The Steep Approach to Garbadale (25 page)

Game Theory. Maybe he should check this out. Hell’s teeth, these guys start early though. The room could hold about a hundred. Less than twenty seats are taken, all near the front. The people look fairly normal. Maybe a bit too lively for eight in the morning.

He goes in, staying near the back in case he needs to leave because he gets bored and/or starts to fall asleep. He’s also very slightly worried that they might instantly see that he’s an interloper and all point and scream at him or something or anyway turf him out, so staying near the exit seems like a good idea. He sits two seats in from the aisle itself, so as not to look too primed for a hair-trigger scarper, but is prepared to move if somebody blocks his getaway route.

The room fills to about half-capacity and starts to smell of coffee as people bring paper cups of the stuff in with them. A girl - no, a woman . . . No, maybe you would call her a girl - anyway, this female with blonde spiky hair and dressed in what looks like a black business suit but with no tie sits down on the very end seat two rows down. He’s confused. She does not look like a mathematician. The black-and-white look is perplexing, too. But for the fact he hasn’t seen any Caucasian help around, he’d probably assume she was a waitress. Only she doesn’t look like a waitress either. Mind you, her shoes are sensible shoes, like somebody would wear who had to stand a lot. She has a broad, vaguely Slavic face and looks a bit bleary-eyed. As though hearing him think, she pulls out some dark glasses and puts them on with the sort of deliberation he’s come to associate with either fragility or morning-after drunkenness.

She has a great face. And for some reason, he really likes the way she sits. Which is a weird thing to pick up on, he tells himself. She puts an arm out along the top of the seat next to her - towards him, though he’s pretty certain this is a coincidence, because after all she’s on the end of the row and there’s no chair in the other direction. Her fingers drum slowly on top of the seat. She crosses one foot up on to her opposite knee, the way women don’t. Maybe she’s a man! Definite breasts, no discernible Adam’s apple . . . Not that these things mean much these days . . . No, he can’t believe she’s not a woman. Not his type, of course - too lean and angular and blonde and not really curvy enough - but interesting; definitely interesting.

She takes out a bulky-looking mobile. It’s more of a PDA; or one of these spiffing new BlackBerrys, perhaps - he can’t quite see. She pushes her dark glasses up on to her spiky blonde hair, checks messages briefly, presses a few more buttons then returns the machine to an inside jacket pocket and her glasses to their place over her eyes. He wonders if he should say something to her. He has a sudden micro-fantasy of her falling asleep during the thing on Game Theory and him accidentally-on-purpose knocking her seat at the end and her waking up and there’d be some Bottom-like moment when she falls for the first thing or person or whatever she sees when she wakes up, or she’d realise he’d woken her deliberately and be grateful and offer to buy him a coffee to say thank you or something.

All highly fucking likely.

No, they’ll never speak, never meet - she may not even speak English, and aside from French he’s barely functional - they’ll sit here a metre and a bit away from each other for an hour or so and that will be that. They’ll go their separate ways, never knowing whether they might have been friends or lovers or business partners or a casual shag for each other, however rubbish or sublime (he still thinks of Paris, of Kalpana, and knows with a strange certainty that will remain his most sublime one-night encounter). There must be hundreds of people you almost meet, perhaps thousands, and you’ll just never know what might have happened. You might have been seconds, a metre, a word away from the true love of your life, and you’d never know.

Well, whatever. That was just the way the world worked and you might as well get on with it. No point worrying. Anyway, he already had a love of his life and much good it had ever done him.

A tall, hulking guy who looks like a lumberjack arrives on the little podium at the end of the room and goes up to the lectern. He takes off his watch, sets it on the lectern, shuffles his papers, takes a look out over the people there to listen to him and starts reading without preamble, save for the words, ‘Good morning.’ Coincidentally, these are pretty much the last two consecutive words Alban understands. He struggles for a minute, comprehending perhaps one word in fifteen, then gives up. He’s still trying to decide how long he can give it before decently leaving when he falls asleep.

He’s woken by somebody knocking into his seat. He starts, jerks upright and sees everybody leaving. He looks round and sees that the only person near him is the girl with the spiky hair, now moving smartly away from the end of the row of seats he’s sitting on. She doesn’t look back.

‘You want more water?’

‘No, thanks, I’ll take it as it is. I can drink it too easily with water.’

‘I find it numbs, sometimes.’ Andy waved vaguely at his face.

‘Kind of the idea, isn’t it?’ Alban smiled.

Andy gave a small laugh. ‘I meant the mouth and tongue, but, yeah, I suppose.’

They sat in Andy’s study, surrounded by bookcases, filing cabinets and screens. Andy had poured decent measures of Springbank. Leah had gone to bed.

Alban knew there should be one small framed photo of Irene on a narrow stretch of wall between two bookcases, and had duly found it. He stood looking at it, sipping the whisky.

‘Do you think about her often?’ Andy asked him. He was sitting on the corner of his desk. He couldn’t see the picture, but he knew what Alban was looking at.

‘To be honest, no,’ Alban said. ‘Once or twice a week, maybe.’ He looked at Andy. He couldn’t read the expression on Andy’s face. He felt a frown gather on his own. ‘I suppose some people would say that is quite often.’

‘Some people,’ Andy agreed mildly. ‘Maybe.’

Alban took a deep breath. ‘It’s something we’ve never really talked about, isn’t it?’

‘Your mother?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I thought we had,’ Andy said. He shrugged. ‘While ago, I suppose, back when you were a kid. Up to adolescence. We talked about her quite a lot. You wanted to know all you could about her. Come on, kiddo, you can’t have forgotten.’

Alban had only very vague memories of this. When he thought about it, he realised they were some of the most vague memories he had from that period of his life, precisely as though he’d been trying to bury them all this time.

‘Yeah, I suppose,’ he said, uneasy. ‘But it’s been a while.’

‘There’s only so much that can be said, Alban,’ Andy told him. ‘Sometimes you just end up hurting yourself and others more, going back over old ground.’

He wasn’t sure what to say at first, so he said nothing, just sipped his whisky and looked at the old photo of Irene. She was sitting in the sunlight on a low stone wall somewhere high, a light blue sea behind her, pale islands in the distance. She wore a short blue dress and her fair brown hair was gathered up. Her legs were crossed and she was holding a glass, looking just to the side of the camera, mouth open, smiling or laughing. Happy.

‘I was talking to old Beryl the other night, before we left Glasgow,’ Alban said.

‘Oh yes?’

He told Andy what she’d told him.

Andy listened, stood, drank about half his whisky, stood for a bit longer, then walked round the back of his desk, sitting in the leather wing-back chair. He put the glass down on the desk. He looked at Alban, who pulled up a seat in front of the desk.

Andy seemed to be about to say something, then appeared to catch himself and said, ‘It’s not a brain tumour, is it? Aunt Beryl, I mean. She’s pretty old, after all. She’s not going—?’

‘No,’ Alban said. ‘If anything it’s like she’s gained a few marbles.’

Andy looked thoughtful, nodded. ‘Well, it certainly wasn’t me,’ he said. ‘I mean, about not wanting her, not wanting Irene, to keep it.’ He looked down at the desk, running a thumbnail along the edge of the inset leather surface. ‘I did everything I could to make sure she did keep it, keep you, kiddo.’ His smile was small and sad.

‘Did she - was she thinking of an abortion?’

Andy did a lot of swallowing, then picked up his glass again. He sighed. ‘Are you sure you really want to know about all this stuff, Alban?’ He shook his head. ‘It’s all so old, and it’s all so painful. Sometimes it’s best to let things scab over, to let things heal up.’

‘I’d really like to know, Dad.’

‘Okay, okay,’ Andy said, drinking. He frowned at his nearly empty glass. ‘Yes, I think your mother did - well, I know she did - think about getting an abortion.’ He patted the desk. ‘It wasn’t something I thought you needed to know.’ He didn’t look at Alban, preferring to study his hand on the desk, but he said, ‘Please tell me you understand this, Alban. More than anything else, Leah and I wanted you to feel wanted, to feel loved.’ He cleared his throat.

‘Well, I always did, so—’

‘We even delayed trying for a child of our own—’

‘I appreciate all that, Dad.’

‘Ah, shit,’ Andy said, putting his hand to the bridge of his nose, pressing and wiping. He sniffed.

Alban felt oddly calm and nowhere near crying. ‘Honestly, Dad. I don’t blame you for not mentioning the abortion thing. I’m glad you didn’t. You did the right thing. And - look, my problems with this family have always been with the whole family, not you and Leah. I appreciate everything you’ve done for me.’

‘She’s been a good mother to you, Alban,’ Andy said, looking away to the side, towards the hidden photo of Irene. ‘She’s been your real mother, the one who’s been there throughout, in all the important ways.’

‘I know,’ Alban said. ‘I know. Leah’s been great, she’s been lovely; she always has. She’s been kind and tolerant and loving and that’s more than a lot of kids get from their biological mothers.’ He smiled, spread his arms. ‘And I’m okay. Seriously. I’m enjoying my life. I had a good career in the firm and then I got fed up with it and I had a highly satisfying job working in the forests and now I’m thinking about what happens next, but I’m happy.’

‘This white finger thing—’

‘Yeah, well, I was getting a bit bored with the sound of buzz saws by then, too. No biggie.’

‘Look, I’m sorry, but do you need any money or—?’

‘Dad, I sold my shares. Well, except for that block of a hundred, so I can still vote. Anyway, I didn’t give them away. The family trust bought them. And I haven’t been spending it all on horses or girls or drugs.’

‘Oh, well. But this thing with your fingers . . .’

‘Nothing serious. If I’d kept on working with a chainsaw, it would gradually have got worse. But I’m not, so I’ll be okay. Absolutely not debilitating.’

‘Do you think you should have a specialist?’

‘Dad, please.’ He let the words hang for a bit. ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s nothing. Really.’

Andy nodded. He drained his glass. ‘Refill?’

‘I’ll take a top-up.’

Andy crossed to the drinks trolley near the door and poured the whiskies.

‘Do you think you and Irene would have married if I hadn’t been on the way?’ Alban asked him. Andy paused as he palmed the cork back into the neck of the bottle.

‘Maybe not,’ he said. He handed Alban back his glass. He sat in his big seat again, studied his whisky. ‘I would have. I mean, the reluctance, if there was reluctance, wasn’t from me.’ He looked at Alban. ‘I loved her from the first time I saw her, in a lecture theatre. LSE. Well, you know what I mean; I started to fall for her, I wanted to get to know her, I was convinced she was the one for me and I was the one for her. Instantly. Made a nuisance of myself for a year; chased her, basically.’

‘Was she seeing anybody else?’

‘No - I think she was too busy with her studies and a bunch of girls she hung out with. Then there was the family, of course.’

Andy looked back to his whisky. ‘There was always somebody passing through London, staying at Bert and Win’s, usually. And James had a flat in Bloomsbury at the time. He and Blake were doing their sort of hippy playboy thing, running around with a bunch of artists who used to stage these Happening things, and the sort of junior aristo who gets sent down from Oxbridge for something unspeakable. Graeme and Kennard were part of the same set.’ He snorted, drank. ‘There was a degree of Upper Class Twit of the Year to the whole thing, except with velvet jackets and drugs. She never got that involved with them. Anyway. I finally—’ he looked at Alban, laughed. ‘Irene was still a virgin when we, when we finally ended up in bed together.’ He held up one hand, apologetic. ‘Stop me if this is grossing you out; I know most children prefer to think their parents never actually had sex.’

‘Somehow I’m coping.’

‘But,’ Andy sighed heavily and looked vaguely in the direction of the photograph, ‘I don’t think I kidded myself at the time and I don’t believe I ever have kidded myself since that she felt as much for me as I felt for her. I loved her with all my heart. She—’ He stopped, shrugged, looked down. ‘Well, she liked me. She thought I was fun to be with.’ He gave a sort of shy laugh and glanced at Alban. ‘Anyway, I made her laugh, and we had fun together, and we were boyfriend and girlfriend, going steady - all that - but she never pretended to love me. At least, not as more than a, more than a friend.’ He shrugged again. ‘But a good friend.’ He drank. ‘I hope.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Anyway, I hope you’ve realised by now - you were a wanted child. I wanted you. I wanted her. She . . . Oh,’ Andy said, and it was a long, slightly drunken ‘oh’; ‘she accepted me. Accepted you. Just couldn’t accept herself, accept living in this world.’ He shrugged, drank.

‘I’m sorry to have brought this up, Dad.’

‘Ah . . .’ Andy waved one hand.

‘How close was she to her own dad?’

‘Bert?’ Andy said. ‘Oh, they were very close. She was more like a first daughter to both of them. Linda and Lizzie were always different; kind of a unit because they were twins, you know what I mean? Practically had their own language until they were teenagers. Anyway, there was a nanny for them; Irene was closer to Bert and Win.’