The retreat is going so well but they’re not there yet.
‘Dan, going back to you, do you feel you are in control of your life?’ Rose asks him.
Dan considers this, his intelligent thin face instantly taken away into cerebral reasoning.
‘Yes,’ he says firmly, ‘yes I do.’
Rose wonders if this is the lie he tells himself most frequently but it’s not her place to name that lie.
‘That’s interesting,’ she says, which is her way of saying,I don’t believe this for one second, honey. ‘So what’s the lie you tell yourself most frequently?’
Now Dan begins to flounder.
Rose can see the battle behind his eyes.
‘My sister says I need to be needed,’ he says stiffly now.
Rose nods. Now they’re getting somewhere.
‘Vicky thinks I should forget about Julia and get on with my life,’ Dan says.
He has just been thinking this and yet he can’t say it in public yet – it feels like a betrayal. Guilt for everything he’s already said overwhelms him. He loves Julia, for heaven’s sake! Isn’t that enough?
Nobody’s saying anything on the terrace at Villa Artemis.
If anything, it’s hotter than yesterday. Dan can feel India fanning herself with her notebook beside him.
Without asking if he’s thirsty, Keera puts a glass of iced water in front of him.
She knows he doesn’t like juice, which is so kind.
Briefly, he wonders if Julia knows that he doesn’t like juice.
He knows how she likes her coffee, black, that she prefers dirty martinis and champagne to any other drink, that her favourite meal is blue loin tuna seared for a few moments in a pan, and that she thinks getting up before eleven on a weekend is for people who don’t know how to enjoy parties.
Julia wants Dan but he’s suddenly aware that she really wants a different sort of Dan: a Dan who’s free to party all the time and doesn’t have a career. He needs to have no other responsibilities except her and then she’ll know he’s absolutely committed to her.
‘Perhaps you can work more on the lies we tell ourselves and what we really want later this afternoon, Dan,’ Rose suggests.
He nods absently.
‘To link back to you, India, let’s talk about the things you both haven’t said to partners. Dan: I think you said that you and Julia have never had a conversation about children. Why not?’
Dan flails a bit.
‘Don’t know,’ he says, uncomfortably. ‘I sensed Julia didn’t want them.’
Rose lets the wordsensedsit with him for a moment.
‘And India, you’ve hidden the fact that you want to be a mother, which is a very valid desire for a woman. Sure, not all women want children but you do, so why hide it?’
‘Because the men I see would not be interested in having a baby,’ India says cautiously. She isn’t ready to talk about this yet. ‘It was a nonsensical idea anyway.’
‘Don’t betray yourself like this,’ says Rose briskly. ‘You want what most people want – love, a family, a child. What’s wrong with wanting those things?’
‘Nothing,’ says India cautiously.
‘The question is whether you choose these men because they won’t be interested in children – or whether you’re stuck repeating old twenty-something patterns now that you’re more mature and have mature wants and needs?’
