This is a lie. But then, in marriages, people lie.
He thinks of Rose’s questions he’s supposed to answer; he doesn’t like Rose.
She sees everything and Bernard hates that, hates the sense of being looked through and found wanting.
But her questions are interesting: what lies does he tell himself?
That Grazia doesn’t mind his secret.
Because she does mind. He knows it.
He also knows what he is most afraid of.
All sensible people know that, don’t they?
But he can’t change who he is. Only weak people change.
Grazia takes up one of her husband’s pens, not one of his ink ones which he’s very particular about. She takes a ballpoint one, still a Montblanc. It’s expensive, like all the things Bernard likes.
He still thinks money is a gloss that covers everything.
Grazia’s handwriting is fluid and elegant. The writing of a woman who learned how to write beautifully, the way she learned to do so many things beautifully.
Culture learned after being raised in the harshness of Soviet Georgia.
Bernard has no idea how much Grazia has learned after leaving the country of her birth. Neither has he any idea how many of the old ways stay with her: she does not say what she thinks easily.
She swallows down the words.
That he does not know this after so many years together makes her very sad.
When I think of what I must say, I wish there was no need for me to be on your retreat. I wish so many things but, Rose, I do not trust in writing things down. Old ways, it is true, but written evidence is never wise. I learned that from my own country. I grew up in the USSR in a time when people who wrote things down sometimes regretted it.
I understand that this is thinking from the past but the past clings, does it not?
I like it here in your hotel. It is beautiful and clever. I like the fabrics in the room, the embroidery on napkins and pillowcases. This reminds me that my grandmother made lace in the old country. She sewed it onto handkerchiefs. We had little money but our handkerchiefs were decorated by lace. I never learned how to do it.
Such lace was bourgeois. My mother told me we must not make lace or embroider. Adornment was frowned upon.
My mother hid the lace handkerchiefs and they are gone now. Wiped out by the memory of men in power.
It is always men in power who make women and children afraid, is it not?
That makes me sad and yet, how to change it?
Dan sits on his small bedroom terrace, smoking and staring at the pad on which he’s made many tiny notes. His handwriting is very small and he can get hundreds of words on a page. Unlike Julia, who writes in a big, flowing script. She’s very artistic with beautiful, lyrical writing. His Julia, born in a small flat in Camden, moved five times with her parents, attended seven schools and, finally, ended up in St Anselm’s because her uncle, Charlie Chance, had got lucky in the import/export business.
Charlie drives a Rolls-Royce, has a gold curb bracelet like a cow chain and is devoted to his little niece. He’d have sent his own Miriam to St Anselm’s too, only she said it was too posh and she wasn’t clever enough.
‘Julia’s OK because she’s smart. Not me, Dad. I’d like to go to a finishing school, though.’
Miriam went to one in Switzerland and came home witha bit of French, a flair for skiing and the ability to adopt a cut-glass accent when she wants to.
She and Julia are thick as thieves.
But Julia runs with a wild pack, the wilder rich people from St Anselm’s, a couple from the shiny contemporary flats near Tower Bridge.
Dan is never capable of keeping up with these friends with their wild nights out, drug taking, determination to live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse.
