Runaway Wife (3 page)

“What do you mean?” Rose asked her, suddenly hooked back into her stream of words, a cold wash of shock drenching her in sudden shudders.

“Well, he lives up the road, doesn’t he?” Jenny said, her expression mirroring the look of shock on Rose’s face, as she saw the impact that piece of information was having on her guest. “John Jacobs, he’s lived up there for almost ten years now, the last three of them sober, by all accounts. We used to see him a lot in the village, in the pub, but not so much anymore, which is a good job, if you ask me, the miserable old bugger. He’s rolling in cash, he is, but does he ever do anything for his community? This village is dying on its feet and he’s quite content to sit up there like a king in his castle, not caring what other people are thinking.”

“That sounds like him,” Rose said slowly, turning away from Jenny’s hawklike eyes to watch Maddie, her head close over her book, Bear sitting demurely on the table as Rose took the news in, reeling and dizzy. Why it had never occurred to her that the artist might paint the place he lived in, she didn’t know, but it hadn’t. Not until that moment. And now she had no idea how to react.

“Why, do you know him, then? Old Jacobs?” Jenny asked her.

“Do I know him?” Rose said thoughtfully. “No, I don’t suppose I do. Although perhaps I ought to. He is my father, after all.”

W
hen Rose was very little, her father used to take her for walks on the beach, in the summer, just as the sun was setting. They’d sit on the sand and pick out the colors in the sky, making up names for every nuance between red and gold. Rose remembered knowing, with total certainty, that John loved her the best, more than anyone else in the world, more than her mother, even. And she remembered what a wonderful feeling that was, that closeness between them filling her with a sense of complete safety, so that nothing ever frightened her. John was a tall man, with long arms and legs, and fingers that seemed to flay wildly and splay as he talked, animating his words, continually wanting to tell the world what he was thinking, because he was certain that the world would care. Rose cared, Rose listened to every word he said, drinking in his wisdom; she was his acolyte.

His thick black shock of hair was long and unbrushed, and there was always stubble on his chin, which Rose liked to rub her cheek against when she hugged him. He wore the same pair of glasses that he’d had since he was fourteen years old, round Lennon spectacles, which didn’t suit his angular face at all, and his clothes and skin were always smeared and stained with paint. Their embraces were always scented with the linseed
oil he used to mix with his pigments and Rose remembered how the three of them—John, her mother, Marian, and she—would spend Saturday mornings in her parents’ big bed, laughing and talking, eating toast and making crumbs. Like in most childhood memories, the sun always seemed to be shining, the sky was always blue, Marian was always smiling, and John was endlessly fascinating, weaving a world around them that made Rose feel special. She wasn’t like the other little girls at school, the ones whose dads had jobs and came home after bedtime. Her father was magical, beguiling, exciting, and adoring. Yes, for the early part of her life, Rose certainly felt like the luckiest little girl in the world to have a father who was so very interesting. Of course, she hadn’t known until later, much later, that John was drunk most of the time.

The last time she had seen him, Rose was nine years old.

The idyll that she believed she existed in didn’t blow up overnight; rather, it wore away, week after week, year after year, and as Rose grew a little older she noticed that the layer of gilt that John had painted over their lives was gradually rubbing away, revealing the rough darkness beneath. He no longer smelt of paint, but instead the sour scent of whiskey was always on his breath. His outbursts of joy had become dark, dangerous episodes when he was just as likely to lash out at Rose for being in the wrong place at the wrong time as he was at her mother. Rose became accustomed to turning up the TV when her parents were screaming at each other, and she went into the garden to play when her mother was weeping, her head buried in her arms, at the kitchen table. And she never climbed into their bed anymore on a Saturday morning, because her father wasn’t there.

The morning he had left was just as bright and as sunny as every other day that Rose remembered. The sun streaming in through the stained-glass window in the door imprinted a
hazy shimmering colored pattern on the floorboards in the hall. John had sat her down on the bottom of the stairs, and, crouching in front of her, taken her hands in his.

“I’ve got to go, Rosie,” he said.

Rose remembered mostly being irritated with him: he never called her Rosie, not ever. Why start now?

“Go where?”

“I’m going away, to live in a different place. Me and your mum, we just . . . well, I’ve got to go. So . . . but . . . you will still be my Rosie and—”

“I’m not your Rosie,” Rose said, frowning deeply. There was nothing about this red-eyed, slurring man that she recognized, not even his voice. “When are you coming back?”

“I’m not coming back,” he said, holding her gaze, unflinching in that moment.

“But I’ll see you?” Rose remembered the tremble in her voice, as the reality of what was happening began to dawn on her. Yet she was determined not to cry. John hated it when she cried.

“Course you will,” John said. “You’ll see me all the time, Rosie-Ro.”

He leant forward and kissed her wetly in the center of her forehead. Rose wanted to put her arms around him, cling onto him and beg him not to go. But even then, even at nine years old, she had known that her father would not stay for her. That, as much as he loved her, he did not love her enough for that.

“I’ll see you really soon.” He’d winked and pointed at her as he’d picked up his bag and closed the front door behind him.

That was the last time that Rose had seen her father.

•  •  •

“Who’d have thought that miserable old beggar would have a daughter?” Jenny had abandoned any pretense of being a
hostess and had sat down at the table with Maddie and Rose and a fresh pot of tea. “I can’t imagine any woman letting that miserable old sod get close enough. He looks like a tramp, smells like one too.”

“I wouldn’t really know,” Rose said, intensely uncomfortable about having to talk about something that still hurt her so deeply. The news that her father was nearby was shocking, terrifying, eclipsing everything else that had happened in the last few hours, and even her postcard. If she’d pictured him at all after he’d left, which she’d tried very hard not to do, it was as a nebulous thing, more of an idea of the man she had used to know and trust, existing somewhere, but nowhere real or solid. She never thought of him with a home, a house, and even though she knew he’d left with another woman, she never thought of them as enduring, of the chances of him having another life, another family, more children, even. Rose took a sharp inward breath as the realization that she could have half sisters and brothers dawned on her.

“So, John Jacobs is your father, but he’s not the reason you came here?” Jenny questioned her, her head tilted to one side.

“Not really.” Rose shifted in her seat. “Well, I knew that he’d painted this postcard. But I didn’t expect to actually find him here. I don’t really know what I expected to find.”

“So why are you here, then?” Jenny asked her, clearly not one for tiptoeing around an issue.

“I just had to get away, and I’ve been looking at this painting for so long. This was the first place I thought of. It seems random, I know . . .” How could Rose explain that there was only ever one place she would be able to run away to, even if it was one she knew so little about?

“Get away, as in on the run, or get away, as in needed a bit of a break?”

Rose thought that strictly speaking both of those things were true.

“You know how things can get sometimes,” Rose said, nodding at Maddie, in the hope that Jenny would take the hint and change the subject. Jenny beamed, hugging her mug of tea to her chest, clearly delighted to have something so fascinating land literally on her doorstep.

“I wish my Brian was here. He’ll be gobsmacked when I tell him we’ve got John Jacobs’s daughter staying. He will. You’ll be able to knock him down with a feather. So he abandoned you, did he, the old bastard? When you were little?”

“I suppose he did,” Rose said reluctantly, not used to talking about it.

“And you never saw a penny of all that money, I’ll bet, did you?” Jenny said, arming herself for a morning of gossip. “The tight old git.”

“When he left, his work didn’t make him any money. We lived on my mum’s salary, mostly.”

“So he bled the poor woman dry and then dumped her for a new model.” Jenny was compiling her version of events at lightning speed.

Rose thought about Tilda Sinclair, the “new model,” also an artist, who had posed for her father. Statuesque, stunning, with a mass of midnight hair and navy blue eyes. She wasn’t a newer model, she wasn’t younger, thinner, or more beautiful than Marian had been. She was just different, in every way. Where Marian worked in an office nine to five, Tilda was a creator who sat for her father during the day and worked on her own art all night. Marian was always neatly turned out, slender and fair-haired. Tilda was a voluptuous woman, who oozed fleshy curves that looked like they might envelop you entirely. Rose had never known Tilda, so when she thought of her it was as this siren, this irresistible creature that had lured
her father away from his family without a backward glance. Had her father bled Marian dry? In a way, Rose thought, feeling her stomach clench as it always did when she thought of her mother. After all, in fewer than ten years after he’d left, she was dead.

“I suppose so,” she said to Jenny, who was pouring her yet another cup of tea.

“So are you going up there to confront him? I could give you a lift, if you like? I don’t mind, if you need some moral support. Or immoral, I’m easy either way.”

Maddie lifted her head from her book. “Going up where?” she asked. “Where are we, again?”

It occurred to Rose that since they’d left in a blaze of confusion, Maddie hadn’t even really looked out the window. She’d cried herself to sleep on the journey up and it had been dark when they finally arrived. She had absolutely no idea how far she was from home, which was probably a good thing as it would only frighten her. Maddie was not a child who liked to be far from the things she knew.

“We are in Millthwaite,” Rose told her. “For a little summer break.”

“And then . . . what then?” Maddie asked her uncertainly. Rose thought of John’s last words to her the morning that he kissed her goodbye as she sat on the bottom stair, that he would see her soon—the first lie of many—and now she had to tell Maddie another one.

“And then everything will be fine again,” she said. How was she ever going to explain that to Maddie?

“I’m free after I’ve done the vacuuming,” Jenny offered again eagerly.

“No, thanks, Jenny,” Rose said firmly. “I didn’t come here to find him. I’m not sure I want to find him at all.”

“Find who?” Maddie asked.

“A man I used to know who lives nearby,” Rose said.

“Your daddy,” Maddie stated. She had clearly been listening to everything. “Your daddy lives near here but you don’t want to see him because he is mean.”

Maddie had an uncanny knack for sensing that something was up in a way that belied her years. As if, even at the age of seven, she was well aware that the world was short of happy endings.

“Not at the moment,” Rose said, telling her as much of the truth as she was able to.

Just at that moment Rose’s phone went off, shrilling noisily in her pocket. Without even looking at it, Rose rejected the call and then turned it off.

“But you will,” Jenny insisted. “Because it’s fate, isn’t it? You come all this way, in the middle of the night, for no apparent reason, and find your father, who you’ve not seen for years! That’s fate, that is. That’s God telling you something.”

“Fate.” Rose repeated the word slowly. “Fate makes it sound like you have no choice about what happens to you, but I don’t think that’s true. I think if I left everything up to fate, then I wouldn’t be here. It was going against fate that brought me here.”

Jenny regarded her for a moment as she chewed her final corner of toast.

“But you will go up there eventually, won’t you? Give the old buzzard a heart attack!”

“I’d like to look at your doll’s house.” Much to Rose’s relief, Maddie interrupted Jenny midinterrogation. “I like small things.”

“Do you, dear?” Jenny said. “It’s not for playing with, I’m afraid.”

“Why not?” Maddie asked her.

“Well, it’s old and precious. It might get broken.”

“So it’s never been played with, ever?” Maddie asked her insistently.

“Well, yes, when I was a girl, and my Haleigh used to love it. But not now. It’s an antique, you know.”

Maddie sighed and spent a long moment examining the ceiling. And then she turned to Jenny and fixed her with her own peculiarly unnerving stare.

“What is the point of a doll’s house if it can’t be played with?”

•  •  •

Rose scowled at herself in the almost full-length mirror that was glued to the back of the wardrobe door in the tiny room. Since Jenny had received the news that Rose was John Jacobs’s abandoned daughter, her attitude had transformed from one of resentful hostess to most eager helper. The first thing Jenny had done when Rose told her she wanted to go to the pub and find out more about the art dealer was to insist that she find her fresh clothes to wear.

“These will do for another day,” Rose had said, looking down at her crumpled skirt and worn, creased blouse.

“No,” Jenny said. “I’m not having my guests going out into the town looking like a pair of tramps. What will people think of me? There’s a wardrobe full of clothes that Haleigh’s left behind, which will do you just fine, and as for madam here, I’m sure I can rustle her something up from the stuff my grandchildren leave here when they come for visits. Although they are all boys. But you don’t mind a few boys’ things, do you, madam?”