Donna interrupted him. ‘You’re two of a kind, you mean, Georgio?’ she said in a low voice. ‘You always liked the ladies, or should I say girls? So I showered in Alan Cox’s flat. Big deal. We’d been driving all night. But all that aside, it hurts me to think you can’t trust me, that you take me for such a tart. After all these years, you could accuse me of that! Me, Donna, the only faithful half of our marriage.’

She leant forward in the chair and said with heavy emphasis, ‘Do you know something? It might do you good if I did have an affair, Georgio. It might just make you realise what you’ve got. I am putting my arse on the line for you, mate. I am trying to keep everything going and all you can do is talk to me like I’m one of bloody Talkto’s so-called escorts.

‘Well, listen to me, Georgio Brunos, and listen bloody good. You ever pull a stunt like this again and me and you are finished. Get that? Finitosberg, goodbyesville as you used to say years ago. “Slipping in a length . . .” you have the gall to say that to me when you spent the best part of our married life fucking anything under the age of twenty-one that showed a bit of leg and looked available. You’ve got a nerve, Georgio. You’ve got some bloody neck!’

Georgio listened to Donna in a stupor of shock so intense he felt an actual wave of heat wash over him, followed by nausea. That Donna could talk to him like this spoke volumes. It showed him just how far his wife had broken free, how the hold he had over her had been destroyed. Half of him was excited by this new, strong-minded Donna and the other half was wary, frightened of her. She had bowed to his will for over twenty years; to realise now that she was a strong person, one to take account of, was a dismaying, even alarming thought. She could make or break him now. She could blow him wide open or she could take him through everything he needed to do. Donna, his little Donna, was in charge. Finally and irrevocably she had thrown off the mantel of underdog, and was meeting him as an equal, as a grown-up woman. He also knew that the Donna he had married, the girl who had catered to his every whim and want, was gone. She would never, ever come back.