Road Ends (32 page)

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

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.”

I took a breath. My lungs didn’t seem to be expanding properly. It was as if they were in a cage that had become too small, too tight. It took a huge effort to speak normally—in fact, it took a huge effort not to shout—but I managed to relate the details of my interview with Ralph Robertson. Gerry listened quietly, looking attentive but unperturbed.

“So it was them,” I said when I’d given him the facts. “It goes without saying that I will repay Archie every cent he lost, the barn, animal feed, any expenses, anything. The question is—”

Gerry raised his hand again. “Hold on, Mr. Cartwright,” he said. “Hold on. I appreciate you comin’ to tell me this—not everybody would—but I’m pretty sure your kids didn’t burn down that barn.”

I was concentrating so hard on trying to keep a lid on my fury that I didn’t hear him properly at first, but after a minute the words sank in, and even though I was sure he was wrong I’d never heard sweeter words in my life.

“I’ve thought all along the jobs were different,” Gerry said. “Whoever did Giles’s barn meant business. They used gasoline, gave it a real soaking. Whereas with the fire behind the bank, your boys, if it was your boys—”

“It was,” I said. “Thank you, but I know it was.”

“Well, no, you don’t, sir,” Gerry said mildly. “There’s no evidence it was them, nobody saw them, and from what you tell me there wasn’t a positive identification down at the sawmill either, so you don’t know, you’re just suspicious.”

“All right,” I said. “I’m suspicious. I’m very, very suspicious.”

“Okay. So what I was sayin’ is, whoever set that little fire at your bank was an amateur. Didn’t know the first thing about it. Struck me the minute I saw it. I reckoned it was kids and they were copy-catting. They’d heard about the Giles’s fire and thought it’d be kinda fun to try it. Same applies down at the sawmill. I’ll go take a look at it but from what you say they didn’t even manage to get the fire properly started.”

He paused, watching me. After a minute he went on.

“So the question is, what’re we gonna do about it. Seein’ that there’s no proof it was them and no damage has been done.”

“What would you normally do in such circumstances?” I said tightly. “I don’t want them treated any differently from anyone else. No differently at all.”

Gerry cleared his throat. “Well, I’ll tell you, the theory is all kids are the same so all kids get treated the same, but the fact is they aren’t and what I do depends on what I think of their parents. In cases such as yourself, a good family, I would normally just report my suspicions to the parents, let them handle it. If I thought the parents wouldn’t care too much or had no control over their children, I’d haul the kids in to the station here, ask ’em a few questions, maybe show ’em what a prison cell looks like. Give ’em a little bit of a scare, you might say.