Road Ends (17 page)

She was pleased with the letter. It made her sound like the person she used to be.

The problem was that, having relearned how to cry, she now had difficulty not crying at the drop of a hat. When she read her parents’ letters (sent in the same envelope to save postage) she
cried even though she was in the kitchen and anyone could have walked in on her. Her mother’s letter made her cry because it reminded her of why she couldn’t go home; her father’s because in the whole of the English language there weren’t words to describe how little she cared about the Tower of London, St. Paul’s Cathedral and the National Gallery.

Her father hadn’t signed his letter for the simple reason (this she knew) that he hadn’t known whether to put “Father” or “Dad,” and for some inexplicable reason that made her miss him. Neither letter had so much as mentioned Adam, and Megan knew as well as she knew her own name that no one would ever send her a picture of him.

From time to time Mrs. Jamison walked through Women’s Wear on her way to somewhere else. Whenever Megan saw her coming she tried to look busy and efficient, but on a Monday morning in April she didn’t see her coming. There were no customers. Tracy and Julie were giggling over by the till and Megan was standing alone by the window in the coat department, watching the silver trickles of rain running down the glass. Suddenly there was Mrs. Jamison, two feet away and smiling at her. The other two girls began refolding sweaters, trying to look busy.

“Well, Megan,” Mrs. Jamison said. “How are you getting along?”

“Very well, thank you, Mrs. Jamison.”

“Are you enjoying fashion more than cosmetics?”

“Yes. Yes, I am. Thank you very much.”

“Good,” Mrs. Jamison said. “I’m glad to hear that.” But she looked at Megan with a searching expression for a moment more before going on her way. The searching expression worried Megan. It worried her still more the following day when Mrs. Timms came and told her Mrs. Jamison wanted to see her in her office. She wondered if Mrs. Jamison had seen through her and knew that she
didn’t like the job and was no good at it. Or if maybe Mrs. Timms had complained about her lack of enthusiasm. She thought Mrs. Jamison was going to give her the sack.

“Sit down, Megan,” Mrs. Jamison said. “I thought it was time we had a chat.”

She had a large desk in a small, cramped office. There was nothing on the desk except a green blotter, a pen and a sheet of paper Megan recognized as her own application form.

Megan sat down, her heart thumping. It occurred to her that the reason she was afraid of being fired was not because she didn’t want to leave Dickins & Jones but because she didn’t want to leave Mrs. Jamison. For some reason Mrs. Jamison seemed to like her and to be interested in her, which made her unique in the world outside Struan.

Mrs. Jamison’s hands, which were slim and elegant like the rest of her, were folded neatly on the blotter in front of her. “Now then,” she said. “Tell me how you’re getting on. Not just here at work, but generally. Have you found somewhere nice to live? Do you have friends over here? Or relatives?”

To her horror Megan felt a lump rise up in her throat. She looked sharply away, appalled at herself.

Mrs. Jamison waited for a moment and then carried on smoothly as if she hadn’t noticed anything. “I know it can be quite difficult when you’re starting out,” she said. “Particularly if you’re a long way from home and don’t know anyone. And if you’re having problems of any sort I hope you would tell me about them. But we can discuss that later, if you like. Or another time. For now let’s just talk about your job.”

She paused, and Megan managed to look at her and make a stab at a smile.

“My guess is that you’re a very capable young woman,” Mrs. Jamison went on, “and I imagine you don’t see yourself being a shop assistant forever.”

Megan swallowed. The lump seemed to have subsided, more or less. “Oh, it’s fine,” she said, and her voice sounded all right. “I mean, maybe not forever, but for now it’s fine. Really.”

Mrs. Jamison nodded. She seemed to be waiting for Megan to go on.

“It’s not always very busy, that’s all,” Megan said. “Sometimes there’s not much to do. I’m used to being busy all the time, so it’s a bit … slow. Just sometimes. Mostly it’s fine.”

Mrs. Jamison picked up Megan’s application form and studied it.

“You’re twenty-one?”

“Yes.”

“And you have no formal qualifications. That’s right, is it?”

Megan nodded.

“Why is that, Megan? A clever girl like you. We didn’t really go into that at your interview, did we?”

“I was needed at home,” Megan said. “There are nine of us—well, there were—and the others are all boys and my mother wasn’t very … my mother needed help.”

She had a sudden vivid memory of her mother smiling down at her, saying, “What would I do without you, Megan?” She couldn’t have been more than seven or eight at the time. She’d adored her mother. The other little girls in her class had gone to each other’s houses after school to play at dressing up or some other silly game and Megan had felt sorry for them. She’d gloried in being needed and, as time went on, she was needed more and more.

When Henry, brother number four, was born with a hole in his heart, her mother’s attention was entirely taken up with him. After he died, she’d seemed to lose interest in everything for a while. Then she became pregnant again. By the time Peter arrived, closely followed by Corey, the roles were set: Megan’s mother looked after the babies and Megan looked after the rest.

She didn’t mind. She was proud of how much her mother relied on her. In any case it had seemed perfectly natural; she was better at running the house than her mother. As the boys got older she’d been better at running them too. Boys needed a firm hand and her mother’s hands weren’t firm. Megan’s were.

When she was in grade eleven Mr. Hardy, her history/guidance teacher in high school, had called her into his office one day for a “little chat” about her future. He’d suggested secretarial school or maybe a course in home economics. Megan had replied that her mother couldn’t spare her and Mr. Hardy had smiled and said she had her own future to think of and he was sure her mother wouldn’t want to stand in her way.

Megan had been insulted by his easy dismissal of how indispensable she was. She’d wanted to say, My mother has just had a miscarriage and is probably crying in her bedroom right this minute and you think I should go off and be a secretary. Who’s going to get supper?

He asked her to talk to her parents and come back and see him in a week, and she’d said she would and then didn’t.

Now, sitting in Mrs. Jamison’s office three thousand miles from home, it occurred to Megan that her mother might have been better off if she’d had to get supper. If she’d had more to do and to think about, maybe she wouldn’t have gone on to try for yet another baby, and had another miscarriage and then a stillbirth.

Perhaps Mr. Hardy had been right after all. She should have detached herself from her family much earlier. Why hadn’t she seen that? Maybe it wasn’t that her mother genuinely couldn’t manage without her; maybe it was the other way around: she—Megan—had made herself indispensable because she was afraid of leaving home. Of leaving her mother.

It was Tom, home from university the summer Megan was nineteen, who had finally forced her to confront the question of her own future. “There’s a world out there, Meg,” he’d said
seriously, not teasing for once, “and you’re going to miss it. If you don’t get out of here soon, you won’t get out at all.”

She’d been angry with him at the time, but it made her think. She’d looked around and seen that those of her classmates with anything about them had gone. The others had married young and were raising families of their own. She was the only one still at home. She saw that Tom was right, but even then she’d almost left it too late. She was nineteen when she decided to leave and twenty-one before she finally managed to go.

The radiator against the far wall in Mrs. Jamison’s office was blasting out so much heat that she’d opened the window, and Megan could hear traffic far below. London, going about its business.

Mrs. Jamison was waiting patiently.

“It was my own fault,” Megan said. “Not getting any qualifications. I just didn’t … I guess I didn’t want to think about it back then.”

Mrs. Jamison nodded. “Well, it’s not the end of the world,” she said. “There are still lots of jobs where you can work your way up. The problem is, we don’t have anything of that kind here at the moment. So I’m afraid that for now, if you stay with us, it’s the shop floor.”

“That’s all right,” Megan said, so relieved that she wasn’t being dismissed that for the moment she positively loved the shop floor. “It’s fine. I like it. Really.”

“Well, that’s good,” Mrs. Jamison said, though she didn’t sound convinced. “But you need to give things some thought, Megan. You need to work out what you really like doing, what you’re particularly good at, and then you need to find yourself a job that makes proper use of you.”

“Oh, I know what I like doing,” Megan said, straightening up and squaring her shoulders. “I like organizing things. I like being busy, really busy, all the time. Getting things done. I’m good at getting things done.”

Mrs. Jamison smiled. “That I can believe,” she said, and she stood up and the interview was over.

Megan went back to her job ridiculously buoyed up, considering that, really, nothing had changed. And somehow it didn’t surprise her when, a week later, a disapproving Mrs. Timms told her that Mrs. Jamison wanted to see her again.

Mrs. Jamison said it was funny how these things sometimes happened, like two pieces of a jigsaw suddenly coming together. Friends of friends of hers had bought a small hotel, a new venture for them, and were looking for someone to help with … “Well, with everything,” Mrs. Jamison said. “Apparently it’s very run down and there’s a great deal to do in order to get it up and running. And once it is, of course, there will be even more to do: hiring staff, managing the front desk—all the things that go into running a hotel.”

She smiled at Megan. “I shouldn’t really be doing this, Dickins & Jones isn’t an employment agency, but we’re not making proper use of you here, Megan. I think you should go and talk to them. I’ve given them your name. I’m making no promises, you understand. It will be up to them. And to you, of course.”