Runaway Wife (16 page)

“I think this is much easier to look at.” Rose gestured at the work, finding it rather beautiful. “I like it.”

The hint of a smiled played around John’s mouth. “It’s often the people with no taste who have all the money,” he told her.

“I clearly have no taste or money,” Rose said, his words stinging her pride, even though she was certain they weren’t intended as an insult. “So, after everything you’ve done for the sake of your artistic integrity, all the lives you’ve ruined for your work, you’ve given up and started painting picture postcards?”

The words shot out of her mouth like a bullet from a gun, far more pointed than she had intended them to be, her desire to strike back at him greater than her restraint.

John shrugged, unconcerned by the barbs that flew his way. “Integrity is for young men.”

“Funny, I didn’t notice that you were too concerned with integrity when last I saw you.” Rose walked a little nearer to him, searching his face for any trace of the father who used to take her beachcombing and, finding none, wondered if he even remembered the last time he’d left her sitting on the stairs as he cheerfully said goodbye. This would be a losing battle, Rose was sure of that. No matter how much she fought for him to care and remember, he would not let it happen, perhaps because he couldn’t do either, and yet, even though she knew she should turn on her heel and walk away from what would certainly be a painful and disappointing experience, she could not.

“Well, anyway,” she said, struggling to regain her composure, “this is Maddie. She is your granddaughter.”

John said nothing and, without even glancing at the child, he returned his gaze to the canvas.

“Aren’t you going to say hello at least?” Rose asked him tightly, much less able to bear the slighting of her daughter than she was when it came to herself.

“I recall agreeing to answer your questions,” John said coolly, “and I emphatically remember saying that I do not wish for a family reunion of any description. I told you, Rose, you will not find that here.”

“I do not wish for a family reunion of any description either,” Maddie said with such calm certainty that John glanced down at her for a moment. “I just wanted to look at you. You look old and quite dirty. I’m not really interested in you. But I do want to know what that paint feels like between your fingers.
It looks much more slimy than poster paint. I like how it stands up, like icing from the cardboard. And sort of swirls together instead of mixing. Tell me how you mix it up but can still see the separate colors.”

John took a step back, his brows raised as he observed his granddaughter.

“It’s called canvas, not cardboard,” he told her. “Here.”

He held out his palette, heavily laden with paint, and watched as Maddie took a finger full of deep crimson oil paint and rubbed it between her thumb and fingers, bringing the paint up to her nose and inhaling deeply.

“It’s sticky,” she told Rose, who watched from a distance, “and greasy.”

Cheerfully, she smeared it on the back of her hand and then impressed that smear against her cheek, smiling at the cool sensation and acrid scent that accompanied it. “I want to paint with it too.”

“Come on, Maddie.” Rose held out her hand, keen that Maddie should not be disappointed. “John is too busy for us.”

“No,” John said. “No, I said I will talk to you and I will. The child can paint while we talk, if that is what she wants.”

He rooted around in what looked like a pile of rubbish for a while and then brought out a small piece of board. Taking an old china plate from a shelf, he picked up four or five lifeless-looking tubes of paint, squeezing fat slugs of color onto the plate and placing it on the floor, leaning the board against the back wall of the barn, and throwing down a couple of balding brushes.

Without needing to be told, Maddie knelt in the dust on the floor in front of the board and picked up a brush. “What shall I paint?” she asked him.

“Paint what you see,” John said, returning to his work. “The only way to begin as an artist is to paint what you
see, because it’s not what you see that matters, it’s how you see it.”

Disconcerted by her father’s sudden almost grandfatherly gesture, not to mention his unexpectedly good-natured exchange with Maddie, Rose was at a loss again to know what to expect, how to be. Cool and aloof had been her plan, and his too, it seemed, but five minutes with him had made her angry and resentful, ready to leave until suddenly he was fairly kind and conversational. At no point had bringing Maddie to Storm Cottage been about getting to know the man he was today, or building bridges, but if he was to become a memory of Maddie’s, if only for a few hours, then it seemed sensible to try at least to get a better sense of him so that she and Maddie would be able to talk about the time they met John Jacobs, whoever he was. Rose only knew that the father she had known as a child, the bright, shining giant of a man she had been dazzled by, seemed entirely disconnected from this gaunt, gray man, who had turned back to his canvas and was doggedly moving waves of paint around with a palette knife.

“Talk,” he instructed Rose, putting her at an instant loss to know what to say.

“Millthwaite seems like a nice place to live,” Rose said awkwardly, finding it impossible to make small talk with him.

“It’s a place,” John said evenly. “The place that I happened to end up, though I must admit the landscape is very useful for my work. People in boxes in cities like to look at mountains and imagine they have a life outside their dull, pointless existence.”

“So you don’t mix much with the villagers, you haven’t any friends here?” Rose hesitated. “You live alone now?”

“I live alone now. Look, I haven’t seen you for twenty-odd years. Do you think that if I can live without my daughter I’d need the reassurance of strangers to get by?” John asked,
pausing to look at her for a second, clearly irritated. “The whole point of my life, of the person that I am, is that I don’t need or want people in it. I want seclusion, I want to be left alone. For the most part, I get it.”

Rose took a breath, looking towards the partially open barn door, fighting the sudden urge to run out of it, and run and run up the nearest slope without stopping until her lungs threatened to burst and she could suck in mouthfuls of air that had not also been inhaled by this man, this cold stranger. Was this what her father had always been like, or were her sun-drenched memories of the man that she had once believed loved her figments of her imagination?

“Is that what happened to Tilda?” Rose said, tasting the metallic taint of lips too often bitten of late, as she searched for some word or memory that would make him feel
something
. “Did you use her up and throw her away too? After leaving Mum, devastating our lives without a backward glance, did you do the same to her?”

“What happened between Tilda and me is none of your business,” John said curtly. “You are two separate chapters of my life. And both are now closed.”

“
That’s
your logic?” Rose asked him, incredulous, her determination to remain as detached as he was crumbling easily away. “You decided to leave one life behind and start—or rather, wreck—another, and never the twain shall meet? Children don’t have an expiration date, you know.”

“Apparently not.” John sighed, wiping his knife on the hem of his shirt and turning back to his tubes of paint, his fingers hovering over the colors until eventually he selected burnt umber. Glancing up at Rose, who was still rooted by the door, he asked, “Have you thought about talking to your husband, trying to work things out? It might not be too late if you go back now.”

“If I go back?” Rose shook her head, forcing herself to keep her voice low. “You really will do anything to get me out of here, even try your hand at matchmaking. Even though you have no idea what hell you’d be sending me back to.”

“You are not me,” John said. “You need people. And as you have so vociferously reminded me, a child needs a father. It is worth talking, surely. At least attempt to work things out.”

“Like you talked to Mum and tried to work things out?” Rose snapped before she could help herself, unable to maintain this distant impartiality, tipping her head sharply to one side. “Oh, except that you disappeared one morning, leaving without even having the courage to wake her up and tell her you were going, leaving only your daughter to tell her, once she’d sobered up, that you’d said goodbye.”

Rose remembered all too clearly that morning, those moments of confused quiet after John shut the door. She had remained sitting on the bottom stair, wondering exactly what had just happened, torn between this pain that seemed intent on rending her chest in two, and a child’s desire just to be normal. To pretend it hadn’t happened, that her father hadn’t just left, and that if he had, he would be back again soon. Glancing up the stairs to where Marian was still sleeping off the bottle of wine she had drunk the night before, sitting at the kitchen table, weeping quietly as Rose made them sandwiches for tea, Rose had wondered if she should wake her mother. Maybe Marian would hold her, stroke her hair and comfort her, like she had when she was very little, or maybe she’d start crying again, bury her head in the pillow, and ignore Rose, who’d sit uncertainly on the edge of the bed, tentatively rubbing her mother’s shoulder, until it became clear that it didn’t matter to Marian whether she was there or not.

But by the time Rose had reached the top of the stairs, her fairy-tale ending played out in her head, she realized the
truth. Her mother was still in her bed, still sleeping through the deep debilitating misery that Rose would later understand as depression, but which then, as a little girl, hanging on the bedroom door, she saw only as a lack of care. No one cared about her anymore.

“Dad’s gone,” she’d told Marian, shaking her shoulder as hard as she could, until her eyes flickered open and focused on Rose. “He’s gone with his fancy woman. He went hours ago. I’ve been on my own all day, not that you care.”

Nine-year-old Rose had slammed her mother’s bedroom door on the way out, running downstairs in her own sudden flood of tears. But it had been the sound of Marian’s dry, rattling repeated sobs that had carried on as Rose had gone to sleep that night, still dressed in her day clothes, teeth and hair unbrushed, hoping against hope that everything would be OK in the morning. But the truth was that, really, nothing had ever been OK again.

•  •  •

“You know, I thought that when I saw you I’d remember how much I missed you and loved you,” Rose said bitterly, and for a moment there it was almost like that. “But looking at you, listening to you now, all I can remember is how much I hate you.”

“I don’t blame you for hating me.” John turned round to look at her directly for the first time. “I made mistakes, bad ones. I was wrapped up in the alcohol, I behaved . . . thoughtlessly. You won’t find me denying that. I am what I am. But
you
are not me, so don’t try to escape your own problems by laying them at my feet. You have a child. Perhaps you haven’t reached the end of your relationship, perhaps there is more ground to cover. Maybe you can sort it out. He might take you back, for the girl’s sake.”

“Take me back!” Rose breathed, the fury that had bubbled
constantly under her skin since she arrived threatening to erupt. Desperately she tried to contain her voice to an urgent whisper, for fear that it would distract Maddie from her painting. “Do you know, Mum would have taken you back, even after everything, even after the humiliation, the years of silence from you? Even up until the point she walked into the sea and drowned herself she would have taken you back, John. All those years, wasted on loving you and she never got over it, never moved on. I know, because I was there every day from the age of nine to pick up the pieces. Every single day I had to put her back together as best I could, made sure she was washed, fed at least. Every day until the day she died I cleaned up the mess you made, the destruction you walked out on. Oh, I know my husband would have me back. I know he’d have me back like a shot, he’d be thrilled. But
I won’t go
. I won’t make the same mistake Mum did. I won’t go back and no one can make me, not him and especially not you.”

The tension crackled in the air between them. For the first time since she had arrived he studied her face closely, and Rose knew he was searching for traces of what had happened to make her so angry, so frightened. Something akin to concern showed in his expression, and the next time he spoke, his voice was more gentle, if still halted and stiff.

“It must have been hard for you,” he conceded quietly. “All that business with your mother.”

“All that business.” Rose laughed mirthlessly. “Which part, becoming a carer for my clinically depressed mother, or discovering that just when I thought she was finally getting better she more than likely killed herself?”

“All of it, of course,” John said. “Although I didn’t realize the extent of how very ill she was. I knew she was upset, of course, but I didn’t realize it became such a burden to you.”

“It wasn’t a burden,” Rose snapped. “She was my mum. I loved her. Which doesn’t mean to say that it was OK for you to leave a little girl to cope with all of that. It wasn’t. When did you find out she was dead?”

The words still stuck in Rose’s throat when she was forced to articulate them. Because although her mother had never again held her, or stroked her hair, or comforted her after John left, Rose still missed her keenly every day; she still wished for her mother over and over again.

“The week it happened, or thereabouts.” John dropped his gaze from hers. “Tilda still had a friend down there. She phoned to let us know when she read about it in the local rag, I assume.”

Detaching herself from the refuge of the door, Rose sat down hard on an ancient stool that stood in the middle of the studio for no apparent reason.

“You knew, and you didn’t come for me?” Rose asked him. “You left me to deal with all that, alone? I can understand that perhaps you couldn’t face Mum, but even when I was alone, you still didn’t think enough of me to come?”