Chapter Twenty-Eight #5
Dan had spent a very long time thinking about the right sort of ring. In the end, he decided upon an antique one he spent ages tracking down. Julia loves emeralds, and it was a 1930s ring: one long emerald baguette with tiny diamonds lined up each side of it.
Julia had said that she loved the ring, thank you very much, but not the engagement thing.
‘It’s a bit old school for me, sweetie,’ she’d said, admiring the ring she’d put on her right hand, the wrong hand.
His sister had been enraged at the time.
‘She takes you for granted, uses you,’ Vicky said. ‘You mop up her messes and give her undying devotion without asking for anything in return. I understand her far better than you, big bro. She needs you and you need to be needed.’
For a long time, Dan has denied Vicky’s claims.
But despite himself, he can see that she’s right.
Co-dependency is the word, according to Rose. Dan hates this word, hates that his and Julia’s beautiful love can be described with this tawdry word.
When he and Julia met, she saved him from his insecurities and his introversion. But now, he saves her from herself.
He spends lots of money on her because she’s never had a career as such.
‘I’m a professional party girl!’ she likes to say, when she’s off to Glastonbury with the expensive wellington boots she acquired mysteriously, long tanned legs and a coolly torn green Barbour, also mysteriously acquired.
People in big houses often lost things when Julia came to stay but nobody said anything: it might be seen as rude.
Sometimes she wears a cowboy hat, sequinned shorts and a vintage tee that says it’s from a Jimi Hendrix gig, which seems unlikely.
She always has a beaten-up Dior tote bag for her belongings. Dan bought her that from Vestiaire, so he knows it’s not stolen. Her tangled necklaces are half junk and her hair is always tangled, bleached blonde and falling over eyes with pupils enlarged due to the post-festival joint she’s smoking.
Dan had only been to Glastonbury with her once. He hated it: the early drug-taking and the fact that most of their crew are out of their minds by four p.m. He hates camping too. It’s only a reasonable proposition when the campers are totally stoned. He never is.
‘You’re no fun!’ Julia said teasingly, but soon everyone was saying it.
He loves music and tried to get in the mood by drinking beer but it was impossible to catch up with the true partygoers who were in another sphere entirely.
Dan didn’t judge them: he’s known many of Julia’s friends for years and he’s fond of some of them, but he doesn’t adore them.
Neither does he adore the new friends who keep enlarging the circle.
New partygoers when the old ones fall prey to getting married, having kids, having to make money with actual jobs.
Julia works to live rather than lives to work.
As for Dan’s career in science, she never asks about it.
She’s everything he’s not: extrovert, thrill-seeking, careless with money.
They are as different as two people can possibly be.
Dan closes his notebook.
He’s not sure what he feels right now.
Happy that he understands things at last or sad that his main relationship in life has been held up to the light and found wanting? Has he wasted his life?
Back on the terrace, Rose finishes her coffee. She’s suddenly exhausted. She’d forgotten how much this kind of work takes out of you. She has to find Dianne, who’s not in her room, and discuss why Dianne has skipped out of the morning’s sessions.
The retreat is going so well but they’re not there yet.
‘Dan, going back to you, do you feel you are in control of your life?’ Rose asks him.
Dan considers this, his intelligent thin face instantly taken away into cerebral reasoning.
‘Yes,’ he says firmly, ‘yes I do.’
Rose wonders if this is the lie he tells himself most frequently but it’s not her place to name that lie.
‘That’s interesting,’ she says, which is her way of saying, I don’t believe this for one second, honey. ‘So what’s the lie you tell yourself most frequently?’
Now Dan begins to flounder.
Rose can see the battle behind his eyes.
‘My sister says I need to be needed,’ he says stiffly now.
Rose nods. Now they’re getting somewhere.
‘Vicky thinks I should forget about Julia and get on with my life,’ Dan says.
He has just been thinking this and yet he can’t say it in public yet – it feels like a betrayal. Guilt for everything he’s already said overwhelms him. He loves Julia, for heaven’s sake! Isn’t that enough?
Nobody’s saying anything on the terrace at Villa Artemis.
If anything, it’s hotter than yesterday. Dan can feel India fanning herself with her notebook beside him.
Without asking if he’s thirsty, Keera puts a glass of iced water in front of him.
She knows he doesn’t like juice, which is so kind.
Briefly, he wonders if Julia knows that he doesn’t like juice.
He knows how she likes her coffee, black, that she prefers dirty martinis and champagne to any other drink, that her favourite meal is blue loin tuna seared for a few moments in a pan, and that she thinks getting up before eleven on a weekend is for people who don’t know how to enjoy parties.
Julia wants Dan but he’s suddenly aware that she really wants a different sort of Dan: a Dan who’s free to party all the time and doesn’t have a career. He needs to have no other responsibilities except her and then she’ll know he’s absolutely committed to her.
‘Perhaps you can work more on the lies we tell ourselves and what we really want later this afternoon, Dan,’ Rose suggests.
He nods absently.
‘To link back to you, India, let’s talk about the things you both haven’t said to partners. Dan: I think you said that you and Julia have never had a conversation about children. Why not?’
Dan flails a bit.
‘Don’t know,’ he says, uncomfortably. ‘I sensed Julia didn’t want them.’
Rose lets the word sensed sit with him for a moment.
‘And India, you’ve hidden the fact that you want to be a mother, which is a very valid desire for a woman. Sure, not all women want children but you do, so why hide it?’
‘Because the men I see would not be interested in having a baby,’ India says cautiously. She isn’t ready to talk about this yet. ‘It was a nonsensical idea anyway.’
‘Don’t betray yourself like this,’ says Rose briskly. ‘You want what most people want – love, a family, a child. What’s wrong with wanting those things?’
‘Nothing,’ says India cautiously.
‘The question is whether you choose these men because they won’t be interested in children – or whether you’re stuck repeating old twenty-something patterns now that you’re more mature and have mature wants and needs?’
The words crowd India’s head: attachment theory, longing for motherhood, limerence, her mother’s crazy unicorn-butterfly stuff, the line of men: Andrey, Felippe …
she could probably do it alphabetically and hit every letter of the alphabet.
A for Andrey, B for Boris, C for Chad … ‘I want to be loved and needed,’ India says quietly.
‘I want to have my person. My mother has Magnús, Dad has Georgie. Everyone has someone—’
‘You want someone for the right reasons, the right someone,’ Rose says.
India nods gloomily.
Rose moves on.
‘Keera, going back to you: do you think your relationship with your mother was one where you protected her from how you were really feeling? Because she reacted so badly when your needs were different to hers?’
Keera nods cautiously.
‘I don’t want you to get the wrong impression: Mom protected me too,’ Keera says softly. ‘She’d had to be tough and she wanted me to be tough.’
‘But that type of protection doesn’t work for you any more. It was fine when you were using drugs and drinking, then you allowed her behaviour to continue. She didn’t call you out on your cocaine use and you didn’t call her out on treating you like a hopeless employee.’
Keera nods. It all makes so much sense when Rose explains it.
Like putting lots of keys in a door and none of them fit no matter how much you wiggle them in the lock. Then suddenly, someone hands you the right key, it fits and the door opens. Simple.
‘I was so angry with her, especially over Cat, my friend. We did the TV show together and once she was ill – she got lupus – I did the show on my own. I was fourteen, I think. The ratings went up.’
Keera smiles sadly.
‘It’s cheaper to pay one kid in a TV show than pay two, plus it was easier to launch one singing star. It’s all about the numbers.’
‘Did your mother really dislike Cat?’ asks Rose curiously.
‘I’m not sure. I think she didn’t mind me being friends with Taniqua or Luka because they were part of the team. Mom liked them but we paid them as professionals, therefore they weren’t a threat. Cat was a threat.
‘At any point, audience screenings could have shown she was more popular than me. The business is ruthless. I’d have been gone. Therefore, Cat was an opponent. She could have taken away my stardom if she became the more famous one.’
Rose gets up and fills a glass with ice and some orange juice from Christos’ little fridge in the side table.
‘Drink this,’ she says. ‘You’ve got to keep your blood sugar up when you’re examining painful truths. As you say, once you’ve seen this you can’t unsee it. You said you haven’t met up with Cat in a long time: it sounds as though you have complex feelings about that?’
Keera flushes.
‘Cat didn’t really care about being famous. It was fun to her. So when she got canned from the show, I was OK with that. She didn’t care. Me and Mom, we would have killed to keep that show on the road.’
She looks up suddenly. ‘Does that make me a horrible person, Rose?’
‘You were fourteen,’ Rose says. ‘Think about how vulnerable you are when you’re fourteen. The atmosphere you live in is one where you must succeed to make your mother happy. Dr Bobbi is the primary person in your life. She comes first.’