In her former life, in private practice, Rose had strict rules about lateness.
It was part of her therapist’s training to enforce the sense that the participation was a contract. The keen-to-be-healed were entering into a contract with her, therefore lateness – unless accompanied by phone footage of a bona fide disaster – meant you got turned away.
Maybe the business magnate, Sir Bernard, if you don’t mind, thinks that rules are for the little people.
What fun to have to take his money and send him home unfixed, Rose thinks with glee. Time spent with wealthy narcissists – and a lot of the ultra-rich are narcissists – means she’s extra fierce with the aggressively rich clients.
You pay, you commit. If you don’t turn up, you forfeit your fee.
But at the last minute, three people arrive together in a rush.
First, a tall, statuesque woman with a sleek chestnut high pony, wearing a one-sleeved pink-patterned Pucci jumpsuit, strides in.
She’s tanned, early fifties perhaps, and wears a gold coiled snake bangle on one wrist, a piece of heavy metal that speaks of serious money spent in the beautiful jewellery shops in Corfu Town.
Rose, who loves jewellery, drools a bit.
She’s definitely Bernard’s wife, Grazia: a former model, Adriana has told Rose.
The elegant Grazia gives off no sense of herself at all. She’s not nervous, not proud, merely calm. Eerily calm, perhaps.
Rose can’t get a read on her at all.
Beside the glacial Grazia is Dianne Wilkins.
If Grazia is precisely what Rose imagines as the wife of a very, very wealthy and status-conscious man, Dianne is nothing like the woman Rose has been expecting.
Her adult children have pushed her to be here, her daughter Lauren saying, ‘Her anger is corrosive. Dad died suddenly and, of course, that was hugely difficult, but she was never angry before he died. She’s said to me:We all die. That’s it.
‘She’s obviously affected by grief but she’s going to end up in prison for driving into a random stranger in a road rage incident if she doesn’t get help. She has lovely neighbours and, since Dad died, she’s fallen out with them all. She doesn’t want to go on the course but it’s an ultimatum.’
Dianne had been the first person Rose had picked forthe retreat. She’d felt kinship with this angry, obviously lost woman and yet, in the flesh, Dianne appears the opposite of a person teetering on the edge.
She’s small but very athletic, sports the healthy glow of someone who’s spectacularly fit and wears a pink polo shirt with white shorts, neat socks and trainers. All she needs is a tennis racquet and she’ll be another sixty-something tennis lady, the one you want on your team and your fundraising committee because she’s a dynamo.
As a mask, it’s a spectacular one constructed of a neutral gaze, alongside age-appropriate make-up including bright lippie and perfect silvery-blonde hair in a neat to-the-shoulder cut that she probably fixes with hairspray and Velcro rollers every morning.
Rose is still staring at Dianne when she gets the weirdest sensation that the Melbourne lady knows she’s being watched from inside the hotel. For a second, fear flashes across her face.
Interesting.
Making up the final member of the class, definitely shorter than his model-wife which makes Rose grin, and with the skin of a man who has spent far too much of his life in the sun, is Sir Bernard.
He’s now white-haired, liver-spotted and wrinkled like an old lizard. Just like the crocodile he resembles, he looks as if he hides in the shallows of the river and waits till the bodies of his old enemies float past.
He’s no longer quite the handsome silvery fox from his Internet publicity photos.
Older now, his eyes are hooded and he appears to be a great man for smiling without engaging the eyes. He’s doing it now, smiling at the others and shaking hands, as if he’s running the retreat and they’re all his guests.
Enough already, Rose thinks, spurred into action.
This is not your show, Bernard: it’s mine.
She grabs her things and silently opens the door onto the terrace.
‘Welcome to Villa Artemis,’ she says.
Chapter Seven
