The Steep Approach to Garbadale

by Iain Banks

  ‘Well, that’s Fielding’s problem,’ Haydn says.

  Verushka glances back at Alban, waggles one flat hand. ‘Very softly. Quite sweet really. Can’t imagine you’ll wake up because Fielding’s trying to smother you with a pillow.’ She looks at Haydn, frowning. ‘You have any spare ear plugs?’

  Alban crosses his arms, looks at her. ‘So. Don’t let us keep you.’

  She gives him her best shit-eating grin. ‘You’re welcome, it was on my way.’

  He smiles and walks up to her, taking her in his arms. ‘Yeah, thank you for the lift. Seriously. It was great. Very much appreciated.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ she says, and kisses him. He kisses back.

  ‘I’d say get a room,’ Haydn tells them, walking past, ‘but I can’t help.’ He sits down heavily on a padded leather chair with corkscrew wooden uprights. He looks through the sheets of paper, shaking his head.

  ‘Problem?’ Alban asks.

  ‘Trying to keep the older people on the ground or first,’ Haydn says. ‘But it’s a struggle.’

  Alban disengages himself from Verushka and walks over to Haydn. ‘We must have a belfry you could allocate to Win, no?’ he suggests (Verushka notices he takes a very quick look round the hall, stairs and gallery before saying it). The workmen with the plant have disappeared.

  Verushka considers saying something on the lines of, I’m a mathematician; maybe I can help, but decides against it on the grounds that this sort of levity has been taken seriously in the past and led only to embarrassment and disappointment all round.

  ‘Ha, ha,’ Haydn says, though he takes a look round, too.

  Verushka shakes her head, unseen.

  ‘All the Americans arrive tomorrow,’ Haydn says, looking at his last sheet on the clipboard. ‘I’ve tried to give the Spraint people the rooms with the best views.’

  ‘What,’ Alban asks, ‘to compensate for theirs?’

  Haydn frowns, blinks, opens his mouth to speak, but then both men look towards the far side of the main staircase from Verushka as a door creaks open. Two enormous shaggy grey dogs - Irish wolfhounds, Verushka is fairly sure - lope in, heads down, and go snuffling up to Alban and Haydn. Haydn grimaces and holds his clipboard up out of the way. Alban grins and ruffles their ears and coats. One animal sees her and pads across.

  ‘That’s Gilbey,’ Alban tells Verushka. ‘Or Plymouth.’ He looks at Haydn. ‘Jamieson; he still around?’

  Haydn shakes his head. ‘Dead.’

  ‘There you are; a spirit now. Anyway,’ Alban says, ‘they’re harmless.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Verushka pats the giant hound on the head, which is about level with her sternum. She has seen full-grown dogs smaller than this thing’s head. Shetland ponies are a couple of hands smaller, if also broader. The first dog raises its nose then goes bounding upstairs. Hers chooses to wander off. It collapses untidily behind the giant gong and starts snoring almost instantly.

  ‘Ah, Lauren,’ Haydn says. ‘Oh! Win. There you are.’

  An oldish woman and a very old woman appear from the same direction as the wolfhounds. Lauren is a reasonably preserved sixty, in slacks and a navy sweater, still with a hint of brown in her hair. Win, the soon-to-be birthday girl, is frail-looking with thin white hair, clad in a loose tweed twin set. She’s stooped and clutching a tall wooden walking stick in her right hand.

  Lauren leaves Win’s side, greets and quickly kisses Alban and then asks, ‘Did a plant come through here? And two chaps?’

  Alban and Haydn both point. ‘Upstairs.’

  ‘Damn.’ She shakes her head, and with one hand on the banister rail runs up the stairs. Halfway up, she sees Verushka looking at her through the banisters; she smiles briefly and mouths Hello, then she disappears along the gallery, brogues clumping.

  ‘Alban, Alban,’ Gran Win says, straightening a little and accepting a kiss on both cheeks. ‘You’ve come. Thank you so much. Will you be here for my birthday, too?’

  ‘Of course, Gran. That’s the main reason.’

  ‘Oh, well, people say that, but . . .’ Win catches sight of Verushka, turns her head a fraction more and frowns. ‘Yes? Can we help you?’

  Verushka walks forward and smiles generously. ‘Oh, I doubt it.’

  Win looks to Alban.

  ‘Win, this is my good friend Verushka Graef. She very kindly drove me all the way here from Glasgow.’

  Verushka nods. ‘How do you do.’

  Win looks uncertain. ‘Yes, hello. Haydn, do we—?’

  ‘I’m just passing through, ma’am,’ Verushka says, before Haydn can answer. ‘Mountains to climb.’ Win looks at her in a way that causes her to add, ‘Literal rather than metaphorical.’

  ‘Oh. I see,’ Win says. ‘Well, can you at least stay for dinner?’

  Verushka glances at Alban and says, ‘Thanks. I kind of have my heart set on a foil pouch of reconstituted chicken curry spooned through a midge net, but . . .’

  ‘Oh, please, do stay for dinner,’ Win says, her hand on the stick shaking slightly. She glances at Haydn, who is starting to look worried. ‘And I’m sure we can put you up for at least one night . . .’

  Alban is smiling at her. Good enough, Verushka decides. ‘Well, that’s very kind,’ she says. ‘I’d love to.’

  Behind his glasses, Haydn closes his eyes. His jaw clenches tight. Then his eyes flick open. He glances at his clipboard. Verushka is ahead of him.

  ‘Inverlochy,’ she tells him.

  ‘Yes, of course! Fielding’s not here until tomorrow!’ Haydn says. ‘Splendid!’ He looks up at Verushka, gaze swivelling between her and Alban, worried again. ‘How good friends . . . ?’

  ‘Sufficiently,’ Verushka assures him, taking Alban’s arm.

  From the room, high on the fourth, attic floor, where once the house’s servants lived, the view extends across the back lawn, over the old walled kitchen garden on its southerly slope to the woods, looking down the glen between the twin lines of hills disappearing to the south-east, the landlocked loch - Loch Garve or Loch Garbh according to which map you chose to consult - unseen throughout the milder months from April to October behind a screen of leaves. In the winter, through the net of bared branches, it glitters sometimes under the slanting low-season light.

  To the north is a steep hillside of grass and scree and a slanted line of cliff, hiding the upper ramparts of Beinn Leòid. A stream runs off the edge of the furthest, highest part of the cliff. Today, the waterfall catches the light against the darker rocks beyond. Alban remembers looking at the waterfall once, in spring, half a dozen years ago, in a momentary break of ragged sunlight between crushing falls of pounding rain and sleet with a storm blowing a high wind up the glen and howling around the old house.

  The wind caught the waterfall that day, bending it back on itself and forcing the water rearing up in a great wind-supported near-circular wave, dumping it in unsteady, billowing veils and lumps back on to the moor it was attempting to fall from. It was like the most fabulous elemental battle between air, water and gravity and he recalls standing at the window in the drawing room, watching this chaos with a feeling of almost sexual excitement. Part of him wanted to run out into the storm, let the rain soak him and the wind buffet him and be part of it all. A more sober part was deeply glad of the roof over his head, the fire in the broad grate and the ancient bulk of the cast-iron radiators sited under each window, the pipes as thick as his arm, gurgling with water and rust or sand or something in them that made them tinkle and rustle.

  Then, the family had been at Garbadale for a similar reason to the one that had brought them here, now.

  Then it had been about selling off just part of the company. Should they sell any of it, and if so, how much? At the time he’d been against any sale, but was already starting to question his own commitment to the family and the firm. Leaving - resigning - had been on his mind lately. It was obvious early on that a majority of family members/shareholders were quite gung-ho for selling anything up to a 49.5 p
er cent share to Spraint Corp, and he had kind of withdrawn from the argument. His last contribution had been to suggest that they didn’t sell more than 20 per cent.

  Subsequently he’d spent a couple of the discussion sessions and Spraint presentations away from the house, out on the hill with Neil McBride, the Garbadale estate manager.

  ‘Ah, it’s all changing. We can see it here. The salmon and brown trout, they’re mostly gone. And we don’t get the winters we used to. I’ve got clothes and winter gear I just never wear - well, maybe a day a year or something - because it’s milder all the time. Windier, too, and cloudier, less sunlight. I’ve spotted that, here; with this. Having a hard time persuading any bugger it’s actually happening, but I’m sure it is.’

  Neil was a shortish guy with a ruddy, outdoors face and hair - and a flourishing moustache - the colour of old bracken. He was in his late fifties and his face looked it because he’d spent so much of his life outside, though he moved like a man half his age.

  ‘That what this does?’ Alban asked.

  ‘Aye. It measures sunlight, basically.’

  They’d driven Neil’s battered Land Rover up a short track off the road to Sloy to the top of a small rise where the estate’s weather station was situated. The sun had just set. The day had been breezy but the evening was becoming calm. Long, soft-looking lines of clouds led off across the dappled scape of mountains and hills and moor and loch, going pink as the sunset swivelled west over the Atlantic.

  Neil had been taking the rainfall, barometric pressure, wind and sunlight measurements here since shortly after he started work at Garbadale, twenty-five years earlier. He logged all the data - in a set of old ledgers, at first; more recently on a PC - and sent the results to the Met Office daily.

  Alban liked the sunlight-measuring device. It was a post with a spherical metal cage on the top at about chest height. A sphere of glass sat in the centre of the cradle. Behind the orb, situated with its centre near due north, a long strip of special light-sensitive paper lay inside a curved glass cover wrapped around the framework. The glass sphere acted as a lens, concentrating the sunlight that fell upon it and directing it on to the paper so that it burned a brown trace across the time-graphed surface, providing a record of how much clear sun there had been that day.

  It was, Alban thought, like something out of a magician’s workshop, an ancient instrument that worked to this day, that still did good science and provided reliable data and yet looked like it could have come straight from an alchemist’s secret chamber.

  ‘I thought the world was warming?’ he asked, studying the instrument carefully as Neil changed the paper.

  ‘It is. Certainly warming here. But there’s more cloud, so it’s dimming, too. Cloud keeps the heat in, so it’s all of a piece.’ Neil put the strip of paper for that day into an envelope and stuck that in his ancient waxed jacket. He clipped a new strip of paper into place. ‘There.’ He looked up and around at the hills and moors. The sea was just visible, off to the north-west beyond the low hills.

  ‘Aye, I remember sitting up . . . There,’ Neil said, turning and pointing at a hill a kilometre or so away to the south. ‘Summer I first started. Seventy-nine, I suppose. Delighted to be here. Knew I’d stay till I was pensioned off or thrown out or died on the job. Loved the place. Running away from the big bad city I was; never liked cities, crowds. Came here, thought, well, whatever else they might do to concrete over the fields and parks and knock down all the lovely old buildings and cover the cities with smog, at least they’ll never touch here. The hills will stay the same as they’ve always been - I mean, I wasnae daft, I knew they’d been covered in trees once and now they were bare, but I meant the hills themselves wouldn’t change - the weather, the climate, the rain and the wind, none of that would change. That gave me heart. That really did. You felt, well, something’s secure, something’s not going to get changed.’ He shook his head, took off his worn-looking cap and rubbed his balding head with one hand before replacing the cap. ‘But you wouldnae credit it, the stuff that’s changing now. The different birds, the game fish disappearing - that’s mostly the fish farms and them being caught out to sea, mind, but all the same - the warmer winters, wetter winters, higher wind speeds. Lot less snow. It’s all changing. Even the sky.’ He nodded up. ‘We’re changing the sky and the weather and the sea. I’m telling you, we’re screwing up the whole bloody planet. We just don’t know our own strength.’

  ‘We certainly don’t know our own stupidity,’ Alban said.

  ‘Aye, we’re too daft to know we’re daft.’

  ‘The hills will be the same, though,’ Alban said. ‘The rock; that won’t change. There might be trees again or different ground cover, but the shape of the hills themselves, the geology; that won’t change.’

  ‘Ah well, that’s about the only thing that won’t.’

  ‘Might not even be us who’s doing it,’ Alban suggested. ‘There are natural cycles of climate change. Could just be one of them.’

  ‘Aye, maybe.’ Neil sounded sceptical. ‘But I keep up wi’ all this stuff, Alban. It’s part of the job to look ahead, especially when you’re planting trees that might last for centuries, but I find it interesting anyway, and I’ll tell you; the people who’ll tell you the jury’s still out on this stuff are clutching at straws, or they’re the kind of people that just can’t stand to admit they’ve been wrong. Either that or they’re just outright liars, back pockets stuffed with dollars from the big oil companies.’ He gave a snort. ‘There’s just a tiny wee chance, getting tinier and weer all the time, that they’re right, and if we all try to cut back hard on greenhouse gases and all that, then we’re going to waste a lot of money for no good reason.’ Neil shrugged. ‘Aye, well. What a shame. But if they’re wrong, we waste the whole fucking planet - scuse my French - and the way it works, once your positive feedback kicks in and it all goes runaway, no amount of money will put it back together again. That’s what’s so stupid, that’s what’s so short-sighted about it. All about the short term. All about increasing shareholder value. Cannae do anything that goes against the shareholders, eh?’

  ‘We do tend to panic otherwise.’

  Neil let slip a small smile. ‘Aye, well, I won’t tell you my thoughts on the shareholders.’

  ‘Ah, go on. Won’t go any further. Promise.’

  ‘Well, I don’t mean people like you, not the family firm and such, but sometimes I think, Fuck the shareholders.’ He gave a slight forward nod, as though to say, There you are.

  ‘Fuck the shareholders? Never had you down as a revolutionary Communist, Neil.’

  ‘Aye, well, I’m no’ that either. And I’m sure there’s much cleverer folk than me who’d explain how shareholders are just the total be-all and end-all of everything and they’re the ones who’ll make it all all right again, through the market, and all that.’

  ‘I don’t doubt there are,’ Alban agreed.

  ‘Still think it’s probably shite, though.’ Neil smiled grimly.

  Alban wondered at the regretful anger that Neil seemed to be trying to control. ‘Well, you could be right.’

  ‘You don’t have any children, that right?’

  ‘None I know of,’ Alban said. ‘You’ve got a couple, haven’t you?’

  ‘One of each. Grown up now. Kirsty’s just made us grandparents again.’

  ‘Oh. Congratulations.’

  ‘Aye, thanks. But they’ll be the ones that have to clean up the mess we make.’

  ‘Jeez, Neil. I was thinking of having kids myself one day. You’re putting me off here.’

  Neil slapped him on the arm. ‘Ah, dinnae mind me. Come on; I’ll let you buy me a pint at the Sloy Arms.’ They got back into the Land Rover.

  Verushka slides her arms round his waist as he stands looking up at the thin little waterfall high on the cliff. (Gravity always won, the water always won; the wind only blew the water back up to where it must fall from one way or the other, between gusts or after the storm h
ad abated.)

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘Yeah. You?’

  ‘Exceptionally. Sure you don’t mind me staying?’

  ‘Mind?’ He turns to her to put his arms round her, hug her. ‘Fucking delighted.’ He nods at the two single beds in the room. ‘Sorry it’s a twin.’

  ‘Hey-ho. I suspect we’ll manage.’

  ‘Do I really snore?’

  ‘Gently. Melodiously. Charmingly. You reassured yet? I could go on.’

  As well as Win and Haydn, Verushka is introduced to Aunt Clara, Uncle Kennard (Managing Director) and his wife Renée, Uncle Graeme and his wife Lauren, cousin Fabiole and his wife Deborah and their children Daniel and Gemma, cousin Lori and her husband Lutz (from Germany) and their children Kyle and Phoebe, Aunt Linda and her husband Perce (Brand Manager), cousin Steve (the container port cranes guy - just flown in for the weekend from Dubai, where he lives and where he works almost all the time now), Aunt Kathleen (Finance Officer) and her husband Lance, their daughter Claire, her partner Chay, cousin Emma, her husband Mark, their children Shona and Bertie, as well as corporate lawyer George Hissop of Messrs Gudell, Futre & Bolk, his legal assistant Gudrun Selves, Neil McBride the estate manager, Neil Durril the house manager and Sandy Lassiter, head cook.

  Andy (Company Secretary) and Leah, sis Cory and her husband Dave plus their children Lachlan and Charlotte, Aunt Lizzie (twin of Linda), Fielding with Beryl and Doris plus cousin Rachel with her husband also called Mark and their two children Ruthven and Foin and cousin Louise, plus cousin Steve’s wife Tessa, her son Rune, his partner Penning and their baby Hannah, not to mention at least two Spraint high-ups - probably two guys called Feaguing and Fromlax - plus their highly pared-down micro-retinues of two flunkies each are all due to arrive tomorrow.

  ‘Got all that?’ Alban asked her, looking up from Haydn’s clipboard, grinning.

  ‘Yup.’

  He took a step back. ‘Really?’

  ‘Course not,’ Verushka said, going to slap him on the upper arm but pulling the blow at the last moment. ‘You think because I’m a mathematician I’ve got a photographic memory or something?’