Chapter Forty
When Rose makes it back to the hotel, focused on her final evening session, Adriana is waiting for her with an anxious look on her face.
‘What’s up?’ asks Rose, bracing herself for more bad news.
‘It’s Keera’s mother,’ Adriana whispers with a backwards glance towards the office.
‘Is she in there?’ Rose whispers back.
Adriana nods.
‘Was it Alexei and the champagne? Please tell me Alexei didn’t behave inappropriately with her?’
Adriana shakes her head and hisses ‘No!’
‘Phew,’ mutters Rose in relief.
Rose, Adriana and Christos had warned him to keep the Alexei power sheathed around the hotel and their guests.
‘He knows you’d murder him in his sleep,’ Adriana says.
‘Plus, he is a good man. So, early on in the afternoon, Bobbi went with Keera up to the acropolis. I have no idea what happened but Keera vanished and Bobbi stormed down and went straight back to the bar. Stacy and Jimi were on duty and she ordered a lot of cocktails. We tried to settle her in a room but she’s restless and is looking for you. ’
‘She needs to give me a piece of her mind, I daresay,’ says Rose.
She hands the Magic Tea to her sister. ‘Can I have a cup of this while I deal with her?’
‘You can have two cups if you get her out of the office,’ says Adriana brightly. ‘You don’t have much time – you’ve got the beach before dinner.’
‘Where’s Julia?’
‘Christos put her in a taxi to Casa Siren, the Airbnb we booked for her.’
‘That’s something,’ says Rose.
‘Christos says Dan will be back in the morning to do the last session and check out. He’s staying in Corfu Town tonight.’
‘I should have promised I’d murder him in his bed if he went missing again,’ Rose says ruefully.
‘No one ever thinks you can be so scary,’ says Adriana fondly. ‘You look so serene. But I know better.’
They hug.
‘When you’re happy, I’m happy,’ says Rose.
The hotel office is just about big enough for three people sitting at desks and answering phones but there’s nobody there now.
Bobbi is sitting on the most industrial-looking of the office chairs, the one Christos uses.
When she arrived at Villa Artemis, Bobbi looked glamorously made-up in a pink-gingham linen shift dress that highlighted long, tanned bare legs finished off with spectacular gold sandals.
Now she’s barefoot, her wedge sandals are splayed on the floor, and she’s playing with a pack of cigarettes. Her mascara has moved south and the chunky gold bangles she wore on her elegant wrists are on the desk beside her.
Rose thinks that Bobbi’s probably younger than her, somewhere in her late forties at most, but now, she looks worn down.
Rose’s need to help people reasserts itself.
Theo used to say she was a hopeless case for a therapist.
‘You have to stop helping people we meet at dinner parties,’ he said one night when they came home after Rose had spent an hour telling a sobbing guest that there was help available for her disordered eating.
‘But that’s what we do, isn’t it?’ Rose had said, and he’d laughed and kissed her, said he adored her.
Just not enough, Rose thinks candidly.
‘Hello Bobbi,’ she says now.
‘I want to know what she says about me,’ mutters Bobbi.
She has a glass of clear liquid with a couple of lemon slices in it beside her.
Rose does not approve. It could be water or it could be neat vodka.
‘Can I get you water?’ Rose asks politely for information purposes. She moves a box of printer paper off a chair and sits down.
The room is blissfully cool thanks to the air-con. Rose had wanted the office to have a zen-like calm, even if it did have to include computers and files.
‘Water? Might be nice,’ Bobbi says owlishly, picking up her glass and holding it close as if someone might take it away.
Definitely not water, then.
Adriana arrives with Rose’s tea, which adds a powerful valerian aroma to the room. Bobbi wrinkles her nose.
‘Could we get some water, please,’ asks Rose.
Adriana’s back in a moment with two glasses and some Greek island spring water.
‘Just drink this first,’ says Bobbi, holding her glass up.
Adriana and Rose look at each other, then, as one, reach towards the glass.
‘Bobbi, I can’t have you getting dangerously drunk on our premises,’ Rose says, forcefully taking the glass away from Bobbi.
‘That’s nasty,’ says Bobbi crossly. ‘The second nasty thing you’ve done to me. No, not nasty – cruel!!! You don’t care who you hurt, do you? You’ve messed with Keera’s head. What have you done to her?’
‘Nothing,’ says Rose calmly, knowing that her very calmness is going to enrage Bobbi even more.
People like Bobbi like operating in fight mode: it’s what they know. Whoever shouts loudest gets what they want.
But Rose, who knows exactly what growing up in a shout-fest is like, had long ago vowed that her life would be about mature grown-up conversations where there was no bullying or screaming.
‘You’ve done something!’ Bobbi hadn’t got the no-shouting memo and is pointing a finger at Rose. ‘She wants to leave music behind. Do something else. Not tour!’
Bobbi stops with her mouth open, as if this concept is so wrong, she can barely continue to talk. But she regroups.
‘It’s your fault, Rose bloody Talisman. She wasn’t like that when she came out of rehab, so it’s your fault. After all I’ve done for her …’
Rose smiles. The old ‘After all I’ve done for them’ trope.
Rose didn’t plan on working with clients’ families but they’re here now so she must.
‘Did you strike a bargain with Keera when she was born?’ asks Rose gently. ‘Did you tell her in the hospital that you would look after her but that she had to pay a price for this care? Your bargain was that you wanted to be in the music business and Keera’s job was to get you there?’
Bobbi’s face scrunches up in confusion. ‘No, don’t be ridiculous,’ she says.
‘So, no bargain whereby you gave motherhood in exchange for something?’
‘No!’ shrieks Bobbi.
‘Discussing the bargain you made when she was a baby is what After all I’ve done for her really means,’ Rose says. ‘You took care of Keera for a reason. It was not unconditional love—’
‘How dare you?’ shrieks Bobbi but Rose holds up a hand.
The power rushing through Rose is not from the Magic Tea.
She is Rose Talisman, a woman who’s survived a childhood in foster care, the collapse of her relationship and the decimation of her career in the full glare of the public eye.
Bobbi doesn’t stand a chance.
‘I’m not doubting that you love Keera,’ she enunciates, ‘but, as the years went by, that love came with conditions and those conditions were that Keera allowed you back into the world from which her birth excluded you. After all I’ve done for you says there was a bargain and you expect to be paid. Is that a fair thing to do to a child?’
‘It’s not like that,’ says Bobbi and she leans back in her chair. ‘Keera loved performing, dancing, singing.’
‘Lots of children do,’ says Rose gently. ‘But very few of them take it any further. Keera did her first audition for a commercial at the age of, what – nine? That isn’t something a child can arrange.’
‘She loved it,’ says Bobbi. ‘Everyone said she was a natural.’
‘What did she miss by working for a living so young? It sounds like a difficult life where it was hard to put down roots.’
‘We both made sacrifices,’ says Bobbi weakly.
‘You were an adult when you made those sacrifices,’ Rose continues. ‘Keera was only a child who wanted to please you. When you pushed her so hard, you weren’t mothering her, were you? You were giving both of you a career.’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ says Bobbi.
‘Tell me what it was like.’
Bobbi falters. ‘I left Ireland a long time ago and I was doing well in LA and then I got pregnant. I thought I could get back into the business after I had the baby, but I couldn’t. I had Keera to look after and my body had changed and—’
Bobbi pauses.
‘I was doing third-rate shows, barely scraping by and we had nothing, nothing. If I had a straight job, who’d look after Keera?
So I sang and kept her with me and then—’ She pauses in her story.
‘One night, she started to sing one of my songs.
She had this grown-up voice. She had the talent, I could see it.
‘I made a life for us,’ Bobbi adds defiantly.
‘You looked after her the only way you knew how,’ says Rose gently, ‘but there’s been a price to pay for Keera. She didn’t choose this life. You did. Nobody’s forcing Keera to become anything. She has made her own choice.’
There’s silence in the office.
‘So it’s my fault?’ says Bobbi.
‘It’s nobody’s fault,’ explains Rose patiently. ‘You did what you thought was right; you were surviving. Keera is choosing to survive a different way. That’s her right. Self-determination.’
She drinks her tea slowly.
Time to let Bobbi do some thinking on her own.