“Oh, I love Beatrix Potter,” said Mrs. Harrod. “Do let’s.”
“This is what I call ‘a shot,’ ” said Peter in his John Wayne voice, holding up his voluminous whisky before knocking it back in one gulp. He put down the empty glass, unimpressed, but not displeased.
“Doesn’t that hill look just like a Christmas pudding?” said Mrs. Harrod, pointing to a rounded hill on the far side of the lake, “with a sprinkling of icing sugar on top.”
“Hang on,” said Dunbar, disturbed by the further turmoil of resemblance suggested by Mrs. Harrod’s comparison.
“You’re right,” Peter interrupted, “with that rusty winter bracken and the dusting of snow. You’ve certainly got an eye for giant puddings, Ursula. Has anybody ever told you that?”
“No, they haven’t,” said Mrs. Harrod bashfully.
“Well, it’s true,” said Peter.
“Now, listen!” insisted Dunbar, trying to master his anxiety with a show of indignation, “we’re not going to some fucking Beatrix Potter museum, or climbing up a Christmas pudding; we’re going to get a car to London and we’re going to get this whole situation under control.”
“Absolutely, old man,” said Peter reassuringly. “Let me take this off your hands before it gets warm and flat,” he said, picking up Dunbar’s glass and draining half the contents. “There’s a fresh one on its way and it’s high time this one got dispatched.” He finished the pint with a theatrical smacking of the lips. “What we have to find out is whether that Swiss card of yours is working so we can make a taxi driver an offer he can’t refuse.”
“Don’t talk about my card in public,” hissed Dunbar, leaning across the table, “it’s a secret account.”
“Your secret is safe with Ursula,” said Peter.
“What secret?” said Mrs. Harrod. “What were we talking about?”
Peter smiled complacently at Dunbar, but the old man was not appeased.
“By the way, Ursula,” said Peter, “does your emergency money need refreshing? Since Henry and I are going to a cashpoint, perhaps I could get some more for you.”
“They don’t let me have a card anymore because I can’t remember the number.”
“Fiends,” said Peter. “Unfeeling monsters.”
“Did your daughters take your cards away as well?” asked Dunbar.
“No, it was my bank,” said Mrs. Harrod. “I think it’s quite sensible; goodness knows what I’d do if I had one.”
When the sandwiches and beer arrived, Peter was tempted to order more whisky, but instead managed to ask the barman where the nearest cashpoint was.
The two men wolfed down their food.
“I never go to London these days,” said Mrs. Harrod. “It’s become like a foreign city.”
“Well, in that case, you’ll be pleased to hear that we won’t be dragging you there today,” said Dunbar drily.
Peter sat down next to Mrs. Harrod and took her hand.
“Now, Ursula, you hold the fort while we go to get some cash. We’ll be back soon.”
“Where are we?” said Mrs. Harrod.
“The King’s Head,” said Dunbar, “we’re in the King’s Head.”
“Do you want this?” asked Peter, pointing to Dunbar’s glass.
“No, you have it,” said Dunbar impatiently, “you seem to like it well enough.”
“Ah, I’ve a terrible thirst on me,” said Peter in a thick Irish accent. “There’s a fire raging in my troubled mind and there’s only one thing in this sorry world can extinguish it.”
“Oh, you poor man,” said Mrs. Harrod, “you must get some professional help.”
“Well, thanks to Dr. Guinness here,” said Peter, winking broadly at Mrs. Harrod, “I’m already feeling much better, thank you kindly.”
—
There was only one bank in Plumdale High Street, a few hundred yards down the hill from the King’s Head, just after a bend in the road. It had a cashpoint inside as well as one on the pavement.
“Let’s go indoors, it’ll be warmer,” said Peter.
“They might have CCTV,” said Dunbar.
“With your daughters watching on the Northern Rock Bank Channel,” said Peter, knowingly.
“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of,” said Dunbar.
“I see,” said Peter. “Well, let’s stay in the unsupervised streets, ignoring this meat cleaver of a wind and those black clouds squabbling over who gets to rain first.”
Wrapped in his fur-collared overcoat, Dunbar was impervious to these meteorological threats and, as he extracted the Swiss credit card from his wallet, he seemed to enter into a kind of trance. He slipped the card into the slot with a solemnity that Peter had never seen in him before. He grew in stature as he chose various options on the screen and tapped in his personal identification number, shielding it from Peter’s inquisitive gaze, and yet it was only after his request for five hundred pounds was answered by the sound of the notes being counted by the automatic teller that he drew himself to his full height, back in command of the money that both men craved, and with which he was so inextricably identified in the eyes of the world, as well as in his own estimation. It reminded Peter of watching a flame being injected from the burner of a hot air balloon into the sagging, wrinkled fabric of the envelope, until it swelled and stretched upward, tugging at the tethered gondola.
“Success!” said Dunbar, pulling the cash from the flashing teeth of the machine.
“Excellent,” said Peter, clapping his hands, and jumping up and down, as if he’d turned into the balloon that he’d just been imagining. “Try it again! We’re three hundred miles from London, who knows what a car service would charge for a limo on a journey like that?”
“Between two and three pounds a mile,” said Dunbar.
“Well, there you go, we need twice as much cash, you’ve only got enough to get us to Birmingham.”
“I’ll pay with the card,” said Dunbar, “it’s got…” he hesitated.
“No limit!” said Peter. “No limit!”
Dunbar closed his eyes to shut out the images that were washing over him, but they only grew stronger: a snapping cord, an astronaut disconnected from the mother ship and sent flipping through the frigid darkness, surrounded by stars so far away they might have ceased to exist by the time their dim lights were reflected in his visor. As the ship disappears, all directions are abolished, there is no gravity, no tangible surface or meaningful reference point, only the hollow scepter of infinite space: forty-one thousand two hundred and fifty-three square degrees of indifference.
He felt Peter’s arm encircling his shoulder and gently turning him back toward the cashpoint. Too shocked by his hellish vision to protest, he stumbled through the motions of another withdrawal and made no effort to stop Peter from extracting the second wad of twenty-pound notes and stuffing them into his own trouser pocket.
“Don’t worry, old man, I’ve got the money,” said Peter, guiding Dunbar back up the street. “We’re all set up for the journey. We’ll just head back to the hotel and order up the best limo service Plumdale has to offer. It may be a car with a bar, plenty of legroom, and a lap pool, or it may be a mobile sheep dip, but one way or another we’re off to London Town, the Big Smoke, the Capital of the World!”
As they rounded the bend in the street, Peter thrust out his arm abruptly, knocking the bewildered Dunbar in the chest.
“Double back, double back,” said Peter. “I saw a Meadowmeade van outside the King’s Head. They’re probably waterboarding poor Ursula right now to find out what she knows. With her memory issues we might have been safe—if only we hadn’t asked the barman for the nearest cashpoint! Hurry up, for God’s sake.”
Peter pounded down the pavement, past the incriminating bank and took the first side street he could. Dunbar followed, but as they rounded the corner of Merewater Lane he pleaded for a slower pace.
“Okay,” said Peter, “take your time; just keep heading downhill toward the lake. This is a dead end for
cars, but I’ll go ahead and see if there’s a way out on foot. Otherwise, it’s going to be a day at the funfair for Nurse Roberts, shooting us with tranquilizing darts through the open window of the van.”
“Please don’t say that,” said Dunbar, “it’s too vivid.”
“Don’t worry, old man, we’ll find a way,” said Peter. “We may have to wade back to the King’s Head along the shore, and then take a couple of rooms for the night. It’s the last place they’ll think of searching for us, once they’ve left there empty-handed!”
Before Dunbar could raise the obvious objections to this scheme, Peter dashed down the lane on his exploratory mission. Neither man had a phone. Dunbar’s had been crushed under the wheels of a London bus, and Peter, after his persistent escape attempts, had been forced to surrender his as a condition of remaining at Meadowmeade, itself a condition of securing a new series of The Many Faces of Peter Walker. If only Dunbar had a phone, he would order a taxi right away. He had taken everything in: they were in Merewater Lane, in Plumdale. He might not be fast, but he was practical and he was as strong as a bull. He had always spent the Canadian part of his winters cross-country skiing and the Canadian part of his summers taking long swims in his own lake, a rather larger body of water than the one opening up in front of him as he came to the end of the lane.
“Henry! This way!” said Peter, reappearing through a small gate to Dunbar’s right. “Quickly, let’s get out of sight before our jailers come down the lane.”
Dunbar hurried through the gate and followed his elated companion along the path.
“It’s perfect,” said Peter. “I’ve seen a big plastic map ruggedly mounted on some local timber: we’re on a public footpath that runs around the lake. They’ll never find us here; it’s wooded and full of forking paths. If we headed for the hills now, we’d be too conspicuous, but at the other end of the lake we can climb up to a pass that takes us into the next valley.”
Dunbar assented with a grunt. He was locking into his walking stride, preserving his energy, refusing to disperse himself in speculative chatter, absorbed by a single objective: to get to London and somehow take back control of the Trust. His body had a sanity that had recently been eluding the rest of him. He could feel its stubbornness and the way his attention was starting to fall in with its narrow sense of purpose. That was just what he needed in order to combat the feeling of—he mustn’t think about it—there being no limits. He mustn’t think about that, but you had to think about something to know what it was you were not thinking about. All his life he had focused, some might say, psychological types might say, fixated on one thing—a deal, a merger, sometimes a woman—without wondering why; it had just seemed inevitable, irresistible, self-explanatory, but now he knew why, he really knew why. He had been like a dog plunging into the water to retrieve a stick, or like a hawk falling out of the sky to claw a sparrow, because the alternative was that hurtling emptiness with no direction and no home. Oh, God, he didn’t want to think about it. Hadn’t he already said that he didn’t want to think about it? Why was nobody paying attention to his instructions? All four secretaries away from their posts, paring their fingernails, while he barked down the phone unheard: “I don’t want to think about it, do you understand?”
“There’s also a car park at the other end of the lake,” said Peter. “Who knows? There may be a payphone there. On some of my unauthorized outings from Meadowmeade I’ve discovered that the simple folk who live in these rural backwaters haven’t yet learnt how to vandalize the public phones, and that some of the phones are still working and—get this—accepting coins!”
Peter rattled the change in his pocket to show Dunbar that he was well prepared to take advantage of such an opportunity.
“Good,” said Dunbar. “The phone or the pass, I’m ready either way. We’re going to make this thing happen.”
He strode forward, as if trampling his doubts underfoot. There was something terse in his tone that brought the conversation to a close. The two men walked on in silence beside the lake. No longer facing the wind, Dunbar could see through the trunks and branches that this more sheltered shore was not splashed by ragged waves like the one in front of the hotel, but shivered with the interlocking ripples that radiated from the turbulent water farther out. The view from the path suddenly opened up, making him stop, almost involuntarily, in front of a black and silver beach on which a few large rocks were distributed with the perfect naturalness of a Japanese garden. Across the lake, a bare bronze mountain, with streaks of snow on its upper slopes, was marbled by a rapid flow of cloud shadows. How could this little island, whose pretty countryside he had mainly seen through the windows of speeding cars, returning to London from a conference in the Home Counties, or a weekend at Chequers, or a surprisingly rural estate in Buckinghamshire, suddenly generate such a ravishing and alien wilderness? With some difficulty, noticing that his mind was glazing over and getting lost in the luminous cross-hatching on the surface of the trembling water, he pulled himself away from the clearing and returned to the woodland path, to the therapeutic rhythm of the walk. Marching forward, he felt his anxiety abating enough to make room for his longing to see Florence again. This emotion, like the anxiety, was almost overwhelming, but not as vibrantly unpleasant. His yearning for reconciliation was so intense that if she had been there now he would have fallen to his knees to beg for her forgiveness. Why was he in this state? Or perhaps the question was why had he not always been in this state? Why had he not always found life so disturbing and so poignant? He spent the next half-hour preoccupied with the question of whether he was finally in a natural state or had, on the contrary, fallen away from his true nature. He couldn’t reach any conclusion before Peter interrupted his reflections.
“I sure could use a drink.”
“You’ve had a fair amount already,” said Dunbar sternly.
“A fair amount,” Peter protested, “what kind of a standard is that? I want to be taken to the International Court of Justice in The Hague to be put on trial for the unfair amount of drinking I’ve done.”
“Is that the car park?” asked Dunbar, seeing an open space through the trees.
“The car park! Yes!” said Peter, reanimated. “I’ll run ahead and hunt for a phone.”
“Wait!” cried Dunbar, but Peter dashed off down the path.
When Dunbar found him again, Peter was standing next to the Information Center in the empty car park, dejected.
“It’s broken,” he said.
“We’ll have to go over the pass then,” said Dunbar, leaving no pause for self-pity.
“I’m not sure I can make it, old man,” said Peter. “It’s a climb and there’ll be snow and it’s quite a trek to Nutting, look at the map. I think we should go back to the King’s Head.”
He pointed out the trail to Dunbar on a brochure from the Information Center.
“It’s a five-hour walk,” said Peter, “it’ll be dark before we get there.”
“I’ve got a torch and a Swiss Army knife,” said Dunbar.
“You certainly love all things Swiss,” said Peter. “But to be honest with you, I can’t go that long without a drink. I’ll get a taxi and pick you up in Nutting.”
“No you won’t, they’ll catch you if you go back.”
“But you don’t understand.”
“Of course I understand, I’ve met plenty of drunks in my time,” said Dunbar. “You must do what you have to, but I think you’re making a mistake. Anyhow,” he said, pulling a woollen cap out of his pocket and fitting it onto his head, “thanks for getting me out of that place; I couldn’t have done it without you. By the way, you can keep the money you took from me, it’ll give you a better chance of staying a step ahead of them.”
“You’re a good guy, Henry Dunbar, much better than I expected,” said Peter, giving the old man a hug and slapping him rather too vigorously on the back.
Dunbar turned his collar up and, without another word, set off toward the trail at the
other end of the car park.
Forced to restrain themselves in front of the staff on the plane, Abigail and Megan had checked in to the Royal Suite of one of Manchester’s finest hotels and invited Dr. Bob to join them there for lunch. He was encouraged to defy the dangers of the important phone call he was about to make by the knowledge that the sisters would require ever-escalating doses of perversion to stimulate their jaded appetites. His body, already flecked with fiery welts and cuts, yellowing bruises, and, most recently, the thin row of renewed stitches in his chest, was screaming for revenge, while his conscience, struggling a little with the betrayal of his former patient, saw a kind of twisted retribution in going on to betray Dunbar’s daughters as well.
After hanging the Do Not Disturb sign on his door, which in this particular hotel read, “I think I want some Me Time,” Dr. Bob settled down at his desk, and got out his pre-paid cell phone, knowing that his own phone had been hacked by one of Abigail’s keen assistants. He had memorized Steve Cogniccenti’s special number so as to leave no record of his access to the charismatic and self-publicizing president of United Communications. Unicom, as everyone called it, was the only media organization larger than the Dunbar Trust. Separated by just two blocks, the New York headquarters of the two companies famously reflected each other in the darkened upper windows of their respective towers on Sixth Avenue. Their studios in Hollywood reiterated that uncomfortable proximity, but despite Unicom and the Dunbar Trust having chased the same prey for years, fighting over television stations, movie stars, and collapsing local newspapers, neither had ever dared to turn against the other directly, knowing that the failure of a takeover bid would carry too high a risk of self-destruction.
Eight on a Sunday morning would have been too early to call most people, but Steve had personally told Dr. Bob what millions of readers of the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and Fortune magazine already knew: at this time on a Sunday, Cogniccenti would be coming to the end of an especially extended exercise routine, dictating emails and memos, while the Bloomberg business news streamed across the bottom of the virtual 3D Tour de France on the screen in front of his exercise bicycle. During this time he took calls from the happy few who were in possession of one of his private numbers, as well as beginning to place calls of his own around the waking world. His directives to the top executives and editors of Unicom followed the passage of the sun. Imperious Asian afternoons flowed into imperious European mornings and as the glistening orb passed over Manhattan, East Coast brags turned into West Coast visions; the assets stripped in one conversation became the potential maximized in another. Sometimes, on his way to dinner, just for the hell of it, he would put through a second call to his Asian staff and interrupt their yoga exercises or their first cup of coffee in order to chastise them for having achieved nothing overnight.
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