Not for a moment does Rose betray her surprise.
‘Of course,’ she says. Perhaps she can get to the nub of the problem. Grazia and Bernard’s issues are not just about his adult children, Rose is sure of it.
India and Keera have lunch, then sit on the beach with Dan, occasionally wading into the sea to cool down.
‘It’s nice this doing nothing,’ says Keera.
‘Lovely,’ says India, who looks sleepy.
She is lying on her stomach, long legs stretched out on the sand.
Keera sees Dan sneaking a look at India but she says nothing. She feels such kinship with the two of them.
They’re all a bit mixed up but they care about each other. Funny how this has happened so quickly.
Rose finishes writing up her notes from the morning and wonders how Grazia is doing.
‘I am embarrassed to share this with you,’ Grazia had said to Rose as they walked to the village.
‘There’s nothing I haven’t heard,’ Rose told her.
Now Rose thinks she understands Grazia and Bernard’s marriage more.
Poor Grazia.
What a risk to tell the story to someone else. Bernard will be enraged when he finds out. He will probably storm out of the retreat.
Rose has prepared Grazia for that. Not every relationship can be saved.
Rose knows that Bernard is getting drunk beside the pool, but she will not worry about him.
She thinks instead of this afternoon’s late session on the terrace which will focus on people’s stories but also on the mind–body link.
Once, a million years ago when she was a practising therapist, a young man with an eating disorder leaped out of his chair and screamed that he was fed up talking about his body.
His body was ‘my business, OK?!’ he shrieked. He stormed off and hadn’t paid.
At the time, Rose decided that a couch might be the way to go. It was harder for people to leap out of the prone position than out of a chair. She also looked into a contractual agreement which meant non-payers had a month to cough up, but it was too tricky to enforce.
On her TV show, the producers had never been keen on focusing on physical signs of emotional pain.
‘It’s kinda boring,’ said the second-in-command producer, whose credentials included the fact that he once speed-readMen Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. ‘I like it when people cry, but not immediately. Fourteen minutes in is the perfect slot – after the first commercial break but just before the second one.’
‘I’ll do my best to remember that,’ Rose had replied gravely.
American TV had far too many commercial breaks and she doubted if Carl Jung and Melanie Klein in a tag team with a stopwatch could make people cry on demand fourteen minutes into a session.
This afternoon, Rose starts on the physical side of pain.
On the terrace, she’s astonished to see that Bernard is present. He’s sitting apart from his wife at the table and has the red face of someone who’s drunk too much in the sun.
Drinking in the sunshine is like drinking on aeroplanes, Rose thinks. Every drink is like a double measure.
The donkey who lives two rocky fields away is roaring hello to the donkey who lives close to the Kri Kri beach. Rose always brings fruit to the beach donkey, who’s called Zeus.
In the background, there’s a hum of the slow scooters that tourists rent to traverse the island. Rose worries every time she sees them blithely riding helmet-less and biker-clothes-less. The roads in Corfu are just as rock hard as the roads wherever the holidaymakers come from, and one small brush with the road can leave many scars.
But still – people make stupid choices all the time. She’s done it herself.
