Runaway Wife (18 page)

Rose nodded.

“We’ll take you,” Maddie said. “You can see my painting. It is very, very good. And it only took me twenty minutes. I don’t know why John takes so long to do his.”

“I frequently wonder the same thing,” Frasier said, smiling at Rose, who continued studiously to avoid his eye. Maddie
loped off ahead of them, clearly delighted to have an excuse to return to the barn, and Rose trailed along beside Frasier, wondering if he would even remember meeting her at all, once it all came out that she was John Jacobs’s daughter. Now, after coming all this way, searching for this man, she discovered that she wanted nothing more than to keep things as they were, after all. To keep Frasier as that happy memory that had meant so much to her. She would rather that these last few moments as strangers could stretch on forever than face the awkwardness and embarrassment that was sure to follow. As they reached the barn, Rose was not aware that Frasier had stopped a few paces behind her until he said her name.

“Rose . . .” He said it so quietly that it was almost like a whisper, uncertain. Rose paused, turning round to look at him as a look of recognition slowly spread over his face. “You are Rose,” he said. “Well, well. Dearest Rose has arrived.”

It was a difficult moment for Rose, standing there as Frasier observed her, seemingly so matter-of-factly.

“I’m so sorry. I never thought I’d see you again,” he said, a little as if he’d rather hoped not to, as his expression was one of pure incredulity. “So you made the journey to see your father at last. I thought I’d hear from you, after I wrote to you with his address a few years back, after I’d got him sober. When I didn’t, I assumed you moved, or decided not to contact him.”

“You wrote to me?” Rose said, her mind struggling to keep up with the words tumbling out of Frasier’s mouth. “Another letter, apart from the postcard, you mean?”

“Yes. You didn’t get it?” Frasier shook his head, as if the sight of her irritated him. “How Shakespearean. It must have got lost in the post. I could have phoned you, of course,
but . . . I don’t know, it never occurred to me. I suppose I thought you’d made your choice and you were sticking to it.”

“You wrote to me?” Rose said. “I didn’t get it.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter now,” Frasier said with a dismissive gesture. “You are here now. So how did you find the old bugger, anyway? It’s not easy, he’s an official recluse. I’ve known journalists who say finding the Holy Grail is a cinch compared to Mr. Jacobs.”

“I . . .” Rose almost told Frasier she had been following the clues to him, not to John, and then thought better of it, remembering the crushing disappointment she had felt only a few seconds before. It would have to be enough that Frasier remembered her at all. The very last thing she must do was reveal any more of her stupid heart to this remote, if pleasant, man. And, as Shona had brutally reminded her, his life probably contained a wife, children, lovers, dogs, and a hundred more reasons why he wouldn’t want to know that she’d come here to tell him she thought she very well might love him. But it was the way he looked at her now, so detached and disinterested, that made her realize she must never let her years of pent-up feelings for him show themselves. “Actually, it was you that led me to him in the end. The postcard you sent, it was the only link I had to . . . to him. That’s why I came to Millthwaite. I didn’t know what I would find here when I came, if anything. I just . . . I felt like I had to come. And here he was—a miracle, really.”

“You followed your instinct.” Frasier studied her face for a moment longer. “You’ve changed. Barely recognizable with that hair.”

Self-consciously, Rose touched her still unfamiliar hair. “I’d forgotten my hair . . . this is all new to me too. Bit of an impulse decision last night.”

“It suits you.” Frasier smiled briefly. “You’re obviously fearless.”

Before Rose could correct his assumption, John appeared in the doorway.

“This child will not stop talking at me about Ancient Egypt. I told her, I don’t care about Ancient Egypt. She does not seem deterred.” He looked Frasier up and down disparagingly. “Oh, you are here.”

“John!” Warmly, Frasier greeted John, who sighed at the sight of the man before ignoring him by turning round and going back into the barn, returning to his canvas. Taking a breath, Frasier followed Maddie in, Rose close behind him.

“This is my painting,” Maddie said very seriously, pointing at her work, which was still propped up against the back wall. “He’s given me more board to shut me up, so I am also working. I shall also not talk to you.”

“Fair enough,” Frasier said amiably. “Very good work in progress, excellent use of texture and depth of color.”

“That’s what I thought,” Maddie said. “I thought that about the texture. If you like, you can sell it in your gallery and give me the money.”

“The thing is, John,” Frasier said, taking a couple of tentative steps closer to him, “the clients are chasing me for their commissions. I need to send the van. I keep leaving you message after message, asking when I can send the van and pick up the latest pieces, and you never reply or call back. Three clients are waiting, John. Three. They’re ready to pay the big bucks, and the long and the short of it is if it’s not your painting on their walls, they’ll take someone else’s. They’re idiots, but that’s how it is.”

“Good,” John muttered. “Three corporate bastards who care more about color coordination than art—why should I do their bidding?”

“John!” Rose was amused and surprised that previously cool and calm Frasier was flustered by John’s disdain. Something about her father clearly set him on edge. Odd, as after all, Frasier had known him in person for almost as many years as she had. “You do realize this isn’t just about you, painting in a shed, don’t you? It’s my reputation at stake here too. The years I’ve put into getting you fit, building your profile, making you a success. Why do we always have to have this conversation every single time I win you a commission? You know why you do it: we all have to pay the bills, John. Even you.”

John withdrew his brush from the canvas for a moment.

“Believe me, if I could live for free, I would. This whole cesspit of art dealership is repugnant. It’s prostitution by any other name.”

Frasier sighed, and Rose could see him wrestling with what seemed like a familiar struggle: deal with John and all his angry tics to get what you ultimately wanted. Rose was intrigued that her father had let anyone so far into his life, let alone have any sort of contact with a dealer or agent, especially one that made him and Frasier seem like an old married couple, destined to bicker away about the same old thing for all eternity.

In the old days, John had seemed to paint almost
because
nobody wanted to look at or buy his work. But then again, in the old days he hadn’t painted these huge, looming, beautiful canvases of the landscapes that surrounded him. At some point John would have either decided or have been encouraged to become commercial, Rose realized, as she watched Frasier search for the right way to talk to her father. What on earth had happened to make him do exactly what he always swore he never would?

“All I’m asking,” Frasier said eventually, his tone carefully
neutral, “is that you sometimes switch your phone on, or look at your emails on the laptop I bought you.”

“Bloody contraptions, they poison your mind. Rose!” The sound of John speaking her name out loud was so unexpected that it made Rose start a little and have to stop herself from looking over her shoulder.

“Yes?” she said.

“Take McCleod here to the storeroom.” John held out a bunch of keys, one of which was presumably to the padlock on the partition wall. “Two of his canvases are there, should be dry by now. This one will be ready early next week. The city folk will have their pretty art after all, and Mr. McCleod will get his fifteen percent.”

“And you will get your money in the bank,” Frasier chided him softly. “Thank you, John. You know, if you’d just taken the time to tell me that when I asked you, ours would be a much smoother friendship.”

“No one said anything about friendship,” John said, raising a brow at Maddie, who treated Frasier to a very haughty look, cloned exactly from her grandfather.

“And this is the one destined for the Berlin bank? May I take a closer look?” Frasier asked.

“No, you may not.” John presented his back to Frasier, blocking what he could of his view with his thin shoulders. “Rose, the storeroom.”

Rose wasn’t entirely sure of this unexpected dynamic between her and her father, where he asked her to do things, and she did them, but given the disappointment of her reunion with Frasier, she didn’t dislike it. As dreadful as he found talking to her, he must hate dealing with Frasier even more, and so was glad at least that she was there to pass the buck to. She was useful for something.

When Rose eventually found the right key and opened the locked door, they discovered that the two canvases were ready and waiting. The air was heavy with the sweet smell of oil paint. This room also was lit by two skylights high in the roof, which gave the room an almost churchlike air of mystery, two heavenly beams of sun cutting squares of gold into the dirty floor. Frasier McCleod was noticeably more relaxed now that he wasn’t in John’s immediate presence, his neatly manicured hands resting loosely on his hips, an expensive-looking gold watch circling a wrist.

“Beautiful,” he said, more to himself than Rose, as he took in the two huge paintings. “What amazing color and light. This is why people love his work. John is the only modern painter I know who can paint something on this scale which still manages to feel like an intimate, private experience.”

Standing next to him, Rose also observed the paintings. They were so vastly different from what she remembered of her father’s brash, abstract, confrontational work. Instead, these were breathtaking landscapes that felt almost as if he were painting the Cumbrian Lake District in its actual size, as if you could step into the landscape and slog through the thick layers of paint, slash upon slash of color that somehow, when you stood back and looked at the work as a whole, made perfect sense. The paintings were beautiful, easy to look at, restful almost. They were everything that John had once abhorred.

Perplexed by what had happened to change her father so radically, Rose looked around the quiet room for more clues. The rest of the room was bare, but at its rear, in what must be the very end of the barn, there was another wall, with another door cut into it, secured with another heavy-looking padlock, the key to which might be on the key ring he’d given her.
What did he keep in there, Rose wondered darkly, the heads of his previous wives on sticks?

“So you sell these?” Rose asked Frasier, who, she became aware, was scrutinizing her rather more closely than the paintings. “To whom?”

“To corporate clients, mainly,” Frasier said, returning his gaze to the paintings. “They work really well in big spaces—reception halls, boardrooms, that sort of thing. John Jacobs’s work is in demand all over; we do particularly well in China and Russia. Can’t get enough of it over there.”

“Really?” Rose was impressed. She’d never thought of her father’s work hanging all around the world. Looking at him, at where and how he lived, it seemed impossible that he had such reach.

“Did you ever feel the need to paint?” Frasier asked her, breaking her train of thought. “Like your daughter?”

“Me? No!” Rose shook her head, genuinely surprised by the question. “I never wanted to, not even as a child. I had no idea that Maddie was artistic until literally just now. I’m afraid I haven’t done much to encourage her . . .”

“It’s no surprise, really. Art hurt you; you are hardly likely to want to embrace it. I wonder, though . . . perhaps you should pick up a brush one day and see what happens. You never know, with your parentage you might be an undiscovered talent. You can certainly see glimpses of creativity in the way you . . .”

“The way I look?” Rose questioned him.

“Well, it’s very different,” Frasier said, his exact opinion of her look unreadable.

“Thank you,” Rose said for want of anything else to say.

“Sorry,” Frasier said, smiling unexpectedly. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. I can never stop saying what I’m thinking. It’s been the bane of my life. I’m sure I would have
a much more standard and conventional life by now if only I had kept my mouth shut at the appropriate times, but then again, who wants a conventional life?”

“Are you gay?” Rose blurted, quite out of nowhere.

“So you’re one of those say-what-you-think people too!” Frasier laughed so loud that Rose felt somehow the sanctity of the storeroom had been broken, and yet she found she was giggling too.

“I never say what I think.” Rose shook her head, smiling. “I never say anything. I have no idea why I just said that. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Frasier said. “No, I am not gay. I’m just really terrible at meeting suitable women—well, until recently, anyway. I do have a decidedly female and very wonderful girlfriend, though.”

Rose felt the smile freeze on her face and threaten to fade as the last fragments of her foolish dream crumbled away.

“And you?” Frasier asked. “Your daughter’s, what, seven? What’s your secret to a happy marriage?”

“Oh, I don’t have one,” Rose said, suddenly keen to be free of that room. “I really don’t think I’ve ever made any true choices in life, I’ve just sort of let it sweep me along.”

“And now it’s swept you here.” The two of them looked at each other for a moment in the half-light, sharing a smile, a memory that was the same but also very different. To Rose, their first meeting had meant everything. To Frasier, it was inconsequential. Almost entirely forgotten.

“Well, it’s nice to see you, Rose,” Frasier said.

“Yes,” Rose said, wishing she had the courage to say much more but supposing she always knew it would end up like this between them, a friendly, if distant, familiarity. “I have often wanted to thank you, for how kind you were to me that day.”

Frasier brushed aside the significance that Rose had
placed on that meeting in one well-meant gesture. “I don’t really remember.”