The Steep Approach to Garbadale (49 page)

That would be pretty stupid. If she ever found out, VG wouldn’t thank him for being venerated like that, and - in the end, he had no doubt - to do so would destroy whatever he and VG had and whatever they might have together.

‘Just love her, you idiot,’ he said in a normal speaking voice, and was shocked anew. It had sounded so loud in the room. He hadn’t meant to say it aloud.

Fielding had suddenly stopped snoring. Alban turned to look at where he knew his cousin was, but could see nothing because the darkness was complete. Then he heard Fielding shift, maybe turning over in bed. Soon he went back to snoring again. Alban looked up once more at the unseen ceiling.

Love her, he told himself. If that’s what you feel, if you can start to work out what it is you really feel for her now that you’re free of this absurd worship of Sophie - maybe, probably - then just be adult about it, be sensible about it. Take it as it comes. See how things work out with her. Okay, so she doesn’t want children, and she’ll probably never want to live with you. Just give all you can offer, and be honest. And if somebody else comes along that offers you all the things you want, or think you want, then at least VG should understand. She’s said so often enough.

Arguably, nobody ever completely knows themselves, so she could be wrong about that and maybe if it ever comes to it she’ll feel more jealous than she expects to feel, but of all the people you’ve ever known she’s the one least likely to be that self-deceptive. In the meantime, make the most of whatever time you have together. And if it’s effectively for ever, for the rest of your lives, can you think of anybody else you’d rather spend that time with?

Well, no.

He so hoped that she was all right, that she was well and healthy and looking forward to seeing him . . . Tomorrow, if you counted this as today rather than last night. Tomorrow; he’d see her tomorrow. Fate willing, he told himself. Chance allowing.

Finally, he fell asleep.

 
He was up before six, fully awake but knowing he’d be tired again by the afternoon. He had breakfast alone, helping himself in the kitchen and packing food for lunch, then - borrowing an old fishing bag from the cloakroom as a day pack and leaving a note on the octagonal table in the front hall describing his intended route - he left the house, feeling oddly relieved and even exultant that he’d got away from the place without anyone seeing him.

He hiked through the gardens and woods in light drizzle from a few small, high clouds which soon disappeared to reveal a sharp, clear blue morning. He made a shallow ascent along the path heading north-west along the shoulder of Beinn Aird da Loch, looking down on the place where his mother had died, watching seagulls wheel and dip over the calm, black waters. He only remembered then that Andy had wanted to scatter some flowers on the loch this morning. He thought about going back, but decided not to.

The path turned the corner after a while, taking the sight of one dark loch away, replacing it with another.

He descended again, towards the head of Loch Glendhu, between tipped, parallel lines of cliffs. He crossed the river by the small bridge just upstream from a small, stony beach and followed the track up the far side of Gleann Dubh, the cliffs and walls of rock creating a gloomy canyon of stone it was a relief to hike up out of, towards the blue richness of the sky above the greens, yellows and browns of the encircling hills.

Free of the steep-sided shade of the narrow glen, he struck off the main path and along the north shore of a small loch he’d have to look at the map to remember the name of, making heavy going over coarse, hummocky ground until - skirting the base of Meill na Leitrach, leg muscles complaining - he met the path from Loch More. He followed it for the remainder of its descent to the side of the burn which fed the small loch he’d passed and then stopped for lunch. He sat on a rock, watching a pair of eagles slide across the sky above Ruigh’ a’ Chnoic Mhóir like a pair of light aircraft with feathers. He drank water he’d bottled at the house, ate his sandwiches and fruit, then continued up the path to the pass, striking out to the right towards the summit of Beinn Leòid. Throughout, he’d been looking for interesting plants - anything beyond the usual heathers, grasses, ferns and wind-stunted trees - but the most exotic species he’d spotted so far had been a couple of small clumps of autumn gentian.

A cool, strong breeze met him at the trig point, and he stood there with his back against the concrete pillar and the wind, breathing hard after the last push to the top.

He gave a small laugh, remembering VG being scurrilous about an ex-colleague she’d dated a few times and then severely fallen out with. ‘Ever been walking in the wind and the rain and come up to a trig point on a big, featureless summit, and you just want to get whatever shelter you can from the gale so you can hunker down and eat your sandwiches? Well, I felt about his cock the way you would about that trig point: you’re glad it’s there, you’re happy you don’t have to share it with anybody, but you can’t help wishing it was just a bit bigger.’

He’d felt vaguely treacherous laughing at this, and got an internal shiver wondering what she’d say about him to some future lover - perhaps, one day - but then she had never been so defamatory or indiscreet about anybody else; he reckoned the guy had probably deserved it.

He looked out across the revealed tops to the north, bright and sharp in the clear northerly airstream, wondering where she was now. Standing on one of those far summits looking out across that same waste of air towards him? Probably not, but the residual romantic in him would still like to think so.

Just come back safely, VG, he thought. Just come back safely to me.

He ate some chocolate then headed cross-country, down then back up to the nameless top from which he could at last look down on Loch Garve, the estate and the house. The best part of three kilometres away, seven hundred metres down, the great grey house, hardly hidden by the trees from this angle, looked tiny and lost and insignificant from here; a vaguely geometrical, human-created interruption in the burgeoning sweep of landscape formed by the long dark lochs and the rock-broken pelts of the arrayed and jumbled mountains, a cheap charm on a thread of road overhung by the surrounding rocky slopes.

It all looked inviolable and changeless from here, yet that was just wrong. Centuries ago there would have been almost nothing to see but forest; now, as ever, the ground cover reflected the use the land was put to, in this case providing a vast, half-vertical paddock for deer and game birds, all there to be shot at by people of means.

Alban tried to see the place as it might be, as Neil McBride might see it; threatened, on the brink of irreversible change. Suppose that some of the great ice sheets melted; that was supposed to be entirely possible before the end of the century. One scenario the climatologists seemed to find eminently plausible had sea levels rising by seven metres. How would that alter the landscape he was looking at? Well, a hell of a lot less than if he was looking out over a bit of East Anglia, or Holland, or Bangladesh, that was for sure. But even here, amongst these sparsely populated mountains, the change would be severe. Harbours, coastal villages, roads along the shore, much of the best arable land; they’d all go. Garbadale House had been built on the remains of glacial till banked up at the end of the great scoured trench that was Loch Garve. It was about eight or nine metres above sea level; close enough for salt spray to buffet the windows on stormy days if Greenland melted. If the Antarctic ice sheets went the same way, then Loch Garve would be a sea loch and the house would simply disappear under the grey waves. Though that, of course, would be utterly insignificant compared to losing every coastal city in the world, and several entire countries.

He thought of Neil McBride’s children and grandchildren and the world they would be bequeathed. It was, arguably, in a bit of a mess. He remembered talking with Sophie, back in the garden at Lydcombe, about how the world their generation was inheriting appeared - at the time - to be in just as big a mess. Sometimes it seemed that all that ever went on was each new generation trying to fix the mistakes and problems caused by the previous one - not to mention those accumulated via still earlier forebears. And this never really seemed to be possible, not as a finished result. It always seemed to be required and it certainly was always worth trying, but if you set your heart on fully achieving such a goal, you were bound to be disappointed.

He recalled Verushka talking about some people seemingly being forever in search of the East Pole. She meant that they had simply misunderstood how things worked. It was as though, having heard of the South Pole and the North Pole, they assumed there must be a West Pole and an East Pole too, and so set off confidently expecting to find one or other of them, never knowing they were inevitably destined to fail.

Some hopes and ambitions were manifest only as a direction, not a destination. Maybe the trick was to realise you were involved in a process, not aiming at a completely achievable end result, and accept that, but travel hopefully anyway.

The trouble was that so many people seemed to feel a need for certainty, for clear paths leading to set objectives with tickable goal-boxes, for the assuredly do-able with guaranteed happiness or fulfilment or enlightenment apparently promised as a result. And so many other people were determined to offer them just those things, through schemes or programmes or sets of rules or institutions or tribalistic, other-excluding, difference-fearing cliques, but always through some sort of faith; whether it was faith in the person peddling their patent fix or whether it was faith in a full-blown religion or whatever secular belief system had partially replaced such primitive creeds and was currently in vogue - once Marxism, now the market.

Always flocks, always priests.

He shook his head.

Still: to travel hopefully.

He looked down at the house, waiting for some sort of movement there, for the glint of sun on moving glass or just one barely discernible speck millimetring its way across the roads or paths or lawns, but he saw nothing for the perhaps five or ten minutes that he watched. For all the life he knew the place contained, there was no sign of it in this early afternoon, the distance and the scale of things reducing whatever might be happening down there to a cheerful triviality.

He hesitated before the descent. There were two obvious approaches to the house from here. The slow, sensible route was a narrow, occasionally indistinct path describing a series of gentle zigzags down the steep grass slope to his right. The quick way meant a scramble round some car-sized boulders at the side of the cliff beneath him and then a fun but frantic bit of scree-running, following the giant fan of fallen grey stones all the way down to the dark mass of spruce trees making up the south plantation.

Scree-running was exciting but dangerous; there was always the chance of a trip or a sprain or even getting hit by a faster-moving rock dislodged from further up. There was even a degree of guilt involved - you were, after all, helping to wear away the landscape. He’d only ever done it twice. Both occasions had been here, once with his dad about twenty years earlier, once with Neil McBride maybe five years ago. He knew that the prudent course - especially given that he was alone - was to take the shallow, zigzag route, but the sheer rattling, flailing madness of taking the scree approach had its own wild attraction.

Whatever; while he’d been pondering his choice of route, he’d had an idea. An idea that might winkle some sort of truth out of Win, if she had any to surrender. He’d have a nap this afternoon, sleep on it that way, then see what happened at Win’s big party in the evening.

He turned away from the shallow path, pulled the strap of the old fishing bag as tight as he could across his shoulder, then rounded the side of the cliff and clambered past the giant boulders. He looked down the steep grey pitch of scree towards the treeline, the gardens and the house, then with a whoop jumped on to the slope, surrendering himself to it, running down, heart-hammering, legs pumping, feet sinking into the loose, tearing grey surface, sliding in a barely controlled, tipped-back stagger, limbs falling into the imposed, shared rhythm of the stones all bustling and tumbling along with him, dropping so fast he could feel his ears pop.

Breathless, laughing, legs quivering, he arrived at the trees in a rattle of stones within a couple of minutes of jumping on to the great grey slope of fractured rock.

‘Brig-a-fuckin’-doon, yeah right,’ Larry Feaguing said. ‘I’m telling you, man, this place is the crock of shit at the brownbow’s end.’

‘Maybe we should buy the estate, too,’ Fromlax suggested. He’d estimated that there was no further point in protesting at his boss’s expletives, given that the last time he had, a couple of drinks ago, Feaguing had fixed him with an unsympathetic look and told him to pull at least one of his fingers out of his ass. Larry was displeased that the board had agreed to buy the Wopuld Group for two hundred million.

He’d done a pretty good job of disguising his displeasure at the dinner for the old grandmother’s eightieth birthday, when he’d clinked his glass and stood up after the other speeches had been completed and told them the sale had been agreed, subject to some negotiation over the cash/stock mix and the usual lawyerly picking-over, blah-de-blah-de-blah (great had been the cheer, manifold the rejoicing, sincere the praise and shockingly unrestrained the consumption of alcohol thereafter), but Fromlax knew Feaguing was privately annoyed at having failed to secure the purchase for less than the maximum amount he’d been allowed.

There was even a hint that some of the board felt that as Larry had been granted authority to just say yes at that price he had rather been wasting their time coming back to them to double-check. So now Feaguing in turn felt that the board had let
him
down by refusing to play ball and say no, at least initially, to the two hundred mill price, depriving him of any lever with which to prise the price downwards. They were surrendering but he would be the one looking weak.