The Veranchetti Marriage(24)

She laughed. “I’ve got a son of almost four.”

“He must have stolen you out of the cradle. Rather you than me,” the other girl, Ann, said feelingly. “Life’s too short to get tied up young.”

“It depends on the man,” Kerry murmured, unperturbed, and the conversation moved on to the places they had been and where they were hoping to get before their restricted budget ran out.

“I’m gasping for a cold drink.” Hilary gave her boyfriend a nudge in the ribs. “Go on, take a walk into the village. The shop’s right on the edge of it.”

In the end, two of the men went off. Kerry sat, cross-legged, talking about Antiques Fayre with Hilary, suppressing her regretful awareness that she was really describing a closed chapter in her life. Ann decided she was hungry and swam out to the yacht. Kerry rested back on the sand, letting the sun wash her upturned face and extended legs.

She must have dozed off for the next thing she knew, somebody was tugging playfully at her hair. Her eyes opened. Dave was bending over her, too close for comfort. “Where is everybody?”

“I persuaded Hilary to push off.”

“Why?” she asked baldly, glancing simultaneously down at her watch. “Oh no…” she groaned.

He caught her arm and prevented her from scrambling up. “Oh, come on, you can’t be leaving. You came down here for a bit of company, didn’t you, and I’m more than willing to play ball,” he told her with a thick, suggestive smile. “We could go somewhere a little quieter.”

“Are you crazy?” Kerry snapped, her pleasure in the little friendly interlude now destroyed by Hilary’s desertion and Dave’s phenomenal conceit. The nerve of him, she wasn’t looking for a toy boy!

Before she could pull free of him, his weight pinioned her down as his hand thrust at her shoulder and he made a rough, clumsy effort to kiss her. In sudden, frank fear, for he was considerably bigger and heavier than she was, she was trying to raise her knee when Dave went flying from her in a blur of movement. As he hit the ground several feet away, she pulled herself upright automatically, a gasp of stricken horror on her lips as she saw Alex dragging the winded Dave up with one powerful hand. Her husband’s dark face was a mask of murderous fury. As his fist connected in a sickening thud of flesh on bone, she screamed, “Alex…stop it!”

All her life she had shrunk from violence. She wanted to end the carnage, but her feet were rooted to the spot by paralysed fear. The third time Alex hit him, the suffocating blackness folded in on her. She crumpled down on the sand as if he had struck her.

When she came out of the faint, she was lying on her bed and a whole row of faces were around her. “That boy…oh, my God,” she mumbled as it all came back to her in a wave.

Someone’s hand gripped hers. Somewhere at a distance Alex was speaking in a vituperative and vicious spate of Italian. “He’s all right, Kerry.” It was her sister-in-law’s voice. “Ricky stopped Alex in time.”

“I thought he was going to kill him…”

Carina came down on the edge of the bed, shooing off the female staff with sharp orders. The room cleared. She turned over the cool cloth on Kerry’s brow. Kerry still couldn’t stop shaking. She kept on seeing Alex wreaking havoc on an over-amorous youth barely out of his teens. Abruptly, she clutched Carina’s hand. “You’ve got to get me away from here…” she muttered in despair.

“What is happening between Alex and you?” Carina was pale and concerned. “A young man tries to kiss you on the beach and Alex goes out of his head. I never saw him lose control before, but my brother would not harm you.”

Kerry looked at her with desolation in her empty eyes. She was defeated for the last time. Alex had broken every bond he held her by. Her emotions had gone into the cold storage of shock. All she could feel was a tearing, desperate need to escape his domination. She didn’t care any more about Jeff and Vickie and her airy-fairy hopes of their marriage surviving. It was a brief dream sequence she no longer had the heart to contemplate.

“We were walking along the shore to find you,” Carina related. “You always forget the time. But Alex was laughing, you know…he was not annoyed…”

“I wish he had hit me.” Kerry was not even listening to her.

“How can you say that? Alex would never touch you. He thought you were being assaulted. Any man would have…no,” Carina sighed unhappily. “It was not right what he did. We saw one thing. He saw another. We saw the girl swim out towards the boat. It was obvious that there was nothing questionable. But Alex…Alex is crazy jealous of you.”

Kerry was enveloped in her own despair. She didn’t hear Alex come in, but his wrathful, “Who are you to keep me from my wife?” penetrated. She shifted away in automatic recoil. She couldn’t even bring herself to look at him.

“You animal,” she whispered, unable to silence the reaction.

His flushed complexion lost colour.

She realised that he wouldn’t leave her alone without an explanation. Woodenly, resentfully, she summed up a brief hour spent chatting to some young holidaymakers. It was punctuated and interposed by Alex’s imprecations.

“Ah…you start talking to strangers, not even strangers from your own background,” Alex gritted. “Cheap tourists. Perhaps you forget who you are. You don’t belong with such people.”

No, it was Alex she did not belong with. Once he had been a stranger. He would have remained one had she not possessed a bright, outgoing personality and the thick-skinned bravado of a friendly teenager. “I spoke to you in a lift,” she murmured helplessly.

To her surprise, he was quick to grasp the connection. “That was different.”

No, it hadn’t been different. She had always talked to people around her. She had always liked meeting new friends. Alex had been attracted by her vivacity, but he had caged her for the same trait. He chose to forget too that those cheap tourists came from a background of greater prosperity than her own.

“Is that how you met? In a lift?” Much intrigued, Carina was eager to lighten the brooding atmosphere.

Kerry’s eyes were wry. “He practically cut me dead.”

“Per dio…;” Alex raked. “You go back six years to complain!”

She had still to look at him, though she didn’t need to look. His lean, strikingly handsome features were permanently inside her head.

“I’ll leave you alone.” Carina escaped uncomfortably.

As the door shut, Alex planted himself where she could no longer avoid visual contact. “What is the matter with you? Hmm?” he demanded, dulled golden eyes pinned to her in derision. “You were flirting. How else did you get into the situation? They didn’t even know who you were. My wife does not mix with people who trespass on private property. Have you no sense of propriety? No sense of discretion? Must I have you watched every place you go?”

Every harsh word lashed into her. She had no answers for him. A thick, impenetrable wall of glass separated them in understanding. She was only twenty-three years old, and just over a year of that time had been spent in the goldfish bowl of Alex’s elitist society. But Alex had never granted her trust. She recognised how he had confined her with his family and vetted everyone she met. Her only escape route had been through Vickie. Alex had subconsciously behaved from the outset as if her betrayal was written into the stars. Somehow it helped to see that his excessive possessiveness had existed even then without just cause. She was not responsible for its birth.

“I want to leave with Ricky and Carina,” was all she said.

Their relationship was impossible. The poison of distrust and jealousy infiltrated every corner of Alex’s mind. A flirtatious glance, a little animated chatter with a man anywhere between twenty and fifty and Alex would be suspicious. It would only get worse. He would imprison her and suffocate her until only enmity and resentment lay between them.

“No!” Alex seethed on another feverish blaze of anger.

It hurt that she should know exactly what he was thinking. He was incredulously reacting to the news that he was in the doghouse when he had only done what any Greek husband would have done to a man making advances to his wife. He was furious that she had not made a more detailed explanation. He was outraged that she was not ashamed of herself. And at the back of it all, he honestly believed that she had encouraged Dave. That was riling him too. He had punished the perpetrator, but not the instigator. His own code wouldn’t let him lay violent hands upon a woman. But for how long could that restraint hold out?

She slept for a while, her own constant lassitude nudging and not quite connecting with some nebulous recollection. Carina was there again when she woke up. “I’m staying for a few days,” she announced.

Kerry sat up. “But you’re supposed to be going to New York tonight,” she objected.

Carina smiled. “Ricky can survive on his own for a few days. It’s a service apartment and he’ll be working all the time.”

“You don’t need to stay.”

“Alex asked me to,” she revealed reluctantly. “He’s worried about you.”