“It’s miles,” Ted told her. “Look, let me give you a lift. I’ll wait and you can pick up some petrol on the way back.”
“No.” Rose squirmed uncomfortably at his magnanimous gesture when she had, after all, been rather rude to him. “Anyway, why are you so keen to be nice to me?”
Ted looked nonplussed, as if she’d asked him the most ridiculous question. “Or I could just leave you stranded here? I don’t know why I’m being nice to you, but I tell you what, the urge is rapidly running out. Do you want a lift or not?”
“Sorry,” Rose said, suddenly sensitive to her inherent sense of mistrust coloring everything, as well as the churning of acid in her guts and the speed of her heartbeat. To not go now, when she’d prepared herself to, would be an anticlimax, and besides, perhaps it would be good to have someone there, someone who was just willing to help her out. It was a concept so alien to her life that she found it hard to believe, even when she encountered it face-to-face. It was Richard who had done that to her: instilled in her a sense of mistrust, isolating her from everyone around her, and putting her trust in Ted’s unexpected offer of friendship was one way of defying him. “I’m stressed-out and snappy. Yes, thank you, I’d appreciate a lift.” Rose was rewarded with a dazzling smile, which was hard not to return. “Just as long as you promise me this wasn’t your mother’s idea, and you aren’t really only working undercover as a spy.”
“You’ve been here five minutes, and yet you know Mum so well.” Ted chuckled, jumping out of the truck and going around to the passenger side to open the door for Rose, holding out a hand and helping her up the high step into her seat. “But if you stick around long enough to really get to know her, you’ll see her bark is much worse than her bite. Nosy, yes, but she cares about people. That must be where I get it from.”
“What does a barman need a great big thing like this for anyway?” Rose asked him as he jumped into the driver’s seat beside her. She found his willingness to be so openly affectionate for his mother very charming.
“This is not a barman’s car,” he told her with a smirk. “It’s a rock star’s.”
• • •
Rose stopped listening to Ted’s stream-of-consciousness chatter, which as far as she could gather seemed to be mostly about himself, as soon as they left the village and began to follow the road that cut into the mountains. Having arrived in the dark and spent her first day here in the shelter of the village, Rose was unprepared for the landscape that surged up around her. Even on this damp August day, with the sky heavy and leaden, and the heat that should have signaled a burning hot day turning the air humid and close, the peaks and valleys of the Lake District were something to behold. It was so unlike what Rose was used to: flat, mild-mannered Kent, gently slipping into the sea. This landscape looked like it had been churned up just minutes earlier by some angry giant, searching for something he’d lost, mountains thundering skyward leaving rocks flung asunder in their wake, white water hurtling down their slopes. There were no lakes on the short drive up to Storm Cottage, but nevertheless Rose was pressed into silence by the sheer scale of her surroundings. No wonder her father had found his natural home in the country. Its wild unpredictability, its cold hard beauty, suited him very well.
Ted pulled the truck into a wide and muddy yard where on one side there stood a large barn, its door propped open. To the left, sitting in the crook of the mountain, situated behind a low derelict-looking drystone wall, was an overgrown garden fringing what had to be Storm Cottage.
As she climbed out of the truck, without speaking or acknowledging Ted, Rose looked up at the cottage—a dim, squat, toadlike silhouette against the thunderous late summer afternoon, hunched against the inclement border weather. Ramshackle and unkempt, it embodied its name—or perhaps that was just Rose, turning the building into her image of her father. The strangeness of the situation did not escape her. Here she was, finally standing outside her father’s house, willing if perhaps not ready to face him again. And, stranger still, he was somewhere in that small building utterly unaware that she was here. Rose was about to change his life, one way or the other.
Fat, slow drops of rain finally began to spatter down from the threatening clouds. “Knock, be brave,” Rose told herself. “Don’t take no for an answer. This is your dad, your dad, remember. Maybe he’ll just open his arms and make everything all right.”
There was no bell, so she hammered on the wet rough wood with her fist, waiting a few moments and then hammering again. The rain seemed to be coming at her horizontally, whipped into needles by the merciless wind. Gasping in a breath of warm air, Rose glanced back at Ted, watching her from his truck, and wondered about going back to the B & B with nothing changed, no grand reunion, no lost love restored. Something had to happen, she knew that. Richard was coming, either to claw her back into her old life, or . . . or God only knew what else. Whatever happened, it had to be something; she couldn’t just sit here and wait for her husband to find her.
Still there was no reply and, deciding she had no option, Rose prepared to leave the meager shelter of the porch. Before she could take a step the door opened at last, and an elongated rectangle of electric light snapped on, slicing through the rain.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” an angry male voice said behind her. Rose steadied herself and turned round, lifting her chin to look the old man in the eye. He was barely recognizable as her father, and yet she knew instantly that it was him. He’d aged, of course. He was smaller, almost withered; the huge life force of a man she always envisioned when she thought of him looked shrunken and diminished. The strong, tall, dark-haired man she remembered so well was thin, his face gaunt and etched with deep lines. His hair was gray, but he still wore it long, over his collar. Rose observed him for a moment longer, unable to tear her eyes away from the face that she used to adore. And then she realized he was scrutinizing her in exactly the same way. Dropping her chin abruptly, she hid her face from him, not wanting him to see the same passing of time in her that she did in him, aware of what a foolish impulse that was. She had been just a little girl that last time he had seen her.
“This is private property,” he said, his anger suddenly muffled and muted by shock.
“Don’t you recognize me?” she asked him, searching his face for any trace of the man who had kissed her in the middle of the forehead and then walked out of the door. “It’s me, it’s Rose, your daughter.”
John Jacobs opened the door a fraction of a centimeter more and stared at her in the poor light, as the rain began to increase in intensity, dribbling through the gaps in the porch roof. His brow furrowed as he studied her face, and for a moment Rose wondered if he remembered that he had once had a daughter at all.
“Of course I recognize you,” he said after a moment, his voice flat, even.
“Hello, John,” Rose said to the father she hadn’t seen since she was nine years old. “I’ve found you.”
It was such an odd thing to say, like they had just completed a long, long game of hide-and-seek, and yet it was the only thing Rose could think of to say. His jaw clenched tightly as he observed her from behind the safety of the door, and Rose knew he was debating whether or not to let her in.
And then, without another word, John Jacobs reached a decision and stood aside to let Rose pass over the threshold into his house. Glancing back briefly at the truck, Rose took a breath and went in.
At a loss as to how to behave, she looked around the single kitchen-cum–living room, paved with cold-looking flagstones, to find a battered old sofa covered in a dusty-looking throw positioned in front of a cold grate. Without looking at her father, she eased off her sodden coat, pushing the damp hair back from her face.
“Have you got a towel?”
John, who was still standing by the open front door, sighed heavily, pushed the door shut with a begrudging slam, shrugged, and looked around, crossing the ancient stone in two long strides to pick up a tea towel that had certainly se
en better days and handing it to Rose. For want of anything better, Rose took the grubby paint-stained article and rubbed it over her hair until the worst of the moisture was absorbed.
“So then,” Rose said, pulling her fingers through her long hair, unaltered in style and color since she’d last seen John, and struggling to know what to say, “I suppose this is a bit of a shock for you. For me too, as it happens.”
John opened his mouth and then shut it again, turning his back on her and staring at the white-painted brick wall behind the old ceramic sink for a moment, perhaps hoping that if he waited long enough, when he turned round she would be gone, and he’d be waking up from some fitful nightmare.
“How have you been?” Rose asked his back, gathering herself to be strong, to keep her tone even and audible, to somehow find a path through this impossible situation. John’s shoulders remained tense and resolute, as if he could drive her out of his house with sheer force of will. Rose bit down on her bottom lip hard enough so the pinch would distract her from the tight band of anxiety that constricted her chest. He palpably wanted her to disappear from his life as quickly as she had reappeared. If hers had been a different life, if she hadn’t been cramming in a lifetime of questions in the time she had before Richard came, Rose would have turned round and left, but if hers had been a different life then perhaps she would still have had her father and her mother, and would never have married the very first man who asked her when she was only eighteen years old. Whether he knew it or not, John had started the chain of events that had brought her to his doorstep on this stormy afternoon, and now it was time to deal with the consequences.
“Look,” John began, his tone curt and stiff, his voice a little hoarse as if he wasn’t used to talking, his gaze still fixed on the whitewashed wall. “What do we have to say to each other, really? We are strangers. And I’m sure you have feelings and anger that you want to talk about, but you see, Rose, it won’t make any difference to you or me, or the way things have been, if you do. I do not wish for either a reunion or a heart-to-heart. I have no place in my life for a long-lost daughter, and I don’t want to make one. There is simply no point, don’t you see?”
“I didn’t come to find you, you know,” Rose said after a moment, feeling it was important he knew that, and surprised by the lack of emotion in her own voice, which came out flat and even, the tidal wave of feelings that she had feared suddenly utterly gone. “I came here, to Millthwaite, because of you, sort of. Because of this.” She held out the postcard of John’s painting, which he squinted at but did not take. “I left my husband, you see. I needed a place to go and this place was the only one I could think of. I had no idea that you were here until I arrived. And it’s taken me two days to decide to come up here to the cottage. And now I’m here, now I’m looking at you . . .” She paused, examining his aged face, looking for any trace of the man she’d once worshipped. “I agree, I don’t know you. And you certainly don’t know me. And perhaps talking wouldn’t make any difference to you, but I think I found you here for a reason, and I think it would help me. And after all is said and done, I think you owe me, don’t you, John? More than you know.”
John looked at her for a moment, a deep furrow carved between his brows, and then he bowed his head, standing where Rose had cornered him. In the weak light it was hard to see him properly, but he seemed to be wearing the same pair of round wire-framed glasses as he had when she’d seen him last. Rose wouldn’t put it past him. He always was a man who liked objects, who kept them around him like talismans. Those glasses had once been his father’s too, her grandfather, whose knee she had once sat on, she dimly recalled from a far-removed childhood memory, in a summer garden full of flowers. Typical that her father would treasure so carefully such an object and yet cast away his family without a second thought.
“You can’t stay here,” he said finally.
“I don’t want to stay here,” Rose said. “And I don’t expect anything. I might have, perhaps, until I saw you. But now, not only do I know that there isn’t going to be a grand reunion, or hugs and tears and love, I’m not at all sure that is what I want either. The only thing I want from you, John, is answers. When you left, you changed my life forever and I want to know why, and I want you to meet your granddaughter, and find out about me, about the life you left behind. You don’t have to care, you don’t have to love me. I just want you to listen and answer my questions. Which, quite honestly, is the very least you can do.”
Rose wondered at her own coolness, her control. Perhaps Richard had taught her this also; when faced with unbearable pain to simply cut off all emotion, to numb every nerve ending so that no matter what might happen next, nothing could hurt her.
After several seconds, during which John did not respond, Rose spoke into the void, emboldened by her self-possession and immunity to his cruelty.
“Do you mind if I make a cup of tea?” she said, crossing to the stove, where a battered old kettle sat squat on the hob. “Do you want one?”
“Rose,” John said quietly, “you can’t just turn up here like this. You can’t just foist yourself on me. I’ve told you, I do not want it.”
“Well, I do.” Rose stopped, clenching the handle of the kettle, forcing herself to keep her voice low and quiet as decades of angry words she had never had a chance to voice began to boil away quietly in the pit of her stomach. “Dad, you left me when I was nine years old and I’ve never asked you for a single thing from that moment until this. All I want is a cup of tea.”
John took the kettle out of her stiff hands, filling it himself from the clanking, creaking tap.
“Why?” he said wearily. “What do you think that talking to me will change?”
“It will help me understand,” she said quietly, firmly. “I don’t think I realized until now that I need to understand everything that’s happened to me since you left. I thought I could perhaps ignore it, sweep it under the carpet, get on with things. But I can’t. My marriage is over, my daughter is . . . unusual. I somehow got this life that doesn’t feel like it’s got anything to do with me and—”
“You blame me,” he said, not as an accusation but as a statement of fact.
“I don’t know,” Rose said. “I don’t think I blame anyone. I just . . . I need to know now, soon, why my life turned out like it did, because I think I only have one chance to change it. I ran away here because . . . I was chasing a silly daydream, and I found you. I have no idea what is going to happen next, but I do know that that has to mean something, or if it doesn’t then I have to make it mean something.”
John shook his head, putting the kettle on the hob and lighting it with a match, the gas flaring in a brief roar before settling into a steady blue flame.
“I live alone, I work alone, I don’t make conversation. I don’t play with small children. I don’t drink anymore. I haven’t had a drop for nearly three years. If I keep myself to myself, then I know I can stay sober and work. And I can’t let anything get in the way of that.”
“Not even me,” Rose said, her voice unintentionally small at the thought of that last kiss that her father had planted on her forehead.
John shook his head. “Not even you.”
Rose drew in a sharp breath, as if he’d slapped her physically in the face with his words. Maybe that touched him, somehow, more than everything she’d said, because there was the smallest shift in his expression, something barely visible, as if in that second he truly recognized her for the first time.
“Very well. Come back tomorrow, then,” he said wearily. “If that’s what it takes to go back to your life and get out of mine, then I will try and answer your questions, but I must warn you, it is very unlikely that you will like what you hear. And now I need to work. Shut the door behind you when you’ve finished your tea.”
Rose stood stock-still in the small, dingy living room for several moments longer after John left the cottage, presumably making his way to the barn across the yard, waiting for the wave of
tears, of emotion, bitterness, and hurt to hit her, but nothing came. Nothing at all, though she was rooted to the spot, caught in a moment that didn’t seem real to her.
The spell was broken and Rose jumped when the door creaked open and an uncertain-looking Ted appeared around it.
“I was just checking he hadn’t axe-murdered you or something,” Ted said a little anxiously, advancing farther into the room. “Are you OK? You’re as white as a sheet. You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
“Perhaps I have, in a way.” Rose shook her head. “I have no idea what just happened, but it wasn’t exactly a conventional reunion.”
“Do you need a stiff drink?” Ted asked her. “I’ll pop you back to the pub and sort you out a single malt.”
Rose had been about to trot out her usual line when anyone offered her alcohol—“No, thank you, I don’t drink”—until it occurred to her that she had no idea why she didn’t drink. She’d always thought it was because of her father’s recklessness, her husband’s disapproval, her own distaste. But in actual fact she’d never taken the time to decide for herself if she liked drinking or not. And now, this very strange and difficult day seemed like as good a time as any.
“Yes, please.” She nodded, allowing Ted to escort her back to the truck.
“You knew that wasn’t going to be easy,” Ted said as the truck bumped and bounced its way down the track and turned back towards Millthwaite, via the petrol station. “I mean, I suppose it’s never easy, but when your dad is famous for being horrible, it’s bound to be a bit tricky.”
Rose smiled faintly, enjoying the simple spin he put on the impossible to understand.
“Yes, I suppose it is,” she said.
It wasn’t until they were seated in the pub, with Albie regarding them from the other end of the bar, that Ted spoke again.
The Runaway Wife Page 8
