Adam's Peak

by Heather Burt

  When Ernie ducked back inside, his expression was nonchalant.

  “Well, Rudy, everything is arranged,” he announced. “We’re welcome to spend the night in here. This chap has a house of some kind up here. He says he’ll fetch us some blankets.”

  Rudy wondered if his uncle were disappointed not to be camping out under the tarp.

  “Thanks for fixing that up,” he said. “Sorry for wimping out on you.”

  Uncle Ernie waved his hand dismissively. “Who knows? The way this wind is blowing, we may actually get a view in the morning. Make it all worthwhile, no?” He rubbed his collarbone. “At any rate, I’m going to go with this chap to get the supplies. You’ll be fine here on your own?”

  Rudy nodded. “Tell our friend I appreciate his help.”

  When his uncle and the gatekeeper had left, Rudy hoisted himself up and hopped awkwardly to the magazine table. There was nothing in the stack that he could read, but he selected two fashion glossies with plenty of photos and tossed them onto the other table. He then fished his journal and pen out of his knapsack.

  July something or other. I made it, barely. The top of Adam’s Peak. Closest thing to the end of the earth I’ve ever experienced. Where are you right now, Clare? I wish you were here. I’d make you a cup of tea. This is really good stuff (better than arrack, although I wouldn’t mind a swig of that too). Have you ever had decent tea? I guess Scottish people are probably as crazy about it as the English, so I suppose you have. Do you know how it gets made? I could tell you. It’s a family business, sort of. The fermenting of the leaves is the most important stage. It’s not as exciting as the rolling or the heating, but that’s what’ll make or break a batch. Goddammit, Clare, I wish you were here. I wish I had some fucking aspirin, and I wish

  He gave up. In the fading light, he closed his journal and began flipping through one of the magazines. A long section on wedding wear featured women in glittering saris and white dresses, posing in front of exotic backdrops. There was a feature on office wear, which seemed to be endorsing East-West combinations. An English-titled “What’s Hot, What’s Not” section gave Rudy pause as he recognized a version of his sarong and T-shirt combination in the “not” column. He was absorbed in a series of hairstyle makeovers when his uncle and the gatekeeper returned, laden with blankets, a kerosene lamp, and a cardboard box that looked promisingly to contain food.

  “Well, we won’t go cold or hungry,” Uncle Ernie announced, depositing the box on the table, and again Rudy suspected that the old man might be itching with a frustrated desire to rough it in the bush. Rudy himself, however, could only sink back in immeasurable relief as he noticed, wedged between a basket of hoppers and a comb of bananas, a foil packet of painkillers. Dumbly smiling his gratitude, he made a mental note to write down the angelic gatekeeper’s name and address so that he might send a gift when he returned to Colombo. He would have liked to chat with the man for a while; it seemed the least he could do. But the gatekeeper didn’t stay. His armful of blankets unloaded, he lit the kerosene lamp and hung it from a hook on the ceiling, said a few words to Ernie, then left, closing the door behind him.

  In addition to the bananas and hoppers there was a container of cold chicken curry, two boiled eggs, a few rambutans, plastic plates, and cutlery. Picking through these luxuries, Rudy shook his head.

  “This is incredible, Uncle. I don’t think I would have been as generous as this with complete strangers.”

  “Oh, I paid the chap,” Ernie said flatly.

  Rudy looked up, embarrassed that a gesture he’d thought to be generous and authentic had in fact been formulaic, even crass. But on the other hand, an awkward weight of indebtedness had been lifted.

  “I hope it wasn’t too much,” he said. “Not that—Don’t worry about it, though; I’ll pay you back. I mean, it’s all because of me that we’re stuck here.”

  “We’ll settle it when we get back to town,” Ernie said. “Let’s eat, shall we? I’m famished.” He reached into the box. “Here, take some paracetamol.”

  The hoppers were gluey and the chicken curry salty, but they ate greedily, until there remained only a banana and rambutan each, reserved for breakfast. It occurred to Rudy that if he’d known the food and accommodation were to be paid for, he would have inquired about some booze as well. But he abandoned the idea straightaway. On a full stomach, his belief in the gatekeeper’s goodwill had been restored, for, really, the fellow could hardly have been expected to give up essential supplies without some form of compensation.

  When the table had been cleared, Ernie lit his pipe. Rudy sat with a thin, itchy blanket wrapped around his shoulders. Above him, the kerosene lamp hissed; outside, branches whisked against the shed. The silence between him and his uncle was awkward.

  “This must be different from other nights you’ve spent up here,” he finally said.

  Ernie sucked on his pipe. He sat with one bony leg crossed over the other; his right elbow rested in his left palm. “Hmm? Oh, yes. It’s certainly quieter.”

  “My dad has an old photo of you taken up here. It’s hanging in his study.” Somehow he had to bring up Alec.

  “Is that so?”

  “Yeah. You’re posing next to the bell with another guy. One of Grandpa’s employees, I think.”

  “Hmm. Yes.”

  Rudy shifted his weight onto one buttock and reached for the packet of paracetamol. “I think it was the same climb Grandpa wrote about in his diary.” He pushed a tablet through the foil and swallowed it with a gulp of cold tea.

  “That could be,” Ernie said. “Your sister’s child is deaf, isn’t she?”

  Rudy straightened up, surprised and confused. “Zoë? Yes.”

  “And how does your sister cope with that?”

  “Uh, with difficulty ... usually.” He searched his uncle’s calm expression then carried on. “Susie’s kind of a high-maintenance person herself. She’s terrific; I love her. She just gets very stressed out. And she and her husband have just split up, so things aren’t great.” He ran his fingers along the splintery edge of the table. “She’s done everything to make Zoë’s life good, though. Zoë’ll be okay.”

  Uncle Ernie nodded thoughtfully and smoked his pipe, punctuating the silence with tiny clicks and aspirations. Rudy tightened the blanket around his shoulders. He imagined he should say more about Susie and her life. Uncle Ernie seemed interested. And eventually the conversation would lead where he wanted it to, gradually, naturally. But thinking about his sister’s life had made him uneasy. He charged ahead.

  “Uncle, why did you and my father lose contact? Was it because of him?”

  Again Uncle Ernie nodded, and Rudy braced himself. But the nod was not an affirmation of that sort.

  “Yes, I thought you might get around to asking that,” he said. “What does Alec have to say about it?”

  “Not much. Nothing very specific.”

  “Well, there’s nothing very specific to be said.” He lowered his pipe. “My father and I had a final discussion that more or less marked the end of things. It was quite innocuous by our usual standards, but the estrangement had been building for years. I was jolly glad to leave, and I’m sure they were happy to see the tail end of me.” He stopped briefly and frowned. “Except Mary. She probably disapproved of me most of all, but I was her brother and that was that.”

  There was little sense in pressing on, Rudy suspected, but he’d come so far with the old man—all the way to the summit of Adam’s Peak—that the story he’d constructed about this long-lost relation begged a climax of its own.

  “What was the disapproval about, Uncle? Why the estrangement?”

  Uncle Ernie uncrossed his legs and rested the heels of his hands on his knees. “You’re an intelligent chap, Rudy.” He lifted his pipe to his mouth. “Let’s just say I didn’t suit the tea planting life.”

  And that was that. Rudy fixed his eyes on a magazine photograph pinned to the shed wall—an elephant draped with red velvet blanket
s and strings of lights, for the Kandy Perahera. “Festival of the Sacred Tooth Relic brings together Sri Lankans of all ethnic backgrounds,” the caption read. When he and his sister were children, Rudy recalled, Susie used to place tiny elephant figurines on the turntable of their grandfather’s phonograph and give them a ride.

  19

  FARRELL ROAD WASN’T DIFFICULT TO FIND, though it was, as Margaret had said, out of town a wee bit. Past the enormous Safeway, it branched off the main road, a narrow, dead-end lane banked by rolling fields and hedgerows. Most of its scattered houses were of brick; number seven, at the very end of the lane, was a light brown pebble-dash box. Approaching it slowly, Clare rehearsed her part—the greeting, pleasant but formal; answers to questions she would no doubt be asked; questions she herself could ask if the conversation lulled. She carried a bunch of flowers, which she expected to give to Patrick’s wife, Anne. So far she’d spoken only to Anne, an easy person to speak to.

  “Yes, yes, I’m sure I’ve heard of your grandfather, Clare,” she’d said. “I’ve probably heard about your mother, too, but I’m getting a bit wandered in my old age.” She laughed. “And so you’re here on a visit?”

  “Yes. Just for a few more days, then I’m going to France.”

  “Ooh, lovely. But listen, Clare, you must come and visit. Do you have plans for lunch?”

  “You mean today?”

  “Aye. Right now. I’m experimenting with a new Moroccan dish. Lamb tagine. Do you like lamb? Why don’t you come and join us?”

  “Uh, sure. Thank you. But is it okay with your husband? Will he mind?”

  “Mind? Ach, he’ll talk your ear off!”

  Two houses away, Clare slowed her pace even more and repeated to herself the significance, the potentially life-shattering magnitude, of what she was about to do. The essential fact was there in her consciousness: You’re about to meet your biological father. But somewhere between the phone booth and Farrell Road, the words had lost their texture and weight. They were just words, as stubbornly flat and mundane as the midday light. She concentrated, tried to make herself feel. Then she decided that her subconscious was protecting her. She would go to P. Locke’s door in this numbed state, afflicted with only the mildest of awkwardness, so that when the startling realities hit—an unmistakable physical resemblance, an identical mannerism, a mention of Patrick’s other children—she wouldn’t be entirely paralyzed. It made sense.

  Number seven was one of the plainer houses on the lane, but the brass door knocker was impressive—an elephant head with enormous ears and a curled trunk, which served as the knocking mechanism. Clare shifted the bunch of flowers to her left hand, breathed in, and knocked. At the sound of footsteps approaching, a hint of the significance she’d been searching for materialized. But it wasn’t anything she would have expected. Not the magnitude or the melodrama, but rather a bizarrely acute awareness of her own weight. The pressure of her feet on the rubber doormat, the heaviness of her arms. She lifted one foot a few inches off the mat to intensify the sensation. Then the door opened.

  “You must be Clare,” the tall, wiry man said, extending his hand. “Glad you could come. No trouble finding the place?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  So this was him.

  “Aye, Anne’s good with directions. Well, come on in.” He stepped back into the dark entrance hall, craning his neck to look over Clare’s shoulder. “I’m just looking for the cat. Did Anne warn you we have a cat? We forget sometimes. To warn folk, that is. A friend of ours is allergic, you see, and the minute he’s inside, he comes down with sneezing fits. Muffy! Here, puss!” He scanned the tiny front yard then closed the door. “You probably won’t see her; she’s skittish. But her fur’s all over the place.”

  “It’s okay. I’m not allergic.”

  She had his chin and jaw, perhaps. Not his nose, thank God. His coarse hair had a bit of brown remaining. The top of his head was almost entirely bald, but the rest needed a trim. He wore green corduroys and a scruffy denim shirt.

  “Well that’s good, then. But we have some antihistamine tablets, if you need them.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

  And his eyes—that was where resemblances were often most striking, Isobel once said. His eyes were blue and large. Indeed, there was little doubt about the eyes. But then again, Alastair’s had been very similar.

  “Those are lovely flowers.”

  “They’re for you and Anne.”

  She handed him the bunch of flowers and watched him trace his finger along the underside of a purple iris petal then plunge his long, lumpy nose into a yellow chrysanthemum. She shifted her weight and tucked her hair behind her ears. She had a place here, she told herself. A claim to this man’s attention.

  She followed Patrick from the entrance hall into the living room, a bright, high-ceilinged space at the front of the house. She called it a living room, but it was more like a museum. The various shelves and end tables were crowded with travel artifacts: wooden carvings, clay pots, lacquerware, baskets. The two couches, dark rattan with red velvet cushions, one of them covered in long, grey fur, were separated by a flat-topped steamer trunk piled with books and National Geographic magazines. The shorter of the couches was flanked on one side by a wooden giraffe and on the other by a water pipe, its long hose snaked around the orange glass base and the gold neck. On the walls were masks, batiks, a green and yellow flag, a pair of papier-mâché puppets, and a zebra skin that reminded Clare of the Vantwests’ crocodile—though next to Patrick’s things, the Vantwests’ crocodile seemed ordinary.

  “You’ve travelled a lot,” Clare said.

  Patrick nodded thoughtfully. “A wee bit, aye. I worked on ships, and Anne used to work in West Africa. She’s a nurse, you see. We met in Ghana.”

  Anne appeared then, drying her hands on a tea towel. Small, fit-looking, she wore jeans and a faded red sweatshirt, no makeup, and her silver hair was drawn from her face with a headband.

  “You found us!” she announced. “I hope you’re hungry!”

  Clare nodded and smiled. She hadn’t noticed till then, but she was famished. “It smells delicious. Thanks again for having me.”

  “Never turn away a guest,” Patrick said. “That’s wisdom from the Bedouin.”

  They ate in the dining room, a much more Scottish-looking room, with sturdy sideboard and lace tablecloth. The walls featured dozens of photographs of children and teenagers, who sparked in Clare an anxious curiosity. But none of the motley array belonged to Patrick. They were Anne’s nieces and nephews, her son from a long-dead marriage, and a collection of foster children from different countries, supported by Patrick and Anne over the years. The current one was Shyamala, an eleven-year-old girl from a village near Mysore, India. She wore a navy blue tunic and a white blouse, and her pose was stiff and serious. Over the course of lunch, Clare’s attention drifted repeatedly to the snapshot of the little foster girl, remaining there long enough at one point that she missed much of Patrick’s account of a hunger riot in one of his ports of call.

  He didn’t seem to notice. His demands on the listener were minimal: an occasional nod, a smile or a frown, as the subject dictated. He had a wealth of stories to tell, and he seemed determined to get through as many of them as possible. Occasionally Anne spoke up, to corroborate or to steer Patrick in a particular direction—it was Anne who eventually asked about Isobel and the McGuigan family, a topic that soon fizzled—but the conversation, if it could be called that, belonged to Patrick. The last remark Clare had made was a vague question about Shyamala’s living conditions. Now Patrick was off and running about India, describing the place in terms that would make Isobel cringe and Alastair blush.

  “Nothing’s hidden away there, you see. The whole fantastic stinking lot is right there in the street for anyone to see. Defecation, celebration ... It’s a bloody teeming cesspool, India is.” He leaned forward. “My first time in Bombay, I got myself lost wandering about a vegetable market.
I wandered into an alley, but all I found there were open doorways with these young lasses. Prostitutes. Aye. Some of them not much older than wee Shyamala there. They saw me looking, so I went closer. But when I got within spitting distance I was in for a nasty shock, so I was.” He jabbed the air with his fork. “These girls weren’t ordinary prostitutes, you see. One of them had no hands; another was missing half her face. They were lepers, you see. Aye. First time I’d seen such a thing. I thought I was in hell. Folk decomposing before my eyes, the whole place reeking of sewage. I nearly spewed right there on the pavement. Then they started yelling at me to bugger off. A lass with no nose hit me in the head with a rock. I was mortified, so I was. But her aim was fantastic.”

  He paused to eat a piece of lamb. Anne was picking idly at the salad. Clare stared at her almost-empty plate and tried to imagine her mother listening to such stories.

  “Aye, India’s a cesspool and a carnival all in one,” Patrick mused, settling back in his chair. “But it works. It runs.” He looked at his wife and nodded. “Shall we take a wee stroll before the sweets? Out to the pond and back?”

  Anne shook her head. “You two go on. My knee’s still jiggered.” Turning to Clare, she added, “We climbed Ben Nevis last week. It was really spectacular, but coming down was murder on the knees.”

  “Oh, aye. First time in ten years we’ve had a view up top,” Patrick said. “So it’ll be just me and the young lassie out to the pond, then?”