The Steep Approach to Garbadale (21 page)

He supposed not having to use condoms might have made it even better, but then that was just the way things had to be. Nothing else he could think of could have made the experience any better at all.

 
He saw Haydn once more before he left Paris; they stood in Notre-Dame soaking up the echoes, rode the Métro and had a wander round Montmartre, a district Alban had always rather dismissed as too touristy but discovered that day he quite liked. They sat on the steps at Sacré Coeur, eating ice creams.

‘I bet you’re going to find you’re just not looking at it the right way,’ Alban told Haydn.

‘You think so?’ Haydn was sitting forward, legs splayed, holding his tie back with one hand so that his ice cream wouldn’t stain anything.

Alban lounged, stretched back, watching sunlit girls and licking lasciviously. ‘Yeah. I knew this guy once who had the neatest, cleanest office you’ve ever seen; real place-for-everything fixation. You know those tiny hand-held vacuum gadgets you get for keyboards? He had two - in case one broke down. The thing was, he hated anything being out of place, even momentarily. He wanted his office so neat and tidy he couldn’t actually do any work in it; he’d convinced himself he’d brought it to such a peak of perfect tidiness even opening a drawer would spoil it. It was like the place was frozen. He wouldn’t even have a litter bin in it because that was like some polluting hole of untidiness in itself.’

Alban looked at Haydn, but he wasn’t responding, just frowning at his ice cream.

‘But the litter bin was the key. I told him, Have a fucking litter bin; it’s the sacrificial anode, the mousetrap; where all the untidiness gets sucked away to. In the bin, it’s all chaos and no ordering is needed, in fact any attempt to organise it misunderstands its function. ’

Haydn still wasn’t replying, but he seemed to be listening.

‘It’s like a good filing system always has a Miscellaneous section,’ Alban said. ‘It’s not a failure to have some things that can’t be filed in exactly the right file, it’s just acknowledging something about how things work in the real world. That’s what Miscellaneous is for and the alternative isn’t more accuracy, it’s less, because you end up overstretching definitions or creating a fresh file for every single thing, each unit, and that’s not filing, that’s naming. Miscellaneous is the definition that makes sense of all the others. In the same way, a litter bin is the heart of tidiness.’

He went back to licking his ice cream. Haydn looked round at him, still keeping his tie pressed close to his chest. ‘Did it work?’ he asked. ‘This incisive piece of analysis. Did your friend see the light and become once again a happy, productive cog in the office machine?’

Alban had to decide quickly - he’d been making the whole thing up - so he did and said, ‘Yeah.’ He was wearing a pair of dark glasses, and he lifted them over his eyes for a moment to smile out at Haydn. ‘Yes, it did. Good, eh?’ He put the glasses back again.

Haydn had looked unconvinced, at the time.

A week later, though, he was back in London. Alban got some of the credit for this. Personally he thought the guy had just needed a holiday.

 
‘Hmm. So, Alban, are you still a champagne socialist?’ Kennard asks.

They are at dinner in Fielding’s parents’ place in Malison Street: Kennard and Renée playing host to Alban and Fielding (Haydn’s here too, but then he still lives at home). Nina - Fielding’s partner - was invited but she has some class she has to attend this evening. Probably Mayan Astrology for Cats or something. She and Fielding live in Islington.

Fielding’s got Alban to wear an old suit of his. Al’s scrubbed up all right, really, though patently a tie was too much to hope for. This champagne socialist stuff strikes Fielding as a load of crap. Alban, when he worked for the firm, took his yearly bonus and company car. Chopping down trees doesn’t make you a leftie, and now he just seems to like playing at being poor.

Al glances at his glass of Aussie Shiraz (trust Dad, Fielding thinks, to ask over the wrong drink).

‘I used to be a champagne socialist,’ Al says.

‘So.’ Kennard’s eyebrows rise. ‘You mean you’re not any more?’

‘No,’ Alban says. ‘I’m older now. I’m a vintage champagne socialist.’ He raises the glass. ‘Cheers.’

Kennard blinks. Haydn smiles.

‘So, where are you working at the moment, Alban?’ Renée asks. Over the years, Kennard’s wife has slowly developed the skills required to cover for her husband’s mistakes, gaffes and stumped silences.

‘I’m not, Renée,’ Alban tells her. ‘I’m unemployed.’

‘Between jobs,’ Kennard says, nodding. ‘Hmm.’ Kennard is not long turned sixty-two, though he seems somewhat older. He has put on some weight over the last year, lost the remains of his hair and developed impressive if at the same time rather offputting jowls. Remarkably bad teeth. He’s company Managing Director, which sounds quite impressive. He is oddly good at talking to small children and politicians.

‘Between jobs,’ Alban agrees.

‘And are you seeing anyone at the moment?’ Renée asks Alban. Fielding’s mother is quite slight.

‘Not really,’ he says. He catches Fielding looking at him.

‘Ah, hah,’ Kennard says.

‘Alban’s got a very bonnie lassie in Glasgow,’ Fielding tells them. ‘She’s a mathematician. A professor.’

‘A what, dear?’

‘A professor.’

‘Oh. That
was
what you said.’

‘She’s a professor of mathematics,’ Fielding tells her, just so there’s no doubt about it.

‘
Really?
’ Renée says.

‘Dark horse,’ Kennard tells nobody in particular.

Renée looks impressed. She turns from Fielding to Alban. ‘And will you be bringing her to the bash at Garbadale?’

‘She might give me a lift there, but she won’t be staying,’ Alban tells Renée. ‘She may go off and climb some mountains.’

‘Climb mountains?’ Renée looks astonished.

‘Oh, yes, Garbadale,’ Kennard says, as though just remembering they’re all supposed to reconvene there in about ten days’ time. Which is not impossible.

‘She climbs mountains?’ Renée says. ‘And she’s a professor?’ She pauses, then laughs that shrill laugh of hers, hand in front of her face. ‘She sounds like a man!’ She looks at Haydn. ‘Haydn. Don’t you think? She sounds like a man!’

‘I couldn’t possibly say, Mother,’ Haydn says, and looks at Al with a tiny shake of the head as though apologising for Renée.

‘Climbs mountains, eh?’ Kennard says. ‘Hmm, there’s a thing.’

This torture only lasts another hour or so and then they’re free to follow Kennard upstairs to the loft and his train set and get some talking and persuading done.

 
‘Alban thinks, as I do, that we should keep the family and the firm together,’ Fielding tells Kennard. He glances over at Al, who is still looking out over the train set. The display is at waist level, mounted on a stout base of two-by-fours. It fills most of the loft, with a central spine of forested hills and alpine-looking mountains made from papier mâché dominating the centre. The mountains are riddled with tunnels and the peaks of the higher ones come within a half-metre of the inverted V of the loft’s ceiling. ‘That’s a fair enough thing to say, isn’t it, Alban?’

‘If it was up to me alone, I wouldn’t sell to Spraint Corp,’ Alban agrees.

‘Dare say you’d rather have a workers’ cooperative, wouldn’t you, Alban?’ Kennard says. ‘Hmm?’ He’s cleaning the underside of one of the locomotives with a small paintbrush.

‘Chance would be a fine thing, Kennard,’ Al says. He sees a little switch on the edge of the layout. ‘What happens if you flick this?’ he says, pointing.

Kennard looks over. ‘Try it and see.’

Alban flicks the switch. A little cable car starts to whirr its way from the station at the foot of the layout’s central mountain and make its way towards the summit, a good couple of metres higher. ‘Ah ha,’ he says. He folds his arms, inspects the rest of the layout.

Kennard turns another control and a one-carriage funicular train begins to click its way up a cogged track set at forty-five degrees on an only slightly smaller mountain. Meanwhile a couple of other trains - a TEE and a mixed goods - whirr round and round the whole layout, contra-rotating.

Fielding can remember when Kennard was still building all this. He’s never seen his father happier or more energised. The layout has essentially stayed the same for the last fifteen years or more, and is still the one place Kennard seems to be truly at home and relaxed. It was important they were here, in this place, to be able to talk to him like this.

‘We both think it would be a terrible waste, and a shame, if we sold up to Spraint,’ Fielding tells Kennard. ‘After everything that Henry built up, and Bert and Win continued and built upon, it would be an act of vandalism to tear it all down.’

‘Wouldn’t really be tearing it down, would it?’ Kennard asks, holding the loco up to the light on its back, almost tenderly. There are strip lights fastened to the underside of the roof trusses all over the loft.

‘It would be tearing us away from our heritage, Daddy,’ Fielding tells him. ‘Spraint will be able to do what they want with the game and you have to assume having paid good money for our name they’ll try to make it all work, but it still might not. These things just don’t, not always. What is certain is that we’ll be separated from the one thing that’s made us who we are as a family for the last century and a quarter. I know this matters to you, Daddy. I don’t want us all to sleepwalk into something we’ll regret later. I just want you to think about it.’ Fielding looks at Alban. ‘We both do.’

Almost miraculously, Al plays along. ‘It is a crunch point,’ he says. ‘Once it’s done, that’s it.’

‘So we all need to think,’ Fielding says. ‘It’s not just us - it’s everybody, Daddy.’

‘I have shares, too,’ Haydn says. He’s here, though sat in a small chair in one corner, reading a book.

‘They all count,’ Fielding agrees. He looks at Haydn. ‘You’re still a Don’t Know, aren’t you, Haydn?’

‘No, I’m a Not Telling You.’ Haydn looks up briefly and blinks at them. ‘Though Spraint have said they want me to stay on in charge of production, if they do take over.’ He looks down to his book again. ‘Mind you,’ he mutters, ‘the word they used was “when”.’

‘We can’t just let them roll over us like this, Daddy,’ Fielding tells Kennard.

Kennard puts the loco carefully back on the outermost track, then bends and - using a little jeweller’s screwdriver - hooks the engine up to its train of carriages. ‘Have to put up a fight, eh?’ he says.

‘I think we must,’ Fielding tells him. He waves at the whole layout. ‘Otherwise it’s just destroying everything we’ve spent so long building up.’

‘Hmm.’

‘So,’ Fielding says. ‘What do you think, Kennard?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Which way do you think you might vote, Daddy?’ Fielding hasn’t dared ask his father so directly before, and Kennard has never volunteered any sign at all. This is a man who abstained in the vote on the 25-per-cent sale to Spraint back in ’99. Fielding honestly has no idea what he’ll say.

‘Hmm.’ Kennard squints at the top of the layout’s highest mountain, where the tiny cable car has just snicked home into the summit station. ‘Think about it,’ he says. He looks at Fielding, then at Alban. ‘You both say No, hmm?’

‘That’s right, Daddy.’

Al just nods.

‘Hmm.’

 
‘In a way, none of this is real.’

Sophie turned in his arms, looked into his eyes. ‘What do you mean?’

He waved his free hand around. ‘That cliff face, this soil, these rhodies. None of this belongs here.’

She turned on to her front, put her chin in one hand. ‘How come?’

‘Old Henry, the great, mythical great-grandfather, our glorious founder, he brought all the rocks and the soil and the plants from Scotland, from Garbadale. You been there?’

‘Uh-huh. Just once. Rained a lot.’

‘Yeah. Anyway, I’ve looked it up. It was 1903. He had thousands of tons of rock quarried out of a mountain near the big house there and shipped to Bristol, then smaller boats brought it along the coast to a special pier they had built down by the river, then traction engines hauled it all up to here. That’s when the ford in the river at the bottom of the garden dates from.’

‘The rock was brought from Scotland?’ She was playing with a long lock of her red hair, shining in a stray beam of sunlight finding its way through the enveloping canopy of broad, dark leaves. She wound the hair round her index finger, let it unwind again. ‘Why?’

Alban shrugged. ‘Because he could. There’s rock like this everywhere; loads on Exmoor. He just wanted this stuff from Garbadale called Durness limestone, wanted it here. Had it made into that little cliff, right there.’

She turned and looked at the low cliff of great, slabby rocks which was visible beyond the western limit of the giant rhododendron bush they were lying inside. A breeze disturbed the ragged umbrella of leaves around them.

They had been here about ten minutes, kissing and caressing each other, though not yet to any sort of climax. They did that sometimes - just pulled away a little, took time off to talk, get their breath back, before they started again and, usually, brought each other to orgasm with their fingers. She had taken him in her mouth once, in a bedroom at a friend’s party in Minehead a few days earlier, but he’d thrust too eagerly, making her gag, and she hadn’t wanted to repeat the experience.

This would be their last week together; the summer holiday was near its end and they’d both be heading off to school soon, him back in London.

The beam of sunlight striking her hair disappeared as clouds covered the sun, and the broad tent of cover under the spreading branches became a little darker.

They talked a lot, too, about the mess the world was in, about music they loved and hated, about how they’d organise things with their parents so they could see each other again soon and, frequently, about TV programmes and films, about war and famine, about what they expected to do with their lives - careers, ambitions - and about whether they wanted children. Sometimes they both assumed they’d be together for the rest of their lives, and get married, or not, and have lots of children, or at least two. Other times they talked in a way that tacitly acknowledged they would never be more than cousins who’d had an adolescent sort of affair, and would meet up at family events in the future - weddings, funerals, big birthdays - probably each with their own partners and children, sharing a conspiratorial look and a smile across a crowded room and maybe having just one dance together, holding each other, discreetly remembering.