‘Really?’ she said, unsure what to make of the invitation. This was the man who only yesterday had told her there was nothing for her, at least not from him. He’d been so clear about it, and nothing very much could have changed in the last few hours. Why was he here, really?
‘I looked at her work again this morning,’ John said, as if it were something he did every day – meet a grandchild, give her a paintbrush. ‘Really quite impressive, intuitive, interesting. I wondered if it was a fluke or if she has some talent. I’d like to see more. The more time the better, and so … I came.’
‘Oh, I see,’ Rose said, feeling a flare of jealousy. John had always been very appreciative of her efforts as a child, but only in the way that any adult will nod and smile and tell his child how wonderful her drawing was; he had never been this keen with her. Still, she reminded herself, that was not the point. The point wasn’t why he was here, it was merely that he was here.
‘It’s talent,’ Maddie told him, with self-assurance. ‘I’ve already read the whole of this book and now I know everything about colour theory.’
‘All that theory is tosh,’ John told her. ‘Nothing can teach true talent. That book was written by some old soak who’d do anything to pay for his next drink. Take it from me, I know.’
‘Oh, well, anyway I am very talented,’ Maddie said. She pushed her half-completed reproduction of a colour wheel across the table towards him. ‘Look. And yes, I do want to come and paint. I want to come now, I’m ready.’
Maddie stood up, still in her pyjamas, 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, emphasising the last word.
‘I’m interested in her ability,’ John replied, looking out of 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.’
‘My name is Maddie,’ Maddie said, appearing in Jenny’s grandson’s bright green Ben 10 T-shirt, and a pair of red pyjama bottoms, picking John’s hand up again instantly. ‘Did you know red and green are complementary colours, that means …’
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 annexe 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 colour, 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 colour. Sometimes she painted things, but mostly just colours, 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 ready 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, searching for a conversation opening. 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, an
d 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 of 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 and borrow 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 room-cum-kitchen, 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 this time 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 coloured 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, 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 jaw line, 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 forgive you.’
John leant his head back on the chair and simply nodded.
‘There’s only one toilet,’ he said, gesturing behind him. ‘You’ll find it upstairs. It used to be outside. I was quite happy with it where it was but then Frasier made me move it – something about my age, no doubt. Whole load of fuss and nonsense, if yo
u ask me. People in and out for days, messing the place up. But everyone seemed to think it was important.’
‘Everyone? I thought you didn’t talk to other people, let alone worried about what they thought,’ Rose said, shutting the pantry door behind her.
‘I don’t. But what I have learnt over the years is that sometimes giving in is the only way to get a quiet life,’ John said. He drew his closed fist from out of his pocket and opened it, revealing four or five twenty-pound notes unfurling in his palm. ‘I didn’t want to say this in front of Maddie, but I thought, what with things being the way they are, you might need some money, for the B & B.’
‘No, thank you,’ Rose said, feeling a little uncomfortable at the gesture. ‘I have enough for now. I had a savings account. I emptied it on my way up here, so I’m OK for now. I really don’t want to take your money. It doesn’t feel right.’
John said nothing, but he looked a little hurt, as if he felt rejected. His offer of money was his only demonstrable way of trying to show her that he cared for her.
‘Well, then,’ he said, stuffing the notes back into his pocket. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’
Upstairs, Storm Cottage was much smaller than its large, long ground-floor footprint. The first floor was probably an afterthought, added much later to the original cottage. There was a small square hallway with three doors leading from it. The first door, left slightly ajar, was obviously her father’s bedroom, consisting of nothing more than a bed, with stacks of books and piles of magazines all around it and a single naked bulb hanging from the ceiling. The only other ornament was an assortment of amber plastic pill bottles lined up along the thick windowsill, probably collected over the years, another relic of his life, carefully catalogued.
The second door was the boxroom, barely more than six foot square, and filled with clutter, so much so that she could only open the door a few inches, enough to be able to glimpse its hoard of hidden treasures. Rose peered through the gap, intrigued by the things that John kept, longing to be able to climb into the tiny space and explore it, like a genuine Egyptian tomb, filled to the brim with relics that meant something only to him. God only knew what was in there, what oddities he had collected on his haphazard journey through life. What if she found something, some small thing saved from his life with her and Mum, a photograph or object, some small pointless token to sum up an entire life? Or worse, what if she found nothing at all to show that Rose and her mother had ever been a part of John Jacobs’ life? Suddenly overcome by a confusion of motives, Rose drew the door firmly to a close, afraid of what demons might lurk in the tiny room. John was right, they couldn’t just be close again. If they were to achieve any kind of affection for each other at all, it would be a long process, full of pain, blame and recrimination, and one that either one of them might not be willing or able to complete.
Dearest Rose Page 18