‘I want to believe that you know what you’re doing, I do,’ Shona said, Rose’s certainty doing nothing to clear away the deep furrows of concern on her brow. ‘It’s just that you seem far too sane for my liking. I’m sure it must be that post-traumatic stress thing.’
‘No,’ Rose said, going to open her wardrobe to take a look at what her meagre selection of new clothes might have to offer for dinner at a Michelin-starred country house hotel. ‘Nope, it’s not that. It’s the freedom. I find it goes quite to my head.’
Maddie drummed her heels impatiently the whole way, as they drove over to Storm Cottage later that afternoon, her sketchbook tucked in her arms, replacing Bear and the book about Ancient Egypt. She’d already unhooked her belt before Rose fully came to a stop, and shot out of the car, leaving the door open and dashing into the barn before Rose could turn off the ignition. Rose steadied herself, checking her reflection in the rear-view mirror.
Keen not to look like she was trying too hard, she’d settled in the end on a white cotton dress with a scoop neck, and fullish fifties-style skirt that settled just above her knees. She teamed it with a pair of flat cherry-red pumps she found in the
bottom
of one of the bin bags of clothes that Jenny had given her, then rubbed a little moisturiser into her skin, put on a flick of mascara, ran her fingers through her hair and she was done.
‘You look like … you look like a professional virgin,’ Shona had told her as she left. ‘Still, it’s a look that suits you.’
Getting out of the car, Rose saw that the gallery van was already here, but she couldn’t see Frasier’s car. He’d said he’d pick her up here at six, which wasn’t for almost an hour, but still Rose wondered if he’d come at all, if he’d forget or prefer to do something with his girlfriend, or just change his mind about the whole thing. Fortunately it had been a warm day, flooded with sunshine, and so Rose didn’t look too out of place in her flimsy cotton dress as she ventured after Maddie, skipping across the caked peaks and troughs of the thankfully dry muddy yard.
‘I understand that I am babysitting?’ John tested the phrase on his tongue as if it were rather distasteful to him.
Maddie was already situated in her corner of the barn, her face a picture of concentration as she began the process of transferring a sketch she’d made of a view from the hillside onto her precious canvas with a pencil.
‘Is that what Maddie said?’ Rose asked. ‘I wasn’t expecting you to. It’s just that she so wanted to come up here today, and I couldn’t keep her at the B & B any longer. I just thought I would drop her off with my friend on the way back. I mean, if I’m being too presumptuous, if it’s too much, I don’t want to overstep –’
‘I don’t want to go back, I want to stay here with John,’ Maddie said. ‘He won’t mind.’
‘Sorry,’ Rose said to John. ‘Look Maddie, you can’t just invite yourself –’
‘She can stay if she must,’ John sighed. Everything about his expression showed a surface veneer of irritation at the prospect of providing childcare, but there was a warmth there too, just the hint that actually he was rather pleased to be having his granddaughter to stay, even if he couldn’t quite believe it himself.
‘Although I must warn you,’ he said sternly to the young girl, ‘it gets rather boring up here after work, Maddie. There is no TV or radio, only some books. And I’ve not much food in – some bread, I think, and cheese that is only a little bit mouldy.’
‘I like cheese on toast,’ Maddie shrugged, as if that was that problem solved.
Rose hesitated, wondering if this was wise. It had been only a few days ago that John had been so determined to keep them at arm’s length, to shut them out of his life. From what he’d told her, she understood a little of why he had been so determined to keep them away, but this new willingness to bring them so fully into his life was hard to understand, and although she hated herself for feeling it, it made Rose wary.
‘I’ll come and pick her up. It might be fairly late, though,’ she said. ‘This is too much for you, too soon. And for Maddie too. You barely know each other.’
‘I said she can stay the night,’ John said, adamant. ‘As long as she won’t be scared of the creaking old house and the noise the wind makes when it rattles by; sounds like screaming ghosts.’ He was trying to be playful, Rose knew, but John had no idea how prone Maddie was to taking these things to heart, and to becoming a screaming, sleep-avoiding, stay-up-all-night, trembling wreck in a matter of seconds. It was a symbol of how very little they knew each other.
‘John,’ she said, ushering him to one side as Maddie stared
at
his work in progress, her nose almost touching it, ‘I’m just … this all seems a bit sudden. Don’t get me wrong, I want it to be like this, but why? Why all this now?’
John said nothing for a moment, his expression unreadable as he seemed to consider what to say next. ‘I was keeping you at bay so I didn’t have to face my own guilt,’ he said finally. ‘Because I didn’t want to know what I had done to you, what I had missed. Someone said something that made me think …’
‘Who?’ Rose asked him. ‘Frasier?’
‘It doesn’t matter who,’ John said, waving her question aside with his hand. ‘What matters is, I’ve reached a point in my life where I’ve finally learnt to listen. I am old, Rose.’
‘Not really. Being in your sixties isn’t old these days,’ Rose said, feeling her heart clench at the realisation of how much time had passed by as her life had stood still.
‘I’m old. And I’ve hated myself for long enough.’ John’s face softened, and Rose realised that he was looking at her with something more than fondness; he was looking at her with love. ‘You said that you can’t forgive me for how I left you, and I don’t expect you to. I’m not even sure I want you to. But I do hope, perhaps unreasonably, to live out the rest of my days without hating myself. If you could see your way to letting me get to know you and Maddie, from this moment on, as the person I am now, the man that I have never been before, then there is a very small chance I might achieve that.’
John held out his hand to her, and Rose stared at it, wavering in mid-air. Since she’d found him they had never once touched each other and she was all too aware of what it would mean if she took his fingers in hers. Her hesitation was excruciating, but then she remembered what she had said to Shona as they
had
sat on the bed in her room at the B & B. Her life began now, and so, it seemed, did John’s. What reason could there be to stop them from making that step together, except to perpetuate anger, bitterness and hate? And Rose had had enough of all of those things to last her a lifetime.
Reaching out, she took his fingers, warm and rough with calluses, in hers, and nodded, noticing the tears like the ones that stood in her own eyes also glistening in John’s.
‘Thank you,’ he said, his voice thick with emotion. ‘Thank you, Rose. It’s more than I deserve.’
‘Are we holding hands?’ Maddie asked, noticing the adults again and plonking her hand heavily on top of John and Rose’s. ‘Does this mean I can stay the night?’
‘I suppose it does,’ Rose smiled at her daughter.
‘Besides,’ John told Maddie, ‘I did some clearing out of the boxroom last night, just in case. You can get to the bed now, and there are clean sheets on it.’
‘Exciting!’ Maddie squealed, with a little hop.
‘Thank you,’ Rose said, uncertain how to proceed now that this fragile bridge had been made between them. ‘The thing about Maddie is, she does sometimes get a bit scared –’
‘Not really,’ Maddie said, looking mortified at her mother’s revelation. ‘I don’t really get scared. I pretend, that’s all. It will be fine, Mum. John is my granddad, after all. Children are always staying with their grandfathers and it’s always fine. Don’t worry, I won’t miss you. There is painting, drawing and books, and John will tell me things and I can do him a test on colour theory. All the things I like are here. This is definitely not a place that makes me scared. Or
pretend
to be scared.’
Rose bit her lip, somehow finding this new-found confidence
in
her daughter as hard to take as it was pleasing. She was used to Maddie depending utterly on her, and as much as she wanted her to have exactly this kind of independent spirit, she still found it hard to let go.
‘If you say so, Maddie. As long as you promise not to be pretend scared of the wind.’
‘It will be the wind,’ Maddie said, waving away the concern with her pencil.
Maddie looked at John, who nodded once.
‘Wind,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘Wind doesn’t scare me. I actually
like
wind.’
‘Very well then,’ Rose said, feeling another new beginning emerging. ‘You may stay.’
Just then the storeroom door opened and two men emerged carrying a carefully wrapped canvas between them with some difficulty.
‘Third one’s still not dry, you say?’ the older of the two men asked John.
‘Not for a couple more days,’ John said, offhand.
‘So another trip down here then,’ the man said huffily.
‘I presume you will get paid twice,’ John said, unrepentant. ‘A veritable godsend in these uncertain times.’
Rose pretended not to hear the man swearing as they carefully manoeuvred the valuable piece of art out of the studio.
‘So what are you working on now?’ she asked John, who had restretched and prepared a small canvas, since she had last seen him, exactly like the one Maddie had co-opted before.
‘Something for me,’ John said. ‘Whenever I finish a commission I take some time for
my
work. It keeps me sane.’
‘What will it be?’ Rose asked him, intrigued as she took a step closer.
John shook his head. ‘I can’t share that with you,’ he said. ‘This is just for me. Perhaps one day, but not yet.’
Rose glanced over her shoulder to where Maddie was painstakingly recreating her sketch on her canvas, the curve of her cheek, the sweep of her lashes making Rose’s heart ache.
‘John,’ Rose said tentatively, ‘can I ask you something? You may not like it, but when I look at Maddie I see her, and … I don’t have anyone else to talk to about her except for you.’
John nodded, visibly steeling himself for what he knew was coming.
‘Do you ever think about Mum?’ Rose asked him.
‘Yes,’ John said simply, heavily, as if merely uttering the word was almost too burdened with regret. ‘I think of her often. The older I get the more I think of her. The way she used to be, the first time I saw her. So smart, so sensible, so … full of light, like a beacon. I tried to stay away from her – she wasn’t really my type at all, a good girl, a girl-next-door – but I couldn’t, like a moth to a flame.’
‘Except you were the flame,’ Rose said sadly, without recrimination. ‘It was Mum who got burnt.’
‘Can I go outside and sit on the fence and draw the mountain?’ Maddie asked. ‘I won’t move from the fence, I promise. I just want to remember what it looks like
exactly
, for my next work.’
‘OK,’ Rose said, mustering a smile. ‘But don’t move from the fence. I mean it.’
‘I won’t,’ Maddie called over her shoulder as she headed outside.
‘She looked like fine bone china,’ John remembered Marian, smiling just a little. ‘Delicate and slim, like you, but she had this passion in her, this strength of appetite for living that made everyone around her want to live harder, better, faster.’ He glanced sideways at Rose as he sorted through assorted crumpled tubes of paint. ‘I’ve been thinking about her more recently. You remind me a lot of your mother.’
‘I’m not sure if that’s a good thing,’ Rose said, unable to keep the bitterness out of her voice, which was still there, which would probably always be there when she thought of the life that her mother had wasted, through no fault of her own, on grief. Rose had only known the woman that John described for a few short years, and even then she was already beginning to fray at the edges, battling daily to make the man she’d given up so much for continue to show an interest in her. How hard she must have tried to be fascinating, beautiful enough for him. How painful it must have been when she realised that even if she was always all of those things, it would still never be enough to stop him from looking elsewhere.
‘I did that to her,’ John admitted. ‘I ruined her, and I regret that, deeply. I wish I could have cared when it counted. I wish so many things.’
‘But you left with Tilda instead?’ Rose stated.
‘I stopped feeling anything real long before Tilda, and long after,’ John admitted. ‘Tilda was not the first, not the last of the women I used. The only thing that set her apart was that she somehow pierced the fog of the alcohol to make me take notice of her for a little while. Tilda is a strong, ferocious woman. I think she thought she could change me.’
Rose turned away from him, finding it difficult to be able to
control
the ferocious feelings that surged through her: anger, hurt, and somehow relief that he was finally saying what she’d always believed to be true, that he was to blame. And yet Rose almost didn’t want to know. She liked this quiet-mannered man who had a way with Maddie and a sort of strength that she felt secure around. More revelations would sweep that man away for good, and she would be left to face whatever harsh truth was left. But she couldn’t make the mistake of letting herself pretend that John was not the kind of man he was; she’d done that for too long with Richard.
‘The day before she died … it was the happiest day of my life,’ Rose said. ‘She was so happy, so light and loving. That’s why none of it made sense.’
‘When I heard how she … passed,’ John said, uncharacteristically squeamish about the facts, ‘I was drunk. I thought perhaps it might have been a dream. I think for a long time I preferred to think that it was a dream.’
The two of them searched each other’s faces for a moment, each one full of sadness.
‘And you didn’t come for me,’ Rose said softly.
‘No,’ John said. ‘I didn’t come. I didn’t care, Rose. I didn’t feel anything. I’m so sorry, but I didn’t.’
Rose nodded, finding it difficult to hold back the threat of tears that constricted her throat.