Runaway Wife (32 page)

“He’s not in here!” Maddie said with some consternation. “Where is he, then, if he’s not in here? He’s always in here.”

“Well,” Rose said as she reached the locked barn door, “I suppose he can’t live in the barn. Let’s go and see if he’s in the cottage. You know, we didn’t check with him that he would be in. He might have gone out.”

“Granddad doesn’t go out,” Maddie said firmly, very sure of the facts, and Rose had to admit that he had certainly given that impression since she’d first visited him. She had only ever seen him outside the confines of Storm Cottage once, when he had come to see her at the B & B, and for some reason she couldn’t imagine him just deciding to take an impromptu trip.

Maddie raced up the path, discovering at once that the door to Storm Cottage was unlocked, which didn’t mean anything. Rose hadn’t known it to be locked since she’d arrived, and she was fairly sure that if John had gone out he would still have left it that way. When they walked into the kitchen and living area, the cottage was still and silent, a pattern of leaves, their shadows cast by the midday sun, dancing cheerfully on the flagstones. A half-empty pint of sour milk sat on the table, and a pair of ancient-looking paint-spattered boots stood at the foot of the stairs.

“He’s in! Granddad!” Maddie yelled, pointing at the boots. “Granddad!”

“Shhh,” Rose said, getting the distinct feeing that she was trespassing as she looked around for any signs of her father.

“Why?” Maddie said, the pitch of her voice seeming at odds with the dusty quiet of the little house. “If he’s not here he won’t know I’m shouting, and if he is he will hear us.”

“Well, I don’t think he is in, so—” A dull thud came from above their heads.

“Granddad!” Maddie said, on the verge of racing up the stairs.

“Hold on!” Rose said, halting her in her tracks. Something wasn’t right. She wasn’t sure what it was, but whatever it
might be, she didn’t want Maddie to be the first person to find out. “He might be in the loo, or in bed or . . .” dead drunk, after realizing that finding his daughter again was just too much for him to take, Rose thought with a sense of foreboding. “Wait here and I’ll go and have a look.”

“But I don’t want to.” Maddie started for the stairs.

“Maddie!” Rose must have said her name with more authority than either of them was used to because instead of bolting up the stairs as she usually would, Maddie came back and plonked herself down at the kitchen table, folding her arms and pouting.

Taking a breath, Rose climbed the rickety, steep staircase, all sorts of visions of what she might find up there racing through her mind: her father passed out with a bottle of vodka cradled in his arms; or in bed with the “someone” who did his shopping and goodness knew what else. Or maybe not John at all, maybe just some particularly big and carnivorous rat.

“John?” Rose called out in barely more than a whisper, as she got to the top of the stairs. “Are you in?”

There was no reply, no further thuds or scrapes that might have been her father or outsized rodents. Advancing slowly, Rose pushed open the door to the bathroom. It was empty. Briefly she peered through the crack in the boxroom door. Almost all of the clutter that had been in there when she’d first arrived was gone, and the little room, although still only just big enough for a single bed, seemed bright and airy. Certain that John was not here, and that the thud had just been the old house making its presence known, Rose pushed open John’s bedroom door, just to be on the safe side, before going back downstairs.

It was then that she realized John was in bed, or half in it, at least. Rose clapped both her hands over her mouth as she
allowed herself a moment to take in what she saw. He seemed to have fallen—no, collapsed—out of bed, his long legs still tangled in the sheets, while his torso lay twisted on the floor, his head turned away from her towards the wall, his skin starkly white in the buttercup summer sunshine.

“John!” Rose whispered, falling to her knees on the floor next to him, feeling like the little girl at her mother’s bedside again. “John?”

Rose let out a long, audible breath of relief as John turned his head to look at her, but the feeling didn’t last for long. His face was sallow, his eyes sunken, ringed in black. How long had he been there?

The sharp scent in the air, the dampness on the edge of his rumpled sheet, made her worry that it was for a very long time.

“Are you drunk?” Rose asked him, withdrawing her hand in a moment of mistrust.

“Rose . . .” John winced, and Rose could see it hurt him to breathe and to talk. “Dizzy spell, useless old bones. I tried to get up, fell, I think I’ve hurt my back. Can’t move.”

“Your back? How long have you been here?” Rose said, her hand fluttering above her father, not sure where or how to touch him, or what to do next. “Why did this happen? Have you been drinking?”

“No!” John said with as much energy as he could muster. “Not even water. Thirsty . . . Been here since about five, feel so bloody stupid.”

“Let me help you up.” Rose tried hooking her arms under his, used to picking up her wisp of a mother from an early age, but even though he looked so thin and frail, she couldn’t budge him. The more she tried, the more it hurt him.

“I’m so sorry, John, I can’t do this alone,” Rose said desperately. “I need to get help.”

“There’s a number . . .”

“I’ll call an ambulance—” Rose began.

“No, no!” John used what little strength he had to be insistent. “There’s a number on the pad by the bed. Call that.”

“Who is it?” Rose said, kneeling up and reaching for the pad. She knew enough to know it was a Keswick number. “Your doctor?”

“No,” John wheezed. “No goddamn doctors. They never do anything.”

“Who, then?” Rose asked him anxiously. John seemed to hold his breath for what felt like the longest time, before he answered on a painful outward gasp.

“Tilda,” he said, breathing the name on a long ragged outward breath. “She knows. She knows what to do.”

T
he sight of Tilda standing at her father’s front door brought Rose up short, catching her breath as she was confronted with the villain of so much of her life. How many nights had she gone to sleep blaming this woman for ruining her life? How many mornings had she woken up wishing her ill? For most of her life Rose had thought of Tilda as the thief of her happiness, and yet here she was, John’s first port of call in an emergency, and looking no more menacing than any other slightly bohemian woman in her sixties.

“How is he?” Tilda asked as Rose awkwardly stood aside to let her in, then followed her to the foot of the stairs. Even if she hadn’t had such limited experience in handling awkward social situations, Rose was pretty sure she would still have found this almost impossible. After her short, surreal telephone conversation with Tilda, which did not seem to rattle the older woman at all, Rose had carefully lifted John’s legs out of the bed and put a pillow under his head to make him at least a little more comfortable. She’d sat on the floor next to him, neither of them speaking as she fed him sips of water from a glass by the bed, just as she had done so many times for her mother, stroking her hair as Marian sobbed herself
dry of tears, even though she could scarcely remember why anymore.

“When Mum was very bad,” Rose said, “sometimes I’d find her out of it on the floor—so often, actually, that it sort of became normal. Get in from school, have a drink of juice, pick Mum up off the floor, put her in bed. I could do it with her; there was nothing to her. I’m sorry I can’t lift you.”

“You really have nothing to be sorry for,” John said, looking a little better now that he’d had a drink. “I’m the one who should be sorry. I want to be the one to look after you for once, not the other way round.”

“I don’t need looking after.” Rose said it reflexively, exactly as she had said it to her mother, discovering only after she had spoken the words that they felt true. “I just need to be with you, to be part of a family. That’s enough for me, more than enough. Now’s the time of my life when I should be standing on my own two feet at last, making a future with Maddie. Looking after myself.”

It had seemed like an age that they had sat there, side by side, but the knock at the door had still come all too soon for Rose.

“Don’t hate her,” John said as she got up to answer the door. “None of this is her fault.”

Rose had said nothing.

“As well as can be expected,” Rose said to Tilda now. “What’s wrong with him? Has he been drinking again? He doesn’t smell of it, but . . . I just want to know what’s going on. I am his daughter.”

Rose looked over to where Maddie was sitting on the sofa, her eyes watchful and wary.

Tilda did not reply, her hand on the banister, clearly eager to be with John, to help him. She stilled herself, though, knowing that she couldn’t just ignore Rose.

“It’s nice to see you, Rose,” she said carefully. “I appreciate that this must be hard for you. I know John hadn’t told you that we are still . . . in touch. If it helps, I can tell you that having you back in his life has made him happier than I’ve seen him for a long time. Not that it’s that easy to tell the difference.”

Tilda hazarded a tiny smile at her attempt at a joke, but Rose found it impossible to reciprocate.

She opened her mouth to speak, then swiftly closed it again. No words would come out. There was nothing that she could think of to say, her mind still too busy processing all this new information.

Tilda, it seemed, was still her father’s secret, his bit on the side. Rose had never asked what had happened to her because she had assumed that her father’s most destructive lover had fallen along the wayside with all the other detritus that he left in his wake. But she had been wrong. He had merely kept Tilda’s presence from her. He’d lied to her again after all this time.

“Well . . . so.” Tilda looked horribly uncomfortable. “If you don’t mind, I’ll go up now. The nurses, when he first had this trouble, taught me a special lifting technique. It should do the trick.” Rose watched as Tilda hurried up the stairs, feeling cut out of John’s life all over again, that little girl sitting on the bottom stair, as Daddy kissed her goodbye.

Of course it wasn’t the first time she had met Tilda, if meeting was the right word to describe the first time that Rose had encountered the person who had somehow endured throughout John’s life. Rose first and last set eyes on her when Tilda had been posing for John in his studio, and, sensing her mother’s discomfort about what might be going on at the bottom of the garden by the way she stood and stared out of the kitchen window, drying the same mug over and over again, Rose had decided to go and investigate.

As she had crept in through the studio door, she was confronted with Tilda reclining, nude, on an old chaise longue that Rose remembered John buying as a prop specifically for this piece of work. Rose had been so fascinated by her first sight of a naked person, excluding herself, that she had forgotten to be frightened of the wrath that would rain down on her if John discovered her presence. He had told her very clearly that she was not welcome in the studio while he was painting Tilda. The instruction had stung just as badly as one of John’s rare but wicked slaps across her legs if she angered him. Rose had been perfectly well aware that John preferred his daughter to his wife—after all, he made no secret of it, often pitting the two of them against poor Marian—and the thought that there might be a new favorite on the scene had piqued her childish jealousy. And yet when she had looked at Tilda, lying there on the black velvet, Rose had understood, even at that tender age, why John had become so fascinated with this otherworldy woman.

Tilda’s body was altogether different from her mother’s. It was opulent, luxuriant, an excess of milky white flesh that curved and undulated, flowing out from beneath her mass of dark hair almost like a waterfall flowing over rocks. John had never troubled himself with life models before Tilda, and even then, even when she was so young, Rose suspected that his newfound interest in figure painting had more to do with this one subject than anything else. Rose couldn’t take her eyes off Tilda and neither could John, that was until he spotted Rose in the corner and, roaring with fury, he’d picked her up and thrown her out of the studio and into the dark and rainy afternoon. Rose had hated Tilda from that moment on. And that iconic image that had for so long been imprinted on her mind seemed to have very little to do with the person
who had stood at her father’s door a few moments before; it had nothing to do with this old lady.

The black hair, though still thick and long, had been replaced by a wiry gray, which fanned out over her heavy-set shoulders, and the fleshy glamorous body she’d once had had thickened and filled out so that her impressive bosom seemed to take up most of the loose embroidered top she was wearing. Her black eyes were still lined with kohl, and her face, though a little heavier and a touch jowled, was still clearly recognizable. Those heavy lids, the straight nose, and full mouth that had proved so alluring to John were all still there. Not as alluring as the drink, though, Rose reminded herself. John had chosen vodka over Tilda in the end, and that too showed in the lines around her eyes and mouth. And yet, she was still here. She was undoubtedly the mysterious person who brought his food, cleaned his house, did his washing. Were they together or not? Frasier had never mentioned Tilda to her, and John had told her that Tilda left him years ago. What did it mean that she was still so involved in his life, and right now, when her father was lying in bed, ashen gray and weak as a kitten, did it matter? It came as a shock to Rose to realize that she never imagined her father would still have Tilda in his life now. Knowing him, she’d expected him to fail at that relationship, just as he’d failed at everything else. Tilda still being around, in whatever capacity, meant that Rose had been wrong about John in one fundamental way: he hadn’t lost or discarded everyone who’d ever meant anything to him.