Dearest Rose (22 page)

Ted had held her hand all the way down the mountainside, and even on the drive back, steering with one hand at speed through
the
twist of country roads. As they’d pulled up outside the pub, which was still thriving from a late licence, Ted had turned to her, bending over to kiss her again.

‘I don’t think we should tell anyone about this,’ Rose said, backing away. ‘I just … not because … only because I’ve got Maddie to think of, and your mum.’

‘OK,’ Ted said. ‘I’ll hold off bragging about how I had you in the palm of my hand until after you’ve gone. Look, lighten up, it was a bit of kissing, not the opening scenes to
Romeo and Juliet
!’

‘Your mum thinks you are secretly vulnerable and likely to get hurt over “a bit of kissing”,’ Rose told him, feeling guilty that she’d forgotten her assurances to Jenny so easily in a moment of madness.

‘My mum still thinks I’m six,’ Ted said, shaking his head. ‘Did she warn you off me, really? That woman …’ He chuckled to himself.

‘Still, we won’t tell anyone and …’ Rose cringed at what she was about to say, ‘… we won’t do it again, will we?’

‘You sound uncertain about that?’ Ted raised an eyebrow.

‘I’m not,’ Rose said determinedly.

‘We’ll see,’ Ted had said. ‘Now come on, let’s go and see if your friend Shona’s scared Andy into snogging her.’

Under her covers Rose decided she would have felt a lot better about letting Ted kiss her if Shona had indeed been snogging Andy, but although her friend was very drunk, and full of fun, the life and soul of the after-show party, she was nowhere near Andy, or any other man, for that matter.

‘Oh!’ she said when she clapped eyes on Rose. ‘Where have you been?’

‘Out for some fresh air,’ Rose said, expecting one of Shona’s typical sarcastic comebacks. Instead her friend grabbed her by the arm.

‘Take me home,’ Shona said. ‘I’ve lost the bleeding key the old witch gave me, and I think I pissed that Andy bloke off by not wanting to cop off with him. Besides, I need to go to sleep in a bed.’

‘You didn’t want to cop off with him after all?’ Rose asked her.

‘I did, but then I didn’t, and then I just couldn’t … Very, very pissed.’

Putting her arm around Shona, Rose guided her through the crowd.

‘Bye, everyone,’ Rose had said, meeting Ted’s eyes briefly as she headed for the door. ‘Thanks for everything.’

The thing was, Rose wondered, touching the slightly inflamed skin around her mouth, what would she do now? How would she look Ted in the eye, or Jenny, or Frasier or Maddie, or anyone now? How would she know how to act the next time she saw Ted, what to do if they were alone together and, most importantly, what not to do? It wasn’t as if she had any real feelings for Ted, not even a little bit, despite his charm and good looks and lips, but it would be very hard to resist the chance to feel the way he’d made her feel last night again, and if she did, did that mean that she wasn’t in love with Frasier after all and that all of everything she had believed in for the last seven years had been swept away with a single kiss, or many kisses and some heavy petting? Rose squirmed further under the cover, screwing up her eyes against the invading sunlight,
before
she realised that she was smiling. For once Rose was rather enjoying having a complicated life.

‘Good gig, was it?’ Jenny asked her suspiciously when she arrived at eight thirty prompt for breakfast, or at least it seemed suspicious in Rose’s heightened state of awareness.

‘It was great, thank you,’ Rose said, smiling at Maddie, who’d collected together a ramshackle collection of felt pens, biros and coloured pencils from Jenny’s rainy-day box and was carefully copying a colour wheel out of her battered book, in between bites of toast. ‘The band was really good. Your son is a talented young man.’

Rose winced at the matronly expression, especially the ‘young man’ bit.

‘I suppose Ted was surrounded by girls,’ Jenny said, her face hovering between pride and disapproval. ‘He always is. I don’t know what they see in him, myself.’

‘There were hundreds of them,’ Rose assured her, ‘all vying for his attention.’

‘If you ask me, he only had eyes for one,’ Shona, who had lumbered down the stairs, despite looking ashen, began.

‘In particular,’ Rose said, ‘some young thing really caught his eye. Some slip of a girl.’

‘Sounds like my Ted,’ Jenny said with some satisfaction. As she returned to the kitchen Shona’s eyebrow shot sky high and Rose shook her head in warning, nodding at Maddie.

‘Mum, did you know that red and green are complementary colours, which doesn’t mean that they go well together, it means green makes red look as red as it can be, and red does the same for green. Did you know that?’

‘I did not,’ Rose said, smiling at her.

‘It really is very interesting,’ Maddie said, returning to the book.

‘Tell me!’ Shona hissed at her, but before she could say more the front doorbell sounded. Rose felt her stomach clench, certain that it was Ted, that he wouldn’t be able to keep their liaison to himself after all, and that he was about to waltz in and announce plans for semi-nakedness with her all over again.

But it wasn’t Ted who walked into the dining room, it was John.

‘Oh,’ Rose said, standing up for no apparent reason. ‘What is it?’

‘Nothing,’ John said. He looked supremely awkward, filling the room with his height, all too aware of the burning look of disapproval that Jenny was boring into his back. ‘I thought rather than wait for you to appear, I might come and collect you and the child.’

Rose stared at him, this version of the man who had once been her father standing in front of her, actually seeking her out. He looked strange in the neat homely room, as if he brought the wildness of the landscape in with him, what was left of his hair standing on end, his clothes ingrained with paint.

‘Really?’ she said, unsure what to make of the invitation. This was the man who only yesterday had told her there was nothing for her, at least not from him. He’d been so clear about it, and nothing very much could have changed in the last few hours. Why was he here, really?

‘I looked at her work again this morning,’ John said, as if it were something he did every day – meet a grandchild, give her a paintbrush. ‘Really quite impressive, intuitive, interesting. I
wondered
if it was a fluke or if she has some talent. I’d like to see more. The more time the better, and so … I came.’

‘Oh, I see,’ Rose said, feeling a flare of jealousy. John had always been very appreciative of her efforts as a child, but only in the way that any adult will nod and smile and tell his child how wonderful her drawing was; he had never been this keen with her. Still, she reminded herself, that was not the point. The point wasn’t why he was here, it was merely that he was here.

‘It’s talent,’ Maddie told him, with self-assurance. ‘I’ve already read the whole of this book and now I know everything about colour theory.’

‘All that theory is tosh,’ John told her. ‘Nothing can teach true talent. That book was written by some old soak who’d do anything to pay for his next drink. Take it from me, I know.’

‘Oh, well, anyway I am very talented,’ Maddie said. She pushed her half-completed reproduction of a colour wheel across the table towards him. ‘Look. And yes, I do want to come and paint. I want to come now, I’m ready.’

Maddie stood up, still in her pyjamas, and went to John, taking his hand, which he looked at as if it were an alien object but he did not let it go.

‘Maddie, you’re not even dressed,’ Rose protested, feeling somehow swept aside by this new unexpected bond.

‘She doesn’t need to be dressed to paint,’ John said. ‘Old clothes are all the better.’

‘You see,’ Maddie said.

‘All the same, go upstairs and find clothes. Five more minutes won’t make a difference.’

‘I’ll go with her,’ Shona said. ‘Give her a hand.’ She paused
by
Jenny, who was still standing resolutely in the doorway. ‘Come on, Jenny, you can help too.’

‘Hmph,’ Jenny said, reluctantly leaving with Shona.

Rose and John regarded each other across the room for a moment.

‘You came here to find us,’ Rose said, emphasising the last word.

‘I’m interested in her ability,’ John replied, looking out of the window.

‘You came
here
,’ Rose repeated. ‘What does that mean? Does it mean anything? I wouldn’t ask, only I’m tired of not knowing where I stand in life. I’m exhausted by it, actually, second guessing, trying always to do the right thing. So just tell me, does it mean anything that you came to get us?’

John shook his head, shrugging apologetically. ‘I don’t know …’ He hesitated, as if debating what to tell her. ‘Frasier and I argue all the time, but he has been, he is, a friend, perhaps my only one. He phoned me last night, on the proper telephone, the one he knows I will answer. He was at some sort of party, all sorts of nonsense and noise going on. He told me he couldn’t concentrate until he’d told me I would be an old and stupid fool to pass up the chance of making peace with you. I do not know that there is a chance for us to make peace, but nevertheless I do respect the man. If it weren’t for him I would certainly be dead now. I feel that there are things you will want me to say, to do, to feel, for you to be … satisfied. And I suspect that I am capable of none of the things you want. So on that basis I have come to collect you, to see what, if any, sort of peace we can salvage. And also because I am interested in the child.’

‘My name is Maddie,’ Maddie said, appearing in Jenny’s grandson’s bright green Ben 10 T-shirt, and a pair of red pyjama bottoms, picking John’s hand up again instantly. ‘Did you know red and green are complementary colours, that means …’

Shona stopped Rose just as she was going to the door to where John was helping Maddie into a battered old Citroën.

‘You sure you’re OK?’ she asked. ‘This all seems a bit dramatic.’

‘What part of my life hasn’t been dramatic?’ Rose said, as if the revelation was news to her. ‘I have literally no idea what it will be like, or if it will work out, if it even can. But it’s better than wondering, I know that much. I’m sorry to leave you here all day at a loose end.’

‘She won’t be at a loose end,’ Jenny said. ‘I’ve been meaning to clear out the annexe where Brian’s mum lived before she passed away, for a year, see if I can’t do something with it. Shona, you can help me do that and I’ll knock a night off your bill, agreed?’

‘Agreed, I suppose,’ Shona said. ‘Although I don’t have any problem at all with being at a loose end.’ She turned to Rose. ‘See you later, quick one in the pub?’

Rose knew that her cheeks had instantly burst into two spots of colour, from the way Shona’s eyes widened in mischievous delight.

‘We’ll catch up later and you can tell me everything that happened,’ she whispered. ‘That’s if Mrs Hitler here doesn’t kill me first.’

For most of that morning Maddie painted, on anything that John could find her – pieces of boards, scraps of cardboard –
filling
them with swathes of colour. Sometimes she painted things, but mostly just colours, jostling with each other for supremacy. When scrap material ran out she begged him for a canvas and after a good deal of grimacing he deigned to part with a small square one that he had ready stretched, warning her to take her time over her next creation as she’d have to wait a few days for there to be any more canvases.

‘Oh, well, in that case I will paint tiny things,’ Maddie said, selecting a fine brush from John’s collection without a second thought before she settled down at the small easel he’d set up, and stared contemplatively at the blank expanse of white.

‘That doesn’t look like it was going to be one of your usual works,’ Rose said, searching for a conversation opening. For the most part she had been watching John and Maddie in silence since they’d arrived, although at one point John had offered her a cup of tea and then told her where everything was in the kitchen so that she could make it, but beyond that they had barely conversed at all. It was probably best that they start slow, Rose supposed, as she sat on a stool in the corner, trying to take in the fact that she was in the same room as her father. For so long he’d been like a fairy-tale figure; now it seemed almost impossible to believe that he was real.

‘I don’t have a usual work,’ John said, a touch snippily.

‘I only mean, well, compared to the other work I’ve seen, it’s very … small.’

‘It was for my own work, my private work,’ John said. ‘Not the stuff I do for McCleod.’

‘Can I ask you something?’ Rose said carefully.

John dropped his head, his shoulders slumping. ‘If you must.’

‘If you hate these paintings, which by the way I think are beautiful, why do you keep on doing them?’

John sighed, stepping back to observe his latest touches of paint. ‘Money.’

‘Really?’ Rose asked him. ‘Are you very hard up?’

‘I have what I need, I am comfortable. And at my age, with my … life, that is very important to me. I’m not proud of it, but it’s a means to an end. An end that has become vital to me. I still do my own work, my true work, that’s what keeps me sane. And that’s why it’s not for sale. I don’t want that part of me to be tainted by this part of me, the part that makes money.’

‘It strikes me that out here on your own, you live quite a frugal life. Frasier looks like the kind of man who moves in rich circles. What do you need all that money for? Are you in a lot of debt or something, because it’s not exactly like you live in the lap of luxury?’

John’s expression became stony and solid, and Rose sensed she’d touched a nerve. Who knows what sort of debts he had racked up during his drinking years? Perhaps it was a part of his life he now had to pay dearly for, and the fact that he was doing that, although it cost his pride dear, impressed her.

‘May I see it?’ Rose asked him, swiftly changing the subject. ‘May I see your private work?’

‘No.’ John was not cruel or unkind in his refusal, just matter of fact. My private work is like my diary, it is too personal to show anyone, even – especially you. I’m sorry, I expect that seems cruel, given the circumstances.’