Chapter Twenty-Eight
Bernard spends Wednesday afternoon drinking too much beside the infinity pool.
He rarely does this now because he can’t cope with hangovers but he wants to escape all the noise in his head. Grazia is barely speaking to him and she says she’s having a spa treatment at half one.
‘Do what you want,’ he says and goes back to sunbathing, his Negroni beside him. He’s tried two other cocktails already, one with peach liqueur, which was a bit sickly sweet but he drank it anyway.
There’s a pretty young girl at the bar today serving him cocktails, not like that supercilious bitch who glared at him as she swept out of his and Grazia’s room with the laundry the other day.
He wouldn’t employ anyone like that.
Bernard likes staff who treat him with respect. He insists upon it.
He broods angrily that he doesn’t feel fully respected in Villa Artemis.
It’s definitely Grazia’s fault. Everyone is on her side.
He’s sure Rose is telling the entire staff that he’s not nice to his wife – well, he’s going to put a stop to that.
He knows things about Rose Talisman.
Bernard has ruined other people’s businesses before. He doesn’t feel any guilt about that – it’s survival of the fittest, he thinks. Rose had better watch out.
Grazia finds Rose at lunch.
‘May I join you on a walk to the village?’ she asks Rose. ‘Can it be just me?’
Not for a moment does Rose betray her surprise.
‘Of course,’ she says. Perhaps she can get to the nub of the problem. Grazia and Bernard’s issues are not just about his adult children, Rose is sure of it.
India and Keera have lunch, then sit on the beach with Dan, occasionally wading into the sea to cool down.
‘It’s nice this doing nothing,’ says Keera.
‘Lovely,’ says India, who looks sleepy.
She is lying on her stomach, long legs stretched out on the sand.
Keera sees Dan sneaking a look at India but she says nothing. She feels such kinship with the two of them.
They’re all a bit mixed up but they care about each other. Funny how this has happened so quickly.
Rose finishes writing up her notes from the morning and wonders how Grazia is doing.
‘I am embarrassed to share this with you,’ Grazia had said to Rose as they walked to the village.
‘There’s nothing I haven’t heard,’ Rose told her.
Now Rose thinks she understands Grazia and Bernard’s marriage more.
Poor Grazia.
What a risk to tell the story to someone else. Bernard will be enraged when he finds out. He will probably storm out of the retreat.
Rose has prepared Grazia for that. Not every relationship can be saved.
Rose knows that Bernard is getting drunk beside the pool, but she will not worry about him.
She thinks instead of this afternoon’s late session on the terrace which will focus on people’s stories but also on the mind–body link.
Once, a million years ago when she was a practising therapist, a young man with an eating disorder leaped out of his chair and screamed that he was fed up talking about his body.
His body was ‘my business, OK?!’ he shrieked. He stormed off and hadn’t paid.
At the time, Rose decided that a couch might be the way to go. It was harder for people to leap out of the prone position than out of a chair. She also looked into a contractual agreement which meant non-payers had a month to cough up, but it was too tricky to enforce.
On her TV show, the producers had never been keen on focusing on physical signs of emotional pain.
‘It’s kinda boring,’ said the second-in-command producer, whose credentials included the fact that he once speed-read Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.
‘I like it when people cry, but not immediately. Fourteen minutes in is the perfect slot – after the first commercial break but just before the second one.’
‘I’ll do my best to remember that,’ Rose had replied gravely.
American TV had far too many commercial breaks and she doubted if Carl Jung and Melanie Klein in a tag team with a stopwatch could make people cry on demand fourteen minutes into a session.
This afternoon, Rose starts on the physical side of pain.
On the terrace, she’s astonished to see that Bernard is present. He’s sitting apart from his wife at the table and has the red face of someone who’s drunk too much in the sun.
Drinking in the sunshine is like drinking on aeroplanes, Rose thinks. Every drink is like a double measure.
The donkey who lives two rocky fields away is roaring hello to the donkey who lives close to the Kri Kri beach. Rose always brings fruit to the beach donkey, who’s called Zeus.
In the background, there’s a hum of the slow scooters that tourists rent to traverse the island.
Rose worries every time she sees them blithely riding helmet-less and biker-clothes-less.
The roads in Corfu are just as rock hard as the roads wherever the holidaymakers come from, and one small brush with the road can leave many scars.
But still – people make stupid choices all the time. She’s done it herself.
Rose stands up. She likes to roam when she’s working.
‘We live in a world where we’re reminded to be aware of our bodies – how we eat, if it’s processed or non-processed, how much exercise we take, running or weight-lifting.
But the impact of emotional stress on our bodies is covered much less frequently and that’s a huge disconnect because our minds and our bodies are inextricably connected. ’
She walks around the table on the terrace, forcing the retreat guests to turn in their chairs.
‘Think about your body now. How does it feel after yesterday and this morning? Looser, tighter? Where do your emotions hide in your body? For some people, it’s a tautness in their head and their neck. Others feel it in their shoulders or the gut.’
Shoulders and guts – she sees Keera look up when she says this.
‘How do you feel physically right now?’ she asks Keera. ‘Your shoulders are tense. Can you let them drop? Is your jaw tight?’
Keera nods at Rose. ‘I grind my teeth,’ she says.
‘Don’t we all,’ India mutters, then turns to Keera. ‘Sorry, babe, interrupted you.’
‘We carry emotional tension in our bodies,’ Rose says. ‘All the hurts and traumas show up in us physically. It’s important to be aware of that. If your physical self becomes locked with certain people or in certain circumstances, that means something.’
‘My mother …’ Keera hears herself say the words without thinking. ‘She … she makes me anxious when she’s annoyed.’
Rose nods at her with that calm, kind face: you wouldn’t know what Rose is thinking, Keera feels, but it’s always thoughtful, gentle. She would never hurt anyone.
‘Can you think of any specific times when this happened?’ Rose asks.
‘When an article appeared about me in February. It was in Empress. It’s a women’s magazine, movie star interviews, the perfect wardrobe for spring, and that sort of thing.’
She stops.
‘My mom hated the way they wrote about me but she blamed me for it. I took a lot of medication that day. And drank. Oh yeah,’ she adds, remembering, ‘I smoked a joint with a complete stranger in the back yard of a cool restaurant.’
Her gaze goes curiously blank, as if she’s blocking another memory.
‘Did any of that help?’ Rose asks.
Keera winces. ‘What do you think? Sorry,’ she amends. ‘No. She still gets mad and it still makes me nervous.’
Rose just nods at this information.
‘Let’s try a group practice,’ she suggests.
She takes a rounded pebble about half the size of one of the villa’s morning bread rolls and puts it on the table in front of them.
‘This is from our beach,’ she says. ‘It’s a little bit of Corfu. Blasted in and out of the sea for generations. It was probably bigger once. Now it’s smaller and round, burnished by the water. I’m going to leave it here and I want each of you to stare at it carefully.’
Dutifully, every eye is on the pebble.
‘Now move it with your mind,’ says Rose.
As one, the group looks up.
‘That’s ridiculous,’ says Dan.
Rose nods. ‘India, what do you think?’
‘What is that – telekinesis?’ says India. ‘Not on my CV.’ She laughs.
‘Nobody can move it without touching it,’ snarls Bernard. ‘Or is it a trick question?’
‘No trick,’ says Rose. ‘Dianne?’
‘No, I can’t move it, obviously—’
‘You’re showing us what we can’t do,’ says Keera suddenly. ‘None of us can move the pebble without touching it.’
India jumps in suddenly: ‘And none of us can move anyone else’s mind or change their mind. It’s what you said: you can’t change anyone.’
‘Excellent answers,’ says Rose, beaming. ‘If the pebble was a person, we couldn’t make it happy or sad. The pebble would be in charge of all that. We could try, but it’s a hopeless case, don’t you all agree?’
The group are staring at her now.
Excellent.
Rose continues: ‘It’s easier to feel guilty over not doing the things that will make someone happy than to face the reality that we cannot make them happy at all. That’s down to them. We are as powerless over their moods and feelings as we are over this pebble.
‘If we bend ourselves into contortions to fix other people, we betray ourselves. If we pour our love into new people all the time to make up for inner pain, we also betray ourselves. We cannot move this pebble but we can move, and change, ourselves and our reactions to life.’
Nobody speaks but they all look down at the pebble itself.
Rose watches everyone processing the information.
Dan stares down at the pebble blankly as if it holds some vital scientific secret.
Dianne’s gaze is slightly glazed.
Did she have wine at lunch too? Rose does not approve.
Bernard looks sceptical of the pebble parable.
He thinks he can control everything, Rose feels.
Big mistake.
Huge.
Grazia is concentrating on the pebble. Her eye make-up has been beautifully reapplied since she and Rose walked into Xanthe together after lunch.
Grazia thought that Rose would be shocked at what she’d said but Rose isn’t. She’s heard everything, a fact which comforts the crying Grazia.
Bernard has now closed his eyes and steepled his fingers.