Beware the mechanics of modern adultery

OH TO have been born a Victorian gentlewoman. When it came to expressing the innermost secrets of the heart, all they had to worry about was finding a suitably delicate nib and perhaps a choice bottle of rose- scented ink. Now it seems that the old-fashioned love letter is dead and in its stead we must do battle with faxes, pagers, emails and call-waiting in order to conduct our affairs, be they innocent or clandestine.

In theory, technology should have made it easier for us to communicate. On the contrary, it looks as if it has real power to betray cheating hearts.

Take the beleaguered entertainer Shane Richie. He had been cheating on his wife, Coleen Nolan, for some time when she discovered his affair. How did she find out? Not by hiring a private detective, not by finding a billet-doux in his pocket, but - oh the humiliation! - by hearing a recording of a more-than-friendly phone conversation between himself and his 23-year-old Grease co-star Louise Tyler, which had been recorded by accident on the family answering machine.

It is possible for many top-of-the-range answering machines to record calls - the problem is that most of us never bother to read the instruction booklets beyond the "how to pick up your messages" stage, and therein lies the problem.

Mobile phones can be equally treacherous. Apart from the incriminating evidence of itemised phone bills, some models can be set up to divert calls to the phone at home.

Jim's wife, Rose, found out about his affair this way.

"I came back and there was this message on the machine from a woman whose voice I didn't recognise. She was asking for the address of the restaurant where she and Jim were supposedly going to meet that night. Well, I couldn't believe it. As far as I knew, he was going out to a corporate awards bash that night." Jim's mistress had thought she was leaving a message on his mobile - but he had forgotten to take his calls off divert.

It's not just mobile phones which cause havoc. With the advent of 1471, British Telecom has sparked off countless marital confrontations.

"I had a strong feeling that Ian was seeing someone," says Marie. "Often I'd answer the phone and the caller would hang up. When I dialled 1471, the message always said `number withheld'. Now why on earth would anyone bother withholding their number?"

This encouraged her to snoop around in her partner's briefcase, and sure enough there was a whole catalogue of evidence on his credit-card bill: florists, restaurants she'd never been to, all the usual things.

Pagers can be problematic, too. "I was round at my girlfriend Jane's one night watching TV while she was at the gym," recalls Brian. "I was bored so I started fiddling around with her pager which she'd left on the table. Then I came across all these messages from someone called Tim. I'd never heard of him. When she got back I confronted her, and she admitted to having an affair."

The most ubiquitous accessory to adultery, though, has got to be electronic mail. Email can be a particularly risky method of communication because it's not as private as we think, and it can go wrong. Most of us who work in offices have fallen victim to the horror of sending inter-office email to the wrong person - usually the person the message is about.

Clearly email has great dramatic potential - Meg Ryan's next movie, You've Got Mail, is all about an email affair between two colleagues. Somehow more intimate than a phone call yet still as immediate, emails can fuel the flames of a humdrum affair - and provide incriminating evidence for a wronged spouse.

For some inexplicable reason, most people tend not to delete email. "I was working at home and wanted to send a fax," says Anna. "But it wasn't working, so I decided to send an email from my husband's laptop. Imagine my surprise when I opened the email programme and there were all these messages from this one woman. I couldn't resist having a look, but I really wish I hadn't, they were very steamy. I was devastated. It was such a horrible way to find out."

The columnist Nicola Davis, who discovered details of her husband's affair from an itemised phone bill, believes that most of us already know the truth before we find the evidence of infidelity.

"Most of us do smell a rat under the floorboards long before we see the computer print-out," she observes. "I knew my husband was having an affair. But when I saw the itemised bill, it kind of shocked me because it created a vivid picture of what had been going on. He'd been phoning this woman on Sunday nights when he was supposed to be locked in his study handling the household bills. So the calls were made in funny, five-minute bites, presumably snatched between the trips I was making up and down the stairs with the washing."

Davis believes that adulterous partners like Shane Richie give themselves away because hi-tech gizmos don't always behave the way we expect them to. "Technology betrays us because it often doesn't work," she observes.

Anyone foolish enough to be contemplating an adulterous affair might bear this in mind - you'd be well advised to read the instruction manual through to the bitter end.