Road Ends

by Mary Lawson

  Her parents had rented a very small house for us so that we could be on our own and I could “get back on my feet”—very kind of them, of course. We were there for two years. It felt to me like being in a steel box barely big enough to stand in, containing scarcely enough air to breathe. I circled around and around inside that box. Around and around. It’s a wonder I didn’t wear a groove in the floor.

  It’s also a wonder Emily didn’t get out the rifle and shoot me, now that I think of it. It must have been very hard for her.

  At one stage I thought the endless babies were Emily’s way of punishing me for not loving her, but I don’t think that anymore. Emily isn’t vindictive. More likely she’s never quite got over Henry’s death. Or maybe it’s simply that I don’t make her happy and babies do. The problem is, they refuse to stay babies. She tries to hold on to them but one after another they slip away.

  It is now Friday night. Another weekend in the bosom of my family. This evening when I got home there was blood on the rug in the living room. My first thought was that Emily had had some sort of post-childbirth problem. I took the stairs two at a time—there were splotches of blood on them as well—and went into her room, to find her peacefully feeding the baby. After asking if she was all right I went back out onto the landing and then, of course, noticed that the splotches led to Peter and Corey’s room, from which came the usual sounds of battle.

  I knocked on the door. There was instant silence. I opened the door and found them frozen, Peter with Corey in a headlock; Corey with blood dripping from his nose.

  “Let go of your brother,” I said to Peter, and he did so. Corey continued to drip. The two of them looked terrified. Probably they were afraid I’d summon Gerry Moynihan again.

  “There is blood all over this house,” I said. “You have fifteen minutes to clean it up.”

  I went down to my study and shut the door.

  I still have no idea what to do about them. You’d think we’d know how to bring up our own young. Other animals seem to. Generally the job seems to fall to the females, but Emily, many times a mother, doesn’t have the first idea, whereas Megan was seemingly born knowing everything there is to know.

  I’ve tried to remember how my mother achieved discipline—I don’t remember her ever shouting at us, nor do I remember us ever misbehaving. I wish I could ask her how she did it. I would like her advice on a good many things.

  I’ve felt her presence very much the past few days. It’s as if the past has sidled up alongside the present for a while. She doesn’t seem to be either approving or disapproving, merely there. A bonus is that I haven’t had a visitation from my father for several weeks now. I don’t know if he’s gone for good—maybe he’s off on a binge like old times and will come staggering back. But in the meantime I’m sleeping better.

  I went upstairs an hour ago, thinking I’d have an early night, and saw that the light was still on in Emily’s room, so I went in. She was asleep with the baby curled beside her. I stepped forward to switch off the light and suddenly realized that the baby—Dominic—wasn’t asleep. His eyes, which are dark and astonishingly clear, were open and were looking intently into my own. He seemed very interested. His fists knotted and unknotted themselves several times and he blew a small bubble but his gaze never wavered. I wondered what he was thinking, or indeed if he was thinking—it’s difficult to imagine how you go about thinking without words.

  There was a chair in the corner of the room. I brought it closer to the bed and sat down, but in the moment I had been out of his line of vision he’d fallen asleep. I sat for a while watching him sleep beside his mother. I wondered who he was—who he would turn out to be.

  I wondered if there were any possibility that I could be a good father to him, this late in the day.

  That last thought was so unsettling that I gave up on the idea of an early night and went back downstairs, thinking I’d leaf through one of the books on Rome to distract myself. I pulled the largest of them over to my side of the desk, opened it at random and found myself transfixed by a magnificent full-page photograph of a sculpture by Bernini of Apollo pursuing Daphne.

  The remarkable thing is, that very photograph was on the cover of one of the books Mr. Sabatini let me take home all those years ago, and of all the works of art he introduced me to, it was the one that moved me most. When he left the school he gave me the book. It was quite literally my most treasured possession. It was destroyed in the fire and when I tried to buy a copy after the war it was out of print.

  But there on my desk was the same photograph, every bit as heart-stopping as it had been the first time I saw it.

  It depicts in dazzling white marble the moment when Daphne is transformed into a laurel tree. Apollo is pursuing her, mad with love and lust, and Daphne is fleeing from him, her hair flying, her back arched in a desperate attempt to evade his grasp. But Apollo’s too fast, he has grabbed her, hard—you can see the indentations his fingers are making on her hip. In panic, Daphne cries out to her father, Peneus, for help, and to save her Peneus turns her into a laurel tree. You can see it happening right before your eyes: leaves are sprouting from her fingers and a root is flowing down from her heel into the ground. It is all over for her. She has escaped Apollo’s advances but she will never walk the earth again.

  Spellbinding.

  One day, I will get to Rome.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Tom

  Struan, March 1969

  He stood looking at the phone when he’d hung up, wondering if he’d said the right things. He thought he knew his sister pretty well, but she’d been away three years and people change; he himself was proof of that.

  There was a sound on the stairs—Adam, coming down again. Tom had sent him up to their mother’s room while he was speaking to Meg. Now Adam crept in and stood by the table, watching him fearfully. At least he was no longer crying.

  “I think I got her,” Tom said slowly, more to himself than to Adam. “But I’m not sure. But I think so.” She’d been madder than hell within a second and a half, which he took as a good sign; it meant she was still the same old Meg in that respect at least, still reacted with her guts instead of her brain.

  Adam was still looking fearful.

  “The aim of the game is to make her come home,” Tom said. “Basically that has to happen. There’s no other solution.”

  He noticed Adam’s clenched hands sliding up towards his chin.

  “This is Meg we’re talking about. Your sister, Meg. Nobody you need to be scared of. The rest of us need to be scared of her all right, but not you. She’s the one who sends you the cars.”

  The fists came down and, for maybe the first time ever, a look of cautious hope appeared. “When is she coming?”

  Now he’d set the kid up for something that might not happen. Megan’s final words, in fact, had been “I am not coming!” which on the face of it wasn’t all that hopeful.

  “I don’t know for certain she is, I just hope so. Meantime we’re going to have to sort you out. You can sleep in the twins’ room. But you’ll need a diaper at night. Don’t start crying!” (Tears were welling.) “Just don’t start! It is not your fault and it’s not a problem—that’s what diapers are for. Let’s go and ask Mum about it.”

  Now that Meg was coming (he still thought she was—you didn’t want to pay any attention to what Megan said; it bore no relation at all to what she eventually did), even the prospect of having to think about diapers didn’t bother him unduly.

  Their mother looked baffled but pointed to a neat pile of muslin squares. They were snowy white—evidently they still got washed, unlike everything else in the house.

  Tom looked at them dubiously. “I don’t think they’re big enough.”

  “The towelling ones are in the cupboard,” his mother said. “But he won’t be needing them for a long time yet.”

  “I don’t think we’re talking about the same backside,” Tom said, his head in the cupboard. Sure enough, there was
a great stack of towelling diapers. He lifted out a foot-high pile.

  “What else do we need?” he asked, but his mother had gone back to communing with the baby.

  “Safety pins,” Adam said. “And plastic pants.”

  “Do you know where she keeps them?”

  Adam nodded, burrowed around and came up with the goods. It was a good thing he was smart, Tom thought, or getting through the day in this house would be completely impossible. They took everything through to the twins’ room and heaped it on one of the beds.

  “What does she do with the dirty ones?” Tom asked, trying not to think about dirty ones.

  “There’s a bucket.”

  “Good. When you take it off in the morning, put it in the bucket. Do you know how to put it on yourself?”

  “You have to fold it first.”

  Tom shook out a diaper. There was no shape to it; it was nothing but a big square of towelling. “So how do you fold it?”

  “There’s a special way,” Adam said.

  “Do you know it?”

  Adam shook his head.

  “Right,” Tom said slowly. Looking at the square reminded him of the paper-plane-making contests they’d had every year at university. Each of them would be given a single sheet of paper—just that and nothing else. No glue or tape was allowed; it all had to be done by folding. There was a prize for the longest sustained flight and another one for hitting a target. He’d won the sustained flight two years running but he was crap on accuracy.

  “Wonder if we can make an airplane out of it,” he said. “If we fold it like this” (taking two corners of the diaper and suiting action to words) “and then like that” (folding a previous fold in on itself) “we’ve got an acute-angle triangle. This is a good shape we’ve got here. These are the wings, see? Think of the lift you’ll get when the air flows over the front edge there. This is going to be the world’s first and finest aerodynamic diaper.”

  Adam was grinning at him, bouncing up and down on his toes for all the world like a four-year-old kid, and Tom was suddenly swamped by a tidal wave of dread and doubt. You have to come home, Meg, he thought. Because what the fuck is going to happen to him if you don’t?

  In the morning the air had a softness to it that had been absent for months and the snow was mushy underfoot. It smelled like spring, which was impossible—the ground was still buried under a couple of feet of snow—but still, some sense you couldn’t put a name to knew it was happening; shoots were stirring down there in the dark.

  When he drove past Reverend Thomas’s house he saw that, apart from an inch or so that had fallen overnight, the car was now clear of snow and the driveway had been partially cleared as well. There’d been no repeat of bare feet on the porch. Maybe things were finally getting better for the Reverend too.

  Out by the New Liskeard turn there was a car in a ditch. The driver was trying to shovel it out, so Tom stopped and they attached a tow rope and got it back on the road. It made him late getting back to town and when he went to buy a newspaper they were sold out, but generally someone left one lying around in Harper’s and anyway so much was going on in there nowadays that the paper wasn’t the necessity it used to be. The town was buzzing. The boss-guy was due to start recruiting any day and everyone wanted to get a look at him first and—more fascinating still—get a look at his wife. She’d visited twice now and people just couldn’t get enough of her: the furs, the sunglasses, the makeup, the voice—the whole package was riveting.

  Tom himself was not immune. The last time she was in Harper’s he’d got hooked on the way she ate—each morsel taken delicately off the fork, masticated primly (eyes cast down) and finally squeezed down her gullet—as if eating were an uncouth business you’d rather not be seen doing in public. After each bite she’d wipe her mouth, twice, inwards from each corner, for fear a gross crumb might be left on her lips. Tom had watched, mesmerized. She made him want to stick a finger up his nose.

  But there’d been no sign of the sea plane today and Harper’s was relatively quiet, which meant that Bo wasn’t rushed off her feet. She pounced on him the minute he stepped in the door.

  “So where is he?” she demanded.

  “Who?” Tom said. He tried to edge past her but she blocked the way.

  “Why haven’t you brought him with you? Give me one good reason.”

  “I’ve just finished my shift,” Tom said. “And I’m hungry. That’s two good reasons.”

  He took a step towards her and she had to take a step back or he’d have been right on top of her, so he kept that up until they reached Luke’s table. Tom slid in opposite him for moral support.

  “How long would it take you to go home and pick him up?” Bo said, hands on hips. “Ten minutes? If you’re too lazy to walk you could’ve picked him up in the snowplough on your way here. Think how much a four-year-old boy would love riding in a snowplough. Just think about it.”

  “Any suggestions?” Tom said to Luke.

  “About kids and snowploughs or about her?”

  “About her.”

  “Nothing works,” Luke said. “Just stick a couple of pieces of Juicy Fruit in your ears and get on with your life.”

  Beside Luke’s plate there was a page torn from a newspaper. It was creased all over as if it had been crumpled and then spread out again. Luke passed it across to Tom.

  “Brought this in for you,” he said. “It was wrapped around some tools I had sent up from Sudbury, caught my eye when I unwrapped it. It’s a couple of weeks old—there was that blizzard, newspapers didn’t make it as far as here. Thought you might not have seen it.”

  The headline read, “The Big Bird Flies.” Beneath it was a photograph of what had to be the most beautiful aircraft that had ever existed or ever would exist, sailing up into the sky. “Concorde makes faultless maiden flight,” the sub-headline read.

  “Holy Moses,” Tom said. “Holy Moses.”

  He’d seen interpretive drawings and artists’ impressions and photos of the prototypes and plans of the profile of those incredible wings, but the finished plane was so much more beautiful than anything he’d imagined it made him go hot and cold all over just looking at it.

  “Says it only went three hundred miles per hour, though,” Luke said. “Wasn’t it meant to go faster than the speed of sound?”

  Bo walked off, disgusted. Neither of them saw her go.

  “Yeah, it does,” Tom said. “The top speed’s something like thirteen hundred miles per hour, but they wouldn’t take it to the limit on its first flight. You need to warm things up a little.”

  He couldn’t take his eyes off it—that incredible fusion of beauty and function. Even in the grainy photograph you could almost see the air streaming over those wings. He could see exactly how it would work.

  His dinner landed with a thump on top of the newspaper. Tom looked up to warn Bo that if she splashed gravy on the photo he would tear her head off but she was already halfway down the aisle.

  “She’s giving you the silent treatment,” Luke said.

  “Hallelujah,” Tom said. “Long may it last.” Though the fact was, when he’d been face to face with her a few minutes ago, it had been disconcertingly difficult to resist getting a little bit closer. Ever since noticing how good-looking she was he hadn’t been able to stop noticing it. Grow up, he told himself. You’re as bad as the boss-guy. She must be ten years younger than you. Eight, anyway. If you want to look at something sexy, look at Concorde.

  “Could I have this?” he asked Luke. “To keep, I mean.”

  “Sure. That’s what I brought it in for.” He was looking thoughtfully at Tom.

  “What?” Tom said, suddenly nervous.

  “I was just wondering if you really want to spend your life making furniture.”

  “Oh,” Tom said, relieved. He lifted his plate, folded the paper carefully and set it to one side. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I’ve been thinking about it, but I still don’t know.”

&
nbsp; There’d been moments lately when going back to it did seem possible. And just now, looking at Concorde, he’d felt stirrings of a kind of hunger he’d thought had left him forever. Imagine working on something like that. It had to be the most amazing job on the planet. But would he be up to it? It would be a challenge and he wasn’t sure he was ready for a challenge. A couple of months back he’d had a letter from Simon, who’d been with him down in the ravine that day. Simon was working for Boeing now, out in Seattle, and after a cautiously worded inquiry about how things were going, he’d said that Boeing had a new project under development and in a few months’ time would be taking on more aeronautical engineers.

  “Don’t know if you’re interested,” he’d written, “but there’s some great stuff going on out here.”

  At the time, Tom had been unable even to contemplate it. Now, though …

  “I need to think about it a little more,” he said to Luke. “I’m still not sure.”

  “That’s okay,” Luke said. “I talked with your dad this morning and I’m going to be extending the workshop and buying more equipment, so I won’t need more guys for a few weeks yet.”

  Bo sailed by carrying three dinners, a jug of coffee and a foil-wrapped package tucked under her chin. It seemed to Tom she stirred the air in a certain way when she passed, as if she generated a strong magnetic field. He had to resist the urge to turn and follow her with his eyes.

  On her return trip she stopped at their table. Tom concentrated on his hot beef sandwich. She’s too young for you, he reminded himself, forking in a mouthful.

  “This is a brownie,” Bo said grimly, depositing the foil-wrapped package in front of him. “It is not for you, it is for Adam. I imagine you’ll eat it yourself on the way home but that’s a risk I have to take.”

  Tom swallowed his mouthful. “I thought the silent treatment lasted for days,” he said to Luke. “I was counting on it.”