but the people were nice and it wasn’t that rough. Plus I liked a good curry and there were LOTS of those style restaurants around. My choice of career was less about a passion for the industry, - although, who doesn’t love money? – and more about what I felt I could easily get into and make a success at, that had at least some chance of financial success at if I put in the effort. Creative endeavors were never really my thing since I just don’t have that gene. I can appreciate a good book or song, but I wouldn’t even know where to start in terms of creating one. But I was good at being able to take information and stats and organizing it against a set of rules and then judging what the information told me.

Yes, I was one of those boring people who not only understood what the statistics professors were talking about, but could imagine it in their heads. Going into the money markets was pretty much inevitable for me. It was either that or being an economist, and I could never actually understand who paid an economist for their understanding? I mean it’s great to understand the why of why the numbers end up being what they are, but who actually pays for that knowledge? I figured economists made money off writing books about economics more than anything.

I was still single, “preferring to play the field” as I loftily told people who asked, doing my best to mask the fact that I just couldn’t seem to get a relationship to stick. It’s not like I was particularly ugly or fat or stupid or had bad personal hygiene or couldn’t dress myself. It was more like I just sucked at the relationship part. I didn’t know the right questions to ask, or have the right interests, or, well, I don’t honestly know, to be frank. If I knew, I’d try and change it. I never really had the courage to ask any of the girls who I dated more than once what the problem was. Pride, I suppose. Who wants to ask girls why they decided to dump you? That just seems like a path to depression and humiliation.

I’d had my share of sexual experiences, some better than others, but I never seemed to have the same kind of thing happening to me that some of the other lads in the office used to boast about on a Monday morning. I strongly suspected that some of them were making stuff up, but even if fifty percent of them were, the other fifty percent were doing things that never seemed to happen to me. No lonely women picked me up when hitchhiking to the Glastonbury concert, and then pulled off the motorway to do unspeakable things to my body. No, I just sat on the train, staring out the window and trying not to listen to some idiot making a very loud phone call, like everyone else. I never ended up locked in a rich woman’s flat in Chelsea during a power cut, where she put out candles then disrobed slowly, tantalizing the guy telling the story, before making him see stars. I just sat in the dark looking at twitter on my phone, while the battery slowly died, that night.

Anyway, I don’t want it to sound like I was, – or am, – a loser. Far from it. I had my adventures. I went downhill mountain biking in Scotland with some friends. I went on a tour of France on a motorbike with other friends. I even had a sideline, selling photos and videos to Shutterstock – you know the sort of thing. A woman looking at a laptop, a guy making an omelet, the white cliffs of Dover. The sort of thing that websites buy when they need stock images. While they don’t sell for much, if you have enough of them, you’d be surprised how much you can make a month for relatively little outlay. A decent camera, the time to set stuff up; you’d have to be a pro photographer these days to do this. And I’m far from a pro. I do this purely for the money, not because I’m any kind of artiste with a camera. It’s purely a sideline that pays my car payment when I have a good month.

So yeah, I have friends, I get out, I have my hobbies. Just not massively successful with the ladies and to compensate I’m spending a lot more time at the office, trying to get a leg up on the competition. As I explained to people who really pried, “I don’t have time for a full-time relationship right now. Establish the career first, then relationship later, when I can devote time to it, appropriately.” Yeah, it’s all complete pompous bollocks, and I don’t think anyone really bought it either, but it was at least an answer without me looking like Billy-no-mates, and I could then change the subject.

So there I was, Richard Livingston, twenty-six, sitting at the bar at this wedding, itching the collar of the slightly-too-tight shirt and desperately wishing they wouldn’t water down the drinks quite as much as they were. Open bar, – inevitable really, but still. They weren’t serving pulled pints and as such, I had decided to move to bottled beer from the gin and tonic I was drinking that I wasn’t sure had even been in sight of a gin bottle, let alone had the contents of the bottle touch it.

I wasn’t part of the wedding party; James and I were friends, but not that good friends, - and while I knew a fair number of people there, James’ circle of friends had enlarged a fair bit and I didn’t have that much in common with the other university people I did know. We’d done the whole “Oh, what are you doing now?” questions, with all the pretend fascination that people express, and then been lost for stuff to talk about. Some of them had gotten married, one set had kids, just ... no commonality to talk about. I ended up at the bar, sitting there in this monkey suit, smiling falsely at everyone and wondering when I could leave decently without it being seen as ‘a poor show’ by the poor sod who just got hitched.

I was just consoling myself that at least it wasn’t a full-on, three-day Indian wedding, and asking the barman for a bottle of Stella Artois when she plonked herself down on the spare stool next to me. I glanced at her and had to force myself to look back at the barman. I mean, talk about knockout. Once you start looking, it’s hard not to stare. And for once, I was going to play it cool. Sure I was. I wasn’t desperately trying not to look like a goldfish out of the bowl, not me. No, cool, calm and collected. That’s what I was. Suuurrrrre.

Clarissa Anne McDonald (I would learn of the Anne part later), had shortish brown chestnut hair, very silky and full. I mean, just the hair alone looked like it had just walked out of hair advert. Wide cheekbones, full red lips, wide smile, which usually showed lots of perfectly aligned teeth. Smaller eyes than you would have thought, and pencil-thin eyebrows, but she pulled it off. Definitely someone you’d look twice at. Three times, in fact. Maybe even four, if she didn’t catch you at it. She had the ability, when engaged with you, to give you her full attention. She didn’t glance around, or fidget, or have body language that wasn’t engaged with you. She faced you full-on, paid attention and watched your eyes.

Of course, now I know why, but back then it was a new thing. She could make you feel like you were interesting. Worth her time. I mean that was a massive ego boost for me when she deigned to focus her attention on me.

She ordered a gin and tonic, and I winced when she did so, and she said, “What’s up? Is the gin crap or something?”

I leaned in, even though it wasn’t noisy, and whispered, “Get a double. It’s watered down.”

“Ahhh,” she replied, tapping her nose in the age old, ‘I understand’ move. “Gotcha. Will do. Thanks for the tip.”

She ordered and then swung around on the swivel stool, stocking-clad legs crossed over each other, the tight green sheath dress she was wearing rode up a little, and as I look back now, I’m pretty sure she knew it.

“Hi,” she said, offering her hand. “I’m Clarissa. But if we end up friends, you can call me Risa. Most people do. Clarissa is just terribly snooty, don’t you think?”

That was a hard one to answer correctly. On the one hand, agreeing with her that her name was snooty was not the way to a lifelong friendship. On the other, disagreeing with the first conversational tidbit offered, wasn’t the way forward either.

So I just hedged. “I’m sure your parents liked it?” I am nothing if not a little conniving when it comes to conversational gambits.

“Oh, very good,” she smiled. “Quick on your feet then. I like that.”

I learned very quickly that Clarissa was all about the conversation gambits, and testing people to see their reactions. Honestly, later on in life, it led to some spirited ‘discussions’, where I had to keep telling her that our friends were not test subjects for her theories and mind games. Particularly not me.

I had thought that I was pretty good at seeing through them, understanding where they came from, and could head them off at the pass, but, ultimately, it would be proved that she was far better than I could have possibly imagined, and all I saw was the levels she wanted me to see. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me tell the story in my order, my way.

To cut a long story short, we talked for a while. She explained she was a distant cousin to James, there wasn’t much family she had left, and so what was still around she felt it was important to be there for ‘the events’, as she put it. She was a trained psychologist, or, at least that’s what her degree was in. She’d got a first from Cambridge, and then gone to work for a multi-national corporation called Xerex International, totally ignoring what her degree was in. She at least wrinkled her nose ruefully at that. She was now twenty-nine, three years older than me, and she was a ‘roving trouble shooter’, whatever that meant. She explained it as ‘part business analyst, part personal analyst, and part ruthless bitch’. The company was a holding company that owned several other businesses, doing different things in different countries. In Spain, they built houses and insured cars. In France, they made tractors and installed lifts in high-rise buildings. In Switzerland, they made water purification systems and air conditioning systems for businesses. In England, they had publishing houses and imported coffee. In China, they ran a telecoms business and owned casinos. In Australia, they built luxury yachts and supplied farming equipment. It was all extremely eclectic and across the expanse of possible businesses, and she smiled and shrugged and said, “The whims of the super-rich!”

Her group was a task force that looked for business units that weren’t fulfilling the potential the partners had decreed, and they went in to do a deep analysis of the business, how it operated, who was doing what and what partners they were working with. They didn’t so much look at what the business was, - as Risa put it to me, “Like I’d know one coffee bean from another. I’ve got no idea what would sell or not. I drink tea!” (which turned out to be another lie, but not one I’d find out for years), - more how the business actually worked. How one process led to another. What bits went where, and why. And then they’d look at the people doing the work to assess if these really were the people who should be doing that work. And then they’d take it all apart, and rebuild it, bit by bit, putting the people who should be doing the specific things in the right place. It was business analysis in its purest form, not concerned with the product, only the process to get to the product.

Generally, she confided in me, the places in the businesses they’d been into saw a fifteen, - in some cases, - to thirty percent jump in income within the year, after they’d been ‘optimized’, as she referred to it. If they didn’t, they were either shut down or sold off.

But. The price to pay for all this wonderful experience was that her team went all over the world, traveled a fair bit to do their initial analysis, so as a result, she was single. As she explained, looking into my eyes, “Career first, fella later.”

Uncharacteristically, I snorted at this. Almost the exact same words I used to justify my single-ness. However in her case, probably true.

“What?” she asked, clearly concerned about my response.

“Look. Just look at you. You could have any guy in here,” I answered, telling the absolute truth as I saw it. “‘Career first’,” I said, using finger quotes. “I know what that means. Hell, I tell people that all the time.”

“What does it mean to you?” she asked, putting her drink down and looking at me, unblinking.

“It means you probably can’t hold a relationship together because of all the traveling, any more than I seem to be able to.” I was fairly sure that wasn’t true. The way she looked, everyone else would do the holding of a relationship together. She’d just have to be there.

Now, this is not my normal reaction, but then this wasn’t your normal interaction anyway. Beautiful women don’t suddenly start talking to me and sticking around like she was, so I figured it was all some set up by James or someone anyway, so what the hell? Why not be honest?

“So, why don’t you think you can hold it together, Richard?” She asked, picking the drink up again, and then playing with the straw. Another one of her little mannerisms I would become intimately familiar with. She always did this when she was asking something she didn’t already know the answer to.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Don’t know the right things to say or do, I guess. You’d probably have to ask the women I’ve no doubt disappointed to find out.”

“And yet, you don’t seem to be blaming women? Not any kind of Incel reaction?”

“Incel?”

“You know. Forced Celibacy. The whole ‘I can’t get a date, therefore all women hate me, so I’ll hate them back’ thing.”

“Oh god no.” I laughed, genuinely amused by that. “Women kind are nothing if not discerning. Well, most of them anyway. No, I just figure I’ve not met the right jigsaw piece that fits in with mine yet. Just ... an accident of time. Maybe my connection part is an odd shape or something.”

I winced when I said that. So many bad ways that could be taken.

“An accident of time. I like that,” and then she gave me a dazzling smile, and goddamn if I didn’t start to get hard.

“Okay, well, Richard Livingston, give me your phone.” She demanded.

Looking at her, I raised an eyebrow, and she gave me a mock glare and made a ‘come here’ gesture with her outstretched hand.

I gave her a half-faced sardonic smile, and pulled out my iPhone, unlocked it, and handed it to her.

“Good,” she murmured, then took a picture of herself, – several in fact, before she was happy with one, - and put her details in as a new contact, and handed the phone back.

“I’m in town till Sunday week. Call me and let’s do dinner. Let’s see if you really are un-dateable, or if you just need some pointers. I’m always up for a challenge!” Which was a truer statement than I could have possibly imagined at the time.

And that was how I met Clarissa McDonald.

To cut a long story short, we clicked. Very clicked. The date, – at the Hawksmoor steakhouse at Seven Dials in London, – went way better than I expected, and was followed by another one, the next day, at a place she knew that was a mix of sushi and broth boiling. Each person sat at a station, where they got a boiling broth, and then they took things off plates on a conveyor belt to put in that broth and cook. Like a sushi place where small tidbits go round on the conveyor belt, only this was all raw stuff, that you then cooked yourself. All very clever and fun. We had a great time feeding each other with chopsticks, of which she was quite the expert. As well she should be, as she explained. She’d spent two months in Shanghai, working on a business building swap between business units in her company.

She then left for two weeks but the moment she got back, she called and we went out again. And again. Of course, the dates got a little mundane; you can’t keep up that level of either cost or uniqueness in every date, and we didn’t. Some nights it was just pub quiz time, others a take-out at home. I got to see her place and she got to see mine. Hers was way nicer than mine, on the eighth floor of a nice tower block, near Tower Bridge. Must have been horrendously expensive but, as it turned out, it was a cheap rent because the building was owned by her company. Of course.

She never complained about the journey out to mine, all thirty minutes on the District/Met Line and we tried to split time between our respective places equally.

We also tried to get away too. Weekends in Dorset or Cumbria or Kent, even a couple in France, where I discovered she was fluent in French.

Now I look back on it, I am amazed how both how unobservant I was and also how she didn’t volunteer that much. I’d just discover it, as I went along. Like the fluency in French thing. I had no clue, till she delivered a torrent of it at the bell boy in the place we stayed in Paris. Apparently, he’d been rude under his breath in French, and she’d picked up on it, and threatened him with being reported to the management. Now I consider what happened with what I know, how I didn’t question the fact that in all our planning, all the traveling we did, it just never came up that she spoke French like a native. I never thought to question that fact. I just rolled with it, and chalked it up to another pleasant surprise! We were learning about each other, and there were new things to learn! How great is that?

Not so great, as it finally turned out.

At the time though, it just went past me. The euphoria of a successful relationship at last! And with such an incredible hottie! I flattered myself that the waiting had paid off. That saving myself was the right thing to do. That the other girls indeed had not known what they were missing. What delusions we tell ourselves, when things are going well, eh? I knew damn well deep down what a crock of shit that really was (what a delightful phrase that is. One of the few I’ve adopted from our cousins over the pond), but I wasn’t going to look that golden goose in the teeth too much, confused metaphors aside.

My family loved her. Mum and Dad, who were pretty doddering by then, since I’d come along late in life, thought she was great. I’m sure there was some unspoken worry on their part about me being perpetually single, but I just ignored any hint of that on their part. I was an only child, so no worrying about siblings liking her.

I only met her mother twice, before the wedding. She was some matronly lady who lived in Herefordshire, near Wales. She lived alone; her father had died some years back and Clarissa was an only child too, so we had that in common too. Neither of us had to share our toys. I got the impression that she wasn’t wildly impressed with me, but she made it clear that she supported Clarissa, and if I was her choice, then she’d go along with that. It didn’t make us bosom buddies, but she wasn’t about to make waves.

She made it to the wedding but died shortly after of a brain hemorrhage. Clarissa just took off to deal with everything and was gone almost three weeks emptying her mother’s house and arranging everything. Still, we got enough inheritance to buy our own place out in Rickmansworth, northwest of London. It was a bit of a commute into the city proper but the house was ours, and we loved it. Semi-detached house, a bit of a garden, three bedrooms, dining room, kitchen, separate living room, lovely bathroom, a downstairs bathroom and even an attached single car garage. Yes, not huge, but it was ours. I kept making jokes about how one of the bedrooms was ready to be a nursery, but it was only a joke. We’d both said we wouldn’t start for kids till our middle thirties, which seemed a bit late to me, but I was prepared to go along with whatever she wanted. While I wanted kids, I wanted Clarissa happy more.

We were happy. I mean, I know I was. I think she was. Knowing what I know now, I could never be sure. But I think she was. I choose to believe it. Otherwise, the entire thing was a sham. Well, it was a sham, but I have to believe parts of it weren’t, or I’d go insane.

I’m trying to find ways to show you what our life was like so you can understand how much of what happened came out of the blue for me. I was metaphorically fat, happy and dumb. We’d have our weekends and read the papers online, and send each other links to stories we’d read in the mornings, and then talk about them over lunch, or as we went for a walk.

We went away for weekends. Our ‘dirty weekends’, as she put it, with a comic leer on her face. She even made us book into a hotel using different names once, so everyone would think we were cheaters or something. Now I mention that, I wonder if that really was the impetus on that, or if it was something more sinister.

She’d travel a lot, and be gone for weeks at a time. A couple of times she was gone for a couple of months. I would hear from her sporadically when she was gone. She’d made it clear that her job was her job, and it was there and I had to understand it wouldn’t change if we were together or married. When she was ‘In Country’, as she put it, her whole attention was on the job, what she was doing, and she would contact me when she ‘came up for air’. I could understand that. While I was elbow deep in the financial aspects of being a market manager, I would also gain singular focus. It just wasn’t for the duration that she had it. I just chalked it up to her career, and let it go. It was either that or force a decision on her that I wasn’t entirely sure would go my way, if I really made it a ‘Job Or Me’ thing. Besides, if we were going to have kids, then it would all have to change anyway, so it didn’t seem smart to force the issue too much. I did make disapproving noises every now and then, and it got me some great guilt sex, and some pretty awesome gifts on her return, - she bought me a new racing bike and a training stand once, which was awesome. I’d been salivating over one of those for years, but just never had the capital on hand that I could plonk down on it and not feel guilty about spending that amount. While I worked advising other people on their money, the kind of advice I was handing out was for people who had so much of it, so it didn’t really translate to my kind of income. I did okay, for sure, but it’s not like I was pulling in the big bucks. It takes speculation to accumulate, and you generally had to speculate on a level I wasn’t anywhere near. Plus, her bonuses were often pretty good when she got back, so I took the rough with the smooth, you know? Didn’t rock the boat too much.

When she was gone, I’d find stuff to do. Weekends on the bike in Scotland or Wales. I even went and did some of the Tour de France route once, with some friends. Never doing that again. Those athletes who do that are extremely fit, and I am less so, and this excursion proved that day after day. I just took solace in the fact that everyone else in my group was as knackered at the end of the day as I was.

It was over four years since we’d been married, and five years since we’d met at James’ wedding, when it all went tits up. When I discovered exactly how unobservant and just plain stupid I really had been. How misled and delusional I was. And the implications, well, I’ll tell you the story and you can judge for yourself.

I was never suspicious of Clarissa. I’d met various people from her work a few times. Parties, Christmas events, a retirement celebration. I knew the receptionist at her office space, in Knightsbridge, since I called so often. While Clarissa had a cell phone, she wasn’t allowed to use it during the day. She actually had two, one for work and one for her. She explained that the company had real security issues and so her work phone was specially secured, and the personal phone was a security risk, so it had to be turned off and left at the main desk when she went to work, so all communication was either over skype or via landline calls when she was in the office. When she was abroad, she just left her personal cell at home entirely. That’s why I usually had to wait for her to call me.

Again though, explaining that, I realize how stupid I was. I mean, who really works for a company as a business unit analyst that is not allowed to take a personal phone with them when they go abroad for business?? I mean, come on. But at the time, I didn’t think twice about it. This was an area of business I knew nothing about, and this was Clarissa. This is what she told me, so I believed her. That’s what husbands do, right?

Her work colleagues seemed friendly enough. I did realize at some point that I’d never actually seen the inside of her office space, but again, just didn’t really think too much of it at the time. I was hugely proud of my Go-Getter Wife, who was a big-time jet-setter. She’d send me selfies from her work phone of herself in the first-class lounge at Heathrow, or at the bar of the A380 she was flying on, or whatever, usually once she got home. She was going places and doing important things, and I got to bask in reflected glory, at least I thought so.

This is not to say everything was perfect. It wasn’t. We had our fights and things that irritated us about the other, as everyone does. I grumbled about her traveling, and like I said, she tended to keep things close to her chest. I’d find out about plans she’d made the day we were going to do something, and sometimes that caused major conflict, because I’d have arranged to do something else. One time it happened, and I’d just had enough, so I left to go and do my thing, plastic snow skiing, I think it was. She was due to travel the next day, and I just left, and she got pissed and left herself. No note, no phone message, she was just gone, and I didn’t hear from her for ten days. My pride and anger stopped me from even trying to leave a message at her work, and it’s not like she reached out either, at least not for ten days.

She’d get mad at me for never doing the washing up. She’d come home to a tip of a house after being away, and then launch into me because of the state of the house. Like it wasn’t enough that she was tired, jet-lagged and beat, no, now she had to clean the house before she could even sit down in it.

I bought a car without talking to her first, an old fixer-upper that I planned to work on, on the weekends, and that caused her to first go ballistic, and then for her to buy a selection of handbags and shoes that caused my eyes to water, once I saw the receipts for them. We did still have our own accounts, and one for where we put the majority of the money for house stuff, but still, I did start to wonder how much she had in her accounts, because she dropped over fifteen thousand pounds without pausing for a second, and I’d had to save for months to get the money for the old Jag I’d bought.

One other thing that really wound me up was a holiday we planned for Madrid got called off at the last minute. I had always wanted to go there, - to be honest, I really wanted to do a biking holiday there, but I knew Risa would never go for that, so I was fine with just a normal sightseeing thing, and we had it organized and paid for, and literally three days before we were due to go, she comes home, all hangdog, and apologizes that she can’t go, we can’t go, something has come up, and she’ll make it up to me. The company will make it up to us, in fact. For a change, I went ballistic. That was the first time I ever really thought about an ultimatum, – the job or me. I was angry, and she left on the day we were supposed to go to Spain. She was in Germany, if she was to be believed.