One afternoon she had ventured in there to ask them if they wanted tea, to find them both asleep on John’s bed, Tilda’s head resting on his chest, his arm wrapped around her. It was such an intensely personal moment that Rose had quickly backed out of the room, quietly closing the door behind her. Nevertheless, Rose was glad that she had seen it.
As soon as the opening night of the exhibition was out of the way Rose was going to ask Tilda to come and stay with them, to use some of the great deal of money that John had released to her to pay for someone to run the shop for as long as was needed. This, Rose realised, was not a time when John should have to choose between the people he loved and cared for, and if she had unwittingly become the cause of that, she was determined not to be, for one moment more.
Rose was quietly optimistic about Maddie’s chances of settling in at her new school. The head had enjoyed all of the seven-year-old’s many questions as she showed her around the small school, seeming undaunted by Maddie’s trademark bluntness
and
lack of tact. Maddie had liked what she’d seen and even been on a successful play date with a local girl who would be in her class, managing to go a whole afternoon without offending or upsetting anyone.
Rose had taken the opportunity to drive to Carlisle again and buy herself some more clothes, including something for the opening. It had been a strange experience, walking around the shops with money in her pockets and no one to please but herself, and she had spent several minutes wandering about before she realised that she had just begun to get a sense of her own style. She knew it wasn’t Richard’s idea of what she should look like, or Haleigh’s haphazard approach to youthful fashion, it was just wearing what made her feel good inside. Initially lost, Rose had laden herself down with item after item, gradually working her way through shop after shop until she found clothes that she liked, that she felt comfortable in and herself, finally choosing a knee-length sea-green pencil dress for her father’s exhibition, which set off her slender figure and contrasted with her blonde hair. As Rose examined herself in the dressing room mirror, she ran her fingers through her hair, which was longer now, and dark at the roots, discovering that she was very keen that her old hair did not come back, not yet. It was still too much of a reminder of who she’d once been.
Still wearing the dress, she sat down on the little stool provided in the cubicle and dialled Shona’s number.
‘Will you come and do my hair again?’ she asked, making Shona chuckle.
‘No, go to a bloody hairdresser or sheep shearer or whatever it is they have up there. So you’re keeping it blonde then?’
‘Yes,’ Rose said, looking at herself in the mirror. ‘Yes, I like
Blonde
Rose, Blonde Rose is the one that hits husbands with planks.’
‘How are you now, about all that?’ Shona asked her. ‘I told Mum, Mum’s told the town all about it. And after the police visited him at the surgery for a chat it’s been brilliant. It was in the local press and everything. “Local Doctor Quizzed over Domestic Abuse!” I’m sending you a copy.’
Rose already knew, but she didn’t say anything. She knew because despite her reservation about pressing a charge against him, she had been left with no choice but to go ahead, when Richard continued to call and text her, becoming increasingly menacing. Finally she had asked the police to intervene, and then after only a moment’s hesitation she had left an anonymous message on the local paper’s news desk answerphone, tipping them off about the scandal. Her only weapon against Richard returning was to show him how she could destroy his precious reputation, and for once in her life Rose did not hold back.
‘It’s Dad’s exhibition coming up,’ Rose said. ‘That’s all I’m thinking about. I wish you could be there. Things OK your end?’
There was the briefest pause. ‘Yes, yes, you know me. We’re all great,’ Shona said.
‘Good,’ Rose replied uncertainly. ‘Shona, you would tell me, wouldn’t you … if –’
‘I’m fine,’ Shona had said. ‘I’ll call you, OK? Speak soon …’ Rose had thought she’d heard Shona talking to someone else as she’d hung up the phone, and a moment later, just as she’d been unzipping her dress, the phone rang, showing Shona’s number. But when Rose answered it the line went dead, and when she tried to call back it was switched to answerphone.
When
Rose had called her again, later that evening, Shona had been bright and cheerful, and Rose reminded herself not to read too much of her own life into other people’s. As Shona kept reassuring her, she knew what she was doing.
The visit with the solicitor that her father insisted on had gone as well as could be expected. Frasier had accompanied her for moral support and Rose had felt a curious mixture of fear and exhilaration as she took the first steps to filing for a divorce. What she did not feel, though, she noted, as the solicitor tried in vain to persuade her to claim maintenance and child support from Richard, something she absolutely refused to do, was regret. No, there wasn’t even a trace of regret.
‘But it’s your house,’ the solicitor said.
‘And I’ve never been happy there,’ Rose said. ‘Let him have it. I want nothing to do with it or him.’
‘Are you OK?’ Frasier had asked her on the drive back afterwards.
‘I think so,’ Rose said. ‘I think I have a lot of things – thoughts, feelings – I need to untangle. I still haven’t really thought about everything that Maddie and I have been through. Haven’t processed it, as the Americans would say. I suppose I probably will need to do that, won’t I, to really move on, and make a fresh start?’
‘I suppose you will,’ Frasier said, ‘yes.’
‘Well, today was a start,’ Rose said, smiling at him. ‘I’ll take that for now.’
At least things between Rose and Frasier were manageable, and she was glad to have him in her life at the crucial time, even though it was not how she had spent so many unhappy hours imagining it.
There had been one moment, the previous night, when Rose had been uncertain again of the way things were. After days of being resolutely careful around her, Frasier had slipped a little again. They’d stayed up late, talking over plans for the big day, laughing about Maddie and how she’d almost successfully turned the whole event into being about her, about John’s reluctance to be involved at all, despite the obvious enjoyment he was getting from it, and how Jenny and Tilda had faced off that morning over the vacuum cleaner, neither one wanting to relinquish its powerful suction.
‘You are beautiful when you laugh,’ Frasier said thoughtlessly. ‘When you really, really laugh you radiate light. It’s quite extraordinary to see.’
Rose held her breath as he reached out and touched her hair. ‘And now the blonde is growing out, I can see you again. The girl I met all those years ago.’
‘I’m getting the roots done in the morning, for the exhibition,’ Rose said sharply. ‘I don’t want to be that girl, that trapped, frightened woman. This is me now, blonde and bolshy, so … there.’
‘Oh, I know that,’ Frasier said, ‘and you make a very good blonde, one the finest I’ve ever seen. I was just –’
‘Don’t,’ Rose said.
‘Rose, I’ve been thinking …’ Frasier began, but Rose got up, promptly walking away from him. Whatever he was thinking, whatever he wanted to say she wasn’t ready to hear it, not yet.
‘There’s still so much to do before tomorrow,’ she said brightly as if he hadn’t spoken at all. ‘I really hope it goes well. That’s really all I want: for it to go well and for Dad to be happy. That’s really all I want to think about now. Good night, Frasier.’
‘Good night,’ Frasier said.
When Rose had reached her room, she’d taken out the postcard that he’d sent her all those years ago, read it again, just the way she had the first time, and fell asleep with it folded in her hand.
When it came time to leave, Frasier, Tilda and Maddie were already outside, Maddie fussing over who sat where in Frasier’s enormous car. It was the first moment that Rose had had alone with John all day.
‘How are you feeling, though?’ she asked him. ‘I mean really.’
John shrugged. ‘Like a man on the point of imminent death, I suppose.’
‘Stop joking!’ Rose protested. ‘I can’t talk to you about anything important without you wanting to brush it off, make light of it.’
‘My dearest Rose,’ John said, smiling fondly at her, ‘a man does not want to spend the last days of his life dwelling on the last days of his life. He doesn’t want to spend it sitting for hours in a car going to the hellhole that is Scotland either, but as you have made me do one of those things, then the very least you can do is let me get away with the other.’
‘I suppose that is fair enough,’ Rose said, impulsively covering his hand with hers. ‘It’s just there is still so much I want to say to you, Dad. So much I want to talk about. All those years that I missed – I can’t help wanting to try and cram them all in now.’
‘But that would be no good,’ John said, putting his arms around her and hugging her to his frail chest, ‘because for most of those years you missed I wasn’t a good enough man to be your father, and now, now that I finally am close to being good
enough
, the best that I can do for you, and you for me, is to live in the moment, with you and Maddie, and Tilda and even Frasier, I suppose. You are my family, and that is so much more that I have any right to hope for.’
Rose nodded, leaving her head where it was for a moment, enjoying the rare embrace.
The car horn sounded outside, signalling that Maddie had finally chosen her seat and that Frasier was ready to take them to Edinburgh.
‘Ready to meet your public?’ Rose asked John.
He sighed heavily. ‘With a little bit of luck I might die on the way,’ he said.
Chapter Twenty
FORTUNATELY IT WAS
a warm evening when they arrived outside the gallery, strong sun giving the dour grey stone of the building a rosy glow. Frasier helped Tilda and John out of the car, Maddie racing ahead to find Tamar was waiting in the doorway, waving madly at her with a youthful enthusiasm that almost matched Maddie’s.
‘We’re all ready,’ Tamar said excitedly as John and his entourage mounted the steps. ‘Everything is exactly as you wanted it, Mr Jacobs.’
‘Not exactly, my dear,’ John said, smiling at her, ‘given that I wanted it all locked up in my barn until after I was dead, but still, I appreciate your efforts.’
‘Oh,’ Tamar said, uncertain whether or not John Jacobs was joking, and at a loss as to how to respond.
‘Ignore him,’ Rose said, smiling at her. ‘
I
, for one, can’t wait to see it.’
‘John,’ Frasier said, ‘why don’t you take Rose and Maddie round now? Show them your work yourself, before anyone else comes. I feel that the first time Rose sees it, it should be a private moment between the three of you.’
‘And my surprise,’ Maddie insisted. ‘Which is most important. Where is that, by the way?’
John looked into the gallery with no small amount of dread on his face, an image of vulnerability that made Rose want to bundle him into the car and take him home again in that instant.
‘Come on then,’ he said, offering Rose his arm and then leaning on her when she took it. ‘But I must warn you, I painted all these sober.’
The buzz of the crowd, the clinking of glasses and the low background of classical piano music filled the gallery, which was packed with people from the art world, who, it appeared, had travelled far and wide to see her father’s work. Having had her own private viewing, Rose was content to watch from the very edges of the room, her back against the wall, as she saw her father laughing and talking with great animation and energy to a group of people he’d never met before, with all the confidence of a man who knew he had every right to be in that place at that time. Tilda stood at his side, quietly proud, and Maddie danced about his feet, leading any adult she could catch, which had been several, to the very heart of the exhibition and her surprise, which she was deeply proud of.
Rose and Maddie’s journey through the gallery with John, before the doors had opened and all of these people had streamed in, had been a journey through years of her life, her life that she had not even been aware of, her life as it had been kept alight in John’s imagination, heart and memory. Or rather, both the life he regretted destroying so wantonly and the one he imagined could have been, if he had been a different man.
As he led Rose from painting to painting, saying very little
about
each one, she understood why he had been so reluctant to talk to her about the past this morning, why he hadn’t wanted to waste any more precious moments on it when it was all here for her to see. Every memory he’d clung on to, every regret and mistake, the image of Rose as a child, the same image, over and over again, it was all here, laid out with brutal affecting honesty.
Tilda was part of the tapestry too, appearing often, sometimes on her own, sometimes with Rose. It had been his depiction of Marian, Rose’s mother, as the beautiful, confident girl he’d first fallen for that touched Rose the most. Marian, whose hair had been light blonde, and who Rose always tried to remember as she was when Rose was very little, always laughing and full of joy. When Rose looked at John’s painting of her mother she saw not only that precious memory of her mother brought to life, but most touchingly of all Rose saw herself as she was now, the image of her mother then. And perhaps that had been the greatest gift that John could have given her, that sense that by surviving Richard, by coming through this, she had picked up the torch of her mother’s life, which had once burnt so brightly, and was carrying it forward into the unknown, living her new life for both of them.
The very last painting by John featured Maddie too, flying amongst the clouds, her arms outstretched above the mountains that surrounded Storm Cottage. And it was there that they found Maddie’s surprise.
Her own painting, mounted and hung right next to John’s portrait of her. It was an image of John at his easel, his granddaughter sitting at his feet, drawing, and Rose, complete with her short spiky blonde hair, sitting on a stool reading a book,
waiting
for the artists to finish. It was about as close to a depiction of perfect, if untraditional, family life that Rose had ever seen, and it meant more than she could say that it was Maddie who recognised and captured the moment.