Suzanne Glass
Body Language
They sang arias together. They shared their mutual passion for the theatrical at the Centenary Operatic and Dramatic Society and became the best of friends.
But the dramatics carried on off-stage when Jenny Cupit began an affair with Kathryn Linaker’s husband, then bought a Kitchen Devil knife and bludgeoned her “best friend” to death – a killing for which she has been jailed for life.
Beyond the clear-cut crimes of murder and betrayal, however, lies a more subtle sin: falling for your friend’s man.
“Women have been going to bed with their friends’ lovers since the beginning of time,” says agony aunt Irma Kurtz. “I get sackloads of letters from women whose husbands are having affairs with their best friends.”
In polygamous societies, she points out, “several women can share a man and think nothing of it. They live in their harems, they compare notes and they consider it normal.”
In our so-called monogamous society, however, Kurtz believes that few friendships can survive: “I always say to the woman that her best friend can’t have been much of a friend and that her husband is just lazy for going off with someone on his own doorstep.”
One of the most morally problematic issues arises when the betrayer continues to be confided in by the betrayed. Lara Sanders, who later married her friend’s husband, was in precisely that position.
“We lived in each other’s pockets and told each other everything,” she recalls. “As families with children, we spent hours together and I began to feel sparks flying whenever her husband was in the room. He and I both sang in the church choir and it was after these sessions that things began to happen.
“I carried on going round to my friend’s house and she’d talk about her relationship with David. When she began to complain that he wasn’t being attentive enough, he bought her a gold locket with `I love you’ written on it. I sat in her kitchen and admired it. Later that night, he assured me he’d just given it to her so he wouldn’t actually have to say he loved her.”
But what of the guilt – surely it must be unbearable? “Absolutely,” Sanders says. “I knew I was being two-faced. I was racked with guilt, but not enough to stop what I was doing.
“Of course when she found out, I was too mortified to look her in the eyes. She called me up once and said: `Bitch! Keep your hands off my husband,’ and then never wanted to see me again. The first time we did meet, years later, I had to get drunk to be able to deal with it.
“We bump into each other at family funerals now and we do say hello. I still miss her as a friend but I feel too guilty ever to try to talk to her about it.”
Interestingly, women’s fury is usually directed at their “friend” rather than the man. “I was angry with him,” admits Fiona Bartlett, “but I was raging with her. It was the humiliation of having laid myself open to her and talked about my husband – I remember how she’d commiserate with me when I said I thought he was being unfaithful.
“She came to see me often while she was sleeping with him. Later I noticed she’d taken photos of him out of my family album. I finally confronted her at a party and poured an entire glass of red wine over her antique white Victorian blouse.”
But why do we feel greater wrath towards the friend than the unfaithful partner who, after all, is the one who presumably promised fidelity? “It’s because a woman is like oneself,” Bartlett says, “and you just can’t believe she hasn’t put herself in your shoes. It’s sad, but I think deep down women still feel that men just do these things.”
Though happy marriages between women and their ex-friends’ husbands do exist, often the liaison is no lifelong love affair. So why would a woman jeopardise her best friendship for a bit of the other? “It’s a competitive thing,” Kurtz says, “like sibling rivalry. It’s about wanting what they’ve got.”
In Hilary and Jackie, the controversial film about the life of cellist Jacqueline du Pr, though Hilary gives her consent for her ailing sister to sleep with her husband, she never gets over it.
Losing your lover, temporarily or permanently, to a close friend is a blow to your sexual confidence and a betrayal bound to damage your trust in other women.
“After he went off with my best friend, I didn’t have any close women friends for ages,” Bartlett recalls. “I was afraid that if I opened up, I’d be betrayed again.”
She did, however, end up confiding in her best friend’s cuckolded husband. “I sought him out at a party,” she explains, “when I noticed that my husband and his wife had disappeared together. The two of us went for a walk and a talk, and ended up having sex in St James’s Park.”
The ultimate revenge or a sad act of desperation? “It’s not uncommon for the wronged friend to end up in some sort of sexual relationship with her best friend’s partner after she’s commiserated with him,” says Julia Coles of Relate.
“It has little to do with passion and much to do with a seething cauldron of anger, jealousy and sadness.”