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, travelled 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 further room secured behind a white padlocked door. The plastered walls had also been whitewashed, and long Velux windows 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 used to creep 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 colour, 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 realise it was John who had taught her always to feel like
an
impostor. And now, now 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 skip 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, tell me, 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.
John shrugged, unconcerned by the barbs that flew his way. ‘Integrity is for young men.’
‘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 slimey 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 colours.’
John took a step back, his brows raised as he observed his granddaughter.
‘It’s called canvas, not cardboard,’ he told her. ‘Here.’
He held out his palette, heavily laden with paint, and watched as Maddie took a finger full of deep crimson oil paint and rubbed it between her thumb and fingers, bringing the paint up to her nose and inhaling deeply.
‘It’s sticky,’ she told Rose, who watched from a distance, ‘and greasy.’
Cheerfully she smeared it on the back of her hand, and then impressed that smear against her cheek, smiling at the cool sensation and acrid scent that accompanied it. ‘I want to paint with it too.’
‘Come on, Maddie.’ Rose held out her hand, keen that Maddie should not be disappointed. ‘John is too busy for us.’
‘No,’ John said. ‘No, I said I will talk to you and I will. The child can paint while we talk, if that is what she wants.’
He rooted around in what looked like a pile of rubbish for a while and then brought out a small piece of board. Taking
an
old china plate from a shelf, he picked up four or five lifeless-looking tubes of paint, squeezing fat slugs of colour onto the plate and placing it on the floor, leaning the board against the back wall of the barn, and throwing down a couple of balding brushes.
Without needing to be told, Maddie knelt in the dust on the floor in front of the board and picked up a brush. ‘What shall I paint?’ she asked him.
‘Paint what you see,’ John said, returning to his work. ‘The only way to begin as an artist is to paint what you see, because it’s not what you see that matters, it’s how you see it.’
Disconcerted by her father’s sudden almost grandfatherly gesture, not to mention his unexpectedly good-natured exchange with Maddie, Rose was at a loss again to know what to expect, how to be. Cool and aloof had been her plan, and his too, it seemed, but five minutes with him had made her angry and resentful, ready to leave until suddenly he was fairly kind and conversational. At no point had bringing Maddie to Storm Cottage been about getting to know the man he was today, or building bridges, but if he was to become a memory of Maddie’s, if only for a few hours, then it seemed sensible to try at least to get a better sense of him so that she and Maddie would be able to talk about the time they met John Jacobs, whoever he was. Rose only knew that the father she had known as a child, the bright, shining, giant of a man she had been dazzled by, seemed entirely disconnected from this gaunt, grey man, who had turned back to his canvas and was doggedly moving waves of paint around with a palette knife.
‘Talk,’ he instructed Rose, putting her at an instant loss to know what to say.
‘Millthwaite seems like a nice place to live,’ Rose said awkwardly, finding it impossible to make small talk with him.
‘It’s a place,’ John said evenly. ‘The place that I happened to end up, though I must admit the landscape is very useful for my work. People in boxes in cities like to look at mountains and imagine they have a life outside their dull, pointless existence.’
‘So, you don’t mix much with the villagers, you haven’t any friends here?’ Rose hesitated. ‘You live alone now?’
‘I live alone now. Look, I haven’t seen you for twenty-odd years, do you think that if I can live without my daughter I’d need the reassurance of strangers to get by?’ John asked, pausing to look at her for a second, his tone serrated with irritation. ‘The whole point of my life, of the person that I am, is that I don’t need or want people in it. I want seclusion, I want to be left alone. For the most part, I get it.’
Rose took a breath, looking towards the partially open barn door, fighting the sudden urge to run out of it, and run and run up the nearest slope without stopping until her lungs threatened to burst and she could suck in mouthfuls of air that had not also been inhaled by this man, this cold stranger. Was this what her father had always been like or were her sun-drenched memories of the man that she had once believed loved her figments of her imagination?
‘Is that what happened to Tilda?’ Rose said, tasting the metallic taint of lips too often bitten of late, as she searched for some word or memory that would make him feel
something
. ‘Did you use her up and throw her away too? After leaving Mum, devastating our lives without a backward glance, did you do the same to her?’
‘What happened between Tilda and me is none of your business,’ John said curtly. ‘You are two separate chapters of my life. And both are now closed.’
‘
That’s
your logic?’ Rose asked him, incredulous, her determination to remain as detached as he was crumbling easily away. ‘You decided to leave one life behind and start – or rather wreck – another, and never the twain shall meet? Children don’t have an expiry date, you know.’
‘Apparently not,’ John sighed, wiping his knife on the hem of his shirt, and turning back to his tubes of paint, his fingers hovering over the colours until eventually he selected burnt umber. Glancing up at Rose, who was still rooted by the door, he asked, ‘Have you thought about talking to your husband, trying to work things out? It might not be too late if you go back now.’
‘If I go back?’ Rose shook her head, forcing herself to keep her voice low. ‘You really will do anything to get me out of here, even try your hand at matchmaking. Even though you have no idea what hell you’d be sending me back to.’
‘You are not me,’ John said. ‘You need people. And as you have so vociferously reminded me, a child needs a father. It is worth talking, surely. At least attempt to work things out.’
‘Like you talked to Mum and tried to work things out?’ Rose snapped before she could help herself, unable to maintain this distant impartiality, tipping her head sharply to one side. ‘Oh, except that you disappeared one morning, leaving without even having the courage to wake her up and tell her you were going, leaving only your daughter to tell her, once she’d sobered up, that you’d said goodbye.’
Rose remembered all too clearly that morning, those moments
of
confused quiet after John shut the door. She had remained sitting on the bottom stair, wondering exactly what had just happened, torn between this pain that seemed intent on rending her chest in two, and a child’s desire just to be normal. To pretend it hadn’t happened, that her father hadn’t just left, and that if he had, he would be back again soon. Glancing up the stairs to where Marian was still sleeping off the bottle of wine she had drunk the night before, sitting at the kitchen table, weeping quietly as Rose made them sandwiches for tea, Rose had wondered if she should wake her mother. Maybe Marian would hold her, stroke her hair and comfort her, like she had when she was very little, or maybe she’d start crying again, bury her head in the pillow, and ignore Rose, who’d sit uncertainly on the edge of the bed, tentatively rubbing her mother’s shoulder, until it became clear that it didn’t matter to Marian whether she was there or not. The desire just to be normal won, and Rose had taken the spare door key from the pot on the mantel and gone out to find some other children to play with, staying out until the sun began to set, when she supposed that Marian might be worried about her and angry, like she had been before when Rose ventured out without permission. But when she had come back the house had been still and dark. Holding her breath Rose had crept up the stairs, wondering if Marian had gone out looking for her. Perhaps she’d called the police, maybe her dad would hear about it and be so worried he’d come back too. Maybe the whole town would form a search party, and there she would be, sitting at home, waiting for them when her parents got back. And they’d be so relieved, so delighted to see that she was safe and well, that not only would they forget to be angry with her, they’d realise just how
important
their little family was, and they’d fix everything. They’d make it just how it used to be only better, because this time it would be for ever.