Iain Banks - The Business

'It might make us no better than everybody else,' I said, then looked at Uncle Freddy, blinking furiously beneath his cloud of white hair to my left. 'However, proportionately — to quote Mr Ferrindonald — we might hope to be ahead when the pain's shared out.'

'Pain can be a good thing,' Poudenhaut said.

'Relatively,' I said. 'In evolutionary terms, it's better to feel pain and rest up than to carry on walking and hunting on an injured leg, say. But —'

'But it's about discipline, isn't it?' Poudenhaut said.

'Is it?'

'Pain teaches you a lesson.'

'It's one way. There are others.'

'Sometimes there is no alternative.'

'Really?' I widened my eyes. 'Gosh.'

'It's like a child,' he explained patiently. 'You can argue with it and get nowhere, or you can just administer a short, sharp smack, and it's all cleared up. That applies to parents with children, schools…any relationship where one half knows what's best for the other half.'

'I see, Mr Poudenhaut,' I said. 'And do you beat your other half? I mean, do you beat your own children?'

'I don't beat them,' Poudenhaut said, with a laugh. 'I give them the occasional slap.' He looked round the others. 'Every family has a naughty stick, doesn't it?'

'Were you beaten as a child, Adrian?' I asked.

He smiled. 'Quite a lot, at school, actually.' He lowered his head a little as he looked round again, as though quietly proud of this proof he'd obviously been a bit of a lad. 'It never did me any harm.'

'My God,' I said, sitting back. 'You mean you'd have been like this anyway?'

'You don't have any children, do you, Kate?' he said, oblivious.

'Indeed not,' I agreed.

'So you —'

'So I don't really know what I'm talking about, I suppose,' I said breezily. 'Though I do seem to recall being a child.'

'I guess we all need to be taught a lesson,' Stephen Buzetski said casually, reaching for a large onyx ashtray and grinding out his cigar. 'I think I need to be taught that gamblin' don't pay.' He looked towards a rather slumped Uncle Freddy and grinned. 'That casino of yours open yet, sir?'

'Casino!' Uncle Freddy said, sitting upright again. 'What a splendid idea!'

'Just fuck me, Stephen.'

'It wouldn't be right, Kate.'

'Then just let me fuck you. You won't have to do a thing. I'll do it all. It'll be fabulous, dreamlike. You can pretend it never happened.'

'That wouldn't be right either.'

'It would be right. It would be very right. Trust me, it would be the rightest, sweetest, nicest thing that's ever happened to either of us. I know this. I do. I feel it in my water. You can trust me. Just let me.'

'Kate, I made a promise. I took these vows.'

'So? So does everybody. They cheat.'

'I know people cheat.'

'Everybody cheats.'

'No, they don't.'

'Every man does.'

'They do not.'

'Everyone I've met does. Or would, if I let them.'

'That's you. You're just so enticing.'

'Except to you.'

'No, to me too.'

'But you can resist.'

'I'm afraid so.'

We were standing in the darkness by the stone wall at one end of the mile-long reflecting lake; the house lay behind us. Uncle Freddy had had the newly renovated gas flare-path lit for the first time that night; Suvinder Dzung had been allowed to ignite it, and a small plaque to this effect had been unveiled, to the Prince's obvious delight. Gas burbled with a comical farting noise from a hundred different patches of water. Flames burned above, detached torches on a wide obsidian floor fifteen hundred metres long. The converging florettes of yellow flame receded into the distance, becoming tiny, stitching the night.

If you looked closely you could see the little blue cones of pilot lights hissing away at the end of thin copper pipes, sticking out above the water in the middle of each darkly bubbling source of fire.

I had gambled in the casino (I was gambling now, though with no real hope of winning). I had talked to various people — I had even made some sort of peace with Adrian Poudenhaut — I had put off Suvinder Dzung as politely but firmly as possible when he'd tried to get me to come to his room, I had stood on the terrace with everybody else to watch fireworks crack and splash across the night skies above the valley, casually shooing off the straying right ring-encrusted hand of the Prince as he came to stand by me and tried to fondle my bum. Elsewhere in the main house there were rooms you could go to for drugs, and apparently there was one where there was some sort of live sex show going on, which might turn into an orgy later, depending on demand.

I had talked to the poet and the soprano, found myself being embarrassingly girly with the ageing rock singer, on whom I'd had a crush in my teens, and been chatted up by both the American conductor and the Oxford don. I had said hello to the monument in muscle and bronze Armani that was Colin Walker as he stood behind Hazleton, who was playing at the blackjack table, and asked him how he'd been enjoying his visit to Britain. He'd told me, in his soft, measured voice, that he had only flown in yesterday, but that so far it had been just fine, ma'am.

I had danced energetically to what I suppose was rave music in one of the small ballrooms with some of the younger execs and fellow guests, and more sedately to the music of the forties and fifties played by a big band in the largest ballroom, where most of the higher-level people were. Suvinder Dzung, twinkle-toed and undeniably impressive, had swept and dipped me round the room a couple of times, though by then, thankfully, he was starting to become distracted by a couple of lissom beauties, one blonde, one auburn, whom I assumed were the cavalry, dispatched to my rescue by Uncle Freddy.

It was there in the ballroom that I'd encountered Stephen Buzetski again at last and persuaded him to get up on to the floor and danced with him and eventually danced him out into the night air and then along a terrace from which we'd seen again the lights of the reflecting lake. I'd taken my shoes off and he'd carried them for me as we'd crossed the lawn.

It was cold, and my little blue-black Versace number didn't provide much in the way of warmth, so this had given me the perfect excuse to hug him and be hugged by him and have him put his jacket around me, which smelled of him. My shoes stuck out of his jacket pockets.

'Stephen, you're a rich and handsome man, you're a nice guy, but life's too short, dammit. What's wrong with you?' I balled a fist and thumped him gently on the chest. 'Is it me? Am I so unattractive? Am I too old? That is it, isn't it? I'm just too old.'

He grinned, face lit by the dully roaring yellow flames. 'Kate, we've been through this before. You are one of the most beautiful and attractive women I have ever had the good fortune to meet.'

I cuddled into him, hugging him tighter, pathetically, adolescently delighted by what had to be an outright lie. 'Nothing about my age, then,' I muttered into his shirt.

He laughed. 'Look, you're younger than me and you certainly don't look your age anyway. Satisfied?'

'Yes. No.' I pulled back and looked into his eyes. 'So, what? Can't you stand women who take the initiative?'

We had, as he'd said, been through all this before, but this too was a dance, something that had to be gone through. The first time we'd been over this ground, four years earlier, I'd suggested he might be gay. He'd rolled his eyes.

That was when I knew just how perfect he was, from the way he did that. Because rolling his eyes in that way — even if it hadn't seemed like an impossibly cute expression in its own right — just made it so obvious that this had happened to him before, that women had accused him of being gay in the past, in their confused and wounded pride at being rejected, and he was getting fed up hearing it.