The look on Grazia’s face tells Rose thatthiscould be where some of the problem lies. Possibly not the only problem but one of them.
‘Girls are trickier,’ says Bernard blandly. ‘Viola’s a marvellous girl. On her second husband, of course, but young people these days have to marry the wrong person before they figure out who the right one is!’
He says this with gusto, as if it’s a phrase he trots out a lot:Stephen is marvellous and Viola’s a lovely young thingwith one marriage behind her but it’s all lovely. Nothing to see here!
‘The new one’s Ivor, a charming boy. The first chap she married wasn’t the best and it took a while to extract her from him …’
He sneaks a glance at Grazia who gives him a look filled with reassurance.
It’s a lovely performance, Rose thinks.
‘But Ivor’s an excellent chap. I’m very lucky,’ Bernard goes on earnestly.
Rose has the sense that this is a well-used and carefully crafted line he uses whenever anyone wants to do a profile of him for a business newspaper.
His children are marvellous, everything’s tickety-boo and he, personally, has been very lucky.
Blah, blah, blah.
‘Interesting,’ Rose comments gravely. ‘The way you explain it, it sounds as if your life is perfect. And yet you are here …’
She lets a nice pause elapse and Bernard glares at her.
Rose thinks his determination to speak has been a lovely little gift.
Dan, India and Keera are now staring at him. Even Dianne has switched her attention to Bernard and is giving him the stink eye.
Rose worked in a rehab clinic when she first began practising and she’d realised that the group therapy was almost magical.
In group therapy, everyone was invested in each other’s recovery and they learned from each other.
Of course, patients often liked to focus a laser gaze on each other.
They’d glare at each other, eyes narrowed, and say: ‘You’re lying’ or ‘Denial much?’
Bernard is definitely covering up.
Rose would bet anything on it.
She turns her attention to Grazia.
‘Do you share these children together or are they your stepchildren?’
Grazia’s nervous tic pings into action and her hand reaches automatically towards her beautiful Dior handbag as if looking for her cigarettes.
‘No,’ she says in her customary blunt way. ‘I am the wicked stepmother.’
Nobody laughs.
‘Not really wicked, I’m guessing,’ says Rose thoughtfully. ‘The wicked stepmother trope came about because so many women died in childbirth that stepmothers were common.’
Everyone looks interested. Dianne is nodding in agreement. Somebody knows their feminist history.
‘The process of naming stepmothers as wicked allowed the vision of the perfectrealmother to remain untouched. Like inAnimal Farm– four legs good, two legs bad. Real mama is good. Stepmama is bad.
‘Let’s face it,’ Rose finishes, ‘did you ever hear about a non-wicked fairy-tale stepmother?’
India laughs out loud.
