The bathroom was basic, although modern. Rose was shocked to see an old man’s seat, positioned above the toilet, to save her father from having to bend his knees too much when he sat on it. He was only sixty-four, which seemed very young to have to have a handle screwed into the side of the wall to help his knees. Perhaps it was the same mysterious ‘everyone’ who’d influenced him to get the bathroom moved inside at all, who was also future-proofing him against his advancing years. Was Frasier really the only person in his life? Rose wasn’t so sure. Despite being ramshackle and full of clutter, Storm Cottage was very clean and well-stocked. Rose couldn’t imagine that John either cleaned or went to the supermarket for his weekly shop. She certainly couldn’t picture Frasier in a pair of Marigolds, on his hands and knees scrubbing out the loo. So who was it then? Rose wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to know.
Coming down the stairs, Rose found her father sitting with his mug of tea in hand, another waiting for her on a small, hand-carved table in front of the cold grate of the fireplace, a plate of roughly cut sandwiches balanced on the arm of his chair.
‘What are you doing?’ Rose asked him. He was sitting with his legs outstretched, staring at the rough stone wall opposite.
‘Looking,’ John said, adding after a moment, ‘Seeing. Trying to think of a way to make you see why I did what I did.’
‘I don’t think I will ever understand,’ Rose replied.
‘I don’t think you have to,’ John said. ‘You just have to see.’
He paused for a moment, his body contracting as if he were physically fighting to get the words out of his mouth. Glancing in the direction of the barn, where Maddie was all alone, Rose hesitated, and sensing a now-or-never moment, sat down opposite him.
‘Soon after I … soon after I left … Broadstairs, I felt disconnected from not only what I had left behind, but also from myself.’ John spoke haltingly, as if the sound of his own voice was uncomfortable to listen to. ‘The vodka made me numb inside and out. I started drinking to kill the pain in my gut, but in the end I killed everything that was there. I couldn’t remember anything – how to feel, how to love, how to miss you, how to care. Not even for Tilda, who must have woken up one day miles from anywhere or anyone she’d ever known, and wondered what on earth she’d got herself into. The worst of it was I couldn’t even paint. I didn’t feel enough of anything to work. So I began to drink even more. There would be weeks when I was never sober.’
His tone was so matter of fact, so flat almost, that it made it all the harder for Rose to hear him admit that he didn’t, couldn’t care. That the drink had chipped away at every nerve ending until there was nothing left, only his passion for painting and collection of other people’s defunct hopes and dreams.
‘And now?’ Rose asked him carefully. ‘Now you’re sober, do you feel again?’
John sat back in his chair, staring into the cold grate, so still and silent that Rose wondered if he’d simply shut off from her question. But then, after a moment, he spoke.
‘I think I have forgotten how to feel,’ he said, turning his grey eyes on her. ‘Perhaps it’s too late now to do any more than acknowledge the people that I have hurt and admit responsibility. There is very little else I can do.’
A flood of words flew into Rose’s mouth, but she kept her lips very firmly shut. This was the most meaningful, important thing that he’d said to her since she’d found him. It wasn’t much, but it was another piece of him, another fragment. The sudden shocking desperate need for him to be her father would have to wait behind clenched teeth if she were ever to piece together what little was left of the man who had been her father, if she were ever to be able to salvage her fragments of him.
‘The work that you do, the paintings for Frasier, I mean – they aren’t inspired by what you’ve done, what you’ve been through. I don’t see the connection.’
‘Because there is no connection,’ John said, sitting suddenly forward in his chair. ‘Those … those posters are nothing more than a lifetime of not giving a damn, which now I find compelled to pay interest on.’ He paused, twisting his fingers into a knot. ‘I could help you and Maddie, financially, I mean. Give you something for a fresh start. Find you a new home. Help you with the rent, or a car until you get on your feet. I could do that, I have enough.’
‘So we would leave Millthwaite, you mean?’ Rose asked him quietly, without anger, because she could see he was trying to be something that he understood very little about. He was trying to be kind. ‘Buy back your solitude?’
John shook his head. ‘No, no, not at all. No, if you want to stay in Millthwaite, stay. I’m getting reasonably used to it and Madeline is a tolerable child, as far as children go.’
Rose took in a sharp breath, deciding that now it was her turn to be frank.
‘Can I be honest?’ she said. ‘I didn’t come here to find you. You were just here. When I came to Millthwaite it was because there was nowhere else for me to go. After a life of staying in one place, it was the only other place I’d ever thought about going. And I had some silly notion that this was one way of finding something that would make me understand my life, make me happy. When I found out that you lived here, I almost didn’t come to see you, I wasn’t sure I wanted to. That’s a terrible feeling, to not know if you even want to see your own father. What I’m trying to say is that I didn’t come for a reunion, or a final scene. I came because I had to, and you happened to be here, but now that I am here I realise that knowing you, in any way at all, is better than the alternative. Perhaps we might even be friends one day.’
John said nothing for a while and then eventually, ‘You could stay here. There is a small room. It’s full of junk, it would need clearing out, but if you wanted to …’
Rose held her breath, listening to the house creak and breathe around her as he waited for the answer.
‘I … I don’t think that is quite the right thing to do yet, do you? You need your space, not me under your feet and Maddie constantly questioning you.’
‘You’re right,’ John said, his expression hidden as he turned his face away from her. ‘Of course. I … I was trying too hard again. I admire you for not being taken in by it. Let me ask you something now.’ Rose waited. ‘What happened to make you run away to a place on the front of a postcard?’
Rose’s face crumpled inwards, and she turned away from him. ‘It’s too soon, it’s too soon to talk about that too,’ she said. ‘Just that I had a line that I promised myself I would not let be crossed again. And it was.’
John’s expression was immobile as he processed the information.
‘Well, whatever I can do,’ he said, ‘even if it might be very small, I will try to do it. I shall try to be some kind of father to you while I can.’
‘Oh, here you are, hello!’ Maddie pushed open the kitchen door, completely unaware of the tension and emotion that washed through the room, flooding out into the August sunshine. ‘I finished that canvas – what else is there to paint? Those sandwiches haven’t got butter in them, have they?’
When Rose returned to the B & B it was on her own. Feeling that there really wasn’t very much else she and John could talk about for now, she’d tried to get Maddie to leave with her for lunch. But Maddie had not wanted to. Her particular style of persistence, which Rose had often felt was based on Chinese water torture, meant that John had abandoned his painting to make her her own canvas, which was exactly her height squared, with the specific instruction that she was to paint something that would take at least a week. Maddie had been fascinated as she watched John measure her against a length of wood, sawing it into mitred corners, quickly assembling the basic frame, questioning him constantly about what it was doing next and how long it would take. For someone who didn’t much like conversation John was remarkably tolerant of Maddie’s relentless curiosity, even her habit of repeating questions a few minutes apart. He liked this, Rose had realised slowly, he liked talking about what he knew, and he particularly like
d the fact that he had a granddaughter to impart his knowledge to. Perhaps it was a primeval thing: after all these years in the wilderness John now had someone to keep his memory, his existence alive a little longer, just as he kept the relics of others who would otherwise now be long forgotten. As he stood the completed canvas against the back wall of the barn, next to Maddie’s other prolific offerings, Rose suggested that now might be a good time to leave.
‘But look!’ Maddie said, her face wrought with anxiety as she pointed at the tantalisingly blank canvas. ‘Look!’
‘You can’t paint on it yet,’ John said. ‘I have to prime it. It will take an afternoon to dry.’
‘I don’t want to wait an afternoon, I want to do it now!’ Maddie demanded furiously. Rose sighed; it was these outbursts that other people found so hard to understand, seeing her daughter as a spoilt brat. The truth was that Maddie really did need to paint now, at least in her world. Her understanding of the requirement of waiting to do what she wanted, or accepting that other people’s wants and needs might sometimes take preference over hers, had never really developed as well as it should, despite Rose’s constant attempts to explain the rules of life to her. This was why she played alone at school, never got invited back to any other little girls’ houses more than once, and why even her teacher seemed at her wits’ end with her most of the time. Not only did Maddie not understand the rules of social nicety, she also did not care about them.
‘Maddie …’ Rose began, feeling that familiar sense of awkwardness and ineffectuality creep up her spine.
‘You need to draw first anyway,’ John told Maddie, with a shrug. ‘All the great artists draw and draw for weeks before they start to paint. You haven’t drawn a stroke so far, very amateurish.’
‘Drawing is boring. I don’t draw, I paint,’ Maddie told him emphatically. John did not know that Maddie was not one to be swayed by reverse psychology if it conflicted with her idea about how things should be, either.
‘Here.’ John opened a large drawing chest, pulled out an A2-sized notebook and waved it at his work in progress. ‘These are my drawings for this painting. This is what you do if you are a real artist. Just painting splodges of colour, as lovely as they are, is actually very childish, but then again I suppose you are a child.’
Rose’s eyebrows shot skywards as she expected Maddie to be infuriated by what her daughter would certainly see as an insult, but instead Maddie seemed to consider what he said.
‘I’m not like other children,’ she said after a moment, with something like a touch of sadness.
‘Good,’ John said emphatically. ‘I don’t like other children.’
‘What should I draw then?’ Maddie asked him, climbing down from her position with unusual grace and ease.
‘Well, if your mother would let you, you could come out and do some drawing with me now. We’ll find a nice spot on the hillside and pick a view. You will be amazed how much movement, depth and texture you can get with one of these.’ John held up a pencil. ‘As long as you explain yourself to my wretched agent why I’ve wasted most of today on a demanding little girl, that is.’
‘Can I?’ Maddie asked Rose, who looked uncertain.
‘I’m not sure I should just leave you here …’ she said.
‘She’ll be perfectly safe,’ John said, a little affronted.
‘No, it’s not that, it’s just … do you really want to do this?’ She stared at John pointedly, giving him time to consider exactly what he’d just proposed.
‘I find that I do,’ John said. ‘It puts me in mind of late afternoons on the beach with you as a child. We would make drawings in the wet sand and then wait and watch as the tide washed them away.’
Rose found that she was unable to respond, that memory, long forgotten until that moment, was now suddenly so vividly present it took her breath away. ‘Let me take her out to draw. I’ll bring her to you in time for tea.’
‘I want to draw,’ Maddie said, in her usual forthright way.
‘OK,’ Rose said. ‘But will you indulge me and take that mobile phone you hate so much, just in case? Maddie knows my number.’
‘Very well,’ John sighed, going to his drawer, finding the phone and putting it in his pocket.
‘Right, well. So.’ Rose looked at Maddie, who was sitting on the floor poring over John’s sketchbook. ‘See you in a bit, then?’
She did not reply, of course.
Rose could not find Shona in her room, or Jenny in any of the places she usually frequented, but the sound of banging and bashing about, and the background fuzz of a distant radio playing told her they had to be somewhere in the building. After a little further investigation Rose found a sofa in the living room that normally sat across an unused doorway, pulled away, and the door swinging wide open. Stepping through a small, dingy hallway and feeling a little bit like she was crossing into Narnia, Rose opened a second door to find Shona and Jenny cheerfully stuffing bin bags with what looked like old clothes, books, and more.
‘Hello?’ Rose said. ‘What are you doing and where am I?’
‘This was Brian’s mum’s annexe,’ Jenny told her. ‘She died a couple of years back, and since then it’s been a junk room. Anything Brian’s not sure what to do with he’s put it in here. But I was thinking it’s a waste, all this space. Maybe it could be more rooms.’
‘Not that you are exactly fully booked as it is,’ Shona said mildly, winking at Rose as she stuffed some aged-looking curtains into a bin liner. But instead of her usual sharp-tongued reply Jenny stopped what she was doing and nodded.
‘You’re right there,’ she said sadly, looking around. ‘This place is on its uppers. When Eve used to be in here, we were a real busy little place. Not always fully booked, but almost always. I loved it, doing all those breakfasts, meeting all those people. Now, though, last couple of years and it’s like the world’s forgotten us. If you haven’t got a flat-screen TV on every wall, velvet wallpaper, and the word “boutique” attached to your name, no one wants to know.’
‘You could try updating a bit, perhaps?’ Rose suggested tentatively, thinking about the candlewick bedspreads.
‘I don’t know. I think I’m too old for all that modern nonsense, offering a choice of eggs at breakfast, herbal tea,’ Jenny said, wrinkling her nose, clearly horrified by the notion that the customer might even sometimes be right. ‘Eve was a terrible old cow, don’t get me wrong, she was the mother-in-law from hell, always making me run around like a blue-arsed fly, and whenever Brian was stood in front of her he turned into a blithering ten-year-old lad again, but she must have brought us some luck – or cursed us on her deathbed – because after she went, that’s when it all started to go wrong.’
‘Maybe she still could bring you luck,’ Shona said, picking up a framed photo that had been lying on its back, its glass filmed in dust. She cleaned it with the palm of her hand before showing it to Rose. It revealed a sepia print of a wedding photo, from around the 1930s, Rose guessed. A chubby-faced smiling young woman, in a long cream dress that trailed down the steps of the church, stood arm in arm with an equally well-built young man, who looked the spitting image of Brian.
‘I don’t see how,’ Jenny said. ‘We’ve got maybe another six months here, then we’ll have to sell up and live on what Brian brings in. It’s not that I mind living carefully, it’s just I like to be busy, and I had all the kids here. Oh, sod it, it’s just bricks and mortar, when all’s said and done.’
Rose looked around the annexe. It was a large single living room-cum-kitchen with a bedroom off it, and what she guessed must be a bathroom.
‘The pub was packed on gig night,’ she said thoughtfully.
‘What are you saying, that I should start a nightclub? I don’t think so!’ Jenny snorted.
‘No, I’m just saying, if you could think of something the local people would use as well as tourists … I bet gig night is what pays most of Albie’s bills.’
‘A lap dancing club,’ Shona offere
d, shimmying her shoulders. ‘I could be the star attraction.’
‘I did think of a café,’ Jenny said, ‘but the start-up cost is too much and there are ten a penny around here.’
‘What about a community space?’ Rose said. ‘I mean, do you have a village hall?’
‘Not any more,’ Jenny said. ‘They pulled it down a few years back. It was dangerous, apparently. Some old prefab that was meant to be temporary and then lasted fifty years. There was talk of rebuilding but nothing’s ever happened.’
‘Well, what if you just made it a place where … I don’t know, people could have parties, or knitting circles could meet, or my dad could take drawing and painting classes.’
‘Your dad teach a class? Never!’ Jenny snorted.
‘Never say never. He’s just elected to spend the afternoon with Maddie. Anything is possible,’ Rose said, pleased to see that she had surprised both the other women with her news. In truth, she’d been rather anxious about leaving Maddie with John, despite the girl’s keenness. He looked so … faint sometimes, as if he were barely there. Rose was worried that Maddie’s strident determination might be too much for him.
Dearest Rose Page 19