When she eventually found the right key and opened the locked door, they discovered that the two huge canvases were there, ready and waiting, just as John promised. The air was heavy with the sweet smell of oil paint. This room was also lit by two Velux windows high in the roof, which gave the room an almost church-like air of mystery, two heavenly beams of sun cutting squares of gold into the dirty floor. Frasier McCleod was noticeably more relaxed now that he wasn’t in John’s immediate presence, his neatly manicured hands resting loosely on his hips, an expensive-looking gold watch circling his wrist.
‘Beautiful,’ he said, more to himself than Rose, as he took in the two huge paintings. ‘What amazing colour and light. This
is
why people love his work. John is the only modern painter I know who can paint something on this scale which still manages to feel like an intimate, private experience.’
Standing next to him, Rose also observed the paintings. They were so vastly different from what she remembered of her father’s brash, abstract, confrontational work. Instead, these were huge, breathtaking landscapes that felt almost as if he were painting the Cumbrian Lake District in its actual size, as if you could step into the landscape and slough through the thick layers of paint, slash upon slash of colour that somehow, when you stood back and looked at the work as a whole, made perfect sense. The paintings were beautiful, easy to look at, restful almost. They were everything that John had once abhorred.
Perplexed by what had happened to change her father so radically, Rose looked around the quiet room for more clues. The rest of the room was bare, but at its rear, in what must be the very end of the barn, there was another wall, with another door cut into it, and this one was secured with another heavy-looking padlock, the key to which might be on the key ring he’d given her. What did he keep in there, Rose wondered darkly, the heads of his previous wives on sticks?
‘So you sell these?’ Rose asked Frasier, who, she became aware, was looking at 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’ 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, with a hesitant smile.
‘You have an air of “Papa Don’t Preach”-era Madonna about you,’ Frasier said, gesturing at Rose’s blonde crop. ‘You know, sort of rebel, sort of punk. It’s so different from the memory I have of you, that curtain of hair that you hid behind, but I like it. It suits you.’
‘Thank you,’ Rose said for want of anything else to say.
‘Sorry,’ Frasier said. ‘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 store cupboard 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 keen girlfriend, though, who is absolutely certain she can get me to propose to her before the year is out. She has spent many months gradually wearing me down, by degrees. No, that’s cruel; Cecily is a fine woman, I’m lucky to have her.’
Rose felt the smile freeze on her face, and threaten to fade.
‘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, sensing that just then would have been the wrong moment to tell him she’d left her husband for the idea of him. ‘I really don’t think I’ve ever made any true choices in life, I’ve just sort of let it sweep me along.’
‘Well, I for one am glad 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.
‘I realise I hardly know you,’ Frasier said, a gentle smile lighting his expression with a warmth that made Rose want to walk up and put her arms around him. ‘But it’s always felt to me, since that first moment that I met you, that you and I were friends. True friends.’
‘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.’
‘It’s an easy thing to be kind,’ Frasier told her mildly, brushing aside the significance that Rose had placed on that meeting in one well-meant gesture. ‘It was nothing, really.’
‘Oh … well,’ Rose said, uncertain of where to look, or how not to betray her feelings that were unravelling so rapidly inside her.
‘Look, I always stop at the pub on the way back, have a drink – 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 –
of course
he did – 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 morning.
‘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? 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.’ Frasier handed it to her. ‘Text me, and then I’ll have your number.’
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 she did, she was dismayed to realise that it changed nothing.
‘So I’ll see you soon then,’ 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 colour, 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 pearlised 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.
‘No! I didn’t say he snogged me,’ Rose said happily. ‘He said my name, twice, and then as soon as he knew it was me he hugged me, really tightly – I almost couldn’t breathe – and then he was polite. And he told me about his girlfriend, Cecily. She’s a fine woman, apparently.’
‘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 defence 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 know it.’
‘He said he’d take me out to dinner,’ Rose said uncertainly. ‘Should I go?’
‘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 some compulsive flirt who’s practically married and off limits.’
‘Really? You really think that?’ Rose said, feeling her high spirits at seeing Frasier again deflate at a rate of knots. ‘No, you can’t be right. You’ve never met him and I have. And I know he’s not like any other men I’ve met, including compulsive flirters.’
‘Babe, no offence, but you’ve barely met any men!’ Shona reminded her. ‘All I’m saying is, be careful with your heart. What I mean is, I always knew 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 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.
‘Over my dead body,’ Shona said.
Rose stopped outside the pub and chewed her lip. It tasted slightly soapy, and slightly fruity, the culmination 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 mid-thigh length, which had looked not bad in the safe confines of the changing room, but which 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 traumatise 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 that sexy Ted interested.’