by Mary Lawson
Tom is coming on Friday but going back to Toronto straight after Christmas. He has exams quite soon. He’s doing a second degree on top of the first one. He always was crazy about planes.
Adam is growing very fast. You will hardly know him when you get home. You still haven’t said when that will be. Soon, I hope!
Love, Mum
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.
Her parents, though, had no excuse. Why do you keep trying? she asked herself angrily. You’re just setting yourself up for more disappointment.
But it was astonishing how much she still missed Adam. It felt wrong, fundamentally wrong, not to know what he looked like.
She was about to throw the envelope away when she saw that her mother had written something on the back. “A letter has come for you from Cora Manning. I will put it in this envelope. But why has she written to you? Aren’t you living with her?”
You’re getting worse, Megan said to her mother inside her head. She checked the envelope: there was nothing in it. Par for the course.
She’d almost forgotten Cora; it was as if she belonged to another place and time. She wondered whether they would ever meet again. It was strange to think someone could have such a huge effect on your life and at the same time vanish from it completely.
On the way to John Lewis on Oxford Street to look at bed linen (they needed a considerable amount and were hoping to do a deal) Megan’s eye was caught by a display of tiny cars in the window of a newsagent. She stopped and peered in. The cars were very cute and there were lots of them, including—best of all—a bright red London bus and a shiny black London taxi. Megan turned and went in.
“I’ll have those two,” she said to the newsagent, not bothering to ask the price. She didn’t care about the price, she who was always so careful about money. Each car had its own neat little box with its picture and the word “Matchbox” on it. They were smaller than the Dinky Toys the other boys had had, which in any case had been lost or smashed to bits years ago. She’d never seen the point of giving toys to very small children—they were just as happy playing with a spoon—but this was different; this was for her as much as for Adam.
She imagined her mother unwrapping the cars for him one at a time and exclaiming over them. “These are from Megan, Adam! From your sister Megan, way over in England! Aren’t they cute?” She imagined Adam’s grin as he seized them. He would try to eat them—he was nearly two and a half now—but they were too big to swallow and looked sturdy enough to survive, and he would enjoy them more and more as he got older. She would send the bus and taxi now, by airmail, expensive though it would be. All the Christmas presents had gone by surface mail weeks ago but this would be a little something extra. From now on she would send him another every couple of months until he had the whole set. It would be her way of keeping in touch with him.
——
The night before the Montrose opened for business they had a hotel-warming party and invited people from the press and the AA and the RAC and anyone else they thought might be interesting or useful. There were nibbles from Harrods and Champagne in tall glasses. Megan’s job was to circulate and keep people’s glasses topped up.
She wore a slim black trouser suit of impeccable cut, a surprise gift from Annabelle and Peter. (She’d been planning to wear a perfectly acceptable black skirt and white blouse.)
“But you gave me the watch!” she’d protested when Annabelle lifted the suit from its layers of tissue paper.
“That was a thank you,” Annabelle said. “This is your uniform for when you’re front of house, and you shouldn’t have to pay for your uniform. And these go with it.” She lifted a pair of shiny black stilettos out of a shopping bag, then laughed at Megan’s expression. “You don’t have to wear them ever again, they’re just in honour of the occasion. Try them on, and if they kill you I’ll take them back.”
When she came downstairs in all her finery just before the first guests arrived Peter did a double-take and said, “Good God, Meg, you’re a stunner!”
“She is, isn’t she?” Annabelle said. She studied Megan as if she were a newly decorated room still in need of a little something. “I like your hair tied back like that, it’s very chic, but I wonder if you should loosen it a bit. Like this.” She carefully eased the knot in the fat black ribbon tying Megan’s hair back. They were standing in front of the huge mirror in the lounge (another junkshop find). “There. What do you think?”
Megan considered the effect. It softened her face, gentled her firm chin. “It’s nice,” she admitted, “but it will be all over the place in a few hours.”
“The party will be over in a few hours,” Annabelle said. Her own hair fell in ravishing curls from a pile on top of her head. She wore a very short, very red dress with shoes to match and would have stopped the traffic in the streets. “How are the shoes?”
“Bearable for a bit, I guess,” Megan said, she who had always sworn she would suffer the pain of silly shoes for no one.
So during the evening, when Megan—circulating with the Champagne bottle and smiling politely and explaining that no, she wasn’t American she was Canadian, and yes, she was enjoying her stay in England—caught sight of herself in the mirror in the lounge she should have been pleased, but in fact her appearance startled her and made her uneasy. It wasn’t her, that elegant girl. Not that she wanted to look like a country hick but she did want to look like herself. Anyone looking at her would think she was one of them, but the minute she opened her mouth they would know that she wasn’t and would think she’d been pretending. For the first time since meeting Annabelle and Peter, she felt unsure of herself.
But then, halfway through the evening, she was rescued quite unintentionally by a photographer from the Evening Standard who asked her to pose by the fireplace in the lounge and then tried to chat her up. He wore a black leather jacket and had hair like the Beatles, and Megan suspected he spent a lot of time in front of a mirror, like the twins. (They’d spent hours and hours in the bathroom, heads together, slicking back their hair and admiring themselves while various desperate brothers pounded on the bathroom door. Megan had tried confiscating the key so that they could be barged in upon but there was a general riot so she’d had to put it back. Finally, much against her better judgment, because in her view the only thing more pathetic than a vain female was a vain male, she’d put a mirror in their room.)
“What are you doing afterwards?” the photographer asked, taking a shot, moving six inches to the right, crouching down and taking another. “When everyone’s gone.”
“Going to bed,” Megan said.
“Alone?” he said, with blinding predictability, leering at her over his camera.
And all at once Megan felt just fine. The photographer looked exceedingly sophisticated and maybe he was, but at heart he was an idiot, and with the exception of Annabelle and Peter, that probably applied to everyone in the room. Megan knew where she was with idiots; she’d been dealing with them all her life.
In later years, when she looked back on her time at the Montrose, Megan had trouble remembering the order of things. The events of the first few months were easy to place—the hotel-warming party, for instance, was immediately followed by her first Christmas in England (spent with Annabelle and Peter and wonderful apart from a phone call home, during which her mother wept and her father almost audibly counted the cost of each second). That was followed by a quiet patch—so quiet that they wondered if the hotel was going to go bust before it had a chance to show the world how good it was—during which Megan made use of her free time to lose her virginity to the Scot named Douglas.
Then came her second English spring,
which was remarkable because it was such a contrast to the first. It was still wet, of course, but when the sun did come out London was transformed. Buildings that mere days ago had looked old and grimy suddenly became majestic. Trees burst into flower, covering themselves in great billows of pink blossoms and lolling about in the breeze. After a few weeks the petals loosened their grip and began blowing around like snow and that was more beautiful still; they flowed across the pavements in gentle drifts, then picked themselves up and whirled off again. Small parks (“squares,” they were called, though many of them weren’t square) sprouted up everywhere, with trees and flower beds and carefully tended grass. They must have been there all along, but somehow she had failed to notice them before. During lunch hours the parks erupted with office workers eating sandwiches and reading books. As soon as it was warm enough—in fact, before it was warm enough—they stripped themselves of every permitted layer of clothing and sprawled on the grass, presenting their bodies and faces to the sun as if they’d turned into plants themselves.
Megan couldn’t recall seeing any of this the previous spring. She must have been blinded by homesickness.
In April business picked up. There were several favourable reviews of the Montrose in the right publications and they were now often full to capacity, which meant that the room Megan had been using was needed for guests, so she moved into a tiny room on the top floor that they ultimately intended to use as a linen cupboard. Annabelle in particular was distressed about this—“Megan, it’s disgraceful! What if someone were to find out that we keep our housekeeper in a linen cupboard! It would be a scandal!” (“Great publicity, though,” Peter said. “Maybe I’ll leak it to the press.”)
But Megan had been adamant. In due course she would have a place of her own but it was early days in her career as housekeeper and she was still doing things for the first time—the first Easter, with its flood of tourists all arriving at the same time and the lobby overflowing with luggage, the first complaint by a guest (noise from the room next door—a tricky one), the first overflowing toilet (Jonah muttering about “wimmin’s things” under his breath). She wanted to be on hand to deal with such problems herself.
In any case, as linen cupboards went it was a sizeable one, Buckingham Palace compared to the box room in Lansdown Terrace. It even had a light and a rail to hang her clothes on and shelves where she could put a kettle and a hotplate.
How long had she slept in there? It felt like just a couple of months but it must have been more like a year. She was there when letters from her parents arrived telling her of the suicide of Robert Thomas—she knew that because she remembered holding the thin airmail sheets up to the ceiling light and reading her mother’s letter through several times, trying to take it in. She couldn’t make it seem real. She’d known Robert quite well, but reading the letter, his death seemed so distant—that part of her life seemed so distant—it was as if he’d existed only in her memory: an idea, not a person. She couldn’t feel the horror she should, and that worried her, because it emphasized how far away from home she was, in every sense.
There’d been something else troubling in the letter as well, quite apart from its content. Her mother had always been very good at spelling but she’d written, “he jumped of the clif down at the gorge.” She’d also failed to sign the letter or even send her love, which was unlike her too. Maybe it was because she was upset by Robert’s death—the accompanying letter from Megan’s father had suggested that. He’d said, “The entire community has been very shocked, as you can imagine. Your mother has been in rather a state over it.” So perhaps that was the explanation—her mother was merely more distracted than usual.
From then on, though, her mother’s spelling was unreliable even when there wasn’t any obvious excuse. But over time the unreliability became normal and Megan stopped noticing.
She was still in the linen cupboard in the autumn when she went out with a policeman who came to investigate the theft of their colour television from the lounge. That relationship lasted a couple of weeks. Then there was the businessman who took Megan to a party and introduced her as “my little colonial” as if she were a pet chimpanzee and then tried to make love to her in a taxi on the way back to the hotel. That one lasted about five hours. After that there was a very nice but rather dim dentist who took her home to meet his mother on the first date. After that, astonishingly, it was the hotel’s first birthday (free Champagne in the lounge for the guests and a nostalgic dinner at the Gay Hussar for Megan, Annabelle and Peter), followed immediately by Christmas and New Year’s. And then, incredibly, it was 1968 and Megan had been in England for two years.
Sometimes it felt like a couple of months. Mostly it seemed like a lifetime.
In March 1968 Megan decided it was time she had a place of her own. She’d resigned herself to a bedsit; a bedroom-cum-living room with either its own kitchen or its own bathroom but not both. Annabelle and Peter paid her well but even so there was no way she could afford a flat of her own anywhere near the hotel; it was either a bedsit or sharing a flat with a group of others, as in Lansdown Terrace, and she wasn’t going to do that again.
She wasn’t in a rush and she was very picky, so it took a while—three months, in fact. In the end she saw it in the window of the newsagent’s where she bought Adam’s Matchbox cars, printed neatly on a postcard, stuck up alongside notices about lost cats and cleaning ladies: a bedsit with its own kitchen and a bathroom shared with just one other person. And the address was a ten-minute walk from the hotel.
The room was on the top floor of an old house, up under the eaves, so it was full of odd corners and sloping ceilings and there were a good many places where you couldn’t stand upright, but that merely added to its charm in Megan’s view. It was painted a drab green but she would change that—the landlady seemed to have no objection. The kitchen, stretched along one wall and closed off from the rest of the room by means of a sliding door, contained all the essentials, including the smallest refrigerator Megan had ever seen. Its interior measured one cubic foot. Megan mentally measured it for milk, butter, orange juice, meat and cheese, and decided it would be fine. Perfect, in fact; no wasted space. She was delighted with it; she was delighted with everything. Even the shared bathroom was fine: it was clean, which was all she asked.
“I’ll take it,” she said to the landlady, a tired-looking woman with a small girl clinging to her knee.
“But Mummy, you said,” the child said. She had a well-practised whine that made the hairs on the back of Megan’s neck stand on end.
“All right, darling, in a minute,” her mother said. To Megan she said, “Oh good, I’m so glad.”
“But Mummy!”
“Who do I share the bathroom with?” Megan asked.
“Mummy, you said!” The little girl was hauling on her mother’s skirt.
Give me five minutes alone with that child, Megan thought. To the mother she said politely, “Do you live here too?” because much as she loved the room, if she had to listen to that whine it would be a deal-breaker.
“Yes, on the ground floor. The first floor is a flat and then the second and third each have two bedsits.”
Excellent, Megan thought. Two full floors of insulation should do it. “And who do I share the bathroom with?”
“Mummy, you said!”
Megan’s mouth went tight. Maybe not, she thought. Maybe I couldn’t even stand hearing it occasionally on the stairs.
Across the hall a door opened and a man came out. He gave the child a look of intense disapproval, then looked at Megan and smiled.
“Hello,” he said. “Are you taking the room next door?”
Megan looked at him. Looked again. “Yes,” she said decidedly. “Yes. I am.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Edward
Struan, March 1969
Sometimes I am tempted to move into the bank. Take up residence there rather than coming home to a fresh set of problems every night. An added bonus would be t
hat the bank doesn’t smell; there’s a very unpleasant smell in this house. Initially it was just upstairs but now you can smell it in the living room too. Emily isn’t keeping up with the laundry—the towels in the bathroom haven’t been changed for a long time—but I don’t think that’s enough to account for it.
And then there are the everlasting problems with the boys. Yesterday evening when I got in there was a letter waiting from Ralph Robertson, the principal of the high school, asking Emily and me to come in and talk to him about Peter and Corey. I took it up to Emily to ask if she knew what it was about, but of course she didn’t, so I went down the hall and knocked on Peter and Corey’s door. They opened it a crack, looking furtive.
“I have here,” I said, pushing the door farther open, “a letter from your principal asking your mother and me to come in and talk to him about the two of you. What’s it about, do you suppose?”
They glanced quickly at each other and then at the floor, looking guilty of virtually any crime you’d care to suggest.
“Well?” I said when the silence showed no sign of coming to an end. I don’t know what it is about the two of them that makes my blood pressure rise so fast and so high. They are indescribably annoying. They give the impression that as far as they’re concerned you don’t exist, you’re just a hazard to be avoided, like a hole in the road.
“Dunno,” Peter said, studying his feet. Corey did likewise.
“Everything’s been going all right at school, then?” I said. “Neither of you is in any kind of trouble?”
Peter gave a minimal shrug. Corey did likewise.
I managed to simply turn and leave, which was an achievement. My father would have knocked them both across the room.
Just for the record, I did not want any of this. A home and a family, a job in a bank. It was the very last thing I wanted. I am not blaming Emily. I did blame her for a long time but I see now that she lost as much as I did. She proposed to me rather than the other way around, but she is not to blame for the fact that I said yes.