The Italian's Token Wife

Magda’s body started to rock…Go away, she thought desperately, go away. Take your designer suit and your expensive briefcase and go…go before I give in, before you tempt me like Lucifer himself…

‘You wouldn’t be doing it for yourself. You’d be doing it for your baby.’

She shut her eyes, trying to block out that soft, seductive voice.

‘If I walk out now—never to come back—how will you live with yourself? Knowing you turned down the chance to get your baby out of here, for ever?’

She went on rocking, her arms wrapped so closely around Benji that he began to protest.

‘Four weeks—no more than that—in my family home in Italy, which is very respectable, Miss Jones, I do assure you—and then you’re free.’

‘Benji comes with me.’ Her voice was high-pitched.

Rafaello spread his hands. ‘Of course the baby comes with you—that is essential.’ It wasn’t necessary to spell out to her just why his bride should arrive accoutred with a fatherless child. ‘You just have to sign the papers, that’s all you have to do…’ He slid his hand inside his breast pocket, taking out a gold fountain pen, slipping off the top, proffering it to her. ‘Come—’

There was an imperiousness in his voice she could not resist. Slowly, as if she was sleepwalking, she slid Benji from her lap back on to the bed, ignoring his wail of protest. Slowly, very slowly, she got to her feet. It wasn’t real. None of this was real. She’d wake up in a moment and find it had all been a dream.

He held the pen out to her. Numbly she took it. Numbly she looked down at the table, to where he was turning the documents to the last page and placing one long, lean finger where she should sign.

The ink flowed from the gold pen in smooth, lustrous curves, despite the halting jerkiness of her signature. In the evening light it seemed blood-coloured. As she handed it back to him, standing at her side like a dark, infernal presence, she felt a wave of weakness go through her.

What have I done? Oh, dear God, what have I done?

But whatever it was, it was too late to go back.

Magda sat, staring out of the porthole, at the sunlit cloudscape beyond. Benji was on her lap, asleep. He’d had a bad takeoff, even with sucking on the bottle of juice to ease the pressure on his little eardrums, but now, after half an hour of grizzling, he’d finally fallen asleep.

She glanced covertly across the aisle to where Rafaello di Viscenti was sitting. He was working through a pile of papers laid out on the table in front of him, and so far as he was concerned, she could tell, he might as well have been alone on the plane.

There were no passengers apart from themselves on the luxurious executive jet winging its way across Europe. For Magda, who had never flown in her life, it was an experience she could hardly believe was happening.

But then her whole life since she had signed her name at Rafaello di Viscenti’s arrogant bidding had been completely unbelievable. She knew that if she had thought too much about what she was doing she could not have gone through with it. So she’d just let herself be swept along, let herself be that tin can racing along behind Rafaello di Viscenti’s powerful, unstoppable car taking her into an un-dreamed-of future.

Not that she’d seen him between that evening and today. Ironically, it had been his total indifference to her once he had got her to agree to marry him that had reassured her most. It was indeed, in his eyes, just a job, and she was nothing more than a junior employee. He had despatched one of his other junior employees to ensure the correct documents for their marriage were in place, to accompany her to register the marriage, and to arrange passports for her and Benji.

This morning she had been collected from her bedsit and driven to her local register office. The ceremony uniting them in matrimony had passed in a complete haze. She must have said the right things at the right time, but all she could remember now, as she sat and stared out at the sun-drenched cloudscape, was an overwhelming impression of a tall presence beside her, a deeply accented voice interspersing with hers and the registrar’s, and that was that.

Only one moment stood out—when the tall presence beside her had lifted her hand and slid a gold wedding ring on her finger. Something had prickled through her like electricity. It must have been the coolness of his brief touch, nothing more. A moment later she’d been required to perform the same office for him, and to her own astonishment had realised she could hardly do so—her hand had trembled so violently.

She’d managed it somehow, all the same, and then, distracting her completely, she had heard Benji, kept back in the outer room with some more of Rafaello di Viscenti’s minions, give out a mournful wail. From that moment on her sole thought had been to get back to him, and the rest of the ceremony had been lost to her.

As soon as she could she had hurried out, back to Benji, and scooped him into her arms. Then Rafaello had been beside her, taking her elbow and saying smoothly, but completely impersonally, ‘If you are ready, we must go.’

A limo had whisked them to Heathrow and, apart from asking her in that same impersonal manner if she were comfortable and had everything she required, that was all her new husband had said to her. He’d seemed, Magda vaguely registered, to be quite abstracted during the whole procedure—as abstracted as she was.

The haze around her brain deepened. Go with the flow, she told herself, and smoothed Benji’s silky hair, gazing again out of the porthole. Shock was keeping her going, she knew. Yet beneath the numbness she could feel a thread of excitement stirring. However bizarre the circumstances, she was going abroad for the first time in her life.

Italy. Could she really be going there? In the time since she had given in to Rafaello di Viscenti’s imperious will she had got out as many library books as she could on the country. Reading had always been her solace, ever since she had discovered it was a way of blotting out reality—the reality of being brought up in care—taking her away to magical lands, with wonderful people, a world away from the disturbed, unhappy children that surrounded her, the cast-off jetsam of adults too dysfunctional to be responsible parents themselves, making their unwanted children pay the price for their own emotional shortfalls.

As she stared out over the radiant cloudscape—another mystical land up here, so far above the earth—her memory fled back to Kaz. Her face clouded. Although she might feel the desolation of a child utterly abandoned by its parents, at least Magda knew she had come off lucky compared with Kaz. Kaz had had the bruises, the badly mended bones, the haunted eyes. Taken into care to be safe from an abusive stepfather and alcoholic mother, Kaz had been almost as withdrawn as Magda. Perhaps it was natural the two of them had drawn together, to form, for perhaps the first time in either of their lives, a real friendship, a real emotional bond.

Sorrow pierced her. She gazed out over the fleecy, sunlit surface of the clouds. Are you out there somewhere, Kaz? she wondered.

In her arms, Benji stirred. Gently Magda bent to kiss his fine dark hair, her heart swelling with love. She lifted her eyes again and stared out of the window. She had done the right thing in agreeing to this bizarre marriage; she knew she had. However weird this was, she was doing the right thing for the right reason.

For Benji.

For the first time since Rafaello di Viscenti had turned her world upside down, she felt at peace with herself for what she had done.

The peace lasted until the plane landed. Then, in the confusion of a busy Italian airport, hanging on to a wailing Benji, whose ears had set off again during the descent into Pisa, Magda once more felt like that tin can rattling along a motorway.

A hand pressed, not roughly, but insistently, into the small of her back.

‘This way,’ said Rafaello di Viscenti, the man she had married a handful of hours ago, and guided her forward. They made their way out of the airport to where a large limousine hummed at the kerb. Within moments they were inside, luggage in the boot, and the chauffeur was drawing out into the traffic.

The journey took well over an hour, and the latter part, away from the autostrada, was by far the most fascinating. Magda stared out of the window, drinking in the Tuscan landscape, a world away from the rainy South London streets she had left that morning. As the car purred along she pointed things out to Benji, whose baby seat was closest to the window. She leant over him, glad of the opportunity to put as much distance between herself and the man occupying the far corner of the huge car. Since he seemed to be preoccupied with his work still, tapping away at a laptop on his knees, she assumed he preferred to be left alone.

That suited her completely. Having to make stilted conversation with him would have been much worse. Right now, she just wanted to savour being in Italy.

Talking softly to Benji, she drank it all in. Road signs in Italian, driving on the wrong side of the road, houses, cars and people—all Italian. They were steadily climbing, she realised, heading up into the hills. Summer sunlight drenched the rolling landscape, etching the cypresses like ink. She stared, entranced. Stone farmhouses and picturesque stone-built towns, olive groves and vineyards, goats and sheep grazing, and, as the road grew steeper and narrower, old men with donkeys, old women covered in black from headscarf to heavy shoes.

Finally, as the roads grew narrower and the traffic more and more sparse, the limo slowed and turned in through large ironwork gates that opened at a buzz from the chauffeur. She heard Rafaello click off his laptop and close it up.

‘We are here,’ he announced.

She glanced briefly across at him. His face was expressionless and, it seemed to her, particularly tense. Automatically she tensed as well. It dawned on her that the flight and car journey had been nothing more than an interlude. Now, right now, in front of others, she was about to take on the role of Signora di Viscenti.

As if reading her attack of nerves, Rafaello spoke suddenly.

‘Be calm,’ he instructed. ‘There is nothing for you to be anxious about. For you, this is simply a job. Please remember that.’

Was she imagining it, or had a grimmer note entered his tense voice? His dark gaze flicked over her again, and something in it sent a chill through her. Instinctively, Magda felt the chill was not directed at her. But there was anger deep down in there somewhere, she knew. Anger at having been required to marry at all.

Well, she thought resolutely, that was his business, not hers. She was simply doing what he was—to put it bluntly—paying her to do. She had gone through a wedding ceremony but it was nothing more than a legal formality. She was Signora di Viscenti in nothing more than name—and she would never be anything else.

For a moment so brief it hardly existed a longing struck her, so intense it pierced like pain, that somehow, if fairytales were real, this might be one—she really was sweeping along the driveway to her new home, with a husband beside her to die for…

But fairytales weren’t real. They were just…fairytales.

Nothing to do with her.

The car drew up in front of a castellated villa that made Magda’s eyes widen in wonder. It was ancient—and beautiful. The old stone was weathered, the huge wooden door studded, and the grounds stretched all the way to the woods and hills beyond.

Carefully she extracted Benji, who had been lulled off to sleep some time ago, by the rocking motion of the car, and clambered out with him. She held him on her hip and gazed around. The warmth of the late afternoon after the limo’s air-conditioning struck her like a blessing, warming her through the thin material of the cotton dress she was wearing. It was the best she possessed, though it had cost under five pounds in a charity shop and was a size too large for her. Its low-waisted, button-fronted style, she knew, would probably have suited a matron of fifty better than herself. But what did it matter? If Rafaello di Viscenti had objected to it he would have got one of his minions to arrange an alternative.

‘Come—’ The man she had married that morning slipped a hand under her elbow. There was a tension in his grip that communicated itself to her and to Benji, who gave a little grizzle.

Magda suffered a swift glance at Rafaello’s face. Its expression was closed and shuttered, and looked, she thought, very remote. Instinctively she realised that she and Benji were the last things on his mind.