The Steep Approach to Garbadale (26 page)

‘Do you think it was Bert, then?’ Alban asked. ‘Who didn’t want her to have the baby,’ he added when Andy looked uncertain. Andy’s eyes were shining.

‘I don’t know,’ Andy confessed. ‘Bit late to ask him.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘Bit late to ask him about ten years before he died, poor old bugger.’

‘Well, he might have loved her but he might have been one of these fathers who can’t stand the thought of his little girl having sex, let alone having a baby.’ Alban sipped his whisky. ‘Did you get on okay with him?’

‘Mm-hmm,’ Andy said. ‘Yeah, we were cool. Nice enough old guy. He was in Egypt and the Far East during the war; hair-raising stories. Not a great business brain, but at least he’d had the sense to marry Win, who was. Is.’ He shook his head. ‘Eight children, and she’s been the real hand on the tiller for nearly sixty bloody years.’ He shook his head again. ‘Hell of a woman.’

‘Do you think Bert thought you were good enough for his little girl?’

Andy looked into the distance and rolled his bottom lip. ‘I think so. We got on all right. No arguments or anything. I worshipped his daughter, I got a good degree, I was a good fit for the firm - I mean, okay, for a long time I didn’t fit in anywhere; I was helping to manage Garbadale for a bit and then doing a bit of painting for the first few years at Lydcombe, but I took the shilling in the end and I’ve done my best for the business. Can’t think they have any complaints. No, no, I liked him. Decent old guy.’

‘What about Irene’s brothers? Would any of them have disapproved? ’

‘Of me and her?’

‘And her getting pregnant.’

‘If they did they kept quiet about it, which wouldn’t have been like them.’

‘So you got on okay with them? Blake, James, Kennard, Graeme? Were you mates?’

‘No, I was never mates with them. They were like officer class. I was the first person in my family to go to Uni. But I met them a few times and they were okay. They were a bit loud, a bit hoorayish, but we got on all right.’

Alban smiled. ‘You get on all right with everybody, Dad.’

‘Yes, I know, and I assume everybody’s as easy-going as I am. Terrible failing, I’ve been told. But anyway, bloody hypocrisy if they had objected,’ Andy said. ‘They were all shagging around all over the place. Well, Kennard wasn’t especially, he was always the quiet one. But the rest . . . James - no, it might have been . . . no, it was James . . . anyway, got at least one girl pregnant. Abortion. Posh girl. Became Lady something, later. Anyway, don’t know of any illegitimate little Wopulds running around out there. Enough of the blighters born in wedlock, God knows. Oh, I don’t know, I shouldn’t be—’

‘Was it Mum who delayed you two marrying until just before I was born?’

‘Hmm? Yes. Yes, it wasn’t parental disapproval or anything. Certainly not me. I wanted to marry her as soon as we knew she was pregnant.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Maybe we did the wrong thing staying at Garbadale. She wanted to be there, she said. And I came to love it. It felt right, and Bert and Win seemed happy we were there - they were still in Knightsbridge at the time, mostly, but they were coming up quite often - but maybe we should have stayed in London. She might have got better medical treatment. They couldn’t really do all that much for postnatal depression, but they might have been able to do more.’ He shrugged again, drank. ‘She’d been prescribed some antidepressant - Valium or whatever they had at the time - but she wouldn’t take it. Chemicals.’ He held up his glass, looking at it.

Alban said, ‘Beryl told me Irene walked in front of a bus after coming out of a clinic in town. That was how she came to be in hospital, when Beryl heard her say this thing about somebody not wanting her to have the baby. She wondered if that was a first attempt at suicide.’

‘Did she?’ Andy said, over a deep breath. He drank some more. ‘Did she now.’

‘It is a thought.’

‘Thoughts. Don’t ya love ’em?’ Andy said. He downed his whisky then put the empty glass down on the desk with a smack. ‘Oops.’

‘She never said anything to you about this?’ Alban asked.

‘We never talked about it,’ Andy told him. ‘We kind of drew a line below everything that happened before your birth, when we moved to Garbadale. Maybe not the most sensible thing to do, but it’s what we did. No counselling or analysis or post-traumatic whatsit, just good old British stiff upper lip not talking about unpleasantness and hoping it’ll all go away with time. And that’s what we did. I swear. We just didn’t talk about it.’ He pat-patted the desk again. ‘Anyway, look, you’ll have to excuse me; I am suddenly very drunk all of a sudden and I had best get to me scratcher. Excuse I.’ He got to his feet, waving towards the drinks trolley. ‘Help yourself. Sorry about this. Party pooper. Disgraceful.’

Alban stood and put his arm briefly round his dad’s shoulder as he passed. They wished each other good night again and Alban sat in the study by himself for a while, finishing his whisky.

 
He keeps thinking about her. She is so not his type, but, over the course of that long Shanghai day, he can’t seem to get her out of his head. He duly does the trade fair stuff on the firm’s stand, does the glad-handing and sincere smiling and two-handed business card handing-over thing and the evening drinks thing and the dinner at whatever glitzy restaurant with whoever it is to be bought food by or buy food for thing and at the end of it rather than go for more drinks he claims he needs a breath of fresh air and maybe an early night and leaves Fielding quite happily assuming the
chef du parti
role and getting overexcited about the idea of the internet being everything good and wonderful in the world of the future, and actually manufacturing stuff being boring and something he calls Sunset (to a group of Chinese and Korean manufacturers, who look mystified) while Alban heads off but - rather than go to bed - makes for the part of the hotel and conference complex where the mathematicians appear to hang out.

A bit of walking and listening and tracing a finger over floor plans brings him to a busy bar where the people might be mathematicians or not, he can’t be sure; they look very normal. Drinks and loud talking and a few people smoking. He sees a group of people bent over a low table, one of them sketching something that reminds him of high-school geometry, and he starts to think he’s in the right place. He makes his way to the bar, listening, gets a bottle of Tsingtao and starts wandering slowly through the press of people. It is crowded. Somebody mentions something about a packing problem and he wonders if this is a practical.

No sign. He wanders a few corridors, ends up back at the same bar and asks an affable-looking little guy in jeans and a T-shirt covered in what appears to be the first few hundred digits of Pi if there’s another bar where the maths people are hanging out because he’s looking for somebody.

‘Who are you looking for?’ the little guy asks.

‘I don’t know her name. She’s kind of . . . Tall and blonde? Sort of sticky-out hair. Saw her at a thing on Game Theory early this morning. Dark business suit, white shirt. Dark -’

‘Sounds like Graef. Lecturer. Glasgow.’ He looks away, shakes his head. ‘Odd choice. Sure Cambridge offered.’ He looks back. ‘Could try the cocktail bar. Some of the hard-core tiling people seem to have colonised it.’

He’s not sure quite what this means, and thinks the better of asking. ‘How do you spell that name?’ he asks.

The cocktail bar is quiet and dark, with good views over the river, ten floors further up in the hotel. He sees her sitting talking with another, older woman and four men, three young, one about his father’s age. She looks at him as he enters the bar, watching him while still talking to one of the younger men. She’s wearing glasses with round, clear lenses.

Alban’s escorted to a table, taking one near the group of mathematicians rather than by the window.

He chooses something called a Shanghai Surprise because it sounds vaguely familiar and for all he knows may even be a classic cocktail, then recalls as he’s waiting for it to arrive that it’s the name of yet another crap Madonna movie. It looks and tastes very orange. He’s chosen his table and seat well; he can look straight at Ms Graef without it being too obvious. He looks over at her.
Very
interesting face. Wide, high cheekbones, thin, strong-looking nose widening to broad nostrils. Hmm, nice nostrils.

Then he thinks, Suddenly I’m a
nostril
man? Where did that come from? She wears - inhabits - an expression of seemingly continual ironic surprise. He can just about make out her voice. It sounds pleasantly mellifluous; not especially Scottish.

She will look at me, he thinks. Pretty much everybody has this ability to spot via peripheral vision that a face with big, front-facing eyes is looking steadily at them, even from some distance away. The message may take a while to thunder through, but people usually catch on in due course and look back.

Finally she does look his way. He hoists his cocktail glass and smiles broadly, as though they know each other. She frowns.

A few minutes later she puts her hands on the ends of the arms of her seat and nods round the various people in the group, like she’s getting ready to get up.

She is getting up. Probably going to leave and go to her room, he thinks. Too much to hope she’ll come over to talk to him.

She walks over to him, face to one side, frown there again. Well, he thinks, whadaya know?

‘You’re the guy who fell asleep at the Game Theory paper this morning, aren’t you?’

He nods. ‘Guilty.’

‘So, should I know you?’

‘Yes,’ he says emphatically. ‘You should.’

She lowers her head and looks at him over the top of her glasses, still with half a frown on that mildly, amusedly surprised face.

He stands, holds out his hand. ‘Pleased to meet you. Alban McGill.’

They have a couple of drinks. He tries to tempt her out to a club or something but she’s tired from the night before; this drink and then she really must to bed. They get on really well, though. She’s heard of
Empire!
and the family firm. He’s - well, he’s done maths at school. He makes an executive decision regarding which he’ll inform Fielding in the morning and asks her out for dinner tomorrow. He only finds out much later that as he’s asking this she’s making a similar decision - actually even more inconvenient for her than his is for him - that allows her to say yes.

 
They eat in a floating seafood place looking upriver from near the Yanpu Bridge. Drink is taken. Things from the depths which look as though they ought not to exist on any world, let alone this one, and which most certainly do not look as though they should be allowed anywhere near a kitchen, let alone the human digestive tract, are duly served for their delectation, and consumed. More drink is taken.

They’ve talked about SETI, the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence and about SETI@home, a program that will let computers - computers that are switched on but not otherwise being used - look for evidence of alien intelligence within the mass of radio signal data SETI has accumulated and which its own computers are going to take for ever to sift through unassisted. From there they get to talking about consoles and online gaming. She wonders if games machines could be used in the same way, to tackle tasks like extending the value of Pi or looking for big primes.

They’re sitting back in their little red-lacquer-and-gold-leaf alcove, him drinking brandy, her drinking whisky, watching the lights of the ships pass up and down the river to one side, and the waiters and diners on the other side.

‘What you should do,’ she tells him, ‘is try to create an AI by hooking up all the games consoles in the world. Use the connectivity. ’

‘AI@home?’

‘Good a name as any.’

‘Through 56k modems?’ he says scornfully.

‘Not now; once most people are connected by fibre optic or wireless. ’

‘Anyway, these things are maxing out their hot little chips filling the screen with gore and flying bullets; they’ve no time left for creating HAL.’

‘Get people to leave them switched on.’

‘Yeah. Best of luck.’

‘Or while they’re being used. You’d need to have them all doing something else for a while.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know.’

He thinks. ‘You could have them downloading updates off the net or showing some screen stuff off their hard disks or a CD. Though there’s the small matter of time synching everything throughout the world.’

‘Do-able, surely.’ Her little round glasses keep sliding down her nose and she keeps popping them back up with her right index finger. He’s wondering how she’d take it if he leaned over just before she did this herself and did it for her. ‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘you wouldn’t need every single one.’

‘And you really think you could keep something like that secret?’

‘Good grief, no, you wouldn’t want to keep it secret!’ She looks horrified. ‘Why would you want to do that? No no! Tell people they’re part of a really cool experiment to create an AI. Give them an incentive; make them cooperate.’

He screws up his eyes. ‘Why are we doing this again?’

‘What?’ she says brightly, almost jumping in her seat, ‘having dinner?’

He laughs. ‘Creating this AI.’

She shrugs. ‘Hell of it.’

He laughs again.

More drink is taken.

‘Gee, dude, you sound, like, conflicted.’

‘And that is a terrible American accent.’

She sucks air through one side of her mouth. ‘I know. I keep trying but it never gets any better.’

‘May be time to give up.’

‘Nevertheless, I intend to persevere.’

‘Please reconsider.’

‘Umm,’ she stares upwards. ‘No.’

He shakes his head.

‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘We’re just stubborn.’

‘What, mathematicians?’

‘No, Graef family. So we return to the issue of family and feelings towards.’