The Steep Approach to Garbadale (48 page)

Aunt Kathleen was standing on the small dais at one end of the room by herself. Behind her lay the long table where Win, Kennard, Andy, Haydn, Fielding, Perce and she would sit shortly, when the Extraordinary General Meeting would be formally called to order.

She asked if there were any objections to a show of hands on whether a motion to the effect she had just outlined should be put to the meeting as soon as it began.

Alban abstained. Pretty much everybody else voted yes, though Uncle Kennard voted each way by mistake.

Texan oilmen generally believe that you can tell a lot about a man by his closest friends, so they take particular care only to buy the best. Before being head-hunted to join Spraint Corp, Larry Feaguing had been in the oil industry, based in Texas, and knew the Bush clan reasonably well. The remark about only buying the best friends was one that some drawling Houstonian sophisticate had either made up or repeated as their own to him at some Republican fund-raising event when he had still been relatively wet behind the ears. He recalled being shocked at the implication, and dismissive of the - probably closet Liberal - cynic who had expressed it. Subsequent experience in the state and the industry had only shown how disillusioningly true the epithet actually was.

Until this weekend the Bush family had provided Larry’s definition of lucky avariciousness and well-connected guile, but now he was beginning to think the Wopulds might have the edge.

‘Did I hear that right?’ he said quietly, leaning over to speak into Fromlax’s ear.

‘Yes, sir. Two hundred million.’

‘Jesus H. Christ.’

‘Sir, please.’

‘Huh? Oh, yeah. Sorry.’

Two hundred was the limit they’d been given authority to go to, depending on the cash/stock mix. Feaguing knew the board was prepared to go as high as two-fifty, at a pinch, though he personally thought that was far too much; at that price it would be a vanity purchase, not good business. Anyway, it didn’t matter. Two hundred? He wasn’t just going to say yes to that, certainly not without putting up some sort of fight. He didn’t want to go back to the States having been taken right up to the limit he’d been given, not unless the only other option was not making the sale at all. It would look bad. He might look weak; gullible, even. It would not do his standing in the firm and on the board any good. Yes, he’d have successfully negotiated the purchase of the Wopuld Group and secured the
Empire!
property, so it wouldn’t do him any harm, as such, but if he could come back, in effect, with change, it would look even better. At the very least he was going to make the greedy bastards sweat a bit.

The motion passed as near as dammit unanimously on a show of hands. Feaguing was so annoyed he had to be reminded by Fromlax that he had a vote, too. Shit, he represented the biggest single share-holding by a long way. They’d tot up the shares belonging to each of the people voting, but as no individual owned more than six per cent of the whole, that would make no difference. Motion carried before he’d even had a chance to put his pitch, the devious Brit bastards.

He was offered the opportunity to say a few words, for whatever it was worth after that ultimatum of a vote. He’d had a big speech prepared but there was little point in going through the whole thing now. He left out the spiel where he flattered them and their stupid little company and just told them how great Spraint was and what a good deal one-twenty represented, then added that he was deeply worried they were asking for an unrealistic amount of money, but that, unless they reconsidered, he would communicate the offer back to the main Spraint board this evening; although it was the weekend, all the board members were anxious to hear whether they’d been successful and various weekend leisure activities would have to be disturbed. He only hoped they would consider it at all rather than dismiss it out of hand. He thanked them for their time and sat down to surprisingly warm applause.

Two hundred mill. A fifth of a billion bucks. The greedy fucks.

 
‘Well, Alban, you had your say,’ Win said to him after dinner that evening. He’d been wandering round some of the various family members gathered in the drawing room rather than working the room this time, just batting around from little group to little group, talking, accepting both restrained praise and severe criticism for his address before the EGM. He fetched up at the fireplace, Win’s usual hangout, and wondered which he’d receive from her.

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘I did, didn’t I?’

‘Was that what you always meant to say?’ Win asked. She was sitting holding her tumbler of whisky, surrounded by Kennard, Renée, Haydn, Linda, Perce, Kathleen and Lance.

‘Pretty much,’ he told her.

‘I thought the political stuff was completely unnecessary, I must say,’ she said.

‘People usually do. It’s generally the most important content people are either embarrassed by or can’t see is relevant.’

‘Still, you got it off your chest.’

‘From spleen via chest to cuff,’ he agreed.

‘You are one for going against the flow, aren’t you, Alban?’ Uncle Perce said. He was Brand Manager these days, husband of Aunt Linda; a tallish, balding, slightly chubby guy with inordinately thick-lensed glasses which gave him a perpetually goggling look. He had a hoarse, slightly breathless voice.

‘I suppose I am,’ Alban agreed. He felt tired. He’d been more keyed up than he’d have liked to admit before saying his piece at the meeting and the whole business with the boat trip had been surprisingly tiring, too. He was looking forward to going to bed.

Larry Feaguing had communicated the good/bad news to the rest of the Spraint board before dinner, and some of the family were talking about waiting around into the small hours, hoping to hear something definitive from the US. Alban wasn’t going to bother. He felt drained and just wanted to sleep.

‘There will always be people who believe in making life difficult for themselves,’ Win said to Perce and the others. Alban was treated to a sustained round of tactfully subdued head-nods, muffled noises of agreement and some slightly sozzled knowing looks following this gritty little pearl of wisdom. Win smiled at Alban. He smiled back, then excused himself and went off to talk to somebody - anybody - else.

 
When Fielding finally came to bed - a bit drunk, stumbling around, apologising - a little after three, Alban was still awake. He asked Fielding if there had been any word from Spraint, but there hadn’t.

Alban lay awake, listening to Fielding snoring softly, snufflingly, intermittently.

Had he said the right thing to the meeting? He’d tried to say what he felt, what he believed. He’d probably been too political, too self-indulgent, but when else was he going to get a chance to say stuff like that to an audience willing to listen? He’d needed to explain that his reluctance to sell was not about the family, that it was about principle, and he had wanted to make the point that the family might gain more than just money if they chose to sell. He hadn’t been sure how that would play, but it seemed to have gone down fairly well. A number of people had come up to him at the dinner or afterwards and said they agreed with him. They’d all been from the younger levels of the family: people like sis Cory and cousins Lori and Claire and Steve. They’d understood; the older generations hadn’t, not really.

Well, the ball was in the Spraint court now. Alban expected they’d be left to twist in the wind for a bit. There was no percentage for Spraint in coming back with an immediate yes, not unless there was some other suitor on the horizon, and there’d been no sign of that.

With any luck they’d hear something tomorrow. He still thought they’d settle on one-eighty, though obviously the family would be even happier with two hundred. Academic. Just figures. Feaguing was right in a way. And it affected him personally, materially, only to the most trivial degree.

He still didn’t know about the whole thing with the boat and the frayed lanyard. Anyway, they’d got out of the situation so it didn’t really matter. He’d probably never trust Neil McBride again, and that was the worst of it (he’d never trusted Win).

His attempt to trade with the old girl hadn’t gone the way he’d hoped. He’d thought that maybe she’d be unsettled because he was - unexpectedly, he was sure - back on time from the fishing trip. He’d even hoped that she might have had some sort of attack of conscience that would make her prepared to be generous, but no. Maybe Win had guessed that what he intended to say at the meeting wasn’t as against her true interests as she’d initially supposed.

Anyway, it hadn’t worked and he had the distinct and nagging impression that more than he’d realised had hung on exactly how he’d answered her question about how he now felt towards Sophie.

Ah yes, then there was Sophie. He still didn’t know what to think about her, about his feelings for her. Was he now properly, officially over her? Had it been a cathartic, cleansing experience? Or had the whole boat trip and the little drama of the broken lanyard somehow kept the flame alive, even rekindled it, so that he was still not free of this ancient, immature infatuation? He didn’t know, not yet. He felt torn, able to see both ways of looking at the matter. He could make an argument to himself for either point of view and he couldn’t easily choose between them on merit.

What did he want to be the case?

He wanted, he supposed, to be free of her. It was a stupid, adolescent fixation, well past its sell-by date. He wanted to be able to go to VG and just say, Whatever you want, however much of me you want, you’ve got. I’ll accept whatever degree of proximity and commitment you want to offer or ask for.

Part of him howled at this. Some sort of old-guard element of his being went into fits of apoplexy at the very idea of abandoning his eternal love for, and obligation to, Sophie. He had promised himself he would always love her, he had made that solemn pledge in his heart, back when he was just starting to become who he was. He had built his world around her, even if it had been done from a distance, even if it was without her knowledge or consent, even if the image that he had of her was based on a ‘her’ that had changed utterly, that had matured and grown and developed away both from him and from her own earlier self, and even if the whole doomed undertaking had been carried out in the teeth of all common sense and rational self-interest.

It was love. It was romantic, pure and perfect love; it wasn’t supposed to make sense or be rational. It was the core of him, this passion, this purity of feeling and commitment. How could he think of abandoning it and her? That pledge had been his foundation for all these years. Could he renounce it now? Should he?

He remembered lying in bed at Lydcombe, pledging himself to his real mother, to Irene, swearing to her memory that he would never call Leah ‘Mum’ or ‘Mother’ or anything like that . . . Then he remembered renouncing all that, because Leah was nice, because he couldn’t hate her, then couldn’t feel indifferent towards her, then admitted he liked her, and sometimes calling her ‘Mum’ just seemed right. He’d felt guilty and mature and pragmatic and like he was betraying Irene, all at once. So, he had form. He’d done this sort of thing before.

Hard to see how you could do otherwise, if you were stupid enough to go around making childish pledges to yourself.

Apostate
, he thought.
Serial betrayer
.

Sophie was his religion, he thought, with a kind of shock. He’d built a temple round her image, her idol, her fixed, unchanging, incorruptible icon. The worship of that symbol had become what mattered, rather than the girl as she actually was or the woman she’d become. She represented his faith in his own trueness of spirit, his ability to keep on believing in something. If he could believe in his love for Sophie, he could believe that he was a good person, a worthwhile person, a decent man. He was an atheist and a secularist, but now he had to confront his own idiot faith, this slightly mad belief system that he’d carried with him all this time, and accept it for the nonsense it was. Maybe it had been a useful nonsense, in a state of relative ignorance, the way conventional religions could be, but it was still a nonsense.

He’d once characterised religions as reason abatement societies. Shit, he hadn’t realised with what authority he’d been speaking. Maybe he owed Tony Fromlax an apology.

In his mind, he could feel a particularly non-violent and well-spoken mob politely storming the temple complex that held the graven image of Sophie. He could almost hear the wailing of the priests, the lamentations of the faithful as the great washed, the well-scrubbed crowd of intellectuals - waving scrolls (closely argued, ink still damp) rather than burning torches - defiled the sacred ground with their presence and their doubt and their faithless, argumentative lack of certainty.

The inquisitive, terribly polite mob dragged some of the precious texts out of the dark temple into the cold light of day and reason, the powerless priests wailing and tearing their hair out in their wake.

‘They’ve all bloody gone . . .’ ‘Fell off me ’oss, didn’ I guv?’ ‘Blimey, Uncle, I didn’t enjoy it that much . . .’ ‘Not a flippin’ fing . . .’ (Plus, the avariciously faithful aspect of him, the obsessive-compulsive part of his personality that collected these little relics had been going to add ‘Aye-aye, cap’n’ to the canon, as of just today.) All shown to the sun, all shrivelling in the strength of daylight and being made to look sad and pathetic and risible. How shallow had been the foundations of his faith, he realised now. How inadequate the corner-stones of his custom-built, home-grown personality cult.

‘Cuz, cuz, sweet cuz.’

He whispered it, very quietly, to the perfectly dark room as Fielding snored obliviously away.

A kind of valediction.

Of course, the mistake would be simply to replace Sophie with Verushka. He knew there was a danger of that. He could easily worship her, she was already a kind of rival religion in his head; a new, shining, more effective, more earthy and hip cult compared to the ancient adoration of Sophie.