Page 126 of One in Three

Roger Lewison was my tutor at Oxford. He was also married; something he neglected to tell me at the time.

Two months into our affair, his wife found out about us, and Roger was finally forced to come clean. He said she’d threatened to tell the college if he didn’t end our relationship; he’d have lost his job, and I might have been sent down. But I was so in love with him, I simply couldn’t accept it was over. I thought if I could just make his wife realise how much we loved each other, she wouldn’t want to stand in our way. She’d set him free, I reasoned, once she knew it was hopeless. No woman wants a man to stay with her out of pity. It was all terribly sad for her, of course,but Roger and I were meant to be together. We weresoulmates.

So I tried to talk to her, to explain, but she wouldn’t give me a chance. She hung up the phone when I called, and refused to speak to me. I sent one or two handwritten letters, but she ignored them, too. I starting hanging around her office – she was a psychology tutor at another college – but she still wouldn’t see me, and eventually had the college porter ban me from the quad.

In the end, she didn’t leave me any choice. I just wanted totalkto her. Roger had an evening lecture every Wednesday, so I knew how to time it so he wouldn’t be home. Jennifer let me in; she hadn’t expected me to turn up on her doorstep, and I took advantage of her confusion to talk my way inside. She’d been preparing supper: she was wearing an old-fashioned white-and-navy striped apron, and had a dusting of flour on her cheek. She also had a paring knife in her right hand.

It was the sight of her in her apron, the domesticity of it: this woman, Roger’swife, cooking him dinner, waiting for him to come home. My memories from that night are confused, a blur of frightening, violent images. I remember her lunging at me, a sudden, sharp pain in the left of my lower abdomen. Jennifer told the police I grabbed the knife from her hand and deliberately stabbed myself in the stomach. I tried to explainshewas the one who’d attackedme, but it was her word against mine, and she was an eminent professor at an Oxford college, and I was an infatuated student who’dbeen having an affair with her husband and had forced my way into her home. Jennifer Lewison took out a restraining order against me; I was lucky not to be expelled from the university.

It took me several years of counselling to be able to admit what had really happened. The therapist showed me I’d wanted Roger’s sympathy, for him to see me as a damsel in distress, so that he’d come to my rescue. In my confused, lovesick teenage mind, the counsellor said, I’d sought to make literal my sense of myself as the victim, and show Jennifer as the aggressor I believed her to be. As far as I was concerned, I wasn’t lying; I genuinely believed Jennifer had attacked me.

But that was nearly twenty-five years ago. I’m forty-three now, a successful journalist, a wife and mother. I know the difference between fantasy and reality. And I’mnotmaking this up.

‘I didn’t poison Bagpuss,’ I say firmly. ‘Caz is the one who’s lied. And I can prove it.’

I wasn’t going to tell Mum I tracked Caz’s mother down, for the same reason I haven’t told Min, but I need her to understand now how dangerous Caz is. ‘She’s lied about everything, Mum,’ I say urgently. ‘Who she is, where she comes from. And that’s not the worst of it. You’ve no idea the kind of person she really is. She’s not who she seems.’

Mum looks hard at me. ‘Who is?’ she says.

JENNIFER DAVITT

PART 1 OF RECORDED INTERVIEW

Date:- 28/07/2020

Duration:- 31 Minutes

Location:- Livingstone College, Oxford

Conducted by Officers from Devon & Cornwall Police

(cont.)

POLICE

So you and Mr Lewison are divorced, then?

JD

---