But Ellie was Dianne’s little fairy girl who’d followed her mother around like a little puppy, one finger in her mouth and the other clutching Dianne’s skirt.
When Dianne thinks back to when her three children were very young, it breaks through the barriers she’s erected.
She feels the tears flood up from the tight, painful place in her chest.
Bloody Rose and her talking about painful stuff.
Can’t she see that Dianne has had enough of pain?
There’s a blue-and-white painted love seat to the right of the pool: it sits under a huge palm tree with two planters full of lavender beside it.
Dianne wipes away her tears with one hand, then sits down heavily and contemplates the sea.
It’s so beautiful here but she wants to be at home, holding Ellie’s hand before she goes into the labour suite. Dianne would love to be her daughter’s birthing partner but she hasn’t been asked.
Lots of mothers stay with their daughters when they give birth. Not all men are able to cope, Dianne knows. She’d manage, even if it meant watching her beloved Ellie in pain.
But she’s ruled herself out of the job of birthing partner with her behaviour.
She feels the damned tears swell up again and she bends over, her mouth in a silent scream, the emotional pain too much to bear.
What hurts the most is that none of it is her fault. But she’s the one being punished.
Back on the terrace, Rose turns to Bernard. She thinks of Lydia’s remarks about him.
Working with people she dislikes is never easy. But needs must. She has plenty of experience of dealing with powerful men in LA who look at young women like prey.
‘What age were the children, Bernard, when you married Grazia?’ Rose asks crisply.
‘Maria died when they were in their teens,’ he says, another response from the newspaper-interview archives, Rose thinks acidly.
‘Stephen and Viola were very young, thirteen and fifteen. Maria’s was a sudden, unexpected death and we were all bereft. Brain haemorrhage. There one minute and gone the next. Tragic. None of us ever got to say goodbye. Tragic,’ he repeats.
He holds his hands up as if holding up an empty vessel.
‘We were alone, the three of us. Not a family but just three people. Maria made us a family. When she died, I was running the business so I wasn’t around a lot and I couldn’t stop working. We got by with help: Stephen and Viola had a housekeeper to drive them around because by then I had money, and of course I was able to send both of them to public schools.’
Rose would like to shake Bernard by the shoulders now, although her expression does not show it.
From the way Bernard speaks, there’s simply no sense of his grieving over the death of his first wife. It’s as if he merely replaced her with more staff. Telling everyone that the children went to public school is just another way of showing off his wealth.
She decides to give him a few minutes more to tell everyone his rehearsed story.
‘They had amazing educations – they’d both tell you that themselves,’ Bernard adds earnestly. ‘I’m a grammar-school boy myself, hauled myself up by my bootstraps.’
It’s his turn to beam around at the group.
Rose notes another line from his cheery business biography.
‘When they left school, they could walk into any university in the world. Stephen chose Exeter, which was where my first wife Maria was from, and Viola …’
There’s another pause.
‘The academic world was not for Viola,’ says Bernard, gaining confidence again and giving it a positive spin. ‘Clever girl, very clever girl, but she wasn’t happy burying herself in books. Went to Edinburgh, had a lot of fun but got into a bit of trouble.’
He looks down at his wrinkled hands.
‘I felt I should marry again to give them a mother figure.’
