‘You are good with her,’ Rose had said quietly, when Maddie went to refresh her glass of coloured pens. ‘It’s kind of you. A lot of people find her difficult to get along with.’
‘She’s not difficult at all.’ Frasier shook his head. ‘A little eccentric perhaps, and unusual, but not difficult. Besides, she is decidedly, preciously talented at drawing, which is fascinating. I like her a lot. She reminds me that I would have liked to have had children once.’
‘Well, there’s still time, you’re not over the hill yet!’ Rose exclaimed, although the idea of Cecily full-bellied with Frasier’s child was quite a painful one.
‘Cecily is not keen on children,’ Frasier admitted, perhaps with a touch of sadness. ‘She prefers it to be just the two of us.’
‘Funny,’ Rose couldn’t stop herself from saying, ‘that’s exactly what Richard said to me. So she’s the one, is she, Cecily? The one you will settle with for ever?’
The question, so loaded with longing and double meanings, slipped out before Rose could control her tongue. Frasier turned to look at her, inclining his head slightly to one side, clearly trying to discern exactly what she meant.
‘I haven’t really thought about not being with Cecily,’ he said. ‘We’ve been together nearly two years now, and we get along pretty well. If I were to marry anyone, then she would seem like the most obvious choice, yes.’
‘Right,’ Rose said, forcing her mouth into a brittle smile. ‘Not that it’s any of my business. I think some of Jenny’s natural curiosity must have rubbed off on me. Look, anyway, thank
you
so much for coming to take us out when you still have that long journey all the way back again.’
‘Oh, no,’ Frasier said. ‘Not tonight. Tonight I’m staying over with John, mostly against his will. His third painting will be ready for shipping tomorrow so I thought I’d oversee the loading and then he might let me talk to him about his next commission. I’ll be free in the afternoon – if you like we could go for a walk? I could show you some of my favourite views.’
‘A walk? Thank you, that would be lovely,’ Rose said, surprised, and confused once more. Just when she finally thought she knew where she stood, Frasier changed the rules all over again. ‘You really are being very nice to me.’
‘It’s not exactly hard,’ Frasier said, smiling perhaps a little coyly, ‘to be nice to you. I’m rather glad to have the chance at last. And I was thinking on Friday I might come down early, pick you and Maddie up, and take you to see my gallery for the day. You can see some of your dad’s work
in situ
, and I thought Maddie would like to see other art – we could even brave the National Gallery, if she’s keen.’
‘Really?’ Rose looked at him. ‘Are you sure? Shouldn’t you be discovering artists or doing something with Cecily?’
‘Oh, Cecily is far too busy to bother with me on a weekday,’ Frasier grinned affectionately. ‘As long as I’m present and correct from six p.m. Friday onwards we get along just fine, and, well, look … you’ve been through some tough times recently. I know you don’t want to talk about it, but I also know that you could do with a friend or two at the moment. The way you are handling this, handling John … it’s admirable. I don’t pretend to know how things were with your husband but I do know
that
when I saw you on that day seven years ago, you looked so unutterably sad and lost and so … trapped, you reminded me of a songbird in a cage.’ Rose’s eyes widened, amazed that Frasier had seen her exactly the way she had seen herself, trapped in a gilded cage. ‘And if I’m honest I’ve never stopped thinking about you since that moment, wondering how you were and where you were. I hoped that I’d simply caught you on a bad day, and that you were truly happy. It pains me to know that for a good deal of the time you were not.’
‘I wasn’t that day.’ Rose remembered, pain flashing across her face. ‘When I met you, it wasn’t long after I realised just how awful my marriage was, and yet I had no idea how to escape from it. That time I spent with you, it gave me …’ she paused, intent on not loading what she said next with too much meaning, ‘… a glimmer of what life could be like.’
There was a silence between them as Maddie returned to the table with all the pens she had been able to gather with two fists, deposited them and returned to retrieve the rest, much to the disapproval of the waitress.
‘Spares,’ she said by way of explanation.
‘I can’t bear to think of you feeling so desolate,’ Frasier said, mustering a smile to cheer both of them. ‘And yet now suddenly here you are, and you look so full of life and promise,’ he continued as Maddie began to arrange the pens into colour groupings. ‘And although I know that we know each other very little in reality, I can promise you that there aren’t many people in the world who are more pleased to see you that way than I am.’
‘I actually think that might be true,’ Rose said with a smile, thinking of her limited pool of friends. ‘And if it is true, then
I
am very lucky to have such a good friend waiting for me, just when I need him.’
Frasier smiled. ‘So you will indulge me and let me show you my empire?’
‘Have you got an empire?’ Maddie asked him, as she sat down now in possession of every single felt-tip pen that the restaurant owned, completely oblivious to the scandalised looks of the waitress, as she began to draw.
‘Well, I’ve got a gallery, some offices and a shop,’ Frasier said modestly.
‘Not really an empire, is it?’ Maddie said, rolling her eyes. ‘An empire is a ton of countries, enslaved by your mighty power. Not a shop and an office.’
‘Fair point,’ Frasier said.
Afterwards, when he drove them home, Maddie fell asleep full of chips in the back of the car, and was still slumbering as Frasier drew up in front of the B & B.
‘I look forward to seeing you tomorrow, for our walk,’ he said, leaning across and kissing Rose ever so lightly on the cheek.
‘Me too,’ Rose said, smiling shyly at him, lost once again in a maze of ambiguous intentions that seemed impossible to interpret.
Their walk the next day had been pleasant, under the sunshine, buffeted by the warm winds, with Maddie talking non-stop, inventing goblins and trolls and whispering ghosts around every turn, and behind every weather-stunted tree. Rose had not said much, and neither had Frasier, but she had been content to be in his company as they made their way to one of the lesser peaks, he offering her his hand when they came to any tricky
inclines
, holding onto her fingers for perhaps just a moment longer than he needed to. And when they finally parted outside John’s house, everything had felt just as it should do.
Yes, Rose discovered that she was rather happy to be confused and beguiled by Frasier McCleod, because even if Frasier was just being especially nice to the daughter of his best client, and Ted had just been in the midst of a passing crush, it was a good deal more pleasant and exciting than being the person she had been before. Than being Richard’s wife.
‘See that dreamy look in your eye?’ Shona declared mischievously, drawing Rose back into the present. ‘You’ve had that a lot recently. That’s definitely a thinking-about-a-man look. Which one is it? Ted, all young and keen; or Frasier, all sweetness and hand-holdy?’
‘Don’t try and change the subject,’ Rose said firmly, although the hint of a blush crept in her cheeks. The funny thing was Shona thought she had two men at her beck and call, and the real truth was that actually she had neither. ‘The point is, I’m not sure I can cope without you.’
‘Don’t be a silly sod,’ Shona said. ‘Don’t you get it? You’ve been coping without me since I got here. Rose, you don’t need anyone any more.’
‘Mum,’ Maddie said with some gravity as Rose went downstairs to find her daughter waiting by the front door with her sketchbook tucked under her arm, ‘can we go now?’
‘Go where?’ Rose asked her, still out of sorts from hearing the news that Shona was leaving. Leaving her alone to live her life alone, for the first time since she was eighteen.
‘To Granddad’s!’ Maddie exclaimed.
‘But we haven’t really made a plan to go to Granddad’s today. He’s not expecting us,’ Rose said. ‘I thought that really you and I haven’t seen each other that much since we got here. The weather looks like it might hold, so I thought we might go for a walk, or drive to one of the lakes, maybe get a boat?’
Maddie stared at her as if she’d just suggested taking a trip to the moon.
‘We don’t need to arrange to see Granddad,’ Maddie said. ‘We just need to go, and besides, we did walking yesterday. I want to go and see Granddad and paint.’
Rose sighed, uncertain what to do. The truth was she wanted to go and see John too. Their odd, both new and old relationship had reached a plateau of polite friendliness over the last few days, which she knew she would have to fight against if she wanted anything deeper from him. Rose hadn’t asked him any more difficult questions and he hadn’t appeared to mind her being there, which was about as close as they had come to any sort of obvious affection. When all of this had started, and Rose had found John here in the middle of nowhere, she’d thought that maybe that was enough. Now, though, with Shona about to leave her and sensing that the time she had to ignore Richard and his demands was quickly running out, Rose needed someone, and she discovered that she really wanted her dad.
The truth was, just being near him was reassuring in a way that Rose hadn’t experienced for the longest time. She’d been so long without a parent that she’d underestimated her longing for that one person who would always be there to lean on, and yet that worried her. She didn’t want to start expecting more
from
John than he was able to give, and she didn’t want to start to need him in her life, not now, even though this was perhaps the time she needed him most. It was too dangerous to rely on a man like John now, when everything was so precariously balanced and when she was supposed to be standing on her own two feet. Shona had told her that she didn’t need anybody else, but Rose wasn’t at all sure about that. If anything, for most of the time she felt like a fraud, like a headless chicken who wasn’t so much getting her life together as just careering around making snap decisions based on very little common sense, mainly in an effort to avoid the fact that her old life, her dark, difficult bad life, had not vanished into thin air, and would need to be confronted and concluded one day very soon.
And yet John
was
her father, and he
was
here, and he didn’t mind her coming. He especially didn’t mind Maddie, and in an odd way the developing relationship between the old man and the seven-year-old had improved Rose’s own connection with her daughter as well as her father. The pressure between mother and child to support each other had been eased, and both of them sensed that release of tension and welcomed it.
John was part of her life now, and whatever came next, whether he would let her know more of him or not, Rose knew that she wouldn’t want to go back to the way things were before she found him.
‘OK,’ Rose said, smiling at the thought of another afternoon in the barn with her family, ‘let’s go and see Granddad and see what he’s up to today.’
They had been about to get in the car when Rose spotted Ted striding down the street towards them. Thinking that he might
have
been about to come and see her, Rose lifted her hand and waved at him.
‘Hello!’
Ted stopped dead, examined her standing with her hand waving hesitantly in the air, and, turning on his heel, walked purposefully in the other direction without even acknowledging that he’d seen her. That confirmed it then: he definitely was avoiding her, and Rose couldn’t really blame him.
You silly fool, Rose thought to herself, letting yourself get carried away on the spur of the moment, and now you’ve upset Ted.
‘Ted pretended not to see you,’ Maddie said with her usual inclination towards clarity. ‘He must not like you any more. It’s just like when Lucy and Caroline stopped playing with me at school, and then everyone else did too.’
‘Horrible Lucy and Caroline,’ Rose said, feeling jangled and confused as she watched Ted walk away. ‘Who wants to be friends with them anyway?’
‘I wouldn’t have minded,’ Maddie said, a touch wistfully, before adding, ‘Oh, well, come on then, let’s go and see Granddad.’
Maddie was rattling the barn door and finding it locked.
‘He’s not in here!’ Maddie said with some consternation. ‘Where is he then, if he’s not in here? He’s always in here.’
‘Well,’ Rose said as she reached the locked barn door, ‘I suppose he can’t live in the barn. Let’s go and see if he’s in the cottage. You know, we didn’t check with him that he would be in. He might have gone out.’
‘Granddad doesn’t go out,’ Maddie said firmly, very sure of
the
facts, and Rose had to admit that he had certainly given that impression since she’d first visited him. She had only ever seen him outside the confines of Storm Cottage once, when he had come to see her at the B & B, and for some reason she couldn’t imagine him just deciding to take an impromptu trip.
Maddie raced up the path, discovering at once that the door to Storm Cottage was unlocked, which didn’t mean anything. Rose hadn’t known it to be locked since she’d arrived, and she was fairly sure that if John had gone out he would still have left it that way. When they walked into the kitchen and living area, the cottage was still and silent, a pattern of leaves, their shadows cast by the midday sun, dancing cheerfully on the flagstones. A half-empty pint of sour milk sat on the table, and a pair of ancient-looking, paint-spattered boots stood at the foot of the stairs.
‘He’s in! Granddad!’ Maddie yelled, pointing at the boots. ‘Granddad!
‘Shhh,’ Rose said, getting the distinct feeing that she was trespassing as she looked around for any signs of her father.
‘Why?’ Maddie said, the pitch of her voice seeming at odds with the dusty quiet of the little house. ‘If he’s not here he won’t know I’m shouting, and if he is he will hear us.’
‘Well, I don’t think he is in, so –’ A dull thud came from above their heads.