Dunbar

by Edward St. Aubyn

  “Bob!” said Steve, as if he were greeting his best friend after a painfully long separation.

  “Is this a good time?” asked Dr. Bob.

  “Good? It’s great!” said Steve, who benefited from sleeping with a pair of earplugs that artfully doubled as headphones, whispering affirmative messages into his sealed ears, just below the consciously audible level but guaranteed by the manufacturers to give their customers a subliminal injection of invincibility and unlimited entitlement. “Give your self-esteem a workout while you sleep…You deserve the greatest rewards that life has to offer.” He had been skeptical when he first read the propaganda on his latest wife’s latest Christmas present, but now it was hard to imagine spending a night without wearing his PowerSleep earplugs. Of nature’s great mistakes, sleep had always struck him as the most outrageous, even harder to explain than altruism: three hours, or in the case of the truly lost, eight hours in which it was impossible to make any money. Even if investments flourished overnight, their success was based on old decisions; nothing new, nothing audacious, nothing truly aggressive could be done in that jailhouse of obligatory passivity. At least with PowerSleep he knew that he was building himself a bulletproof ego for the Dodge City of perpetual competition and breaking news.

  “What have you got for me?” said Steve.

  “Well,” said Dr. Bob, “I’ve confirmed that they can only go to a fifteen percent premium over the market price. Eagle Rock, their family fund, will launch its bid to take the Dunbar Trust private on Thursday morning, straight after the Board ratifies the offer.”

  “Only fifteen percent?”

  A slight panting was audible between Steve’s short sentences, forgivable in a man who was in one of the mountain sections of the Tour de France, cycling up a steep Pyrenean gradient. “I’ve gotta hear that meeting in real time. We’ll use the microphone on your laptop.”

  “They may be able to go up another three percent,” said Dr. Bob, “but that’s the max. And one other thing: they want to remove Dunbar as non-executive chairman.”

  “What? They want to do this without his blessing? Their backers must be pretty confident.”

  “They’ve got Dick Bild organizing it.”

  “Victor’s old partner,” said Steve. “How close is he to Megan? He was basically her husband’s only friend, right?”

  “That’s right, but I don’t think the merry widow has him on her lovers’ chain gang,” said Dr. Bob.

  “That may be a miscalculation,” said Steve.

  “Anyhow, they’ll have me on the Board,” said Dr. Bob, “and…”

  “Well, I’m sure that’s really fucking reassuring for them,” said Steve, taking a hairpin bend on his virtual mountain road, “but you don’t seem to get it, I’m paying for information here, I need something solid. What keeps them awake at night?”

  “China,” said Dr. Bob, dismayed by Steve’s sudden change of tone.

  “What, because they lost the satellite deal with Zhou? Unicom won the deal. Do you think I don’t know about that? I organized it and it’s all over the market that Dunbar is floundering in China.”

  “No, no, you don’t understand. Zhou gave them some very impressive compensation. He doesn’t want either of you bearing a grudge against China. The trading figures are amazing, and what keeps the girls awake at night is the idea that the good news will break out and the share price will rocket before they complete their deal.”

  “Now you’re giving me something,” said Steve. “And what are they doing with the old man?”

  “Well, at the moment I’m in Manchester…”

  “Manchester? What is this, 1850?” said Steve. “Why would anybody be in Manchester at this point?”

  “Dunbar is in a sanatorium nearby,” said Dr. Bob. “We want to move him to a more secure facility.”

  “The type you keep six foot underground,” said Steve, with an immaculate laugh, neither too sinister nor too facetious. “No,” he said, as if he was opposing someone else’s misguided plan, “I’m fond of old Dunbar. He’s built a great empire—which is why I’m going to have to take it over. But make the fuck sure you get him out of the picture, okay, Bob?”

  “I will,” said Dr. Bob, popping an Adderall with a little sip of water, to reinforce his conviction. “The only complication is his youngest daughter, Florence, who is also looking for him.”

  “What harm can she do us?”

  “She might bring Dunbar back into play before the big meeting.”

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “We’re going to take him to Austria, to a clinic with some serious security, unlike the genteel British place he’s in at the moment.”

  “Isn’t the company plane a little conspicuous?” said Steve, knowingly.

  “That’s why we’re leaving Global One in Manchester as a kind of decoy and taking a rented jet out of Liverpool. Even if Florence finds her father’s plane, it won’t get her any closer to her father.”

  “Does she have any shares?”

  “No, they got redistributed to the other daughters when she fell out with Dunbar.”

  “And she’s the one looking for him? What is that? The loyalty of the maltreated—some kind of Stockholm syndrome?”

  “That could be it, but in her case, I think she loves her father.”

  “You think she’s a good person? That’s your explanation? Do you have any idea how—”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt, Steve, but I’ve just seen a text from Abby on my other phone saying that she needs to see me urgently.”

  “They’ve sure got you on a tight leash.”

  “You have no idea,” said Dr. Bob.

  “Hang in there, my friend! It’s only till Thursday night,” said Steve.

  Dr. Bob hung up the phone, knowing that if he didn’t turn up soon, Abby would be coming to get him. His heart was pounding, his skin was stinging, his mouth was parched, and his scalp was itching. He was falling apart; he was just a body of uncontrollable symptoms and raging side effects.

  The long walk down the corridor to the Royal Suite brought to mind his current bedside reading, a book called Cruel and Unusual Punishments. The chapter he had finished on the plane described how Jacobean traitors, after an inconclusive hanging, were castrated and disemboweled while still alive and then, perhaps rather pedantically, torn apart. In his vulnerable state of almost hysterical tiredness, in which the insides of his eyelids seemed to be coated with sandpaper, the polychrome chaos of the carpet underfoot, designed to disguise stains by looking as if it had already suffered every imaginable catastrophe before leaving the factory, seemed to him like the boards of a scaffold already spattered with the fruits of effusive torture. Dr. Bob leant against the wall for a moment and let out an involuntary sob. He was thinking about the execution of Sir Everard Digby, one of the men implicated in the Gunpowder Plot, who had managed, after his heart was ripped out and held aloft by the executioner with the cry, “This is the heart of a traitor,” to gasp, “Thou liest!”

  Dr. Bob was tempted to slide farther down the wall. Where was the pride of successful deception, the exhilaration of sudden advantage? Now more than ever he needed to connect with the cold-hearted bastard at the core of his being, but instead he was weeping over the defiance and integrity of a long-dead Catholic martyr, as if he were mourning something he could never have: the experience of sacrificing himself for a principle, a community, an ideal.

  He punched the wall with a strangely autonomous violence, not emanating from his mood but imposed on it. In the absence of anyone else to be cruel to, he had to make do with his own knuckles. The pain shocked him out of his pitiful state of mind and as he straightened his body and resumed his progress down the corridor, he reminded himself that by Thursday evening he would be independently rich, not through the tedium of hard work, or through the depravity of a huge inheritance, but through his wit, his cunning, his charisma, and his transcendence of the slave morality that held lesser men in check. The combinatio
n of the payment Cogniccenti would be making into his Swiss bank account the next day and the expected doubling of the value of his Dunbar stock after the merger, as well as the salary he had wisely insisted on receiving from the Dunbar girls before he stabbed them in the back, would enable him to live what would be at least a simulacrum of the life he had grown used to as the entourage physician to billionaires. The income from his investments would still not be enough, but with no children and no intention of extending his life beyond his capacity to dominate the situations he found himself in, he was not averse to running through the capital and dying in debt.

  By the time the double doors at the end of the corridor flew open, he had managed to introduce a certain swagger into his step.

  “Where the hell have you been?” said Megan.

  “No need to pump those bellows,” said Dr. Bob, smiling as he approached, “you’re burning with impatience already. You’d better watch out, or one day you might just,” he paused and then snapped his fingers suddenly and loudly an inch from her eyes, “drop dead from a heart attack, or a stroke.”

  Megan looked startled and upset. How easy she was to dominate. These Dunbar girls were arrogant, imperious, and tough, but toughness was not strength, imperiousness was not authority, and their arrogance was an unearned pride born of an unearned income.

  “Are you threatening me?” said Megan.

  “Good God, no, who would ever be mad enough to do that?” said Dr. Bob, with a disarming chuckle. “I’m saying that you’re a threat to yourself, if you live at this pitch of impatience. I’m your doctor, Meg, and I know it’s not good for you to put yourself under this stress,” he went on, resting an avuncular hand on her shoulder and reflecting that it would be wise not to show too much hostility and insubordination before the end of the week.

  “Well, we’ve got a crisis on our hands, so I guess I’m not at my calmest,” she conceded. “Daddy’s escaped from that stupid sanatorium. Once we’ve got him back, we’re going to sue them into the ground.”

  “I’m sure you are,” said Dr. Bob, following her into the drawing room, but falling silent when he saw that Abigail was pacing the room, with her phone held to her ear.

  “I warn you,” said Abigail in response to what she had just heard, “we’re going to be there by five o’clock this afternoon, and if my father isn’t in his room when we arrive, you’re going to read a series of articles about Meadowmeade that will redefine your idea of what bad publicity means.”

  She ended the call and threw her phone onto the sofa with a growl of frustration. Dr. Bob was skeptical about the threat she had just made. In all his years with Dunbar, although he had often seen the old man rant privately about destroying a reputation, he had never seen him make a direct threat. The threat should remain implicit but unmistakable. To expose it in a few angry sentences, as Abigail had done, was bound to make her look petty as well as entailing the fatal error of admitting that the news she sold was an instrument of her vindictive whims. The truth was that he had a duty to undermine her plans, if only to save half the world’s media from being run on such capricious grounds. Although by the end of the week it might look as if he had contributed to the destruction of the Dunbar empire, he was in fact preserving it from further degradation, protecting it from its unworthy heirs. In the eyes of posterity he would probably be seen as its savior, but he shouldn’t expect to get any thanks in the short term.

  “Can you fucking believe it?” said Abigail. “Nobody has seen him since breakfast and they have no idea whether he’s still on the property or not.”

  “He’s strong for his age, but he can’t have gone very far with no money and no phone,” said Dr. Bob soothingly.

  “He shouldn’t have gone anywhere at all,” said Abigail. “This was supposed to be a completely smooth and discreet operation.”

  “Which is why it would be better to hold back those ruthless articles about Meadowmeade losing your famous father.”

  “I was just keeping them on their toes,” said Abigail.

  “An empty threat is always a sign of weakness,” said Dr. Bob.

  “You can put away your kindergarten Machiavelli,” said Abigail. “Remember who you are.”

  “And who we are,” Megan added, delighted to gang up on the man who had just tried to terrorize her with his medical advice.

  Dr. Bob was close to slapping them both or, worse, boasting about how wrong they were, in the light of his conversation with Steve Cogniccenti, but instead he managed to draw on his deep reserves of hypocrisy and recommit himself to a few more days of submission.

  “I’m sorry. Of course you know more about handling power than I can ever hope to learn. It’s in your DNA, as people like to say nowadays, however meaninglessly.”

  “We’ll meet in the lobby in forty-five minutes,” said Abby, turning her back on her chastened minion and walking away without another word.

  “Great,” said Dr. Bob, smiling this time without any dissimulation. There would be no time to go to bed; it was enough to make him believe in guardian angels.

  Dunbar’s path ran parallel to a stream that coursed down the middle of the hill. The white noise of rushing water helped to camouflage the anxious murmur of his thoughts. He treated each step and each breath as an individual package of concentration, pausing briefly when both his feet were safely on the ground and then starting up again. The climb ahead was steep and indistinct, but all he had to do was take the next step, propelled by the relentless forward motion that had characterized his entire adult life. He had always stretched into the future, bringing his business to new continents and bringing new technologies to his business, not because he understood them in any detail, or enjoyed using them himself, but because they smelt of novelty. Although he was still driven forward by these dogged habits, his confidence was now so easily destroyed that he was trying to reduce the horizon of anticipation, keeping his eyes on the ground immediately in front of him, as if darkness had already fallen and he was being guided by a lantern that only cast a faint pool of light a few yards ahead of him.

  As he heard the splashing water grow closer, he allowed himself to glance up and saw that the path would soon be crossing the stream on an improvised bridge of flat stones. He lowered his head again and pressed on, but this time he found that the more resolutely he narrowed his field of vision, the more complexity seemed to emerge from it: the gray rocks on the edge of the path were covered in patches of white and acid green lichen, and where water gathered in cracks and hollows there were pockets of dark velvety moss. The broken rock on the path itself showed traces of rusty red and sometimes the momentary glitter of crystal. Like a child on a beach, he wanted to pick up the smooth stone with a white mineral vein encircling its dark surface, but he knew there would be no one to show it to.

  By the time he reached the stream, he no longer felt protected by his downward gaze; on the contrary, it seemed to be drawing him into a vertigo of detail, a microscopic world that he didn’t need a microscope to imagine, where every patch of lichen was a strangely colored forest of spores, their trunks rearing from the stony planet on which they lived. Freshly alarmed by how suggestible his mind had become, he decided to pause in the middle of the stream, needing to negotiate between the engulfing richness at his feet and accepting what until now had seemed to be the harder challenge of facing the scale of his isolation in such a wild and empty place.

  He stood on the flat stones, facing downstream, imagining that the glassy water spilling over the gray rocks in front of him and tumbling into a foaming pool was also flowing through his troubled mind and washing away the confusion and dread that kept threatening to take it over. As it ran down the hill, the stream looked to him like an incision, a comparison that immediately gave him the mad feeling that a surgical knife was running down the center of his own torso. He moved his attention hurriedly on to the serene expanse of Merewater, but the sight of the now distant car park in which he had parted from Peter assailed him with a sense of
bereavement that he didn’t want to dwell on either. When at last he dared to look up he saw a canopy of thin broken cloud and, behind it, the detached blue of the upper sky flooded with light. The clouds themselves appeared to be racing toward him, funneled by the high hills on either side of the lake toward the pass at his back, making him feel trapped at the convergence point of a horizontal V. Along with this disturbing illusion, he felt an incoherent sense of guilt, as if the broken clouds were fragments of an infinitely precious blue and white vase he had been entrusted with and had stupidly dropped, and that he must somehow glue back together before the owner returned.

  “Please don’t let me go mad,” he muttered, and then, after a pause, he tried to cover his secondary confusion. Who was he asking to grant him this mercy? He bowed to the stream with exaggerated courtesy, hoping that his sarcastic formality would give him some relief, but his need was too urgent to play with.

  “Please, please, please, don’t let me go mad,” he begged, not making fun of anything anymore, and promising he never would again, if only this feeling would go away.

  He twisted round desperately, trying not to lose his balance on the stones but wanting to get some idea of how much farther he had to climb to the pass. All the while he muttered, “please, please, please,” hoping that his plea could imitate the fluency of the stream and, like the stream, flow into something greater and less agitated than itself.