Runaway Wife (41 page)

“I rather thought I’d get to say when I decided I couldn’t make the stairs,” John said a little churlishly. “But thank you, I know you are trying to help. What helps me the most is knowing that you will be there. It’s more than I deserve.”

What neither Frasier nor Rose had mentioned to him was their plan to exhibit his private work. Frasier said there were things he had to get in place first. He’d have to clear the gallery of its planned events for the next couple of months, which meant placating other painters and mobilizing an army of PR and marketing executives. They couldn’t risk waiting until there was a window in the schedule or for the usual lead time of publicizing an event like this, but neither could they afford to open without as much fanfare as possible. Between them, Rose and Frasier had decided, late one night, over a glass of wine in the kitchen at Storm Cottage, that they would tell John only when most of the work had already been done.

Tensions had eased considerably between Rose and Frasier, his anger at discovering her liaison with Ted now neatly tucked away behind his polite, concerned smile and friendly attentions. Not since the moment that Frasier had brought her back to Storm Cottage had either one of them mentioned the words they’d said, the promises they’d made to each other in those few idyllic hours that night. The hope that there had been, the happiness—it was as if none of it had ever happened,
as if Frasier had cut those twenty-four hours out of his life without a second thought, his life with Cecily, and the gallery, and worrying about John closing over that one night and the following stormy morning with cool, calm waters.

Whenever Rose had had a second to think about herself since then she even questioned whether any of it had ever happened, or if it was just a figment of her fevered imagination, a dream so vivid, so longed for, that she had believed it to be real. In any case, it seemed like the best policy was simply to leave things as they were. If indeed she had been within touching distance of a life with Frasier, then the moment had passed, and perhaps it had less to do with her misdemeanor and much more to do with his waking up with cold feet and looking for a way to back out.

After some wrangling, she decided finally that she had to tell Maddie what was happening before John arrived home. It seemed too unfair not to, to expect the child to be robbed quite suddenly of someone she had come to care about, without a moment to prepare. Rose had been a lot older than Maddie when her mother had died, but still she remembered how she would have given anything to know that Marian was playing out her last days. To know, to savor every last moment with her, and to not waste a second on boredom or bad feeling. Perhaps it would be too much for Maddie to bear, but Rose had come to realize over the last few weeks that her daughter was really a remarkable person, coping with a world that must seem almost impossible to live in with a stoicism beyond her years.

“Granddad’s coming home,” Rose said to Maddie, who’d been making him an excessively colorful welcome home card earlier that morning. “Frasier and Tilda have gone to collect him. Want to help me make him some soup?”

“Yes!” Maddie said, jumping up, her hands smothered in
poster paint. “And then Granddad and I can get back to work again, and you can sort me out a school, and I can practice being good at friends.”

“I’m not sure he’ll be up to working, not in the barn,” Rose said. “He’s had an operation, so he’s still very sore and he’s very, very sick, Maddie.”

“I know,” Maddie said. “Ambulances don’t come for you unless you are very, very sick.”

“The thing is,” Rose said, handing Maddie some potatoes to peel, with no idea how to phrase what she needed to say, other than just saying it. “The thing is, Granddad won’t ever get better.”

“Well, he is old,” Maddie said. “Old people are slower.”

“No, I mean, he’s not ever going to be like he was before the ambulance came. He’s very ill, and . . . I thought you should know, you should be ready when he . . . because quite soon he . . .”

Rose had been unable to finish the sentence, sobs constricting her throat and tears streaming down her cheeks. Turning away from Maddie, she tried to hide her own grief, to keep it in check until there was time for it, but she failed.

“Granddad is going to die,” Maddie stated, rubbing the palm of her hand across Rose’s back. “How soon?”

“Soon,” Rose said. “We don’t know exactly. Hopefully he will have a few weeks, months even. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have told you.”

“It’s OK,” Maddie said quite calmly, picking up the potato peeler and setting about skinning the potatoes. She hadn’t spoken more than two words about it to Rose since, certainly not about how she felt, and Rose worried that she’d done the wrong thing in telling her, but when John arrived back, leaning heavily on Frasier, Maddie had gone directly to him and put her arms around his waist.

“I’m sorry about you dying, Granddad,” she said. “I love you.”

“Me too,” John said, masking his surprise with a gruff cough. “Me too.”

“Still,” Maddie said, taking his hand and holding it as Frasier helped him over to his armchair, “we’ve got weeks and weeks, months even, so let’s not think about it. OK?”

“OK,” John said, as he settled painfully into the chair and took the still wet card that Maddie handed him, a portrait of him, painting in his barn, looking exactly as grim and gruff as he did when he worked.

“It says get well soon,” Maddie said apologetically. “I didn’t know you were going to die when I made it.”

“It’s lovely,” John said, repressing a grim smile as he looked at his granddaughter. “Just like you.”

“Thanks,” Maddie said. “I’ve made you some soup too. Mum helped, slightly.”

Frasier and Tilda stayed, spooning the soup out of bowls, seated around John in his armchair. John ate very little, and at one point almost spilt what was left in his lap, as he nodded off, listening to Frasier talking about the value of exhibiting new work and how it enriched an artist’s life and reputation.

“Granddad!” Maddie’s voice roused him, as she saved the bowl from tilting too far on his tray and lifted it off his lap.

“I think perhaps I’d better go to bed,” John said, leaning his head against the back of the chair. “It’s these pills they’ve given me, I expect. I’ll give it a day or two and then see how I get on without them.”

“Dad, you can’t just stop taking them,” Rose said.

“She’s right,” Tilda said anxiously. “You can’t just ignore the doctors, John.”

“I can do what I bloody like. It’s my body,” John snapped. “I know I’d rather spend what time I’ve got left awake and not snoring my head off.”

“Granddad,” Maddie said, biting her lip, “if you go to sleep, you will wake up, won’t you?”

“I will do my best,” John promised her as Frasier helped him to his feet.

“I’ll watch you, then,” Maddie said. “Poke you if you stop breathing or anything.”

“Maddie,” John said gently, resting his palm on the top of her head, “what happened to not thinking about it?”

“I’m not thinking about it,” Maddie said. “I’m just being vigilant.”

“Here.” John reached into his pocket and pulled out a key. “You can have the barn as your studio now. I’m giving it to you. You go over there now and start working for both of us. That will be the best way to make sure I wake up again. I’ll be worrying about the mess you’ll be making in my barn too much not to.”

“OK!” Maddie said with delight, racing off at top speed without even pausing to close the cottage door behind her.

“I’m not really sure a seven-year-old should be given free rein over an entire barn,” Rose said anxiously, caught between her maternal worry and the look of joy on Maddie’s face.

“Nonsense,” John said, as he made his way into the bedroom with Frasier’s assistance. “Children are too coddled these days. Besides, running riot in a barn is better than sitting vigil over my deathbed, don’t you agree?”

“I really thought I was doing the right thing, telling her,” Rose said, making John comfortable as Frasier and Tilda discreetly left the room.

“And so do I. Children deserve honesty and respect. Another lesson I’ve learnt too late.” He leant back on the pillow, gazing out of the window to a view of almost solid rock, broken up only here and there with patches of growth. “Strikes
me that child’s grown up in a house so full of lies and artifice she’s hungry for truth, even if it is difficult. She’s learnt to shut herself away, disconnect herself from the world, like you have. Like I did. And it’s partly my fault she’s lived through what she has and believed it to be normal. I want you to protect her, Rose, but don’t lie to her. Don’t let her be shut away from the world like we were. There is too much joy in it to be missed. And that is the last thing I wanted for either of you.”

“Do you think I’ve ruined her?” Rose asked him. “I let her live that way. I believed she was immune to it all, because everything that happened, happened out of sight. It’s only since we got here, since I’ve seen her stop living constantly on the edge of her seat, that I’ve realized she went through it just as much as I did. I should have left so much earlier, the day she was born, long before she was born. Why didn’t I? Why wasn’t I strong enough?”

“I don’t think you should dwell on that,” John said, studying her face. “Maddie’s damaged, yes, and so are you. But you have a lifetime to repair that damage, and that’s what you need to focus on now. That’s what I need to know that you will be focusing on after I’m gone.”

Rose nodded. “I promise,” she said.

“I had hoped to die looking at the mountain peak,” he said drowsily, returning his gaze to the window. “Not its grubby roots.”

“I’m sorry,” Rose said.

“Don’t be.” John smiled at her, reaching for her hand. “I can’t manage the stairs all of a sudden and there it is. There’s nothing to be done about it. Thank you for making this neglected old room as pleasant as you have.”

Rose said nothing, sitting on the edge of the bed as she looked out the window at the wall of rock outside.

“Feeling trapped?” John asked her. “You know you don’t have to stay, don’t you? I don’t expect you to. You are under no obligation.”

“Yes,” Rose said, “I do feel trapped, but not by you or your mountain. I’m just trying to come to terms with the life that I have, the one that closes doors as soon as it opens them. That’s what I feel trapped by: my fate to only ever have who or what I want for the shortest of times. You, Mum, a happy marriage . . .” Frasier, she added silently.

“Don’t say that,” John said. “You have Maddie, and she is quite the most interesting child I’ve ever met. And although your mother is gone, and I soon will be, you will always have us. I wonder if I’ll see her again, afterwards. I do hope so. I would very much like to apologize to her for being such an arse.”

“I don’t think you’ll have to,” Rose said. “Mum forgave you long before she died. It was her own frailties that she never let up on.”

“Then I’ll apologize for that,” John said drowsily, his eyes fluttering. “I never met a finer woman than your mother. If I could have just loved her enough then I would have been a very happy man.”

He breathed out a long rattling breath as he drifted into sleep, and Rose waited for his chest to rise and fall again twice before she felt able to get up and go back to the living room.

Tilda was gone. Only Frasier remained, standing by the kitchen sink, looking out the window, the afternoon sunshine lighting up his face with golden promise, making him look very young, just exactly as he had the first time Rose had met him. She stood for a moment watching him, wishing she was free to go to him, touch his cheek and kiss him, just as she longed to do. Perhaps her feelings for him had been nothing more than pipe dreams when she arrived, but now, oddly perhaps,
since he’d withdrawn romantically she found she still loved him so much it ached and pulsated in every limb, every fiber of her body.

“Hello,” she said for want of anything better to say and needing to make her presence known somehow.

“Hello.” Frasier turned to her and smiled. “Tilda went. She said to call her if you needed anything. I think she finds this all rather hard, keeping her distance, being stalwart. She’s trying awfully hard to do the right thing by you.”

“I know,” Rose said. “I know I need to do the same for her, and I will.”

“I told her about the exhibition,” Frasier went on. “She thinks it’s a great idea and on that front I have cleared the schedule and got the PR people ready. So now we need to talk to your father, to get him to allow me to remove the work, photograph it, frame it, hang it, get it ready to be discovered.” He hesitated, smiling ruefully. “I was thinking that perhaps that part would come better from you?”

“Me?” Rose said, feeling daunted by the prospect. “I’m not sure. I promised Dad I wouldn’t look at his work before he was ready to show it to me. And I haven’t broken that promise yet. I think it should come from you.”

“Or how about both of us,” Frasier said warmly, “presenting a united front. And we can recruit Maddie too. He’s bound to be less angry with her as a buffer.”

Rose grinned. “He’d be glad to know that we are still intimidated by him.”

“I always will be,” Frasier said fondly. “I’ve never met another man like him.”

The two of them stood there in the late afternoon sunshine, smiling at each other for a moment longer, sensing the gulf of years stretching between them, now seemingly impossible to bridge.

“I should go,” Frasier said. “I’ve got this dinner.”

“Cecily will be waiting,” Rose added.

“No.” Frasier hesitated. “I ended things with Cecily. It wasn’t right to string her along. I didn’t love her, not as much as a man should love a woman. And judging by her reaction, I don’t think she loved me more than life itself either. If anything, she was almost relieved.”

“Oh,” Rose said, uncertain how to react. “It’s just I thought after . . . what happened.”

There was a difficult silence, neither of them knowing quite what to say next.

“I’ll be down tomorrow,” Frasier said finally. “I will be here every single day that I can be for your father, for as long as it takes.”