Chapter Twenty-Five
‘Meditation on the beach sounds fabulous,’ says Keera to India when the group splits up. By unspoken agreement, the two women head for the infinity pool where the little jewelled bar will be open and they can order juices or iced tea.
India wants more than iced tea but won’t ask for it when she’s with Keera. Drinking wine would seem insulting to her new friend.
‘Me and Dianne are the only ones who haven’t talked,’ she says in worried tones to Keera.
‘It’s not so bad,’ Keera says. ‘It’s freeing to talk about all the crap you never talk about normally. Nobody falls over in shock, people listen and, here anyway, they don’t judge.’
‘Dianne does,’ mutters India.
‘That’s just for the men,’ Keera points out. ‘Some guy broke her heart, for sure. She’s nice to the women. She hates the men.’
‘Not my problem,’ says India.
‘If you get it over first thing tomorrow, then you can relax and learn how to fix all the things you do wrong,’ Keera says.
‘In her book, Rose never says we do things wrong,’ India explains. ‘It’s more that we learned survival techniques and we keep using them. But that’s not my problem.’
Rose’s flowing shirt swirls out behind her as she hurries to the private part of the hotel and finds Adriana in the small white living room with the air-con on.
Adriana’s sitting at a small desk with a big notebook.
‘How’s it going?’ she asks Rose.
Adriana looks so Greek now, Rose thinks suddenly.
Adriana’s hair has been a rich chocolate colour since she was a little girl, but now her pale skin is tanned to a glowing caramel.
In her blue flower-print cotton dress, with the necklace made in the village from fake coral and tiny orange glass beads, Adriana looks like a beautiful Greek woman from a fashion magazine.
She now speaks Greek fluently, far better than Rose, who has been learning, but then Adriana has lived here for much longer.
Rose could not have dreamed up a happier life for her baby sister.
‘Well,’ Rose says, sitting down on one of the big couches and putting her feet up on a footstool. ‘Bernard marched off at the end after glaring at me like he wished he could say “you’re fired!”’
‘Ouch,’ says Adriana.
‘Ouch indeed. Is he very wealthy?’ Rose asks. She doesn’t want to tell her sister the details of the therapy – the guests are owed privacy.
‘Filthy rich,’ Adriana replies. ‘Company listed on the UK stock market.’
‘His adult kids are worried about their inheritance,’ Rose says carefully.
‘That’s going to be some inheritance.’
‘How people react to money is an interesting weather vane,’ Rose says, shrugging.
‘I saw it all the time in LA. Some people get rich and then there simply isn’t enough money in the world for them.
They become obsessed, think they’ll never have enough and they don’t care whose lives they ruin in the pursuit of it. ’
‘Not our problem,’ jokes Adriana.
Rose grins.
‘You were always brilliant at spending money,’ Rose teases. ‘Lipsticks, nail varnish, that expensive thing with your hair to straighten it.’
Adriana laughs the way only a sister can laugh.
‘I was dreadful, wasn’t I?’ she says. ‘I wanted to be grown-up and glamorous like you. But I never could catch up.’
Adriana gets up and goes to sit beside her big sister on the couch.
‘I think this is working brilliantly.’
‘I know,’ Rose agrees. ‘Bar Bernard, I think the guests are enjoying it. Well …’ She rephrases it. ‘Maybe not enjoying it but appreciating it. Keera and India are happy and so, amazingly, is Dan. He seems more relaxed today. Obviously he’s never talked about himself to anyone ever before.’
‘I know I’m not a therapist and you can’t really talk about that side of things with me,’ says Adriana. ‘You did with Theo, didn’t you—?’
‘Stop with the Theo stuff,’ begs Rose. ‘He’s in the past. Sure, we talked about work but it’s perfectly possible to run a retreat with one therapist. If this works out, we might think of having another person with me—’
Adriana interrupts her.
‘I know you said yesterday that’s all in the past but you’ve never tried to get in touch with Theo, have you?
When the show blew up, you just ran and he’s had no idea where you’ve been for the past five years.
I bet you he was looking for you, Rose, but you’ve changed everything – from phone number to email address. There was no way to track you down.’
‘He wouldn’t have wanted to find me,’ Rose says firmly, ‘and I’m OK with that.’
‘You’re so not OK with it,’ Adriana chides. ‘I’m your sister, I know you better than anyone. You miss him. I can tell. I just want you to be happy.’
Rose says nothing for a beat. She loves the way her sister worries about her but it’s a lost cause.
‘I miss being with someone who loved me the way he did, but I lied to him, Adriana, you know that.’
‘A lie of omission,’ her sister reminds her. ‘It was entirely understandable, Rose. I lied about it myself.’
‘But you didn’t reinvent yourself for the television,’ Rose reminds her. ‘I created a whole new person.’
‘Remember what you’ve always told me, what you wrote in your book,’ Adriana says. ‘Forgive yourself for what you had to do to survive.’
‘Should we have that embroidered on the bags in the gift shop?’ asks Rose wryly. ‘They’d be best sellers.’
The day that Rose meets Theo for the first time, she’s just spent part of the afternoon taping an ‘ask your therapist’ segment for a morning TV show. It’s the first time she’s ever done anything like this.
When she’s finished taping her segment, a twenty-
something assistant producer tells her that the show is never live with newbies because ‘Some people don’t spark on film.’
‘You were really good, though,’ the woman says as an afterthought as Rose leaves the set.
‘Thank you,’ says Rose, not believing a word of it.
In the dressing room, she takes off the grey linen trouser suit she decided to wear on camera and pulls on the pale-pink silk dress she’s wearing with strappy sandals to her friends’ dinner party later.
‘You’ll message me when it’s going to be on?’ Rose asks the young assistant producer before she leaves.
She might as well know precisely when she’s going to look dreadful on television instead of having all her friends phone her when it happens.
‘Sure, sure,’ says the woman.
Rose laughs to herself.
In LA, that’s code for Not a hope. You’re not important.
It takes Rose an hour to navigate the traffic to get to her friends Victor and Celeste’s house.
They’re landscape gardeners who love the theatre, cloud trees and entertaining.
The dinner party guests are in the garden when Rose arrives and, as usual, it’s an eclectic mix of people.
A Swedish director whose garden they designed, the two lovely guys who run an art gallery in Santa Fe but are in town for an exhibition, Celeste’s two nieces, one of whom is trying to break into TV work and is nose to nose with the film director.
Victor’s daughter from his first marriage is there, along with their neighbour Liza and her twenty-something son who does something in tech. There’s also a man Rose doesn’t recognise.
He’s got curly dark hair with a hint of grey around his hairline, wears horn-rimmed glasses and a cream sweater that looks darned, and he’s laughing at something Victor’s saying.
He’s got a warm, clever face and Rose finds herself wondering where his significant other is.
‘Stop talking about terracing,’ says Celeste impatiently, pulling Rose in his direction. ‘Rose, you must meet Theo. He’s new in town and he’s single. He’s also a therapist! We’ve told him all about you.’
Rose flushes. Now he’ll think she’s a desperate single woman who forces her friends to matchmake on every occasion.
When Victor and Celeste finally leave them alone, Rose apologises.
‘I promise I didn’t ask Celeste to set me up,’ she says ruefully.
‘I am so sorry. A new single man in this neck of the woods gets the married people excited because they think there’s someone new for all their single friends.
Normally, Celeste and Victor aren’t matchmakers but they appear to have lost the plot tonight. ’
‘I don’t mind,’ says Theo. ‘I don’t mind at all. How about we make our hosts really happy by having a heart to heart?’
‘You’re very kind and gentlemanly,’ Rose says, smiling.
Theo surprises her by leaning close and whispering in her ear: ‘I am not actually being kind at all, Ms Talisman.’
Rose looks him in the eye.
He’s being serious. Despite all she knows about dating in this city, she allows herself to smile at him.
They’re on their first date – lunch in a nearby vineyard – when a different, more senior producer from the breakfast television show phones offering Rose a weekly slot.
Discussions will have to happen with her agent, the producer says, but they’re really keen.
‘I can’t believe this is happening,’ Rose says to Theo.
‘Why not? I’d want to watch you on TV,’ he says.
‘Really?’ she says.
‘Really, truly,’ Theo replies.
It’s like all her dreams have come true at once: her career is in the ascendent and this handsome man who ticks every box on the ‘decent men to date’ list seems to be crazy about her.
But the TV people want her potted biography and Rose, who has tried so very hard to disguise her past, spins them the story she always tells people.
Theo hears it too.
She can’t risk telling him that her truth is wildly different. It’s hard to explain her real life story: it’s messy and complex, nothing like the lovely CV she gives people.
They’re only just dating, after all. What if she tells him and he leaves with all her secrets?
No, it’s better this way, she thinks.
But Rose finds out that the longer a lie exists, the harder it is to come clean.
Rose doesn’t think she’s ever seen such beauty as Massachusetts in what Theo calls ‘the Fall’.
‘Ochre, honey, gold, burned sienna, acid green …?’ she wonders as she spots a tree with stunning greens still on its leaves in the midst of the great russet explosion of autumn.
They’ve been dating six months and Theo is driving her to meet his parents.
‘They’ll love you,’ says Theo.
Theo has driven from Logan airport because Rose has never been a fan of driving on the vast US roads.
It’s lovely to be driven – she tries to relax and stop worrying about how she’ll fit into Theo’s parents’ world.
Instead, she concentrates on the colours of the trees as they drive towards the small town of Falmouth on the coast.
Theo had grown up in Philadelphia and, in their retirement, his parents had moved to what Theo called ‘possibly the prettiest colonial house on the eastern seaboard that you can imagine’.
His parents are a retired surgeon, his mother, and a retired psychiatrist, his father. Contrary to what Theo says, Rose has absolutely no belief that his parents will love her.
They are old-school intellectuals, he’s said, and sound like charming people who represent the sort of background that is nothing like Rose’s.
She doesn’t say this to Theo.
She’s forty-three and has never fallen in love like this before.
Theo, with his horn-rimmed glasses, his runner’s body, his wise smile – she’s never known anyone smile the way Theo does! – has entirely stolen her heart.
Rose feels as if nobody has ever taken care of her the way Theo does. They’re on the verge of moving in together: she’ll move in to his small house outside Carmel, an expensive house that overlooks the ocean.
When she stays over, he makes her coffee in the morning and, in the evenings, he cooks.
‘Linguine with clams,’ he’ll say when she arrives over for dinner, barefoot in shorts, with a linen shirt thrown over a T-shirt, holding a spoon out for her to taste.
Or ‘Tomato sauce with confit garlic,’ which will taste like some angel made it.
‘How did you learn to cook like this?’ she once asked, after moaning with pleasure as she ate.
‘Cooking is one of the great arts,’ Theo said. ‘Get people around a dinner table talking and you have the perfect mix of family and friends.’
Rose loves this idea, loves the notion of them sharing this sort of life, the life that she and Adriana were denied as kids. She holds the preciousness of this deep in her heart, as if this wondrous new life with Theo is something she can see only from afar.
Most of all, she wants to tell him all about Adriana and their true story, but she keeps putting it off. Soon, she thinks.
If she tells him, he might leave and she can’t bear to think about that.
Spending time with Theo, curled up on his couch watching old movies or just staring into the ocean, cradling a glass of wine, talking about their days, is blissful.
Theo is a homebird. He likes sea swimming in the early morning before going to his office. In the evenings, he and Rose sit with their feet up on the deck rails, solving the problems of the world.
He massages her feet when she’s tired and then leads her to bed so she can sleep.
Sometimes, Theo is so kind and loving that Rose thinks she doesn’t deserve him: she’s too flawed, reacts too quickly.
None of this makes sense, she knows that, but feelings don’t always make sense. Every therapist knows that.
His parents, Susan and Henry, welcome Rose into the house which is just as pretty as Theo has said, with bookcases all over the place and art on the walls.
The house is like a Norman Rockwell illustration of a home: garden flowers on the table, a fluffy cat on the windowsill and a sense of warmth engrained in every inch.
‘We’ve heard so much about you, Rose,’ Susan says warmly when they sit down to dinner, second family animal, a rescue Heinz 57 dancing around excitedly and being told, gently, to sit in his basket by Henry.
‘I’ve heard so much about you too,’ beams Rose.
‘Are there going to be wedding bells, that’s what I want to know,’ says Henry, earning a ‘Dad!’ from Theo and a groan from his wife.
‘Forgive my husband,’ Susan begs. ‘We’re merely happy that you and Theo have found each other. Tell us about yourself …’
And Rose, smiling at lovely Theo whom she adores with all her heart, the man who has no idea what her actual real name is, does what she has to do. She lies.