He wanted to control, to beat me down, to show me how bad I was at everything.
When I bought anything for myself, he wanted to see me in it. He’d put his head to one side and say: ‘It would really suit someone thinner.’
I was the thinnest I’d ever been but this was immaterial. I was a mess. He was ashamed of me.
Even his first wife had dressed better and had style.
I never met her, obviously, but had been taught to despise her.
How did I not see this as the reddest of all red flags?
Because I was imprisoned in the sort of prison where you don’t see the bars.
Instead, I kept my head down, tried to take up as little space as possible. Tried to avoid being a mess, being overemotional or dramatic. These were my flaws and I did anything to avoid punishment.
It was almost impossible to make sense of it all. For so long, I lived in this chaotic state of high anxiety, waiting for the next attack, the next vicious comment.
I looked back over the past, recalling how much he’d loved me at first. I thought that if I could see where I’d gone wrong, where I’d made him so angry, then I could make it all better.
Initially, he’d run after me and besieged me.
Sworn his undying love.
He’d been so lovely to my mother. After he’d met and charmed her.
‘I wanted her to like me, silly,’ he’d said.
He said it so easily that the clarity of those words was lost entirely.
I understood it later, though.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Bernard spends Wednesday afternoon drinking too much beside the infinity pool.
He rarely does this now because he can’t cope with hangovers but he wants to escape all the noise in his head. Grazia is barely speaking to him and she says she’s having a spa treatment at half one.
‘Do what you want,’ he says and goes back to sunbathing, his Negroni beside him. He’s tried two other cocktails already, one with peach liqueur, which was a bit sickly sweet but he drank it anyway.
There’s a pretty young girl at the bar today serving him cocktails, not like that supercilious bitch who glared at him as she swept out of his and Grazia’s room with the laundry the other day.
He wouldn’t employ anyone like that.
Bernard likes staff who treat him with respect. He insists upon it.
He broods angrily that he doesn’t feel fully respected in Villa Artemis.
It’s definitely Grazia’s fault. Everyone is on her side.
He’s sure Rose is telling the entire staff that he’s not nice to his wife – well, he’s going to put a stop to that.
He knows things about Rose Talisman.
Bernard has ruined other people’s businesses before. He doesn’t feel any guilt about that – it’s survival of the fittest, he thinks. Rose had better watch out.
Grazia finds Rose at lunch.
‘May I join you on a walk to the village?’ she asks Rose. ‘Can it be just me?’
