Janine Saphir was satiny. Yes, her nightdress was satin, and her little kitten-heeled mules were satin, and her peignoir was satin, but her hair, Veronica Lake style, was also satiny-sheeny and her skin, a marked olive, was so fine-pored you just knew she went for facials more than once a week, and nothing costing less than $500 a bottle ever went on her moosh.

She looked at me, throwing her hair back out her eyes, and, perplexingly, turned away just as I smiled and handed her the bottle.

“Look, there’s nothing there,” she said, and when I didn’t follow her she let her shoulders fall in that resigned droop while she looked heavenwards as if at the end of her tether. “Well, come and see then…” and she walked on into the bathroom.

Great. I took a deep breath and followed her, sighing it out inaudibly. It was an important art to master. She wanted to make a meal out of it. Well, might as well get it over with. I got ready to wring my hands, fixing my consumer smile rigidly in place. I be ever so humble.

I went into the preposterously Victorian bathroom (it wasn’t called the Victoria suite for nothing) in that dark, dark green that looks almost black that the Victorians so loved, with the ornate shower-head the size of a dinner plate and the throne-like toilet covered in stags and hills. I kid you not. When the Hanovers or the Saxe-Coburgs came to stay you got it right, and that meant overdoing everything. Overdone was what this bathroom was. Even the bathroom cabinet was inlaid mahogany. It was a dark, dark room.

She threw open the monarch’s cupboard doors and sure enough, it was empty. Completely. No shampoo, no little bars of soap, no spare flannels. No gratis sachets of Vichy Night Cream. Nothing.

“I am so sorry…” I began. But she wasn’t having that.

“My brother didn’t pay £8000 a week to rent this place just to have to hunt down 10¢ drugs in the dead of night.”

Ten cents, eh? I knew America was cheaper than us, but I was guessing this was someone that never bought anything herself – other than designer shoes. “I can only repeat, madam, I’m terribly…”

But what I was terribly was never finished.

“Jan, what are you…?” He was in pyjamas, black silk pyjamas. Only kidding. He was in pyjamas, but I’m guessing they were some kind of satinised cotton. They had a sheen certainly, but they were dark blue. Not exactly navy – midnight, maybe. He had come through the other door which led from the bedroom and I could see the rumpled bed behind him, framed in the doorway.

Now, she did not look as if she’d ever been to bed. He, however, had very obviously just got up and pulled on pyjama bottoms. His top half was bare.

My first impression of him was one of goldness. He had that strange skin that only wealthy people have. It’s something more than perma-tan, it’s that look of pampering, in everything from their diet to their skin-care. She had it, and he had it. But it didn’t exactly look like tan. It was obviously a skin tone, a touch of foreignness that hadn’t come out a bottle. It was Jewishness.

That said, you would never have known he, or she, were Jews. They were so manicured, so perfect, it simply never really struck you. Until he turned his head. And yes, he did look like Jason Isaacs, and yes, like Isaacs, he had that very slightly hooked nose. It was like God had made them perfect little mimics of Aryan beauty then stamped them with that little ‘flaw’ to make sure they couldn’t escape, blameless, among us. One of God’s chosen, one of God’s damned.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You are…?”

“The steward, sir.” It’s what my job title was, officially.

“And you’re doing…” he shrugged an eyebrow, turning his head slightly as if to hear better, rather like a headmaster who expects your next lie to be a good one, “…what? Exactly?”

“Getting Miss Saphir some tablets, sir. I’m afraid they were overlooked when the suite was restocked. I’m terribly sorry. I’ll have someone come first thing tomorrow and replenish all the toiletries.”

She immediately chipped in, “Oh no, you won’t. I don’t want woken before ten.”

I nodded – that ingratiating little head thing. “No, of course, madam. I’ll see to it. As soon as it’s convenient for you.”

I put the tablets down on the old washstand, which was not the original, and which had had its marble top cut up to plumb in a double sink. I started backing out, lackey to the end.

I was stopped in my retreat by his highness jerking his head back. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“My name, sir?” I wasn’t exactly unused to it. I mean, quite a few of the great & good like to do the common man stunt, and call you by your first name, but somehow, from him, it felt different. Like he was actually listening. Like somehow he’d hear it and promptly dash off to look it up on the FBI most wanted list.

“Jones, Sir. Friday…. Jones,” I added unnecessarily, feeling foolish for no reason I could clearly understand.

He cocked his head a little and smiled slowly. She gave a cynical little laugh and folded her arms, looking at me as if I had thought up the most preposterous name possible just to delay my exit and so annoy her.

“Friday, huh?” he said.

“Yes sir.”

“Unusual name.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay, Friday, thanks.” And he looked at me expectantly, as if to say Why are you still here?

I backed out and went.

Next day was beautiful and blue and, although I was tried from being dragged out my bed at 2 am, the only real legacy from my night was in giving the girls a bollocking for forgetting to stock up their rooms.

They were suitably chastened – they sulked with me for the entire day – and snubbed me repeatedly in the corridors to show it. I was good at what I did, and I had enough awareness of my own waste of life to be ashamed at that, but not good enough at people management. Some people were able to get others to jump to attention without making enemies, but I wasn’t one of them.

Other than that constant little reminder in the shape of Becky and Alison’s pouts, I pretty much forgot about our guests as people and concerned myself with making their stay run like clockwork from now on.

Saphir went out on the boat with his aide de camp immediately after breakfast, but they took the usual laptops and even more papers and expensive leather briefcases and notebooks than normal. I felt, inasmuch as I thought of it at all, that the loch was merely the most unreachable location we had and that’s why they were there.

They stayed out there all day, having lunch on board, and only came back in for a late meal at seven o’clock. Late because here we ran on a strictly Scottish mealtime system. Breakfast was early, you had a ‘wee cup of tea and a biscuit’ at eleven or so, lunch at twelve, your ‘tea’ at five and then your supper at nine. It was impossibly old-fashioned and guests liked it or lumped it.

In reality, of course, most of them were hungrier here than they were at home, and the seduction of George’s cooking was such that they usually rolled up cheerfully starving at the odd, for the business world, hours of Scottish country castle life.

Saphir, of course, had pretty much alienated George from the outset by never taking any meal at a fixed hour. And George was suitably vocal about “Him an’ his fuckin’ ways.”

Gabriel, however, was smitten. Although there seemed to be an indecent number of people in the party, they were all oddly faceless. An obvious metaphor perhaps, but they were like ants keeping a nest running, quietly scurrying here and there doing their drone jobs, but all oddly featureless, just another little soldier keeping the hierarchy alive.

She, however, was distinctive, although we seldom saw her, and he likewise – and we saw even less of him.

He soon established a pattern of getting up, breakfasting in his suite, going out on the boat, arriving back almost on the dot of seven, eating downstairs where his entourage sat and talked business round the table till nine or ten and then he went to bed. He had no supper, no milky drinks and no nightcaps. He never complimented the chef, asked for recipes or otherwise gave any impression he was aware of any of us at all.

He was never rude, but he ignored us in a way that spoke of either absolute dedication or absolute power – perhaps both. He wasn’t too good for us, we were just irrelevant, which meant that actually, in practice, he was too good for us, because none of us could impinge on his life.

Even if something went wrong he didn’t deal with it. That was someone else’s job, sometimes his aide de camp, a rather shy self-effacing boy who was probably about 28, with eight business degrees to his name, but who came across more as a computer geek who lived in bedroom. Even his dress was strangely casual. He wore slacks and a sweater where all Saphir’s men normally wore black suits. Actually, as a party they looked rather like the FBI, or MIBs from a sci-fi movie where they moved in on area 51 and ran around making important and secretive calls all day but no-one had a clue what they were doing.

I’d met a lot of businessmen in my time, but the odd thing about this lot was they were neither loud and rambunctious, boys having a week off, or aggressive and stressed alpha males dealing with a retreat crisis.

It was apparent within 2 or 3 days that something heavy was ‘going down’ as the Americans say, but it was singularly stressless. There was no shouting, no undone ties and talks long into the night. Whatever it was, they all worked on it all day but in singularly hushed and methodical lines.

I rapidly got the impression that Saphir liked precision, quiet dedication. He had no room for yelling or posturing, no time for strutting power displays. The men did their work and did it fast and quietly. I felt it wasn’t a coincidence his aide de camp was the most self-effacing of the bunch, or that he was ‘allowed’ that semi-casual dress. I sensed that he’d earned the right to be that person, and his casualness was a curious assertion of superiority among the men.

But Gabriel, as I say, was smitten. We’d had Rock Gods and film stars here, many times, and none of them had quite entranced Gabriel as Saphir had. Gabriel, of course, went out on the boat with him day after day, as did the sous chef, Francois. Francois was a spotty French youth with oily hair who stank of garlic. Every stereotype and a few more. Ironically, he only stank of garlic because George loved garlic in food and he gave the job of chopping it up to Francois, who as a Cordon Bleu trained chef, was good at that. Subsequently he never got the scent of it out from under his nails, and his habit of running his hands through his hair every time he took his hat off, of wiping his hands down the sides of his trousers, ensured that he smelt of garlic everywhere he went.

On the boat, however, he was responsible for serving lunch and any snack meals and so he was spared some of his usual duties. He seemed perfectly happy to be there too and the two of them, him and Gabriel, came home in high spirits each night.

Because the men did nothing but work, there was little for the two boys to do and so it was rather like a paid holiday for them. No complaints.

Gabriel was full of adolescent awe at Saphir’s poise, his elegance, even the meticulousness of his shave. He waxed long and loud on the respect that Saphir was held in by his ‘men’, his assertive manner on the phone. In short, Saphir was a god and Gabriel was definitely in love with him.

It began to get irksome to me after about five days of listening to Gabriel’s eulogising over the supper table.

“Do you think he seriously notices you, or cares what you think of him?” I heard myself asking.

Gabriel gave me a look that managed to be both injured and sly. “You’re just jealous because he hasn’t noticed what a great lackey you make.”

There was some small element of truth to this, in that I was used to being appreciated as the perfect butler.

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