Dunbar

by Edward St. Aubyn

  She had hardly been able to speak with him since she retrieved him from that barren mountainside a few hours ago. Her father had refused to wear headphones on the helicopter, indeed he had recoiled from them, clutching his head, as if he were being offered a vice or some other instrument of torture. She decided to take the helicopter straight to Manchester airport, with Mark and Wilson following with the luggage by car. Although he mumbled to himself throughout the journey, what he said was inaudible, and what she was saying to Chris and the helicopter pilot was inaudible to him, which was just as well, since she was emphasizing the importance of landing on the far side of her plane in order to block the view of Global One. Her plane was parked as far away as possible, but there was nowhere on the tarmac from which Dunbar’s big old Boeing could not be seen, unless something was in the way. Global One had always been her father’s favorite toy. It was like another home to him, a home with no fixed address, decorated to his specifications; its astonishing paneled library, carpeted with a pale gold Persian rug, had still lifes by Chardin and William Nicholson hanging between the bookshelves. As a child, the room that amazed her most was the hammam, where she had watched the orange, green, and black geometric tiles on the walls and benches fade among clouds of steam, knowing that the plane was floating thirty thousand feet above the glaciers of Greenland or the deserts of New Mexico.

  Florence thought that seeing his old plane and not being allowed on board would throw her father into a deeper turmoil, but once he was safely installed in her rented Gulfstream, she wondered if it would have made such a difference after all. Perhaps she had been trying to protect him from a confusion that he had already exceeded long ago. He seemed to be bewildered by simply being on a plane. He asked continually if Simon was safe and whether Peter had made it to London. She hadn’t known at the time that Peter was dead, nor had she said that he was at Meadowmeade because her father seemed so desperate to see him again. When she asked who Simon was, all Dunbar could say was that he was a religious man who had saved his life and that they must make sure that he was all right and to “put him on the payroll.” He seemed to recognize Florence as a beneficent figure who had found him when he was lost, but if he understood their relationship, he kept forgetting what it was.

  Dunbar’s mumbling anxiety about the fate of the two men who had helped him to escape only yielded to other emotions when Wilson and Mark turned up by car an hour later. He stared at Wilson with an expression of irresolute intensity, trying to place the face, coming up with a theory and then seeming to dismiss it as altogether too improbable.

  Mark, on the other hand, produced a reaction of instant rage.

  “You! You!” shouted Dunbar, pointing at his sleek and slightly corpulent son-in-law. “No! Not you! Get him out of here! He has conspired against me and had me locked away. You can’t make me go back!” and with these words he leapt out of his chair and dashed with surprising alacrity down the corridor of the plane and locked himself in one of the bedrooms.

  Wilson and Florence had no hesitation in asking Mark to go back to New York on another plane. Florence had the impression that Mark was more put out by the prospect of taking a commercial flight than he was by the way her father had responded to his arrival.

  “Of course,” he said, with a tattered version of his habitual suavity. “Henry seems to be in a thoroughly confused state, poor man. I hope you’ll put him right about my role and explain that it was precisely my strong objection to his imprisonment that got me over here in the first place.”

  While the doctor busied himself with his stethoscope and his blood pressure monitor, his torch and his reflex hammer, Dunbar slipped into an abstracted state, as if he were looking at a screen behind his eyes on which an alternative story was being projected. Florence felt that the plane, the plans, and all the people around him were not radically absent in his mind but, like the Exit signs in a darkened cinema, they couldn’t be expected to compete with something as absorbing as the film itself. After eating some chicken soup and some bread he fell asleep almost immediately.

  Sitting beside him with a hand resting lightly on his shoulder, Florence felt relieved to have her father under her protection, but disturbed by the thought that the person she yearned to be reconciled with might never return from the mental exile he had been driven to by her sisters. She had flown into the Cumbrian wilderness to fetch him, but she had no idea how to retrieve him from the wilderness of his psyche. Nothing in his ascent to power had prepared him for the experience of the last weeks and in particular of the last few days, which seemed to have overrun his mind with a kind of knowledge that he was unable to make sense of. Like a deluge rushing onto a flat, rocky plain, with no slope to direct it or soil to absorb it, it had obliterated all familiar landmarks without bringing any new life in return. How could she reach him in the middle of that sterile flood?

  As the plane hit a band of turbulence on its way down to London, Dunbar frowned in his sleep and then half opened his eyes. He looked up at Florence’s face with an incredulity verging on resentment.

  “Has anyone told you that you look like my youngest daughter?” he asked, speaking with unexpected clarity, given the state he had been in before he fell asleep.

  “I am your daughter,” she said. “I’m Florence.”

  “No,” said Dunbar. “You can’t be, but it’s true that you do look like her.”

  He raised his hands, bracketing the air around his head.

  “I’ve been having trouble,” he said, his fingers testing the space, as if he were trying to locate the extent of a bruise, “getting my thoughts in order.”

  “Yes,” said Florence.

  “When you mustn’t walk on the cracks between the paving stones, but you can’t walk anywhere else…” he paused, his fingers continuing to explore, like a blind man reading a face, “…and the thing that you must avoid at all costs is the only thing that happens.”

  “I understand,” said Florence, “but you’re safe now.”

  “Safe?” said Dunbar bitterly. “If you think that, you’re a fool. Being alive is falling, once you know that, it never stops. Do you understand what I’m telling you? There is no ground, nothing to catch you…”

  Florence could feel what he was saying, but could think of no way to respond. There was no point in trying to argue a person out of a feeling, and in the case of this particular feeling, that nothing was safe, reassurance would only sound like another argument in disguise. He seemed to have become more lucid after a little food and a little rest, but only in order to describe his confusion and his despair more lucidly. All she could do was to stay with him and to wish him well.

  “What’s that?” said Dunbar, startled by the plane’s slightly bumpy landing.

  “We’ve arrived in London,” said Florence.

  “Is Peter here?” asked Dunbar anxiously.

  “No, he stayed behind in Cumbria.”

  “Silly fool,” said Dunbar, “we were going to go to Rome to drink Negronis, that’s what he said, among some of the most beautiful ruins in the world. He helped me to escape from the prison camp. We must put him on the payroll.”

  “We will, Daddy,” said Florence, getting off the bed in preparation for the visitors her father would soon be receiving. She felt she should not be present when legal documents might be changed in her favor. It might seem like a subtle form of coercion, and besides the team that Wilson described wouldn’t be able to fit in her father’s room, even without her being there as well.

  “What did you call me?” said Dunbar, “Florence, is that you?”

  “Yes,” said Florence.

  “I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” said Dunbar, holding his arms out.

  Florence moved round to the far side of the bed and knelt down beside her father, kissing him on either cheek.

  He reached out and tentatively touched the top of her head.

  “Can you ever forgive me?” he said, “cutting you and your children off and giving everythin
g to those two monsters? I have been proud and tyrannical and, worst of all, stupid.”

  Florence looked up and saw that her father’s face was soaked in tears.

  “Of course, of course,” she said, “I’m the one who has been proud. I should have made the first move long ago.”

  “No,” Dunbar insisted, “it was my wretched temper that caused the trouble, and the habit of being in command. Ha!” he let out a short guffaw, full of disillusion. “I can’t even command—sometimes I reach the end of a thought and I have already forgotten where it started.”

  “Well, we’re never going to fall out again,” said Florence, kissing her father’s forehead and briefly resting her head on his chest.

  “Never again,” said Dunbar, holding her face tenderly in both his hands. “My darling Catherine,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief, “I thought I’d lost you, but you’re alive.”

  In the confusion and despondency that followed Florence’s success, Megan was experiencing one of those rare moments in which she wished her husband hadn’t died so unexpectedly last year. By the time she met him, Victor Allen’s colorful Wall Street career had already earned him the nickname “Mad Dog”; in the last ten years of their marriage he had been promoted to “Evil Fuck.” No major deal could take place, even ones that Victor had never glanced at, without the question, “Where is Evil Fuck on this one?” being voiced in anxious conference rooms around the world. He took considerable pride in turning what might have been a pathetically vague description, applicable to any number of his colleagues, into a personal title. In a world in which his rivals tended to be known as Darth Vader, Lord Sauron, or Voldemort, Victor also regarded his sobriquet as a sign of maturity, made up as it was of two plain English words, without any cute allusions to children’s entertainment. Generally speaking, he was a man exhilarated by insults, just as he was impatient of praise, which he regarded as either “a blinding statement of the obvious” or a Trojan horse for extracting money from him. It was hard to point to any particular deal or innovation that justified the title he grew to cherish: his exploitation of barely legal tax loopholes, his creation of catastrophic debt, using ever more intricate and deceptive financial instruments, his preparedness to rip apart old and successful companies, on which whole communities and tens of thousands of families depended, in order to make a few investors even more disruptively rich, were in themselves no more surprising on Wall Street than finding bread in a bakery, but the scale of his operations, the extent of his duplicity, and the intensity of his sarcasm and triumphalism meant that, like a runner who still has the reserves to sprint at the end of a marathon, he broke away from the bobbing mass of evil fucks in his generation and crossed the finish line ahead of the competition.

  If only he were still around, or, even better, if only he could come back for a week, like a special guest star in a hot television series, and then disappear again. It had been tough for Megan to line up enough eulogies at Victor’s memorial service to do justice to her status as a very important widow, but right now she could almost have written a poem for that impoverished occasion. As Jesus busied himself trying to bring her to orgasm, she started to imagine the first line. “Victor, thou shouldst be living at this hour!” That was a firm traditional start…“We need thy venom and thy debt…” She couldn’t immediately think of anything that rhymed with “debt,” but in any case, the inspiration for her poem was the fact that Victor would have improvised some wonderfully aggressive or devious move to secure the buyout of the Dunbar Trust. His old partner, Dick Bild, was holding the line, but could he be trusted to go to the necessary extremes?

  Oh, that was an unexpected little thrill! Jesus had managed to capture her attention. There was no doubt that he deserved an “A” for effort and he was certainly making better use of his tongue than when he murmured inane compliments from a neighboring pillow, showing her that he was not just a ruthless killer but a bashful little boy who allowed his mother’s tender Hispanic influence, already quite conspicuous enough in his Christian name, to give a sibilant softness to a Texan accent otherwise hardened and whitewashed by his belt-wielding, truck-driving, hard-drinking, dreadful old ex-military Pa. She already knew the whole dreary story.

  She realized she hadn’t sighed for ages. She probably should, or perhaps even moan.

  “Don’t stop,” she said, catching her breath, “please don’t stop.”

  If he stopped, he might talk. On balance, she was better off as she was, although it was tempting to scream with frustration, while thrashing about to give the impression that she was in an epileptic sexual ecstasy.

  Of course one had to be prepared to run into occasional patches of turbulence, but the last few hours had been really ridiculous. The British police, who wanted to question her team about Peter Walker’s suicide, had almost caught up with them, but they had just managed to get Global One off the ground in time. A few minutes later and they would have been in some godawful provincial police station. And then Braggs had started behaving strangely, saying it couldn’t represent them in this particular case, due to a conflict of interest. Obviously, Dr. Harris was more of a wily old fox than he seemed at first sight. In any case her conscience was clear: how were they supposed to be responsible, when they were miles away at the time, for a complete lunatic hanging himself in an asylum shower? She wasn’t surprised that they were being accused; people never tired of attacking her family. It was envy, of course, pure and simple. There was nothing one could do about envy, it was just part of human nature; her mother had warned her about it on her first day of kindergarten, but it was especially disappointing to see it rear its ugly head at this precise moment.

  Florence had been a complete nightmare as usual. They had managed to get rid of her for a year, but now she had come back in order to meddle in things that she knew nothing about. Of course she had been the one to get Daddy, as she always had been. The last daughter to arrive, she was still the first to have really captured his attention. Through most of Megan’s life, Florence had sat there smugly monopolizing their father’s love, while no amount of obedience, flattery, or aping of his attitudes could secure a single drop for either of her sisters. This time it was too serious to let Florence get away with being Daddy’s little favorite. Florence now stood between Megan and the prize that she and Abby had been working toward for three years. Bloated on her father’s love, she was like a grazing cow that wanders onto the railway tracks just as a high-speed train is coming round the bend. As far as Megan was concerned, the consequences were inevitable.

  Florence would of course claim that her sudden presence was entirely motivated by concern for their father but, first of all, he had been in an excellent (and very expensive) facility where he was being given the best professional care and, secondly, he was not just any old doddery father who needed to be visited in his nursing home (which she had fully intended to do in due course), but a powerful symbol around whom all sorts of outdated and reactionary forces might gather. She and Abigail had been secretly cultivating the least self-righteous directors, offering them not entirely ethical inducements to favor Eagle Rock’s bid. They hadn’t dared approach Dunbar and Wilson’s old allies, but with their own votes and with Dr. Bob joining the Board, they expected to command a slim majority, hoping the rest of the directors would be brought around by the very generous proposal itself.

  Eagle Rock would be offering fifteen percent over the current share price, making it a bonanza for ordinary shareholders. It would of course be quite wrong to pile a huge burden of debt on the poor Trust: it was, after all, excessive debts that led to massive redundancies, fire sales of subsidiaries, and the destruction of fine old companies. In other words, exactly what they had in mind! They were going to make the Trust leaner and meaner, and then make a new public offering of the streamlined company five years down the road. According to Dick Bild, she and Abby could expect to make 1.4 billion dollars each—which didn’t seem that much, considering what a pain it was turning ou
t to be—but they were only doing what made sound business sense, and it was better to have it done by people who truly loved the company and not by some rapacious outsider. Really, there was nothing to worry about. Eagle Rock had a very clear, fully financed, legally bulletproof friendly merger proposal, and nobody else would be interested in the Dunbar Trust at this price since it had lost the China satellite deal to Unicom.

  “Oh God, that feels good,” she groaned.

  It was quite frightening how soon she tired of her lovers. J had seemed so thrilling last night, with his glowing young body, and his look of feverish concentration, worthy of a man working against the clock to defuse a nuclear device but all in fact lavished on bringing her wave after wave of pleasure. How could he already feel like a misguided revival? It couldn’t just be that Dr. Bob was no longer in the room next door, making it less fun to abandon herself to fits of amplified screaming. She wasn’t that superficial, although there had been a certain vindictive comfort in knowing that he was on the other side of the wall, seething with jealousy, or at least insomnia. In a better world than this, J might have lasted a few weeks, or just stuck around as a sexual opportunity she took up when it suited her, but the pressure of the times meant that she was going to have to ask him for a special favor. She wouldn’t have time to dress up the request, except to give it an air of heart-wrenching necessity. She would shed silent but copious tears, genuinely impressed by the burden placed on her in having to ask something so unnatural, but also intuiting that J would be powerless in the face of her tears, having spent much of his violent childhood comforting his beaten mother as she wept in a corner of their bungalow. J would assent with fitting gravity, while advancing the theory that in his opinion it took real courage on her part to make such a tough decision. She would respond by clinging to him more tightly and squeezing a little more fluid from her tear ducts onto his hairless chest. In a moment of pure stillness, a small puddle might form between his intimidating pectorals. Megan couldn’t help being impressed by her own painstaking choreography.