I practically threw myself underneath a prepare after my husband had an affair

In part three of Lindsay Nicholson’s brave and raw memoir Perfect Bound, the former editor of Good Housekeeping magazine reveals how she came terrifyingly close to throwing herself under a Tube train after discovering her husband was having an affair, and how she finally laid her old life to rest with the help of a Chilean shaman…

The attendant at the BA check-in desk repeats herself: ‘You don’t appear to be who you say you are.’

The world tilts slightly on its axis. I shake my head trying to clear the fog that has been filling my brain for months. Despite losing my marriage and my job in quick succession, I hoped I would still be me? But maybe not? 

The fragile bond that anchors me to the planet has become so frayed and weakened by recent events that now I fear it may snap altogether and, untethered, I will float away into the vast empty darkness of space.

Only nine months before — my mind in turmoil as my marriage disintegrated after discovering that Mark, my husband of 12 years, was having an affair — I stood on the platform at Swiss Cottage Tube station, and as the train approached, realised there was, in fact, one obvious solution to my crisis.

It was 9am, I was on my way to work, but it struck me quite plainly: it wasn’t my marriage that was toxic, it was me. I teetered on the balls of my feet. One step was all it would take not to feel this pain any more. I rocked back and forth. None of the other commuters paid me any attention at all.

Move one foot, then the other and — what — a momentary starburst of agony? Then nothing. This would all stop. I need never, ever be alone again…

As the train rushed into the station, I turned and ran, pushing my way through the crowd, away from the platform — and sat on the concrete steps between the up and down escalators, panting with fright, a knife turning in my stomach.

Five months later, after 18 years as the editor of the nation’s best-selling glossy magazine Good Housekeeping, I am ‘let go’ after a company-wide restructuring.

Brutally, for someone who had made their name by predicting consumer trends, I am no longer in fashion.

I need to do something else, but what? In a moment of supreme hubris, notwithstanding that I am by any definition in the middle of a major nervous breakdown, I decide to become a life coach.

Yes, I really do think that, despite being jobless, divorcing and dependent on antidepressants, my new calling should be telling other women how to live their lives.

So it is for this reason I find myself trying to fly to California, where I have enrolled on a life coaching course. This is my fresh start, a last throw of the dice that I am paying for using my redundancy money.

Except the BA attendant at Heathrow is telling me my ‘paperwork does not appear to be in order’ and I ‘won’t be getting on a plane today’.

Metaphorically, and perhaps actually, I smack my forehead in despair. I have recently acquired a new passport, reverting to my maiden name… But amid the chaos and panic of the past year, I have forgotten to update the ESTA, the document allowing me to travel without a visa to the U.S., which is still registered to my old — now irrevocably lost — married identity.

I am 61 years old and I start to cry, right there in Terminal 5.

The check-in attendant softens her tone, maybe because I am a top-tier frequent flyer, or more likely because I am no longer young and my tears are not pretty.

‘If you’re lucky you might be able to change your paperwork online and still make the flight,’ she says, and tells me to go into the first class area, which she will authorise. (I am no stranger to business travel, but since I am paying my own fare today, I will not be turning left when, or even if, I get on the plane.)

First class this side of passport control is not luxurious, it is simply an empty space, screened off from the rest of the travelling public. There is no seating because VIP travellers don’t linger here but are ushered through, the sooner to get to the lounge itself and the free champagne that is their due.

So I sit on the floor and start to Google. I’ve been drinking a lot of wine recently, which means few of my smart work clothes fit me any more, and I feel the elastic waistband of my trousers slide down, revealing bum cleavage. And it is while in this utterly undignified position — more or less looking like a homeless person — that a pair of high-heeled boots clicks past me.

As though the world is laughing at me, I now look up into the dark glasses and signature bob of Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of American Vogue, and the most successful, admired and, in some quarters, feared magazine editor of all time. In my early career, Wintour was my idol. When I rose up the ranks of glossies, we used to nod to each other at London Fashion Week.

Once we chatted over a lunch where she was the guest of honour and I had just picked up a major award for Good Housekeeping.

She was wearing Chanel and a fabulous necklace; I wore my favourite Donna Karan. Anna is known to be shy, but I found her warm and friendly — nothing like her Nuclear Wintour reputation.

I could not claim we were friends — but even if we were, I doubt she would have expected the weepy person in fat-pants sitting on the floor of an airport terminal that afternoon to be anyone she actually knew.

I hide my face in shame as she strides on by, noticing as she passes that, not only is she not trailing luggage like me and every other passenger, she doesn’t appear to be carrying a bag, nor even a phone — just her passport and boarding card held lightly in one hand, her transatlantic path smoothed by unseen helpers.

Her identity so beyond doubt that, unlike every other woman in this airport, she doesn’t need to carry a handbag — not even one by Prada.

‘I used to be someone like that,’ I mutter to myself, then again with more force: ‘I used to be someone.’

On my previous trip to the U.S., only months before but with another name and life, there was a limo meeting me at the airport whisking me to the Plaza Athenee Hotel, every step of my itinerary planned out by my super-efficient PA.

Now, cut loose from the world of work and all its trappings, I am stranded in the chains of my own humiliation. How has it come to this? How have I fallen so far?

In the end, I make it to San Francisco and take the course, but intentions formed under the bright sun of California disintegrate into a fog of cold and jet-lag upon my return.

I will not become a life coach. Instead, I retreat to my canal-side home in Hertfordshire — the place my ex-husband and I spent eight months turning into our ‘dream house’ — and continue seeking solace in wine.

That November, in 2017, the decree absolute is granted and my marriage to Mark is over. It turns out that he ‘got’ both Waitrose and Tesco in the settlement, so I take to shopping in the nearby M&S in order to avoid seeing him and his girlfriend, and that is where I bump into a woman I know from the local yoga studio.

Despite being tiny, Angie is easy to spot in a crowd, with her flowing purple and orange robes, hooped earrings and extravagantly winged eyeliner. She wants to know where I’ve been lately, so I pour out my tale of woe. She listens, then: ‘You need a cleanse,’ she says briskly.

I assume she’s telling me to get to grips with my personal hygiene — in my depressed stupor I have been thoroughly neglecting my personal grooming routines — but it turns out the cleanse she is referring to is spiritual, and she means for my house, to rid it of bad energy surrounding the end of my marriage.

I don’t actually believe in this stuff — but it has to be worth a go and, indeed, for the first time in months I make an effort in the run-up to our appointed day. If I could do with a scrub-up, so could the house.

I vacuum throughout and wash the scum from around the bath. I do this mainly because ‘feasting’, as Angie calls it, is an important part of any shamanic ceremony, and she has instructed me to organise a party for the evening after the cleanse.

I have invited a dozen girlfriends and it is their critical eyes — not the gods — I fear. On the day itself, Angie, who is from Chile, traverses through every room of my house waving what she calls a ‘smudging stick’, made of leaves of dried sage lit with a taper that smoulders like a home-made cigar.

To be honest, it’s all a bit Ab Fab.

We make altars — or as I, more Britishly, decide to refer to them: tables. One in the kitchen for flowers and leaves to mark the changing seasons; one in my study to celebrate the work that has been so important to me; and most precious of all, an ancestors’ altar, upon which I place pictures of my first husband, John Merritt, and my first daughter, Ellie, who in the cruellest of twists of fate, both died of leukaemia in the 1990s at the ages of 35 and nine respectively. 

These have been stashed away, too painful for me to look at, but now I carefully arrange them on a small desk in the hall.

There is one last element to the cleansing ceremony — the burying of an item that represents my past life. Here at last I can lay to rest my old identity, this self-made thing I worked so hard at, but in the end unravelled in my hands.

What to offer? Inspiration strikes in the form of a box of trinkets stashed at the back of a wardrobe in the spare room. In my working life, I dressed every day as if for a cocktail party and, over the years, inevitably, bits of jewellery broke.

None of it was valuable, but magpie-like, I kept these pretty gewgaws in an old shoebox.

I decide to ‘bury’ some of them in the canal that flows past the back of the house — and as I toss an old clutch stuffed with these treasures from my former life upwards into the darkening skies, the feeling of relief makes me gasp. At the zenith of its trajectory, the fragile clasp gives way and the bag bursts open, raining diamante, glitter and paste down into the bottle-green water.

My younger daughter, Hope, 24, watches from the kitchen, where she cooks up our feast, and no sooner have we finished these ceremonies than friends arrive, greeting each other on the doorstep laughing and chattering. They shed winter coats to reveal elegant outfits, having dressed up for the occasion, and bring gifts of food and drink.

To think that all the design advice I dished out while editing Good Housekeeping, all those room-sets I created for visual effect, all those artfully placed objets d’art and plumped cushions, and I never before understood that it’s always the people who turn a house into a home.

I still live in the ‘dream house’ today, with its beamed ceilings and views of passing narrow boats. I am alone but not lonely. I read or walk the dogs, or simply sit on the terrace enjoying the evening sun.

I first married when I was 25; I am more than twice that now and, in the intervening years, I have filled every waking hour with work, with caring for my family, battling my own ill health, including depression, and, above all, trying to stem an endless tide of grief. Now, at last, I have no one to please but myself.

A new emotion has been washing over me lately. Not fear, nor guilt — I have had my fill of those — nor ecstatic happiness, which I have often felt, too, despite it all. But a warm hug of contentment — a word I haven’t had much call for, and all the more surprising because I have now weaned myself off the antidepressants.

I am no longer an editor or a wife, but I am a daughter, a mother and, above all, a survivor.

At last, I know in my heart, that is all I need.

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 0203 176 2937.

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