Chapter Two
Dianne Wilkins growls under her breath at the woman in front of her on the airport travelator.
If only she could growl loudly.
That would clear the travelator, for sure.
‘Excuse me,’ she says loudly, and the woman ahead looks back, startled, and finally hauls in the suitcase which has been blocking the way.
Dianne is not a laid-back traveller. She’s an enraged one.
People walk too slowly in front of her in airports, stop in the middle of busy walkways and just dawdle.
In Singapore airport, they lean lazily against the side of the travelator and let their huge suitcases block the other lane so that nobody can get past.
Inevitably, they huff loudly if Dianne mutters ‘Excuse me’ to make them move their ruddy bags.
Dianne barrels past traveller after traveller, notching up more steps on her Fitbit and burning off some of her inner fire.
She wonders why this anger was never available to her before. Or why women weren’t told about getting angry.
Because it turns out, anger is fabulous.
On the outside, Dianne looks like an ordinary sixty-something lady with curled frosted-blonde hair. She’s wearing a beige comfortable tee, an indigo padded gilet and actual mom jeans as well as a nice lippie. People probably can tell she plays tennis at a mildly competitive standard.
In short, she looks like a nice, cake-baking granny until anyone really looks into her eyes.
Her eyes tell the real story.
That she’s an enraged woman with dagger-sharp senses, screaming Hurry the hell up! I will stab you with my blood donor gift pencil if you don’t get the hell out of my way!
On the fourth Singapore airport travelator, Dianne yet again refrains from doing this.
I deserve something, possibly a medal for self-restraint, she thinks, but then, getting angry at inappropriate moments is why she’s doing this long-haul journey in the first place.
Since January, she’s been on a warning from her three kids after a road rage incident culminated in The Intervention.
The Intervention is why she’s just come off an eight-hour flight from Melbourne. She’s heading on to a connecting flight to Athens, before she gets another flight to Corfu. Three flights! Of course she’s angry.
She should be home waiting for Ellie’s baby to be born, but no: she’s being held up by stupid tourists with huge bags dropped all over the place, and if she doesn’t control herself, someone’s going to die.
‘The coppers could have charged you with road rage!’ Toby, her youngest, said in shock when it all began to come out in the open.
He had a pal in the police who’d told him that it was sheer fluke that Dianne wasn’t being charged over the screaming row with the Tesla driver.
‘That moron took my parking spot,’ snarled Dianne. ‘I only kicked his tyres. I could have done worse.’
‘Mum?’ said Lauren, her eldest, holding out her hands in supplication like she was about to catch a beach ball or hold a church service. ‘The police called it a serious incident. You screamed at him for ten minutes and wouldn’t let him leave the car park. What’s wrong with you?’
‘Nothing’s wrong with me!’ Dianne had shrieked back, which had turned out to be a mistake too because Ellie, middle daughter, had weighed in.
‘You never used to shout?’ whispered Ellie, sounding heartbroken and then bursting into tears. ‘I love you but you haven’t been the same since Dad died.’
Lauren, who ran an architect’s practice with a chromium hand in a chromium glove, was less emotional. She listed Dianne’s transgressions briskly.
‘You’ve fought with all your neighbours. If a kid’s ball comes into your garden, you apparently puncture it and then throw it out, which is dreadful. Now the police are involved because of your road rage. You need help.
‘So,’ Lauren continues, ‘I can only find one anger-management live-in programme and it’s full, but there’s this place in Greece, run by that woman who was on American TV with her therapy show.
She can fix anyone. Rose Talisman: remember her?
The Talisman Effect. She’s been off TV for years because of some disaster on her show, but still. She was good.
‘It’s a week-long stay in Corfu. Late September. It’s expensive but frankly, it’s either this island retreat or we’ll have to get you put into a psych ward.’
‘Psych ward?’ hissed Dianne furiously. ‘I’m not mad,’ she’d added in a deliberately calmer tone.
‘Yet here you are, behaving as if you’re a complete psycho,’ Lauren snapped back.
Lauren had been the queen of debating at school. She hadn’t lost it.
Dianne wishes she could explain about the anger thing but she can’t. They won’t get it.
‘If you can’t do something about your behaviour, we’re taking ourselves out of your life. You have to go to the island or accept the consequences,’ Lauren had said.
Dianne is going to the island.
She’ll pretend to join in.
Dianne can pretend at Olympic level.
She doesn’t want to change.
Why would she?
India knows exactly what she wants her wedding to be like.
For starters, she’s chosen the dress: well, she has a top three.
Number one is an ivory column dress in heavy silk satin that shimmies down her long legs and makes her look a little bit Grace Kelly. Her wedding flowers consist of a calla lily arrangement, and her copper hair will be in a slightly distressed bun at the nape of her neck.
The number two is a different vibe altogether: an antique lace garment with a demure heart-shaped neckline and teeny cap sleeves that somebody’s great-grandmother made.
In India’s mind, it’s a dress which is riddled with memories of great love.
Everyone who’s worn it has had a Great Love which has never failed.
Made in some tiny village in the middle of nowhere where the ladies hand-made lace for decades, centuries even. She can just imagine this on Instagram.
The Great Love bit is what’s important.
An Italian great-grandmother dress could do, she thinks as she sits in the back of the taxi on its way from Corfu airport to Villa Artemis.
She loves Italian fashion and her closet wish list is Gucci, Prada, Versace – stuff she buys after much rummaging at vintage stores and car boot sales. Making a unique outfit out of vintage buys is her idea of absolute heaven.
Maybe Albania not Italy. An Albanian antique/vintage garment is just that bit more unique.
India’s a bit hazy on geography and honestly cannot point to Albania on a map, but she’ll ask one of her stepmother’s people to look into finding this fantasy gem.
Georgie, her stepmother, has an amazing team.
Georgie’s an interior designer and does houses for rich people, mainly Russian and Chinese billionaires, in London.
There is nothing Georgie’s people cannot source: Mesopotamian doors made of ancient wood with iron ornaments; Warhols that nobody’s ever seen before; museum-quality fragments of Napoleon’s uniform set inside an ebony box frame with a painting light to hang over the frame. Nothing is off limits.
Georgie sounded surprised that India’s heading to Corfu for a therapy retreat, but she never criticises.
‘You make your own choices, darling,’ is all she said.
It’s dark now in Corfu and, as the taxi winds its way along the coast to the Villa Artemis and her Brand New Adventure, India’s busy scrawling notes in her metallic-pink fake-crocodile-skin notebook with her initials in gold lettering on the front.
She prints out pictures she likes on her portable baby printer.
She sticks them on with stickers of daisies.
She’s found her third dress choice – Daphne’s dress in Bridgerton.
If that isn’t the stuff of fairy tale, India doesn’t know what is.
India isn’t built like the petite Daphne: instead, she’s tall and has ultra-long legs like her mum, Sonja, who was a famous model. Sonja left India when she was a baby to run off with a successful guitarist who played with one of the world’s biggest bands.
Even though India basically grew up without her mother, she’s inherited her best features: her legs, general skinniness, snaky copper hair which falls to below her angular shoulder blades, and sky-blue eyes.
There’s only one teeny problem about her wedding plans: India and her last boyfriend, Chad, split up a month ago, which means it is handy she had booked the retreat.
A wedding dress is somewhat surplus to requirements.
But she’ll need one soon, she just knows it. She knows she has a big heart, and there’s got to be someone out there who’ll love her the same way, surely?
‘Rose can fix me!’ she had said cheerfully to Georgie and her father.
‘You don’t need to be fixed, pumpkin,’ said her dad, reaching out and twirling a bit of her long coppery hair wistfully. ‘You’re perfect.’
‘We can always improve ourselves, Dad,’ India said seriously. ‘Since going to Pune in India, my Iyengar yoga has been epic. You should see my downward dog. I was doing it wrong for years. Shocking, right? It’s all about getting expert help, Dad.’
When India was a teenager, she spent a lot of time skipping school and watching daytime TV. Her favourite show was The Talisman Effect.
Nobody was judged no matter what they’d done.
People were urged to do their best but also told to realise that nobody’s perfect.
India loved this. She often felt like a klutz because she wasn’t brilliant at stuff like her dad, who’d left school at fifteen and built a car rental company from nothing, or beautiful enough to be a model like her mum, or clever enough to do up giant houses for rich people like Georgie.
Her dad and stepmum both work hard for a living. Meanwhile, India’s been living on money her mum set aside for India from her modelling career – and the money’s running out.
India needs to know what to do next. How to earn a living after abortive attempts to be an influencer and a stylist. How to – she feels silly even thinking this – but how to be.
India’s convinced that Rose Talisman alone can help her with these things.
Also, and India is almost embarrassed to have to mention this, perhaps Rose could explain why India finds a lovely man, thinks he’s the one, and then it fizzles out in weeks.
Like, why?
India’s thirty-four now.
Men of thirty-four all want twenty-four-year-old girlfriends. India’s ageing out.
And thirty-four is standing at the side of a very big cliff in fertility years. Like, a really big cliff.
At least she’d had Chad, until his sister got pregnant and Chad – perfect on paper – told everyone that his sister was ruining her life and Why bring a baby into the world, man?
India, lost in imagining soft baby feet curled up in her palms, a downy head nestled in the crook of her elbow, had let out a tiny moan of loss.
Clearly, that was the end of Chad. India knows she’s soft as butter but even she couldn’t stay with him.
The final shock was when Lizzie, one of her two best friends from forever, gave birth to Lily-Blossom, a fairy child with Lizzie’s dark hair, dark eyes and a dimple.
Going into Lizzie’s apartment to meet the baby for the first time, India felt a vast gaping abyss open up inside her at the thought of never having her own Lily-Blossom.
The pain was like carving a giant blade-sweep across her abdomen. It burned and ached but was startlingly invisible to the rest of the world.
Lizzie had a job as a Pilates teacher, a partner and now a baby.
India was manless, and her most recent job was as a sales assistant in a very posh shop where the owner was a friend of Georgie’s.
India’s honesty does her no favours when people try stuff on.
Saying ‘Don’t you have six Lululemon jackets already?’ gets you fired.
The taxi slows down and takes a sharp right up a steep drive to a beautiful stone building that glitters with lights in the dusk.
India hops out of the taxi.
‘Attack each day with enthusiasm,’ is what Georgie always advises.
India has taken this motto to heart, no matter how weirdly anxious she is.
Nobody can ever call me a quitter, she thinks stoically.
She tightens the belt on her travelling cardigan, a very elderly cashmere jacket she has endlessly washed to get the charity shop smell out of.
This is going to be fun, she tells herself. It has to be.