by Mary Lawson
They entered yet another room, filled with yet more paintings. Andrew steered her over to a large picture with several figures in it, all of them in dark clothing, the room behind them dark, everything dark apart from the central figure of a pale girl in a pearl white dress with a blindfold over her eyes.
“This is the one I’m doing a piece on,” Andrew said. “The Execution of Lady Jane Grey. The National Gallery’s just acquired it.”
“Who was she?”
“She was queen of England back in 1553. She reigned for nine days and then she was sent to the Tower. And after a bit they chopped her head off.”
The blindfold covered almost half of the girl’s face, but nonetheless you could see that she was very young, and you could also see that she was absolutely terrified. Her lips, which looked very soft, like a child’s, were slightly parted and she was reaching out her arms as you would if you couldn’t see what was in front of you. What was in front of her was a chopping block. Beside it was a man dressed in dark red tights, leaning casually on an axe. An old man in a fur-lined coat was guiding the girl down towards the block, helping her to kneel. In one corner, two women were swooning against the wall.
“How old was she?”
“Sixteen.”
“Sixteen!”
If you reached out and touched her hand it would be like ice.
“Who are the other women—the ones against the wall?”
“Her ladies in waiting, I imagine. Overcome with horror and grief.”
Megan studied them, her lips tight. Get up, she thought. Go over to her, kneel down beside her and talk to her. Stay there until she’s dead. Then you can be overcome with horror and grief.
“It wouldn’t have happened quite like he’s painted it,” Andrew said. “For a start they wouldn’t have executed her indoors; they’d have taken her outside and done it on Tower Green. And her dress is wrong for the time.”
Who cares where it happened or what she was wearing, Megan thought. She was astonished by the intensity of emotion the painting conveyed. Who’d have thought you could paint terror and dread?
“It’s powerful, isn’t it?” Andrew said. “I’ve always been interested in her because she lived very close to where I grew up. Her home was in Bradgate Park, up near Leicester. The day her head was cut off, her household lopped off the tops of all the oak trees. Decapitated them as a gesture of respect for her. A few of them are still there.”
Megan tore her eyes from the girl’s face. “The actual trees? Didn’t you say it was 15-something?”
“That’s right.” He studied her, smiling at her interest. “Would you like to see them? I’m going up there next week—I want to mention them in the piece I’m writing, and I need a photo. I’m borrowing a car, so if you want to, you could come and see them for yourself.”
They arranged to go on Tuesday, Megan’s day off. She spent the intervening days storming around the Montrose with an energy born of joy. She reorganized the linen cupboard, harried Jonah to check and bleed the radiators in preparation for winter, took down and cleaned the chandeliers on the landings, rehung the curtains in room 8. In the evenings she spring-cleaned her flat as well. It didn’t need it but she had energy to burn. She wanted it perfect to come home to, in honour of the fact that, although ostensibly everything would be the same as when they set off, in reality everything was going to be different.
It was a three-hour drive to Bradgate Park, and they were going up and back in a day, so they set off early. The sky was overcast and the landscape en route flat and uninteresting but when they finally arrived, the park made up for it. It was bigger than Megan had expected and wilder and far more beautiful. Hills covered with bracken, their surfaces broken here and there by granite outcrops, areas of woodland, a wide clear stream. The leaves were turning. They didn’t have the drama of Fall at home—the colours were softer and more muted—but with every gust of wind the leaves went swirling through the air in clouds of russet and gold.
They came across several of the ancient oaks straight away: huge trunks abruptly sliced off about ten feet from the ground, topped by a mass of smaller branches sticking up like fingers on a hand. One of the trees was dead, its mutilated body stark against the sky. Megan thought of the girl with the childish lips and icy hands; thought of her seeing that tree when both she and it were young. She might have sought out its shade on a hot day, sat under it peacefully. Not knowing its Fate. Not knowing her own.
It had never struck her before that the people you read about in history books had actually lived. Theoretically you knew they had, but in practice they’d been no more than words on a page. The tree was proof. It made Megan wonder who had killed the girl and why, but she didn’t ask Andrew because if she had he would have told her, and that would have turned it into a history lesson and destroyed her feeling of connection with the girl. She would ask him another day.
They wandered, Andrew stopping now and then to take photographs. One tree in particular seemed to please him. They passed it early on and after exploring elsewhere they returned to it and he spent a long time photographing it from different angles. At some stage in its history it had been struck by lightning—one side had been partially burned away, leaving a great black cave at its heart. Incredibly, several branches were still reaching up, topped with small crowns of crisp brown leaves. As Megan watched, a gust of wind made the leaves shiver; several of them lost their grip and whirled away.
“A true survivor,” Andrew said. “Still soldiering on.”
A few yards away there was a log. Megan sat down and wrapped her arms around herself. The wind was cold. While they’d been walking the sky had clouded over, and her feeling of closeness with the place and its history had drained away. She was just herself now; herself, sitting on a log, trying not to think about the fact that time was passing and the day was more than half gone. In a few minutes Andrew was going to say he had enough photos. They’d go back to the car and drive somewhere for lunch, and then they’d head home and the trip would be over.
Which would have been fine if the trip had been truly and solely about Lady Jane Grey, but it was not. Megan had imagined herself and Andrew walking through this park hand in hand; she’d seen him leaning back against one of the ancient trees, wrapping his arms around her. Kissing her. Holding her to him. Ridiculous women’s magazine images, but it turned out there was a core of truth in them because—she knew this now—when you were in love with someone you wanted to be as close to them as it was possible to get, you wanted to weld yourself to them, become part of them, make them part of you. You needed to touch them, you needed them to touch you. And he hadn’t touched her. He’d never touched her and had shown no sign of wanting to. Never kissed her. She’d been certain that today, finally, would mark a turning point in their relationship, but once again, nothing had changed.
Andrew had climbed up as far as he could get into the ancient trunk and was taking a photo down into its hollowed-out innards. “I have fond memories of this particular tree,” he said. “My brother and I used to pretend it was a castle—we had to defend it against all comers. Our parents, in other words. Our parents and our little sister. She was a ravening wolf. She didn’t want to be a ravening wolf, she wanted to be inside the castle with us, but we needed a ravening wolf and she was it. Very mean.”
A response was required. Megan said, “So this is really close to where you lived, then?”
“About ten miles. We came here a lot at weekends.”
She tried to imagine him young, scrambling over the rocks with his brother, but she could only see him now.
“I’m nearly done,” he said from inside the trunk. “Are you cold?”
“No, I’m fine.” She wasn’t fine. She was wretched.
“Good. I’ll … Bugger, that’s the end of the roll. I guess it’ll have to do.” He climbed out of the tree and came and sat down beside her. “There’s a pub in the village,” he said, opening the back of his camera. “We’ll get some lunch there and warm up be
fore heading back.” He took out the roll of film and put it in his pocket. Then he looked at her and smiled. “So what did you think of the trees? I hope it hasn’t been a waste of a day off.”
“No,” Megan said. “They’re amazing.”
She wanted him so badly she didn’t dare look at him; he would see it in her eyes.
A minute passed. Andrew said, “You okay, Meg?”
“Yes, of course. I’m fine,” she said, not looking at him. “Do you want to stop and see your parents on the way back?”
“No, not this time.”
She could feel him watching her and tried to pull herself together. “Are you sure? Because I’m not in a hurry, if you want to.” She had assumed he would—she’d wondered if they would like her.
“It wouldn’t be smart,” he said.
Which was such an odd thing to say that she looked at him. He was watching her. There was something in his eyes she couldn’t read.
He said, “Meg, there’s something I think you should know.” He hesitated, and looked away for a minute, then looked back and smiled. She couldn’t read the smile either. “You’ve probably guessed, but I need to be sure, because I like you a lot—really a lot—and I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I’m getting the feeling—maybe I’m wrong, in which case everything’s fine—but I’m getting the feeling that maybe you’d like there to be more to our friendship than just … friendship.”
She looked down at her feet. She was cold right through to her bones. If he was telling her he already had a girlfriend hidden away somewhere, she wished he would say so.
Andrew said, “Basically, what it boils down to is I’m not good boyfriend material.”
What did he mean by that? She was getting angry with him. Was he saying he was married?
“Are you married?” she said, looking at him fiercely.
He smiled, but his smile was tired, as if he’d had this conversation before and would rather not be having it again. “No. No, I’m not married. And I don’t have a girlfriend. I’ve never had a girlfriend. I’m homosexual.”
Megan felt a jolt go through her, felt colour flood her face. She turned sharply away. On the hillside to the right of them there was another of the ancient oaks, dead but still standing, black against the sky.
He said, “You didn’t realize. Sorry. I should have told you sooner.”
She couldn’t look at him. She kept her eyes on the ancient oak.
He said gently, “Megan, say something. You’ve heard of homosexuality, right? Even in Northern Ontario they’ve heard of homosexuality?”
She had heard of homosexuality but only as a term, as a concept. She’d never met anyone—or at least never knowingly met anyone—who was homosexual. Mostly it just seemed to be a term of abuse used against boys by other boys. “Homo.”
In the trees behind them some rooks were squabbling. Apart from that there was no sound.
Andrew said quietly, “You are making this hard for me, Meg.”
She had to say something. She cleared her throat. “I’ve never understood it,” she said.
“Okay, good. You’re talking.” Relief in his voice. “What don’t you understand?”
“I don’t understand why it would happen. Why would such a thing …?”
“Yes, well, the problem with these ‘why?’ questions is there’s no one to ask. It just happens. Always has, always will, unless they find some way of wiping us all out, which no doubt they’re working on.”
It just didn’t make sense. Surely, Megan thought, surely if he were homosexual then her love for him—this incessant, desperate longing—would not have come about; her body would have known that his body didn’t want hers and that would have been the end of it. Instead of which she had loved and wanted him more every time she saw him. Surely that meant it couldn’t be true.
“But, Andrew, how can you be sure? I mean—”
He stood up quickly, cutting her off, and walked away and stood with his back to her, hands in his pockets, looking out over the park.
She saw that his back was taut with strain, that there was strain in every line of his body. She saw that telling her had not been easy for him. That nothing about it was easy for him. That he would not have said it unless it was true.
She wanted to go home. Not home to London, home to Struan. She wanted to go home to her own bed in her own room and stay there because life was too much for her. Too complicated, too painful.
Finally he came and sat down beside her again.
“Sorry,” he said. “Difficult subject.” He reached out and rubbed her back. “Let’s go and have lunch.”
It was the first time he’d ever touched her.
How are you supposed to stop loving someone you love?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Edward
Struan, March 1969
I need some time off. I don’t mean from work. I’m entitled to two weeks’ annual vacation, which I never take because being at work is so much less stressful than being at home. I mean time off from the escalating chaos in this family. There are things I need to think about and they’re important, because it seems to me that if I could get a sense of perspective on the past I’d be able to deal better with the present, but there’s no time; the present goes from one crisis to the next so fast that there’s scarcely time to draw breath, far less think.
This afternoon I had the interview with Ralph Robertson, the principal at the high school. It was very inconvenient to have to go—there were a great many papers waiting on my desk at the bank—but I went. Robertson is a grey man. He wears grey and he looks grey. He greeted me rather anxiously, I thought, and spent an unnecessarily long time on the pleasantries, but eventually I managed to steer the conversation around to the purpose of our meeting.
“You wanted to see me about Peter and Corey,” I said when we were both sitting down.
“Yes,” he said, frowning at his pen. “Yes, I thought perhaps we should have a word …”
I nodded encouragingly. I was recalling that he has a wife and three teenage daughters, all of whom disappear off to Sudbury with his chequebook from time to time and manage to spend more in an afternoon than he earns in a month. I wondered if they’d done it again and seeing me reminded him of his bank account and that was why he was looking anxious.
“Nice boys,” he was saying. “Though at a difficult age, of course.”
“I take it they’ve been misbehaving,” I said, trying to speed things along.
“Not seriously,” he said. “Well, by and large not seriously. By and large just the usual things, fighting in the schoolyard, smoking in the toilets, failing to do homework, that sort—”
“Smoking?” I said. It’s the most ridiculous habit known to man; quite apart from its effect on your health, you might as well roll up a dollar bill and set fire to it.
“They all do it,” he said, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “It’s because it’s forbidden. And now there’s all this new stuff, marijuana, LSD, who knows what else. LSD hasn’t reached us up here yet—or at least I don’t think it has. Makes them go out of their minds, apparently, but with some of ours it can be hard to tell. In my view we should make it compulsory, all of it, then they’d stop.” He put his glasses back on. “But with Peter and Corey the greatest concern at the moment is the absenteeism and the—”
“Absenteeism?”
“Yes, lately they’ve been regularly missing a day or two a week, sometimes more. They weren’t in at all last week and only on Tuesday the week before. Our secretary, Mrs. Turner, phoned your wife several times to see if they had colds, but there was no reply. So I thought it would be a good idea to speak to you.”
It didn’t surprise me that Emily hadn’t answered the phone—she probably can’t even hear it, up in her room with the door closed—but the boys playing truant was something else. It wasn’t only the fact of them missing lessons that concerned me, it was also the thought of what they might be up to instead.
“Also,” Ralph Robertson said. He was hunched over his desk with his shoulders up around his ears and his hands clasped in front of him, and I suddenly noticed that he was twiddling his thumbs. Literally twiddling them—they were spinning around each other like little turbines. I’ve never seen anyone actually do that before. I thought it was a figure of speech. If I were Robertson, that is a habit I would break. His pupils must love it.
“Also—and this I can’t verify, it is merely hearsay, but I thought I should tell you just in case—one afternoon last week they, or two boys looking very like them, were seen down at the sawmill apparently trying to set fire to one of the old shacks. Well, partially succeeding—it was the smoke that drew attention to them. Though I believe it soon went out. The wood, of course, was very wet.”
I was frozen to my chair.
“As I say, the boys weren’t identified for certain, but I thought I should pass it on to you. Because your two weren’t in school at the time.”
All sorts of images were scrolling through my head. Archie Giles’s hay barn. The charred sticks behind the bank. Joel Pickett and his sons. Sergeant Moynihan filling the doorway to my office.
“I see,” I said.
I stood up. Ralph Robertson stood up as well.
I said, “Thank you for telling me. Are they here now? At school?”
“Er, no. I don’t think they’ve been in today.”
——
I didn’t go home to see if they were there. I didn’t dare. I was so angry I didn’t trust myself anywhere near them. I drove directly to the police station. Fortunately Gerry Moynihan was there. He offered me a chair and I sat down but I was so agitated it was all I could do to stay seated.
“It was my sons,” I said to Gerry without preamble. “Peter and Corey. They burned down Archie Giles’s hay barn. You don’t need to look any further. It goes without saying that I will—”
Gerry raised his hand and I stopped. He said, very calmly, “Sorry, Mr. Cartwright, can we start again? What’s happened? Take your time, sir. We’ve got plenty of time.”