Road Ends (23 page)

Well, it doesn’t matter, she told herself, expertly pasting a length of wallpaper for the downstairs cloakroom. Nobody cares whether or not you know things. It’s not going to make any difference to the world. It turns out you’re good at papering walls, so get on with it. She carefully turned up the bottom of the paper and passed the sheet up to Annabelle, who was standing on top of the stepladder.

The paper was creamy with a fine pink stripe. Separately both it and the room had looked bland and uninteresting; together they were wonderful. When the papering was finished Annabelle stood in the doorway for a few minutes looking at it thoughtfully and then went off to a junk shop and came back with a hideously ornate gold-painted mirror. Now
that
is a mistake, Megan said to herself, but it wasn’t. When the mirror was hung above the oval wash basin so that it reflected the two candle lights on the opposite wall, the whole room took on a rich, golden glow.

“What are we trying for here, Versailles?” Peter asked when he saw it—he’d been off talking to the bank manager.

“Exactly,” Annabelle said. “Versailles is what cloakrooms should be. Are you converted, Megan?” (Which meant she’d noticed Megan thinking it was a mistake.)

“Yes,” Megan admitted, running a finger around a curly bit of the frame and checking for dust, of which there was an abundance—Annabelle had been too impatient to get it up on the wall to let her clean it first—“but it’s going to be murder to keep clean.”

In the evenings—or more likely late at night—when they had finished whatever task they had set themselves for the day, the three of them would sit on beanbags amidst the paint pots on the floor and survey their handiwork, eating exotic (and frequently disgusting) cheeses from Harrods Food Hall with chunks of
French bread and wine Peter had stolen from his father’s wine cellar. Most of the time they were modestly admiring of what they’d achieved, though not always.

“Everyone else is doing Habitat,” Annabelle said anxiously one evening. “Stripped pine. Clean lines.” Despite being absolutely confident in her own taste she was prone to last-minute doubts—later than last minute in this case: they’d completed all the bedrooms and were well advanced with the ground floor.

“Here we go again,” Peter said.

“You don’t think we’re out of step with the times?”

“I
know
we’re out of step with the times. We’re
deliberately
out of step with the times! Stop thinking about it, for God’s sake.”

“What do you think, Megan?”

It surprised and flattered Megan when they asked her opinion but she was perfectly happy to give it. “I think foreigners will love it,” she said.

“Do you?” Annabelle said hopefully.

“Yes. It’s old-looking and England’s supposed to be old.”

“Spot on,” Peter said. “Have some more wine. What do you think of this wine, Meg?”

“Not much.”

“No palate, this girl,” Peter said sadly, which pleased Megan. Most people would have said, “No palate, these Canadians,” as if her lack of palate were to do with her being Canadian instead of with her being her. Wine was another thing she didn’t know anything about and she was happy to leave it that way. Peter’s one fault, from what she’d seen so far, was that he drank too much of it, and when he did, he was impatient with Annabelle. Annabelle’s one fault was that she didn’t slap him down on the spot. She was too nice, that was the problem. In Megan’s view, if you’re too nice to a man he’ll take advantage of you every time.

But mostly, they were good to each other. And always, they were good to her.

——

It was only at night that she felt alone nowadays. Of course, she
was
alone at night—during the renovations and for the first few months after the hotel opened she slept in one of the single rooms on the top floor. Annabelle and Peter had a flat a few streets away, so when they left each evening she had the hotel to herself. Annabelle had worried about this. “Are you sure you won’t be nervous, Megan? You’re very welcome to sleep on our couch. These old houses tend to creak.”

“I’ll be fine,” Megan replied. “Creaks don’t bother me.”

Which they didn’t. It was the distance between herself and home that bothered her. For some reason, now that she was doing a job she loved and that looked set to evolve into one she could imagine doing for many years—she was to be responsible for the day-to-day running of the hotel—she ached more for home than she had when she was shut in a cupboard in Lansdown Terrace. There it had felt like a holiday gone wrong, which, being a holiday, would soon be over. Now she could see herself here in five years’ time. In ten. Her family going on its way without her. Thinking of her less and less, as she would probably think of them less and less. Her mother growing old without anyone to make sure she was all right. Adam, whose small warm shape in her arms she still missed, growing up a stranger. The emptiness inside her gradually filling with other things, other people. The word “home” taking on a different meaning, so that when she went back to visit she would no longer belong there. She would no longer be the person she would have been if she’d stayed.

She’d fall asleep with a kind of grief lying in her, a kind of bereavement. But then in the morning she’d wake to the thought that today they were starting on the second-floor landing, which was to be papered in a soft, deep plum overlaid with a tracery of
mellow gold, which sounded absolutely disgusting but would turn out to be exactly right.

The Montrose was in a terrace (nothing like Lansdown Terrace, though—these houses were tall and clean and proud) near Gloucester Road, convenient for the airport buses to and from Heathrow and walking distance from the Victoria and Albert, the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum. It had fifteen bedrooms spread over three floors, a large, welcoming lounge and a small but elegant lobby. The ceilings were high with elaborate cornices and ceiling roses three feet across. Annabelle had already designed the brochures.
(“Fifteen beautiful bedrooms, twelve doubles, three singles, full central heating, hot and cold water in every room, sprung interior mattresses, bedside lights, shaving points, comfortable lounge with colour television.”)
They would provide a turndown service (the hotel would have a higher AA rating if they did) and a bar that would operate on an honesty basis.

Their target clientele was businessmen during the week and discerning Europeans and out-of-towners on the weekends, plus North Americans who didn’t quite fall into the “wealthy” category in the high seasons.

“People who are prepared to pay a little extra for something nice,” Annabelle explained.

“And we want them to come back,” Peter added. “We’re not out to milk them for every drop and then never see them again, we want them to return year after year and recommend us to all their friends. We want the Montrose to be so good that even if they could afford to stay at the Ritz and have their own private bathrooms, they’d come here instead.”

Up until now Megan had never knowingly met anyone who fitted Annabelle and Peter’s description but she realized she had two examples right in front of her. The Montroses were exactly
the sort of people who would stay in the sort of hotel they intended the Montrose to be. They weren’t exactly wealthy but they flew to Paris or Rome or Florence a couple of times a year and always stayed somewhere “nice.” They were taking on the hotel not because they desperately needed the money but because they somewhat needed the money and thought running a small hotel would be rather fun.

Annabelle was tall and pale with luxuriant chestnut hair that she piled up on her head when she and Peter were going out for the evening and tied back with a scarf when they were tiling the bathrooms. Peter was handsome and clever and, apart from when he’d had too much to drink, clearly besotted with Annabelle even though they’d been married for five years. Megan had never seen a good marriage at close quarters before. This looked like one and she strongly approved.

Annabelle was to be “front of house,” taking bookings, welcoming guests, advising them on what to see and where to eat while they were in London. Peter would look after the business end—keeping the books, arranging advertising, dealing with problems as they arose.

Megan was to be the housekeeper. It would be her job to make sure the whole thing worked. There were to be two girls to do the cleaning—three if it turned out to be necessary—a handyman and a part-time, all-purpose receptionist/dogsbody to look after things in the evenings and on Megan’s day off. All of them were to be under Megan’s personal supervision. “I’d like to hire them myself if that’s all right,” she’d said to Annabelle when they were discussing all this. It was this business of Annabelle being too nice. She’d hire girls she felt sorry for and be unable to fire them when they turned out to be useless.

“Of course,” Annabelle replied meekly. “All that side of things is up to you.”

In the month prior to the opening, when the carpets were
being laid and the chandeliers hung and doorknobs put on the doors, Megan spent a night in each of the bedrooms in turn to ensure there were no dripping taps, no faulty electrical connections, no leaky radiators. That was when the Montrose really became hers. She loved every room more than the last.

Each morning she went through a list of problems with the handyman. He was the first person she hired. His name was Jonah and he had just one tooth, top row (though there was no row), dead centre. Megan didn’t see the point of one tooth—surely you needed at least two so that they’d have something to gnash against—but she liked the fact that Jonah automatically took off his shoes when he came in the door and the way he looked around him, head slightly forward, searching out loose hinges or missing screws like a tracker dog.

“We need someone who can do everything,” she’d said. “Painting and carpentry and blocked drains and radiators. Can you do everything?”

“Yup,” Jonah said. “That window sash’s loose, s’gonna rattle in the wind.”

PS I am enclosing a brochure of the hotel so you can see what it looks like
.

Did they simply not see her request for a photo of Adam? Or did they see it but couldn’t be bothered even to comment, far less to act? She had written to Tom twice herself but of course he hadn’t replied. Though maybe he was preoccupied with worry about Robert. That at least would be understandable. She couldn’t imagine how you went about comforting someone who had killed a child.