Adam's Peak (43 page)

Clare's hands clenched. Back at the piano, she'd forgotten him, forgotten why she was here. She made herself look up.

“Patrick Locke.”

“The lad who worked with her father, you mean?”

“Yes.” Her insides quivered—a sensation more like swimming eels than butterflies. He was real. “Do you know him?”

“Oh, not well. I haven't seen him in years. Isobel's stayed in touch with him then?” She sounded puzzled.

“Not really. No. I just wanted to track him down ... for some personal reasons.” Clare held her breath.

“Oh?”

She believed that Margaret would understand. She suspected the whole story might be something her mother's friend deserved to know. The words were in her head. But her too-brief relationship with Margaret didn't warrant the uttering.

“My mother thinks he's done a lot of travelling,” she said. “I wanted to talk to him about it.”

Margaret nodded. “Aye, I seem to remember him leaving on some grand adventure. Seems he and your mother both had itchy feet.”

“I guess so.”

Margaret nodded toward a distant door. “The hall is through there. Are you sure you won't join us for coffee?”

Clare smiled and shook her head. She needed to return to the phone box across from Hobbs and Sons before her courage failed her. “No. Thank you. I'll be off. It was good to meet you.” She extended her hand. “My mother sends her love. She'll write again.”

Margaret gave a sharp squeeze. “Lovely to meet you, Clare.” She turned to the hall then turned back. “I think his house is out of town a wee bit. You may want to ask for directions.”

“Thanks. I will.”

In the phone box on the high street, Clare gripped the black receiver in one hand and stared at the slip of paper on which she'd written P. Locke's telephone number. She thought of Adam, struggling to get back to his roots. His voice came to her weakly, but she shut him out. This wasn't a homecoming. It was a departure, an irreversible transformation. She deposited a coin in the slot and entered the number. At the first double ring, her heart struck up a riotous pounding, and her hand clenched the receiver tighter. She hoped he wouldn't answer, but knew at the same time that that wouldn't solve anything.

After the third ring, a woman's voice said hello.

T
HE PATH TO THE SUMMIT
became steeper, narrower, wetter. The rain, angled by wind, rustled through the leafy shrubs and skinny trees and splattered the ragged flagstone steps. Rudy still had no sense of the peak as a whole. He'd imagined himself climbing the benign, two-dimensional hill of Uncle Ernie's painting, but this was something entirely different. He followed his uncle blindly up the slippery ascent, stopping regularly to shake water from his hair and pluck small leeches from the legs of his trousers. Since their last stop, in a tiny clearing with sodden planks for benches, the pain in his pelvis had reached deeper, tightening its grip, so that his progress was now hindered by a limp. To carry on was foolish. Still, they climbed in silence, and gradually Rudy found himself anticipating the summit, allowing himself to believe that the red pavilion in Uncle Ernie's painting would actually be there, warm and welcoming, when they arrived.

His optimism was dampened by the return of the teenage brother and sister from Toronto. Their T-shirts and sweatpants were smeared with dirt and soaking wet. They'd made it to the top but were clearly unimpressed.

“There's, like, no view at all!” the girl complained, as if, despite the weather, she'd been expecting the glorious panorama of the tourist brochures. “It's totally clouded over. But at least you get a workout.”

“Are there any buildings up there?” Rudy asked, aware that he sounded desperate.

“There's some, but they're all closed, I think,” the boy said. “You can see the footprint, though.”

His sister elaborated. “Yeah, it's just, like, a big slab of concrete, though. It's in a little temple thingy, but the whole place is locked up. There's a guy up there with a key, and he lets you in. I don't think he speaks much English, though. He kept speaking to us in Sinhalese”—she glanced at her brother—“but I can, like, hardly even speak Tamil anymore. Oh, and you have to take your shoes off! It's, like, freezing! But the guy won't let you in if you don't. I mean, I understand we should respect the culture and everything, but that's just a little extreme.” She rolled her eyes. “Don't you think?”

Rudy gave a noncommittal smile and wondered if Kanda would acknowledge these Canadian kids as his kind. They could have been any of the hundreds of teenagers Rudy had taught back in Toronto, and he could easily have chatted with them at length about “home.” Even their talk about Sri Pada was steeped in subtle cues that identified the three of them, like a password or a secret handshake, as members of a particular club. It was comforting, but the very fact of the comfort, the reminder of what it signified, left him anxious to get away.

“How far is it to the top?” he said.

The girl widened her eyes and turned to her brother, who deliberated a moment in silence. “Uh, not too far,” he said. “I think we left there about half an hour ago. Maybe a bit more. I'm not too sure.”

“It gets super-steep near the end, though,” the girl added. “But there's railings for that part, and you're pretty much finished by then, so it's not so bad.”

Rudy glanced at his uncle, who seemed not to be paying much attention. He considered asking the brother and sister, diplomatically, if they thought the climb would be too difficult for an elderly man, but decided that their judgment on that matter wasn't likely to be any more reliable than their sense of distance.

“Well, we'd better get going,” he said instead, adjusting the straps of his knapsack. “Enjoy the rest of your trip.”

“Yeah, you too!”The girl waved, then she and her brother carried on down the steps, quick and agile as mountain goats.

“Are you still up for this, Uncle?” Rudy said. “We could turn back.”

In answer, Uncle Ernie jabbed the end of his walking stick into the uphill slope and took three of the steps at once. Rudy limped behind, scanning the forest for a stick of his own. As they climbed, neither able to see the face of the other, he imagined himself in a confessional. Ernie was the aging priest, familiar, but mysterious nonetheless; Rudy himself was the muddled confessant, struggling at that moment to sort out the peculiar restlessness that his conversation with the teenagers had fuelled.

“You know, Uncle,” he began, “I expected that moving back to Sri Lanka would be different than it's actually been.”

“Is that so?” Uncle Ernie said, his tone appropriately neutral.

“I think I expected that coming back here would give me a sense of who I really am. But it hasn't really worked out that way.”

“Hmm. You're having what they call an identity crisis then.”

Rudy couldn't tell if his uncle was making fun of him or not. He gave a short laugh. “Yeah, I guess that's what it is. It sounds pretty corny.”

“Not necessarily. What were you hoping would happen back here?”

“I'm not sure. I guess I thought I could slide back in where I left off when I was six. Become an older version of that kid.”

“Ah. Well. Picking up where one left off isn't so easy. Too much water under the bridge, as it were.”

“Yeah. I suspect that kid I left behind drowned ages ago.” He sighed noisily, partly in disgruntlement, partly in pain. “I never really thought about it this way when I left, but I actually believed I'd step off the plane and there'd be some kind of mystical Sri Lankan vibe connecting me to everything.” He paused, recognizing in his words the very thinking for which he'd criticized Kanda. His tone became mocking. “I thought I'd be in my groove.”

“And I take it that didn't happen? Your groove?”

“Well, obviously I didn't feel like a complete stranger. But no, it hasn't been what I was hoping for.”

As if in affirmation of what he'd been saying, Rudy lost his footing on the steps and fell forward onto his hands, shaving his palms on the wet stone. He swore at the sudden cold sting and the jolt to his wrists. Uncle Ernie turned around.

“All right?”

Rudy wiped his palms down the front of his trousers. “I'm fine. Just clumsy.”

He squinted ahead at the point where the muddy stairway was swallowed into the cloud mass; he massaged his hip. He suspected that if he were to plead fatigue, or pain, or wimpiness, Uncle Ernie would agree to turn back. But stubborn pride, and a niggling fear that he'd regret the retreat, prevented him from making the plea himself.

“Are you still sure you want to continue, Uncle? From what those kids were saying, it sounds like we're still quite far from the top. I don't mind turning around.”

Uncle Ernie pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and shook it out vigorously.

“Stop worrying about me, Nephew. I'm not an invalid.” He mopped the rainwater from his face, muffling his words. “In fact, I'm jolly glad we're coming up here out of season. I'm all for this kind of thing. Man against the elements. No modern conveniences to dull the senses. I'm telling you, Rudy, this is better than battling hordes of drunken pilgrims for a full night. Builds character.”

Listening to his uncle's litany of clichés, Rudy stared at the ground. He tried to imagine what had happened to the sensitive, quirky artist of Aunty Mary's recollections. He wanted to tell Ernie that he understood, that there was no need to pretend; he wanted to tell him about Adam. And yet the possibility remained—not entirely absurd—that Ernie wasn't pretending. That somewhere along the line he had changed. Or perhaps, Rudy considered, the young man who'd been capable of giggling and prattling like a village woman at the market was also capable of blustering like an old army general.

“I'm up for it if you are,” he said, and they carried on.

The rain let up a little, and for a while the voice urging him forward, as clear and real to him as the dripping vegetation, was his grandfather's.
To climb Adam's Peak is to conquer one's demons
, the old man was saying, but
Rudy found that the words, on him, were lost. If he had demons at all, they were of a fat, indolent breed that neither chased him down nor haunted his soul, but rather clung to his skin like leeches. He recalled that the entry in Grandpa's diary hadn't actually referred to demons at all but to “weaknesses,” a more suitable term. Demons had no interest in him; they were for people like Alec Vantwest.

His thoughts began to drift, back to Morgan Hill Road, but Uncle Ernie cut them off.

“You were saying you feel out of place here.”

Rudy stooped to pick up a discarded walking stick, a slender tree trunk trimmed of its branches. It was on the short side, but it worked well enough. “Oh. Yeah,” he answered absently. Like the rain, his confessional mood had subsided. If he couldn't ponder in silence, he wanted Ernie to talk, to start clearing up some mysteries.

“But what about you, Uncle? What was it like moving to England? Did you feel you belonged there?”

“So you know I was in England?”

“You mentioned it when you came to the house.” Rudy planted his stick rhythmically, pleased with the momentum it gave him. “And Aunty Mary told me. She said you were a teacher there.”

Uncle Ernie gave a quizzical grunt. “I conducted evening classes in painting. She must be thinking of that. No, I worked for the Ministry of Agriculture. Government job.”

Rudy hesitated, flustered by the implications of each perfunctory piece of information, wondering which thread to pursue. “Was it the job that took you to England?” he said at length.

“In part. There were boatloads of us ex-colonials returning to the homeland after independence. The British were offering passports.”

“The homeland? But it wouldn't have seemed like home, would it?”

“No less than Ceylon,” Uncle Ernie said, matter-of-factly. “I had a good job, a decent flat in London. The country was a mess, I'm telling you—decimated work force, end of the empire and all—but very interesting. England had to be rebuilt from the ground up, like a new civilization if you will.”

Ernie's progress up the mountain had slowed. Pausing, Rudy tore through a clump of dark, leafy vines with the end of his walking stick.
He suspected his uncle had fascinating stories to tell about post-war Britain, but it wasn't the sort of thing he wanted to hear.

“Why did you come back?” he said.

Ernie looked skyward. “Got fed up with the weather.”

“The weather?”

“Damp, cold. Like this. I put up with it while I was there, but you know, Rudy, chaps like you and I simply fare better in the equatorial climate. The English are miserable here, but you and I, we thrive. It isn't just a matter of skin pigmentation either. I've seen the same characteristics in very fair-skinned Burghers, chaps as pale as the English. Yes—there's something else we've acquired over the generations, something in our metabolism.”