‘Don’t be,’ Rose said, but nevertheless she did feel deflated, uncertain of what to do next. How would it be possible to know, to forgive and love a man who kept himself locked so
tightly
away, in every sense? Rose sat and watched John and Maddie for a few moments more, feeling very much surplus to requirements, a spare wheel in her own reconciliation.
‘I might just … I’ll probably just pop and borrow the loo, if that’s all right?’ she said, feeling the need to put some space between her and John for a few minutes at least, but he did not acknowledge having heard her. After a few seconds more, Rose shrugged and left the two artists to their work.
Pushing the unlocked door of Storm Cottage open, Rose hurried across the large living room-cum-kitchen, 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 this time 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 coloured 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, 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 jaw line, 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 forgive you.’
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 out of 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 & 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 for now. 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 catalogued.
The second door was the boxroom, barely more than six foot square, and filled with clutter, so much so that she could only open the door a few inches, 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’ life? Suddenly overcome by a confusion of motives, Rose drew the door firmly to a close, 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 Marigolds, 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 miles 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 grey eyes on her. ‘Perhaps it’s too late now to do any more than acknowledge the people that 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. It wasn’t much, but it was another piece of him, another fragment. The sudden shocking desperate need for him to be her father would have to wait behind clenched teeth if she were ever to piece together what little was left of the man who had been her father, if she were ever to be able to salvage her fragments of him.