Rose knows that deep emotional work is physically exhausting but people rarely realise it. It’s the intensity of the work – and the exhalation as great monuments of walled-up pain begin to crack.
Time to do more cracking, Rose thinks, and bangs her tiny gong.
‘We’re going to do fifteen minutes of guided meditation but, beforehand, let’s look over today. How did we all get on with the homework?’ she asks. ‘Your notebooks.’
Keera and India, both stretched out luxuriously on loungers, look at each other with dismay.
‘It was difficult, this homework,’ announces Grazia. ‘I do not tell lies so there’s nothing to write.’
Rose gives her a knowing look.
‘Really?’
‘I don’t lie!’ protests Grazia.
‘That’s commendable,’ Rose goes on. ‘But what I meanreally are the small lies we tell ourselves. That we are not hurt by someone else’s actions, that we are strong when, actually, we feel fragile and vulnerable.’
She just throws it out there and Grazia doesn’t pick it up.
Grazia tries to adopt her usual haughty expression but it no longer works on the group or Rose. They’ve seen behind her mask.
She’s rattling around in the handbag again, searching for her cigarettes.
Hell, thinks Rose. Grazia’s going to get lung cancer from trying to sort out her life.
Rose tries another tack.
‘It can happen,’ she says, ‘that when one parent is gone and another person comes into the family to stand in the metaphorical place where the first parent has been, the natural instinct for some offspring is to see the person as an interloper. Like a virus in the family body, and they want to stamp out this virus.’
Everyone but Bernard and Grazia looks suitably appalled.
Grazia is nodding.
‘But when the children, grown or otherwise – and incredibly, grown children often find this harder than younger ones – succeed in pushing out the so-called interloper, then they are astonished that nothing goes back to the way it was before.’
‘Exactly!’ says Grazia. ‘They are so stupid – they have no idea what it would mean if I left.’
‘They might feel shame,’ Rose goes on, ‘because they made their parent pick who mattered most: their children or their new partner. They couldn’t be bigger people and understand that a human can love their childrenandtheir new wife at the same time. Both things can be true simultaneously.’
Rose gazes meaningfully at Grazia and Bernard.
‘If you were gone from Bernard’s life, Grazia, his children would suddenly be called upon to be there for their father in new ways. He’s older. He’s more likely to die first. Sorry, Bernard,’ Rose says, with a little bow to him.
‘You’re only telling the truth,’ he says magnanimously.
‘So who’d go with you to doctor’s appointments, play chess with you in the evening, do all the things you do with Grazia …?’ Rose asks.
Astonishingly, Rose realises that tears have appeared in Bernard’s eyes.
Real tears? She’s not sure.
Is he thinking of the enormous loss in his life if Grazia wasn’t there? Or perhaps these are merely the tears of the wily old crocodile realising that he loses no matter what happens.
Grazia might make him choose: them or me.
Grazia says nothing but stares at the barbecue.
Rose moves slightly to see what she’s looking at.
