Title:The Steep Approach to Garbadale
Author(s): Iain M. Banks
Publisher(s): MacAdam/Cage
Pages: 390
Year: 2007
Format: EPUB
Language: English
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He’d been made Brand Manager as well as Head of Product Development, with more money, more shares, bigger potential bonuses and a greater say in the running of the company – partly, he suspected, to compensate him after being on the losing side of the Spraint battle – but even that had felt hollow, like he was being thrown a few disposable scraps; an acknowledgement that none of it really mattered anyway.
He knew in himself it was only a matter of time before he left.
He’d already written a series of draft resignation letters, though he’d always deleted them without saving them to disk. Maybe he’d be fired instead. Win was just the girl to do it. It was late 1999 and the last thing he felt like doing was partying.
‘For what?’ Win quoted back at him, eyes wide. ‘For not joining in a toast, for that weaselly smart remark about not having the stomach for it. For your whole attitude throughout the meal. In fact, for your attitude this weekend, and recently in general. I think an apology is required. I’d love to hear your reasons to the contrary, if you’d care to air them.’
At moments like this, Alb an thought, Win did not look her seventy–four years. She looked ten, maybe twenty years younger. It was as though anger and indignation energised her, kept her young.
He did something he’d been doing with her for the last few years at such moments, stepping back inside himself and looking at her as objectively as he could, ignoring the perfect make–up and the power–dressing suit (a bit Eighties, anyway, he thought, almost slightly Dallas, if you were inclined to be particularly critical, which he was). He looked, instead, at the loose, chickeny skin at the foot of her throat, the wrinkled hands and wrists, the slight sag under the eyes (though, annoyingly, if also impressively, the consensus amongst those in the family who knew and cared about such things was that the old girl had never had any cosmetic surgery). And that looked like make–up on the backs of her hands. Maybe Win was disguising liver spots. Had he been displaying a bad attitude during the weekend at the trade fair? He didn’t think he had, any more than he thought he’d been anything other than good company at the dinner, right until he jumped ship after the cruel and unusual toast. The only even vaguely controversial thing he could recall saying earlier was something to the effect that if one was being excruciatingly politically correct one would choose the locally–produced wines to go with dinner from post–apartheid vintages. He hadn’t even pitched it as a recommendation, let alone a criticism, just an early observation, mostly to see how the assembled Spraint–ocrats would react and so gauge their position on the political spectrum (they’d looked mystified, so default right wing as well as rather dim).
On the other hand, if anybody was going to notice a lack of conviction in one of her family and/or one of her company underlings, it was Win. This, he was all too painfully aware, went right back to Lydcombe, to the looks he and Sophie had been exchanging over the dinner table, thinking, stupidly as it turned out, that their gran would be as oblivious as James and Clara to what was going on under their noses. They’d been woefully wrong then and you could argue that they’d both been paying for it one way or another ever since. Maybe he hadn’t been hiding his disillusion with the job so well after all and Win, predator that she was, had spotted a weakness in the herd. He was the wildebeest she had singled out and was going to try and bring down.
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