Road Ends (7 page)

He switched the rope from one hand to the other and trudged on through the snow. It’ll be okay, he thought. Everything’s going to be okay.

CHAPTER FOUR

London, February 1966

Thinking about it afterwards Megan saw she’d made three very foolish mistakes. The first and most serious was not waiting until she’d heard from Cora before setting off for England. Megan had written to her immediately after the talk with her father, but there were only two weeks between her decision to go and her departure, scarcely time for her letters to reach England, far less for a reply to get back.

She’d have phoned but there was no phone—Cora had once described running out in her pyjamas to a payphone down the street.

There was no good reason why she couldn’t have delayed her flight for a few weeks, but the truth was, having told everyone she was leaving, she was desperate to go before Fate stepped in and stopped her. Cora had been urging her to come for years, her last letter being only two months ago, so Megan was sure of her welcome. She had the address and decided that was all she needed. Which was rash, and most unlike her.

The second mistake was buying one big suitcase. She should have bought two smaller ones.

The third was not asking the taxi driver to wait while she rang the doorbell. That was just plain silly.

It was raining when they landed at Gatwick Airport, but she’d been expecting that. Everyone knew it rained all the time in England. She hadn’t slept much on the plane (it was an overnight flight) but she felt fine. Inside the terminal there were trolleys for your luggage, which was handy because despite her ruthless packing she could hardly lift her suitcase, and it turned out there was a train directly from the airport to Victoria Station, in the centre of London. Megan bought a ticket and got on. She had some difficulty getting the suitcase up the steps into the carriage, but a guard saw her struggling and heaved it up behind her.

“What’ve you got in there, then?” he asked disapprovingly.

“Everything I own,” Megan said cheerfully. As she said it the truth of the statement hit her; apart from this one suitcase she had no encumbrances whatsoever. No responsibilities. No fixed plans. For the first time in her life she didn’t know what tomorrow might bring—it was the most amazing, wonderful, exhilarating thought she’d ever had.

She found a seat by the window and sat down, dragging her suitcase into the space beside her feet. The train moved off and she sat back and watched the countryside passing by. So this was England. “The old country” people at home called it.
I pledge allegiance to this flag and to my country, Canada
—they’d chanted it every morning at school when she was small, standing at attention, facing the flag in the corner of the classroom, the flag being the Union Jack. England: home of Shakespeare and Dickens and Henry the Eighth. The British Empire, pink on the map. Countless wars. What else? She searched her memory but came up with nothing. History had bored her at school—everything
had bored her at school; she’d wanted to be at home in the kitchen helping her mother.

Well, you’re making up for it now, she thought, wiping the steaming window with the side of her hand. You’re seeing the real thing.

In terms of landscape the real thing was disappointing. She’d expected beauty—rolling hills, tranquil valleys—and instead, what little she could make out through the misted windows was flat and wet and a tedious shade of grey. She kept thinking it would get better around the next bend but there were no bends and it didn’t; in fact, as they approached London it got dramatically worse. They passed mile upon mile of ugly blackened brick buildings, all jammed up against each other like rotten teeth and so close to the railway tracks she felt she could have reached out and touched them. At first she assumed they were warehouses but then she noticed strips of curtain hanging in some of the windows and in one she saw a woman holding a baby.

Megan was shocked. Slums, she thought. She hadn’t known they still existed in civilized countries. Were there slums like this in Canada? Maybe there were, maybe all cities had slums; how would she know? She’d never been to a city before, not even Toronto. Patrick had driven her to Toronto Airport the previous day, but it was north of the city, so they hadn’t had to drive through it.

Thinking about Patrick brought back the goodbyes. Saying goodbye to him had been difficult, but saying goodbye to her mother and Adam had been terrible. She’d seen that her mother hadn’t really believed that she, Megan, would go until the moment Patrick loaded the suitcase into the car. Then Adam somehow sensed that she was abandoning him, and when Megan, who’d been giving him a final hug, tried to hand him back to her mother, he had screamed, which he almost never did, and clung to her so tightly she’d had to prise his fingers open. It had almost undone her at the time and it almost undid her again now.

Stop thinking about it, she told herself. He’ll have forgotten all about it now. He’ll be fine. She pushed the memory firmly out of her mind.

The train had been largely empty when they’d left Gatwick but every few minutes it would stop at a grimy station to collect more passengers and by the time they reached Victoria it was like a cattle car. People wedged themselves into seats or stood hard up against each other, shoulder to shoulder, holding on to the luggage racks strung like hammocks above the seats, rocking back and forth with the movement of the train. Megan’s suitcase was monumentally in the way. The standing passengers contorted themselves around it, tight-lipped and grim. Nobody spoke. A fat man in a wet coat squeezed himself into the seat beside her, his legs sticking out sideways into the aisle. Megan didn’t like the closeness of him; it made her tense. She wanted to tell him sharply to get up.

The train slowed to a crawl and people began to shift themselves and collect their belongings. The instant it stopped they all surged towards the doors. Megan stood up and began half lifting, half dragging her suitcase along the floor. A man behind her said crossly, “Here, let me take it.” He pushed past her, grabbed the case and heaved it down onto the platform.

Megan stepped down beside it and turned to thank him but he was gone, swallowed instantly by a churning mass of people. She’d never seen so many people, never even imagined such numbers. It took her breath away. But worse—much worse—than the crowds was the noise; it was like an assault. She could feel it reverberating inside her chest, trains groaning to a stop as they rolled into the station, other trains rumbling out, carriage doors slamming, whistles shrieking, unintelligible announcements booming out of loudspeakers. Megan stood, stunned and breathless, people milling around her. Then someone bumped into her, hard, and gave her an exasperated look, and she pulled herself together.

What’s the matter with you? she said to herself, ashamed of
the thumping of her heart. She shuffled the case and herself out of the way, stood beside one of the steel pillars supporting the roof and looked around.

The station was colossal. It was like a vast, echoing, underground cavern, except that it wasn’t underground. Through an archway she could see daylight and cars passing by. She had planned to ask a porter how to get to Cora’s but there were no porters to be seen. There were signs pointing to various exits—to the underground, to the buses—and there were people pouring in and out of all of them. She didn’t know what was meant by “underground”—was it just another level of the station?—and through the archways she could see dozens of buses going by. How was she to know which one to get on? When she saw a sign saying TAXIS, her breath came out in a rush of relief. She would take a taxi to Cora’s. It was a terrible extravagance but she would do it, just this once.

She dragged her suitcase down the length of the station, through the high archway. There was a lineup of people waiting but she didn’t mind, it gave her time to collect herself. She stood beside her suitcase and watched the taxis, big black beetles with crowns on their heads, come and go at tremendous speed.

When her turn came she showed the driver the address on the back of Cora’s last letter. He nodded wordlessly, waited while she heaved her suitcase and herself into the cab, and then drove off.

For a moment Megan sat with her eyes closed, savouring the luxury of it. The taxi driver would know where he was going; there was nothing more she needed to worry about. After a bit she opened her eyes. The slums had vanished. Imposing buildings now lined the streets. This was more like the London she had imagined. The traffic was astounding: swarms of taxis and big red buses, hundreds of cars, all of them competing for the same road space. The taxi driver sped amongst them, swerving, dodging, jamming on his brakes.

She leaned forward so that she could speak through the gap in the glass partition separating her from the driver. “Is it always like this?” she shouted.

He glanced at her in his rear-view mirror. She saw his eyes, fiercely blue under shaggy red brows. “Rush hour,” he shouted back, and then added, “You from the United States?”

“Canada.”

He shrugged and lost interest, swerved around a cyclist, rolled down his window and yelled abuse.

Megan looked at her watch; it said three a.m., which meant that here it was eight in the morning. She’d heard of rush hours, though it hadn’t occurred to her that people literally rushed. Struan didn’t have a rush hour. If all the cars within a hundred-mile radius of Struan descended on Main Street at once, Megan thought, they still couldn’t produce a scene remotely like this one.

The same went for pedestrians. It was still raining and scores of umbrellas with legs sticking out beneath them were hurrying along the sidewalks, sidestepping each other, weaving around the puddles. The women weren’t dressed for the weather—she’d noticed that on the train as well; their coats looked thin and they wore skirts so short they seemed scarcely worth bothering with. Megan saw a bottom, a sizeable one, clad in inadequate white panties, peeking out from under the shortest skirt she had ever seen. The bottom looked very cold, she thought. Then she saw a girl in a shiny green plastic mac, the rain running off it. Sensible! Megan thought. I’ll get myself one of those with my first paycheque.

The taxi went over an elegant bridge with slender cables sweeping from one supporting column to another, crossing what must be the Thames. The large imposing buildings had been replaced by tall narrow houses all joined together like the ones she’d seen from the train, though less shabby. There were fewer cars or people about. As they went on, the streets became
narrower, emptier, the houses smaller and shabby again. There were very few trees and only the odd patch of grass. But at least there’s no snow, Megan thought. That’s something.

She began to worry about the cost of the ride. She hadn’t known the city would be so big, that the drive would take so long. And then suddenly, as if in response to that thought, the taxi swerved to the side of the road and pulled up.

Megan looked out of the windows. Mean, seedy little houses lined both sides of the road. She leaned forward again to speak to the driver.