Road Ends (31 page)

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.

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 before 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.”