by Iain Banks
‘Close personal friend.’
‘Your bird, then,’ Neil said.
‘Yeah, my bird.’
‘She’s a cracker. I’d hold on to that one.’
‘I bet you would.’
‘Haw haw.’
‘Anyway, thanks for the advice.’
‘Any time.’
‘To trade fairs, not fair trade.’
Win raised her champagne flute. It glittered in the light of the circular private dining room. Alban looked around the slick facets of the carved crystal held in his grandmother’s hand, gazing out through the tall floor-to-ceiling windows into the warm darkness of the Johannesburg night and the lines of golden light beyond; the startlingly bright clusters of towering sodium vapour masts and curved, swooping highway lines of new development crowding out a distant hillside picked out with tiny scattered lights, all random and dull.
There was a murmur round the circular table and much clinking of glasses. After she’d drunk to her own toast, Win looked at him. ‘Alban. You’re not drinking?’
‘Sometimes I just don’t have the stomach for it, Gran. You’ll have to excuse me.’
‘Have I?’ She smiled frostily. ‘Well, if you’re not feeling well . . .’ She nodded and he realised he was being dismissed. He wondered if she thought he meant ‘excuse me’ in the sense of ‘I have to go’. Or if she was getting rid of him for not presenting a united front; for dissent. It didn’t matter. He didn’t care. He wanted away from this crowd of ghastly boring loud-mouth wanks anyway. Seize the chance.
He patted his belly as he rose, placing his napkin on the table. ‘Bit unsettled. Think I will have an early night.’ He nodded at their host, a Spraint high-up called Hursch. ‘Thank you for dinner.’
The next morning he was summoned to her suite for breakfast. The room looked out over Sandton Square and the spread of clean, sparkling buildings clustered there then - beyond - the view took in distant townships grouped around the highways out of greater Johannesburg, indistinct in the hazy light of a warm new morning. A couple of hotel staff were quietly setting out breakfast. He took a seat, smiled at the two servants.
Win appeared from her bedroom after the two staff exited. She was dressed in a crisp-looking business suit and a silk blouse, her hair freshly done and her make-up film quality. She stood behind her seat, looking at Alban, who made a noise of apology, got up and held her chair for her. Win sat down, flicking her napkin as though trying to create a sonic boom. Alban resumed his seat.
They looked at each other across gleaming crockery, cutlery and a large central dome of chromed steel.
Eventually, Win said, ‘I am, in case you’re wondering, rather expecting an apology.’
‘Are you? For what?’ He could feel anger rising inside him, and a sort of ancient legacy of shame. Part of him wanted to start shouting at her now, while another part, a part he thoroughly despised, wanted to say sorry as quickly as possible and as sincerely as he could this side of abjection, just so that everything would be all right again.
Only everything would never really be all right again. At Garbadale, a few months earlier, he’d lost the argument about selling out to Spraint. The family firm was now 25 per cent owned by the big US software Corp, and whatever connection and commitment and loyalty he’d felt towards the company was all starting to trickle away now. Lately the trickle seemed to be swelling into a flood.
How quickly all that stuff dissipated. And how depressingly little it all seemed to have meant. He could still do the job, though these days he was just going through the motions and didn’t really believe in what he was doing any more, but even that was no source of relief. On the contrary, discovering that it was perfectly possible to do his job without really caring about it in the least made him feel disillusioned about all the years he’d spent doing it when it had meant something to him. What did it say about his position in the firm, what did it say about him, when any insincere corporate grin-pedlar could have done it just as well all these years? What had been the point?
He’d been made Brand Manager as well as Head of Product Development, with more money, more shares, bigger potential bonuses and a greater say in the running of the company - partly, he suspected, to compensate him after being on the losing side of the Spraint battle - but even that had felt hollow, like he was being thrown a few disposable scraps; an acknowledgement that none of it really mattered anyway.
He knew in himself it was only a matter of time before he left. He’d already written a series of draft resignation letters, though he’d always deleted them without saving them to disk. Maybe he’d be fired instead. Win was just the girl to do it. It was late 1999 and the last thing he felt like doing was partying.
‘For what?’ Win quoted back at him, eyes wide. ‘For not joining in a toast, for that weaselly smart remark about not having the stomach for it. For your whole attitude throughout the meal. In fact, for your attitude this weekend, and recently in general. I think an apology is required. I’d love to hear your reasons to the contrary, if you’d care to air them.’
At moments like this, Alban thought, Win did not look her seventy-four years. She looked ten, maybe twenty years younger. It was as though anger and indignation energised her, kept her young. He did something he’d been doing with her for the last few years at such moments, stepping back inside himself and looking at her as objectively as he could, ignoring the perfect make-up and the power-dressing suit (a bit Eighties, anyway, he thought, almost slightly Dallas, if you were inclined to be particularly critical, which he was). He looked, instead, at the loose, chickeny skin at the foot of her throat, the wrinkled hands and wrists, the slight sag under the eyes (though, annoyingly, if also impressively, the consensus amongst those in the family who knew and cared about such things was that the old girl had never had any cosmetic surgery). And that looked like make-up on the backs of her hands. Maybe Win was disguising liver spots.
Had he been displaying a bad attitude during the weekend at the trade fair? He didn’t think he had, any more than he thought he’d been anything other than good company at the dinner, right until he jumped ship after the cruel and unusual toast. The only even vaguely controversial thing he could recall saying earlier was something to the effect that if one was being excruciatingly politically correct one would choose the locally-produced wines to go with dinner from post-apartheid vintages. He hadn’t even pitched it as a recommendation, let alone a criticism, just an early observation, mostly to see how the assembled Spraint-ocrats would react and so gauge their position on the political spectrum (they’d looked mystified, so default right wing as well as rather dim).
On the other hand, if anybody was going to notice a lack of conviction in one of her family and/or one of her company underlings, it was Win. This, he was all too painfully aware, went right back to Lydcombe, to the looks he and Sophie had been exchanging over the dinner table, thinking, stupidly as it turned out, that their gran would be as oblivious as James and Clara to what was going on under their noses. They’d been woefully wrong then and you could argue that they’d both been paying for it one way or another ever since. Maybe he hadn’t been hiding his disillusion with the job so well after all and Win, predator that she was, had spotted a weakness in the herd. He was the wildebeest she had singled out and was going to try and bring down.
Yes, well. Maybe, he thought, he should have done the Kruger National Park after the trade fair, not before.
Anyway; the dear, vicious old thing was waiting on an apology or reasons for not issuing one. He ought not to disappoint.
He did his best to look and sound reasonable. ‘I have to say I thought the toast to trade fairs, not fair trade was uncalled for.’ He took a sip of orange juice.
‘That is not what I said.’
‘Oh, I think you’ll find it was exactly what you said.’
‘I said, To trade fairs, not just fair trade.’
‘I don’t think you did, Win.’
He lifted the giant chr
omed bowl to reveal a steaming assortment of cooked breakfast material being kept warm by little burners. A slightly sulphurous scent of imperfectly combusted fuel wafted across the table. He set the chromed hemisphere down on the floor. ‘Shall I serve?’
‘Don’t try to distract from what actually matters here,’ Win said. ‘This is not about a single remark, it’s about your whole attitude. You were ungracious, even rude. You’d been making anti-American remarks all evening.’
‘No I wasn’t. I like America. The country’s breathtaking.’ Alban took his time inspecting the fare on offer and helped himself to a couple of thick strips of bacon. He didn’t really have an appetite, but it had to be done. ‘Plus I rather like Americans.’ He added some mushrooms and scrambled egg to his plate. ‘And if they vote for that nice Mr Gore I fully intend to go on liking them for some time to come.’ He waved one hand at the breakfast stuff. ‘Sure I can’t tempt you?’
Win waited a little, looking at him without obvious expression, before saying, ‘You know, you are not remotely as funny as you think you are, Alban.’
‘I’m not trying to be funny, Win.’ He nodded at the breakfast. ‘Seriously. Would you like me to serve you? Otherwise, frankly, mine’s getting cold.’
‘Bacon, chop, kidneys,’ Win said. ‘Please,’ she added.
Alban obliged, holding his tongue over remarks apologising for the lack of sheep’s eyes or gorilla testicles.
Win looked, unimpressed, at the plate he presented her with. ‘It’s a little dull-looking,’ she said. ‘Perhaps some tomatoes.’
‘Presentation matters,’ he agreed, and obliged.
‘I worry about you, Alban,’ Win said, after they’d both taken a few silent mouthfuls.
‘Do you, Win?’
‘I always have. And I still do.’
‘What is it that you worry about?’
‘I can’t tell you everything that I worry about in regard to you, Alban.’ Win was, Alban decided, in one of her more portentous moods. ‘But believe me, I do.’
‘Okay,’ he said.
‘Have you ever really known what you’re doing?’
Alban sat back. Well, he thought, now there’s a question. ‘You mean, more than anybody else?’
Win ignored this and just said, ‘Have you?’
He wondered about meeting this head on. What sort of question was that, anyway? How many people could answer with an honest, ‘Yes’?
‘Win,’ he said, putting his knife and fork down and sitting back. ‘What are you looking for from me?’
‘At the moment, an answer to my question.’
‘Then the answer is yes. Yes, I have always known what I was doing. How about you?’
‘This is not about me, Alban.’
‘It seems to me it’s about your attitude to me, Win.’
‘And it seems to me it’s about your attitude to your job, to the firm, to the family and to your life.’
‘Well, that’s fairly comprehensive.’
‘Have you ever known what you’re doing?’
‘Win, what sort of question is that?’ he protested. ‘I mean, yes, I think I have. I’ve kind of known what I’ve been doing since I was at school, since I stuck in and made sure I passed my exams. I chose my Uni course knowing exactly what I was doing and then I joined the firm. I thought I’d done a good job. I still think I’ve done a good job.’
‘I never thought you’d join the firm,’ Win told him. She put down her cutlery. She was finished. Somehow she’d eaten everything on her plate apart from the tomatoes.
‘Well, I did,’ he told her.
‘I never imagined you’d do Business Studies, and then when you started that course I was certain you’d chuck it in and do something more artistic.’
‘Artistic?’
‘You used to write poems, didn’t you?’
‘I was in my early teens. I thought it was mandatory.’
‘Well, you surprised me,’ Win admitted. She dabbed at the corners of her still perfectly lipsticked mouth with the edge of one starched napkin. ‘I even wondered if you joined the firm because your cousin Sophie did.’
Christ, you fucking old bitch.
He laughed, looking away and making it obvious he was having to stifle the laugh to hide quite how preposterous this obviously was. It was, of course, completely true. That was why there was absolutely no possibility he could ever admit it to anybody, least of all to Win. He cleared his throat and sat up, arms folded. ‘Well, no, Win. I was over Sophie some time before I decided what I was going to do with my life.’
‘Really.’ There was, somehow, no question in Win’s voice. Her expression was unreadable, too. ‘I thought you still felt something for her for a long time afterwards. Even up until a couple of years ago, which would imply you still might, to this day. If you’re going to carry a torch for the girl for a dozen years, why not two more?’
He hated the way Win did this, starting with a supposition at one end of a sentence and ending up with it having become a given by the end, and attached to something you had to tackle. Thing was, how much did the old bat know? Had Sophie said something about the débâcle in Singapore? He’d opened his heart to the girl and admitted he still loved her, told her she was the love of his life - she still was; she always would be - but had she then told Win that?
Had he blown it by being drunk? Of course he’d been drunk; he was too terrified of rejection to be able to tell Sophie he still loved her when he was sober. The point was that he’d needed the drink to be able to tell her, to overcome this Brit reserve he’d managed to pick up from his family or school or through the water or his genes or something. The drink hadn’t had anything to do with the feeling itself, just with the ability to express it; the feeling was there all the time, drunk or sober, asleep as well as awake. He just couldn’t admit it. Not without being out of his head. Of course, the chances were he’d overdone it and come across as pathetic, needy, adolescent and immature.
He’d managed to push the incident to the back of his mind very successfully and very quickly, within a day, by the simple expedient of getting utterly mashed on a cocktail of drink and dubious drugs with Fielding. As a way of forgetting what had happened between him and Sophie, of smearing it into something too vague to be made out in his memory, it had worked almost too well. The incident was so close to the demented swirl of humid day-glo idiocy he and Fielding had indulged in that it seemed, in retrospect, like part of it; not wholly real, and the tatters of what seemed like genuine memories associated with it themselves not completely reliable either.
Had Sophie told Win? Was she that cruel, did she want to humiliate him that much? Or did he mean so little to her that she hadn’t even thought about how telling Win what he’d said to her would hurt, even shame him?
Tell a half-truth. They were the easiest lies to defend. ‘Win,’ he said, smiling, and sounding, he hoped, eminently reasonable, ‘Sophie’s always going to mean something to me. I mean, she was my first love. Puppy love if you want to call it that, but it still felt intense at the time.’
‘Yes, so I saw,’ Win said acidly.
He knew they were talking about that last evening at Lydcombe, and Win and James discovering Sophie and him in the grass. That feeling of old shame - and an anger at feeling it - built up in him again. He controlled his breathing, tried to think his heart calm. Jesus, he’d thought this was long since brushed under the carpet; ancient history not worth raking over, by mutual consent.
‘Anyway,’ he said, puffing out his lower lip, sitting back and gesturing with his hands, spreading them a little before clasping them again. ‘Water under the bridge.’
‘It’s one of those things you’re not supposed to say these days, apparently; people just sneer at you or simply laugh, but it really was for your own good.’ She raised her head to him a fraction, defiant, as though daring him either to sneer or laugh. ‘I knew that then and I know it now. You must have hated me, Alban, I understand that.’ A wintry smile. ‘I
suspect somewhere deep inside, you still hate me.’
Deep inside? Just under the surface, actually. And all the way through. ‘Oh, Win, really—’ he started.
‘It would only be natural. I’m not stupid, Alban.’
No, sadly, you’re not, are you?
‘But I did it for the good of both of you, no matter what you might think. I’m sorry it seemed so brutal at the time. James overreacted, arguably. On the other hand, that was the worst of it over with.’
Oh no it fucking wasn’t. You have no idea.
‘Well, it’s history now,’ he told her.
She arched one eyebrow. ‘Yes, as though history doesn’t matter.’
‘Henry Ford thought it was bunk.’
‘Yes, but then that remark has become part of history.’ Win shrugged delicately. ‘He may not have meant what he appears to have meant, but if he did then he was a fool.’ Alban looked appropriately surprised. Win smiled. ‘Oh, I’ve met plenty of rich and successful fools, Alban. You must have encountered one or two yourself. Usually one of the things that shows how stupid they are is that they don’t understand how big a part luck played in their success.’
From which I’m meant to take the point that you’re no fool. ‘History matters,’ he agreed. ‘But I am over Sophie.’ He looked her in the eyes and thought, I’m lying. I am so not over Sophie. I hate you for getting me right. I hate you for reading me like a fucking poster, you old hag. Are you reading this now? I still hate you. I’ll always hate you just as I’ll always love her. Call it balance. He thought it very carefully, articulating the thoughts, the words in his mind, as though daring her to read the truth through his eyes or somehow telepathically intuit what he was thinking.
‘Well, perhaps that’s the reason, then,’ Win said. ‘But I can see a change in you, Alban.’
‘Well, we’re all getting older. Everybody changes.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Win said, one hand waving dismissively, ‘but as well as that.’