Chapter Twenty-One
In their luxury suite, the biggest bedroom in Villa Artemis, Bernard sits on the edge of the bed and watches Grazia taking off her make-up.
No matter how tired she is, she goes through the ritual. Then she will do her before-bed stretches. These things keep his wife strong.
Her mother, a tricky woman who had been jealous of her beautiful daughter, had advised Grazia:
‘Do not waste time on diets. You may have no food one day. Put cream on your face, any cream is better than no cream. Never try to be someone you are not.’
Grazia never does that, Bernard knows.
She is a remarkable woman.
Given their money, Bernard knows Grazia could have changed every part of herself. But she hasn’t. She’s had some fillers, as she calls them, and Botox, but no surgery, which is so common now that it surprises Bernard.
His forty-year-old personal assistant has had a full facelift.
She looks younger but different somehow.
Grazia goes to fitness classes and has a personal trainer come to the house when they’re in France and has another she works with in the New York apartment. Women trainers. Bernard isn’t stupid.
He knows his wife is a beautiful woman and younger too.
It’s hard getting older, Bernard thinks bitterly.
Sometimes he just longs to sit in a chair all day and read. That isn’t an option, obviously.
When Bernard was young, which seems like a million years ago, people like him did not sit in chairs and read.
Instead, they worked for other people until their bodies were broken and they retired to live in poverty.
Learning to read had been an accomplishment for many of his peers. His father had never thought much of reading and had been handy with a belt.
Bernard has not built the company he runs today by sitting down and relaxing.
Neither has he run it by being a softie, even though he knows Grazia hates that he is hard now. It’s the aura of power – it becomes a cloak he wears all the time.
His children know how much he loves them: they might have forgotten this but they know, deep down—
‘Shall we work on the notebooks that Rose gave us?’ asks Grazia.
‘Of course, darling,’ he says. ‘You do it. I might early in the morning, I’ll see if I have the energy.’
This is a lie. But then, in marriages, people lie.
He thinks of Rose’s questions he’s supposed to answer; he doesn’t like Rose.
She sees everything and Bernard hates that, hates the sense of being looked through and found wanting.
But her questions are interesting: what lies does he tell himself?
That Grazia doesn’t mind his secret.
Because she does mind. He knows it.
He also knows what he is most afraid of.
All sensible people know that, don’t they?
But he can’t change who he is. Only weak people change.
Grazia takes up one of her husband’s pens, not one of his ink ones which he’s very particular about. She takes a ballpoint one, still a Montblanc. It’s expensive, like all the things Bernard likes.
He still thinks money is a gloss that covers everything.
Grazia’s handwriting is fluid and elegant. The writing of a woman who learned how to write beautifully, the way she learned to do so many things beautifully.
Culture learned after being raised in the harshness of Soviet Georgia.
Bernard has no idea how much Grazia has learned after leaving the country of her birth. Neither has he any idea how many of the old ways stay with her: she does not say what she thinks easily.
She swallows down the words.
That he does not know this after so many years together makes her very sad.
When I think of what I must say, I wish there was no need for me to be on your retreat.
I wish so many things but, Rose, I do not trust in writing things down.
Old ways, it is true, but written evidence is never wise.
I learned that from my own country. I grew up in the USSR in a time when people who wrote things down sometimes regretted it.
I understand that this is thinking from the past but the past clings, does it not?
I like it here in your hotel. It is beautiful and clever.
I like the fabrics in the room, the embroidery on napkins and pillowcases.
This reminds me that my grandmother made lace in the old country.
She sewed it onto handkerchiefs. We had little money but our handkerchiefs were decorated by lace. I never learned how to do it.
Such lace was bourgeois. My mother told me we must not make lace or embroider. Adornment was frowned upon.
My mother hid the lace handkerchiefs and they are gone now. Wiped out by the memory of men in power.
It is always men in power who make women and children afraid, is it not?
That makes me sad and yet, how to change it?
Dan sits on his small bedroom terrace, smoking and staring at the pad on which he’s made many tiny notes.
His handwriting is very small and he can get hundreds of words on a page.
Unlike Julia, who writes in a big, flowing script.
She’s very artistic with beautiful, lyrical writing.
His Julia, born in a small flat in Camden, moved five times with her parents, attended seven schools and, finally, ended up in St Anselm’s because her uncle, Charlie Chance, had got lucky in the import/export business.
Charlie drives a Rolls-Royce, has a gold curb bracelet like a cow chain and is devoted to his little niece. He’d have sent his own Miriam to St Anselm’s too, only she said it was too posh and she wasn’t clever enough.
‘Julia’s OK because she’s smart. Not me, Dad. I’d like to go to a finishing school, though.’
Miriam went to one in Switzerland and came home with a bit of French, a flair for skiing and the ability to adopt a cut-glass accent when she wants to.
She and Julia are thick as thieves.
But Julia runs with a wild pack, the wilder rich people from St Anselm’s, a couple from the shiny contemporary flats near Tower Bridge.
Dan is never capable of keeping up with these friends with their wild nights out, drug taking, determination to live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse.
What lie does he tell himself most? he wonders.
That Julia will one day settle down and be different, stop going out every night, stop the party scene.
That he will be enough for her, as he is.
That the arguments will stop.
Writing down what he lies about is no use.
Everyone in his life seems to see him as the baddie: Vicky and Julia’s cousin, Miriam, they both think he’s to blame for the way Julia is.
Vicky says: ‘Anyone normal would tell her they can’t hang around while she takes drugs and parties to excess. You’re propping all that crazy behaviour up. She’ll never stop if you keep mopping up the pieces, Dan.’
It’s not his job to stop Julia: it’s his job to look after her. She’s a wounded bird and he adores her. What’s so wrong about taking care of her?
Even here in therapy, Rose has pushed him about it.
He’s supposed to imagine if Julia left him for good, permanently.
What a ridiculous idea. They’ll always be pulled back together, even if they are apart for now. This separation is just a break …
Winded, he drops the pen.
His cigarette has gone out from lack of smoking.
If Julia left the way Rose suggests she could, he wouldn’t be responsible for her any more.
Imagine what that would be like – freeing, like jumping off Glastonbury Tor and allowing the wind to make his body sail up into the sky. The freedom of never worrying how she is, walking on eggshells in case he upsets her, which always results in her going on a bender with her friends …
He crumples back on earth with a mental bang.
He will never let that happen.
Julia saved him from the crippling loneliness of his teenage years and early twenties.
It had been a time when Dan felt both supremely clever and hideously shy, unable to exist in the world because he’d been born without any shell.
His Julia had been there: beautiful, fun, one of the exciting people, always.
She went to every party, was top of the list of fabulous people and, holding her hand, Dan was there too. In return for loving her, she gave him acceptance into the world.
She’s beautiful, breathtaking, and he doesn’t deserve her. He can’t lose her.
He feels such guilt about today’s sharing about her. It was a cry for help and he’d made it about him.
What a fool he is.
But then Rose’s other statements crash fleetingly into his conscious mind: it sounds like a co-dependent relationship, and you can’t change other people.
Julia’s always trying to change him.
India fiddles with the pen and her notebook. Purple writing, she decides, and puts away the pink pen – too girly – and takes up her purple one.
She draws a couple of flowers on the page.
The word that comes to mind is ‘naive’.
She’d gone wedding dress shopping when she was going out with Felippe, who was the one before Chad.
India had secretly visited two bridal boutiques on her own, just to see what would suit her, even though she knew it was too soon.
She and Felippe were only dating a month.
She’d told her friend, Lizzie, about the wedding dress trips.
‘You can’t choose this early,’ Lizzie had said on the phone, her voice shocked.
Lizzie was heavily pregnant at the time. The reality of the pregnancy had not yet filtered through to India’s brain. It was all part of the fun of Lizzie being married. But the separateness of Lizzie having a baby, being an absolute grown-up – that hadn’t registered properly.
India and Cleo had been Lizzie’s bridesmaids. Lizzie was a pocket-rocket brunette, and Cleo’s mother was from Singapore so Cleo had perfect skin, almond eyes like glowing dark jewels and straight silken hair. Together, they were India’s best friends.
Cleo had gone to Maastricht to study for her master’s, so India relied on Lizzie for the best friend thing.
‘I know Felippe and I are only together a few weeks but I couldn’t resist it,’ India had said dreamily about her wedding shop experience.
‘I’ve always thought that you can’t go into a bridal shop unless you are actually engaged – that a sign pings on over your head if you chance going in otherwise!
Isn’t that a mad thought? But I pretended I was.
Oh Lizzie, I tried on one that was totally Cinderella princess.
Tiny waist and a huge skirt that moved with you. You’d love it.’
‘You do you, hon,’ Lizzie had said, but she hadn’t sounded invested in the wedding dress idea.
Now, India wonders what sort of an idiot she’d sounded like. She feels like phoning up Lizzie to apologise for being such a dense friend – but Lizzie has a baby and India has no idea what’s a good time ever to call her.
In the end, she types in a message on her phone:
I was being really stupid when I told you about trying on wedding dresses, Lizzie – she writes.
Then she realises that Lizzie has a new baby and that she won’t care over something silly her friend had done months ago. How self-absorbed has she become? India thinks with frustration.
She deletes the first message then types again: Missing you out here in Corfu. How is Lily-Blossom? I think about her all the time. I hope she’s sleeping, love India.
That’s better.
India feels that she can’t write anything in the notebook now apart from a few bullet points.
Wedding dress fantasy – really stupid?
Daydreaming about relationships.
Perfect boyfriends.
She can’t do any more. There’s too much swirling in her head.
She’ll think about it tomorrow.