The Steep Approach to Garbadale (36 page)

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were quite gung-ho for selling anything up to a 49.5 per cent share to Spraint Corp, and he had kind of withdrawn from the argument.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 had 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?’

 
Verushka and Aunt Clara are talking:

‘I don’t understand. What can that mean, “Where are the numbers?”’

‘I think it means, Do they exist as abstract entities - like physical laws, as functions of the nature of the universe; or are they cultural constructs? Do they exist without somebody thinking them?’

‘This sounds awfully complicated.’ They are sitting together at dinner that evening. The dining room is wood-panelled, quite highceilinged, and very long. Verushka thinks it’s a little like being in an enormous coffin, but has thought better of actually saying this aloud. ‘
Awfully
complicated,’ Clara says again. ‘My husband might have understood this, I doubt I shall.’ Clara’s husband James had died of a heart attack in 2001 and Clara inherited all his shares.

‘I don’t know about complicated. Esoteric, maybe.’

‘Esoteric,’ Graeme Wopuld says. Alban’s Uncle Graeme, the Norfolk farmer and husband of Aunt Lauren, has been trying to get Verushka to talk to him for the last twenty minutes, without noticeable success. ‘What a wonderful word, don’t you think?’ Graeme is a craggy-looking fellow with wispy, sandy hair, extensive eyebrows and full lips he feels the need to lick rather a lot.

‘Isn’t it?’ Verushka agrees, glancing at him before turning back to Clara, who says,

‘And so, what do you think?’

‘About where are the numbers?’

‘Yes. What’s your answer?’

(‘What was the question?’ Graeme asks.)

‘I think I have to put it in the form of another question,’ Verushka tells Clara.

‘I was somewhat afraid of that.’

‘Alban got me thinking about it this way.’

‘Alban? Really?’

‘Yes. He said, “Where you left them,” which is pretty much just flippant, but there’s a wee grain of possibility there and so my answer to the question, “Where are the numbers?” is, “Where do you think?” See what I’m doing there?’

‘Not really. That sounds flippant too.’

‘Well, it sounds it at first, but if you take it out of the context of flippancy and treat it as a new question in its own right, you’re asking, Where does your thinking happen?’

‘In your brain?’

‘Well, yes, so if you use one question as an answer to the first, you’re saying that the numbers exist in your head.’

‘Mine feels rather tight at the moment. Like it’s about to burst with numbers and odd questions.’

‘Yeah, I get that a lot. Anyway. It’s more interesting than just saying, “The numbers are in your head,” because otherwise why put it in the form of a question at all? Why not just say that?’

‘You mean, say, “The numbers are in your head”?’

‘Yes. Because then it becomes a question about boundaries.’

‘Boundaries.’

‘When you think about numbers, are you using a little bit of the universe to think about
it
, or is
it
using a little bit of itself to think about itself, or, even, about something - about these entities called numbers - that might be said to exist outside of itself, if one uses one of the less ultimately inclusive definitions of the word “universe”?’ Verushka sits back, triumphant. ‘See?’

‘Not really,’ Clara admits. ‘And my old head is rather starting to spin.’

‘Well, to be fair,’ Verushka agrees, ‘it’s an incomplete answer. But I like the direction it’s going in.’

‘This all sounds very fascinating,’ Graeme says.

‘It is, isn’t it?’ Verushka says brightly before turning back to Clara as she says,