The Marriage Surrender

She gave it. Her time ran out and the line went dead. She dropped the receiver back onto its rest, then just stood there staring at it, unsure if Sandro had managed to get down every digit before they were cut off, scared that he had done, and terrified that he had not!

Almost faint with stress and wretched confusion, she bent again to search the grubby ground for her other lost coins, found them, then stepped out of the call box to let the man waiting outside take his turn on the telephone.

He sidled past her as though she was some kind of freak. She didn’t blame him; if he had been watching her enact her nervous breakdown inside that telephone box, then she knew she must have looked like a freak!

Sandro’s fault; it was always Sandro’s fault when she went to pieces like this. No one else could make her lose all her usually ice-cold self-possession as completely he could. And he had been doing it since the first time she ever set eyes on him. A few short minutes of his undivided company, and he had always been able to turn her into a shivering, quivering wreck of a useless creature.

Sex.

That single telling word hit her with a hard, cruel honesty. The difference between Sandro and every other man she had ever met was the fact that he was the only one who could stir her up sexually.

And that was why she was standing here, a shivering, quivering wreck. Because in stirring her up sexually he also stirred up all the phobias that sent her into this kind of panic.

Fear was the main thing: a stark, staring fear that if she ever gave in to the sex then her life would be over.

Because he would know then, wouldn’t he? Know what she was and despise her for it

The man came out of the phone box. He hadn’t been much more than a couple of minutes, which made her feel even guiltier for keeping him waiting as long as she had.

‘I’m so sorry I was so long,’ she felt compelled to say. ‘Only I had difficulty—’

The phone inside the kiosk began to ring and she made a sudden desperate lurch for it, forgetting about the man, forgetting everything as she snatched the receiver to her ear again.

‘What the hell happened?’ Sandro’s voice shot down the line at her. ‘I have been trying that number for the last five minutes and kept getting an engaged signal! Were you stupid enough to hold onto the receiver instead of hanging up and waiting for me to call you back?’

Well, Joanna thought ruefully, that just about said it. Stupid. He thought her that stupid, and Sandro suffered fools as most people suffered raging toothache.

‘I let the man I told you was waiting use the phone,’ she explained.

Another of those Italian curses hit her burning eardrums, then she heard him take in a deep breath of air and his voice, when it came again, was more as it should be, grim but controlled.

‘What is it you want from me, Joanna,’ he demanded. ‘Since when have you ever wanted anything from me?’

Which only showed that even when he was under control he still couldn’t resist another dig at her.

‘It isn’t something I can discuss over the telephone,’ she told him. Then as her own temper suddenly flared, ‘And if this is a taste of how your attitude is going to be, then it probably isn’t worth me taking it any further!’

‘OK—OK,’ he conceded on a heavy sigh. ‘So I am reacting badly. But I am up to my neck in work at the moment, and the last thing I expected, on top of it all, was for my long-lost wife to give me a call!’

‘Try for sarcasm,’ she snapped. ‘Pleasantries just don’t become you somehow.’

Their simultaneous sighs were acknowledgements that they both recognised they were reacting to each other now as they had always used to do: biting and scratching.

‘How can I help you?’ he asked, with more heaviness than hostility.

And Joanna relented too, saying with an equal heaviness. ‘If you can’t find time to see me today, Sandro, then I’m afraid I have been wasting your valuable time. I did try to tell you that,’ she couldn’t resist adding, ‘before you went off at half-cock.’

‘Five o’clock,’ he said. ‘At the house.’

‘No!’ she instantly protested. ‘I don’t want to go there!’ Then she bit her lip, knowing exactly how he was going to take mat horrified reaction.

But his lovely house in Belgravia held only bad memories for her. She couldn’t meet him there, would probably die of mortification before she’d even stepped over the threshold!

‘Here, then,’ he clipped. And now he really was angry: not hot, Italian angry but frozen, arctic angry. ‘In an hour. It is all I can offer you. And don’t be late,’ he warned. ‘I am working on a very tight schedule and as it is I will have to fit you in between two important meetings.’

‘OK,’ she agreed, wondering sinkingly if meeting him at his office was any better than meeting him at the house they had once used to share? In all honesty she had no idea, because she had never been to his place of work before. ‘How—w-what do I do? When I arrive there, I m-mean?’ she asked, her bottom lip beginning to feel as if it had been completely mutilated by her own anxious teeth. ‘W-will I have to tell someone who I...? Only I don’t like...’

‘Coming out of hiding?’ he suggested acidly. ‘Or don’t you like admitting your legal association to me?’

‘Sandro...’ she whispered huskily. ‘Can’t you appreciate how difficult I’m finding this to do?’

‘And how difficult do you think I am finding it?’ he threw back gruffly. ‘You walked out of my life two years ago and have never bothered to so much as show your lovely face since!’

‘You told me not to,’ she reminded him. ‘When I left, you said—’

‘I know what I said!’ he bit out. Then he sighed, and sighed again. ‘Just be here, Joanna,’ he concluded wearily. ‘After all of this, just make sure you don’t chicken out at the last minute and stand me up, or so help me, I’ll—Oh, damn it,’ he muttered, and the line went dead.

And suddenly Joanna felt dead: dead from the neck up, dead from the neck down. Dealing with Sandro had always ended up with her feeling like this. Drained, so sucked clean to the dregs of her reserves that it was all she could do to slump against the phone booth wall while she wondered wearily why she had set herself up for all of it in the first place!

Then a sudden vision of Arthur Bates sitting behind his cluttered desk as he issued his ultimatum flashed in front of her eyes, and, with the usual shudder, she remembered exactly why.

‘Payment, Joanna, comes in cash or in kind,’ he had declared in that soft and silken voice of his. ‘You know the score here.’

Payment in cash or in kind...

The very words had made her feel sick.

‘How long have I got to pay?’ she’d demanded with an icy composure that completely ignored the second option.

But the man himself had refused to ignore it. He had waited a long time to bring her down to this low point and he meant to savour every second of it. So he’d sat back in the creaky leather desk chair, inserted a heavily ringed finger into the gap between two gaping buttons on his overstretched shirt, then taken his time sliding his eyes over her slender figure, so perfectly defined beneath the tiny white waiter’s jacket and black satin skirt she had to wear for work.

‘Now would be good,’ he’d suggested huskily. ‘Now would be very good for me...’

Which had had the effect of freezing her up like a polar ice cap. ‘I meant to pay the money.’ She’d made it clear. ‘How long?’

‘A debt is a debt, sweetheart.’ He’d smoothly dismissed the question. ‘And you are already two weeks late with your payments.’

‘Because I was off work with the ’flu,’ she’d reminded him. ‘Now I’m back at work I can pay you as soon as I—’

‘You know the rules,’ he’d cut in. ‘You pay on time or else. I don’t make them for fun, you know. You people come to me to help you out of your financial difficulties and I say, Yeah—good old Arthur will lend you the cash—so long as you understand that I don’t take it nicely if you don’t pay me back on time. It’s for your own sake,’ he contended. ‘If I were to let you get behind, then you’d only end up in a worse mess trying to play catch-up again.’

He’d meant she’d have to borrow more from him to keep up the extortionate repayments on his high interest loan and thereby sink further in his debt. It was a clever little ploy. One which kept him, the loan shark, firmly in control.

But for her it was different, and she’d always known it. Arthur Bates didn’t want her money, he wanted her body, and by getting behind with her repayments she had played right into his hands. What made it worse was that she worked for him, which meant he knew exactly how much she earned; he knew he was in control of that part of her life. She waited on tables or worked behind the bar of his seedy little nightclub—the same club where she had got herself into debt by stupidly playing at its gaming tables.

Which actually meant that Arthur Bates believed he was in control of Joanna’s life every which way he wanted to look at it.

But then, Arthur Bates didn’t know about her marriage. He didn’t know about her connection to the powerful Bonetti family. He didn’t know she had a way out of the whole wretched mess—if she could find the will to use it.