by Mary Lawson
“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?”
“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 Lans
down 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.
So what would she do? If Peter and Annabelle left London or tired of the hotel business, or if there was some other unforeseen eventuality, what would she do? She’d have to start over and she didn’t want to start over—it was too hard. She saw that it wasn’t England or even London she’d been living in for the past almost-three years, it was the Montrose Hotel. Outside its walls she was still a stranger here. It was her own fault: she should have pushed herself, met more people, tried new things. But it had been easier not to.
There was a tap at the door. Megan went over and opened it. Andrew Bannerman, wearing an apron and holding a glass of red wine in each hand, said, “Spaghetti?”
She’d never known anyone who listened as intently as he did. She told him about Peter’s announcement, making light of her reaction to it, but he saw through that. “New things are scary, but nothing stays the same, Meg. You have to go with it, grab opportunities when they come along.”
“I know,” she said. “I know.”
He smiled. “Sorry. Unasked-for advice. Have some more spaghetti.”
She liked the fact that he gave unasked-for advice. It was a sign that he was interested. But she didn’t want to talk about herself again, she wanted to know more about him. She asked about journalism and he described his early days in London, trying to sell his work. It had been a struggle, he said, and she guessed it had got him down sometimes; he wasn’t as laid-back as he looked. He was the only member of his family who wasn’t a doctor—two grandfathers, father, mother, brother and sister. “They don’t think journalism is a real job,” he said ruefully. “They’re all infuriatingly patronizing, even my little sister. Especially my little sister.”
Megan nodded. “My older brother used to patronize me. He did it all the time. I got so fed up I banned it, in the end.”
“Banned it?” Andrew said with a grin. “How do you ban being patronizing?”
“Well, there were certain phrases he used that made me mad because they didn’t sound rude but you knew they were. You know, things like ‘If you think about it,’ which means you’re not thinking about it, and ‘With respect,’ which basically means without respect. ‘I think you’ll find’ is another one. I fined him twenty-five cents every time he said something like that.”
Andrew let out a whoop of laughter. “Brilliant!” he said. “Did he pay up?”
“I was in charge of the pocket money, so I just deducted it. Some weeks he didn’t get any at all.”
Which Andrew thought was funnier still.
Megan wasn’t sure what he found so amusing. Though now, looking back, she suddenly wondered if Tom had found it funny too, funny enough, in fact, to be worth sacrificing his pocket money for—that possibility hadn’t occurred to her at the time. But regardless of the reason, she was glad she could make Andrew laugh. There was no reserve in his laughter and she was becoming aware of a shadow of reserve in him the rest of the time. Not exactly guardedness. “Carefulness” would be a better word. Maybe he’d been hurt in a previous relationship. But then, the English were famous for their reserve, weren’t they? So maybe it was just that.
She asked what he was working on at the moment and he said he was doing a piece on a painting at the National Gallery.
“Have you been to the National Gallery?” he asked.
“No,” Megan said. “I haven’t been anywhere.” She’d been dreading that question—it was bound to come up sooner or later.
But if he was horrified he didn’t show it. “Buckingham Palace? Hampton Court?”
“No,” she said. “Nothing like that. I don’t know anything about history or art or anything, so I’m afraid I wouldn’t get a lot out of it. To be honest.”
“You don’t need to know anything. I don’t know much myself. It doesn’t matter. Look, I’m going to see the painting again on Thursday—I need another look at it. Do you want to come? Can you get time off? Say, Thursday afternoon?”
“Yes,” Megan said. “Yes, I can get time off. Yes, I’d like to come.”
Who’d have believed she would ever accept an invitation to the National Gallery with such a leap of the heart?
Though when it came to it, the gallery was just as she’d thought it would be, only bigger. Room after enormous room filled with paintings of absurdly dressed men and women looking down their noses at you or unreal landscapes or ships being tossed about in storms or pictures of angels and saints with golden halos. They left Megan cold.
Andrew pretended not to be watching her. Every now and then he’d tell her who someone was or the story behind a painting.
“You recognize this guy?”
A skinny-looking guy wearing armour and sitting on a horse with a head too small for the rest of it.
“No, but I can read. It’s Charles I—it’s on the plaque.” Much as she loved him, she wasn’t going to let him patronize her.
“Ah, so it is.” She could hear his grin.