Road Ends Read Online Free PDF

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 amountof 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 thequestion, 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