Chapter Twenty
Dianne watches the woman send a high kick into her opponent’s abdomen, can hear the roar of the crowd. The kicked woman falls to the mat for a moment, then recovers and is up, fighting again, determination in every move.
Yes!
Dianne loves watching women’s kickboxing on YouTube.
If only her kids could see her now, she thinks wryly.
They’d have her committed instead of opting to send her to a Greek retreat.
But watching powerful, muscled women fighting calms Dianne down. These women own their power and she loves it.
Ironic since she can’t even do basic stretches any more. Walking is her only exercise.
But if only she’d started doing something like kickboxing when she was in her twenties …
Imagine who she’d have been then. Fierce, determined, brave.
She’d have set up her own business, been somebody, run her life her way.
Then again, the twenty-something version of her wouldn’t have known where to start with getting kickboxing lessons, never mind setting up a business. But she thinks about what might have been.
The world is there for modern women, despite the misogynists, and it might have been there for her too, if only she’d known then what she knows now.
If only are the saddest words in the universe, she thinks.
Dianne looks at the time. Five p.m. Finally.
She’s been waiting to listen to Ellie’s message and then send one in return when Ellie is asleep thanks to the time difference. Waiting to hear her darling’s voice has been hell but she wants to do it when Ellie can’t see the blue tick, can’t know her mother’s waiting to leave a message.
Dianne now needs to be totally alone. Not in the villa, where she feels people can hear her, but away from them all.
She asked Adriana about where she might find privacy and Adriana told her about the little viewing point behind the villa.
They call it ‘the acropolis’, Adriana says.
‘It’s Greek for a citadel, really, and our acropolis is not that. But it’s high up, very private behind the villa. It’s a little terrace half-way up the cliff. When you’re up there, only the birds can hear you.’
Dianne doubts the birds will be interested in her conversation.
The sun is moving slowly down the early evening sky. Adriana has told her that this blissful September warmth is a relief after the sweltering summer.
Dianne climbs up the beautifully laid stone steps that seem part of the cliff face.
She holds carefully on to the wooden railing on the outer edge of the steps.
When she reaches the top, she stops and pants a little. She’s fit but it’s quite a climb.
Dianne peers over the edge which has a curved stone balcony and fragrant oleander and lavender bushes planted neatly around. It’s been set up as a little retreat where people can sit and stare at the sea, or meditate, as Rose has suggested.
She figures that the acropolis is some forty metres above the Villa Artemis complex. An eyrie in the sky.
Or a jumping-off place if a person doesn’t care about living any more. Dianne is still in the hazy area where she does not know what she actually wants.
Today has been a strange day, she reflects. Dianne had thought everyone would be there for anger issues like herself but they weren’t.
She distrusts Bernard: there’s something sleazy about him, and Dianne has a good eye for sleaze.
Neither is she sure about Dan.
She’s wary of Grazia, who looked at her with almost understanding eyes, which Dianne found most deeply irritating. What can a woman like Grazia understand about Dianne’s life?
She likes Keera and India and, in spite of herself, even likes Rose.
She envies Rose because, despite whatever happened to her on the TV show, Rose appears to have her life sorted out. She reeks of happiness and contentment.
Dianne usually can’t bear people like that.
Rose will not get information out of her, Dianne vows. She’ll go home and tell the kids she’s been to Corfu and has done the anger management gig.
Which will be the literal truth.
Sitting on the wooden bench with the hotel beneath her and the vast expanse of the beautiful sea below her, Dianne takes her mobile phone out of her pocket.
Her fingers shake as she presses the button to listen.
‘Hi Mum, glad it’s a lovely place but no, I think Lauren would go mental if you came home. I’m fine, the baby’s fine and Tate’s being so good to me.’
Tate is Ellie’s boyfriend and Dianne has sworn that if he hurts her Ellie, she’ll bury him in a shallow grave so well hidden that even Google won’t be able to find him.
‘The kicking is insane! I think the baby’s a little footballer even if it is a girl! Get fixed, Mum, I love you, please remember that, bye.’
Dianne plays it one more time and lets the tears fall unchecked down her face.
Ellie said she loved her mother.
Dianne’s heart is swollen with relief because she thought she’d lost Ellie. Yet Ellie said ‘I love you’.
As for ‘Get fixed’, that’s another story.
Dianne thinks that after all these years, she is unfixable.
She’s pretty sure that even Rose, whose show Dianne watched many years ago, cannot possibly fix her.
But thinking of the baby, her ‘little footballer’, she wishes she could change.
Recover some of who she was a long time ago. Have a new life.
Is it even possible? She doesn’t know.
Closing the door to her bedroom at ten that night, Rose immediately lights up a bergamot, lime and cinnamon bark Sia sisters candle.
She throws open the French doors to her balcony and the muslin curtains ripple in the whisper of the breeze from the sea.
Christos has left a tiny carafe of good wine in her room, and she pours a small glass.
First day over, she thinks with relief as she drinks.
When she was on TV, the first day of any show was always the worst. She had to hype herself up to become Rose Talisman, the therapy guru.
The mystery Instagram message-sender has implied that Rose isn’t her real name, and they are correct, which makes Rose fear them.
Apart from Adriana and Christos, nobody knows her real name. She was baptised Rosemarie but it was her second name, not her first. Talisman is the surname she chose all those years ago.
It has such a good ring to it: part mystery, part magic.
Not even Theo knows it isn’t her real name, which makes Rose shudder deep inside at how much she’s betrayed him by omission.
Adriana thinks it’s easy to go back and ask for forgiveness, but for someone like Theo, whose very bone marrow is invested in truth, learning about Rose’s lies would destroy his opinion of her.
Ironically, Rose had been determined to tell him about her real life, as opposed to her fantasy legend, before he’d left.
Her own therapist, Vida, had urged her to do it.
Vida could analyse with rapier-like intensity.
‘Your greatest fear is that he’ll never forgive the lies you’ve told him, not that he’ll find your background difficult to accept.’
‘It’s very boring that you’re always right,’ Rose had said gloomily.
She hasn’t talked to Vida for a long time.
Rose knows that she ought to contact Vida again now that Rose is accepting clients.
First topic would be the sense of fear that accompanied the message Mercedes found on Instagram.
Rose shivers. She’d been brave earlier with Adriana but she fears the Instagram messager.
She can only think of one person it can be and she really hopes it isn’t him. He could destroy everything.
Rose finishes her wine and pours some more.
She turns to her notes; work has always calmed her.
Tonight has been good for her six clients.
Keera had been a bit subdued at first over dinner but Dan and India had got talking quite animatedly, and soon Keera was joining in. Dan had spent an internship summer in Boston, it turned out, and India’s father had once rented a house on Martha’s Vineyard.
There was no discussing their therapy. Instead, as if by mutual consent, the guests talked and chatted about other parts of their lives.
Even Grazia had come out of her eerily calm shell.
Bernard was ebullient as if making up for trying to skip the next day.
He was very keen on a wildly expensive bottle of the hotel’s wine and instead of letting him pour a fourth glass, which Rose herself knew was a recipe for disaster, Grazia gently said: ‘Perhaps you have had enough, yes?’
Grazia is truly nothing like the iron-hearted second or third wife Rose had suspected she was.
Sir Bernard had tried to talk to Dianne, telling her about the businesses he owns in Australia.
‘Love Melbourne, of course,’ he’d said, closing his eyes as if imagining it in his brain. ‘I love the buzz of Sydney, though.’
‘It is a passionate place,’ said Grazia, ‘a vibrant place.’
But Dianne did not bite.
‘Interesting,’ she’d said blankly, looking at Bernard as if she could imagine putting his head in a blender.
Rose blinked as she looked at Dianne.
Blender … Surely not. But she’d felt the violent urge coming off Dianne as if it was written in big letters in the air.
Shut your mouth, or I’ll blend you to a pulp, Bernard.
Rose wonders if she imagined it.
Dianne didn’t drink all evening. She was curiously still, like a person very aware of her physical self.
‘How are you feeling, Dianne?’ Rose had ventured, and Dianne had smiled quickly and begun to speak:
‘My daughter sent me a message, which is lovely …’
Then she’d clammed up. As if the smallest amount of sharing was a mistake and she had to seal her mouth shut rather than speak of it.
Grazia had turned out to be excellent in the kitchen – totally different from what Christos had imagined.
‘I would eat your dolmades any day,’ he’d said, bowing to her and kissing her hand. ‘Where did you learn to cook?’
‘In Georgia,’ she’d said simply. ‘My grandmother taught me. Not my mother – she was not the mothering type.’
Rose highlighted that remark in her mental notebook in case she needed it.
Dianne had carried the dirty plates into the kitchen and then vanished, which made Rose irritated, because she should have rinsed them and loaded them into the industrial dishwasher.
If they’d been in a proper rehab place, Dianne would have been washing the floor, cleaning the toilets or doing whatever her day’s chores were.
Still, she feels sorry for Dianne and whatever massive burden she carries. Anger is a symptom not the cause.
Everyone else is talking and Dianne is maintaining her little iceberg act.
It gets lonely on icebergs.
Finally, her notes finished, Rose undresses tiredly, taking the little piece of turquoise out of her pocket and putting it on the table.
The pain of holding it burns her and yet it’s the only link she has with him any more. Theo is gone.
There’s no point thinking about what she could have done better, which was just about everything.
But today has awakened the past for her, which is not what she’d planned.
For a woman who makes her living telling other people how to heal the pain of the past, she feels as if she’s spectacularly bad at managing this in her own life.
This was to be a spectacular return to business and a way to build Villa Artemis up.
She’s been negligent in not expecting it to throw up so many thoughts about her work in the past.
How she’d lost control of the runaway train that was her TV show. How she’d lost Theo.
The Instagram message has frightened her.
Despite her best efforts to keep her mind on the dynamics of the retreat, Rose keeps thinking about the way she and Theo would have been able to discuss how best to get through to the different people at Villa Artemis.
Accept the pain of sadness and loss, but know it’s further away than ever. Remember, your inner critic is rarely your friend.
It’s one of her favourite sayings, one she likes to leave people with when their sessions are over.
‘Remember it yourself,’ she thought, channelling her therapist, Vida. ‘You’re here to work not wallow.’
She has her notes all ready for the next day.
Who knows what will be revealed as the week goes on.
Rose had talked about it again at dinner.
‘The notebooks are private but, tonight, I want each of you to write down the answers to two questions. They’re just for your benefit, ideas to think about.
‘“What do I want most in the world?” and “What do I fear most in the world?”
‘Write the headings down and then any words that come to mind. Peace, health, a better job, to get on with your sister, your uncle, your boss – whatever you feel. Dan and Keera, perhaps you might write about how it felt to open up today.’
Rose wonders now who’ll do it and who won’t.
People get so crushed by the baggage they carry from the past and by living up to other people’s expectations that they neglect to think about what they want.
This exercise will help with that.
She reminded them about the thought for the day, too: You can’t change other people.
She hopes it’s beginning to sink in.
Before she goes to sleep, she writes down her fears about the anonymous messager in her journal. She firmly believes in writing fears and gratitude down in a journal. But tonight, writing doesn’t heal her the way it usually does.
The guests on the island retreat would be shocked to learn the real truth about Rose, who has built her reputation on being a clear-sighted, truthful woman. They think that a TV-show disaster is the worst thing in her past.
It isn’t.