Or a jumping-off place if a person doesn’t care about living any more. Dianne is still in the hazy area where she does not know what she actually wants.
Today has been a strange day, she reflects. Dianne had thought everyone would be there for anger issues like herself but they weren’t.
She distrusts Bernard: there’s something sleazy about him, and Dianne has a good eye for sleaze.
Neither is she sure about Dan.
She’s wary of Grazia, who looked at her with almost understanding eyes, which Dianne found most deeply irritating. What can a woman like Grazia understand about Dianne’s life?
She likes Keera and India and, in spite of herself, even likes Rose.
She envies Rose because, despite whatever happened to her on the TV show, Rose appears to have her life sorted out. She reeks of happiness and contentment.
Dianne usually can’t bear people like that.
Rose will not get information out of her, Dianne vows. She’ll go home and tell the kids she’s been to Corfu and has done the anger management gig.
Which will be the literal truth.
Sitting on the wooden bench with the hotel beneath herand the vast expanse of the beautiful sea below her, Dianne takes her mobile phone out of her pocket.
Her fingers shake as she presses the button to listen.
‘Hi Mum, glad it’s a lovely place but no, I think Lauren would go mental if you came home. I’m fine, the baby’s fine and Tate’s being so good to me.’
Tate is Ellie’s boyfriend and Dianne has sworn that if he hurts her Ellie, she’ll bury him in a shallow grave so well hidden that even Google won’t be able to find him.
‘The kicking is insane! I think the baby’s a little footballer even if it is a girl! Get fixed, Mum, I love you, please remember that, bye.’
Dianne plays it one more time and lets the tears fall unchecked down her face.
Ellie said she loved her mother.
Dianne’s heart is swollen with relief because she thought she’d lost Ellie. Yet Ellie said ‘I love you’.
As for ‘Get fixed’, that’s another story.
Dianne thinks that after all these years, she is unfixable.
She’s pretty sure that even Rose, whose show Dianne watched many years ago, cannot possibly fix her.
But thinking of the baby, her ‘little footballer’, she wishes she could change.
Recover some of who she was a long time ago. Have a new life.
Is it even possible? She doesn’t know.
Closing the door to her bedroom at ten that night, Rose immediately lights up a bergamot, lime and cinnamon bark Sia sisters candle. She throws open the French doors to her balcony and the muslin curtains ripple in the whisper of the breeze from the sea. Christos has lefta tiny carafe of good wine in her room, and she pours a small glass.
First day over, she thinks with relief as she drinks.
When she was on TV, the first day of any show was always the worst. She had to hype herself up to become Rose Talisman, the therapy guru.
The mystery Instagram message-sender has implied that Rose isn’t her real name, and they are correct, which makes Rose fear them.
Apart from Adriana and Christos,nobodyknows her real name. She was baptised Rosemarie but it was her second name, not her first. Talisman is the surname she chose all those years ago.
It has such a good ring to it: part mystery, part magic.
