Dearest Rose

by Rowan Coleman

  ‘I don’t want it if it isn’t my bread,’ Maddie said, referring to the only brand of sliced bread that she liked to eat.

  Rose closed her eyes for a moment and took a breath. Really, when she’d decided to run away from her home and husband, she perhaps should have given more thought to Maddie’s very particular dietary requirements. ‘Fussy’ was how her teacher referred to her at school, but what she didn’t realise was that anything different on her plate caused Maddie real anxiety.

  ‘Just try it, for me. You never know, you might like it,’ Rose smiled encouragingly.

  ‘I won’t if it’s not my bread,’ Maddie said miserably, adding as she trailed after Rose down the stairs, ‘When will it be OK to go home again? Before school starts back, after the holidays?’

  Rose didn’t have the heart to tell her the answer was never.

  They discovered the dining room after opening a series of doors that led off the main hallway, finding first a guest sitting room, dominated by a huge doll’s house encased in glass, which Rose had to drag Maddie away from, and then an office containing a desk covered in piles of paper, with an ancient, almost historical PC sitting on top of it.

  ‘This isn’t a hotel, you know,’ Jenny greeted Rose and Maddie as they finally made it into the small dining room, with about six tables all neatly laid, despite the absence of other guests.

  ‘Well, it sort of is,’ Brian said, winking at Rose as he picked up his keys, and kissed Jenny goodbye, before heading for the door.

  ‘I’ve got too much to do without waiting around for people to deign to get up!’

  ‘We didn’t expect you to wait,’ Rose said. ‘I’d have just taken Maddie out for breakfast.’

  ‘You will not,’ Jenny said, pointing at the table next to the window in a clear command to sit. ‘Can you imagine? No, tea and toast will be through in a minute. And what about you, young lady? Would you like a glass of milk?’

  ‘I don’t like milk,’ Maddie said.

  ‘Well, orange juice then?’ Jenny asked her, and Maddie nodded.

  ‘Do you mean yes please?’ Jenny chided her. Maddie nodded again.

  Rose rubbed her hands over her face, pushing her long hair back as she reached into her skirt pocket and took out the postcard. Pushing Maddie’s book across the table towards the little girl, hoping its contents would distract her from her toast, she let herself read the short message on the back for a moment, following the familiar swirls and loops of the handwriting that she had come to know by heart over the years. And then she turned it over and looked at the picture on the front, which had become just as familiar. A reproduction of an oil painting, Millthwaite from a Distance by John Jacobs. This small, slight piece of card with a neatly written note inscribed on the back of it was the only reason she had run away to here, which seemed crazy if she even thought it, let alone said it out loud, but it was true.

  Frasier McCleod, the person who had written the note, was the reason that she had come to Millthwaite, although she had no idea where he was, or even who he was really. That card, this place, were the only links she had with him and the possibility that had been haunting her since she had met him once, more than seven years ago, for less than an hour: that he might, just might, feel the same way about her as she did about him. That in that one and only meeting of less than an hour, when Rose had been long married and very pregnant, she might just have met the love of her life.

  Rose held her breath as Jenny plonked down a plate of toast, and Maddie picked it up, eyeing it suspiciously as she touched it to her lips, licked it, and then nibbled the tiniest crumb off the corner, before taking a full bite.

  ‘Delicious!’ Maddie said, nodding at Jenny, who also put down a small glass of juice. ‘Thank you very much, you are most kind.’

  ‘You are very welcome,’ Jenny said, a little put off by Maddie’s sudden burst of good manners, but that was Maddie. It wasn’t that she didn’t know how to behave, it was just that most of the time she didn’t see the point.

  ‘Do you know this postcard?’ Rose plucked up the courage to ask Jenny before she bustled back to the kitchen to resentfully fry bacon. ‘The painting of the village?’

  Jenny nodded and then pointed at the wall above Rose’s head, where an exact, but larger, reproduction of the same painting was hanging.

  ‘You’ll find one like that in most houses round here,’ Jenny said. ‘It’s the closest Millthwaite’s ever come to being famous – well, unless you count that one time we were on Escape to the Country. Still, it’s made Albie Simpson more money than he needs.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Rose asked her, twisting in her chair to get a better look at the print. It was a bold and confident painting, almost as if the artist had been bored when he painted it, restless and eager to be onto the next thing, dashing it off as an afterthought, and yet, for all its carelessness, it was very beautiful.

  ‘The artist, John Jacobs, he was a heavy drinker, a real boozer, never sober. A few years back he turned up at the pub and offered Albie his painting of the village in exchange for a bottle of whisky. Albie – who’s no better than he should be, if you ask me – took it because he fancied the look of it over his bar. And that’s where it sat, until about four years ago. Then all of a sudden this fancy-looking feller from over the border turned up and offered Albie five thousand for it! Pounds!’

  Jenny waited for Rose to be either scandalised or shocked, her face registering clear disappointment when she was neither.

  ‘Well, Albie turned him down, don’t know why – he must have been drunk as a dog. Or not, because the bloke doubles his offer on the spot without blinking an eye. And he said he’d throw in a print of it to replace the original if Albie shook on the deal there and then. So Albie did the deal, the man got the painting and Albie got his money.’ Jenny pressed her lips together, shaking her head.

  Rose looked down from the painting, running the tips of her fingers over the writing. A well-dressed man with an interest in John Jacobs, willing to pay what it took to secure one. That could be him. That could be Frasier McCleod. All she had to do to be one step nearer to finding out where he was, was to talk to the landlord, who might still have a number or an address for him, and then … And then what?

  Rose bit her lip as Jenny talked on over her head, entirely oblivious as to whether or not Rose was listening.

  And then turn up on Frasier’s doorstep, and say, what? ‘Hello, remember me? You came to my house once, years ago, looking for some information. I was crying, you were kind to me. We talked for a while, and the only other thing I ever heard from you is written on the back of a postcard. A postcard that I have treasured every single day since. Oh, and by the way, I think I love you. You can take out a restraining order on me now, if you like.’

  Rose blinked as the foolishness of what she was doing washed over her with a wave of icy-cold reality. This was madness, a crazy teenage wild-goose chase, in which she’d selfishly involved her daughter. Frasier McCleod hadn’t written her a coded love letter, he’d written her a thank-you note, a polite little formality that somehow she’d turned into some grand forbidden passion. What on earth was she doing here? And yet she couldn’t go home, she couldn’t take Maddie back to the home that she knew, where she could eat her favourite bread, or back to the nice teaching assistant in school who sat next to her and helped her keep up, and played with her at break time when no one else would. There was no way she could go home. A postcard, a painting of Millthwaite, might be why she was here, so far from home and following the thread of a fantasy that was bound to unravel to nothing as soon as it was pulled, but it was not the reason she’d run away.

  ‘Anyway, old Albie was laughing on the other side of his face when the painting sold for four times as much, a year or so later. Turned out that the man who sold it was some arty-farty type from Edinburgh. Made a packet on it, and has made a ton more besides since he started selling the old git’s other stuff. That bloody John Jacobs, sitting pretty on all that
money. You know what I say? I say it’s a shame that he sobered up otherwise maybe we all would have had a chance of getting hold of one of his paintings. I know I’d have swapped him a full English for one.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Rose asked her, suddenly hooked back into her stream of words, a cold wash of shock drenching her in sudden shudders.

  ‘Well, he lives up the road, doesn’t he?’ Jenny said, her expression mirroring the look of shock on Rose’s face, as she saw the impact that piece of information was having on her guest. ‘John Jacobs, he’s lived up there for almost ten years now, the last three of them sober, by all accounts. We used to see him a lot in the village, in the pub, but not so much any more, which is a good job, if you ask me, the miserable old bugger. He’s rolling in cash, he is, but does he ever do anything for his community? This village is dying on its feet and he’s quite content to sit up there like a king in his castle, not caring what other people are thinking.’

  ‘That sounds like him,’ Rose said slowly, turning away from Jenny’s hawklike eyes to watch Maddie, her head close over her book, Bear sitting demurely on the table as Rose took the news in, reeling and dizzy. Why it had never occurred to her that the artist might paint the place he lived in, she didn’t know, but it hadn’t. Not until that moment. And now she had no idea how to react.

  ‘Why, do you know him then? Old Jacobs?’ Jenny asked her.

  ‘Do I know him?’ Rose said thoughtfully. ‘No, I don’t suppose I do. Although perhaps I ought to. He is my father, after all.’

  Chapter Two

  WHEN SHE WAS very little her father had used to take her for walks on the beach, in the summer, just as the sun was setting. They’d sit on the sand and pick out the colours in the sky, making up names for every nuance between red and gold. Rose remembered knowing, with total certainty, that John loved her the best, more than anyone else in the world; more than her mother, even. And she remembered what a wonderful feeling that was, that closeness between them filling her with a sense of complete safety, so that nothing ever frightened her. John was a tall man, with long arms and legs, and fingers that seemed to flay wildly and splay as he talked, animating his words, continually wanting to tell the world what he was thinking, because he was certain that the world would care. Rose cared, Rose listened to every word he said, drinking in his wisdom; she was his acolyte.

  His thick black shock of hair was long and unbrushed, and there was always stubble on his chin, which Rose liked to rub her cheek against when she hugged him. He wore the same pair of glasses that he’d had since he was fourteen years old, round Lennon spectacles, which didn’t suit his angular face at all, and his clothes and skin were always smeared and stained with paint. Their embraces were always scented with the linseed oil he used to mix with his pigments and Rose remembered how the three of them – John, her mother, Marian, and she – would spend Saturday mornings in her parents’ big bed, laughing and talking, eating toast and making crumbs. Like in most childhood memories, the sun always seemed to be shining, the sky was always blue, Marian was always smiling and John was endlessly fascinating, weaving a world around them that made Rose feel special. She wasn’t like the other little girls at school, the ones whose dads had jobs and came home after bedtime. Her father was magical, beguiling, exciting and adoring. Yes, for the early part of her life, Rose certainly felt like the luckiest little girl in the world to have a father who was so very interesting. Of course, she hadn’t known until later, much later, that John was drunk most of the time.

  The last time she had seen him, Rose was nine years old.

  The idyll that she believed she existed in didn’t blow up overnight, rather it wore away, week after week, year after year, and as Rose grew a little older she noticed that the layer of gilt that John had painted over their lives was gradually rubbing away, revealing the rough darkness beneath. He no longer smelt of paint, but instead the sour scent of whisky was always on his breath. His outbursts of joy had become dark, dangerous episodes when he was just as likely to lash out at Rose for being in the wrong place at the wrong time as he was at her mother. Rose became accustomed to turning up the TV when her parents were screaming at each other, and she went into the garden to play when her mother was weeping, her head buried in her arms, at the kitchen table. And she never climbed into their bed any more on a Saturday morning, because her father wasn’t there.

  The morning he had left was just as bright and as sunny as every other day that Rose remembered. The sun streaming in through the stained-glass window in the door imprinted a hazy shimmering coloured pattern on the floorboards in the hall. John had sat her down on the bottom of the stairs, and, crouching in front of her, taken her hands in his.

  ‘I’ve got to go, Rosie,’ he said.

  Rose remembered mostly being irritated with him: he never called her Rosie, not ever. Why start now?

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘I’m going away, to live in a different place. Me and your mum, we just … well, I’ve got to go. So … but … you will still be my Rosie and –’

  ‘I’m not your Rosie,’ Rose said, frowning deeply. There was nothing about this red-eyed, slurring man that she recognised, not even his voice. ‘When are you coming back?’

  ‘I’m not coming back,’ he said, holding her gaze, unflinching in that moment.

  ‘But I’ll see you?’ Rose remembered the tremble in her voice, as the reality of what was happening began to dawn on her. Yet she was determined not to cry. John hated it when she cried.

  ‘Course you will,’ John said. ‘You’ll see me all the time, Rosie-Ro.’

  He leant forward and kissed her wetly in the centre of her forehead. Rose wanted to put her arms around him, cling onto him and beg him not to go. But even then, even at nine years old, she had known that her father would not stay for her. That, as much as he loved her, he did not love her enough for that.

  ‘I’ll see you really soon.’ He’d winked and pointed at her as he’d picked up his bag and closed the front door behind him.

  That was the last time that Rose had seen her father.

  ‘Who’d have thought that miserable old beggar would have a daughter?’ Jenny had abandoned any pretence of being a hostess and had sat down at the table with Maddie and Rose and a fresh pot of tea. ‘I can’t imagine any woman letting that miserable old sod get close enough. He looks like a tramp, smells like one too.’

  ‘I wouldn’t really know,’ Rose said, intensely uncomfortable about having to talk about something that still hurt her so deeply. The news that her father was nearby was shocking, terrifying, eclipsing everything else that had happened in the last few hours, and even her postcard. If she’d pictured him at all after he’d left, which she’d tried very hard not to do, it was as a nebulous thing, more of an idea of the man she had used to know and trust, existing somewhere, but nowhere real or solid. She never thought of him with a home, a house, and even though she knew he’d left with another woman, she never thought of them as enduring, of the chances of him having another life, another family, more children even. Rose took a sharp inward breath as the realisation that she could have half-sisters and -brothers dawned on her.

  ‘So, John Jacobs is your father, but he’s not the reason you came here?’ Jenny questioned her, her head tilted to one side.

  ‘Not really.’ Rose shifted in her seat. ‘Well, I knew that he’d painted this postcard. But I didn’t expect to actually find him here. I don’t really know what I expected to find.’

  ‘So why are you here then?’ Jenny asked her, clearly not one for tiptoeing around an issue.

  ‘I just had to get away, and I’ve been looking at this painting for so long. This was the first place I thought of. It seems random, I know …’ How could Rose explain that there was only ever one place she would be able to run away to, even if it was one she knew so little about?

  ‘Get away, as in on the run, or get away, as in needed a bit of a break?’

  Rose thought that strictly speaking bot
h of those things were true.

  ‘You know how things can get sometimes,’ Rose said, nodding at Maddie, in the hope that Jenny would take the hint and change the subject. Jenny beamed, hugging her mug of tea to her chest, clearly delighted to have something so fascinating land literally on her doorstep.

  ‘I wish my Brian was here. He’ll be gobsmacked when I tell him we’ve got John Jacobs’ daughter staying. He will. You’ll be able to knock him down with a feather. So he abandoned you, did he, the old bastard? When you were little?’

  ‘I suppose he did,’ Rose said reluctantly, not used to talking about it.

  ‘And you never saw a penny of all that money, I’ll bet, did you?’ Jenny said, arming herself for a morning of gossip. ‘The tight old git.’

  ‘When he left, his work didn’t make him any money. We lived on my mum’s salary, mostly.’

  ‘So he bled the poor woman dry and then dumped her for a new model.’ Jenny was compiling her version of events at lightning speed.

  Rose thought about Tilda Sinclair, the ‘new model’, also an artist, who had posed for her father. Statuesque, stunning, with a mass of midnight hair, and navy-blue eyes. She wasn’t a newer model, she wasn’t younger, thinner or more beautiful than Marian had been. She was just different, in every way. Where Marian worked in an office nine to five, Tilda was a creator who sat for her father during the day, and worked on her own art all night. Marian was always neatly turned out, slender and fair-haired. Tilda was a voluptuous woman, who oozed fleshy curves, which looked like they might envelop you entirely. Rose had never known Tilda, so when she thought of her it was as this siren, this irresistible creature that had lured her father away from his family without a backward glance. Had her father bled Marian dry? In a way, Rose thought, feeling her stomach clench as it always did when she thought of her mother. After all, in fewer than ten years after he’d left, she was dead.