Road Ends (29 page)

Adam hauled up his T-shirt, releasing a fresh puff of stink, then hauled it down again. “Why doesn’t she live here with us?”

“That’s a good question,” Tom said. “I wish she did, then you wouldn’t smell like you do and we wouldn’t be in this mess. Have all your cars come like this?”

“Yes.”

“So Meg sent you all those cars. Wow! That’s really nice of her, isn’t it? I think she must like you. She’s never sent me anything.”

Adam looked thoughtful. For a moment he seemed to debate something with himself, then abruptly he disappeared behind the chair, rattled cars briefly and reappeared with a red and yellow dump truck that had seen better days.

“You can have this,” he said.

“You mean to keep?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you,” Tom said. “That’s very generous of you. I’m touched.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

London, July 1968

His name was Andrew Bannerman and, apart from having an attractive smile, there was nothing remarkable about him. He had brown hair in need of a cut and a pleasant enough face and dirty jeans and a sweater that was unravelling at the collar. His bedsit room, across the landing from her own, was a shambles—at least the bit she caught a glimpse of through the open doorway was. Clothes and books and papers everywhere.

A standard male, in other words. He was on his way out when she met him on the landing and said he’d be away for a couple of weeks but would knock and introduce himself properly when he got back, so she only had that one brief look at him and he was nothing special. That was what she decided.

He seems nice enough, she told herself as she painted the window frame. It’ll be good to have someone nice across the landing. Did I just paint that bit or not?

——

Annabelle and Peter came over to view the room the evening after Megan signed the lease, bearing a bottle of wine and a set of wineglasses with delicate twisted stems.

“To your new home!” Peter said, raising a glass. “This is a real find, Meg. And that’s quite a view.” He went over to the big sash window. (Megan had washed it, inside and out, at no little risk to life and limb, as soon as she took possession of the room.)

“You’ve got your own private nature sanctuary,” Peter said. Birds were flitting about, squirrels were flowing up and down the trees. It was like a miniature forest, and from the road you’d never have guessed it was there. Just before Annabelle and Peter arrived there’d been a short but vigorous downpour and now the evening sun was glancing off the rooftops as if the whole thing had been stage-managed for the specific purpose of impressing Megan’s visitors.

Annabelle turned back from the window and contemplated the room with a decorator’s eye. They had offered to help Megan do up the flat before she moved in. “Have you decided on the colour?”

“Pale yellow-gold.” (Two years ago she would have painted everything white and never given it another thought.)

“Perfect,” Annabelle said. “I think you need another armchair for when someone comes around. Would you like the Windsor chair in the office? We never use it.”

Megan imagined Andrew Bannerman sitting in it, glass of wine in hand.

She took a week off to paint and decorate the room. Janet, her assistant housekeeper at the hotel, was quite capable of filling in for her now, and in any case Megan was still sleeping at the hotel, so she could keep an eye on things. Annabelle and Peter came around on a couple of evenings to help out and it was just like old times, though in fact it was the days on her own that Megan
enjoyed most. She’d never had a holiday before, at least not since she was too young to remember. In between coats of emulsion she sat at the table by the window, looking down into people’s back gardens and thinking about the strangeness of the past two and a half years: the desperate homesickness of the early days, how close she had come to giving up and going home, how much she would have missed if she’d done so. Here she was in a place of her own, paid for with her own money, earned by doing a job she loved. And who knew what tomorrow would bring?

When the decorating was finished she went shopping. Around the corner there was a hardware store that sold all kinds of things for the kitchen. She bought a set of crockery (plain white, four of everything), cutlery, saucepans, a bread board, a chopping board, kitchen utensils and a fat brown tea pot. Then she went to John Lewis (“Never knowingly undersold”) and bought an electric kettle, a toaster, a coffee percolator and a casserole dish nice enough to put on the table should she happen to invite someone for dinner. She had to take a taxi to get everything home.

On Sunday, the final day of her week off, Megan moved in. It didn’t take long; apart from her recent purchases she still had very few possessions. She’d invited Annabelle and Peter for dinner that evening to celebrate, so after sorting out where everything went she started cooking. She made a chicken pie for the main course, just to check that she hadn’t lost the knack of making pastry, and fresh poached plums for dessert. Then, because she’d been wanting to make them for two and a half years and now she finally could, she made Chelsea buns to serve with the plums. They weren’t considered a dessert, but so what? She served them warm with custard and they were a triumph.

——

Megan was so happy that day she almost burst with it, so it was strange that she had a disturbing dream that night. In the dream she went back to see her family and they weren’t there anymore. Nothing was there: not the people, not the house, not even Struan itself. It and they no longer existed. The dream didn’t provide any explanation. Megan awoke to a feeling of loss and grief she hadn’t felt since her days at Lansdown Terrace. Why would you have a dream like that at a time like this?

On Monday morning she got a letter from her father—just her father, which was unusual; normally her parents wrote at the same time so as to economize on stamps. Megan opened it with a vague sense of apprehension (the dream was still lingering in the back of her mind) but by the time she finished reading the letter it was no longer apprehension she felt but outrage.

The way he slipped it in: “
Your mother is expecting another baby after Christmas
.” As if it was of no particular consequence. As if he hadn’t been told, straight out, by Dr. Christopherson—Megan had heard it with her own ears—that there were to be no more babies. Her mother wouldn’t be able to cope, the place would be utter chaos. But more important than that, much more important, was Adam: who would look after him while his mother fell in love with the new arrival? Megan was so furious she wanted to phone her father and shout, “You’re a disgrace!” down the phone line.

Fortunately, things were busy at the hotel. Mondays were Annabelle’s day off, so in addition to her other duties, Megan was front of house. An elderly lady guest had been taken by surprise by a spider in the bath and had to be soothed and brought tea and the spider disposed of. Someone had stolen a bottle of Harveys Bristol Cream, a bottle of Courvoisier and the contents of the honesty box from the bar. (A guest? A member of staff? Someone off the street? There was no way of knowing.) Megan grimly made a note of it and sent Janet out to buy more. Doing the rounds with Jonah (he of the single tooth), she happened to catch sight of his hand, which he had stabbed with a screwdriver the previous week. Megan didn’t like the look of it. “That’s infected,” she told him. “Go to the doctor. Go this minute.” Jonah said he didn’t have a doctor, he’d never had a doctor, he didn’t believe in doctors. Megan phoned the nearest surgery, made an appointment for him and threatened to escort him if he didn’t go at once. An American couple arrived with no luggage: they’d flown overnight from New York to Heathrow while their luggage had flown
from New York to Singapore. Megan was very sympathetic—she didn’t have to pretend. She gave them complimentary toothpaste and toothbrushes and promised to make the airline’s life hell until the luggage was returned.

Whenever her father’s letter entered her mind she reminded herself that her mother had coped without her for two and a half years now and Mrs. Jarvis came in twice a week and would doubtless come more often if necessary. And Adam was nearly four and, unless he had changed his personality since she’d left (and he wouldn’t have—in Megan’s experience they were who they were from the moment they drew breath), was a steady little soul. He’ll be fine, she told herself, just fine.

She did a reasonable job of convincing herself, but back at her bedsit that evening she reread her father’s letter and saw something she had failed to take in earlier—that Tom was still at home—and that made her mad all over again. Neither of her parents had mentioned him for a while and she’d assumed he’d managed to pull himself together and get on with his life. She should have known better. Tom had always been a brooder. As a child, when any little thing had gone wrong—someone stepping on his Lancaster bomber, his prize penknife vanishing—he’d withdrawn into himself and brooded for days.

She decided to write to him. Somebody had to do something or he’d sit there for the rest of his life. She got a pen and an airmail form from the kitchen drawer she’d dedicated to such things and sat down at the table by the window.
“Dear Tom,”
she wrote, and paused. What she wanted to say was,
“Dear Tom, I know Robert’s death was terrible, but I hear from Dad that you are still at home sitting on your backside brooding about it and I was wondering exactly what you thought you were achieving by that and when you were going to get on with your life,”
but she suspected that would be a mistake. She was still puzzling over it when there was a tap at the door. She answered it absent-mindedly, pen in hand.

“Hi,” Andrew Bannerman said. “I’ve come to say welcome to the top floor. Oh …,” he broke off, noticing the pen. “Sorry. You’re in the middle of something. I’ll come back another time. But welcome anyway.” He gave her his very nice smile and started to turn away.

“No,” Megan said hastily. “It doesn’t matter. I was just writing a letter. I can do it later. Please come in.”

“Just for a sec,” he said. “I can’t stay—I was just going to say hello. Wow!” He looked around the room. “What a difference! It looks amazing. It’s a great colour.”

“It was easy because it was empty,” Megan said, ridiculously pleased. “I did it before I moved in.”

He looked at her uncertainly. “I’m useless at accents but I think I detect one. Where are you from?” (How could you fail to like someone who phrased it like that?)

“Canada.”

“Canada,” he said, looking thoughtful. He seemed to be mulling Canada over.

“It’s above the United States,” Megan said dryly. (She was used to this now but nonetheless a little disappointed—she’d expected better of him.) She pointed upwards. “North.”

He looked down at his feet and grinned. “I did know that much, believe it or not. I was just wondering if I knew anything else. I know it’s big and there’s a lot of snow. Let’s see: there’s the Northwest Passage and the Franklin Expedition—they all died. Polar bears. Mounties, of course, always getting their man. Lumberjacks—there are lots of lumberjacks, right?”