Dunbar

by Edward St. Aubyn

  “How was Austria?” said Steve. “Have you got the old man in a secure facility with Alsatians patrolling the perimeter?”

  “Well, that didn’t pan out quite the way we planned it,” said Dr. Bob, immediately feeling defensive and wondering if there was any way Cogniccenti could take his money back.

  “How so?”

  “Florence got to her father before we could and she’s brought him back here.”

  “This is a fuck-up, Bob,” said Steve coldly. “This is not what we agreed. Dunbar is one of the toughest negotiators on the planet; we needed to get him out of the picture. Is he going to be in any shape to attend their meeting on Thursday?”

  “Absolutely not,” said Dr. Bob. “He was lost in a storm in the Lake District for the best part of three days, with nothing to eat and nowhere to sleep. It’s a wonder he’s alive at all. Mark Rush saw him earlier today and said that he’s completely incoherent and physically wrecked. I’m sorry we couldn’t secure him. Florence got the police involved—”

  “I’m not interested in what happened,” Steve interrupted. “I’m only looking in one direction: straight ahead. After this call, I want you to destroy the phone you’re using right now. I’m going to do the same with mine.”

  “But how will I get hold of you?”

  “You won’t. This is our last conversation until the takeover is completed. Then we can meet up to celebrate.”

  “Okay,” said Dr. Bob, who’d never heard anyone who sounded less inclined to celebrate with him. Before he could say anything to round off the conversation amicably, he realized that the connection had gone dead.

  “Well, fuck you, too,” he muttered, lowering the tinted window to his right and posting his Unicom phone into four lanes of busy traffic on the highway.

  —

  Like a swimmer blowing the water from his flooded snorkel before returning to the reassuring, amplified rhythm of his breathing, Dunbar threw off the weight of his dream; the dream of a stag being pursued by dogs and men intent on bursting his heart. He emerged at a level where he could hear his own labored breath and knew that he had been dreaming, but without being fully awake and without knowing where he was. His mind was a bruise of pure emotion with no conscious direction or sense of context. Each pulse of fear and longing and hope was like an overdose pushing him back into a dream. He pictured himself trying to clamber out of a rough sea onto a rocky shore, and being reclaimed again and again by an indisputable wave that dragged him back out into the open water. He woke a little more on his next attempt. The sharp rocks of his half-dream cut into his bare feet and hands as he scrambled to get beyond the reach of the exploding waves. He felt the sting of his lacerated skin and, as he emerged further, into a more rational realm, the image of the seashore receded and disappeared. His confusion no longer took the form of overpowering visions, but of unanswerable arguments. He had a memory of seeing Catherine recently, which he knew must be false, unless he was dead, which he did not believe to be the case. So what the hell was going on?

  He opened his eyes. He was definitely not dead, unless death was a perfect replica of life. Perhaps the dead were removed, like sculptures that are buried in museums to protect them from curious crowds and acid rain, and then replaced by the copies that preside over public squares and excavated cities. Anything seemed possible on these contested borders, but what were they the borders between: life and death, or sanity and madness? He couldn’t tell what was private anymore.

  “Hello,” he called out quietly, not knowing whether he was inviting help or hurt. And then he called more loudly, because the pain of not knowing what was going on was even greater than the possibility of things going wrong.

  “Hello!”

  The door opened and a lovely woman came into the room. Dunbar’s immediate past, which had been hidden by dreams and speculations, suddenly fell into place.

  “Florence,” he said, “it’s you.”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “You saved me when I was lost.”

  Florence came over and sat on the edge of the bed by her father and instinctively reached out and brushed some of the hair from his forehead, and rested her hand on the side of his face, as she would have if one of her children were suffering from a fever. Dunbar reached up and covered her hand with his own. He had been so starved of gentleness that tears swelled up spontaneously in his eyes.

  “We were on a plane to London,” he said.

  “That’s right, and now we’ve flown on to New York.”

  “New York,” said Dunbar, like someone who had heard about it but never imagined he would go there.

  “I was waiting for you to wake up and then I thought we could go to my apartment in the city, if you like, or,” Florence hesitated, “we could go back to my place in Wyoming. You’ve never been there before, but it’s really cosy and the land around is very beautiful.”

  “No more land,” said Dunbar.

  “You’d be looking at it from a safe place,” said Florence, “not lost in it.”

  “No more land,” said Dunbar firmly. “Don’t I have a meeting to go to? Wilson was here and he said there was a meeting.”

  “You only have to go if you want to. The main thing is for you to get some rest.”

  “I’ve had some rest,” said Dunbar, hoisting himself up on his pillows. “What time is it?”

  “It’s two-thirty on Wednesday morning,” said Florence, half pleased and half alarmed to see the return of her father’s old habit of authority. “Nobody is awake, apart from us, and so there’s nothing to do except go home and settle in.”

  Dunbar subsided again, as if he had been told to stand at ease after making an especially rigid and formal salute.

  “Nothing to do,” he said, his tears working their way through the folds and ridges of his cheeks. The phrase seemed to reprieve him for a while from a world of suffering, but he couldn’t stay away for long.

  “Can you forgive me?” He asked. “I’ve been so confused, not just recently but always—”

  “There’s nothing to forgive,” she interrupted him.

  “This is what matters,” he said, pressing her hand.

  “We can just leave,” said Florence; “if this is what matters, let’s just go away and forget about the meeting.”

  “But it’s all part of it,” said Dunbar, caught up again. “I mustn’t let your sisters take the Trust. I want it to go to you and your children.”

  “We’re fine,” said Florence, “we’ve got enough.”

  “Enough,” said Dunbar, amazed again. “You’ve got enough and there’s nothing to do.” He let these two simple phrases shine for a moment, like a man holding a gem to the light to see if it has any hidden flaws, but then, as if he had never really meant to buy them in the first place, he returned them to Florence with a shake of the head.

  “They mustn’t be allowed to get away with it,” he said.

  “It’s just how they are,” said Florence. “Let them have it.”

  “No,” said Dunbar. “It’s the legacy.”

  It was five in the morning when Jesus walked out through the checkered marble hall of Megan’s building, past the half-sleepy and half-contemptuous night porter who thought he knew exactly what was going on, and had no intention of opening the door for Mrs. Allen’s latest “personal trainer.”

  Park Avenue was dark and unseasonably warm. Cabs drifted by, but J was in the mood to walk, to stay focused on this incredible feeling that was expanding inside him. He was in love for the first time in his life, truly in love. He wanted to surrender to Megan completely, to merge with her, to be an extension of her will. He hadn’t abandoned himself to another person since he was a tiny kid and naturally loved his mom with all his heart, but then instead of looking after him, she had needed his protection and his comforting. Of course he would protect Megan on a security level, but in the bigger picture she was the magic woman he had always wanted, the woman who was going to totally look after him. She said they were go
ing to live together, that she wanted him around her all the time, because he made her feel safe and excited all at once, which was every woman’s dream. After he had done the “special favor” she had requested she was going to take him to her place in Maui, “a real paradise on Earth.” She had shown him photographs of the vast white house on top of a Hawaiian hill, with a path leading down to a private beach, and mangos you could just reach up and pluck off a tree. And while he looked at the pictures, he had this movie running in his head, thinking of all the ways he was going to drive her crazy with desire, but then he had recoiled from his own porno fantasies, because it was so much more than a sex thing: it was a total thing, as if they were one person. Just being separated from her right now felt like being punched with his hands tied. They were meant to be together, totally together all the time.

  He wasn’t going to let anything steal his attention from this beautiful feeling. Everything else could be delegated to his inner drill sergeant, a cold bastard who got things done without wasting his time having feelings about what he was doing. If somebody needed to be taught a lesson, he was the man. If somebody needed to have the fear of God put into her soul, the sergeant was on it. Just say the word. No problem. Job done.

  —

  Mark was not exactly proud of what he’d done, but his overall pride, like a large, diversified portfolio, could easily survive the crash of an individual stock, or the shame of an individual incident. Besides, was it really so shameful to catch a lift home on the family plane? There had been an odd atmosphere at the time, as he hurried over from Florence’s rented jet to what might be seen as the enemy camp, but the more he thought about it on the flight over, the more he realized that he was essentially a neutral nation, a Switzerland, looking down, with distaste and regret, but without favoritism, at the raging armies slaughtering each other incompetently on the muddy plains beyond the well-guarded and mountainous frontiers of his indifference. If there was one thing he disliked more than the way his wife had treated Dunbar, it was the way Dunbar had treated him: shaking his palsied finger and making all sorts of unjustified accusations in front of everybody, in front of Wilson and his dreadful, earnest son, who was obviously desperate to get Florence, now that she was galloping back into the family business on her white charger, saving Daddy and getting all his non-Trust assets along the way. Frankly, it was all a little too sordid for his taste.

  Mark sat in the cosy paneled breakfast room on the middle floor of the apartment, enjoying his tropical fruit and black coffee. He encouraged Manuela to pour him another cup of coffee and turned his attention to the Wednesday morning papers folded neatly beside him on the breakfast table. However things turned out in the end, neutrality was the order of the day. He may have paid rather too much for his ticket home by giving an exhaustive account of everything he’d found out from Florence, but from now on, when it came to keeping out of destructive conflicts, he was going to be more Swiss than the Swiss. Thank God he was seeing Mindy for lunch. She always made him feel good about himself, about who he really was and what he really stood for. She reminded him that the Rushes had been there before the Dunbars and would still be there after the Dunbars had fled the scene.

  Mark picked up the Wall Street Journal and leafed through the first few pages of familiar headlines about low oil prices and declining Chinese stocks, eventually settling on an article that promised to reinforce his established view that government was tightening a hangman’s noose of red tape around the innocent neck of the American business community. His passion for material comfort was matched by a passion for intellectual comfort, even when it took the form of indignation or, if it came to that, apocalyptic pessimism toward things he couldn’t care less about, like the mounting pressure on the middle classes or the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest at the rate of one Belgium a year (or was that the melting of the Arctic ice cap?). It made him chuckle that Belgium had become a unit of ecological catastrophe, whereas in his childhood it had been used to describe the vastness of the lost estates (so much more affecting than the loss of ice or jungle) of various Polish or Hungarian families.

  As he was folding the Wall Street Journal in half to make it more manageable, Mark’s eye was caught by the screen on the wall of the breakfast room, permanently tuned to Bloomberg, with the sound turned down and the subtitles turned on. The word “Dunbar” was written in huge letters behind the presenter’s back. What he saw not only stole his attention from the promising article about the scandal of over-regulation; it also produced the opposite emotions to the outraged complacencies he had been counting on. Unicom was making a tender offer for the common stock of the Dunbar Trust, at a very aggressive premium, which Mark quickly calculated was somewhere in the region of twenty-two percent, significantly higher than the usual offer of fifteen to twenty percent above the current market price. He immediately felt a tangle of conflicting impulses. A few minutes ago, the five hundred thousand Dunbar shares he had been given as a wedding present by his father-in-law were worth twenty-three million dollars, now they were potentially worth over twenty-eight million, but he could only realize that intoxicating five-million-dollar rush by stabbing his wife unceremoniously in the back.

  How much money was enough? It was a question he found profoundly puzzling, since the money he already had gave him so little satisfaction. He seemed to fear losing it without enjoying having it. The only thing that was certain, if he was going to get away from Abby without making the rest of his life either very short or very unpleasant, was that he could not ask for any more from the Dunbars. Combined with his other assets, the twenty-eight would bring his net worth to a round fifty million. He vaguely remembered a time when that might have seemed to him a splendid sum, but the distorting influence of spending the last twenty years among billionaires now made it seem strangely inadequate.

  Oh, to hell with it! It was better to live in a cottage with the woman he loved than in a palace with his ghastly wife. Farewell, Global One! Farewell, Home Lake! Farewell, estates the size of Belgium! He would run away with Mindy and live the simple life in Connecticut, or perhaps in Palm Beach (with only fifty, it really would be a simple life in that particular location) or (one crazy notion tumbling upon another) Santa Barbara? How relaxing it would be to live with Mindy by the sea, reading books he had always meant to get round to, taking trips to places he had always meant to visit, as well as returning to favorite old haunts. Life by the pool at the Cipriani wasn’t so bad. “A Bellini in the hand is worth two on the wall,” as his father famously said when he refused to leave that delightful watering hole in order to be dragged to some museum or church through the overcrowded streets of Venice.

  One problem was that Unicom’s tender offer would contain all the usual conditions about having to acquire a majority of the stock within a limited period. If he offered his stock to Unicom and they failed to complete the deal, Abby would find out and nail him to a cross for the rest of his miserable existence. It would be wiser to wait until he knew which way the wind was blowing. He had met Cogniccenti once or twice—a classic mushroom man—but it would be too risky to approach him directly. The simplest way to discover what sort of headway Unicom was making was to hurry to Abby’s side in her hour of need and share her worries about Cogniccenti’s outrageous act of piracy and, above all, to find out how close he was to succeeding. What bliss to be the one who threw his stock into the scales and tipped the balance, to be the man who destroyed the Dunbar Trust!

  —

  The shock that Wilson experienced when he was sacked after forty years in charge of Dunbar’s legal department was trivial compared to the dismay he felt now, no longer in charge of the Trust’s defenses when it was facing the launch of Unicom’s hostile takeover. His earlier feelings of resentment had soon been eclipsed by his sympathy for the turmoil that his old friend was struggling with, whereas his current feeling of alarm was reinforced by that sympathy.

  What could he do to help? He started to make a list of the factors t
hat could affect the outcome, but as he wrote he realized that he could not answer the underlying question: Who was the list for? Florence and Henry were not capable of deploying it, Abigail and Megan were not fit to have it, and the legal department he had directed until recently was not allowed to share any information with him, or to consult him in any matters relating to company business. The heart of the problem was that the company had lost its leadership; everyone was an imposter compared to Dunbar, but now Dunbar had become an imposter in his own right, startled by the things he should have found most familiar and estranged from the drives that had built his empire in the first place. He had always run his emotional life like a subsidiary of the Trust, something that could be managed by negotiation and incentive, or punishment and exile. Now, it was the other way round, and all he could bring to the business was his emotional chaos. The only man who could save the company was himself in need of being saved. And yet the Board might still go with him, if he could just make himself halfway persuasive and coherent at tomorrow’s meeting. His resignation of power, his strange fit of madness in London, his incarceration and his escape seemed to have brought about a revolution that might ultimately have some benefit for his soul, but in the current crisis could only be disastrous.

  Wilson continued to write the list, as much to calm himself down as to explore possible tactics. There was the antitrust issue. A complaint should immediately be drawn up for the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice outlining the competitive harm of letting a media company the size of Unicom take over a media company the size of Dunbar. He made a new dash on the yellow legal pad and wrote “Insider.” It was an unlikely mistake, but then again there was no reason to underestimate the greed and clumsiness of people in a hurry to make money. Was there anyone close to Cogniccenti, or any shell company that had acquired Dunbar stock in anticipation of a rise in value that would inevitably follow the tender offer? That question led naturally to the next two points that he jotted down: “Creeping tender” and “Concert party.” Had Unicom been covertly acquiring shares over a long period, or through third parties in order to join forces this morning?