Iain Banks: The Business

At any rate, one of the reasons that we are able to go quietly about our business as a company without too much intrusion or publicity — adverse or otherwise — is that we have at least a little dirt on almost everybody, whether they are other commercial concerns, sovereign states or major religions. There are other reasons, but we'll come to those later. All in good time (a resource which, given our longevity, we are obviously well used to working with in bulk).

'Well, thanks for the ride.'

Raymond grinned. 'It was a pleasure having you in the back, Ms Telman.' He squeezed my hand rather harder than a normal handshake would have called for, then tipped his cap and swung his lithe form back into the Lexus. I permitted myself the briefest of lingering glances and a sigh, then followed the two footmen carrying my luggage into the vast symphony in grey stone that was Blysecrag House, while the car crunched over the pale stones of the driveway and set off back through the deer-scattered parklands and forests for the main road.

'Kate! My girl! Good to see you!' Dressed in well-worn tweeds, waving a shepherd's crook with the thoughtless abandon of one brought up all his life under extravagantly high ceilings, attended by a brace of gangling wolfhounds leaving a double trail of whiskery grey hairs and saliva across the parquet, his own white hair seeming to float uncombed around his head as though in only casual contact with his scalp, Freddy Ferrindonald advanced down the length of the entrance hall, laughing, arms held wide.

He was lit from the side by the wintry sunlight pouring through a two-storey-high stained-glass window depicting a Victorian steel works; all gaudy reds, splashing oranges and sparking yellows with great roils of belching smoke issuing from huge machines, and small hunched human figures barely visible beneath the fumes and sparks.

A self-consciously eccentric dashing English toff of the old school, Uncle Freddy was genuinely an adopted uncle of mine, as he was a step-brother of Mrs Telman's, a familial relationship that he had never let stand in the way of sharing with me the odd toothily leering sexual innuendo, or giving my bum the occasional pat. Still, he was a laugh and — maybe because like me he didn't have much in the way of real family — we'd always got on surprisingly well.

'Welcome back!' Freddy hugged me as enthusiastically as his thin frame and eighty-plus years would allow, then held me at arm's length and looked me down and up. 'You're looking as lovely as ever.'

'As are you, Uncle Freddy.'

He seemed to find this hilarious, laughing loud enough to raise an echo from the tiered upper galleries of the hall and exposing a wealth of variously angled and diversely coloured teeth. He put an arm round my shoulder and walked with me towards the distant foothills of the main staircase.

Miss Heggies appeared. Miss Heggies was the housekeeper of Blysecrag. She was small but formidable, with grey bunned hair, a steely stare, lips the colour and fullness of a small elastic band, artificial eyebrows and a voice to etch titanium. She also gave the impression of having a combined Transporter Room and Tardis buried somewhere in the house at her command, as she seemed to possess the gift of materialising at will wherever and whenever she wanted. The only difference was that in Star Trek or Doctor Who there was a cheesy sound effect and a vaguely human-shaped shimmer — or the sudden appearance of a Metropolitan Police box — to give you a few seconds' warning; Miss H had perfected the art of arriving instantly and without a sound.

'Ah, Miss H,' Uncle Freddy called out. 'Where's the lovely Kate billeted?'

Miss Heggies nodded to the expectant-looking footmen with my cases. 'Ms Telman's in the Richmond room,' she told them.

'Miss Heggies,' I said, with a nod and what I hoped looked like a respectful smile. Miss H is the sort of person it pays to keep in with.

'Ms Telman. Welcome back.' Miss Heggies allowed her head to incline downwards by about a degree, while the corners of her mouth twitched. This was her equivalent of a floor-deep curtsy and a broad but bashful grin. I felt truly honoured. We started up the stairs.

I threw open the tall windows and stepped out on to the balcony, hugging myself as I drank in the cold air beneath a clear, cobalt sky. My breath smoked in front of me. Beyond the stone balustrade the view dropped sharply away in a series of sculpted terraces dotted with lawns, flower-beds, pools and waterfalls to the wooded floor of the valley where a few loops of river sparkled through the trees before decanting into the broad lake to my right, at the centre of which a single huge fountain towered. On all sides, the parkland spread away to the hills and crags beyond.

Looking along the cliff edge the house was perched upon, I could see a long structure like the top part of a crane laid along the lawn and jutting out over the drop. Steam drifted over it from behind, its rear obscured by a towered and crenellated wing of the house.

I rubbed my upper arms through my jacket and blouse, realising that I was smiling broadly at the view.

This was Blysecrag. It was begun in the early eighteen hundreds by the local duke, who was determined to create one of the great houses of England. He was responsible for the huge reservoir created in the hills five miles to the north of the house, which — via two valley-spanning aqueducts and a network of canals, cisterns and balancing reservoirs — supplied the water, and the pressure for the various water features in the house and grounds, of which the tall fountain in the lake was but the most immediately obvious.

The duke devoted all his time to the construction of the building but neglected to maintain the fortune that was supposed to pay for it. He duly went bankrupt. The estate was purchased by Hieronymus Cowle, an eccentric from a local mill-owning family who had made a second fortune in railways. He judged the already vast and rambling half-built structure to be a decent start, but insufficiently ambitious; many more architects, landscape gardeners, hydrologists, engineers, stone masons and artists would have to be thrown at the project.

By the time Hieronymus had finished, Blysecrag boasted three hundred rooms, eighteen towers, two miles of cellars, five lifts, thirty dumb-waiter shafts, a similar number of laundry-delivery elevators disguised as wardrobes, a water-powered funicular linking the house to its own railway branch line, a six-hundred seat underground theatre with a hydraulically driven revolving stage, numerous fountains and a mile-long reflecting lake. The place was equipped with a variety of systems for communicating with the staff, plus a pressurised petroleum-vapour lighting system powered by an early hydraulic turbine.

Hieronymus died before he could move in. His son, Bardolphe, spent most of the rest of the family fortune indulging passions for gambling and aviation; he converted one of the ballrooms into a casino and adapted the reflecting lake — which was handily aligned with the prevailing westerlies — into a landing lake for his seaplane and, near one end of the lake, up a short incline, had installed the world's first land-based steam-powered catapult on the cliff edge, to launch the aircraft. It was this structure I could see from the balcony of my room, wreathed in steam.. Uncle Freddy had just had it restored to working order.

Not content with being able to land his seaplane during the day, Bardolphe had devised a system of coal-gas pipes set just beneath the surface of the mile-long lake to release bubbles of methane which could be ignited during the hours of darkness to provide a flare-path for night landings. He died in the fall of 1913 trying to make his first such landing; apparently the wind blew out half the plumes of burning gas and ignited several piles of leaves at the side of the lake, causing him to fly towards the trees to one side and collide with the top of an ornamental pagoda. He was buried in a coffin that looked like a roulette table, housed within a seaplane-shaped mausoleum on the hillside looking over the lake and the house.