“I wasn’t ever!” Rose exclaimed.
“It’s just . . .” Jenny paused, as if weighing whether or not to say more. “He makes out he’s some gigolo type, but deep down he goes soft on a girl far too easily. I don’t want him to go soft on you.”
“There really isn’t any chance of that happening,” Rose assured her. “Nothing is going to happen between me and Ted. That’s the last thing on my mind.”
“Hey,” Shona called out from the dining room, “where’s the nearest town? I can’t stand seeing this poor kid dressed in hand-me-downs anymore, or you dressed up like mutton.”
“That’s rich, coming from you!” Rose called back. “I guess Carlisle is the nearest town.”
“Right, then, before we do anything else we’re going to buy you two some clothes,” Shona said, and Rose turned to watch her grinning at Maddie and ruffling her hair. “Maybe we can stretch to a bacon sandwich while we’re there.”
“Well, I suppose you do look like a refugee from a prison camp,” Jenny said, scrutinizing Rose’s hair once more, “and my Haleigh’s clothes are a bit young for you.” She held out a newly washed frying pan. “Here you are, if you want to do yourself some bacon, you can. Make sure you clean up after, though.”
“Thank you,” Rose said. “I will. Not that I’ll eat anything. I’m too nervous.”
“About talking to your dad?” Jenny asked.
“Yes,” Rose admitted. “I didn’t think I cared anymore. I honestly believed that I’d given up minding about him not being around at all, and God knows I shouldn’t. I didn’t even come here to find him. But I have, and the thing is, I think that maybe I do care. That I really, really do mind. That it turns out that I’ve been missing my dad for a long time. And that makes me nervous, because if I feel one thing for him, then the anger and hurt and pain will be bound to follow. And he’s already made it pretty clear that he doesn’t feel anything about me.”
“Now then,” Jenny said, her voice softening, “who’s to say he doesn’t feel the same?”
“Him,” Rose said simply. “He couldn’t have been more blunt.”
“When the kids were little,” Jenny said, “we had this old collie. Got her off a farmer who couldn’t use her anymore as a working animal. She’d got arthritis, you see, wasn’t quick enough on her toes. She was an old girl, Ginnie, but had plenty of years left in her so Brian brought her home for the kids. And they loved her. Fussed over her like nothing I’ve ever seen. We all did.” Jenny smiled fondly as the memory played out in her mind’s eye. “And then one day Ginnie got out, which normally wouldn’t matter round here, but she got out on the one day this big old lorry was hurtling through the village. I could hear her cries from upstairs. I had to take her to the vet, and there was nothing for it, she had to be put down. It was my fault, you see. I left the back gate open. And I was heartbroken—not that you’d ever know it. I acted as if for all the world I didn’t give two hoots that Ginnie had passed on. The kids were howling, Brian was distraught, and I was as hard as nails, tough as old boots. It’s just a dog, I’d say.”
“Your point is?” Rose asked her uncertainly.
“Guilt,” Jenny said. “It makes you act in very strange ways.”
• • •
A morning of shopping in Carlisle was not quite enough to take Rose’s mind off everything, but it went some way to establishing her fledgling sense of self a little more. Shona picked stuff for her to try on that she never would have dreamt of wearing before: skinny jeans, bright summer dresses, and tops that Rose almost couldn’t bear to look at, at first, just as she almost couldn’t bear to look at her radically altered reflection when she tried them on. Then after a while she stopped thinking of the slender blonde in the mirror as herself, and it was almost like she was dressing up a stranger, picking and choosing for another person entirely. As soon as Rose saw it that way, she stopped letting Shona choose for her and began to make her own careful selection of the few things she decided she could afford until, when she picked her final shopping bag up off the counter, Rose at least knew what the new her looked like, even if she still wasn’t at all sure what it felt like to be her. It brightened Maddie too, as she led her mother around the shops, doing her best to replace her absent wardrobe with items identical to those left at home, insisting on ditching her boy’s jeans for good in the changing room and wearing her new Hello Kitty ones from that moment on.
They were in good spirits when they got back to the B & B in the early afternoon, and for a few fleeting hours it had felt to Rose like she really was on holiday. And then she remembered she was due to visit her father again. Even in her new hand-picked jeans and dark green scooped-back T-shirt, Rose was sure she wasn’t completely prepared for that.
Shona looked pale and sickly as Rose prepared, with a definite air of doom, to go and see her father. She wasn’t sure how much she’d drunk last night, but Shona must have had more. Her brightness of the morning was fading rapidly and her normally tanned complexion was decidedly sallow.
“I like your hair,” Shona said as Rose collected her bag and waited for Maddie, who was fetching Bear and her Egyptians book. “It suits you. Which is really lucky, because I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. Who knew that sensible little Rose could be so wild? Next time you get drunk, let’s not hang around any tattoo parlors . . .”
“I’m thinking maybe a double nipple piercing next time,” Rose said, smiling weakly, preoccupied with what was about to come.
“Look, babe,” Shona said, holding the car door open for Maddie to scramble into the backseat. “Don’t let the fucker see you’re upset. Don’t let him have the power. You and me both know it’s the tears that give them the power.”
Rose hesitated as she opened the driver’s door. “That’s our men, Shona. Not all men are like that.”
Shona shrugged. “If you say so. Just don’t let him see you cry.”
“OK,” Rose said, reaching out to touch her friend’s arm, suddenly reluctant to leave her. Every now and then she’d get glimpses of what life was really like for Shona, lonely, difficult, a constant struggle to keep her head above water, and all she wants is someone to make everything all right, even if it’s only temporary. It was a yearning that Rose understood. “Should I stay?”
“Stay? Why?” Shona looked puzzled. “Go on, sod off. I’m going to spend the afternoon tormenting the old bag; I’m cool. Stop trying to get out of it and fuck off.”
“Right.” Rose nodded. “Wish me luck and I’ll tell you all about it at the gig later,” she said. “Over a lemonade.”
“Don’t be so fucking ridiculous,” Shona said, rolling her eyes at Maddie. “The only thing that’s going to cure this hangover is vodka.”
• • •
Rose found that her stomach was in knots as she pulled the car into the muddy yard. It was a brighter day today. A certain golden light reflected off the relentless steel-gray clouds, bringing sharp contrast to the early August day. In this oddly surreal light Storm Cottage sat like a bright white jewel in the crook of the mountain, looking much less grim and cold than it had the previous day. Rose turned off the engine and sat for a while, watching the dark, empty windows of the cottage as Maddie climbed into the front passenger seat to sit alongside her, offering her own particular brand of solidarity.
“It looks like a troll’s house,” she said after several moments of observation. This wasn’t a good thing. Maddie had developed a genuine fear of trolls after a particularly graphic storytelling session at the local library with some wannabe actress who seemed to think that Storytelling Saturday was a chance of impressing the Royal Shakespeare Company. For months Maddie’s debilitating fear of trolls and where they might be lurking had prevented Rose from doing anything with her that didn’t involve school and home, and home only after every nook and cranny had been proved to be free of any child- and goat-eating troll.
“Trolls only live under bridges, remember?” Rose said, referring to their second visi
t to the library, where a very kind librarian put on her serious-looking glasses especially in order to assure Maddie that it was a fact that trolls only live under bridges in Scandinavia and aren’t indigenous to the UK at all, even producing a book to that effect. It had seemed to work in quelling fact-hungry Maddie’s concerns up until now, and Rose hoped it would hold a little longer. The last thing she needed was to be managing her daughter’s irrationalities when she had so many of her own to contend with.
“And besides,” Rose continued, looking across the yard to where an arc of bright electric light was escaping from the barn, its door slightly ajar, “we’re not going into the cottage. We’re going to the barn. Only nice things can be found in barns.”
“Mum, I’m scared,” Maddie said, staring at the barn, which imposed itself starkly against the mountain that rose behind it.
“Me too,” Rose said.
“Are you?” Maddie twisted in her seat to look at Rose, suddenly fascinated. “But you are a grown-up.”
“I know,” Rose said. “Will you look after me?”
“OK, then,” Maddie said, the sudden novelty of responsibility banishing her own worries in an instant.
Steeling herself, Rose got out of the car, Haleigh’s slightly too large and downtrodden fake Uggs sinking immediately into the mud. Going round the car, she opened the door and took Maddie’s hand, allowing her daughter to march her across the mire towards the barn, her heart beating furiously as she approached. Had John even remembered that she was coming back today?
With Maddie’s hand in hers, Rose ventured into the barn.
John was standing with his back to them, his nose millimeters away from the surface of a huge canvas which covered almost an entire wall, his white-clad figure standing out like a bolt of lightning from the mass of color. Completely absorbed in what he was doing, he was unaware that he had visitors, and Rose was content to let it stay that way for a few minutes more as she watched him at work, instantly transported back in a vivid flash to her childhood: the scent of paint, the touch of it, oily and viscous beneath her fingers, breathing in the heady fumes of her father’s secret world as she’d watched him working, feeling closer to him as he ignored her than she often did when she had his attention. Rose had always known, even when she was very small, that when her father was working, nothing else existed for him, and when he wasn’t working he longed to be. Even when they were walking on the beach, or when he would swing her around and around so fast the world became a blur of color, she knew he would rather be at his easel. How he would hate this new distraction.
Forgetting her caretaking duties, Maddie wriggled her fingers free from Rose’s tight grip, taking a few steps forward to watch what John was doing, clearly fascinated but making no attempt to approach him.
Caught in a paralysis of uncertainty as to what to do next, Rose looked at her surroundings, forcing herself into the present moment, determined to be the adult woman who’d broken away from her marriage, traveled hundreds of miles, and cut her hair, and not the little girl who’d do anything for a few seconds of her father’s attention.
It came as no surprise to her that the building, as shabby as it had looked on the outside, had had more money spent on it than what she had seen of the ramshackle old cottage. It had been divided into two by the white plasterboard partition wall that the work in progress was leaning against, the farther room secured behind a white padlocked door. The plastered walls had also been whitewashed, and long skylights had been cut into the high ceiling to allow in the maximum amount of natural light. When, like today, this was in short supply, there were huge daylight lamps plugged in all around, bathing the room in artificial sunlight and giving it a dreamlike, surreal quality. To their left, a stack of huge blank canvases, some taller than her father, stretched and ready to be worked on, were leaning against the far wall, and one work, a curiously disjointed version of the landscape that enveloped them, completed with her father’s signature, still glistening with the thick slick of fresh paint, rested against another.
“Your style has changed,” Rose said, surprising herself and causing John to start.
He had been silently regarding his work, his long arms wrapped around his chest as if he were hugging himself. Still clutching himself, he half turned to look at her, and if he was shocked by her appearance his expression did not register it. Despite her best intentions, Rose felt acutely the same sense of trepidation and uncertainty she had had when, as a little girl, she’d crept into his studio, even though her mother used to warn her not to, crawling along the dusty floorboards of the converted garage where he was working, sitting at his feet, watching in contented silence as he created universes with his brushes. Sometimes he wouldn’t notice she was there for hours, and then when he did, he’d pick her up and twirl her round until she was giddy with laughter. Then he’d throw down his brushes and take her to the beach to look for “interesting things” until well past teatime and bedtime, and any time a little girl should be out rooting around in sand and stones at all. Other times he’d see her creeping up on him and settle her at a table with her own little piece of board, brushes, and a palette full of fat blobs of color, telling her she could stay as long as she was quiet. And sometimes, just every now and then, the sight of her would make him furious. He’d pick her up, his grip pinching her arms, and march her back into the house to deposit her at her mother’s feet, raging all the while at the useless mother and pointless wife who utterly failed to understand his need to work in peace. As he slammed the door shut, Rose would run to it, pressing her palms against the glass as he strode back down the garden to his studio, her sobs muffled behind the closed door. And yet she never blamed him for his taciturn fury, not once, no matter how precarious her place in his affections could be. It took Rose a very long time to blame him at all, to realize it was John who had taught her always to feel like an impostor. And now, when she had crept up on him in his studio again, would he throw her in the air and kiss her, or throw her out? This time she knew the answer.
“How has it changed?” John asked her, choosing not to acknowledge Maddie, who was inching closer to the painting, ignoring the man as she was seemingly fascinated with the image. Rose found it infinitely harder to think what to say next.
“It’s friendlier than I remember. Less . . . like you. And you can tell what it is. I can only think of a few pieces like that from before.” Two pieces, to be precise: his painting of Millthwaite, which she had kept all those years, and one of Tilda, the woman he’d left her for, a painting that Rose had happily let Richard throw into the trash with the rest of her father’s things, soon after they were married. What paintings were there of her now? Rose wondered. What markers of their life together? Rose wasn’t sure if she wanted Tilda to be part of John’s life or not. It would seem like an awfully cruel twist if he no longer knew the woman he’d ripped her life apart for, if he’d discarded her as easily as he had his first family, and yet Rose was hoping that she wouldn’t appear carrying tea and calling her “dear.” John had yet to mention her, and Rose decided not to ask.
“It’s more commercial, is what you mean,” John conceded, untouched by the barbs in her comment. “This is the work that pays the bills. My real work I keep elsewhere.”
“I think this is much easier to look at.” Rose gestured at the work, finding it rather beautiful. “I like it.”
The hint of a smiled played around John’s mouth. “It’s often the people with no taste who have all the money,” he told her.
“I clearly have no taste or money,” Rose said, his words stinging her pride, even though she was certain they weren’t intended as an insult. “So, after everything you’ve done for the sake of your artistic integrity, all the lives you’ve ruined for your work, you’ve given up and started painting picture postcards?”
The words shot out of her mouth like a bullet from a gun, far more pointed than she had intended them to be, her desire to strike back at him greater than her restraint.
“Funny, I didn’t notice that you were too concerned with integrity when last I saw you.” Rose walked a little nearer to him, searching his face for any trace of the father who used to take her beachcombing and, finding none, wondered if he even remembered the last time he’d left her sitting on the stairs as he cheerfully said goodbye. This would be a losing battle, Rose was sure of that. No matter how much she fought for him to care and remember, he would not let it happen, perhaps because he couldn’t do either, and yet, even though she knew she should turn on her heel and walk away from what would certainly be a painful and disappointing experience, she could not.
“Well, anyway,” she said, struggling to regain her composure, “this is Maddie. She is your granddaughter.”
John said nothing and, without even glancing at the child, he returned his gaze to the canvas.
“Aren’t you going to say hello at least?” Rose asked him tightly, much less able to bear the slighting of her daughter than she was when it came to herself.
“I recall agreeing to answer your questions,” John said coolly, “and I emphatically remember saying that I do not wish for a family reunion of any description. I told you, Rose, you will not find that here.”
“I do not wish for a family reunion of any description either,” Maddie said with such calm certainty that John glanced down at her for a moment. “I just wanted to look at you. You look old and quite dirty. I’m not really interested in you. But I do want to know what that paint feels like between your fingers. It looks much more slimy than poster paint. I like how it stands up, like icing from the cardboard. And sort of swirls together instead of mixing. Tell me how you mix it up but can still see the separate colors.”
John took a step back, his brows raised as he observed his granddaughter.
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