Dearest Rose (17 page)

But by the time Rose had reached the top of the stairs, her fairy-tale ending played out in her head, she realised the truth. Her mother was still in her bed, still sleeping through the deep debilitating misery that Rose would later understand as depression, but which then, as a little girl, hanging on the bedroom door, she saw only as a lack of care. No one cared about her any more.

‘Dad’s gone,’ she’d told Marian, shaking her shoulder as hard as she could, until her eyes flickered open and focused on Rose. ‘He’s gone with his fancy woman. He went hours ago. I’ve been on my own all day, not that you care.’

Nine-year-old Rose had slammed her mother’s bedroom door on the way out, running downstairs in her own sudden flood of tears. But it had been the sound of Marian’s dry, rattling repeated sobs that had carried on as Rose had gone to sleep that night, still dressed in her day clothes, teeth and hair unbrushed, hoping against hope that everything would be OK in the morning. But the truth was that, really, nothing had ever been OK again.

‘You know, I thought that when I saw you I’d remember how much I missed you and loved you,’ Rose said bitterly, and for a moment there it was almost like that. ‘But looking at you, listening to you now, all I can remember is how much I hate you.’

‘I don’t blame you for hating me.’ John turned round to look at her directly for the first time. ‘I made mistakes, bad ones. I
was
wrapped up in the alcohol, I behaved … thoughtlessly. You won’t find me denying that. I am what I am. But
you
are not me so don’t try to escape your own problems by laying them at my feet. You have a child. Perhaps you haven’t reached the end of your relationship, perhaps there is more ground to cover. Maybe you can sort it out. He might take you back, for the girl’s sake.’

‘Take me back!’ Rose breathed, the fury that had bubbled constantly under her skin since she arrived threatening to erupt. Desperately she tried to contain her voice to an urgent whisper, for fear that it would distract Maddie from her painting. ‘Do you know, Mum would have taken you back, even after everything, even after the humiliation, the years of silence from you? Even up until the point she walked into the sea and drowned herself she would have taken you back, John. All those years, wasted on loving you and she never got over it, never moved on. I know, because I was there every day from the age of nine to pick up the pieces. Every single day I had to put her back together as best I could, made sure she was washed, fed at least. Every day until the day she died I cleaned up the mess you made, the destruction you walked out on. Oh, I know my husband would have me back. I know he’d have me back like a shot, he’d be thrilled. But
I won’t go
. I won’t make the same mistake Mum did. I won’t go back and no one can make me, not him and especially not you.’

The tension crackled in the air between them. For the first time since she had arrived he studied her face closely, and Rose knew he was searching for traces of what had happened to make her so angry, so frightened. Something akin to concern showed in his expression and the next time he spoke, his voice was more gentle, if still halted and stiff.

‘It must have been hard for you,’ he conceded quietly. ‘All that business with your mother.’

‘All that business.’ Rose laughed mirthlessly. ‘Which part, the becoming a carer for my clinically depressed mother, or discovering that just when I thought she was finally getting better she more than likely killed herself?’

‘All of it, of course,’ John said. ‘Although I didn’t realise the extent of how very ill she was. I knew she was upset, of course, but I didn’t realise it became such a burden to you.’

‘It wasn’t a burden,’ Rose snapped. ‘She was my mum. I loved her. Which doesn’t mean to say that it was OK for you to leave a little girl to cope with all of that. It wasn’t. When did you find out she was dead?’

The words still stuck in Rose’s throat when she was forced to articulate them. Because although her mother had never again held her, or stroked her hair, or comforted her after John left, Rose still missed her keenly every day; she still wished for her mother over and over again.

‘The week it happened, or thereabouts,’ John dropped his gaze from hers. ‘Tilda still had a friend down there. She phoned to let us know when she read about it in the local rag, I assume.’

Detaching herself from the refuge of the door, Rose sat down hard on an ancient stool that stood in the middle of the studio for no apparent reason.

‘You knew, and you didn’t come for me?’ Rose asked him. ‘You left me to deal with all that, alone? I can understand that perhaps you couldn’t face Mum, but even when I was alone, you still didn’t think enough of me to come?’

John bowed his head, pinching the bridge of his nose between his fingers. ‘I didn’t think of you at all,’ he said simply, finally
raising
his head to meet her eyes. ‘What I thought of was the next drink, and the drink after that. And that was all. Rose, I’m tired, and you are upset. Perhaps it would be best if you left now. I need to work.’

‘Finished!’ Maddie said, trotting cheerfully over to Rose and, taking her fingers, pulling her towards her painted board. Suddenly exhausted, Rose went with Maddie and looked at her painting. Taking John at his word, she had painted the rough wooden slats of the end of the barn, which was what she could see from her position on the floor, thick black lines delineating each plank, which she had built up with layer upon layer of colours, with a striking, textured and pleasing result.

‘Darling, that’s lovely!’ Rose breathed, seeing the rare flash of pride and pleasure on Maddie’s face. ‘Really, really lovely.’

‘It is good,’ John said, standing some way behind them. ‘The girl’s got an eye, that’s for sure.’

‘I know,’ Maddie said happily. ‘I didn’t even really try. It just came out. It’s brilliant. Painting is brilliant.’ She looked John square in the eye, unflinching. ‘I want to come and paint again. Soon.’

Rose felt her heart clench, unable to bear her daughter, who was so rarely and so purely happy, suffering rejection.

‘Come tomorrow,’ John said, so quietly that Rose wasn’t sure she’d heard him.

‘I beg your pardon?’ Rose asked him.

‘Bring the child tomorrow. She can paint, I can work. We can talk more.’

‘You want to talk to me?’ Rose was incredulous.

John looked pained by her scepticism, and suddenly very frail, as if contact with another person did genuinely drain him.

‘Rose,’ he said her name slowly, testing it on his tongue, ‘please understand, I am not a good man, or a kind one. I am not any sort of father or grandfather. I may well have ruined your life and if I have … then I think the booze killed any part of me that would feel guilty about it years ago. But I am a man, and you are my daughter, and I do wish to do for you what little I can. I must be honest, I don’t believe that talking to me will make your life any more tolerable, but it may help you see the way forward from here.’

‘If you are talking about going back to my husband …?’ Rose said warily, very unsure of what, if anything, this remote man was offering her.

‘No,’ John said, turning back to his work. ‘You should realise that the one thing I am not is the sort of person to make another do a single thing they don’t want to. Come back tomorrow if you want the girl to paint, and for us to talk some more. If not, then I shall carry on as before.’

‘I want to come back,’ Maddie said. ‘And paint. I want to paint that wood again.’

‘What time?’ Rose asked him.

‘Makes no odds to me,’ John said. ‘I’ll be in here as long as the sun is up.’

‘That was good,’ Maddie said happily as she and Rose headed back across the yard, Rose caught up in a flurry of confused emotion. It would have been impossible to feel more anger or animosity towards her father than she had in the barn. It had been pure, visceral, pumping through her veins instead of blood. But somehow their meeting had resulted in a planned return visit. Rose wasn’t entirely sure how that had happened, or what
it
meant, except that for some reason that she wasn’t able to fathom yet, John wanted her to come back. He must do, otherwise Rose was very certain that they wouldn’t have been invited.

‘I like John, actually,’ Maddie said. ‘He’s very interesting.’

‘Good,’ Rose said, pausing and turning to gaze up at the mountains around them, finding their ancient enormity a comfort for her sore mind. ‘I think he liked you too, in his way.’

‘He liked how I painted,’ Maddie said proudly, certain that was more important than personal affection. ‘I am extremely good, after all.’

‘You are,’ Rose smiled, letting her hand rest briefly on Maddie’s shoulder before she inevitably shrugged it off. Maddie had looked more at ease in the company of her strange grandfather, and with a paintbrush in her hand, than Rose had seen her for a long time. Naturally it was easy to blame Richard for Maddie’s sense of unease, the tautness in her face and limbs, the underlying current of anxiety that Rose thought she could sometimes feel vibrating from her daughter. But perhaps she had to accept that at least some of what happened to make her life with Richard so toxic was down to her. If she’d been more experienced with men, if she’d listened to the sense of disquiet that had always been there, even when they were first together and she had thought she was at her happiest … But she’d pushed it away, and pushed it away, ignored her own instincts for that chance of having the kind of normal happy life that she saw going on all around her. For the chance to be anything but like her parents.

Perhaps it was her anxious, frightened, overprotective, uncertain mother that was stifling Maddie the most, Rose thought as she remembered the sense of creeping dread that used to
pervade
her as she made the slow walk home from school to where her mother would be waiting for her, waiting to unleash all her unhappiness and sorrow onto her daughter’s shoulders. Rose dreaded sliding the key into the lock, knowing a tidal wave of misery was waiting for her on the other side of it, and yet she always opened the door. She always went in. What if, even at this young age, Maddie’s oddness, which set her so far apart from other children her own age, was really caused by Rose, by her failure to stop her unhappiness leaking out through every pore, no matter how much she tried to hide it? Being free of Richard, even if only for a little while, had seemed to breathe life into her. She felt like a wind-up toy, finally able to release all that pent-up energy after sitting on a shelf for so long. Rose had to acknowledge that she felt released, here in the wild country, and perhaps that was slowly starting to rub off onto Maddie too.

Rose had come here chasing a pipe dream, a fantasy, but the reality was that nothing else mattered but Maddie, because if it wasn’t for her odd, awkward, strange, distant little girl and a battered and tatty old postcard with a few lines scrawled on the back, then Rose would have walked into the sea after her mother a long time ago and have been glad to feel the cool, soft waves closing over her head. And just as Rose didn’t want Maddie to dread coming home to her, neither did she want to leave her with the legacy her mother had. It was time to thank Frasier for keeping her heart beating when it was almost ready to give up hope. After that she could try her best to forget him.

Albie had told her that she was bound to bump into Frasier; that any day now, she’d turn a corner and he’d be here. It seemed strange that she’d found her way to this random, abstract corner
of
the world to find the converging threads of her past and future meeting head-on. If she just stayed here and did nothing, then one day she would do the thing she’d dreamt of for a very long time. She’d see Frasier again. And even at her most rational and pragmatic, Rose could not imagine how the world might continue after that moment, even if it was, as Shona seemed certain, an epic anti-climax.

How childish of her to believe that somehow he would just walk into her life like a knight in shining armour and rescue her. It was time she stood on her own two feet, forgot her silly romantic notions and got on with the business of being a grown-up and a parent. Perhaps she had come here seeking something that didn’t ever truly exist, but even if that was true the look on Maddie’s face when she’d been painting was reason enough to go back and see John again tomorrow; it was reason enough to stay for as long as she could.

‘Do you know, I wouldn’t mind going up one of those big hills,’ Maddie said, squinting at the horizon, where the sun was doing its best to burn away the thick insulation of cloud.

‘What, now?’ Rose asked her. To be honest, walking up a hill was the very last thing that she had in mind right now, but it was so surprising for Maddie to want to do anything physical that she didn’t like the thought of turning her down. And besides, Rose had a feeling that if there was ever a place to clear her head of all the cotton wool and confusion it was packed with, then halfway up a very big hill would be just that place. ‘Well, I don’t suppose it will hurt to go a little way. Looks like the rain’s going to hold off for a while. There’s a footpath over there, I think.’

Rose pointed towards a stile across the yard, bridging a fence
that
led into a field of sheep, a worn-away path snaking up the more gentle slope of the mountain.

‘We are like archaeologists about to open the lost tomb of Tutankhamen!’ Maddie said, charging off across the yard with a sudden burst of energy, just as a shiny, outsized 4x4 Audi rolled into the yard, missing squashing her by mere centimetres.

Maternal fury filling her instantly, Rose marched across, squelching mud to confront the driver, pulling open the heavy door before he could turn the engine off.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ she shouted as he climbed out of the car. ‘You almost killed my daughter with your idiotic driving!’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said instantly, rubbing his hand through his blond hair. ‘Truly. I wasn’t expecting a child in my path. I’ve been here many times and there have never been any small children before!’

‘You’ve never seen any small children before – that’s your excuse, really …’ Rose faltered to a stop, her mouth freezing before it could form another syllable as she realised who she was looking at. The man who had almost run her daughter over was Frasier McCleod. The moment she’d just been anticipating had arrived without any fanfare or warning, and there, sitting in the driver’s seat, looking slightly flushed and awkward, was her pipe dream in the flesh. He hadn’t changed, not a single bit, since the moment she had first set eyes on him standing on her doorstep. And yet she had; she’d changed almost completely, and most radically in the last few hours. With a freezing cold shock, Rose realised that Frasier McCleod was looking her right in the face, contrite and concerned, and
completely
oblivious to the fact that they had ever met before. He had forgotten her.