The Italian's Token Wife

But this time there was something different about it. This time it was directed at himself.

With an abrupt movement he got to his feet.

‘Come.’

Magda’s eyes snapped away from where Benji and the Calvis had just disappeared. Rafaello was standing there, looking tall and commanding. Haltingly she stood up, dusting breadcrumbs from her trousers. As she looked up she saw Rafaello studying them disdainfully.

Yes, she thought silently, they are cheap, and unflattering, and hopelessly unfashionable. I do not wear them from choice, but necessity. If I had your money I would not wear them—but I don’t, so I do. Poverty is not a crime. And it is not a cause for shame. I will not, she told herself, bow my head in disgrace for my lack of wealth. Nor will I bow it because I do not know who my parents were!

‘Today,’ announced Rafaello in a tight voice, ‘we are driving to Lucca.’

Magda’s eyes widened. She had not in the slightest expected this. Then she realised that it must be something to do with dinner last night, when the professor had talked about Lucca and his wife had urged her nephew to take his bride touring.

‘It is quite unnecessary,’ she said. Her voice was low and blank.

‘You will,’ replied Rafaello, ‘allow me to be the judge of that.’

She sensed anger in him beneath the clipped words. She could not be surprised. His aunt had chivvied him, in her imperious fashion, to take her sightseeing, and it was obvious he would not be too thrilled at the prospect of not only wasting a good day but wasting it in the company of a woman he had chosen for being the lowest of the low…

‘I can’t leave Benji,’ she said. She couldn’t meet his eyes, she found. Hers were focussing somewhere just below, where the smooth strong column of his throat rose out of the open-necked top of his polo shirt. She found that was not a good place to focus and shifted her gaze a little lower. But that meant her gaze was now eyeballing the broad expanse of his pectoral muscles, straining at the knitted fabric of the polo shirt, descending to the narrow leanness of his abdomen.

She flicked her gaze so that it was staring harmlessly over his shoulder instead, at a distant cypress tree edging the gardens.

‘Benji will be fine,’ Rafaello said, with the dismissiveness of a childless man for the neurotic anxieties of a mother. ‘Between Maria and my aunt he will do very well, be assured—they are both very taken with him.’ He glanced at his watch—a thin, expensive-looking circlet of gold on his strong wrist. ‘I should like to set off in half an hour. Please be ready.’

He nodded at her and was gone, striding off indoors.

She sighed. What should she do? Dig her heels in and refuse to go with him? She certainly wanted to. The very thought of having to spend any time at all with him was anathema, let alone being dutifully carted around sightseeing by a man who wished her to perdition. What on earth was he doing this for? Surely he could have come up with some excuse about pressing matters of work to distract his aunt from her evident determination to pack them off together? And it didn’t matter what he said—she did not like to leave Benji. She’d never spent any time away from him at all—ever.

Yet when she went off in search of him she found that he was not missing her at all. Maria and Rafaello’s aunt were making a huge fuss of him, and he had an exciting push-along trike to ride. The housekeeper hurried over to her.

‘Go,’ she instructed her. ‘The little one will be very happy. He does not notice you are not here. If he sees you he will want you. So go now. Yes, yes, if he is unhappy without you I shall phone Signor Rafaello on his mobile phone, and he will return you at once. He has promised me. But we shall take care of the boy as if he were ours. And I have cared for many, many children—go, go now.’ She shooed Magda away and returned eagerly to Benji, volubly admiring his prowess on his vehicle.

Reluctantly she turned and left. She knew that it was sensible for Benji to start being happy away from her, for when she returned to England and bought a proper place of her own to live it would be time to start introducing Benji to playgroups and nursery school.

But it still pulled at her terribly as she went up to her room to tidy herself and change into something very slightly less shabby. She had a cotton skirt with her, khaki-coloured, which although it hung on her hips was at least a skirt. She put on a white cotton short-sleeved blouse with it, slipped an olive-green jumper into her capacious bag that seemed strangely empty without its usual complement of baby stuff, and then went downstairs again. She ached to go and check on Benji again, but knew it would be counterproductive.