Love is stronger than money, even in Hendon

A romantic conversation would go: 'You're worth the world to me.' 'No, I'm worth a million dollars'

This column doesn't usually delve into private lives if there's no public interest attached to them; I always found those old stories in the News of the World about vicars running off with teachers curiously pointless. In the case of the businessman, the teacher and the $1m, however, there is something strangely haunting about the story.

It begins with Brian Maccaba, a 45-year-old businessman and Irish convert to Judaism, employing a younger woman, Nathalie Attar, to teach his children. Mr Maccaba is a reasonably successful businessman, living in a large house in Hendon, north London. Mrs Attar and her husband, Alain, are devout Jews and not very wealthy; he has a small business, and she works part-time for Beth Yosef, a Jewish educational organisation.

Although Mr Maccaba is married, over time he developed a fondness for Mrs Attar to the point of obsession. In the end, he persuaded himself that where personal charms had failed, filthy lucre might do the trick. He wrote a letter in highly reasonable terms to the couple, suggesting that Mrs Attar might like to consider leaving her husband and setting up with Mr Maccaba. What was to be done with Mr Maccaba's wife, Ruth, we do not know: perhaps she was to be donated to Beth Yosef with a bag of jumble-sale oddments.

Acknowledging that being deprived of your wife is rather a blow, particularly if your marriage is perfectly happy, Mr Maccaba suggested that Mr Attar might be consoled with a one-off gift, "tax-free" as he romantically put it, of one million US dollars. With that sum of money, Mr Maccaba rhapsodically went on, Mr Attar could enjoy "a bachelor's freedom again". He could even "be a playboy in the South of France for a while". Anyway, he hopefully awaited their early response, etc.

Alas, Mr Attar didn't want "a bachelor's freedom". He was rather keen on his wife, who herself was quite happy as she was. I wonder, too, whether they came to the same conclusion that I did about the curious fact that the offer was made in US dollars – which as far as I know are not yet common currency even in Hendon – that he put it like that because, though wanting to sound flash, he is a bit of a cheapskate and couldn't stretch to a million quid.

This story came to the public eye because the Attars, disturbed by the letter, went to their rabbi. According to Mr Maccaba, the rabbi then went around gossipping and called him a "pervert". Mr Maccaba is, most ill-advisedly, suing Rabbi Lichtenstein for defamation; the Attars have gone to Israel, which starts to look calm by comparison to Hendon.

I keep wondering what would have happened if Mr Maccaba had got his way, and the offer had been accepted, and the conclusion you quickly reach is that he hadn't thought it through at all. Most of us don't know and couldn't say how much our spouses and partners are worth to us in monetary terms; it seems a meaningless question, a confusion of categories, like "How heavy is happiness?".

Mr Maccaba, however, sought to place a value on love, and if he had succeeded, both he and Mrs Attar would forever afterwards have known exactly how much she was worth to him. For these lovers, there could be no question of saying, with Solomon, "how much better is thy love than wine! And the smell of thine ointments than all spices!". A romantic conversation could only go: "You're worth the world to me." "Well, no, not really, I'm worth a million dollars." "Well, yes, that's true." "Not two million?" "No, I wouldn't have put your market value as high as that."

And the recriminations: "I paid a million dollars for you, you lazy tart, and all you can do is sit around watching Richard and Judy. It's just not good enough." If he was dissatisfied, could he return the goods to the vendor? All in all, it doesn't seem like a very good plan to me at all.

But Mr Maccaba, in reality, has only sought to do in an unusually naïve way what many of us routinely do, which is to buy someone's love. It is not just romantic love, but quite often family love that gets manipulated in this way. When you take a date out to a flash restaurant in the hope that it might get results, or you splash out on an absurdly lavish birthday present to make up for the fact that you haven't actually had much time for your family, or are rather hoping that it might stop your wife having an affair with the milkman, or impose some vague guilt and obligation on your children, you are really behaving in exactly the same way.

The sad and rather funny story of poor idiotic Mr Maccaba and the Attars, who didn't even have to be admirable, just human, shows beyond doubt that the tactic never works. As I say, love and money are in two distinct categories, and when love enters into the category of money, it instantly stops being love at all.

p.hensher@independent.co.uk