by Iain Banks
Al frowns at him. ‘You look like you’re straining.’
‘What?’
‘How’d you find out I was in Wales anyway?’
‘I talked to your girl . . . your friend, whatever you . . . you know: in Glasgow. What’s her—?’
‘VG?’
‘VD?’
‘Vee, Gee. Those are her initials.’
‘Right. What was her name again? Foreign, wasn’t it?’
‘Verushka Graef.’
‘Ver-oosh-ka. That’s the one.’
‘Yes, I know.’
This, frankly, does give Fielding pause for thought. ‘You and her really an item?’ he asks.
Alban grins without any apparent mirth. ‘Fielding, I can see you looking at me with new respect and a degree of incredulity, but no, we’re not an “item”. We meet up now and again. Occasional lovers. Don’t imagine I’m her only one.’
‘Oh, I see. Anyway, she told me the last definite address she had for you was in this Llangurig place.’
‘That was good of her.’
‘Took some persuading.’
‘She knows I like my privacy.’
‘Well, hurrah for her. Actually, she took some finding herself, too. Had to go through the university. Are you part of some sort of weird cult or something? I mean, renouncing the use of mobile phones. What the hell is that all about?’
‘I don’t like being at other people’s beck and call, Fielding. VG . . . She just doesn’t like being disturbed.’
‘She for real?’
‘What do you mean, like not a robot or something?’
‘Fuck off, you know what I mean. Is she really this shit-hot mathematician? ’
Al shrugs. ‘Think so. Glasgow University Mathematics Department seems to think so. Not to mention what you could justifiably call a plethora of peer-reviewed journals.’
‘So, really a professor?’
‘Yeah, really. Not that I actually saw her being invested or whatever it is they do when they make you one.’
‘She doesn’t look like a professor.’
‘That’d be the spiky blonde hair.’
‘It was black.’
‘Again?’ Al shakes his head, drinks. ‘She’s a natural blonde.’
‘Is she mad?’
‘She’s a little eccentric. Once dyed it mousy brown, just to see.’
‘Just to see what?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Right. Anyway.’
‘Anyway.’
‘So, Gran asked me to find you and talk to you. There’s stuff happening. Stuff you need to know. Stuff you might even want to be involved in.’ Fielding’s mobile is vibrating again but he’s ignoring it.
‘Really?’ Al sounds sceptical.
‘Yes, and I think you’ll agree when you hear it . . .’
‘This going to take long?’
‘A few minutes.’
‘Hold on then. Better take a leak.’ Alban stands up, draining his pint as he does so. He starts towards the exit, then pauses, turning back. ‘You could get another round in.’
‘Okay, okay.’
Alban made his way to the Gents in the Salutation Hotel, sighing and smoothing his hand over his beard. He smiled at a passing waitress, let himself into the toilets, stood looking at the tall porcelain urinals for a moment and then went into a cubicle, closing the door behind him. He didn’t need to sit down; he didn’t really need to visit the toilet at all. He pulled the letter from his pocket and sat on the seat cover. He read both sides of the closely-written single sheet, squinting in the dim light. He read the letter once straight through, then re-read a couple of sections. After that he just sat there for a while, staring at nothing.
A little later he shook his head as though pulling himself out of a daydream, stood, put the letter back in his pocket and left. For some reason he flushed the toilet as he did so, and then washed his hands.
Fielding, just putting his mobile away, looked relieved and then slightly annoyed when he saw his cousin again, as though he’d been worrying that Al had run off. At least the pint of IPA was sitting there.
‘Right, there’s a few things,’ Fielding tells Al once he’s started on his new pint. ‘First of all, Gran is thinking of - well, she’s decided, it’s happening - to sell Garbadale.’
‘Uh-huh?’
‘Yes. Well, I mean, come on. She’s eighty soon and she had a couple of health scares over the last year or so and some of us have been trying to persuade her to move to somewhere near a decent hospital for a while now. It can take a couple of hours to get to, umm, the Inverness hospital—’
‘Raigmore.’
‘Yeah, that’s the place. Anyway, that’s far too long, and that’s just a one-way trip, somebody driving her there. An ambulance would take twice as long. I mean, they have an air ambulance, but you can’t rely on that always being available. I think that last heart thing she had—’
‘She had a heart thing?’ Al sounds almost interested.
‘Fibrillations or something. She kind of fainted. Of course, that was back in March, so you won’t have heard, will you?’
‘That’s right. Was it serious?’
‘Serious enough. Anyway, that seems to have convinced her to move out of the middle of nowhere at last. She’s only talking about Inverness or maybe Edinburgh or Glasgow, but I think we can convince her she’d be better off in London and near Harley Street.’
‘But they haven’t, say, given her only a couple of months to live or anything?’
‘Oh, God, no. Nothing that bad. She’ll live to be a hundred if she takes care of herself, or lets us take care of her.’
‘And you really don’t find that depressing?’ Al asks, looking at his cousin quizzically.
‘Al, stop it.’ Fielding sips his mineral water. ‘Anyway, there’s more. The thing - oh, yes. You’re invited to Gran’s eightieth birthday party next month.’ He digs in his other jacket pocket and produces the envelope with Al’s invitation in it and hands it to him. Al looks at it like it contains a bomb, or possibly anthrax. He puts it unopened in his grubby hiking jacket. ‘The place is going on the market this week,’ Fielding tells him, ‘though there’s no viewing for a couple of days either side of the party. But it will be the last chance for the family to see the place. Well, you know. To stay there.’
‘Think I’ll pass.’ Al drinks. ‘Thanks all the same. Pass on my apologies if I forget to RSVP.’
‘There’s more.’
‘Is there now?’
‘This is what it’s really all about. I didn’t track you down over half the UK just to give you a party invite. The point is, the party’s more than just a party. I mean, there’ll be the party, but there’s other stuff over those few days too. That’s what I really need to talk to you about.’
‘Will it take long? Should I nip to the loo again?’
‘Please don’t.’
‘Just kidding.’
‘It’s about Spraint Corp.’
‘Oh, really? What joy.’
‘Basically, they want to buy us out.’
Al’s glass is halfway to his lips, but there it stops, for quite a few seconds. At last - some sort of reaction. He looks surprised. Taken aback, Fielding would even go as far as to say. ‘Do they now?’ Alban says, and drinks, but it’s with a forced casualness. Now they were getting somewhere.
‘One hundred per cent,’ Fielding tells him. ‘Total buy-out. One or two of us might get to stay on as consultants. Maybe. It’d be for shares and cash. Mostly shares. They’d keep the name, of course. That’s a large part of the value.’
Al just sits there nodding for a while, arms folded. He seems to be staring at his boots; chunky yellow things with lots of laces.
He looks at Fielding and shrugs. ‘Is that it?’
‘Well, that’s where the party comes in. The family, the firm, will be holding an Extraordinary General Meeting the day before Gran’s birthday, at the castle, at Garbadale House.’ Fielding sips h
is water. ‘Pretty much everybody will be there.’
‘Mm-hmm,’ Al says, and nods. He’s still staring at his footwear. His eyes are open quite wide.
‘So you might like to be there for that, too, obviously,’ Fielding tells him. ‘The EGM is on Saturday, October the eighth. Gran’s birthday party is the day after.’
‘Okay.’
‘Like I say, more or less the whole family should be there. They’re coming in from all over the world.’ Fielding gives it a moment. ‘Be a pity if you weren’t there, Al. Really.’
Alban nods, looks at his pint, then nearly drains it and stands up, pulling on his jacket. ‘You fit?’ he asks, nodding at Fielding’s mineral water. ‘Continue our walk?’
‘Sure.’
They walk down the river embankment, to where the traffic on that side disappears and a railway bridge crosses the river. There’s a footbridge tacked on to the side of the rail bridge; they take the steps up to it and on.
‘So, what do you think?’ Fielding asks Alban.
‘About the party? The Extraordinary Meeting? The takeover? Our one big happy family getting together for a knees-up?’
‘All of the above.’
Al strides purposefully on for a bit, then slows and stops, near the centre of the footbridge. He turns and looks down at the water rushing gently past beneath. It’s clear brown like smoked glass and sparkles fitfully under the sun. Fielding leans on the parapet beside him.
Alban shakes his head slowly, light brown curls blowing in the breeze. ‘I don’t know that I want to be part of any of it. Sorry.’
Fielding feels like saying something and normally would, but sometimes you just have to let people fill their own silences.
Al takes a series of deep breaths and looks up to where the river disappears upstream. ‘Once upon a time I felt . . . constrained, all tied up by this family. I had this idiot idea that if I could get away for a year and a day, I’d be free of it somehow, or at least able to accept it on . . . On mutually agreeable terms.’ He glances at his cousin. ‘You know? Like in the days of serfdom? If a serf could escape his master for a year and a day without being caught, he was a free man.’
‘I’ve heard something like that.’
He laughs. ‘Stupid idea, anyway. Glorified gap year. But anyway. After I came back, after I took up my supposedly rightful place in the company, and then got fed up with that, that was when I knew I had to get out, and decided - realised - a year and a day wouldn’t be enough, that it would never have been enough. Not with this family.’ He turns, gives a small smile.
And then, sometimes, people leave you silences you have no real choice but to fill. ‘So,’ Fielding asks him, ‘how long would be long enough?’
A shrug. ‘Somewhere between until further notice and for ever, I suppose.’
Fielding leaves it a bit, then says, ‘Look, I seem to remember you left because we sold a quarter of the stock to Spraint in the first place.’
No reaction.
‘That’s certainly become the story,’ Fielding tells him. ‘That’s the family mythology, that you disagreed with the twenty-five-per-cent disposal and jumped ship. Back in ninety-nine. I mean, is that right?’
‘That had a lot to do with it,’ Al says. ‘Well, something to do with it.’
‘So, look, if you’re still on the anti side, then—’ Fielding pulls back. ‘Are you?’
‘Am I what?’ Alban asks. ‘Still sworn to renounce the Spraint Corporation of America, Inc., and all its works?’
‘Yes.’
Al shakes his head. ‘I’m not sure I care any more, Fielding. I’m not sure it matters very much at all. One group of shareholders: another group of shareholders.’ He makes a sort of rolling motion with one hand then the other.
‘Shit,’ Fielding says, leaning back on the metal tube of the parapet. ‘I’ll be honest, Al. Some of us were kind of hoping you might help organise the opposition to the deal.’
Alban looks round, surprised. ‘There is opposition?’ He pauses, appears to think. ‘We’re not getting greedy, are we?’ He looks away again. ‘Why, that would never do.’
‘Of course there’s opposition,’ Fielding tells him, trying not to respond to the obvious sarcasm. ‘This is our firm, our family, Al. It’s our name on the board. It’s what we’ve done for four generations. It’s what we do, it’s what we are. That’s the point, don’t you see? I mean, that’s what’s thundered through to quite a few people in the family, especially since Spraint took their quarter-share. That it’s not about money. Sure the money’s good, but - Jeez - we’ve all basically got enough. If we sell up we’ll all be richer, but we’ll be just like any other family.’
‘No, we won’t.’
‘Well, okay, like any other well-off family.’
‘That may not count as demotion.’
‘Al, come on! I thought this at least would get you going! Aren’t you interested at all? Doesn’t any of this matter to you?’
‘Not in the ways you might think, cuz.’
‘Shit.’
They stand like that for a while, leaning on the edge of the bridge, looking upstream. A passenger train rumbles slowly past, heading into the city, wheels screeching. It looks very tall and heavily metallic, this close up. A kid waves down and Fielding waves back, then turns to lean with Al again. It’s one of those silences.
‘Are you seriously trying to tell me,’ Al says at last, ‘there’s any possibility of stopping the sale?’
Fielding keeps deadpan, in case Al looks round at him suddenly. ‘Yes,’ he states.
‘How many people . . . no, make that, what are the percentages involved?’
‘Hard to say for sure. People are keeping their cards pretty close to their chests. Spraint only needs twenty-six per cent of the remaining family shares to get control—’
‘No, they need a third of the remaining—’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘I suppose. Would they be satisfied with control, or do they want total ownership?’
‘They say they might settle for control, but they really want the lot.’
‘“Might settle for control”?’
‘They’d have to think about it. They say they’re so confident we’ll take their offer they haven’t bothered thinking about what to do if we don’t.’
Al snorts. ‘Yeah, sure. Well, it’s this family. There are always going to be some diehards.’
‘Guaranteed.’
Al looks thoughtful, strokes his beard. ‘Doesn’t the ninety-two-per-cent thing apply here?’
‘Yeah. They’re really looking for a ninety-two-per-cent share, so they can compulsorily purchase the rest.’
‘Mm-hmm.’ Alban looks round at his cousin. ‘So who’s going to stop them?’ His gaze seems to search Fielding’s eyes. ‘I seem to recall you were on the for-sale side, six years ago.’
‘Yes, I was,’ Fielding says smoothly. ‘Struck me as the right thing to do then. Probably still would, circumstances being the same. We needed the cash injection. I mean, I understand - understood - your point of view, but there wasn’t much argument that we needed more investment. But anyway. That was then. This is now. We don’t need to sell to Spraint. We could keep going as a - basically - family firm. We could keep Spraint on board as helpful, even enthusiastic partners, we could be happy with them selling the shares to a third party or we could easily organise a bank loan to buy them back.’ Fielding expects Al to look round again at this, but he doesn’t. ‘Seriously,’ Fielding tells him. ‘That’s a possibility. Our credit’s good. Very good. Kath’s already . . . That’s Aunt Kath - she’s Finance Officer now. You knew that?’
‘Yeah, I knew that,’ Al says quietly.
‘Anyway, she’s held informal talks with a couple of banks and they’re like totally up for it. Positively encouraging. I think they think we should go for it.’
Fielding lets Alban mull this over for a while.
‘So. Look, Al, there’s a couple of people
in the family who could be wavering on this. They feel tugged both ways. They can see what Spraint are offering is basically a good deal. It would make sound business sense to sell up. That’s a given. Okay. On the other hand, this is their life, their family, their name being sold here. They can see value - and I mean something more than monetary - in staying on board, keeping in charge. It all depends on how much we value the family, I guess. How much all of us do.’ Fielding thinks he sees his cousin nod. ‘So, some of us would like to at least give Spraint a proper fight. And you could help, Al. There are people - Jeez, my dad’s one - people who’d listen to you. Beryl? Great-Aunt Beryl? She’s always had a soft spot for you, hasn’t she? She’s another.’
‘What about the old girl?’
‘Gran?’
‘Yes. Where does she stand on this?’
‘Well, she sent me. This was her idea. Well, and mine.’
Alban looks at the other man. ‘She’s against the takeover?’
‘Yes,’ Fielding tells him.
‘She was for the last one, the twenty-five-per-cent sale.’
‘I keep telling you, that was different. That was about keeping the company going. This is about keeping the company going.’
‘That’s not different, that’s the same.’
‘Jesus, Al, you know what I mean. Without Spraint’s money we might have gone under, so we took it and the company survived. But now they want to make it all theirs and it’ll only be the name that goes on - the company will have gone. It’s business - it’s all about survival. Look, you can help here. If you want to you can make a difference, you can matter. I’m serious. You could have a real influence. Just come and talk to a few people.’
Fielding leaves a space.
‘Why now?’ Al asks. He turns round and his eyes have narrowed and Fielding knows he’s got him.
‘Why now?’ Fielding repeats.
‘Why are Spraint so keen now? What’s changed, what’s on the horizon?’
‘Ah, well, now, we think it’s because the Empire! series has been doing so well on the PC and Gamebox, and they’re working on a fresh title for their own new machine, the NG. You heard of that?’
