Iain Banks: The Business

'Adrian tells me you're meeting him tomorrow, Kathryn.'

'That's right. I wanted to talk to him.' I smiled. 'He seems very proud of his new car. 355, I think he said. Sounds nice.'

She smiled thinly. 'Red is not his colour, but he insisted.'

'Well, it is a Ferrari. I think it's almost compulsory.'

'You are meeting for lunch?'

'Yes, in a place near the Grimsel Pass. He recommended it.'

She looked uncertain. 'You will take good care of him, yes?'

'Of course,' I said. What was she talking about? She was staring intently at her glass. She didn't think I had any designs on his tumid butt, did she?

'Thank you. He is…important to me. Very dear.'

'Of course, I understand. I'll try to make sure he leaves me in one piece.' I laughed lightly. 'Why? He's not a bad driver, is he? I was thinking of asking for a drive in the Ferrari.'

'No, no, he is a perfectly fine driver, I think.'

'Well, that's a relief.' I raised my glass. 'To careful drivers.'

'Indeed.'

In my dream, I was in a great house in the mountains. There was bright moonlight and starlight, but the stars were wrong and I remember thinking I must be in New Zealand. The great house was built on a vast rumpled landscape of spired and crevassed ice tipped between two mountain ranges. It didn't seem in the least strange to me that the building had been constructed on a glacier, though the whole place creaked and trembled as it moved with the rest of our immediate landscape down the vast slow river of ice. With each rumble and creak beneath us, a host of diamond chandeliers tinkled, mirrors flexed and distorted, and cracks appeared in the ceilings and walls, sprinkling white dust. White-overalled servants rushed to repair the fissures, clattering up ladders and shinning up skinny poles to slap fresh plaster across the faults, raining white damp dots. This happened a lot. We held umbrellas above us as we walked through the huge, echoing rooms. Marble statues were real people who had stood too long in one place under the drizzle of plaster.

Teams of yaks moved through constantly branching tunnels in the ice beneath us, only surfacing at the great house, where their smiling, round-faced minders thanked us for soup and their beds in the many tents scattered across the icy scenery.

A masked man I knew not to trust was doing a complicated trick with cups and hats and my little netsuke monkey, shifting them around the table while people placed bets and laughed. The masked man's mouth was visible and he was missing lots of teeth, but they weren't really missing at all: some had been blacked out as though he was an actor.

I woke up, wondering where I was again. Thulahn? Not cold enough. But, then, I'd been moved to a more hotel-like room. But still not Thulahn. I remembered the smell of the Heavenly Luck Tea House. Yorkshire? No. London? No, Château d'Oex. Ah yes. Nice room. Valley view. Alone. Nobody here. I felt groggily across the bed. No, no one here. Monkey gone. This monkey's gone to heaven — wasn't that a Pixies' song? Dulsung. Why hadn't she been in my dream? And who's this 'we' anyway, white man? Na, nothing. Sleep again.

There was time to kill at the Grimsel Pass. I sat in the 7-series waiting for Poudenhaut, reading the Herald Tribune. The phone rang and it was, at last, Stephen.

'Kathryn? Hi. Sorry for the delay. Daniella was running a serious temperature and Emma was away at one of her friend's so I had to do the hospital thing. She's okay now but, well, hence the delay.'

'That's all right. It's good to hear you.'

'What was it you wanted to talk about? Nothing too urgent, I hope.'

'Hold on.' I got out of the car, only just beating Happy Hans, my white-haired chauffeur, to the draw: he had his cap on, he was out of his door and reaching for the outside handle of my door while I was still pushing. He drew the door fully open as I got out into the chill air of the early afternoon. The car park was gravel, uneven. I nodded to Hans and let him put my coat over my shoulders before I walked off, heading away from the quaintly painted old wooden inn and the other cars and coaches.

'Kathryn?'

I stopped at the low wall, looking down the valley at the road winding into Italy.

'Still here, Stephen,' I said. 'Listen, what I have to tell you is pretty bad news.'

'Oh, yeah?' He sounded only a little wary at first. 'What? How bad?'

I took a deep breath. The air was cold; I could feel its raw, numbing touch in my nostrils and at the back of my throat and could sense it filling my lungs. 'It's about Emma.'

I told him. He was silent, mostly. I told him all of it: about the DVD, Hazleton's involvement, the dates and places and the obligation that Hazleton expected of me. He was so quiet. I wondered if perhaps none of this was coming as a great shock at all. Maybe, I thought, they had an open relationship that he'd never wanted to tell me about in case it encouraged me. Maybe Hazleton had been upset that I'd told him I'd made my mind up but that I wasn't going to tell him what my decision was yet, and he had told Stephen.

But no. Stephen was just stunned. He hadn't really started to guess, or if he had entertained any suspicions whatsoever they had been the sort that occur to you unbidden, as purely theoretical constructs, the sort of thing that an imaginative mind throws up as a matter of course, but which the moral self dismisses as preposterous, and even feels shameful to be associated with.

He said, 'Yes,' once or twice, and, 'I see,' and, 'Right.'

'Stephen, I'm sorry.' Silence. 'That's hopelessly inadequate, I know.' More silence. 'I just hope you…Stephen, I've thought about this for a long time. Two weeks. I didn't know what to do. I still don't know that I'm doing the right thing. I think it's all pretty horrible, including Hazleton's part in it, and making me have anything to do with it, too. I want you to know I'm not enjoying this. I'm trying to be straight with you, trying to be honest. I could have got Hazleton to let you know without me being —'

'All right! ' he said loudly, almost shouting. Then, 'Sorry. All right, Kathryn. I take the point. I guess you did the right thing.'

I looked up at the blue, blue sky. 'You're going to hate me for this, aren't you?'

'I don't know what I'm going to feel, Kathryn. I feel…I don't know. Winded. Yeah, sort of winded, like when you fall on your back and can't breathe, but…hey, a lot worse, you know?'

'Yeah, I know. Stephen, I'm so sorry.'

'Oh. Well. I guess it had to be done. Jeez.' He sounded like he might be about to laugh or cry. Breath whistled out of him. 'Some start to the day.'

'Is Emma there?'

'No, still away…Well, just coming back today. God, the bitch.'

'You take it easy, okay?'

'Huh? Yeah, sure. Sure. Ah, and thanks. I guess.'

'Look, call me whenever, all right? Get your breath back. But keep in touch. Call me later. Will you?'

'Ah, yeah. Yeah, right. I'll… Goodbye, Kathryn. Goodbye.'

'Good — ' The phone clicked off. ' — bye,' I said.

I closed my eyes. Somewhere down the road, in Italy, I could hear the muted rasp of a high-performance engine, coming closer.

Lunch was a disappointment. Poudenhaut couldn't stop talking about his car, a shiny red 355 soft-top with a black hood. He'd driven me here in it, keeping the revs below five thousand because even though the engine was meant to have been run-in on the bench he just wanted to be sure. Hans and the BMW would appear here later to take me back to the château. We were in a modern glass and steel restaurant in the trees above an archetypically twee village that looked like it was composed of scaled-up cuckoo clocks: on the hour you expected a door under the eaves to flap open and Heidi to bounce out at the end of a giant spring.

We both drank spring water. The food was Swiss-German, not my favourite cuisine, so it was easy to save plenty of space for a pudding, which was satisfyingly rich and chocolaty.