Chapter Five
‘Are you ready, darling?’
Bernard loves Grazia’s accent.
They’ve been married for twenty-five years and he still loves the way she says ‘darling’ so that it comes out as ‘darlink’.
She’s lived in Britain for longer than she ever lived in Tbilisi, but Tbilisi is inside her in every way.
For Christmas she makes Georgian khachapuri, cheese-filled bread, and the classic plum cake, drizzled with rum.
Last Christmas, she made forty for all her friends.
Forty small cakes! Bernard had just smiled but he thought she was mad.
Why not buy the cakes? Bernard believes that money can sort everything out.
It’s one of life’s most obvious truths and those who say he’s wrong haven’t lived the sort of life he has.
From the slums of post-war Liverpool to running a huge company that’s made him very wealthy, Bernard finds that money always helps.
‘Yes, I’m ready,’ he says, scanning around to make sure he has got everything. Handkerchief, sunglasses and his two phones which he is keeping in his shorts pocket no matter what the literature told them about ‘no mobile devices’ in the sessions.
He needs to be in touch with work.
Does this Rose person not know who he is?
Grazia is taking a small bottle of orange juice out of the minibar. He knows it’s in case his blood sugar gets low.
Old age has been creeping up on Bernard slowly and he hates it. Would fight it if he could but age is a stealthy adversary and never gets straight into the ring.
It lightly touches many things at once so it’s hard to fight ageing in the aggressive way he fights people in business.
Once, he was agile, lithe, loved playing squash and flattening the hell out of younger guys. The sheer buzz of that made him feel like a hero. But smashing people with humiliating defeats on the squash court was a million years ago.
Now his knees are creaky as hell and he gets up from chairs with painful slowness, saying ‘Oomph’.
The skin on his arms has become covered with age spots, so that almost overnight, Bernard’s once-strong forearms are now dotted and paper thin.
Now he has to be careful of blood sugar and needs a scan to check his bone density because of his childhood lack of calcium.
His accent is no longer reminiscent of a poverty-stricken childhood in Liverpool but his bones still are.
Grazia buys him multi-vitamins, and watches to make sure he takes his cholesterol medication.
He can’t help it: he resents it all.
‘Shall we go?’ Grazia’s at the suite door, tall and poised in an outfit covered in colourful psychedelic swirls which she says is vintage.
Bernard always feels that vintage is second-hand, and he had enough of that as a kid. No thank you, he likes new clothes. Expensive, made-to-measure clothes. But if it makes her happy.
He’s here for Grazia. For now, at least.
His wife swings back to him with her little handbag rattling on her arm.
‘We’ll be late, Bernard!’
He shrugs. ‘We’re paying them enough. No matter if we’re late.’
‘If we’re late,’ his wife says, ‘we get thrown out of the programme.’
Normally, this is a red rag to a bull. Nobody throws Sir Bernard out of anything, but he sees the tautness of Grazia’s normally full upper lip, the slight whitening underneath her nose.
He will do this for her.
For one day, anyway.
After that, he’ll have to see. Nobody gets to tell him he can’t be late, certainly not some charlatan of a therapist who’s been in hiding for five years.
Bernard has researched Rose Talisman: he knows exactly what she did and what she’s been up to since. He’s ready for her if she annoys him. Bernard has spent his life making more and more money so that nobody ever gets to tell him what to do or reprove him for anything.
He will decimate Rose Talisman if she attempts to do so.
For now, Bernard will go along with this to make Grazia happy. But if Rose steps out of line, Bernard will flatten her.
In the private quarters of the house, as the guests file out to the breakfast that has been lovingly prepared and laid out, Adriana and Christos are having a rare five-minute sit-down in the shade of their terrace and drinking iced tea.
Christos is trialling a new breakfast smoothie: made of watermelon, mint and pomegranate juice. He has a small glass of it for Adriana because she has amazing taste, despite not being born into a family of restauranteurs.
‘I think it needs more mint …’ ponders Christos, sipping it again.
He’s left the door into the kitchen open so he can hear if Beata, the hotel’s waitress-cum-housekeeping-stalwart, needs any help.
Most of Villa Artemis’ small staff are related to Christos in some way.
Without them, he, Adriana and Rose would not be able to run the place.
His cousin is the villa’s yoga guru, Beata’s two daughters run the tiny spa, his nephew takes care of gardening.
His second cousins, the amazing Sia sisters, make the natural candles, soaps and aromatic oils that are used all over the hotel.
His yaya, or grandmother, is the boss of the local sewing ladies: she has designed the villa’s cushions, and the pretty tote bags available in the tiny shop are made by her and her friends.
‘I hope Rose will be all right,’ frets Adriana, not even seeing the glass of pink perfection her husband is holding out to her. ‘This is such a high-pressure way to go back to work. I worry that we pushed her into it.’
‘Nonsense,’ says Christos.
He’s a big bear of a man who never ceases to feel lucky he found his tiny, beloved wife. Adriana is as dark-haired and dark-eyed as any Greek woman but has creamy pale skin like her sister, Rose.
‘Rose is a therapist at heart,’ Christos reassures her. ‘Sure, she enjoyed renovating the house, choosing colours, lamps, candles.’
Adriana grins at him.
She loved choosing candles and lamps too. Pure linen throws for the beds, shell-shaped light sconces around the hallways, embroidered pillowcases, crystal vases ready to be filled with flowers.
It was like being in charge of a luxury doll’s house, naming rooms after goddesses, picking plants to go beside the new infinity pool, helping design the cool, airy dining room which they’d created by knocking three of the original rooms together.
Adriana feels her body tighten with stress at the thought of all the money they have spent turning Villa Artemis into a luxurious jewel of a destination.
Christos has finished his smoothie. ‘What Rose loves most is fixing people. She’s good at it too.’
Adriana zones back in.
‘But this will be her first time since …’ she pauses.
‘Yeah,’ agrees her husband. ‘She’s so confident, so ready. She can do this.’
Adriana murmurs a quiet prayer. She’s not exactly religious but, sometimes, she finds comfort in the quiet of a cool church or the ritual of a prayer.
‘Let this be the right thing,’ she says.
‘It will be.’ Christos sounds convinced. ‘I’ve got some photos of the terrace for when we launch the next therapy week. I was thinking November?’
‘This one needs to work first,’ says Adriana.
Christos shrugs. He does good shrugs – huge shoulders raising, large arms that like to hold his beloved wife splaying out. ‘What can go wrong?’ he says cheerfully.