‘Loving someone honestly for who they are and not trying to change them is one of the purest and most mature definitions of love,’ Rose said once in an interview when she was still in Los Angeles, still a ratings magnet in the afternoon TV slots.
She and Theo were together and she loved him heart and soul, but he didn’t know everything about her.
Six years in, it was hard to say: ‘You know the story about where I grew up? Well, I lied …’
Rose sighs. No point in dwelling on the past and thinking of how she’d messed things up with Theo and with her career.
The past is always full of lessons and once you’ve learned them, you have to move on – she’s told many people that.
Personally, she’s really tired of learning lessons. She feels as if she’s learned damned near everything.
Rose finishes off Christos’ murderously strong coffee and then downs a glass of water.
It’s a hot day for late September and Rose does not plan to miss a moment of the week because she’s suffering from heat stroke.
With Theo still in her thoughts, she can’t help but think of the caveat of her week-long programme here in Xanthe:Nobody gets healed in a week. But – this is not just a week-long programme.
It’s the start of something.
This week will be her chance to see if she still has what it takes.
Chapter Five
‘Are you ready, darling?’
Bernard loves Grazia’s accent.
They’ve been married for twenty-five years and he still loves the way she says ‘darling’ so that it comes out as ‘darlink’.
She’s lived in Britain for longer than she ever lived in Tbilisi, but Tbilisi is inside her in every way. For Christmas she makes Georgian khachapuri, cheese-filled bread, and the classic plum cake, drizzled with rum. Last Christmas, she made forty for all her friends. Forty small cakes! Bernard had just smiled but he thought she was mad.
Why notbuythe cakes? Bernard believes that money can sort everything out. It’s one of life’s most obvious truths and those who say he’s wrong haven’t lived the sort of life he has. From the slums of post-war Liverpool to running a huge company that’s made him very wealthy, Bernard finds that money always helps.
‘Yes, I’m ready,’ he says, scanning around to make sure he has got everything. Handkerchief, sunglasses and his two phones which he is keeping in his shorts pocket no matterwhat the literature told them about ‘no mobile devices’ in the sessions.
He needs to be in touch with work.
Does this Rose person not know who he is?
Grazia is taking a small bottle of orange juice out of the minibar. He knows it’s in case his blood sugar gets low.
Old age has been creeping up on Bernard slowly and he hates it. Would fight it if he could but age is a stealthy adversary and never gets straight into the ring.
It lightly touches many things at once so it’s hard to fight ageing in the aggressive way he fights people in business.
Once, he was agile, lithe, loved playing squash and flattening the hell out of younger guys. The sheer buzz of that made him feel like a hero. But smashing people with humiliating defeats on the squash court was a million years ago.
Now his knees are creaky as hell and he gets up from chairs with painful slowness, saying ‘Oomph’.
The skin on his arms has become covered with age spots, so that almost overnight, Bernard’s once-strong forearms are now dotted and paper thin.
Now he has to be careful of blood sugar and needs a scan to check his bone density because of his childhood lack of calcium.
His accent is no longer reminiscent of a poverty-stricken childhood in Liverpool but his bones still are.
Grazia buys him multi-vitamins, and watches to make sure he takes his cholesterol medication.
He can’t help it: he resents it all.
