The Steep Approach to Garbadale (44 page)

A treasure hunt in the gardens had been arranged later in the afternoon for those children who didn’t think such childish pursuits beneath them. Alban helped set the treasure hunt up during the hour after his elongated breakfast, hiding prizes and instructions, most of them rain-proofed in plastic kitchenware boxes, amongst the trees and bushes and lawns of the garden, all according to a plan drawn up by Aunt Lauren.

He wandered a little, visiting parts of the gardens the treasure hunt wasn’t supposed to reach, taking in the pinetum, the arboretum and the old walled kitchen garden, its long-vanished glasshouses present only in the ghostly form of marks on the walls and the channels of the flues for the fires that had heated the plants in the winter.

The rain had almost ceased now, the wind shifting, blowing in clear from the north-west. He walked under the fine, tall trees he remembered from earlier visits - various pines and firs plus a number of Western Hemlock and Wellingtonia - letting the few fat heavy drops of leaf-filtered rain fall on to his face. Too many places were choked with rhodies, he thought. The place was ideal for them - peaty, acidic soil, lots of rain - but it needed a clear-out.

He was surrounded by the signs of autumn - the leaves were turning, the deciduous trees beginning the process of drawing the goodness inward, leaving the leaves to yellow and redden and brown and fall.

He returned to the house as the last of the rain cleared and blue skies appeared between the mountains to the north-west. The temperature had dropped a couple of degrees, but it still felt mild.

Sophie met him in the cloakroom as he took his jacket off. ‘Alban, would you come fishing with me?’

‘Fishing?’ he said. ‘What, on Loch Garve?’

‘Yeah. Care to?’ she asked. She wore chunky black boots, black jeans, a green blouse that matched her eyes and a grey sweater. She stood, arms folded, leaning back against the wall by the door into the rest of the house, one leg up behind her.

‘You’re not shooting, then?’ he asked.

‘Not a great fan of guns,’ she told him. ‘But I’ve kinda taken up fishing back home. I asked your pal Neil McBride and he said you knew the loch pretty well and you might take me if I asked you nicely.’

‘Well, he’s the real expert,’ Alban said, hanging up his jacket. ‘But I’ve got a rough idea of the best places; the ones Neil’s told me about, anyway. Anybody else coming?’

‘Just us.’ She smiled. ‘That okay?’

‘Course it’s okay,’ he said. He looked at his watch - it was nearly noon. ‘Give me half an hour to get everything together. You want to eat before we go or take a packed lunch down the loch?’

‘I’ll organise some food to take with us. Neil’s sorting us a boat.’

‘Good man. We’ll need to be back about five at the latest, that all right?’

‘Sure.’

He scratched the nape of his neck. ‘We will be out in this wee boat for several hours; I’d schedule a toilet break before we head off.’

She hoisted one eyebrow. ‘Aye-aye, cap’n.’

‘Okay then.’

‘Okay.’

 
Neil had the boat started and idling at the jetty for them. ‘You’ve got a full tank,’ he told Alban, ‘and there’s a can of fuel under the bow seat, though you shouldn’t need it. Already mixed, but you might want to give it a good slosh around before you pour it in, if you do have to. Funnel’s in the wee crate under the back seat there, with the rest of the bits and bobs.’

‘Cheers, Neil.’ Alban stepped in and started stowing the fishing gear in the little boat. Sophie had one of the rods, a fishing bag and the cool box with the food.

‘Forecast is fine,’ Neil told them. ‘Clear. Wind’s to stay the same or freshen a bit. Three to a four.’

‘That all?’ Alban said. ‘Good as dead calm by Loch Garve standards.’

‘Want a suggestion?’ Neil asked.

‘Sure.’

‘Try down at Eagle Rock, under Meall an Aonaich. Do you know that bit?’

‘Nearly at the head?’

‘Aye, about a mile this way. There’s a buoy off the bit of shore between the two burns. Tie up there and use fly for brownies. The wash-off from the burns pushes them out that way after heavy rain. If that doesn’t work ’cause there’s too much chop I’ve put a couple of wee rods in for spinners.’

‘Okay.’ Alban turned to Sophie as she handed him the stuff she’d been carrying. ‘It’s a fair distance to get there, but I guess we’ll get a couple of hours in.’

‘Fine by me,’ she said. Sophie wore a dark blue jacket over what she’d been wearing earlier, with a canvas gilet over that, much pocketed. Neil helped her slip into a slim, self-inflating life-jacket, then she put out one hand and Alban held it while she stepped into the boat, taking a long stride to bring her foot down in the centre of the bottom boards.

‘Well, have fun,’ Neil told them.

‘See you later,’ Alban said.

‘Thanks again,’ Sophie told Neil. ‘Hope the shooting goes well.’

‘For everybody but the deer, aye,’ Neil said, casting them off.

 
Loch Garve was nearly twenty-six kilometres long and nowhere wider than two. At nearly two hundred metres in places it was deeper than the North Sea; a steep-sided inland loch bordered and hemmed in by tall mountains and shaped ‘like a dug’s hind leg’ according to Neil McBride.

The wind was behind them as they headed south-east in the slim, clinker-built boat, the little four-horsepower two-stroke droning away at their backs. He didn’t need it for the temperature, but Alban pulled a thick ski glove over his hand holding the motor’s throttle tiller. These old two-strokes were rattly, buzzy old things.

‘You want to sit up the front?’ he asked Sophie, raising his voice over the noise of the engine. ‘Keep us better trimmed. Kind of hard to talk over the sound of this thing anyway.’ He patted the motor’s tiller. The handle of the starting lanyard was protruding a little; he pushed it fully into the cowling. ‘We can gossip all we like once we’re moored and the engine’s off.’

‘Okay,’ she said. She moved to the front, keeping low, taking care to avoid stepping on the oars and rods in the bottom of the boat, swinging her legs over the midship seat and taking up her position on the little seat nubbed in across the angle of the bows, looking back once at him - they exchanged smiles - then facing forward, away from him and towards the loch and the mountains ahead.

He’d watched the material of her jeans tighten and stretch over her trim little behind as she made the manoeuvre.

Was this no more than it appeared to be? He didn’t know. He was happy to be with her, and she seemed to be genuinely interested in fishing, and maybe this was partly her way of letting him know they were okay now, that they could be friends, even if not especially close ones . . . Still, he’d felt surprised when she’d first suggested this little expedition, and almost instantly suspicious. He had Sophie down as one of the definite Fors, a certain Yes. She was almost certainly going to vote to sell to Spraint, even though she was employed by the US side of the family business and wasn’t guaranteed a job with Spraint if they did buy them out.

From what Alban knew, Sophie was good at her job of Retail Liaison Officer, even if he’d never entirely worked out exactly what this job description meant. If he’d been Larry Feaguing he’d have had a word by now and made her a verbal promise she would be found a post within Spraint. Though without, of course, putting anything in writing or necessarily meaning to make good on the promise.

Was she going to try to persuade him not to make his pitch at the meeting before the EGM? Was she going to try to get him to change what she - or whoever might have put her up to this - thought he was going to say? He looked out across the hull-slapping waves of the loch and then up at the distant, darkly towering mass of Ben More Assynt coming into view round the shoulder of a nearer hill, both peaks starting to appear as the mass of clouds lifted. Or, he thought, perhaps he was just being too suspicious.

He thought of VG again, maybe now climbing in the dry at last. He knew exactly what she’d ask. What did he really want? What was he really attempting to achieve?

Oh, how the hell should he know? He wanted to be happy but he didn’t even know who he wanted to be happy with, or even if he really needed somebody else around to be happy with.
Why
should he know? Nobody else seemed to know, or if they did, they weren’t acting on it in any obviously sensible way. He wanted peace and love and all that shit for the whole fucking world and you’d imagine that sort of stuff would be fairly near the top of everybody’s wish list, but it was all going in the other direction, descending into madness and barbarism, reverting to a mind-numbing, morality-sapping set of cruel, mutually intolerant superstitions and authoritarianisms. Stupidity and viciousness were rewarded, illegality not just tolerated but encouraged, lying profoundly worked, and torture was justified - even lauded. Meanwhile the whole world was warming up, getting ready to drown.

Everybody should know better. Nobody did.

Every fucker was mad, nobody paid any attention whatso-bleeding-ever to whatever was in their best interests, so how the hell was he supposed to be any better or different?

He shifted his position on the thin cushion covering the wooden seat. The little engine revved high, wasting fuel. He turned and adjusted the throttle friction control. He turned back and watched the rear of Sophie’s head, her neat, shoulder-length blonde hair barely moving as the boat almost kept pace with the wind at their backs.

What did she want? What was her goal?

Maybe the girl just needed to get some quality time in. Perhaps she wanted to do some fishing and soak up some of the tranquillity of the old family estate before it was all sold off. Maybe it wasn’t even anything to do with him - with their history together - at all; perhaps it was just her being sensible, going with somebody who knew the loch rather than taking a boat out herself. On the face of it Loch Garve was no more treacherous or difficult than any other inland loch, but it would be an especially unforgiving place to get into difficulties because there was nowhere except the foot of it - the Garbadale end - to go for help; there was no other house or shelter, and no road or even forestry track on either shore, just a rough path on the north-east side which was more or less passable in a well-driven quad bike or an Argocat. Even that was probably a no-go on a day like today, with multiple fording points blocked by streams and burns in spate after all the recent rain.

After about half an hour they made a shallow turn round the shoulder of Mullach and were out of sight of the house. A minute or two later Sophie came swivelling back towards the stern of the boat, still keeping low. Alban watched the bows rise slightly as the boat adjusted to the weight transferral. The waves had grown a little since they’d left Garbadale, partly because they’d left the lee of the trees and the shallow rise the house was built on, but mostly because of the reach becoming greater; the wind had an increasingly long stretch of water to work on, gradually pushing up fractionally taller waves. They were still going with the wind and the waves, however, and so their progress was almost stately. It would feel a bit chop-pier coming back, but the waves weren’t near breaking and the forecast was good; there shouldn’t be any drama.

‘Okay?’ he asked Sophie as she sat next to him, raising his voice over the sound of the outboard.

‘Fine.’ She leaned closer, nodded at the insulated box. ‘Want some coffee?’

‘Good idea.’

They sat together on the transom seat, holding cups of coffee.

‘Thanks for coming with me,’ she said.

‘No problem; good idea. I guess we won’t be able to do this again once the place is sold. Glad you suggested it.’

She looked back and down, frowning at his hand holding the engine’s throttle tiller. ‘Why are you wearing just one glove?’

He shrugged. ‘I can stick this one in my pocket,’ he said, holding up his hand with the coffee cup. Not a lie, he told himself, and it saved a lot of boring explanation. They sat together within the companionable noisiness of the engine’s monotone drone for a while.

Now she was staring at his left hand. ‘Oh my God, what happened to your little finger?’

‘Oh, chainsaw accident,’ he said, looking at his half-finger. ‘Few years ago.’

‘Jeez, Alban.’

‘Only a nuisance when I’m trying to get wax out my left ear.’

‘Thanks for sharing that,’ she said.

‘Welcome,’ he told her. ‘Oh. Should have checked this before we started out, but do you know how to work the engine? Just in case I fall overboard - you know, trying to land a marlin or a great white or something - or lapse into a coffee-induced coma or whatever.’

She looked back at the engine. ‘It’s a two-stroke. There’s no little window so I guess you add the oil to the gas before you put it in the tank.’ Then she pointed as she said, ‘Starting lanyard, choke, twist throttle, throttle friction whadaya-callit -’

‘Okay.’ He touched her forearm. ‘You’ve passed.’

They rinsed the cups over the side, then she went back to sit up front. He’d switched hands - and glove - once so far, and was about to do so again when he remembered an old trick.

He took some care to make only the most minute adjustments to the tiller to keep their course straight - substituting small increments and patience for coarse inputs and quick results - and waited until the bearing the bows indicated on the mountains far ahead didn’t seem to have changed for a minute or so, then he carefully let go of the tiller and stood up, moving forward towards the widest part of the boat, feet planted as far apart as the inner hull would allow.

Sophie felt something change in the attitude of the boat and looked back.

Her eyes widened deliberately. ‘You going to test me on what to do if you fall overboard?’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘If you get the engine set just right,’ he said loudly, ‘and the wind’s behaving itself, you can steer like this.’ He leaned to the right, tipping the boat a few degrees. Their heading started to change fractionally to starboard. He gave a big grin. ‘See?’