Charlotte Heathcote
“I’m sorry to tell you this, but your husband is having an affair with my wife.”
To hear these words out of the blue, from a stranger on the end of a phone, would bring anyone’s world crashing down. But lawyer Belle Burden believed that she and her financier husband had been happily married for 20 years, and that James*, a man she had chosen for his steadfastness and reliability, was as committed to raising their three children as she was.
“I felt total confusion, just absolute disorientation, and a belief that he would somehow explain it and it wouldn’t be true,” she says, speaking from her New York apartment as she recounts the events of that night, which she eventually wrote about in a viral article, and now a book, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage.
Even worse, the phone call came during the second week of the pandemic lockdown in March 2020. Belle, James and their daughters Evie, then 15, and Carrie, 12 – their son Finn, 17, was staying with friends – had retreated from New York to hunker down in their Martha’s Vineyard home.
Belle immediately sought out James. “I promise you, this meant nothing,” he assured her. He said that the affair, with a banker and mother of two whom he met through work, had only begun a few weeks ago.
“And then he said, ‘I still love you and only you.’ So I felt absolute heartbreak and hurt but I also felt like I was dealing with my husband, someone I knew and recognised. And that somehow we would have muddled through, though I don’t know if we would have stayed together.”
Belle and James had met in 1998 when they worked for the same law firm. In marrying the steady, unflappable lawyer, Belle was consciously trying to break the pattern of her family history. Her grandparents were Bill Paley, CBS founder and notorious philanderer, and socialite Babe – who was the subject of a scandal in 1975, when Truman Capote exposed the goings-on in her glamorous social set in Esquire magazine. Her parents were politician Carter Burden, descendant of railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, and town planner Amanda. They both had affairs, divorcing when Belle was two.
“I felt that I was breaking a pattern because James was so even tempered and mild mannered and never yelled, and the men in my family all yelled. I felt that I was picking somebody who would be the last person to do this.”
But it was not to be. That evening, the woman’s husband told Belle that his wife had taken an overdose and was in an ambulance. James’ attention pivoted to his mistress. That night, he slept in another bedroom, and appeared in their bedroom at 6am, fully dressed, his bag packed, his expression cold. “I’ve decided I want a divorce,” he said. “I’m leaving.”
“In the morning when he came in, he seemed so different,” says Belle. “All the warmth had gone. It was a very icy person – his eyes, his whole aspect – because he had decided.”
After James walked out, Belle spent the next five hours trying to call him. Once he’d arrived back in New York, she was given as much insight into James’ feelings as she would ever get.
“I thought I was happy but I’m not,” he told her. “I thought I wanted our life but I don’t. I feel like a switch has flipped. I’m done. You can have the house and the apartment. You can have custody of the kids. I don’t want it. I don’t want any of it.”
Instead of finding James comforting his daughters, she was stunned to find him rummaging through boxes in search of their prenuptial agreement.
“And then I felt my whole world crumble,” says Belle. “He was someone I trusted more than anyone in the world. He was my children’s father.
“And we were all so afraid then. We didn’t know when we would get a vaccine. And he was walking out the door. So I felt an absolute chill. Fear along with the heartbreak. And it really took me down. I could not get out of bed for a long time. I was pretending for my kids that I was OK, so I would only be able to get myself up when I had to do something for them. It was really, really hard.”
In April, Belle asked James to come back to Martha’s Vineyard and tell the children that they were divorcing. Informing Belle he would only stay for 90 minutes before taking his boss’s seaplane back to New York, James broke the news to the girls, and Carrie ran out of the room sobbing while Evie sat silently with crossed arms. James turned to Belle and said, “I’m starving, can you make me a sandwich?”
Though shocked, Belle obliged, deciding that the best strategy was to make the nicest possible sandwich. Then, instead of finding James comforting his daughters, she was stunned to find him rummaging through boxes in the basement in search of their prenuptial agreement.
By September, James’ divorce papers were filed. Though he earned millions of dollars a year, he sought to enforce the prenup which would require Belle to sell both of their family homes. She was prescribed antidepressants. James only reached a settlement an hour before their divorce trial was due to begin, which “brought me to my knees”, Belle says.
James’ choice to relinquish responsibility for their children was especially difficult for Belle to process. “That was the part that broke my heart the most and continues to break my heart,” she says.
He took a two-bedroom flat but turned the spare bedroom into an office, though their youngest wanted to visit her father so badly that she would send him links for homeware shop Pottery Barn beds.
“That was really painful. I said to my daughter, ‘I don’t know why but your dad can’t make a home right now.’ And that was better for her than saying, ‘This is fine. Everything’s normal.’ So it’s been this line of acknowledging the challenges of their reality but not being nasty about their dad.”
But one of the biggest challenges for Belle in coming to terms with the end of her marriage, which she still describes as “a huge loss”, is the fact that James could never explain his decision to leave. Though she doesn’t know if he is still with the woman he had an affair with, she knows he hasn’t remarried.
Belle asked James “at least 50 times” for an explanation, but to no avail. Emotionally, she reached a turning point a year after he left.
“I said, ‘Can you just please tell me something about why?’ Even hoping that he would say, ‘This woman and I are now living together and we’re going to get married’ or ‘I just was not attracted to you any more.’ And he couldn’t do it. The most he would give me is to say that something broke in him. And in that moment, I thought, ‘It’s like trying to get blood from a stone.’ It was not going to happen. It’s not that he’s not telling me. It’s that he may not know himself why.”
Their children are now 23, 21, and 18. “They’re all really great kids. My hope is that this experience actually helps them have very honest and open relationships and doesn’t harm them.
“He is kind to them, he is sweet to them. They see him occasionally for a dinner or a game. But there are no overnight staycations or any of the day-to-day parenting with teenagers with college applications and all that. But there are good things to that, too. I have them for every holiday, which I really like.”
Belle says she found it helpful to write her account of the marriage, the reflective and poignant Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage. ”It helped me to figure things out. I never really figured him out. Or why. But I think I figured out a way to have it rest. Putting it behind me is not quite right but just have it live somewhere for me, and move on to figuring out myself.”
In the wake of the divorce, her friendships are much stronger. “Perhaps it’s just looking at silver linings, as much as I miss being married, having an intact family, which I cared so deeply about having.”
Friends occasionally try to introduce Belle to eligible men and she accepts their invitations. “But I think I am meant to focus on this book and on the kids for right now. I definitely am guarded. But I still believe in love and relationships. It would be wonderful if that happened, but I also think I’ll be OK if it doesn’t.
“My biggest priority in another relationship is to have a very deep emotional and intellectual intimacy.” But, of course, Belle thought she had that intimacy in her marriage. “I felt like we really knew each other and that it was really intimate. It probably changed at some point and I didn’t know when.
“But I don’t think there were things that happened between us that should have been a sign of what was to come. I wouldn’t do much differently. I don’t kick myself for certain things. I am almost proud of the way I trusted my husband, and behaved in the marriage. I don’t regret falling in love with him.”
* Name has been changed.
Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage (Ebury Press) by Belle Burden is out now.
The Telegraph, London.
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