Road Ends

by Mary Lawson

  Patrick didn’t say anything for a minute or two after Megan made her announcement. He studied the menu printed on the paper table mat in front of him as if he ever had anything but a cheeseburger and fries.

  Finally he looked up and said, “Megan, will you marry me?”

  Megan said, “Patrick, please.”

  He picked up a spoon and stirred his coffee. His head was tilted to one side, the way it always was when he was out of sorts. Not that he was often out of sorts, Megan conceded. He was a very even-tempered man.

  “I’ve always said I was going to go,” she said. She felt even worse than she’d thought she would. “Always.”

  “Not to England. Why England, for God’s sake?”

  “I’ve always wanted to see it,” she said, which wasn’t true, but going all that way just because her father would pay for the ticket and a friend was there didn’t seem good enough reasons even to her.

  Patrick went on stirring his coffee. “How long will you stay?”

  “I don’t know. A while, I think. I have an open ticket.”

  “How long is a while? Are we talking weeks? Months? Years?”

  “I don’t know.”

  There was a long pause.

  Megan said, “Patrick, I’ve never been anywhere in my whole life. I’ve never been to a city. Any city. I want to see things. Do things. I’ve never done anything. I’ve never been anywhere.”

  Patrick shrugged. “Neither have I. Well, college in Sudbury.”

  “Don’t you want to?” Megan asked. “Don’t you want to see things? See other places?” Then she held her breath for fear he’d think she was asking him to come with her.

  “Sure, someday,” he said, and she let out her breath. “At the moment there are things I want more.” He smiled at her wryly. “A lot more.”

  “Yes, well,” Megan said.

  There was another pause.

  “England’s a hell of a long way, Meg.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  So many things weren’t being said but were nonetheless plain as day, chief amongst them that Patrick loved her and she did not love him, or at least not as much. The knowledge made her feel guilty, which in turn made her feel cross, because she had never led him on, never pretended to feel more than she felt. Maybe we’re just at different stages, she thought. He’s older, he’s been to college. He’s ready to settle down. I’ve been settled down my whole life. I’ve never been anything but settled down.

  “When are you leaving?” Patrick said.

  “The Thursday after next.”

  “The Thursday after next!”

  “I booked it today. There was a seat on a cheap flight.”

  More silence.

  “I’ll drive you to the airport,” Patrick said at last.

  “That’s very nice of you but it’s way too far to drive. Really. It would be silly. I’ll take the train to Toronto and get a bus or something to the airport. There must be all kinds of buses.”

  “I’m driving you to the airport,” Patrick said. “I’ll take the day off work.” He put down the spoon and picked up his coffee.

  And that was it. There was nothing left to do but go.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Edward

  Struan, January 1969

  I heard my father’s voice today. Like the echo of a nightmare.

  I was shouting at Peter and Corey—hardly an unusual event. I shout at them too much, I know that. When they are not around I think, From now on I will be different, I will be a better father, and ten minutes after they reappear I’m shouting at them again. But this is the first time I have recognized his voice, his rage, coming out of my own mouth.

  Not that my anger wasn’t justified. Their behaviour is intolerable; it is like a dentist drilling. The constant noise, the continual yelling and crashing about, make it impossible to concentrate on anything.

  This afternoon was a prime example. I had been waiting all week for a chance to look at the books on Rome that Betty Parry got for me from the central library in Toronto. She has pulled strings on my behalf—I believe she said I was doing research, which is stretching things—and they have extended the borrowing period from three weeks to six, but today is Saturday, which means that already one whole week has passed without my being able to do more than flip through the pages. It is even more frustrating because all three of the books appear to be comprehensive and well written.

  Rome is my subject for this winter. Over the past five winters I have done Paris, London, Cairo, Leningrad and Istanbul. I do one city or culture per year. You could call it a survival strategy, I suppose; the winters up here take some surviving. My life takes some surviving, come to that.

  So this afternoon, as a birthday present to myself—as of today I have been on this earth for forty-seven years (no one has remembered, needless to say)—I decided to take advantage of the fact that Peter and Corey, beyond question the two most disruptive members of this family, seemed to have gone out, to ignore the pile of papers I’d brought home with me from the bank and spend the whole afternoon in Rome. If a miracle were to occur, if a genie popped out of the antique inkwell on my desk and said I could visit just one of the world’s great cities, Rome is the one I’d choose. I nearly made it once but got several lumps of shrapnel in my legs instead.

  From the photographs it looks as if two thousand years of history are just lying in the streets. There’s a photograph of the Colosseum, for instance, with traffic roaring around it. The Colosseum—the actual Colosseum, the real thing, not a replica—is a traffic island. It’s simply incredible. And then there’s the Pantheon, built in 27 BC by Marcus Agrippa, son-in-law of Augustus. Apparently its dome is the largest masonry vault ever constructed. As near as I can figure it—all of the books seem to use the metric scale and I have to convert it in order to get a real idea of the size—it’s 142 feet in both height and diameter. If you stand in the middle (you can still do this, it is virtually intact) light pours down on you through a thirty-foot-wide opening at the top. It must feel as if you are looking straight up to heaven. Think of the vision, the sheer genius required even to conceive of such a thing.

  None of the books has a photograph of the dome itself, so I was sitting at my desk looking out at the driving snow—we have another full-scale blizzard on our hands—trying to visualize that vast and perfect space transfixed, as it must frequently be, by a great column of sunlight, when the boys announced their arrival home by slamming the front door.

  It sounds a small thing, put like that: they slammed the door. Perhaps any single slam of a door is a small thing. But if it is not a single slam, if they slam it every time they go in or out, and if it is not one son who does it but every son, the effect is cumulative.

  Nonetheless I did my best to ignore them. I told myself that it was my birthday and I wasn’t going to let anything spoil it and attempted to think my way back to Rome. The boys fought their way across the living room and into the kitchen. I tried not to listen. The crashes continued in there for a minute or two and then there was a brief pause followed by Corey—I could hear him clearly, here in my study, with the door closed—saying, “There’s nothing to eat in this place. There isn’t even any bread.” His footsteps clumped out of the kitchen and across the living room to the foot of the stairs and then, rather than climb them, he yelled, “Mum! I can’t find the bread! Is there any bread?”

  By then I’d stopped pretending that I could ignore them. I sat here, struggling to contain the anger massing up inside me. I dimly heard Emily’s voice making some reply from upstairs—she is the only member of the household whose voice has no carrying power—and Corey yelled, “What? I can’t hear you!” And then Peter, still in the kitchen, shouted, “Stop shouting, stupid! You’ll wake the baby!” and immediately the baby’s wail drifted down the stairs. And suddenly I was beside myself with rage.

  It’s been a long time since I’ve been that angry. I’m not sure how to account for it. Perhaps it was a combination of turn
ing forty-seven and having a week-old baby upstairs. I will be almost seventy before this one is off my hands. I will have lived out—used up—my three score years and ten. If someone had told me thirty years ago that this was going to be the extent of my life, I simply would not have believed him.

  This new child—number nine, eight of whom survive—wasn’t even supposed to be. John Christopherson specifically warned against Emily having more children after Adam was born. But she insisted and it is the one thing I cannot deny her; she knows it, and I know it. So maybe that was at the root of my fury. I don’t know.

  Whatever it was, I heaved myself out of my chair and crossed to the door and flung it open and roared at them, bellowed at them, “Will you be quiet! How many times do you have to be told!”

  And heard my father’s voice. Exactly his voice. His rage. And saw the rest of us, cowering.

  It made me feel quite sick. The thought that I might be like him in any way.

  I am not like him. There is no comparison. He used to knock us about—all of us, including my mother. I have never laid a finger on any of them. Haven’t even threatened it. Not once in twenty-five years.

  But I must not shout at them like that again.

  There is no food in the house. The boys were right about that. Presumably Emily has arranged for Marshall’s to deliver the groceries this afternoon, though how they’ll manage in this blizzard I can’t imagine. Fortunately I keep a packet of digestive biscuits in my desk. I have one at the bank as well—I’ve become addicted to digestives over the years. A harmless enough vice.

  The kitchen is a disgrace. I went in to look for something to eat when lunch failed to materialize and I’ve never seen such a mess. I realize the arrival of a new baby means a certain amount of disruption, but Emily has had nine months to prepare for it and God knows she is no novice. And she has help—I pay for a woman to come in twice a week. I assume she does come; I have no way of knowing as I’m always at work. There certainly isn’t much to show for it at the moment.

  It was never like this when Megan was home.

  I ran into Tom in the kitchen last night. I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately; I get off to sleep easily enough but by three I’m awake again and that’s it for the night. Either I lie there brooding on the pointlessness of life or I get up and go downstairs and get myself a bowl of cornflakes and do my brooding at the kitchen table. And as I say, last night I found Tom down there, no doubt doing some brooding of his own.

  Neither of us knew what to say. No doubt from the outside it would have looked quite funny. Tom got up from the table and said, “I was just going,” which was transparently untrue, and took his cornflakes up to his room.

  I hesitate to go down there now. Probably he does too.

  Tom was—used to be—the exception in this family in that even as a child you could imagine him amounting to something. He has a decent brain, which is more than can be said for the rest of them. Though I suppose you could say Megan has, in a different way. Megan was never a child, it seems to me. Always working alongside her mother, almost from the moment she could walk. It surprised me, three years ago, when she left. It demonstrated a spirit of adventure I had not credited her with.

  But Tom I had real hopes for, which makes what has happened all the worse. Yesterday I asked him straight out what his plans were and he looked puzzled, as if he didn’t understand the question, and then said, “None at the moment,” as if that was a satisfactory answer. As if driving a snowplough was a suitable occupation for someone with an MSc in aeronautical engineering. He’s wasting his life over this thing. Not that I deny it was a tragedy. But it has been a year and a half now and he shows no sign of pulling himself together. It has reached the point where it annoys me just to look at him.

  You’d have thought he’d want to put as much distance as possible between himself and this place, with all its reminders.

  The same applies to Reverend Thomas and his wife. They are still here too. It beats me why they stay. I saw Reverend Thomas last Saturday when I went to the library to collect the books on Rome, and he has changed so much I almost didn’t recognize him. To begin with I didn’t realize he was there. No one else was; it was snowing hard and people weren’t venturing out for inessentials such as books. Our library isn’t a good place to take refuge on a cold day; it’s housed in the two rooms of Struan’s one remaining genuine log cabin, which is a dark and draughty place even at the height of summer. Betty Parry had on her coat and hat and gloves and snow boots and was reluctant to take off her gloves even to check out my books. She’s a smallish, roundish woman and her get-up made her look much the same shape as the pot-bellied stove behind the counter. The stove was roaring its head off but making no impression at all on the temperature of the room.

  “I keep moving around it,” Betty said, meaning the stove. “It burns one leg so I move to the other side and it burns the other leg, but the rest of me’s still frozen stiff. I’ve been thinking of burning the place down so they’ll have to build a new one.”

  I asked if she could give me a couple of days’ notice so that I could come in and rescue a few of my favourite books, make sure they didn’t go up in flames, and she said certainly, which ones did I want. I said the Times Atlas and the entire works of the historian and philosopher Will Durant. She said she’d put them aside for me. She said the handy thing was everyone would assume they’d been destroyed in the fire, so I could just keep them.

  She’s a nice woman. Rather plain, but very nice. I enjoy talking to her. I imagine I’m one of her best customers.

  I’d turned to go when I saw a hunched figure sitting at the table in the other room. It took me a minute to work out that it was Reverend Thomas. He seemed to have shrunk. Even though he was sitting down, that big black coat of his hung on him as if on a skeleton. There was a newspaper on the table in front of him but it hadn’t been opened.

  It seemed a curious place for him to be. If he wanted to get out of the house, why not the church? It couldn’t have been any colder than the library. But then I remembered; he has left the church. He’s now just plain Mr. Thomas. James, his name is. Not Jim, of course.

  My first instinct was to pretend I hadn’t seen him but then I wondered if common decency demanded that I go over and say something. I hesitated, though. It would be awkward; apart from at his son’s funeral, where I offered my condolences, we have not spoken for years. It crossed my mind that he might even think I took some satisfaction from his downfall, which is not so. It is hard to sympathize with someone you dislike, but no man could take pleasure in what has happened in that family.

  “Dislike” is not the right word. I disliked James Thomas long before he made his slanderous accusations about me from the pulpit. In fact I disliked him from the moment we met. There is—was—an arrogant certainty about him that stuck in my craw. He is (only that should be “was” too, because even that appears to have changed) tall and straight—“upright” would be a good word—with pale hair combed back and a long thin nose, the better to look down on you. Almost patrician. I suspect he worked at it—at looking patrician. As if he sat at God’s right hand and had a monopoly on the truth.

  I remember he came to the house the day Henry died. Megan answered the door. Emily was in her bedroom and I was in my study. I heard Megan go upstairs, presumably to ask her mother if she wanted to see him, but she did not. She wanted to see no one, including me.

  I am not a believer, as the Reverend knew very well. When he first arrived in Struan, fifteen years or so ago, and noticed that I was not a member of his congregation although Emily and the children were, he came to the house one evening to ask me why. I replied, quite courteously, I think, considering that it was none of his business, that I had no religious faith, whereupon he immediately set about trying to convert me, right there in my own living room. I had had a hard day at work and was not in the best of tempers, so it was a short discussion. Although polite on both sides.

  So we both kne
w it was Emily he had come to comfort. I did not wish to speak to him or to any man—Henry had died in Emily’s arms less than two hours previously—but I felt obliged to invite him in and he felt obliged to accept. I offered him a chair and he sat down, and the very first thing he said was, “Your child is at peace in the arms of the Lord, Edward.”

  I don’t know why the words caused me such pain. Or perhaps it wasn’t pain, perhaps it was rage. Henry was a squalling, fretful baby; I had felt almost nothing but irritation towards him while he was alive, which I knew was inexcusable with a child so ill. Now it was too late to make amends. Upstairs was my wife, utterly distraught, who had made it clear that she did not want me near her. And in walks a man who knows I am not a believer and tells me my child is at peace in the arms of the Lord.

  I remember I had some trouble getting the words out and, when I managed, they came out through my teeth and with some force.

  I said, “Have you any idea how offensive that sounds to someone who does not share your faith?”

  I remember the pleasure I felt as his face went first white and then deep red. I remember the silence that followed as he searched for and failed to find anything to say. I loathed him at that moment almost as much as I loathed myself.

  Why am I writing about this? First my father and now the once-Reverend James Thomas! Why am I reliving events dead and gone and beyond redemption? It’s my birthday. I should be thinking about something cheerful or at least interesting. I should be thinking about Rome.

  The Pantheon. I will think about the Pantheon. That is worth dwelling on. Augustus dedicated it to the planetary gods—the dome represents the firmament. The opening at the top is called an oculus, from the Latin meaning “eye.” Apparently there are holes in the floor beneath it to allow rainwater to drain away. I doubt that would work here. Not with a snowfall like we’re having today. The whole building would simply fill up with snow. Lift up the dome and you’d find an igloo.