Was it because she was so frightened of him casting her aside if she pried? She knew he had cultivated Harry Robertson and the others because they were on the Council, and Harry dealt with Planning. But somehow that didn’t really seem illegal because everyone they knew was doing it and they paid their taxes. What was the difference?

Now she was finding out so much about her husband, and none of it was good.

Stephen’s offices in Soho were for prostitutes, but hadn’t she known that deep down long ago? Hadn’t she guessed that, and shrugged it off? Stephen’s business was his business.

That had always been the way. Donna had never pried and now she was sorry. Sorry because she was finding it out all at once and it was killing a little bit of her every day.

All she wanted was Georgio home, back in her bed, his arms around her and the knowledge that he’d be there all the time.

She would do anything to gain that end. Anything.

In a way she felt responsible for Georgio and what happened to him. If she had stood beside him as a wife should, as Carol Jackson did with Davey, maybe he wouldn’t have got so deeply involved in everything. The hotels that died a death in Asia, and the Talkto business. She wasn’t stupid, she knew exactly what those phone lines were for. She had known as soon as she saw Stephen’s name alongside her own, because he had always dealt in women, his mother knew that and she knew that, though it was never actually discussed.

It was the old story. If you didn’t talk about it then it had never happened.

Like her life with Georgio, in fact.

Don’t ask your husband what he’s been doing because he just might tell you, then you’d have to do something about it. Well, she was going to do something about it. Twenty years too late maybe, but she’d do something anyway.

Because the one thing she wanted now, more than anything, was to have her husband back beside her.

Tomorrow she would talk to him properly, and then give him her final answer. She had a feeling she was going to do whatever he asked. After all, why break the habit of a lifetime?

She had given him twenty years of her life, and could not imagine giving herself to anyone else. He was hers, right or wrong. Hers.

He was all she had, and she loved him with a ferocity that startled her it was so strong.

She knew now that no matter what he did, she would forgive him, as she had over the years forgiven him his women, his separate lifestyle, and his periodic neglect of her.