Standing still for a moment in front of the mirror, a coil of hair in one hand, she realises something: she can’t sit in front of her laptop and phone in here and wait for news, wait for everything to come crashing down around her.
That was what happened with the show. She waited when she should have acted. She relied on others to change the format.
Villa Artemis is the beloved home she’s made with Adriana and Christos, her brave venture back into running a therapy retreat. Nobody else can fix this except Rose. She has to fight back and she needs some quiet time to figure out what to do.
Five minutes in the kitchen with the coffee machine gives her a steaming, double-strength coffee. Rose grabs one of Adriana’s hats, jams it on her head and slips out a side door then goes onto the terrace.
There’s lots of noise coming from the bar.
Peering around the corner and hidden from sight byvast shrubs and a curled olive tree in a pot, she sees Julia drinking with Alexei and Stavros. All previous animosity seems to have disappeared.
Rose avoids being seen by taking the rocky back steps down to the gardens and descends into the bower that is her hidden Greek garden.
Rose needs to think clearly away from the hectic energy of the others if she is to save her beloved retreat. She knows it doesn’t take her long. She just needs to be able to go within.
She’d never been even vaguely interested in gardening before but, when the remains of the original stone house were being excavated, Rose decided to create a peaceful green area where guests could relax, surrounded by the scents of Corfu.
Christos had said he didn’t know what would grow there, when she showed him her sketch of this garden, an oblong surrounded by terraced flowerbeds and with local sculptures dotted around.
‘I know nothing about plants,’ he said, shrugging, ‘but this area will be dry. We won’t have any money left over from landscaping the rest of the villa. We are eco-friendly with all that watering, but here?’ He shrugged again. ‘We can’t afford to add it to the irrigation system.’
Rose had thought it was unlikely that the Ancient Greeks, who’d achieved such mathematical, philosophical and architectural brilliance, didn’t have a plan for watering gardens that didn’t involve linking it to the villa’s clever use of grey water to keep the plants watered.
She researched and found that ollas were the key: terracotta cylinders planted in the garden, they were filled with water which slowly seeped out into the earth when the nearby shrubs were dry and needed it.
Dotted all over this now flourishing garden are countless simple, terracotta ollas which are carefully monitored by Stavros. Thanks to the watering system of the ancients, there are flourishing waves of lady’s mantle which has grown like wildfire.
There’s bushy catmint and lavender, both wafting fabulous scents into the air, and currently a magnet for clusters of happy bees. Low-lying sedums and leggy agapanthus grow side by side, and little clumps of sea holly and rosemary dot the raised rockery that Stavros was working on last week.
Rose finds the little stone bench at the bottom of the garden where their property is bordered by another one. The goat who lives in the next-door field has seen Rose arrive and has bustled over in the hope of something to eat.
He peers over his fence at the seated woman. His name is Elvis, according to Stavros.
‘I’ve nothing for you, Elvis,’ Rose tells him. ‘Not a thing.’
If goats could pout, Rose knows Elvis is pouting. He fully expects all visitors to the garden to bring him treats.
He paws sullenly at the earth a bit, then goes back to staring out to sea.
Rose stares too.
Below her is the curving road to Xanthe and the small path to the Kri Kri beach where she’s had so many successful sessions with her retreaters. A single boat is in the distance, sails high in search of a breeze which Rose feels is unlikely today.
She keeps watching it but it appears the boat is becalmed: no wind to puff her sails.
Like us, Rose thinks.
Becalmed.
She doesn’t want to fail in this beautiful place. She doesn’t know if she has it in her to start her life all over again.Corfu is magical. If Villa Artemis fails, she knows that her sister and Christos can move into his mother’s house until they get back on their feet. Rose could live there too but she doesn’t want to. She thinks she’d never get over the failure.
Bored, Elvis is now banging his head against his fence for attention and, as she looks at him, her eyes catch a few single shoots of clover in the soil.
The watering of her ollas has made snippets of grass grow too, so she gets up and picks the clover’s fluffy purple heads as well as a few blades of grass for her companion.
‘No biting,’ Rose warns, holding the clover out as if feeding a horse, with her hand flat.
The goat delicately nibbles at her flat palm and Rose can’t help but smile at the sensation of his soft muzzle.
