Runaway Wife (22 page)

Maddie stood up, still in her pajamas, and went to John, taking his hand, which he looked at as if it were an alien object but he did not let it go.

“Maddie, you’re not even dressed,” Rose protested, feeling somehow swept aside by this new, unexpected bond.

“She doesn’t need to be dressed to paint,” John said. “Old clothes are all the better.”

“You see,” Maddie said.

“All the same, go upstairs and find clothes. Five more minutes won’t make a difference.”

“I’ll go with her,” Shona said. “Give her a hand.” She paused by Jenny, who was still standing resolutely in the doorway. “Come on, Jenny, you can help too.”

“Hmph,” Jenny said, reluctantly leaving with Shona.

Rose and John regarded each other across the room for a moment.

“You came here to find us,” Rose said, emphasizing the last word.

“I’m interested in her ability,” John replied, looking out the window.

“You came
here
,” Rose repeated. “What does that mean? Does it mean anything? I wouldn’t ask, only I’m tired of not knowing where I stand in life. I’m exhausted by it, actually, second guessing, trying always to do the right thing. So just tell me, does it mean anything that you came to get us?”

John shook his head, shrugging apologetically. “I don’t know . . .” He hesitated, as if debating what to tell her. “Frasier and I argue all the time, but he has been, he is, a friend, perhaps my only one. He phoned me last night, on the proper telephone, the one he knows I will answer. He was at some sort of party, all sorts of nonsense and noise going on. He told me he couldn’t concentrate until he’d told me I would be an old and stupid fool to pass up the chance of making peace with you. I do not know that there is a chance for us to make peace, but nevertheless I do respect the man. If it weren’t for him I would certainly be dead now. I feel that there are things you will want me to say, to do, to feel, for you to be . . . satisfied. And I suspect that I am capable of none of the things you want. So on that basis I have come to collect you, to see what, if any, sort of peace we can salvage. And also because I am interested in the child.”

“Frasier said that?” Rose struggled to reconcile the man who would go to all that trouble to help with the one she’d met yesterday. John’s description made him sound much more like the Frasier she’d dreamt of for so long.

“My name is Maddie,” Maddie reminded John, appearing in Jenny’s grandson’s bright green Spider-Man T-shirt and red pajama bottoms, picking John’s hand up again instantly. “Did you know red and green are complementary colors, that means . . .”

“So you will come?”

“Yes,” Rose said. “Of course.”

Shona stopped Rose just as she was going to the door
to where John was helping Maddie into a battered old Citroën.

“You sure you’re OK?” she asked. “This all seems a bit dramatic.”

“What part of my life hasn’t been dramatic?” Rose said, as if the revelation was news to her. “I have literally no idea what it will be like, or if it will work out, if it even can. But it’s better than wondering, I know that much. I’m sorry to leave you here all day at a loose end.”

“She won’t be at a loose end,” Jenny said. “I’ve been meaning to clear out the annex where Brian’s mum lived before she passed away, for a year, see if I can’t do something with it. Shona, you can help me do that and I’ll knock a night off your bill, agreed?”

“Agreed, I suppose,” Shona said. “Although I don’t have any problem at all with being at a loose end.” She turned to Rose. “See you later, quick one in the pub?”

Rose knew that her cheeks had instantly burst into two spots of color, from the way Shona’s eyes widened in mischievous delight.

“We’ll catch up later and you can tell me everything that happened,” she whispered. “That’s if Mrs. Hitler here doesn’t kill me first.”

•  •  •

For most of that morning, Maddie painted on anything that John could find her—pieces of boards, scraps of cardboard—filling them with swathes of color. Sometimes she painted things, but mostly just colors, jostling with each other for supremacy. When scrap material ran out, she begged him for a canvas, and after a good deal of grimacing he deigned to part with a small square one that he had already stretched, warning her to take her time over her next creation as she’d have to wait a few days for there to be any more canvases.

“Oh, well, in that case I will paint tiny things,” Maddie said, selecting a fine brush from John’s collection without a second thought before she settled down at the small easel he’d set up and stared contemplatively at the blank expanse of white.

“That doesn’t look like it was going to be one of your usual works,” Rose said to John, searching for a conversation opener. For the most part she had been watching John and Maddie in silence since they’d arrived, although at one point John had offered her a cup of tea and then told her where everything was in the kitchen so that she could make it, but beyond that they had barely conversed at all. It was probably best that they start slow, Rose supposed, as she sat on a stool in the corner, trying to take in the fact that she was in the same room as her father. For so long he’d been like a fairy-tale figure; now it seemed almost impossible to believe that he was real.

“I don’t have a usual work,” John said a touch snippily.

“I only mean, well, compared to the other work I’ve seen, it’s very . . . small.”

“It was for my own work, my private work,” John said. “Not the stuff I do for McCleod.”

“Can I ask you something?” Rose said carefully.

John dropped his head, his shoulders slumping. “If you must.”

“If you hate these paintings, which by the way I think are beautiful, why do you keep on doing them?”

John sighed, stepping back to observe his latest touches of paint. “Money.”

“Really?” Rose asked him. “Are you very hard up?”

“I have what I need, I am comfortable. And at my age, with my . . . life, that is very important to me. I’m not proud of it, but it’s a means to an end. An end that has become vital to me. I still do my own work, my true work, that’s what keeps
me sane. And that’s why it’s not for sale. I don’t want that part of me to be tainted by this part of me, the part that makes money.”

“It strikes me that out here on your own, you live quite a frugal life. Frasier looks like the kind of man who moves in rich circles. What do you need all that money for? Are you in a lot of debt or something, because it’s not exactly like you live in the lap of luxury?”

John’s expression became stony and solid, and Rose sensed she’d touched a nerve. Who knows what sort of debts he had racked up during his drinking years? Perhaps it was a part of his life he now had to pay dearly for, and the fact that he was doing that, although it cost his pride dear, impressed her.

“May I see it?” Rose asked him, swiftly changing the subject. “May I see your private work?”

“No.” John was not cruel or unkind in his refusal, just matter-of-fact. “My private work is like my diary, it is too personal to show anyone, even . . . especially you. I’m sorry, I expect that seems cruel, given the circumstances.”

“Don’t be,” Rose said, but nevertheless she did feel deflated, uncertain what to do next. How would it be possible to know, to forgive and love a man who kept himself locked so tightly away, in every sense? Rose sat and watched John and Maddie for a few moments more, feeling very much surplus to requirements, a spare wheel in her own reconciliation.

“I might just . . . I’ll probably just pop over and use the loo, if that’s all right?” she said, feeling the need to put some space between her and John for a few minutes at least, but he did not acknowledge having heard her. After a few seconds more, Rose shrugged and left the two artists to their work.

Pushing the unlocked door of Storm Cottage open, Rose hurried across the large living area, which seemed eerily still to her, as if it were waiting for something to happen. Hoping
to find a loo, she opened a stable door on the far side of the kitchen, but she was disappointed. There was only a large pantry, filled not with food but tins and tubes of oil paints, various old white spirit bottles filled with a rainbow of colored liquids that could be anything and might just be old bottles of white spirit that her father had kept for reasons known only to him. Also there were pots and pots of brushes, in various states of disrepair, some all but naked of bristles, but still he kept each one of them, perhaps every brush he’d ever worked with, lined up in old mugs and jars like comrades-in-arms.

“There’s nothing in there for you,” John said behind her, making Rose jump. She turned round, running her fingers through her short hair, which she knew stood up in rebellious spikes.

“I was looking for a loo,” she said. “Is Maddie OK on her own in the barn?”

“Yes, very dedicated. I said I was coming in for a sandwich, and she said to make her one, cheese, no butter, no salad, she’d come across in a little while.” John seemed mildly amused by his granddaughter’s pickiness. It was a good thing, Rose thought, that he was the sort of person to admire eccentricity rather than be irritated by it. It boded well for his and Maddie’s relationship. Still, she couldn’t believe Maddie was happy alone in the barn.

“It’s not like Maddie to want to be on her own,” Rose said, raising an eyebrow. “Normally she’d be running in here after a few seconds, convinced there is a child-eating gnome hiding in the attic. I suppose there must be something about this place that makes her feel . . . confident.”

“It’s probably that she can be who she is here, without anyone expecting anything of her,” John said, implying very much that that was what he most enjoyed about life in Storm
Cottage. “She is a little different from most children, in some ways more mature and in others she seems very young. Quite fascinating.”

“I know,” Rose said uneasily. “I’m not really sure what to do about it, if anything. I love her the way she is, but other people . . . other children find her hard to tolerate a lot of the time. I worry about her, growing up in her own little world. How will she ever fit in, meet a boy, get a job? I keep hoping it’s just a phase, but I don’t know. Was I like her when I was little?”

John shook his head. In the August sunshine, he looked even older than he had yesterday, his skin sallow and thin, sunken around the contours of his skull. Once he’d been an immensely handsome man, and Rose supposed that hadn’t entirely gone. There was still something about that Roman nose and jawline, a little of which was echoed in her own face, although she was much more her mother’s daughter when it came to looks, small, slight, with a delicate heart-shaped face. Rose looked at John, the deep shadows engraved under his eyes, the silver bristle of stubble that covered his jaw and neck, the slight stoop in his broad shoulders, and she discovered she was glad that all the years of alcoholism had taken their toll. It didn’t seem right that a man could live as badly as her father had and not pay some price for it. And yet, looking at him like that, so frail and fragile, made her want to hold him. Something she was certain he would be horrified by.

“You were a little ray of sunshine,” he said. “Always so eager to please, always so happy to get any scrap of attention, never angry with me, even after I’d been angry with you. Perhaps that’s why . . .”

“Why what?” Rose asked him.

“Why I was able to leave you so easily, because I was certain you’d forgive me, just like you always did.”

Rose swallowed, for a moment taken back to the bottom step, her father cheerfully kissing her goodbye.

“It’s not easy to forgive someone who isn’t there,” she said simply.

“I don’t imagine that it is,” John replied.

“I just can’t understand it,” Rose said, shaking her head, forcing him to hold her gaze. “That’s what I can’t get past. That you walked out and then nothing, nothing. Not a phone call, a letter, nothing. Not when Mum died . . . not ever. Not ever, Dad. It’s nice being here with you, watching you work, watching you with Maddie. I like it. It’s strange but I like it, and then I remember . . . and I can’t get past that. I can’t get over the fact that you just left me, completely and utterly. Why?”

John stared at her for a long moment, and then Rose watched as his whole body seemed to crumple and fold in on itself and he sank wearily into a chair.

“I didn’t care about you, Rose,” he said, his face ashen, scratched deeply with emotion. “I didn’t feel a thing for you, or Marian. Or even Tilda, really; she was more just a reason, a better reason than the real one.”

“Which was?” Rose asked him, forcing herself to hold her ground in the face of his brutal words.

“I wanted to be somewhere else. I wanted to be on my own, to be free, to drink. Really, all I wanted was to drink. Not even the work mattered at that point.” John closed his eyes, and for a moment Rose wondered if he would ever open them again, he looked so drained, so finished. “It is very hard to live with, the knowledge of the person that I have been, the man I am. The hate I have for myself, which is eating me away inside, even now, is a thousand times whatever you might feel for me.” He looked at her, his face like granite. “For you to come here, to be here, it’s almost too much. It’s much
more than I can cope with. And in truth that’s why I wanted you to go so badly. To look at you, Rose, is to face what I have done. And to accept that a very large part of me doesn’t want your forgiveness because I don’t deserve it. Redemption now would be too easy. Too neat. I need to suffer, Rose. I need to suffer more than I have. And this, you and Maddie here now, it’s too much. It’s more than I can take.”

Rose stared at him, unable to comprehend what he was saying, or even to accept that he was saying it, that he was talking to her like this at all. Was he telling her to go, or to stay? She couldn’t be sure.

“I don’t forgive you,” she said, “if that helps. I don’t forgive you, I never will. Not for what you did to me and to Mum. And if you’re worried about not deserving us, then forget it, because this isn’t about what you deserve. It’s about what Maddie and I deserve. That’s why we’re here, why we are still here. To know you, to be part of your life, whether you want it or not. John, open your eyes, this isn’t about you. It’s about me, for once; for the first time in my life, it’s about me. You owe me that at least and that’s why Maddie and I are going to stick around and see what happens. Not because I forgive you. Because I don’t.”