The Steep Approach to Garbadale (40 page)

One of the Inverlochy staff appeared at the table, refilling his glass. Doris and Beryl were slapping each other on the forearm and holding napkins to their mouths as they giggled, glancing round the now nearly empty dining room. Most of the other guests at the hotel had moved through to the lounge or the main hall for coffee.

‘Discharge himself! D’you see?’ Beryl said in a sort of subdued shriek.

‘Yes! Oh yes!’ Doris coughed. She drained her Sauternes, then looked at the empty half-bottle sitting on the table. ‘My, that was lovely,’ she told Fielding. She gazed mournfully at her now empty glass and the equally defunct bottle. ‘They are such terribly
small
bottles though, aren’t they?’

Fielding smiled the smile of a tired, tired man who can associate every bend and straight on the road between Glasgow and Fort William with some confused phrase or cross-purposed exchange of geriatric garrulity and has come to accept that he is not going to see his bed this side of the witching hour. He signalled to the hovering waiter, raising his eyebrows, and held up the sticky emptiness of the Sauternes bottle.

‘What are we all going to do if everybody does sell their shares to these Sprint people?’ Great-Aunt Doris asked suddenly, watching the waiter exit, defunct bottle in hand.

‘Spraint, dear,’ Beryl corrected. She smiled at Fielding, who seemed oblivious, fiddling with his napkin. ‘Spend our ill-gotten gains on wine, women and whatever, one imagines,’ she told Doris.

Doris looked suddenly alarmed. ‘You wouldn’t up sticks and abandon me and move to your own desert island or that sort of thing, would you, old thing?’ she asked Beryl, blinking furiously.

Beryl smiled. ‘No, dear. If there were any desert islands on the cards, I’d take you with me.’ Then the smile faded a little and she looked down at the table, letting a silence descend.

Fielding was trying to do origami with his napkin. ‘Some people would use the dosh to do things they’d always wanted to,’ he said absently, frowning as he tried to tuck one corner of cloth inside another. ‘Fund projects, use as seed capital.’ The bits of cloth weren’t fitting together quite properly. He wished he had three hands. ‘Dreams, really,’ he muttered. He glanced up to find both the old girls looking at him. His gaze darted from one to the other. ‘Probably,’ he added. ‘I mean, possibly.’ He cleared his throat, shook his napkin flat again. ‘Maybe.’

‘Is that what you would do with yours, dear?’ Doris asked.

Fielding shrugged. ‘Well, I don’t know. I suppose. I was just talking hypothetically. I mean, I, I personally don’t have anything—’ The waiter reappeared. ‘Ah, more wine!’

‘Oh!’ Doris said, turning in her seat. ‘Did we order more? I suppose we must. Oh well, then.’

Beryl smiled sadly. ‘Jolly-D.’

 
The years passed. He got a 2.1 and took up the post waiting for him in Wopuld Games Ltd. Sophie had already started with Wopuld Games Inc., the company’s US subsidiary. He felt that basically he was over her, though she was never far from his thoughts and he still hoped they might meet up now and again, through business if nothing else. Then, well, who knew?

He knew about playing a long game.

In third year he had shared a flat in St Judes with three guys who were really into playing the board version of
Empire!
Because his surname was McGill and he’d never mentioned anything to the guys about the family firm - they were all doing English or art and weren’t really interested in his course - they didn’t realise he was part of the family who owned the rights, made the games, took the profits.

He knew all there was to know about how to play the game, though that still didn’t mean he won all the time.
Empire!
wasn’t chess; it depended on luck on occasion, both in the initial set-up and then in the playing. Still, you could get a lot better at playing it with lots of practice, and he’d spent a fair bit of his childhood playing the board version.

One of his flatmates was Chris, whose board it was and who thought himself a pretty damn shit-hot
Empire!
player. Chris, Alban was fairly sure, had assumed that he would be the ace game-player in the flat. He dismissed Alban’s first few wins as beginner’s luck, which let Alban know that Chris wasn’t that clever. They’d agreed at the start of the semester that they’d have a league that ran all that academic year, and as Alban gradually built up a lead over everybody else, Chris started to realise Alban was more than just lucky.

After a while Alban noticed Chris beginning to change his game-playing style. Now, he would always choose to attack Alban whenever Alban’s forces got to a level Chris regarded as being too great, even though they might pose no obvious tactical or strategic threat to Chris’s homelands, territories or expeditionary forces. Alban still won sometimes, and Chris improved his record only slightly, while occasionally other people used the opportunity to gang up on Alban, or attack Chris while he was busy trying to whittle down Alban’s forces. Initially Alban just accepted this, but, after one game when he was left relatively powerless and two other players tussled it out inelegantly, inexpertly, for a win they were each too crap and stoned actually to accomplish - it ended in a smoky stalemate and an agreed draw - Alban decided to change the way he responded to Chris’s policeman role.

Next time Chris attacked him, committing a sizeable but restrained amount of forces to the battle, Alban went after him with all he had. He defeated Chris but left himself hopelessly weakened. They were both taken out of the game in the next round. This time one of their pals actually managed to win the game.

Chris protested during the game and at length afterwards when they sat around drinking and watching telly with the sound down.

‘Why did you do that, man? I wasn’t trying to put you out the game! I was just trying to reduce your power a bit.’

‘Yeah, I know,’ Alban told him, opening a couple of cans and passing one to Chris. Chris was a gangly guy with frizzy dark hair and bad skin.

‘So why did you go fucking mental, Al?’

‘I don’t like you doing that.’

‘But it’s all part of the game, man.’

‘I know; so’s what I did.’

‘Yeah, but it’s just to stop you getting too powerful.’

‘Oh, yeah, I know why you’re doing it. I just want you to stop.’

‘Well, I ain’t gonna,’ Chris told him, laughing. He accepted a joint from one of their flatmates, took a shallow toke and passed it to Alban.

‘Well then,’ Alban said, shrugging.

‘But you lost, Al!’ Chris pointed out. ‘You got me, but you fucked yourself.’

‘Yeah, and I’ll keep doing it until you stop attacking me when there’s no good reason to, apart from this taking-me-down-a-peg thing.’

‘What? You’re kidding!’

‘No, I’m serious. I’ll keep doing it.’

‘You’ll keep on going after me, after me homelands and everything, just cos I attack one block?’

‘Yeah.’

‘That’s crazy! You’ll get me out but you’ll put yourself out as well!’

‘Yeah, I know. Until you stop doing it.’

‘Well, what if I don’t?’

Alban shrugged.

‘But you
lose the game
, man!’ Chris pointed out, struggling to see the logic of this.

Alban clinked cans. ‘Cheers.’

Chris attacked him in just the same way for just the same reasons in the next two games, and Alban reacted just as he had before.

Chris told him he was crazy, but in the next game, didn’t try the same manoeuvre. Alban explained one drunken night, just in case Chris hadn’t got it, that there was the game, and then there was the meta-game. Even without a league lasting all year long, there was always the meta-game, the game beyond the game; you had to think of that, too.

Chris told him he was still fucking crazy.

 
‘You take care.’

‘You too.’

‘I’m serious. The weather forecast looks pretty shitty for tonight and tomorrow. Don’t take any stupid risks. Please. Come back safely.’

‘Depend on it.’ Verushka, already kitted out, booted and fleeced, goes up on tiptoes to kiss his forehead, then crunches back on to the gravel flat-footed and plants another squarely and long on his lips. ‘I’m serious too,’ she whispers, hugging him close. ‘You take good care.
You
don’t take any stupid risks.’

‘Promise,’ he says.

She pulls back, studies his eyes in turn. ‘You don’t remember last night, do you?’

He raises his brows, tips his head to one side.

She smiles. ‘After that. You were talking about your mother. In your sleep.’

He looks shocked. ‘I was? I never do that.’

‘Unless there’s somebody else called Irene, or Mummy.’

‘Jesus,’ he breathes, looking away down the drive towards the unseen sea loch. He looks at her. ‘Wait a moment. I remember you waking me up.’

‘Yeah.’ She nods.

He looks away again. ‘Oh well.’

‘Anyway,’ she says, with one last kiss. ‘See you on Monday morning. You go in and get some breakfast.’

‘Hey. Listen,’ he says, still holding one hand. ‘If you get rained off or just think the better of it, come back. Okay? At any point. We’ll decamp to a room at the Inchnadamph if we can’t stay here together, or Neil McBride and his wife would put us up.’

She stops, puts her head back, eyebrows raised. ‘Not rather be here with your family?’

‘Hey, we could just break into the north wing with a few logs and get a fire going,’ he tells her. ‘But no. You come back if you need to. If you want to. Don’t hold off.’

‘Deal,’ she says, and, grinning, holds her hand up for him to kiss.

She slides into the Forester, fires it up and takes off down the gravel drive, one hand waving from the window. He waves back, watching until the car disappears behind the screen of trees.

He turns and walks back into the great house.

8

‘
I
used to have a hearty dick,’ Blake told him. ‘Now I’ve got a dicky heart.’

Alban smiled and tried to look sympathetic at the same time. ‘Is it really that bad?’

‘Bad enough. Docs say I should lay off the booze.’ Blake held up his glass of whisky and soda and stared at it with a look of accusatory sorrow, as though it was a trusted friend who had let him down. ‘May need a triple bypass.’

‘Well, they’re pretty routine these days.’

‘Hmm. Maybe so, but I still don’t like the sound of it. They cut through your breastbone and prise your ribs apart, did you know that? Big steel clamp things. Grisly.’ He shook his head. ‘And there’s a risk with any operation. Things go wrong. Mistakes get made. Infection.’

‘I’m sure you’ll be fine, Blake.’

‘Huh.’ Blake drank some more of his whisky and soda.

Alban hadn’t seen Blake since his visit during his gap year. This time, he’d been in Hong Kong to meet with some product development people and factory owners from Shenzen, preparing the ground for a redesign of the
Empire!
board and pieces. Hong Kong was both highly altered and just the same. The new airport had taken the fun/terror out of flying into the place, buildings Alban was sure had been a block from the sea were now six or seven blocks away as more land was reclaimed and immediately built upon and the last of the junks and sampans had long since disappeared from the harbour.

On the other hand, it was still stiflingly hot and humid and berserkly crowded at ground level, the Chinese still spat everywhere and were not in the least shy about coughing and sneezing right in your face, everybody constantly pushed and shoved and jostled everybody else as they walked around - and kicked and elbowed you out of the way if you stopped in the street for any reason - the tall, teetering, anorexically narrow wooden trams were still liable to burst into flames at the drop of a match and the racket of rattling that issued from mah-jong parlours if you happened to be passing when the doors opened was exceeded only by the choking super-dense cloud of cigarette smoke that pulsed out at the same time.

‘Anyway,’ Blake said, ‘it was kind of you to look me up. No one else in the family ever does.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Alban told him.

Blake made a desultory flapping gesture with one hand. He was as tall and thin as ever. When he’d first greeted Alban he’d been wearing a large floppy hat that made him look like an Anglepoise lamp.

They were sitting in the rooftop garden of Blake’s skyscraper. This was still near the harbour; the land immediately offshore hadn’t been reclaimed. Not yet, anyway. They were a hundred and something metres up, shaded by a broad canopy and with a moderately strong breeze blowing, but it was still uncomfortably hot. Drinking, reclined, was fine, but just the thought of doing anything more energetic, like getting up and moving around, was enough to bathe you in sweat all by itself.

Alban wondered whether to try and get Blake to talk more about the family and the reasons he’d left it. He was, after all, on the brink of doing something similar himself. It was a month or so after the breakfast telling-off he’d received from Win, and in his heart he was moving closer all the time to just chucking it in. He carried a copy of his letter of resignation around with him in an envelope all the time now, like a suicide pill. Maybe he needed one last push, a final prod to make him take the leap. Would comparing notes with Blake do that? Not that their circumstances were that similar; Blake had been thrown out for embezzlement, whereas he was just thinking about resigning after doing a good, conscientious job for the last few years. It wasn’t like he’d be punished or sent into exile by the family. He was looking at the equivalent of an honourable discharge, not a dishonourable one like Blake’s.

‘Do you ever try to contact other people in the family?’ he asked Blake. He sipped on his iced water. He was in shirtsleeves, tie loose, shoes and socks off. Blake was even less formal; barefoot too, baggy shorts and a loose silk shirt. The warm breeze brought the scent of jasmine to them; the roof garden held dozens of the plants.