Road Ends (30 page)

“Some,” Megan said. He was joking but she didn’t mind. He was older than she’d thought, maybe close to thirty, and much better-looking. How could she have thought his face merely pleasant?

“I think that’s about it,” he said. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay,” Megan said. “That’s more than I knew about England when I came. Would you like some coffee?”

He had the nicest eyes she’d ever seen. Honest eyes. They were blue (unusual with such dark brown hair) and direct, and you didn’t get the feeling that behind them he was wondering how soon he could get you into bed.

“I’d love to,” he said. “But I can’t just now. I have a deadline. But definitely another time. Or you come over to my place, except I’ll have to clean it first.”

He only stayed a minute after that, just long enough to say that he sometimes had the radio on when he was writing up his “stuff” (he was a journalist) and if it disturbed her she should knock and he’d turn it down. So he couldn’t have been there longer than five minutes in total, but still, by the time he left, Megan felt as though she were running a temperature. She went over to the window, opened it fully and stood looking out over the quiet gardens. Don’t you get carried away, her rational self said. He’s nice—I’ll grant you that. He’s very nice. You like him and he likes you—because he did—she had felt that immediately—but that’s all there is to it, so don’t pretend there’s more.

But another self, a self that despite the absurdity of pop song lyrics did indeed seem to be located somewhere down near the heart, safely beyond the reach of common sense or reason, said, This is it. He’s the one.

When she finally turned from the window and saw the airmail form lying on the table, for a moment she couldn’t remember who she’d been writing to. Then she picked it up, refolded it and put it back in the kitchen drawer. Not tonight, she said to Tom in her head. Sorry. I can’t think about you tonight.

Three weeks after he first knocked on her door Megan decided to invite Andrew Bannerman to dinner. She’d thought about it long
and hard beforehand. The man was supposed to do the asking—it was silly but that was how it was, which was why she’d spent three weeks waiting for him to invite her over for coffee. The fact that he hadn’t was disappointing, but she reasoned that it didn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t interested. It was possible, of course, that he already had a girlfriend, though if so he never brought her back to his room in the evenings. It was also possible that he hadn’t had the time—certainly she heard his typewriter rattling away at all hours of the day and night. But the most likely reason, from what Megan knew of the male sex, was that he was chronically disorganized and simply hadn’t got around to it yet.

It seemed to Megan that inviting him for dinner would do no harm. If she made it a casual, spur-of-the-moment, “I just happened to make too much of this stew” sort of invitation, it would look like a neighbourly gesture rather than anything more. Where was the harm in that?

She considered the menu carefully. It needed to be something tempting, something really good, but it also needed to be the sort of thing she’d cook for herself or he’d smell a rat. Men loved pies, but no one made pies for themselves. They loved steak, but you couldn’t “accidentally” buy twice as much steak as you could eat. She went to a bookstore on her lunch hour and browsed through cookbooks, looking for inspiration, and found it in the form of something called coq au vin. It sounded delicious. It also sounded posh, but she could call it a chicken casserole and he’d never know.

She left work early and bought the ingredients on the way home: a chicken, streaky bacon, butter, olive oil (she’d never heard of it), garlic (ditto), button onions (ditto), button mushrooms (ditto), herbs (mostly ditto), a quarter bottle of brandy (you only needed two tablespoons but you couldn’t buy two tablespoons) and a bottle of Burgundy (you only needed half a bottle but they’d drink the rest). It cost a fortune but she didn’t care. She carted it all
home, the plastic bags cutting into her fingers. It was an oppressively hot day but she didn’t care about that either. It took her the better part of an hour to bone the chicken and peel the onions and make the stock and cream the butter and flour for the roux, and she loved every minute of it. It wasn’t until she’d put the dish in the oven and was standing back, hands on hips, smiling at the wreckage of her tiny kitchen, that she suddenly caught sight of herself in her mind’s eye and realized she was behaving
exactly
like the sort of female she most despised, the sort she’d seen in ads on the television in the bar at the hotel, the sort who longed for nothing more than to spend her life chopping onions in order to please a man.

Worse still, she was deceiving herself. If he’d been interested in her, he would have shown it by now. And he wasn’t stupid; if she knocked on his door with some story about having made too much stew, he would know precisely what she was doing and why.

Megan, already hot from slaving over the stove, went hotter still with shame. I will not, she said, silently but furiously, not just with her rational self but with every molecule, every atom of her being, I will
not
make myself ridiculous for any man. I will eat it myself. It will keep a couple of days in the fridge. And I’ll drink the wine too.

She had a cool bath to lower her temperature and put on jeans and a none-too-clean shirt and her Scholl sandals and was on her way back to her room when Andrew’s door opened and he came out, stopped dead in his tracks and said, “My God, Megan, what are you cooking? It smells fantastic out here!”

He was originally from Leicester, where his parents still lived, but when he was young the family had spent a couple of years in Edinburgh and in the summers they’d gone to the Isle of Skye for their holidays and stayed in a small town called, of all things, Struan. He was twenty-nine and had an older brother and a
younger sister. He’d always wanted to be a journalist. (The problem was, he said, so did everyone else, so it was a crowded field, which was why he was permanently broke.)

He had a habit of looking down at his feet when he was joking or expressing an opinion, as if he thought he shouldn’t force it on you, but then when he looked up he met your eyes so directly that it made you feel he was looking straight into your soul.

He seemed fascinated by Megan’s description of life in Struan. His interest made her feel interesting, though afterwards she worried that she’d talked about herself too much. She told him about never having been to a city before she came to London, and he shook his head in amazement. She told him about her arrival at 31 Lansdown Terrace and losing her suitcase. She laughed as she told the story, remembering how naive she’d been, but he didn’t laugh. He said, “That isn’t funny, it’s terrible. What an introduction to England!” so she hastily told him about Mrs. Jamison at Dickins & Jones and Annabelle and Peter and how she loved working at the Montrose.

When they’d finished their dinner (she’d explained the coq au vin away as part of her plan to teach herself some fancy European cooking), he insisted on helping with the washing up—the first time she’d ever known a man to do that. As he was leaving he said, “That was a really great meal, Meg—thank you. Next time you have to come to me if you’re brave enough. I’m not up to your standards but I do a mean spaghetti bolognese.”

Three weeks. Four. They ran into each other frequently on the landing and he always seemed pleased to see her and never seemed in the least embarrassed or apologetic about the passage of time since the spaghetti invitation. Maybe he hadn’t meant it. Or maybe he was the sort of person who took relationships seriously and didn’t rush into them. Which, of course, was good.

Once she came up the stairs just as he was on his way back to his room from the bathroom, wrapped only in a very small towel. His hair was wet and he looked so astonishingly beautiful that Megan felt the blood rush to her face. Fortunately, he misinterpreted it. “Sorry, Meg,” he said. “Timed it wrong.” He didn’t try to make anything of it, as she suspected most men would have done.

His door didn’t latch properly unless he leaned against it, so generally it was open a few inches and if Megan left her door open too, she could see his right elbow as he sat at his desk. Now and again he’d tap at her door and say, “Coffee?” and her heart would give an enormous lurch and warmth would flood through her like a tide.

On and off he was away for a few days. The top floor felt wrong then. The silence echoed, and sometimes Megan heard the whining brat downstairs.

“We’ve been thinking,” Peter said.

They were in the office, behind the reception desk. It was three in the afternoon, a quiet time of day.

“We think we’re going to sell the Montrose.”

Megan stared. The front door opened and the young couple from Paris came in. Megan got up automatically, went out to the desk, smiled, gave them their room key and returned to the office.

“That was not a good way to break it to her, Peter,” Annabelle said. “Megan, you’ve gone pale. You’re not going to be out of a job. We want to buy another old hotel and do the same as we did with this, and of course we want you to be part of it. We wouldn’t dream of doing it without you.”

“We’ll get a good price for the Montrose,” Peter said. “It’s the right time to sell. And we’ll buy something a bit bigger, twenty to thirty rooms.”

“It’ll be a challenge,” Annabelle said, smiling at her. “And we know you like a challenge.”

Sell the Montrose? They wanted to sell the Montrose? She couldn’t believe it. The Montrose was theirs—they had made it, the three of them. They had poured their hearts into it. They
were
the Montrose. How could they sell it?

Annabelle and Peter were watching her.

“It’s not going to happen straight away,” Peter said. “Probably not until next year, unless we stumble on the perfect place before then. Come on, Meg, you look as if someone had died. Think what fun it was last time.”

Megan collected herself. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course. Of course.”

At home that evening she sat at her small table watching the swaying of the trees against the darkening sky. Cold rain splattered against the window. It was October and the nights were closing in. When Peter had made his announcement it was as if the world had tilted—everything that had seemed fixed was suddenly shown to be precarious.

With hindsight, Megan thought, there had been signs recently that Peter was restless; he’d taken to standing on the porch of the hotel, hands in his pockets, looking out at the road as if he was waiting for something to happen. It had crossed her mind that he didn’t have enough to do, but she’d thought no further about it. Now she saw that Peter having too little to do was the source of the problem. The Montrose was running smoothly, they were frequently fully booked and their accounts were in good order. All of those things were a source of satisfaction to the three of them, but for Peter they also meant that the hotel was no longer a challenge. He was the one who liked a challenge. And what Peter wanted, Annabelle would persuade herself she wanted too.

At least, Megan thought, they’re looking for another property in London. They could have decided to start up a hotel in
France, or Italy, or Spain. They could still decide that. They both spoke several languages and loved going abroad. But if that happened, she would not want to go with them. She had no gift for languages and in any case it would be one step too far. She wasn’t an adventurous person. She knew that now.