by Sam Eden
Early on Sunday morning James brooded in his study. Their flight was in a few hours. Having slept on his decision time was running out to call the police.
Hearing a knock at the front door he went to the window. It was a freezing, sunny day. A thick covering of snow had fallen in the night, making a perfect winter landscape.
He was enormously relieved to see Nicola; all the more so because Carlo was not with her. When he opened the door she stood on the step, smiling up at him. She wore a woolly hat and a thick sheepskin coat over her jeans and furry boots. The tip of her nose was red from the cold. She looked utterly delightful and he felt a pang of regret that she would no longer be gracing his study, let alone his lap.
She refused his invitation to come into the house, even though she was shivering.
‘Where is your car?’ he asked, puzzled. The snow on the drive was unbroken by tyre tracks.
‘I came in at the back gate and parked near the stables,’ she explained. ‘Hope that’s okay.’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘I’ve only just played my messages,’ she said sheepishly. ‘We were out last night.’
‘I left it yesterday morning,’ he replied irritably.
‘Sorry, yes. Carlo and I were a bit, um...’ she hesitated, ‘...preoccupied most of the day. To be honest, I’d hoped you wouldn’t realise they were gone.’
‘Why did you take them?’ he asked, perplexed.
‘I only borrowed them, James,’ she said soothingly. ‘You said I’m like a daughter to you now. I wouldn’t steal from you.’
‘I know, Nick,’ he sighed. ‘But what did you want them for?’
Instead of replying she handed him the small blue box containing the engagement ring. He put it in his pocket, expecting the larger box with the choker to follow. ‘Where’s the necklace?’ he asked.
‘In the stables.’
‘What do you mean?’ He was losing patience with her bizarre behaviour. ‘What’s it doing there of all places?’
Nicola hugged him to calm him down, and instinctively James hugged her back.
‘The necklace isn’t important,’ she said. ‘There’s something else in the stables, too.’
‘Not important?’ He made to break away, but she clung to him harder and kissed him on the cheek.
‘Don’t be dumb, James,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘You can put two and two together, can’t you?’
He stared at her in bewilderment as she stepped back onto the drive. He had the uneasy feeling that their roles had been reversed, and she was now instructing him. But what the subject was he wasn’t sure.
‘Got to go,’ she said brightly. ‘We’re leaving for the airport soon.’
She blew him a kiss and padded off round the back of the house. James called for her to wait, then ran back to grab a coat before trudging after her. By the time he got there Nicola was driving through the gates.
James cursed and plodded along to the stables. If she thought he knew what she was up to she was crediting him with more intelligence than he had. As he approached the stable door he was met by a wall of warm air. Someone, presumably Nicola, had turned the stables heating on high.
Propped just inside the open door was the finished portrait of Rebecca in white. Here was the ‘something else’ Nicola had mentioned. The face in the painting was very lovely and rather sad. Gazing back at her he too felt inconsolably sad.
A rustle to his left startled him, and when he turned to see what it was he was more startled still. Rebecca stood facing a wooden post in the wall. Her arms were held high above her head. Her wrists were bound by leather handcuffs which had been looped over a hook in the post. She was naked apart from riding boots.
‘Rebecca!’
When she heard his voice she turned to him. He went up to her and held his body against hers. Her chestnut hair fell down her back. He nestled his face in it and kissed her shoulder. Around her neck was the diamond choker.
‘Thank you for the necklace,’ she said. ‘It’s a wonderful present.’
‘Nicola was right,’ he whispered, ‘it’s not important compared to having you back.’
‘Don’t be angry with her for taking it.’
‘I’m not. She was only making sure it went to its rightful home.’
‘Have you the ring?’ she asked.
He remembered it was in his pocket and he reached up and slipped it on her finger.
‘Now you need to finish off what Carlo started,’ she told him. ‘Really, it was your job all along, but you were not to know what I’d done to Nicola.’
On a ledge in the wall lay the flogger James had seen Carlo using on Christmas Eve. He picked it up. Once again, he thought, I have the whip hand, but they seem to have been in control. He could live with that, he thought, if it meant regaining Rebecca.
‘How many?’ he asked, taking off his coat and rolling up his sleeves.
‘That’s for you to decide,’ she replied.
He gently swept her hair over her shoulder, leaving her back bare.
‘Nicola told me that Carlo gave her forty lashes.’
She nodded.
‘So you shall have fifty,’ he declared, watching her closely.
She smiled wanly at him. ‘You know me so well,’ she said.
The whipping had been terrible, of course, but at least Carlo’s truncated effort had taught her what to expect. She danced and swung on the hook, sometimes screaming obscenities through gritted teeth. The more extreme of these earned extras, but James was lenient in view of the overall severity of the flogging. Rebecca didn’t faint; she felt every excruciating lash, but with each had also come the joy of knowing she had James back.
Afterwards he lifted her down and draped his coat around her shoulders. He offered to carry her in his arms, but her bottom and back was too painful.
She tried to stagger along supported by his arm, and when her legs gave way he stooped, held her around the knees and hoisted her over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift.
‘Time for me to carry you off like a caveman,’ he said as he picked her up.
A spark of her old fire returned. ‘Except your cave has eight beds and five reception rooms,’ she quipped quietly into his back.
He took her to his bedroom and fetched a hot drink. After tenderly treating her wounds he left her to rest for a couple of hours.
She lay on his bed, beaten but triumphant. James knew her better than anyone, she thought, except perhaps her mother. Her insatiable competitive streak, her hot-headed tendency to go too far, and her innate sense of justice, which required that her excesses were punished. From the outset his refusal to accept Rebecca’s wilful behaviour had satisfied a profound need within her. He had a natural authority she could submit to, and it made her life at once richer and more ordered in consequence.
The change in her was noticed at work; her latest promotion had come as a consequence of a widely perceived improvement in her self-control. There was even talk of a directorship in the not too distant future.
After a while Rebecca drifted off to sleep. She and Nicola had been up late the night before planning what to do. Once again Carlo had been banished to the village pub.
When she awoke James was there with a tray and some food. He sat beside her on the bed. They ate chicken soup and beef sandwiches and drank some burgundy. Afterwards they made love. She sat astride him, trying as best she could to avoid pressing her injuries.
For the rest of the day they lay on the bed talking contentedly. They speculated as to whether the relationship between Nicola and Carlo would last. James was inclined to think not.
‘Do you think the police will find out that Carlo was the forger?’ she asked.
‘They already know he was.’
‘What?’ Rebecca pushed
herself up from the bed, ignoring the stab of pain it caused.
‘Don’t worry,’ he soothed her, ‘your contract with Carlo is safe. Even if they could build a watertight case against him it was hardly the crime of the century. The forgeries weren’t even sold.’
He went on to describe his meeting at Scotland Yard on Christmas Eve. Officers from the Milanese Questura had been present, and they were after much fatter fish than Carlo. Pursuing him would cause a commotion that wouldn’t be helpful to their wider investigation.
‘They also told me why he needed the money.’
James related Maria’s tragic story. Rebecca was silent for a time. She remembered Carlo’s worried frown that night at the bar in Milan after he had phoned his sister. It seemed so long ago. The mention of Christmas Eve reminded her too of the nadir of her life.
‘So he isn’t a total shit after all,’ she said. She was pleased for Nicola’s sake, but for her own she would have preferred to be able to hate him unreservedly for what he did to her that afternoon, and how close it had come to breaking her engagement for good.
‘I love you, James.’
‘You’re not marrying me for my eight bedroom cave, then?’ he joked, kissing her.
‘No, I’m not. And in the marriage ceremony I’ll use the old words. I’ll promise to obey you, and I’ll mean it.’
Truthfulness and faithfulness would be cornerstones of their marriage, they agreed solemnly. That way, any repetition of the temptations and misunderstandings of December would be avoided. That and the fact that, from now on, Rebecca would be choosing James’ secretaries.
Carlo and Nicola had splashed out on business class tickets for the flight to Milan, which had also enabled them to wait in the comfortable surroundings of the British Airways Club lounge at Heathrow. Still sore, she preferred to sit on deep cushions and avoid the jostle of crowds. Forgetting to remove a cheap anklet she had triggered the airport metal scanner. The female security guard frisked her and Nicola jumped in pain when she caught a sensitive spot on her hips. The guard had cast Carlo a deeply suspicious look.
He had been suitably contrite since his fall from grace on Christmas Eve. Nicola had more or less forgiven him. In his favour he had been uncharacteristically understanding about her need to fulfil the agreement with James. Would he be as sympathetic when he had her to himself in Milan, she wondered?
Certainly he had hated her doing it. When he had returned to the flat on Saturday morning he scrutinised her stripes and bruises carefully, mortified to find they were worse than he’d inflicted at the cottage.
‘It’s not a competition, Carlo,’ she had chided him, yet she wondered if, in a way, for him it was. If so, James had won by a whisker, and she meant it to be a long time before Carlo could try to outdo him. The degree and frequency of her punishments in recent weeks had turned a sublime joy into a trial by fire. For the coming few months her misdemeanours would be of the merely spankable variety.
After inspecting her damaged skin Carlo had first worked his wonders with the lotion, and then his wonders with her body. Whatever Carlo’s skills as a painter there was one art form in which he was a consummate master.
After the small airline meal he held her hand and talked to her about his hopes for the future. His commissions included some commercial art work for an advertising company, which was lucrative business. Together with the contract for Rebecca’s firm and the removal of the shadow of his debt to the syndicate, it meant he was feeling more secure financially. He thought they might look for a larger flat, because his studio was really too small for two people.
Nicola let him talk. She liked the fact that his plans reflected her needs as well. The idea of moving to a new place, which she could help choose and decorate, was appealing. According to Rebecca his bachelor pad was a bit grim.
She considered how her one little disobedience with James’ shares had brought her so much suffering, and so much joy. She had won through trying times, and a more mature and confident young woman had emerged. Who knew what she was capable of if she put her mind to it?
At least there was the glimmer of a job for her. A friend of Carlo’s had told him that a language professor at Milan University needed a secretarial assistant, and for reasons which were not entirely clear the professor preferred English applicants.
Maybe life with Carlo would work out well, but she wasn’t building her hopes up yet; there were too many imponderables.
That story about his sister was very strange. She wasn’t sure she believed it; it sounded like something from an old gangster film. Could an innocent girl in modern Italy be caught so easily in the web of organised crime? Perhaps he had embellished it to put himself in a good light after screwing up so badly with Rebecca.
The thought of Rebecca reminded her of the morning’s stratagem in the stables. She prayed it had worked well. Rebecca had promised to call her later to let her know, and it would be good to get a call from England on her first night away. She would warn her that James was to feel free to use his new piece of furniture. Somehow, she thought, if Rebecca were to share the bonds that had once held her, it would cement their newfound friendship.
Maria drank coffee in Linate airport, awaiting her flight to London. She frowned with disapproval at some young Englishmen lounging untidily across more seats than they needed. Eleven in the morning and they were already drinking beer heavily. They were dressed in combat trousers, as though about to undertake guerrilla warfare rather than board a civilian flight. Maria hoped they were not representative of men in London.
Yet they could not dim the thrill she felt at escaping Italy to begin afresh. A strada senza uscita had miraculously opened up into a piazza of possibilities.
La Pera had given her an excellent reference which had landed her a job as a waitress in an Italian restaurant. It seemed sensible to ease herself into her new life in London in an environment where her Italian upbringing would help. She hoped against hope that the place had no mob connections. If she suspected any she would leave at once.
Carlo had told her that London was an expensive city, but Maria knew it was also vibrant and full of opportunities. She had a few thousand in savings as a cushion. Although her line of work had rarely been pleasurable, it had been well paid. The girls were allowed to keep nearly all their tips, because the managers knew they would try harder to please the customers that way. Maria supposed she had been fortunate in ending up in places catering for the discerning wealthy, but her natural beauty had helped her. There were other houses where the girls became drug addicted fodder to be discarded once they were no longer able to function. Drugs had not been pressed on her, and although she’d experimented a little she had never come close to addiction.
Nearing twenty, Maria felt much wiser than she was when she’d become infatuated with the well dressed hunks in her home town of Catanzaro in the south. Their expensive clothes, flash cars and full wallets, the deference they were shown in the streets, their superficial good looks had lured her into what seemed an exciting world. Only later did she realise it was squalid, brutal and empty. After a short stint as girlfriend to a minor henchman she was packed off to Milan, far away from friends and family.
Although well treated and not exactly a prisoner, it was made clear to her that attempts to escape would be dealt with mercilessly. Two of the girls with whom she worked were made an example of, and were no longer beautiful in consequence. Passports were taken from them so they could not stray too far. In any case, for Maria a life on the run and in fear would have been no life. Going to the police was pointless. Even if you found someone who wasn’t corrupt, your family was still vulnerable. Too ashamed to phone her mother she had retreated into an alien existence.
Carlo was her hero. After their mother died he tracked her down in Milan and bought her life back for her. There had been some last minute hitch with the money, but he came thro
ugh for her. It seemed he had a new English girlfriend, and Maria hoped they would meet soon. It was a pity they had missed each other, crossing between Italy and England.
She wondered whether the English girl knew about Carlo’s sexual preferences. Probably she did. Maria had known since she was thirteen. From the top of the stairs one night she’d peeped down, goggle-eyed, as her eighteen year old brother bent her babysitter over the kitchen table and spanked her with a wooden spoon. It seemed Carlo had just come home and caught her smoking his cigarettes. And thereafter Maria’s mother had been bemused by how often and how eagerly the girl volunteered to babysit for her. Unluckily for the girl she was never to see Carlo again; he was rarely home before their mother and soon afterwards he went off to college.
Her thoughts took Maria back to the night Filippo had spanked and strapped her. He hadn’t hurt her at all really, just wounded her pride. He had promised to spend a weekend in London once she was settled. When he did Maria intended to be a little bit naughty, and to let Filippo decide what he ought to do about it.
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