‘Where are you going?’

He ignored her and walked from the room, every nerve in his body taut. To George’s mind this was the final insult. He walked up the stairs and went into the bedroom he shared with Elaine. There he lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling. He half expected her to come barrelling into the room demanding to know why he’d walked out on her, but she left him alone.

Down in the kitchen, it occurred to Elaine that she just might have gone too far.

George lay still until his breathing returned to normal and he watched as his whole life with Elaine floated in front of him. He saw her on their wedding day - he had been quite proud of her then. Proud that he actually had a wife. It was like a declaration to the world, as if he was shouting: ‘See, someone wants me.’ It had galled his mother that he had married. She wanted to keep him at home with her. Wanted to carry on ‘looking after him’, as she called it. She had called Elaine a red-headed whore. Well, his mother knew all about them, she had been one herself for most of her life. And in spite of everything their marriage had not been bad at first. Elaine had come to him a virgin and he had appreciated that fact. He had never tried it on with her because she was what George termed a ‘good girl’. He knew that she would balk at anything other than a chaste kiss on the lips after an evening out.

Once married, though, Elaine had turned out to be quite a handful. She’d wanted sex much more often than he had. He had wanted to experiment, but Elaine wanted straight sex and no kissing. George could not keep up such a boring way of spending evenings and when she had become pregnant he had been secretly relieved.

It had been then that he had rediscovered his pornographic pastime. Before his marriage George had relied heavily on girlie magazines - or wank mags as he would call them to himself. He had built up a fantasy world of women who did whatever he bid them. He had thought that with the advent of marriage he would not need the fantasy world any more, but instead had found that he needed it more than ever.

At first, the fact that the magazines were in the house would excite him. The element of risking being caught out had always attracted George. He knew that if Elaine had found the magazines she would have blown her top and he relished that feeling. He had begun to frequent the porno movie theatres in Soho, and the bookshops that abounded there. This was in the days when the naked women had their photographs outside with strategically placed stars to just hide nipples and pubic hair. He had learned a lot from those French films, and from the blue films. That was when he had been introduced to the world of sadism and bondage.