Adam's Peak

by Heather Burt

  “Dada, this isn’t a good time for me to be courting young ladies. Don’t you agree?”

  “It seems to me that spending time with young ladies is precisely what you need.”

  “Dada, I’m not—” Ernie sighed. “Introduce Sirima to Alec. She’s closer to his age, and she’ll prefer him anyway.”There was a long pause before Ernie spoke again, his voice imploring. “Please don’t make Amitha go. He doesn’t have—”

  The Tea Maker cleared his throat officiously. “Jayasuriya left two hours ago.”

  Little by little, Alec began to see what he’d done. His body leaden with responsibility, he crawled to his bed and lay on his side, head pounding. When his brother came in, he pretended to be asleep. He watched through his eyelashes as Ernie changed his shirt and trousers, combed his hair at the mirror, then left, closing the door behind him.

  13

  CLARE LEFT THE VANTWESTS’ house and walked in the direction of the Boulevard. The sun hung low and lazy; the maple buds were fat. It was a perfectly pleasant early spring evening, in which the fragrant air, the soft light, and the sturdy brick and aluminum houses seemed, like the photographs in the Vantwests’ living room, to deny the existence of anything, anywhere, that might contradict such pleasantness.

  At the corner of the Boulevard and Morgan Hill Road there was a pair of newspaper boxes. Clare rummaged change from her pockets and bought a copy of the Gazette. The news from Colombo was on the front page, along with a photo. “Blast in Sri Lanka Kills 60, Injures 1,400,” the headline read. She studied the photograph, in which four men—office workers, according to the caption—were running, arms bent, legs mid-stride, through a street filled with debris. They looked absurd, running in their white business shirts and ties through the obstacle course of rubbish. One of the men had an enormous belly and probably hadn’t run in years. The young man in the foreground looked fit enough, but his shirt was splattered with blood and he was holding a cloth up to his forehead. Clare thought of Rudy and studied the injured man’s face more closely. There was a resemblance, but Mr. Vantwest had said Rudy was lucky. She skimmed the article below the photograph—things about Tamil Tiger rebels and a truck packed with explosives—then she folded the newspaper and turned back down her street.

  There was no one out, with the exception of Mr. Carroll pulling into his driveway in his blue Reliant. Mrs. Carroll, Clare imagined, would be inside, making dinner—pork chops or chicken casserole, or something like that. The radio would be tuned to The World at Six, which would probably lead with the bombing in Colombo, though not necessarily. Clare watched Mr. Carroll get out of his car and head for his brown and white split-level house, briefcase in hand. Only moments earlier it had seemed inconceivable that the Vantwests’ home-land could be falling apart while Morgan Hill Road basked in its pleasantness. Now it seemed to her that this pleasantness was dangerously volatile, and that the pattern of her life could not possibly hold.

  As Mr. Carroll unlocked his front door, Clare held her breath and imagined his house blowing up in his face. She waited for the deafening noise and flying debris and clouds of smoke. Hoped for them even. She was at the edge of the Boswells’ front lawn, and she imagined all the neighbours running out to join her at the sound of the blast—a bizarre re-enactment of the time they’d all gathered to build an ice castle during Carnaval. But Mr. Carroll disappeared quietly behind his door, leaving Clare alone in the street.

  She carried on to her own house. In the narrow, shadowy space between the Skinners’ property and the Frasers’, she leaned against the brick chimney to think. She needed to do something. If the Sri Lanka plan was dead, she had to go somewhere else. Anywhere—it didn’t really matter. Within reason. She recalled her awful, awkward family holiday in Scotland and realized that with the exception of trips to Vancouver she hadn’t been away since. The Sri Lanka plan had been too much, too ambitious, but the impulse to escape made sense. She would do that much. Like a teenager fresh out of high school, she would leave the patterns of her Morgan Hill life.

  Pull up your roots, the chorus in her head chimed.

  Do your own thing.

  Find yourself.

  The words were empty and crass. They trivialized the terrible urgency mounting inside her, so she shut them out and turned to the matter of where to go. Europe had been Emma’s first destination—backpacking, taking the train from city to city, staying in pensions and hostels. It would do. In an instant her decision was made, and she realized with a calming confidence that she would go through with it. She walked around to the front of the house, hardly noticing the lights on in the living room across the street.

  Inside, she heard her mother on the kitchen phone.

  “I think that’s her just coming in now,” Isobel said. “Clare! Telephone! It’s Markus, from the shop.”

  She frowned. Markus never called. Never once in the time they’d known each other had he called. As she ran upstairs to her studio, she imagined him finally, after long and arduous soul-searching, working up the nerve to reveal his feelings. Or, perhaps, experiencing an epiphany of some kind. She dropped her newspaper on the floor, flopped on the loveseat, and picked up the phone. She would let him down easy.

  “Hello? Markus?”

  “Oh, hi,” he said, and it was clear that no epiphany had occurred. “Is everything okay, Clare?”

  “Everything’s fine. What’s up?”

  “Didn’t you want to talk to me after work?”

  “About what?” she said. Then she remembered. Her telephone call to Markus seemed ages ago, when all she’d hoped to do was tell him she was moving to Vancouver. “Oh God, Markus. I’m sorry. I forgot. I was distracted all day. I was—” She glanced at the Gazette, its front page picture facing up on the floor. “I’m really sorry.”

  “It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”

  Clare picked at the loveseat’s tweedy armrest. Now that she’d shaken up her own life, Markus’s impotence was more exasperating than ever.

  “Are you still at the shop?” she said. “I hope you didn’t wait around for me.”

  “I’m just clearing some paperwork. I thought you might have gone out on an errand or something.”

  “No ...”

  He seemed to be waiting for more, but she punished him with a dull silence.

  “So ... what did you want to talk about?” he finally said. “I mean, you don’t have to tell me now, if you’d rather ...”

  “No, it’s fine.” Again Clare glanced at the newspaper photo. “I’m planning another trip.”

  “Oh. Really?” Markus took shelter in his employer voice. “When are you thinking of going?”

  “I’m not sure exactly. May, June. But listen, Markus, I know you can’t give me any more holiday time. That’s not why I’m telling you.” She clenched her left hand and rubbed her index finger with her thumb. “I’m actually planning to leave the shop.”

  “To resign, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you can go on a trip?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know, Clare. I don’t really think you need to leave. It’s just that ...” The employer gave way to the repressed lover.

  “It’s not just the trip. I need to do something different with my life.” There. She’d said it.

  “Well ... so ... where are you going?”

  She sat up straighter. “Europe.” The word was sharp and convincing, completely different from the fuzzy foreignness of Sri Lanka.

  “Really? How long—I mean, you could always come back.”

  “I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone. But really, Markus, I don’t think I’ll be back.”

  In the silence she imagined him absorbing this.

  “Um ... okay. So, uh ... what are you planning to do there?”

  “Travel around.” She improvised. “I’ll start with France and Spain. At least I can handle the languages there.”

  “Do you think you’ll go to Germany?”

  What Markus
really wanted to say and just couldn’t get out, she knew, was that he hoped she’d visit Germany, for him. She was tempted to punish him again, to say she had no intention of visiting his homeland. Then an image came to her: Markus showing her around the small Bavarian town where he was born, speaking German with shopkeepers and the old people on park benches, wearing hiking shorts and Birkenstocks. The same decent, dependable Markus, but different.

  “I might. It would depend.”

  “Oh?”

  Her thoughts raced ahead. Surely if they got away from the shop, away from Montreal and the small but significant patterns they’d established with each other, they could each be different. Things could happen.

  “If I knew someone there ... you know, someone who knew the language and stuff, I might.”

  “Hmm. Yeah. That makes sense,” Markus said, his voice even, his feelings couched. But wanting her to continue. Yes ... definitely wanting her to ask.

  Clare stared at the Gazette photo, the businessmen running, dazed. She could do this. After her encounter with Alec Vantwest, she could handle this. It was only Markus after all.

  “So ... Markus,” she said, “would you be interested in going with me?”

  She imagined him looking up at the calendar over his desk—sketches and biographies of famous composers; April was Beethoven—and assuring himself, with mounting excitement, that he could find his way to taking some time off.

  “You could call Terry,” she said, to help him along. “She’s always offering to come back if we need her.”

  Markus made a curious sound, something like a dreaming child’s sigh. “That’s a great offer, Clare,” he said, “but I think I’ll have to pass.”

  If she’d thought about it an instant longer, she would have given up. But she went on without thinking. “Is the timing bad? We could go later in the summer, or even the fall.”

  Again Markus made his strange sound, and Clare realized, too late, what it meant.

  “Well ... no. It’s not the timing. I guess it’s just not really something I feel like doing.”

  Not something I feel like doing. An impossible answer. She wanted to shake him, to wake him up. But she’d already humiliated herself. Worse than that, she’d glimpsed a possibility that had never, in all the time she’d known Markus, occurred to her: maybe he simply wasn’t interested. Wasn’t attracted to her after all ... felt as blasé toward her as his behaviour suggested.

  “Oh. No problem,” she said. “It was just something that came to me when you mentioned Germany.”

  “Oh ... yeah. Well, that makes sense. I guess I’m just not into going back there anymore.”

  Queasily she suffered Markus’s tedious explanations and mortifying apology. She muttered an official resignation, and when Markus knotted himself up in speculations over the difficulty of replacing her, she rescued him. “I’ll stay till you get someone else trained,” she said. Then Peter interrupted, panicking over a cash register glitch, and Markus was gone.

  LONG AFTER THE CONVERSATION had ended, Clare remained slumped on the loveseat. She’d read two of Clarissa Harlowe’s letters then closed the massive volume without marking the page. The sun had gone down on the picture from Colombo, and the room was dark.

  At the sound of pots clanging in the kitchen, she went downstairs. There were tins of spaghetti and a styrofoam tray of chicken breasts on the kitchen counter, onions frying on the stove. Isobel was rummaging through the gadget drawer. Clare stood in the doorway, straddling the strip of wood that separated the new carpeting from the kitchen linoleum. The white door frame was pencilled with height marks: 18 mos.; 2 yrs. 3 mos.; 2 yrs. 8 mos.; 3 yrs. 11 mos. The last mark—10 years and 5 months: 5’4”!!—Clare had done herself, ridiculously proud of having grown. Positioning herself against the door frame, she reached for the pencil on the telephone table and scratched a new line, about two inches above the previous one. She turned and studied the mark, considering its finality. As she reached up to write her age, the pencil slipped from her fingers and fell onto the linoleum.

  Isobel looked over her shoulder. Can opener in hand, she closed the gadget drawer with a sharp hip check.

  “There you are, pet. Guess who I ran into at the grocery store?”

  “Who?”

  “Mary. From across the street. I asked about dinner on Tuesday, but it seems they have another invitation that night.” She set to work opening a tin. “Anyway, did you get a chance to pop over there? Have you heard what happened to Rudy?”

  “Rudy? No.”

  “Apparently he was caught in the middle of a terrorist attack.”

  “What?”

  “He’ll be all right, fortunately. But there was a bombing in the city where he lives, and a taxi drove right into him in all the commotion. Can you imagine?”

  Clare bent down to pick up the pencil. Fleetingly she saw the stick-like boy who’d watched her from across the street with suitcases in his hands. She saw Mr. Vantwest’s weary face. Rudy too, he’d said. Rudy too. “He’s lucky,” she murmured distantly. Her mother frowned, so she added, “that it wasn’t worse.”

  “Oh, aye. You’re right, pet.” Isobel set aside the first tin and started on another. “We just never know what’s going to happen, do we. Even here. I suppose it’s best that way. But when something like this happens ...” Her voice was strangely heavy. “Oh, I asked Mary how Adam is doing, and she said he’s improving, so that’s a relief.” She took a paring knife and poked the plastic wrap covering the chicken. “That poor family.”

  Clare scribbled “31 yrs.” on the door frame then turned back to her mother.

  “I’m going to Europe.”

  Isobel spun around, wide-eyed. The Vancouver announcement hadn’t surprised her as much, it seemed. Before she could answer, Clare forged ahead.

  “I haven’t booked anything yet. I probably won’t go till June. I quit my job and I just want to go somewhere and think about what to do next.”

  Her mother nodded slowly. “That sounds lovely, pet.” She rested the knife on the counter. “Will you visit the U.K.?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.”

  Isobel turned off the stove element and extracted a pack of cigarettes from her apron pocket. She plucked one out and held it between her fingers then returned it to the packet, shaking her head.

  “Can we have a wee talk about something, Clare?” she said, and Clare, flustered to find that her stomach was knotting and her hands shaking, crossed the kitchen to the table.

  JUNE 1964

  When she reached the chemist’s shop below the flat that Patrick Locke shared with his mother, Isobel’s lungs were heaving and her blouse was pasted to her back. She’d run from the pond, partly out of fear that the bleeding had indeed started, but more as a means of extracting herself from the suffocating closeness of her encounter with Margaret. She opened the heavy black door next to the chemist’s and mounted the stairs slowly, wondering if it mightn’t be better just to carry on home. But Patrick was standing in the doorway of his flat.

  “I saw you from the window,” he said.

  Isobel forced a smile. “Can I use your loo?”

  Patrick stepped back. “Go on in. Mum’s out.”

  She squeezed past him and locked herself in the lavatory. There was no blood yet, just a whitish stain of a sort she’d had before. She scrubbed it with a damp flannel and it vanished. Calmer now, she used the toilet, re-tied the ponytail at the side of her head, and splashed cool water on her cheeks, which were redder than her hair.

  She found Patrick in the kitchen, stuffing a small kit bag.

  “Haven’t seen you in a while,” he said. “Where’ve you been?”

  In all the fuss at the pond, she’d managed to forget her courtship with Alastair Fraser, but now it came back to her, more troublesome than ever.

  “Oh. Nowhere. Helping my mother.”

  Patrick rubbed his bristled chin and nodded. “Shall we take a wee walk out to your pond?”
/>   Isobel took a slow breath. She didn’t want to return to the pond. She didn’t particularly want to be with her father’s apprentice. But there was nothing else, it seemed.

  “All right,” she said wearily, and Patrick stuffed a bottle of Bell’s whisky into the bag.

  They walked the high street in silence, Isobel lagging half a step behind, her arms crossed, her eyes on the ground. At the edge of town she sighed a sigh of resignation and stuffed her hands in the back pockets of her jeans.

  “Did you hear Ringo Starr collapsed and had to be hospitalized?” she said, for something to say.

  “Serves him right,” Patrick sniggered.

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s a Sassenach.”

  “Because he’s English?”

  “Aye. His lot have had more than their share. Let them all rot in hospital.”

  He marched into the half-dead vegetation spilling across the path that would lead them to the pond. Isobel hung back an instant then followed uncertainly.

  “Which lot?” she said.

  Patrick turned and waited. “It disnae do your head in, Isobel, that your country’s governed by folk who’re nothing like you?”

  “The English?”

  “Aye.”

  Isobel plucked a rush leaning limply across the path. She squeezed it, and water ran down her thumb. “I don’t think Stanwick folk are anything like me,” she said solemnly. It was the first time she’d expressed the idea aloud, and the sound of it both startled and impressed her. She tossed the rush aside, wishing it were a weightier thing. “Anyway, Ringo can’t help it if he’s English.”

  Patrick smiled. “Aye, I suppose he has enough worries getting by with that hooter of his.”

  “Talk about the pot calling the kettle,” Isobel muttered.

  They reached the pond’s clearing, and she eyed the place nervously—the surrounding trees, the turbid water. Patrick wrapped his hand around her wrist and pulled her forward. At the edge of the pond, he held his boot over the water’s surface, as if preparing to step out onto it.