“I said she can stay the night,” John said, adamant. “As long as she won’t be scared of the creaking old house and the noise the wind makes when it rattles by—sounds like screaming ghosts.” He was trying to be playful, Rose knew, but John had no idea how prone Maddie was to taking these things to heart and to becoming a screaming, sleep-avoiding, stay-up-all-night, trembling wreck in a matter of seconds. It was a symbol of how very little they knew each other.
“John,” she said, ushering him to one side as Maddie stared at his work in progress, her nose almost touching it, “I’m just . . . this all seems a bit sudden. Don’t get me wrong, I want it to be like this, but why? Why all this now?”
John said nothing for a moment, his expression unreadable as he seemed to consider what to say next. “I was keeping you at bay so I didn’t have to face my own guilt,” he said finally. “Because I didn’t want to know what I had done to you, what I had missed. Someone said something that made me think . . .”
“Who?” Rose asked him. “Frasier?”
“It doesn’t matter who,” John said, waving her question aside with his hand. “What matters is, I’ve reached a point in my life where I’ve finally learnt to listen. I am old, Rose.”
“Not really. Being in your sixties isn’t old these days,” Rose said, feeling her heart clench at the realization of how much time had passed by as her life had stood still.
“I’m old. And I’ve hated myself for long enough.” John’s face softened, and Rose realized that he was looking at her with something more than fondness; he was looking at her with love. “You said that you can’t forgive me for how I left you, and I don’t expect you to. I’m not even sure I want you to. But I do hope, perhaps unreasonably, to live out the rest of my days without hating myself. If you could see your way to letting me get to know you and Maddie, from this moment on, as the person I am now, the man that I have never been before, then there is a very small chance I might achieve that.”
John held out his hand to her, and Rose stared at it, wavering in midair. Since she’d found him they had never once touched each other and she was all too aware of what it would mean if she took his fingers in hers. Her hesitation was excruciating, but then she remembered what she had said to Shona as they had sat on the bed in her room at the B & B. Her life began now, and so, it seemed, did John’s. What reason could there be to stop them from making that step together, except to perpetuate anger, bitterness, and hate? And Rose had had enough of all of those things to last her a lifetime.
Reaching out, she took his fingers, warm and rough with calluses, in hers, and nodded, noticing the tears like the ones that stood in her own eyes also glistening in John’s.
“Thank you,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. “Thank you, Rose. It’s more than I deserve.”
“Are we holding hands?” Maddie asked, noticing the adults again and plonking her hand heavily on top of John and Rose’s. “Does this mean I can stay the night?”
“I suppose it does.” Rose smiled at her daughter.
“Besides,” John told Maddie, “I did some clearing out of the boxroom last night, just in case. You can get to the bed now, and there are clean sheets on it.”
“Exciting!” Maddie squealed, with a little hop.
“Thank you,” Rose said, uncertain how to proceed now that this fragile bridge had been made between them. “The thing about Maddie is, she does sometimes get a bit scared—”
“Not really,” Maddie said, looking mortified at her mother’s revelation. “I don’t really get scared. I pretend, that’s all. It will be fine, Mum. John is my granddad, after all. Children are always staying with their grandfathers and it’s always fine. Don’t worry, I won’t miss you. There is painting, drawing and books, and John will tell me things and I can do him a test on color theory. All the things I like are here. This is definitely not a place that makes me scared. Or pretend to be scared.”
Rose bit her lip, somehow finding her daughter’s newfound confidence as hard to take as it was pleasing. She was used to Maddie depending utterly on her, and as much as she wanted her to have exactly this kind of independent spirit, she still found it hard to let go.
“If you say so, Maddie. As long as you promise not to be pretend scared of the wind.”
“It will be the wind,” Maddie said, waving away the concern with her pencil.
Maddie looked at John, who nodded once.
“Wind,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Wind doesn’t scare me. I actually like wind.”
“Very well, then,” Rose said, feeling another new beginning emerging. “You may stay.”
Just then the storeroom door opened and two men emerged carrying a carefully wrapped canvas between them with some difficulty.
“Third one’s still not dry, you say?” the older of the two men asked John.
“Not for a couple more days,” John said, offhand.
“So another trip down here, then,” the man said huffily.
“I presume you will get paid twice,” John said, unrepentant. “A veritable godsend in these uncertain times.”
Rose pretended not to hear the man swearing as they carefully maneuvered the valuable piece of art out of the studio.
“So what are you working on now?” she asked John, who had restretched and prepared a small canvas since she had last seen him, exactly like the one Maddie had co-opted before.
“Something for me,” John said. “Whenever I finish a commission I take some time for my work. It keeps me sane.”
“What will it be?” Rose asked him, intrigued as she took a step closer.
John shook his head. “I can’t share that with you,” he said. “This is just for me. Perhaps one day, but not yet.”
Rose glanced over her shoulder to where Maddie was painstakingly re-creating her sketch on her canvas, the curve of her cheek, the sweep of her lashes making Rose’s heart ache.
“John,” Rose said tentatively, “can I ask you something? You may not like it, but when I look at Maddie I see Mum, and . . . I don’t have anyone else to talk to about her except for you.”
John nodded, visibly steeling himself for what he knew was coming.
“Do you ever think about Mum?” Rose asked him.
“Yes,” John said simply, heavily, as if merely uttering the word was almost too burdened with regret. “I think of her often. The older I get the more I think of her. The way she used to be, the first time I saw her. So smart, so sensible, so . . . full of light, like a beacon. I tried to stay away from her—she wasn’t really my type at all, a good girl, a girl next door—but I couldn’t, like a moth to a flame.”
“Except you were the flame,” Rose said sadly, without recrimination. “It was Mum who got burnt.”
“Can I go outside and sit on the fence and draw the mountain?” Maddie asked. “I won’t move from the fence, I promise. I just want to remember what it looks like exactly, for my next work.”
“OK,” Rose said, mustering a smile. “But don’t move from the fence. I mean it.”
“I won’t,” Maddie called over her shoulder as she headed outside.
“She looked like fine bone china.” John remembered Marian, smiling just a little. “Delicate and slim, like you, but she had this passion in her, this strength of appetite for living that made everyone around her want to live harder, better, faster.” He glanced sideways at Rose as he sorted through assorted crumpled tubes of paint. “I’ve been thinking about her more recently. You remind me a lot of your mother.”
“I’m not sure if that’s a good thing,” Rose said, unable to keep the bitterness out of her voice, which was still there, which would probably always be there when she thought of the life that her mother had wasted, through no fault of her own, on grief. Rose had known the woman that John described for only a few short years, and even then she was already beginning to fray at the edges, battling daily to make the man she’d given up so much for continue to show an interest in her. How hard she must have tried to b
e fascinating, beautiful enough for him. How painful it must have been when she realized that even if she was always all of those things, it would still never be enough to stop him from looking elsewhere.
“I did that to her,” John admitted. “I ruined her, and I regret that, deeply. I wish I could have cared when it counted. I wish so many things.”
“But you left with Tilda instead,” Rose stated.
“I stopped feeling anything real long before Tilda, and long after,” John admitted. “Tilda was not the first and not the last of the women I used. The only thing that set her apart was that she somehow pierced the fog of the alcohol to make me take notice of her for a little while. Tilda is a strong, ferocious woman. I think she thought she could change me.”
Rose turned away from him, finding it difficult to control the ferocious feelings that surged through her: anger, hurt, and somehow relief that he was finally saying what she’d always believed to be true, that he was to blame. And yet Rose almost didn’t want to know. She liked this quiet-mannered man who had a way with Maddie and a sort of strength that she felt secure around. More revelations would sweep that man away for good, and she would be left to face whatever harsh truth was left. But she couldn’t make the mistake of letting herself pretend that John was not the kind of man he was; she’d done that for too long with Richard.
“The day before she died . . . it was the happiest day of my life,” Rose said. “She was so happy, so light and loving. That’s why none of it made sense.”
“When I heard how she . . . passed,” John said, uncharacteristically squeamish about the facts, “I was drunk. I thought perhaps it might have been a dream. I think for a long time I preferred to think that it was a dream.”
The two of them searched each other’s faces for a moment, each one full of sadness.
“And you didn’t come for me,” Rose said softly.
“No,” John said. “I didn’t come. I didn’t care, Rose. I didn’t feel anything. I’m so sorry, but I didn’t.”
Rose nodded, finding it difficult to hold back the threat of tears that constricted her throat.
“After Mum died,” she said, in a tone so low it was almost a whisper, knowing that she had to tell John everything she could, unburden herself of all her secrets, if they were to have any chance of moving on together, and now was the first and perhaps the last moment to do it, “soon after, that’s when I met my husband. When I met Richard. I think he saw me, and he saw exactly what he wanted. Someone young, inexperienced, someone completely on her own, without anyone to tell her what to do or advise her. Without anyone to protect her. He wanted a wife who would love him unreservedly, a wife he could own. That’s what he saw in me. It must have been written all over my face: abandoned girl seeks refuge. I don’t suppose he meant for things to end the way they did when we got married; I don’t suppose for one minute he foresaw how he would become.” Rose made herself look John in the eye so that he would see everything she saw, feel everything she felt. “Controlling, restricting every aspect of my life, slowly, slowly over years and years, until I was afraid to breathe if he was in the room, or to chew too loudly, or accidentally wear the wrong expression. I don’t suppose it was his plan to take a girl, already weak and vulnerable, and wear her down, centimeter by centimeter, until she had just the tiniest scrap left of her own identity. I don’t suppose he planned any of that, but that is what happened to me, after Mum died. And if you’d been there, or just been in my life, another person to turn to, perhaps it would have helped me see things clearly and perhaps . . . I wouldn’t be hiding from Richard now.”
John nodded, swallowing with difficulty. “This is hard for me to bear too,” he said. “I let you down, and I can never make up for that.”
“No,” Rose said. “And whether you believe it or not, I really wish you could.”
“You still had that tiny scrap, though,” John said, looking her square in the eyes, placing his hands lightly on her shoulders. “That small part of you that you hung on to, that was from your mother. It was her strength that stopped you from disappearing completely and made you start to fight back. Your mother saved you.”
“Did she?” Rose asked him. “I’d like to believe that, but Mum was the one that gave in. That gave up. You beat your addiction—doesn’t that make you the strong one?”
John shook his head. “No,” he said. “It makes me the coward, too afraid to die, even though . . . even though I get closer to it day by day. But not your mother, she was not afraid.”
“Hello?” Frasier’s voice sounded outside, as Rose and John kept looking at each other, trying to search out some answers in those last few seconds they had before Frasier came into the barn.
“I think it’s the courageous who want to stay alive,” Rose said finally. “And I think that it’s a little bit of that, of you, that has to be in me. Mum’s there too, of course, but you are my father, you are part of me too.” She wrinkled her brow as a thought occurred to her. “It never crossed my mind before to be grateful for that.”
Before John could respond, Frasier walked into the barn, with a curious Maddie at his side. He was wearing a sea-green shirt that matched the color of his eyes, open slightly at the neck, his blond hair looking ruffled as if he’d been driving with the window down.
“Hello, all!” he said cheerfully, stopping and smiling at Rose in her white cotton dress. “You look very refreshing,” he said. “And Maddie, I see you are quite the protégée. Your work is coming on apace!”
Maddie stared at her drawing as if she very much doubted him. It was clear that she did not like this planning stage nearly as much as she liked throwing paint about or sketching, but she had persevered, which was unusual for her.
“John, Greg tells me I have to wait three more days for the third work,” Frasier said, trying his best to look stern.
“This is an artist’s studio,” John said, “not a McDonald’s drive-through.”
Frasier laughed. “Nothing you can say will put me in a bad mood today,” he said happily. “I’ve sold almost all of the awful woman’s work. And the world’s finest sticky toffee pudding awaits Rose and me!”
Neither Rose nor Frasier were prepared for John’s disapproving expression.
“Make sure you take care of her,” he said gruffly, obviously a little embarrassed himself by his belated paternal concern.
“This is Dearest Rose,” Frasier said. “Of course I will take care of her.”
• • •
Sharrow Bay House Hotel turned out to be set right on the shores of Ullswater, an elegant white-painted Victorian house that Rose felt altogether underdressed for after all, although she was not at all sure that any of Haleigh’s going-out clothes would have served her any better. The warmth of the sun was thankfully still strong, and Rose was enchanted when they were seated at a table on the terrace, overlooking the lake, the mountains glowing golden in the evening light.
“Wow,” Rose said as she looked out at the view.
“Stunning, isn’t it?” Frasier said. “It’s at times like this I wish I had the skill to create art, rather than just appreciate it, and sell it, and make quite a lot of money from it.”
“But it’s not all about the money for you, is it?” Rose asked him, curiously, grateful to have something to say. The drive over had been mostly silent, punctuated with stilted small talk that soon petered out. “If it was, you wouldn’t have come to my house in Broadstairs, would you? You wouldn’t have tracked my father down, you wouldn’t have put so much effort, time, and probably money into getting him sober. You basically saved his life.” And mine, she thought as she dared to look at him. His strong nose and sensitive mouth and jaw made her want to reach out and touch his face, despite herself. It seemed dreamlike that she was here with him, in this beautiful setting. All the darkness and dread that Richard brought with him seemed like another lifetime, another universe away. Rose realized that she was going to have to work very hard to keep her feet on the ground, to r
emember that Frasier saw her as pleasant company at best, the daughter of a valuable client, not his long-lost soul mate.
“I tracked your father down because of his work. His true work is remarkable. I wanted to be the one to discover him; I wanted the credit, if I’m honest,” Frasier said, smiling. “But when I found him, he was a wreck. He had no one, he didn’t care what happened next. I only had to look at him to see he didn’t have much time left if he carried on the way he was. I took a risk, a gamble. I paid for him to get medical help and the support he needed to become clean, hoping that if he survived I’d get my chance at discovering him after all. So I’m not quite as noble as you might imagine.”
“He respects you, though,” Rose said. “I can see that, despite how he grumbles and moans around you. What you say and think mean a lot to him, although he’d never admit it.”
“And I respect him too,” Frasier answered. “I do finally think, under all the bluster, that we are friends now, after all these years. I care about the man. If it was up to me I wouldn’t have him painting like there’s no tomorrow for big business and greeting card companies. As much as he likes to imply that it’s me who makes him do it, I never have. The truth is it’s easier for him to pretend I’m the heartless commercial dealer cracking the whip. In reality he insists on doing the big-money work and refuses to let me see his ‘real’ work.”
“But why?” Rose asked him, intrigued, forgetting for a moment whom she was talking to. “That doesn’t sound like the man I knew at all. Although to be fair I barely know him at all now.”
Although she knew him a good deal better today than ever before, Rose supposed, thinking of the way that John had quietly squeezed her shoulder as she had left with Frasier, a sign of what they both hoped would become a new bond between them, a connection that, despite everything, they could both now admit that they wanted.
“I . . .” Frasier hesitated as he considered Rose’s question, and whatever he was thinking remained unsaid. “He has his reasons. Perhaps he’s lost confidence in his private work; perhaps it’s just too painful to show. I do hope that one day he will change his mind, because he really is an amazing man, not just an artist. Which I know must sound a little trite, considering what you’ve been through largely because of him.”
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