Chapter Twenty-Four #2
Rose turns back to Dianne. ‘How do you get on with your children, Dianne?’ she asks.
Dianne shoots her a poisonous look and both Grazia and Bernard, who notice it, are startled.
‘Fine,’ snaps Dianne.
‘They made you come here, isn’t that right?’
‘Kids know nothing,’ Dianne replies harshly. ‘They grow up and then think you’re an old person who knows nothing. How dare they!’
‘So you’re angry with them?’ Rose asks gently.
There’s a tiny chink in Dianne’s armour; Rose feels herself slipping in.
Dianne’s nostrils flare with anger.
‘I am here because they wanted me to come but I should be at home,’ she says icily. ‘My daughter’s expecting a baby; it’s due soon. Why the hell am I here on this bloody island when I should be with her?’
‘Why do you think you’re here?’ Rose asks.
‘Because I got angry with a stupid man and his stupid car. That’s all. I’m not mad.’
The terrace is quiet apart from the distant noise of the sea and the buzzing of insects in the warm morning air.
‘Nobody here is mad,’ Rose says easily.
‘He bloody well is!’ shoots back Dianne, pointing at Dan. ‘He’s a controlling bastard. It’s written all over him. Only he can look after his girlfriend, she’s nothing without him. That’s what controlling people say.’
‘How dare you!’ explodes Dan, getting to his feet. ‘I have never tried to control her in my life! I’ve never thought Julia’s nothing without me. I adore her and you know nothing—’
‘I know more than you think!’ yells Dianne, also standing.
‘Please sit down,’ says Rose in a calm yet very stern voice.
Dianne flushes but sits.
Dan follows suit, his hands balled up into fists.
‘We’re not here to attack other people, Dianne,’ says Rose.
‘Do you want to throw me off the retreat?’ says Dianne, a hint of hope on her face.
‘No, nobody gets thrown off yet,’ says Rose, sounding steely. ‘You have to stay.’
She pauses for a moment, lets a silence settle, then turns deliberately.
‘Bernard? You have a son and a daughter, I think?’ Rose asks, smoothly changing tack.
‘Yes!’ Bernard answers eagerly.
It appears that he’s dying to talk, which Rose finds remarkable. Bernard has looked as if he’s barely tolerating things up to now. Plus he wanted to go out on a boat today. But for some reason, he’s turned into Mr Chatty.
‘Stephen’s the eldest, very clever chap, not one but two degrees in business. Smarter than me, no doubt about it. Decent too. Lovely wife and a very nice house in Wiltshire, I have to tell you. Three grandkids, all marvellous, marvellous …’ His voice trails off a little.
Rose feels she might have heard enough about Bernard’s son.
‘Your daughter?’ she says gently.
The look on Grazia’s face tells Rose that this could be where some of the problem lies. Possibly not the only problem but one of them.
‘Girls are trickier,’ says Bernard blandly. ‘Viola’s a marvellous girl. On her second husband, of course, but young people these days have to marry the wrong person before they figure out who the right one is!’
He says this with gusto, as if it’s a phrase he trots out a lot: Stephen is marvellous and Viola’s a lovely young thing with one marriage behind her but it’s all lovely. Nothing to see here!
‘The new one’s Ivor, a charming boy. The first chap she married wasn’t the best and it took a while to extract her from him …’
He sneaks a glance at Grazia who gives him a look filled with reassurance.
It’s a lovely performance, Rose thinks.
‘But Ivor’s an excellent chap. I’m very lucky,’ Bernard goes on earnestly.
Rose has the sense that this is a well-used and carefully crafted line he uses whenever anyone wants to do a profile of him for a business newspaper.
His children are marvellous, everything’s tickety-boo and he, personally, has been very lucky.
Blah, blah, blah.
‘Interesting,’ Rose comments gravely. ‘The way you explain it, it sounds as if your life is perfect. And yet you are here …’
She lets a nice pause elapse and Bernard glares at her.
Rose thinks his determination to speak has been a lovely little gift.
Dan, India and Keera are now staring at him. Even Dianne has switched her attention to Bernard and is giving him the stink eye.
Rose worked in a rehab clinic when she first began practising and she’d realised that the group therapy was almost magical.
In group therapy, everyone was invested in each other’s recovery and they learned from each other.
Of course, patients often liked to focus a laser gaze on each other.
They’d glare at each other, eyes narrowed, and say: ‘You’re lying’ or ‘Denial much?’
Bernard is definitely covering up.
Rose would bet anything on it.
She turns her attention to Grazia.
‘Do you share these children together or are they your stepchildren?’
Grazia’s nervous tic pings into action and her hand reaches automatically towards her beautiful Dior handbag as if looking for her cigarettes.
‘No,’ she says in her customary blunt way. ‘I am the wicked stepmother.’
Nobody laughs.
‘Not really wicked, I’m guessing,’ says Rose thoughtfully. ‘The wicked stepmother trope came about because so many women died in childbirth that stepmothers were common.’
Everyone looks interested. Dianne is nodding in agreement. Somebody knows their feminist history.
‘The process of naming stepmothers as wicked allowed the vision of the perfect real mother to remain untouched. Like in Animal Farm – four legs good, two legs bad. Real mama is good. Stepmama is bad.
‘Let’s face it,’ Rose finishes, ‘did you ever hear about a non-wicked fairy-tale stepmother?’
India laughs out loud.
She’s thought about wicked stepmothers too, it seems. But Rose doesn’t think India’s problem is with hers.
‘It pitted women against women, too, which was a neat patriarchal trick,’ interjects Dianne abruptly.
‘I never thought of it that way,’ says India, interested.
Grazia smiles back at Rose with a very chilly smile.
‘Sometimes people believe fairy stories,’ she says.
‘Do your stepchildren believe that about you?’ Rose inquires. ‘Blended families can be tricky.’
Grazia shrugs at this open-ended question. This time, she grabs the Dior handbag, pulls it onto her lap and opens it, long fingers stretching inside.
‘You want to smoke?’ Rose says quietly.
‘Yes. It is good for stress.’
‘I’ll tell you what,’ Rose says. ‘Let’s have a little break, you can have your cigarette and, when we’re back, we’ll talk about your stepchildren in a short session before lunch.’
Grazia beams at her.
‘I like this plan.’
In the kitchen, Christos is working on prep for tonight’s barbecue on the beach with Alzina, his sous-chef.
He has already been down to the quay in Xanthe to buy fish and he’s now examining plump aubergines with gleaming skin.
Alzina’s cousin, Lydia, is busy helping Adriana with the hotel’s beautiful white towels. Together, they’ve cleaned most of the rooms, and the industrial washing machine that Adriana loves is working overtime.
‘How’s it going?’ asks Adriana, pausing briefly.
‘Excellent,’ Rose replies.
‘That rich guest wiped up some red wine with the hand towels,’ Lydia complains to Rose. ‘They will never be properly white again.’
‘Bernard?’ asks Rose.
‘The old one who watches me walk past,’ Lydia says with revulsion. ‘I hate the way he looks at me.’ She’s in her early twenties, working for a year after college and saving to pay for her master’s.
‘He looks at every woman,’ agrees Adriana. ‘Like he’s awarding marks out of ten. He’s certainly demanding.’
‘Should I say something?’ queries Rose.
Adriana shakes her head. Working alongside Christos in some of the top hotels in Europe has given her much experience of hotel life.
‘No. I’ll handle their room in future. He knows I’m a manager. He won’t try anything with me.’
‘Does he need to know that I’m your husband?’ says Christos, looming over her.
The three women laugh.
‘Absolutely,’ says Rose, grinning.
Dianne has wandered off to the edge of the infinity pool and is staring at her mobile phone. Still nothing. No more messages from Ellie.
She can understand Lauren not talking to her: Lauren has a very black-and-white world view. She simply wants her mother to be the way she used to be.
Until that happens, she’s removing herself from the conversation.
But Ellie was Dianne’s little fairy girl who’d followed her mother around like a little puppy, one finger in her mouth and the other clutching Dianne’s skirt.
When Dianne thinks back to when her three children were very young, it breaks through the barriers she’s erected.
She feels the tears flood up from the tight, painful place in her chest.
Bloody Rose and her talking about painful stuff.
Can’t she see that Dianne has had enough of pain?
There’s a blue-and-white painted love seat to the right of the pool: it sits under a huge palm tree with two planters full of lavender beside it.
Dianne wipes away her tears with one hand, then sits down heavily and contemplates the sea.
It’s so beautiful here but she wants to be at home, holding Ellie’s hand before she goes into the labour suite. Dianne would love to be her daughter’s birthing partner but she hasn’t been asked.
Lots of mothers stay with their daughters when they give birth. Not all men are able to cope, Dianne knows. She’d manage, even if it meant watching her beloved Ellie in pain.
But she’s ruled herself out of the job of birthing partner with her behaviour.
She feels the damned tears swell up again and she bends over, her mouth in a silent scream, the emotional pain too much to bear.
What hurts the most is that none of it is her fault. But she’s the one being punished.
Back on the terrace, Rose turns to Bernard. She thinks of Lydia’s remarks about him.
Working with people she dislikes is never easy. But needs must. She has plenty of experience of dealing with powerful men in LA who look at young women like prey.
‘What age were the children, Bernard, when you married Grazia?’ Rose asks crisply.