She doesn’t wear jewellery, Rose realised from day one. No wedding ring, no bracelet, no golden spoils of a long marriage.
‘I don’t like talking about it,’ Dianne says.
‘Nobody does at first,’ Rose says, her voice soft.
Dianne does some more watch-fiddling. Then she gets up abruptly and Rose is sure she’s going to leave but, instead, Dianne goes to the drinks station and pours herself a glass of Adriana’s mint-and-lemon-flavoured sparkling water.
She sits down slowly, drinks her water and then slumps back into her chair.
‘I don’t want anybody to feel sorry for me,’ Dianne says. ‘I’m not a victim.’
‘The word “victim” gets overused,’ Rose comments gently. ‘People can be badly hurt by their life experiences or by another person’s behaviour. The idea of victimhood is that someone wallows in the pain caused by these things and, in that context, it’s both an unfair and unhelpful label.
‘To reframe it, we can be victims of circumstances and we are allowed to both feel that pain and express it without people assuming we like being victims.’
Dianne nods.
She exhales slowly.
Rose sees her make the decision to speak.
The island retreat has worked its magic.
‘I’m trying to figure it out,’ she says, still hesitant. ‘I’ve talked to myself about this for a long time but I’ve never said it out loud. To other people. In my head, yes. But my kids don’t know it.’
‘They were worried about your behaviour; that’s why you’re here,’ Rose said.
‘I never wanted them to grow up the way I did,’ Dianne says softly and, for the first time, Rose feels as if this gently spoken woman is the real Dianne Wilkins.
The hard and angry person is merely a protective wall.
‘How did you grow up?’ she asks.
Dianne takes a deep breath.
‘I thought we were normal,’ she begins. ‘We were my mum, my dad, my younger brother, Kev, and me. Both my grandmothers lived with us. It was a lot for my mother to take on. It made her bitter …’
Dianne’s eyes begin to lose focus on Rose.
She’s in the past.
Her mother had adored Geoff.
‘He’s nice, isn’t he?’ she’d said to Dianne approvingly when Geoff had gone to the loo.
For a millisecond, Dianne had felt that she’d done something right, which was not a feeling she was familiar with.
‘Yes,’ she’d breathed. ‘He is.’
‘Don’t screw it up the way you normally do,’ her mother had gone on, reaching out for her cigarettes. She smoked Winfields, two packs a day when she was in good form, three packs on bad days. She and Dianne looked a lot alike but Dianne was small and neat, a bundle of nervous energy, while her mother was taller, thin like a bicycle frame, her face caved in from bitterness and inhaling.
‘Tina.’ Geoff had walked into the room exuding masculinity and good humour. ‘I love the way you’ve decorated the place. There’s a sense of heritage here, you know?’
Dianne has often replayed this in her head because only the most fantastical of liars could say such a thing and be believed. Her family home was a four-bed brick house with a tacked-on wooden verandah around half of the house where her mother liked to sit, smoke, read her magazines and watch what the neighbours were up to. In place of an actual hobby, she had judgy watching of everyone else.
She’d learned it from Ida and Antoinette, the two women who’d ruled the house for so long. Now they were dead, Tina could judge all by herself.
Dianne had watched her mother preen in front of Geoff.
