Mrs Daredevil

It was a phone call from my father-in-law that revealed my husband was betraying me again. 'You must be so worried,' he said. 'Oh, Richard's safe in Damascus,' I assured him. 'He's just interviewing a politician.' An embarrassed silence. 'Er, actually, I think he's in Baghdad,' he said rather timidly. I snatched up the newspaper. Yes, there was my husband, gazing sternly from his picture byline above a story I couldn't bring myself to read. Once again, the adrenaline junkie I married had found a way of getting his fix.

When I first met Richard, 15 years ago, we were working at the same newspaper. Once he had to dive into a pool in immaculate black tie to test its waterproof qualities. 'Just like James Bond,' I teased. Little did I realise the similarities were more than merely sartorial.Shortly after we moved in together, the war in Kosovo broke out. Richard petitioned his newsdesk to cover it, and disappeared for three months. Occasionally, he would ring home on a crackly satellite phone to recount the day's horrors. When he told me how a sniper had nearly taken his nose off, I became hysterical. 'I don't want to hear about it!' I shrieked. Offended, he didn't ring for a fortnight and I assumed he was dead. When he finally returned, I remember opening the door to a strange, bearded figure that I barely recognised. 'Oh, it's you,' I said, walking off.

It took months and a lot of therapy to repair our relationship after his hurt that I didn't
care about him and my anger that he'd left me. But it didn't cure him of his death wish. The following year, he was in Chechnya when the Russians besieged Grozny. He'd told me he was attending a comedy festival in Moscow. And that was what his visa said. The Russian colonel who arrested him in Chechnya was also puzzled by this discrepancy.

On 12 September 2001, he was on a plane to Pakistan, in an attempt to get over the border into Afghanistan. Then I heard no more for a week. When he resurfaced, he explained he'd been in jail on the Hindu Kush, having been arrested trying to sneak over the Afghan border disguised in a burkha. (As he is six feet tall with size 12 feet, I wasn't all that surprised he'd been spotted.) He has evaded Zanu PF thugs in Mugabe's Zimbabwe, been shelled by the Israeli army in Lebanon and lived in Baghdad's Red Zone. And weeks after the birth of our first baby, he was in Beslan, reporting from the horrific school siege in which so many other small children died. He said he wanted to see history in the making, I felt abandoned.

For a few years, there were regular trips to Iraq; now it's Afghanistan. Last summer, while I took a holiday in Norfolk with our two small daughters, alone, he was with the British army for Operation Panther's Claw, the offensive in Helmand. He came back with jolly footage of himself being machine-gunned in a ditch by Taliban fighters; I wondered how long I could stand it. 'I'm not doing that again,' he reassured me. But he's just got back from another Afghan trip, during which he was with the US army in the Taliban heartland. Another journalist working there at the same time had both his legs blown off.

In most ways my husband and I are ideally matched. We have the same eccentric taste in literature, the same things make us laugh and after ten years our marriage has lost none of its spark. But in this we are hopelessly ill-suited. He has a Boy's Own approach to his safety and I come from a pathologically risk-averse family. My grandmother was so petrified by air travel that none of us ever told her we were going on holiday. My father panics if his children don't answer their phones. He and my mother accompany one another to the dentist. Richard's disappearances are incomprehen-sible to all of us. And I'm not just in a state of terror for the entire time he's away, I'm also humiliated. I feel that if he really loved me and our children, he'd do something else. Nigel Nicholson, professor of organisational behaviour at the London Business School, offers two theories for Richard's behaviour: 1) 'He has the sensation-seeking gene that drives addicted gamblers and dangerous sports enthusiasts,' or 2) 'He endures the risk for some other benefit in experience
or value,' and adds 'but poor you. How annoying and worrying for a wife.'

Indeed. Over the years, I've developed a coping strategy. I adopt an ostrich pose, pretend he's away on a business trip, and avoid reading his articles or discussing what he's doing when he phones. This is how I convinced myself he was on a jolly in Damascus not braving bullets in Baghdad. When he went to Zimbabwe, I thought he was on safari in South Africa. This trip to Afghanistan, he assured me he would be in Kandahar, interviewing army officials.

These fictions are hard to maintain in the face of concerned friends who have read about what he's really up to and call me up to sym-pathise. Meanwhile, as well as shouldering the burdens of domesticity alone, I have to soothe the fears and resentments of the children (including his teenage son who lives with us), who know where he's gone but, like me, don't understand why. When he returns, there are new hurdles to overcome. One year, he left a firework display because the noise reminded him of a war; another time, when I went for a walk alone in a French wood, I returned to find him white and shaking at the risks I'd run. And because he's seen so many child victims of war, he's not even happy for ours to go to the park.

'You must be so proud of him,' people gush, when he wins an award or files a particularly searing report. And of course I am. I know he's brave, bordering on positively heroic. But how I wish he wasn't.