Dan Simmons - The Abominable - A Novel

“Lord Bromley-Montfort. He has closed off the whole wing just down the hall from our suites, and he has that sirdar Pasang and two other oversized Sherpas standing in front of the doors, arms folded across their chests— guarding the doors, Jake, as if it were a bloody harem in there.”

The Deacon shakes his head in disgust. “Evidently Lord Bromley-Montfort is sleeping late this morning and does not wish to be disturbed. Even by the climbers who have come thousands of miles to risk their lives to find the body of his beloved cousin.”

“ Was he beloved?” asks Jean-Claude as he joins us by falling into line on the surprisingly narrow stairway.

“Who?” snaps the Deacon, obviously still distracted by being turned away from Lord Reggie’s suite.

“Young Lord Percival,” says J.C. “Cousin Percy. Lady Bromley’s wastrel of a son. The fellow whose frozen corpse we’ve come to find. Was young Percy beloved by Darjeeling’s Lord Bromley-Montfort…by his cousin Reggie?”

“How the devil should I know?” barks the Deacon. He leads us downstairs to the large breakfast room.

“I suggest we get a good breakfast,” I say so there’ll be no more Deaconesque snarling. India has certainly brought out the dark, impatient side of our friend, one we’ve never seen before. It’s been my conviction during the months that I’ve known Richard Davis Deacon that he would choose his own beheading before allowing himself to commit an emotional scene in public.

I will very soon find out just how wrong I’ve been about that.

The long breakfast room is empty except for a table that has been set for seven. The same manager who’d greeted us in the middle of the night leads us to that table and sets five menus down. J.C. and I sit on one side of the table, the Deacon opposite us, and we leave the chair to my right at the head of the table and the one to the left of the Deacon empty. I’ve expected a British buffet, serve-yourself upper-class sort of breakfast, but evidently that’s not how the Hotel Mount Everest is going to feed us. The five menus set down suggest that Lord Bromley-Montfort and someone else—perhaps Lady Bromley-Montfort—may be joining us. This is not exactly a Sherlockian-level deduction, but then, I’m still groggy with sleep and without my morning coffee.

After twenty minutes of waiting for them—mostly in silence save for the sounds of our stomachs rumbling—we decide to order. The breakfasts are very English. Jean-Claude orders only muffin-biscuits and black coffee—a large pot of black coffee. The clerk/waiter pouts. “No tea, Monsieur?”

“No tea,” grunts J.C. “Coffee, coffee, coffee.”

The clerk/waiter nods dolefully and shuffles closer, looming over me, pen poised again. “Mr. Perry?”

I should find it unusual that he remembers my name from our checking in during the night, but then again, other than Lord and Lady Bromley-Montfort and their retinue, we seem to be the only three people in the hotel. I’m hesitating because I’ve had trouble in England finding breakfasts I can really enjoy, and this menu is most definitely English.

The Deacon leans my way. “Try the Full Monty, Jake.”

I don’t see it on the menu. “The Full Monty?” I say to the Deacon. “What is that?”

The Deacon smiles. “Trust me.”

I order a Full Monty with coffee, the Deacon orders the same with tea, Jean-Claude again mumbles “Coffee,” and the three of us are alone in the long room again.

“Not much business these days in the ol’ Mount Everest Hotel,” I say as we wait.

“Don’t be naive, Jake,” says the Deacon. “It’s obvious that Lord Bromley-Montfort has rented the entire hotel so that our meeting here today can be private.”

“Oh,” I say, feeling stupid. But not so stupid that I don’t ask, “Why would he do that?”

The Deacon sighs and shakes his head. “There goes our attempt to keep a low profile and to pass through Darjeeling without really being noticed.”

“Well,” I persist, “if Lord Bromley-Montfort cleared the place out so that we could meet this morning…where is he? Why keep us waiting?”

The Deacon shrugs. J.C. says, “Evidently English lords in India prefer to sleep late.”

Our breakfasts arrive. The coffee tastes like slightly warmed ditchwater. My breakfast plate is heaped so high with fried foods that bits keep slopping off as if trying to escape; the heap includes half a dozen burned-black pieces of bacon, at least five fried eggs, two gigantic pieces of fried bread slathered in butter, some sort of semi-ambulatory black pudding, fried tomatoes crouching next to grilled tomatoes, a row of sausages bursting through their burnt-fried skins, fried onions dolloped here and there at random, and a heap of leftover vegetables and potatoes from the previous evening’s dinners now all shallow-fried and jumble-piled together: bubble and squeak, I know the jumbled part of this mess is called. I hate bubble and squeak.

I’ve had large English breakfasts before, but this is…ridiculous.

“All right,” I say to the Deacon. “ Why is this called ‘the Full Monty’? What does ‘Full Monty’ mean?”

“It means, approximately—‘everything’ or ‘the whole thing.’” He is already busy forking the fried stuff into his mouth in that insufferable way the Brits do—fork upside down and held in his left hand, blob of food teetering impossibly on the fork’s backside, keeping the knife in his right hand to carve through the gelatinous mass.

“What does ‘Full Monty’ mean? ” I persist. “Where’d the phrase come from? Who’s Monty? ”

The Deacon sighs and sets down his fork. Jean-Claude, obviously more interested in the view of the mountains than in his food, is looking out through the window at the bright Darjeeling morning.

“There are different etymological theories on ‘the Full Monty,’ Jake,” intones the Deacon. “The one I think most likely to be true comes from the tailoring business of a certain Sir Montague Burton, begun, I believe, shortly after the turn of the century. Burton offered that most oxymoronic of things—well-tailored suits for the common bourgeois man.”

“I thought all you English fellows had tailored suits…what did you call it when you bought mine in London?” I said. “Bespoke.”

“That certainly applies to the upper classes,” said the Deacon. “But Sir Montague Burton sold such tailored suits to men who might wear a suit just a few times in their adult lives—one’s own wedding, one’s children’s weddings, friends’ funerals, one’s own funeral, that sort of thing. And Burton’s stores specialized in lifelong tailoring of the same suit, so as the bourgeois gent expanded, so did his suit. Nor was the cut ever of such a sort that it would, as you Bostonians would say, ‘go out of style.’ Burton started with one shop, in Derbyshire, I believe, and within a few years had a chain of stores all over England.”

“So asking for the Full Monty means…what? I want the whole suit? The whole thing?”

“Exactly, my dear chap. Coat, trousers, waistcoat…”

“Vest,” I correct.

The Deacon squints again. Actually, this time, I have squirted him with juice as I knifed into one of the sausages.

I start to say something sarcastic but stop with my mouth open as the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen—or would ever see—walks into the room.

I can’t adequately describe her. I realized that decades ago when I first attempted to write these memoirs without the death sentence of cancer hanging over me. I had to abandon the attempt then when I came to describing…her. Perhaps I can tell you a little bit about what she was by describing what she was not.