Love and marriage: Richard and Carole's story
Richard Lindley, once a reporter and presenter for news programmes including Panorama and News At Ten, now an author, most recently of "And Finally, The History of ITN", decided after the failure of his first marriage that his best bet was to remain single He met Britain's networking queen Carole Stone (The Ultimate Guide to Successful Networking and Networking: The Art of Making Friends) at the Edinburgh television festival in 1988 and although their relationship began almost at once he told her firmly that he didn't have marriage in mind. Carole says to him: “You were doing the washing up and you looked over your shoulder and said, ‘I live for the weekends when I see my children [then aged nine and ten], everything else is just a fill-in, you're a fill-in'.” She was 46, single and extremely jealous. At the first reception they attended together, at the Irish Embassy, she fretted when Richard became engrossed in conversation with another woman. “When I saw them exchanging business cards I stormed over and picked her up by her lapels – she was little and Spanish – and said ‘He's having me tonight, Sunshine.' Everyone went quiet and then Richard said, ‘I think we'll go now, darling'.” “We managed to make quite a dignified exit,” Richard smiles. “Over the years Carole used to say: ‘Go on, Richard, just ask me to marry you. I'll say no, but I hate having to tell my girlfriends you've never asked'.” But it was not until Christmas Day 1998, when she was 57 and he was 63, that he finally proposed. “I had reached the point when I thought my happiness would only be secured if I spent the rest of my life with Carole,” says Richard. “I was stunned,” she says. “I thought ‘I'll lose my identity', ‘No man will take me out again'. But I didn't want to upset him so I thought I'd say yes and we could just be engaged for 10 years.” They married within six months. Richard's son and daughter played their part in the wedding service. “They like Carole much better than they like me, they took to her immediately,” he says. “I had it easy because they never lived with us,” says Carole, who understood from the start what they might be feeling, having herself seen her widowed mother marry again. “I didn't like him at first and I caused trouble. I had a go at him once and he said, ‘Your mother puts you before me, she'll leave me if you want her to'. There were tears in his eyes and I thought ‘What the hell am I doing?' I was 37 at the time.” “I used to think that if you had somebody all your worries went, but you just get new worries, don't you?” says Carole, who is also wise enough to realise that in many ways she has had it easy. “I'm very much in love with Richard and I think he is with me, but we haven't been through a lot of the trials that other people face. Owning a house together, sharing money, having children, all those things put a strain on a marriage; I think I'm very lucky to have been able to do my own thing.” Because Carole's business demands a central meeting place, she kept her glamorous flat in Covent Garden and it is there that she has her office and hosts her lunches. They live in the house she still calls Richard's (as in “I'm going to Richard's now”) and because he works at home, he does the shopping, cooking, gardening and so on. Carole has done virtually nothing to make her domestic mark. “Another person, more homely than me, could have settled into Richard's better than I've done,” says Carole. But she has no regrets. “I will be absolutely honest and say that having been on my own for 57 years and had my house, my money, my bank account, I would have found it ever so difficult to have a joint house. We love living together, but I've got my flat and my money and Richard's got his house and his money and what he does with his will is his affair.” The big dayRichard Lindley says Carole would have liked to have had 3,500 guests at their wedding, whereas he would have liked 35. In the end they settled for 350, who came to the wedding at St Martin-in-the-Fields – Carole's regular church – and then walked across Trafalgar Square to a reception in the Reform Club. Carole was walked down the aisle by her Aunt Eileen. She wore special wedding knickers which cost £49.50 and a dress and train by Lindka Cierach. “At one fitting I caught sight of my nose in a side mirror which I try never to do, and I thought ‘I'm ugly, I'm 57 and I've got this bloody girlish train, I'm not having it, I'm too old,' and I threw the train down. But in the end I went for it.” “And you looked fantastic,” I say, looking at a silver-framed photograph on her piano. “She did, she is,” says Richard, whose mother once said that Carole had brought her son out of the wilderness and made him smile. Written by Serena Allott
This article was created: 14 July 2006.
This article was last edited: 14 December 2006.
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