From my birthday in March 1997 until Olie's birth in February 1998, life had felt solid again. Stable. Familiar. Domestic bliss, even. I was in love with Terry, and for a while there, I really believed she was in love with me again too. Jonathan was gone—physically and emotionally. We never spoke of him, and I took that silence as a sign that we'd moved on. A line had been drawn. We were a family again.
But not long after Olie was born, the signs started creeping in. Terry came to me and said she wanted to study by correspondence again. I had a sinking feeling in my gut, but of course, I agreed. That didn't last long. A few months later, she said she needed something more than just being a mom—wanted to feel useful, earn her own money. She'd been offered a part-time job at Willowbrook & de Waal, a new little shop at The Coterie, three kilometres out on the Lydenburg side of town.
The shop sold high-end homeware: mohair carpets by Sue Green and beautiful hardwood beds by Johan de Waal, a talented cabinetmaker from White River. In fact, our own bed had been made by him. Terry was going to run the shop part-time with Kim. At that point, Kim and Mark were in the throes of a divorce—Mark had suffered a nervous breakdown while managing one of my retail shops in Dullstroom and had returned to Joburg, filing for divorce not long after. His breakdown wasn't work-related; it had to do with a seriously messed-up childhood.
I can't say exactly when it started, but by the end of 1998, I could feel something shifting in Terry again. That familiar, sickening feeling returned. She wasn't happy. Mike Hutchinson was back in town, working for The Dullstroom Epic and eventually for my shop. I didn't like it. One day I took her in my arms outside her shop, looked deep into her eyes and said, "Please promise me this isn't all starting again." She smiled and said simply, "I promise you it isn't." I believed her. What else could I do?
Then came Mauritius. January 1999. Olie was eleven months old and stayed with Mary while we went on holiday—Terry, me, Angie, Mikey, Briony and Peter Curle. A week at Club Med. On paper, it should've been paradise. But it wasn't. Not for Terry. She was distant, irritated, and clearly unhappy. Alarm bells started ringing—loudly.
There was a day we went out on a marlin fishing boat. I insisted Terry come along, thinking it would be a fun family adventure. She got horribly seasick. It ended in a screaming match. In hindsight, I'd misread the room. I'd gotten ahead of myself—business was booming, the family was seemingly whole, and I thought we were through the worst of it. But clearly, we weren't.
One incident during that period still gnaws at me. I'd tried calling Terry on her mobile while I was at work in Lydenburg. Straight to voicemail. So I phoned the landline at the shop at The Coterie. Kim picked up. "Isn't Terry in?" I asked. "No," Kim said. "She and Mike went swimming."
"What the fuck?"
When I got back to Dullstroom that evening, I asked Terry where they'd gone swimming. "Oh, we went to the waterfall at Trout River Falls," she said, as casually as if she'd popped out for milk. Just the two of them.
Later that evening, we had a braai and Mike showed up. He was sheepish as hell. Looking back, I still don't know if anything physical happened. But years later, Mike Leipzig—the one and only member of the Dullstroom Epic—told me he'd seen Mike and Terry kissing one morning outside my shop, so I would say the chances are pretty high that it did.
Soon after that, another incident occurred. We were at the Duck and Trout one evening, the whole gang was there, but suddenly I noticed Terry was missing. I called her mobile and she answered—she was halfway to Johannesburg. I begged her to come back, which she did, but she spent the night at Mike's. He swore to me that they were just friends and all she wanted to do was talk.
And then, in April, Terry dropped the bomb. We were sitting at lunch, the three kids at the table. She calmly informed me she wanted to move to Johannesburg to run the Jo'burg Willowbrook and De Waal shop. She'd come back on weekends. I felt like I'd been stabbed. Tears just poured from my eyes—silently, uncontrollably. I wasn't sobbing; it was like my face had sprung a leak.
What could I do? In hindsight, I could have been a hell of a lot tougher than I was.
Briony offered Terry her townhouse in Johannesburg, and Terry moved in. I couldn't care for the kids full-time, so her mother Mary agreed to come help—but not without conditions. "I'll have to leave my job at the school," she said. "You'll need to pay my salary." So I did.
That arrangement lasted two months.
Then, out of nowhere, Terry had another revelation. She thought maybe we could be a family again—if we all moved to Johannesburg. I had a full-blown business in Lydenburg, a life, a house. But if moving would keep the family together, I'd do it. I managed to get Mikey into St. John's, and for the first couple of weeks, we stayed at Briony's place. One night, we went to a Bryan Adams concert. Terry sat on my shoulders the whole evening. It should've been romantic. Instead, it felt like a last gasp.
The next day, I visited my mother at Merrow Down and broke down completely. I didn't know what the hell to do. She said, "You need a house here in Joburg." I told her I hadn't sold the one in Dullstroom yet. "Don't worry," she said. "I'll lend you the money." She phoned her broker in London and had £30,000 transferred—about R300,000 at the time.
We started house-hunting. Terry was excited. I wanted to believe again. We found 84 Galway Road and bought it for R600,000. I put the Dullstroom house on the market. My life became one of commuting—this time without a plane.
And honestly? Looking back, I was a complete patsy. I indulged her every whim. I uprooted my life, my kids, my business—just to keep the family together. She said she couldn't be a mom, couldn't be a wife, couldn't take it anymore. So we all had to move.
And I did it.
That's how our second life in Johannesburg began