“So you sell these?” Rose asked Frasier, who, she became aware, was scrutinizing her rather more closely than the paintings. “To whom?”
“To corporate clients, mainly,” Frasier said, returning his gaze to the paintings. “They work really well in big spaces—reception halls, boardrooms, that sort of thing. John Jacobs’s work is in demand all over; we do particularly well in China and Russia. Can’t get enough of it over there.”
“Really?” Rose was impressed. She’d never thought of her father’s work hanging all around the world. Looking at him, at where and how he lived, it seemed impossible that he had such reach.
“Did you ever feel the need to paint?” Frasier asked her, breaking her train of thought. “Like your daughter?”
“Me? No!” Rose shook her head, genuinely surprised by the question. “I never wanted to, not even as a child. I had no idea that Maddie was artistic until literally just now. I’m afraid I haven’t done much to encourage her . . .”
“It’s no surprise, really. Art hurt you; you are hardly likely to want to embrace it. I wonder, though . . . perhaps you should pick up a brush one day and see what happens. You never know, with your parentage you might be an undiscovered talent. You can certainly see glimpses of creativity in the way you . . .”
“The way I look?” Rose questioned him.
“Well, it’s very different,” Frasier said, his exact opinion of her look unreadable.
“Thank you,” Rose said for want of anything else to say.
“Sorry,” Frasier said, smiling unexpectedly. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. I can never stop saying what I’m thinking. It’s been the bane of my life. I’m sure I would have a much more standard and conventional life by now if only I had kept my mouth shut at the appropriate times, but then again, who wants a conventional life?”
“Are you gay?” Rose blurted, quite out of nowhere.
“So you’re one of those say-what-you-think people too!” Frasier laughed so loud that Rose felt somehow the sanctity of the storeroom had been broken, and yet she found she was giggling too.
“I never say what I think.” Rose shook her head, smiling. “I never say anything. I have no idea why I just said that. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Frasier said. “No, I am not gay. I’m just really terrible at meeting suitable women—well, until recently, anyway. I do have a decidedly female and very wonderful girlfriend, though.”
Rose felt the smile freeze on her face and threaten to fade as the last fragments of her foolish dream crumbled away.
“And you?” Frasier asked. “Your daughter’s, what, seven? What’s your secret to a happy marriage?”
“Oh, I don’t have one,” Rose said, suddenly keen to be free of that room. “I really don’t think I’ve ever made any true choices in life, I’ve just sort of let it sweep me along.”
“And now it’s swept you here.” The two of them looked at each other for a moment in the half-light, sharing a smile, a memory that was the same but also very different. To Rose, their first meeting had meant everything. To Frasier, it was inconsequential. Almost entirely forgotten.
“Well, it’s nice to see you, Rose,” Frasier said.
“Yes,” Rose said, wishing she had the courage to say much more but supposing she always knew it would end up like this between them, a friendly, if distant, familiarity. “I have often wanted to thank you, for how kind you were to me that day.”
Frasier brushed aside the significance that Rose had placed on that meeting in one well-meant gesture. “I don’t really remember.”
“Oh . . . well,” Rose said, uncertain where to look, or how not to betray the feelings that were unraveling so rapidly inside her.
“Look,” Frasier said amicably, “I always stop at the pub on the way back, have a drink to get over your father. How about you have one with me? We can have a proper catch-up?” Frasier said, lowering his voice as Rose escorted him past an oblivious John and an intent-looking Maddie.
“I can’t,” Rose said, suddenly very keen not to be near him. “I promised Maddie a walk, and I have a friend staying with me.” The truth was she knew that if she spent even a few more minutes with Frasier she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from telling the truth and ruining everything and humiliating herself even further. Of course he had a girlfriend. Shona had been right, and secretly Rose had expected that. No, what she needed now was time to go away and collect her thoughts about everything that had happened at Storm Cottage that day.
“Probably just as well,” Frasier said amiably, not overtly disappointed. “I’ve got an opening tonight, this bloody awful woman, paints with found pigment. You know, ketchup, egg whites, and bodily fluids. Utter rubbish, but Edinburgh’s glitterati seem to love her. But I’ll be back in a couple of days with the van to pick up the paintings, so perhaps then?” Frasier looked thoughtful for a moment. “Let’s have dinner. Although to be fair, dinner round here means a packet of peanuts in the pub.”
“Perhaps. I’m not sure if I will still be here,” Rose said, looking at Storm Cottage sitting so small and silently squat in the crook of the mountain. In that moment, she felt just like that broken-down little building, dwarfed by everything that was happening around her. It was still standing, though.
“Well, here’s my card, anyway.” Frasier handed it to her. “Let me know if you are. Least I can do is entertain my most profitable artist’s daughter for an hour or two.”
Rose took the card and looked at it, sitting nonchalantly in her hand. For so long she dreamt of knowing where he was in the world, and now that she did, she was dismayed to realize that it changed nothing.
“Hope to see you again,” he said, catching her hand for a moment before letting it go. “Don’t go and disappear again!”
Rose watched as his car pulled away.
“I never went anywhere,” she said.
Chapter
Eight
“What, he didn’t know who you were?” Shona asked her, liberally applying liquid eyeliner under her pale blue eyes, giving her something of a warrior princess look, particularly as she swept it up at the corners into cat-like points.
“No, not at first, but then why would he?” Rose looked at her reflection in the mirror and ruffled her hair again. She wasn’t used to this ritual preparation-to-go-out thing that Shona was so excited by, insisting that they lock themselves in her room at least an hour before they were due to arrive at the pub for Ted’s gig to “get ready.”
Rose had left a very serene and calm Maddie telling a long-suffering Jenny about the intricacies of color, which she had read about in an old book called The Theory of Art she’d picked up from the dusty floor in John’s barn, and which he’d said, with a wave of a disinterested hand, she could take home. It wasn’t until Rose had been helping Jenny clear up the kitchen after dinner that she noticed that the battered book’s author was “J. Jacobs.” Unable to wrest the book, which looked like a very dry and difficult read, from an apparently engrossed Maddie, Rose couldn’t investigate further to see if it was true, if during the life—the lifetime—he’d had apart from her, her father had at some point written a book. Rose tried to imagine John sitting for even one moment at a desk to write about how to do the things he’d always claimed were instinctive and could not be taught. It seemed impossible, but then again she was still measuring him against the man she’d once known, a man who might very well have been a figment of her imagination even then. The lonely, cross old man who was probably still at work in his barn, in the middle of nowhere, had nothing to do with the father she had thought she’d known, just as really he had nothing to do with her. What else had he done in that lifetime, Rose wondered, while all the time she had been standing perfectly still, almost exactly as he’d left her?
“What, and then he snogged you?” Shona said, unscrewing a pearlized lipstick, which she slicked on with gusto, pressing her lips together and then kissing the dressing room mirror in lieu of a piece of tissue.<
br />
“No! Far from it,” Rose said thoughtfully. “I seemed to make him . . . quite annoyed. But he was perfectly polite. Told me about his girlfriend, asked me out for a client dinner, even. But there was nothing there between us. Nothing at all.” That wasn’t quite true; there had been plenty there for Rose, but she chose to not mention it.
“You knew that might happen, you knew that his life wouldn’t just stand still. Life doesn’t do that. Well, other people’s lives don’t.” Shona examined herself in the mirror and then, dissatisfied with her look, peeled off her skin-tight white top and replaced it with a black one, with an even deeper plunging neckline. “Christ, I look fit tonight. You are going to have to fight blokes off me.” She grinned at Rose over her shoulder, arming herself with her cast-iron confidence, the defense she needed to face the outside world. “You did what you came here to do: you left Dickhead, which matters more than anything, and you found your dream man. OK, so he’s taken and it’s not the dream ending you’d planned, but does that matter? Really? The last thing you need is another boyfriend to let you down now anyway, and I bet you he wouldn’t live up to your expectations, even if he was into you. He’d be farting in bed and picking his nose before you knew it.”
“Should I go out to dinner with him?” Rose asked uncertainly. “He made it sound like he was obliged to offer.”
“No,” Shona said categorically. “It will only confuse you, and you need to get your head straight now, work out what you’re going to do next, how you’re going to get Richard off your back, how you are really going to be you, for once in your life. Not pine after someone who’s already moved on.”
“Really? You really think that?” Rose said, feeling her high spirits at seeing Frasier again rapidly deflate.
“All I’m saying is, be careful with your heart. The happy ending you were looking for wasn’t really here, not the way you imagined it, at least. Life just isn’t like that. Trust me, I know. But it doesn’t matter, because some poncy art bloke isn’t the ending you need, anyway. In fact, it’s not an ending you need at all; you need a beginning. And the way you look, the way you talk, the sound of your voice, your smile, your laugh, that’s it, that’s your beginning, because it’s you, Rose. The real you. It’s like now that you’re out of Richard’s shadow you’re blossoming into the woman you were meant to be, and I’m finally getting to know you properly, and you know what, you are actually quite a laugh. Now before I sound even more gay, tell me, when do you plan to start getting ready?”
“I am ready,” Rose said, glancing down at herself in the outfit she’d been wearing all day.
“For a funeral maybe,” Shona said.
• • •
Rose stopped outside the pub and chewed her lip. It tasted slightly soapy and slightly fruity, the combination of the several layers of lipstick and lip gloss that Shona had put on her, after pouring her into one of her new dresses, a simple enough black jersey number, slashed across the shoulder, about midthigh length, which had looked not bad in the safe confines of the changing room but now Rose found uncomfortably racy. Shona had tried her level best to get Rose to wear it without a bra (“You ain’t got nothing there, so what’s the difference?”) and with some lacy tights, but Rose had point-blank refused, stating that she wasn’t going to traumatize her daughter any more for one day by dressing up like a hooker. Eventually they had settled on allowing Rose to wear the dress over some skinny jeans and with a bra, as long as she pulled it off both shoulders.
“Come on, New You,” Shona said. “You got to sexify it up a bit if you want to keep Ted interested.”
“I do not,” Rose said. “I do not wish to be sexified, whatever that is. Ted is not interested in me and I am not interested in him.”
“I am the definition of sexification, and I’m on a mission to spread the love,” Shona said, pulling her own top down so that her bosom spilt over the top of it. “And you know what, it’s all your fault. You’ve inspired me to let myself go a bit. Maybe I will pull another bloke tonight; maybe I’ll start again, just like you.”
“I’m not really starting again,” Rose reminded her. “I’m more sort of hiding. Being sexy, that’s not really me. Not the old me, not the new me. I’m not . . . well, it’s just not me.”
“It should be you,” Shona said determinedly. “Just because you’ve spent too long being married to the world’s most unattractive creep doesn’t mean you have to spend the rest of your life as a dried-up old maid. You did your mental stalking-Frasier thing and I admire you for it. You came all this way on a wing and a prayer and you got closer than anyone thought you would. Now it’s done, it’s time to move on to the next thing, and I’ve decided that the next thing on your list is to shag Ted.”
“Shona!” Rose hissed, worried there was a very real possibility that Jenny had a glass to the bedroom door. “Just stop it, will you? The very last thing I want is . . . that. I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want to joke about, so just, please . . . leave it, OK?”
“OK,” Shona said slowly, frowning. “I was only joking, mate. Didn’t think it’d get you so rattled. Anyway, all you need to worry about is finally telling Dickhead where to get off.”
“Why are you always so good at giving advice and not taking it?” Rose said, still a little shaken by Shona’s insinuations.
“I could say the same for you,” Shona said. “But you’re right, I know. And I’m just wondering, if you can do it, if you can finally get Dickhead out of your life for good . . . then maybe I can do the same with Ryan too.”
“Really?” Rose asked her, touched that her friend had so much faith in her that it made her see her own life differently. “Really, you’d thinking about ending it with Ryan for good?”
“Yes,” Shona said, with about as much determination as she had ever mustered over this point. “Well. Maybe, anyway. Now let’s go and find ourselves some country totty.”
• • •
Maddie had pretty much ignored her as Rose kissed her good night on the way out, and Shona’s ensemble was quite enough to distract Jenny from any further thoughts of her son’s interest, real or imagined, in Rose.
“There’s no red-light district in Millthwaite!” she called out as they finally escaped out the front door, giggling like a pair of teenagers trying to sneak their short skirts and eyeliner past Mum.
“I’ve never done this,” Rose said, the realization hitting her hard.
“What, gone to a pub?” Shona replied, as if she wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised.
“No, I mean gone out, dressed up, done the stuff young women normally do. Before Mum died it never felt like I could go out and have fun, knowing that she would be back at home sitting on her own in the dark with a bottle of gin. And then after, even when we were first working together, I know you took me under your wing, but I never really did this. I never really had a proper laugh, like you and the other girls did. There I would be, sitting meekly in the corner, dressed in black, just watching everyone else. And then—”
“And then there was Dickhead,” Shona said. “Well, now you are off the leash, we are in the middle of nowhere, no one knows us, and babe, what happens in Millthwaite stays in Millthwaite! Let’s be outrageous!”
Which was when Rose stopped outside the pub, filled with sudden apprehension.
“I don’t know if I can be outrageous,” she said. “I don’t know that I’ve got fun and outrageousness in me.”
“Mate, you’ve run away from home, cut off all your hair, and your dad is a legendary party animal. It’s in your genes! Just relax, just for tonight. Let’s celebrate one night of getting to be us for a change.”
• • •
The pub was crowded, packed full of people of all ages but mostly on the younger side, the majority of them girls. Gig night had to be a big deal locally, because Rose was sure that most of the people crammed into the bar weren’t from the tiny village. She hadn’t seen more than three of them before as she walked around the f
requently deserted green. There was a small platform, made of what looked like upturned beer crates, where the pool table usually stood, stacked with a battered-looking PA, a microphone, and a drum kit crammed up against the wall, on which someone had tacked a hand-painted banner reading “The Cult of Creation.”
“Fuck this bar queue, we’ll be waiting all night for a drink,” Shona said, grabbing Rose’s hand and heading towards the snug. “Let’s go backstage and be proper groupies.”
“I’m not really sure if we should.” Rose attempted to make herself heard over the din. “I mean, do you think the band is really going to want a couple of mums gate-crashing?”
“We’ve got VIP passes, haven’t we?”
“Not completely sure that beer mats strictly count,” Rose muttered under her breath, but it was too late. Shona had already shoved open the door to the band’s inner sanctum, or as Ted usually referred to it, “the old man’s bar.”
“All right?” Shona said, swinging in through the door and immediately picking up two bottles of lager, one of which she handed to Rose. “Got anything stronger?”
“Shona, Rose . . . Rose!” Ted stopped short when he caught sight of Rose lurking behind Shona. “Bloody hell, your hair! It looks amazing!”
Ted stepped over a beer-bottle-strewn table to greet her. “Wow, man. Radical! I love it!” Rose couldn’t help smiling as he took her hand and led her in front of his band mates, one of whom was far too engaged in some athletic kissing with a girl of about nineteen to be bothered to look at her.
“This is my friend Rose, you know, who I was telling you about,” Ted said, without letting go of her fingers. “Oh, and this is her friend Shona.”
“What, I’m not your friend too?” Shona said, striding around the table and sliding into the vacant seat that Ted had left, grinning at a rather alarmed-looking young man who turned out to be Andy the drummer. “So, handsome, who are you? Ever done it with a MILF?”
The Runaway Wife Page 15