‘But he’d made you use them,’ said Rose.
‘Yeah,’ agrees Dianne, ‘but I’d upset him and I had to pay.’
‘Tell me how you met.’
‘I met Geoff when I was a kid. Eighteen. I had no idea what I wanted in life, no idea that people were supposed to treat me with kindness or respect. My mother loved Geoff. Do you know why?’ Dianne asks.
‘Because he treated you with no respect in front of her and she liked it,’ says Rose gently.
‘Got it in one,’ Dianne says bitterly. ‘My mother loved him, couldn’t wait for the wedding, the kids. Geoff was a golden boy.’
‘From your diary it sounds as if your mother had some narcissistic tendencies, so she might have felt envious of you, jealous even …?’
Dianne nods again.
‘You’re on the money, Rose. I learned how to walk on eggshells as a kid in case anything I did upset my mother. She wasn’t interested in anybody’s problems – just her own. She hated her own mother, hated my father’s mother too.
‘If you’re scared of upsetting your parents when you’re a kid, then that’s what you consider is normal.’
Dianne looks at Rose square in the face.
‘I wasn’t trained to care about myself or have standards about how other people treated me. That’s the problem. So when some guy turns out to treat you like absolute crap, you think that’s normal. That it’s actually your fault. Your fault they’re upset, your fault they don’t have what they want.’
Dianne’s face is stony.
‘But it’s familiar. You leave an abusive home and go right into abusive relationships. It was like I had a beacon on me that shone for people like Geoff: someone who wanted a person to treat like absolute crap and who would accept it.’
‘What was he like with the children?’ asks Rose.
‘He was a tough father. Made a big deal out of everyone doing their best, yadda yadda. Was rarely angry with them, though. He had different rules with different people. He liked the girls – Lauren was so clever, so he adored that. His clever daughter. Ellie was very pretty and brilliant at sports, so that was all inherited from him too.’
‘They never witnessed his cruelty to you?’ Rose asks.
‘They certainly did as they got older but I made it all seem OK. “Daddy and Mummy were having words,” or “Mummy did something silly” …
‘I protected them as well as I could from him. I never thought of leaving because I thought I was stupid, I thought I was all the useless things he told me I was. I made us a part of the community. We were always having cake sales, the kids played all sorts of sports, Lauren played clarinet for years. The hours I spent in the car driving them around. I got us into a car pool. Other women were coming into our house picking the kids up. We always had someone else’s child in for dinner.’
‘You hid in the herd,’ says Rose softly.
‘Yeah. Geoff didn’t realise what I was doing. He liked it because I told my friends he was the perfect man. I said we would have lovely special dinners at home when the kids were in bed. I said I was so lucky to be with the love of my life.’
Dianne stares up at Rose.
‘People really believed that shit,’ she growls. ‘Nobody ever looked any further. I mean, a fucking idiot with halfa brain cell could see that I was exhausted, never had any money for myself although my husband had a decent job. I froze when he came into a room, jumped if I heard a loud noise – I was a walking, talking case of domestic abuse and nobody noticed.
‘I was so thin, my mind raced and my heart raced, I was always behind. Behind with the laundry, running low on housekeeping, trying to keep up with all the school stuff and parents’ groups, doing the kids’ homework with them. He never did anything. Came home from work and sat on the verandah with a beer,’ Dianne went on. ‘At night, he’d expect the kids to be in bed, the place tidy and me to be waiting for him in our bed. I always said yes.’
Her face looks haunted but she keeps going, as if she has to get it all out in one go.
‘He’d lie on top of me, bang and bang into me and I’d cry, silent crying, but still crying. I’d have tears on my face. He’d see me wiping them away and he never saidanything. I was his, he could do what he liked to me.’
‘I am so sorry you had to go through this—’ began Rose but Dianne waves her concern away.
‘Just let me get to the end. But you can’t tell anyone, OK? Promise?’
‘I promise but you can’t blame yourself, Dianne.’
‘I do.Imarried the bastard. I chose him. It’s like my daughter Ellie’s married to Tate and I don’t trust him. He seems fine but then every man can seem fine from the outside. I’m not sure if I’m any judge. Because how can I be? I lived with abuse for so long, all my life, to be honest, and I never knew. I thought it was normal.’
