Adam's Peak (33 page)

“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.

W
hen 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.

“Have you ever thought about where this water goes, Isobel?”

“What if I say it goes to England?”

His mouth curved in an enigmatic smile, but he said nothing. Isobel crouched to dip her hands.

“I know this pond feeds the stream,” she said. “And the stream ends up in the Clyde River, and that ends up in the Firth of Clyde. Some of this pond water might go all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.” She hesitated. “Maybe some of it will wash up on a beach in America. Wouldn't that be something?”

Patrick stepped back into the tall grass. Against the pinkish-blue sky, he cut an imposing if slightly scruffy figure.

“Aye, it would.”

He went to the tree, unzipped his kit bag, and pulled out a blanket, which he spread over the lumpy ground, over the very spot where Isobel had stretched out earlier.

“Come sit and have a wee dram,” he said, uncapping the bottle.

Isobel sat down and wrapped her arms around her knees. The cramps were still there, but bearable. She reached for the bottle and took a drink, basting the inside of her mouth until its surfaces burned then numbed. Patrick extracted a limp cigarette and a book of matches from his pocket, pinched the cigarette between his lips, and cupped his hands to light it. He leaned back against the tree, exhaling a grey-white cloud.

“I envy that water,” he said.

Isobel held back a laugh. “What do you mean?”

“It travels,” he said, intensely serious. “It goes places. You said yourself, this pond water could end up in America. It could go anywhere.” He took a puff then passed the cigarette to Isobel. “That's what I envy. That freedom. I'm sure your dad could give me a grand working life, Isobel, but what I really want is to experience other places. Do you understand what I mean?”

“I know,” she said. “I'd do anything to go to America. I think about it every day.”

She took a puff, then another drink.

“It wouldn't be America for me,” Patrick said. “I want to see the exotic places of the world. China, India, Ceylon ...”

“Ceylon is a lovely name,” Isobel mused. “Very romantic,” she then added, awkwardly, for it wasn't the sort of thing she was in the habit of saying.

Patrick took back the cigarette, and Isobel carried on drinking. It was like the lobbing of stones into the pond—a metronome to the conversation.

“We could go together,” Patrick said. “Ceylon.”

If he'd looked at her when he said it, she might have believed him. But his eyes were fixed on the end of his cigarette as he rolled a fragile point of ash against a stone he'd picked up from the ground.

“And what would we do there?” she said.

“I don't know. That's the beauty of it, you see. Anything is possible.”

Isobel recapped the whisky bottle and swung it back and forth in front of the distant outline of her too-familiar town. She imagined herself on a gently tossing ship, a glimpse of tropical green on the horizon.

“Let's go then,” she said.

Patrick coughed. “When?”

“Now. Tomorrow.”

She felt his unshaven chin on her neck.

“I cannae arrange it for tomorrow, Isobel, but we'll go.” He took a last puff then stubbed the cigarette on the stone. “In the meantime there's another place we could go,” he said, his voice strangely quiet, almost breathless. “If you fancy it.”