Road Ends (22 page)

“Mum,” Tom said, “Adam needs a bath.” But she didn’t seem to hear him. That at least was normal.

After she’d gone Adam said, “I can do a bath.”

“Can you? Can you soap yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Go do it, then.”

He went back to the paper. It was distinctly old news but it was either that or start
The Grapes of Wrath
for the third time.

The waft of urine returned. Tom looked up from the paper. Adam was standing in front of him with nothing on, shivering.

“What’s the matter?” Tom said.

“I can’t do the taps.”

“Oh. Okay.” Reluctantly he put down the paper and went upstairs, Adam at his heels. The bathtub looked disgusting. In fact, the bathroom looked disgusting. Tom refused to notice it but was suddenly hot with fury that his father obviously refused to notice it too. He put the plug in and turned both taps on full. Adam was standing on the outside edges of his feet, toes curled in to limit contact with the freezing linoleum. His dirty clothes were in a heap on the floor.

“Do you have something clean to put on?”

“I don’t know,” Adam said. His teeth were chattering. Tom felt the bathwater. “Get in,” he said, turning off the taps. “It’s warmer in there.” Adam climbed into the bath. His ribs looked fragile as a bird’s nest. Were all four year olds that thin? How should
he
know?
Why
should he know?

In an expanding rage Tom went down the hall to what used to be Meg’s room and was now Adam’s. The smell assaulted him as he walked in. The bed had been roughly made but apart from that the place was a dump. His anger billowed out to include Sherry the Slut. She had to go; someone had to tell her to go and it wasn’t going to be him. And since his mother wasn’t in a state to do anything about anything, it was his father’s job. Why the hell hadn’t he done it already? Why the fuck haven’t you fired her and got in somebody good? he said to his father inside his head. Why the
fuck
aren’t you
doing
anything about this
fucking family
!

He jerked open the drawers and rummaged about until he found a reasonably complete set of clothes and took them back to the bathroom. Adam was curled over, soaping his feet. His vertebrae stood up like tiny mountain peaks. His hair stuck out all over the place. It had snot in it; there was nothing else it could be.

“How about your hair?” Tom said. He must have sounded angry because Adam looked at him quickly, his eyes wide.

“Can you wash your hair yourself?”

A shake of the head.

“Lie back, then. Get it wet.”

He washed Adam’s hair, tipped him back and sloshed water around to rinse it, sat him up again and washed his back and around his neck and under his arms. It was all he could do not to scrub him savagely—he felt savage; he was so angry he could taste it in his mouth like bile. When Adam was clean he hoisted him out of the bath and wrapped a dirty towel around him.

“Okay,” he said. “Dry yourself and put these on.”

He went downstairs and knocked on the door of his father’s study. His heart was pounding so hard it shook his chest. When there was no reply he opened the door and went in. His father wasn’t there. Tom checked his watch—it wasn’t yet six o’clock. He swore. He wanted to confront his father
now
, this minute, while he was still angry enough not to chicken out. But then, as he was leaving the study, he heard the front door open. He swiftly crossed the floor to the entrance hall. His father was hanging up his coat.

“I need to talk to you,” Tom said.

“Oh?” His father looked at him in surprise. Then he said, “Well, good, I’ve been wanting to talk to you too. Let’s go into my study.”

They went into the study and his father sat down at his desk. “Take a seat,” he said, nodding at the chair in the corner. His tone was formal but pleasant. Tom guessed it was the way he spoke at work. He hadn’t switched into family mode yet.

“No thanks. It’ll only take a sec. I just wanted to say—”

“Take a seat, Tom.”

Tom dragged the chair out of the corner and sat down. He could feel the anger giving way to dread or despair or whatever it was his father inspired in him nowadays. He was bitterly aware of his father’s disapproval of him, of the fact that he still hadn’t “pulled himself together.” He was aware of it every minute of the day. But he needed to put it out of his mind because it didn’t
matter now. What mattered now was that he said what had to be said, which was, This family is going to hell and you have to do something about it.

He looked down, focused on the floor, trying to summon up the force that was needed to get the message through.

“Now then,” his father said. “You go first. What was it you wanted to say?”

Tom drew a breath. “There’s something wrong with Mum,” he said, still looking at the floor. “She’s not—”

The outer front door slammed and then the inner door. Peter yelled, “You fucking moron!” and the boys charged through the living room and into the kitchen.

“I don’t know what it is,” Tom continued, “but there’s definitely something wrong with her. And Adam—”

Corey yelled, “Bastard! You stupid, bleeding, bloody … 
bastard
, I’m going to tell—” A crash, followed by a cry of rage or pain, followed by the familiar sound of a body bouncing off a wall.

Tom looked up and saw the anger rising in his father’s face, saw that he wasn’t listening. This is useless, Tom thought. He’s useless. This whole fucking family—the whole fucking world—is useless.

He stood up and walked out and went up to his room and shut the door.

CHAPTER TEN

London, February 1967

Megan lost her virginity—or more correctly, gave it away—on a wet Wednesday night a year and a bit after arriving in England. She was glad to be rid of it. It was a leftover from childhood, a barrier, mental as well as physical, to seeing herself as fully in charge of her life.

She’d always disapproved of “sleeping around” on principle and had no intention of doing so, particularly as men kept trying to talk her into it, but over the course of many long nights alone in her box room and then many more long nights alone on the top floor of the hotel, she’d had time to think about such things and had failed to find a single reason why people shouldn’t sleep together if they wanted to. If you weren’t being pressured, if you were old enough to know what you were doing, if you took care not to beget an unwanted child, why exactly shouldn’t you? This business of saving yourself for your husband—if ever there was an idea indisputably thought up by a man, that was it. And anyway, she wasn’t going to get married. Marriage led to children and she’d done children. So the only question was, might she want to have sex, if not now
then at some not-too-distant date, and the answer was yes, if she happened to feel like it and the time/place/person were right. Judging by the amount of time other people spent doing it and talking about it, it was something you didn’t want to miss out on altogether.

Having made her decision, she went to a GP and asked to go on the Pill so as to be ready when the right person happened along. The GP didn’t want to give it to her (he was a man) and tried to talk her out of it, but Megan said very firmly that she was nearly twenty-three and it was her body they were talking about, not his, and in the end he gave in.

She was picky and it was a while before the right person turned up but eventually he did, in the form of a Scot named Douglas whose employers had sent him down to London from Edinburgh for a six-week senior management training course. Megan selected him because he had nice eyes and didn’t remind her of any of her brothers and had expressed an interest in having sex with her in a polite and non-pushy way and, most importantly, because he would be going back to Edinburgh when his course came to an end, so there wouldn’t be any question of things developing further. It was only her virginity she wanted to lose, not her freedom.

She’d wanted to know what sex was like and now she did. It was messy, but that aside she’d enjoyed it. She suspected it ruined your judgment though, because after Douglas left she rather wished he’d come back, but that wore off quite quickly.

All this took place some months after the Montrose Hotel was up and running. Before that all of Megan’s time and energy had been focused on the great and glorious task of bringing the hotel back to life. Megan loved the Montrose with a passion and ran it like Captain Bligh.

“This is a clean bathroom,” she’d say, gesturing at a gleaming bathtub/basin/toilet, to the various girls who replied to her advertisement for cleaners. “I expect it to be this clean all the time. I check every room every day and I look in every corner; if it’s not clean, you’ll get two warnings and then you’re out. The same if you’re late for work. Do you still want the job?”

Sometimes they didn’t and sometimes they did.

The renovation of the Montrose had taken six months and was the most fun Megan had ever had in her life. She and Annabelle and Peter Montrose did most of it themselves. They hired an electrician to do the wiring and a plumber to put basins with hot and cold water in every room and redo the bathrooms (one on each floor, plus a cloakroom, which was what the British called a washroom, off reception), but the three of them did all the tiling and the painting and the papering and the selecting of fabrics and the choosing of furniture and lamps and pictures to hang on the walls. It was Annabelle and Peter who did the selecting; Megan just went along for the fun of it. If it had been up to her, she’d have painted everything white and covered all the furniture in hard-wearing, stain-resistant, dark-coloured cord. But Annabelle and Peter had taste, she could see that. She hadn’t known what taste was (people in Struan didn’t think along those lines—if they wanted a lamp they bought a lamp) and she wasn’t sure she approved of the concept (how could one person’s opinion of what looked nice be “better than” another’s?), but if there was such a thing as good taste, then Annabelle and Peter undoubtedly had it. They went to antique stores and house clearances and auction houses and came home with junk Megan wouldn’t have paid two cents for, which turned out to look great when stuck in a particular corner of a particular room.

All three of them worked twelve-hour days and seven-day weeks and to Megan it felt like one long party.

“Megan, you
must
take a day off,” Annabelle would say from time to time, a frown drawing a single fine furrow across her brow. “You haven’t had a day off in weeks! You’re not making the most of your time here—you should be seeing the sights.”

“I will when we’re finished,” Megan would say. “When it’s up and running, I’ll have Tuesdays off every week.”

She still hadn’t seen the Tower of London, St. Paul’s Cathedral or the National Gallery, or indeed anything else. The idea of trudging around a bunch of old buildings bored her, or at least that was the explanation she had been giving herself. But the truth was more complicated, and she knew it. The truth was that none of those old buildings would mean a thing to her because she didn’t know anything about them. She didn’t know anything about anything: history, art, other countries, world religions, the Vietnam War—all the things that everyone around her was talking about. The breadth and depth of her ignorance had become apparent to her over the months she’d spent in England and it astonished and embarrassed her. How could you put it right, ignorance on that scale? Where did you start? It was like someone presenting you with a book, saying, “This is fantastic, you’ll love it,” and when you opened it you found it was written in a foreign language and you couldn’t read a word.

Whose fault was it? She couldn’t blame her education and she couldn’t blame Struan—Tom knew things and so did her father. In fact, her father knew a lot; Megan hadn’t been aware of how much until she left home. She’d learned more about him through his letters over the past year than in the twenty-one years she’d lived at home. He hadn’t been to university like Tom—he hadn’t been anywhere apart from during the war—so he must have learned it all from books, which in Megan’s view was hard work.