Pushing the unlocked door of Storm Cottage open, Rose hurried across the large living area, which seemed eerily still to her, as if it were waiting for something to happen. Hoping to find a loo, she opened a stable door on the far side of the kitchen, but she was disappointed. There was only a large pantry, filled not with food but tins and tubes of oil paints, various old white spirit bottles filled with a rainbow of colored liquids that could be anything and might just be old bottles of white spirit that her father had kept for reasons known only to him. Also there were pots and pots of brushes, in various states of disrepair, some all but naked of bristles, but still he kept each one of them, perhaps every brush he’d ever worked with, lined up in old mugs and jars like comrades-in-arms.
“There’s nothing in there for you,” John said behind her, making Rose jump. She turned round, running her fingers through her short hair, which she knew stood up in rebellious spikes.
“I was looking for a loo,” she said. “Is Maddie OK on her own in the barn?”
“Yes, very dedicated. I said I was coming in for a sandwich, and she said to make her one, cheese, no butter, no salad, she’d come across in a little while.” John seemed mildly amused by his granddaughter’s pickiness. It was a good thing, Rose thought, that he was the sort of person to admire eccentricity rather than be irritated by it. It boded well for his and Maddie’s relationship. Still, she couldn’t believe Maddie was happy alone in the barn.
“It’s not like Maddie to want to be on her own,” Rose said, raising an eyebrow. “Normally she’d be running in here after a few seconds, convinced there is a child-eating gnome hiding in the attic. I suppose there must be something about this place that makes her feel . . . confident.”
“It’s probably that she can be who she is here, without anyone expecting anything of her,” John said, implying very much that that was what he most enjoyed about life in Storm Cottage. “She is a little different from most children, in some ways more mature and in others she seems very young. Quite fascinating.”
“I know,” Rose said uneasily. “I’m not really sure what to do about it, if anything. I love her the way she is, but other people . . . other children find her hard to tolerate a lot of the time. I worry about her, growing up in her own little world. How will she ever fit in, meet a boy, get a job? I keep hoping it’s just a phase, but I don’t know. Was I like her when I was little?”
John shook his head. In the August sunshine, he looked even older than he had yesterday, his skin sallow and thin, sunken around the contours of his skull. Once he’d been an immensely handsome man, and Rose supposed that hadn’t entirely gone. There was still something about that Roman nose and jawline, a little of which was echoed in her own face, although she was much more her mother’s daughter when it came to looks, small, slight, with a delicate heart-shaped face. Rose looked at John, the deep shadows engraved under his eyes, the silver bristle of stubble that covered his jaw and neck, the slight stoop in his broad shoulders, and she discovered she was glad that all the years of alcoholism had taken their toll. It didn’t seem right that a man could live as badly as her father had and not pay some price for it. And yet, looking at him like that, so frail and fragile, made her want to hold him. Something she was certain he would be horrified by.
“You were a little ray of sunshine,” he said. “Always so eager to please, always so happy to get any scrap of attention, never angry with me, even after I’d been angry with you. Perhaps that’s why . . .”
“Why what?” Rose asked him.
“Why I was able to leave you so easily, because I was certain you’d forgive me, just like you always did.”
Rose swallowed, for a moment taken back to the bottom step, her father cheerfully kissing her goodbye.
“It’s not easy to forgive someone who isn’t there,” she said simply.
“I don’t imagine that it is,” John replied.
“I just can’t understand it,” Rose said, shaking her head, forcing him to hold her gaze. “That’s what I can’t get past. That you walked out and then nothing, nothing. Not a phone call, a letter, nothing. Not when Mum died . . . not ever. Not ever, Dad. It’s nice being here with you, watching you work, watching you with Maddie. I like it. It’s strange but I like it, and then I remember . . . and I can’t get past that. I can’t get over the fact that you just left me, completely and utterly. Why?”
John stared at her for a long moment, and then Rose watched as his whole body seemed to crumple and fold in on itself and he sank wearily into a chair.
“I didn’t care about you, Rose,” he said, his face ashen, scratched deeply with emotion. “I didn’t feel a thing for you, or Marian. Or even Tilda, really; she was more just a reason, a better reason than the real one.”
“Which was?” Rose asked him, forcing herself to hold her ground in the face of his brutal words.
“I wanted to be somewhere else. I wanted to be on my own, to be free, to drink. Really, all I wanted was to drink. Not even the work mattered at that point.” John closed his eyes, and for a moment Rose wondered if he would ever open them again, he looked so drained, so finished. “It is very hard to live with, the knowledge of the person that I have been, the man I am. The hate I have for myself, which is eating me away inside, even now, is a thousand times whatever you might feel for me.” He looked at her, his face like granite. “For you to come here, to be here, it’s almost too much. It’s much more than I can cope with. And in truth that’s why I wanted you to go so badly. To look at you, Rose, is to face what I have done. And to accept that a very large part of me doesn’t want your forgiveness because I don’t deserve it. Redemption now would be too easy. Too neat. I need to suffer, Rose. I need to suffer more than I have. And this, you and Maddie here now, it’s too much. It’s more than I can take.”
Rose stared at him, unable to comprehend what he was saying, or even to accept that he was saying it, that he was talking to her like this at all. Was he telling her to go, or to stay? She couldn’t be sure.
“I don’t forgive you,” she said, “if that helps. I don’t forgive you, I never will. Not for what you did to me and to Mum. And if you’re worried about not deserving us, then forget it, because this isn’t about what you deserve. It’s about what Maddie and I deserve. That’s why we’re here, why we are still here. To know you, to be part of your life, whether you want it or not. John, open your eyes, this isn’t about you. It’s about me, for once; for the first time in my life, it’s about me. You owe me that at least and that’s why Maddie and I are going to stick around and see what happens. Not because I forgive you. Because I don’t.”
John leant his head back on the chair and simply nodded.
“There’s only one toilet,” he said, gesturing behind him. “You’ll find it upstairs. It used to be outside. I was quite happy with it where it was, but then Frasier made me move it—something about my age, no doubt. Whole load of fuss and nonsense, if you ask me. People in and out for days, messing the place up. But everyone seemed to think it was important.”
“Everyone? I thought you didn’t talk to other people, let alone worried about what they thought,” Rose said, shutting the pantry door behind her.
“I don’t. But what I have learnt over the years is that sometimes giving in is the only way to get a quiet life,” John said. He drew his closed fist from his pocket and opened it, revealing four or five twenty-pound notes unfurling in his palm. “I didn’t want to say this in front of Maddie, but I thought, what with things being the way they are, you might need some money, for the B and B.”
“No, thank you,” Rose said, feeling a little uncomfortable at the gesture. “I have enough for now. I had a savings account. I emptied it on my way up here, so I’m OK. I really don’t want to take your money. It doesn’t feel right.”
John said nothing, but he looked a little hurt, as if he felt rejected. His offer of money was his only demonstrable way of trying to show her that he cared for her.
“Well, then,” he
said, stuffing the notes back into his pocket. “I’ll put the kettle on.”
• • •
Upstairs, Storm Cottage was much smaller than its large, long ground-floor footprint. The first floor was probably an afterthought, added much later to the original cottage. There was a small square hallway with three doors leading from it. The first door, left slightly ajar, was obviously her father’s bedroom, consisting of nothing more than a bed, with stacks of books and piles of magazines all around it and a single naked bulb hanging from the ceiling. The only other ornament was an assortment of amber plastic pill bottles lined up along the thick windowsill, probably collected over the years, another relic of his life, carefully cataloged.
The second door was the boxroom, barely more than two meters square, and filled with clutter, so much so that she could open the door only enough to be able to glimpse its hoard of hidden treasures. Rose peered through the gap, intrigued by the things that John kept, longing to be able to climb into the tiny space and explore it, like a genuine Egyptian tomb, filled to the brim with relics that meant something only to him. God only knew what was in there, what oddities he had collected on his haphazard journey through life. What if she found something, some small thing saved from his life with her and Mum, a photograph or object, some small pointless token to sum up an entire life? Or worse, what if she found nothing at all to show that Rose and her mother had ever been a part of John Jacobs’s life? Suddenly overcome by a confusion of motives, Rose drew the door firmly closed, afraid of what demons might lurk in the tiny room. John was right, they couldn’t just be close again. If they were to achieve any kind of affection for each other at all, it would be a long process, full of pain, blame, and recrimination, and one that either one of them might not be willing or able to complete.
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 rubber gloves, 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 kilometers 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 gray eyes on her. “Perhaps it’s too late now to do any more than acknowledge the people 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.
“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. 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 realize 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, 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 woul
d 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 mitered corners, quickly assembling the basic frame, questioning him constantly about what he 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 realized slowly, he liked talking about what he knew, and he particularly liked 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.
The Runaway Wife Page 18
