Dunbar

by Edward St. Aubyn

  Even as he pressed on, his confidence was undermined by not knowing his exact objective. If Dunbar and Florence were not capable of standing up for the Trust, then the only way forward would be to support Abigail and Megan’s grab for power and put them in charge of defending the company’s employees and assets from a hostile takeover. That was an outcome that Wilson wanted to avoid. He was fighting a battle on two fronts, while having to concede that he might have to form an alliance with one of his enemies. Normally, Wilson would have delighted in playing three-dimensional chess, but instead of enjoying the familiar sense of his own clarity and ability to think a few moves ahead of his opponents, he was suddenly engulfed by a feeling of sadness and loss.

  He dropped his pen onto the pad and sank back in his armchair, staring at the dried flowers in the fireplace of his hotel suite. He thought about the first time he met Henry back in Eagle Rock, his old house in Bridle Path, where he lived with his first wife. Wilson had only been twenty-nine at the time. The senior partner who usually dealt with Dunbar was away and, in what turned out to be a misguided protection of his weekend plans, had delegated the meeting to Wilson. The maid who opened the door had led him through the house to the terrace above the sloping lawn of the garden. Dunbar was trying to organize a baseball game with his family. Abby and Megan, who were still children, were bored but compliant, while their mother, already half drunk, wearing bright yellow trousers and holding a cigarette in one hand, was making loud, mocking remarks from the edge of the improvised field. Dunbar soon spotted Wilson and the loose, disgruntled configuration formed by the game dissolved as he strode up the slope to greet his guest, but in that first glimpse Wilson had seen that Dunbar had to organize something, compete with something, and be active in some way at all times, even when he was ostensibly playing with his unwilling family on a Sunday afternoon. He had a phenomenal physical energy that made all contact with him seem urgent and adventurous.

  Dunbar, who also radiated unfulfilled ambition at that time, was more impressed by what people wanted to become than by what they already were, and after spending a few hours with Wilson asked him to leave his firm and take charge of forming the legal team that would take his company public. For some reason Dunbar had immediately commanded his loyalty and inspired a level of dedication that turned out always to include Sundays. Wilson took the risk of leaving his law firm and taking an important piece of their business with him. He knew that he and Dunbar could do great things together, much greater than he could ever achieve by crawling up the hierarchy of the Toronto branch of Stone, Rucker and White.

  Wilson picked up the pad and pen again. He must press on. If only Henry could regain enough focus for one last fight, maybe they could still save his life’s work from the predatory Unicom.

  —

  After her torrid night with Jesus, Megan had slept until lunchtime on Wednesday. Glancing at her phone, but refusing to get involved with it just yet, she was struck by the number of missed calls she had from Abby and from just about every senior executive in the company. There were also calls from the bankers involved in Eagle Rock’s acquisition of the Trust. Well, they were just going to have to wait. There was always a lot of traffic before a Board meeting, but she needed all her concentration and all her acting skills to carry off the meeting she was about to have with Kevin. She wanted Kevin to get rid of J for her. In order not to seem too capricious she would have to give him a convincing reason for liquidating his new colleague. She had settled on the fantasy that she had let slip a crucial corporate secret potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars and that J was blackmailing her with the threat of selling the information to some rival—Unicom was the obvious choice.

  Ah, here he was! She could hear the doorbell ringing and prepared an agitated, deeply preoccupied and tragic look to greet him with.

  —

  Dunbar knew exactly where he was: he was in the dining room of Florence’s apartment in New York, drinking a small cup of coffee after lunch. Florence was talking to Wilson on the phone, his old friend Wilson, to whom he owed an apology for his unfair sacking. Everything in the room looked bright and a little startling as the light flooded in through the glass doors of the surrounding terrace. He had come close to insanity and to death; he had been beside himself with anxiety that he might not see Florence before he died, and yet here he was staying in her apartment. Far from the mediocrity of returning to normal, things were better than they had ever been. For the first time in weeks he felt that his body was made of one substance, rather than held together, like a favorite old toy, with rags and tape and string. He had slept and eaten and the bad meds forced on him by Dr. Bob and Dr. Harris seemed to have been purged by his Cumbrian ordeal and to have lost their hold over his mind and mood. He had always taken a certain physical solidity for granted and only noticed it when it was taken away. Just for the moment he was as surprised to have it back as he had been to lose it. It was familiar and strange in equal measure, like the first hour of arriving at Home Lake at the beginning of the summer when a thousand forgotten details rushed back and insisted that they had been there all along.

  He struggled to define what it was he was feeling underneath that tangle of novelty and recognition. There was some ground to it all, something he had scarcely ever known, except maybe when Catherine agreed to marry him, but then it had been much more euphoric than this steady and fundamental sense of something. Perhaps it was gratitude; perhaps that was the right name for the ground he was now standing on. Yes, he felt—his vocabulary was venturing into new territory here—blessed. It was out of character for him to care about identifying his feelings beyond the basic division between the ones he liked and the ones he didn’t. He had never had much of a language for exploring his motivation, or any motive to develop one. He had always been lost in action, driven by what he had taken to be the self-evident truth that there could be nothing more meaningful than accumulating power and money. It was late to be beginning an introspective journey, but he knew he had no choice. The last few weeks had not just been about madness; they had taken him away from the world of facts and statistics and laws into a world of metaphors and insights and obscure connections. He was not flying out of a war zone he need never return to; he was still in a maze that he couldn’t get out of except by going through its center. Nevertheless, he felt he was near its center and that he might be able to find his way out, given time.

  “Hello, Daddy,” said Florence, coming back into the dining room.

  “Darling!” said Dunbar, “I was just thinking how happy, well, how blessed I feel.”

  Florence rested both hands on his shoulders and leant over to kiss the top of his head. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you use that word before.”

  “Yes,” said Dunbar, “it’s a first.” He smiled at her, a little embarrassed.

  She pressed gently on his shoulders to reassure him.

  “Wilson would like to come over at five o’clock to discuss a few things with you, if that’s all right.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Dunbar, falling over himself trying to catch up with his guilt, “I must apologize more fully. I thanked him this morning and gave him his job back.”

  “He’s never really stopped doing it,” said Florence, “but I know he’s happy to have your confidence back.”

  “I’d like to have my confidence back as well,” said Dunbar.

  “It’s so great that it is coming back,” said Florence. “I was thinking we might go for a walk in the Park, if you’d like that. It’s such a beautiful day and Wilson won’t be here for a couple of hours.”

  “Yes, I’d love that,” said Dunbar.

  As the two of them rode down together in the elevator, Dunbar noticed that he felt a kind of inexplicable pleasure in everything. Danny, the elevator man, who Florence had greeted when they got in, seemed to be a person of almost saintly beneficence; the triangular brown button leather seat in the corner of the elevator had the curious charm and intensity of the miniat
ure; the dark gray and gold hall glowed with mirrors and flowers. The doorman was obviously in love with Florence, and who could blame him? In fact, the whole experience reminded Dunbar of A Day in the Park, one of the favorite books of his early childhood, in which Bobby, a boy in shorts and a yellow sweater, goes with his elegant mother, who is wearing a cream-colored pleated dress and a pair of dark glasses, to buy a balloon in Central Park. The story had almost no point at all and yet it exerted a fascination on him when he was four that was close to the feeling of gratuitous delight that he was having right now, crossing Fifth Avenue toward the Park’s nearest entrance, with Florence by his side.

  Asked which way he wanted to go, Dunbar chose the path that curved down to the Conservatory Pond, where people went to sail model boats on the water.

  “I’ve been thinking about our talk on the plane last night,” he said. “I feel much more rested now and…”

  “Blessed?” said Florence, smiling.

  “I knew I was going to be teased about that word,” said Dunbar, smiling back at her. “I was going to say ‘solid,’ but it sounded a bit odd. The point is I’d like to take up your offer and come with you to Wyoming.”

  “That’s wonderful,” said Florence.

  “At least for a few weeks, or maybe longer.”

  “As long as you like.”

  “Your sisters don’t know this yet, and technically it has to go through the directors, but Wilson persuaded me to buy back the Trust’s property assets and I’ve put in a strong offer. They’re not part of the core business, just good investments, land on the edge of Vancouver and Toronto and other big cities, worth near enough a billion. All that’ll go to you and your kids, along with the art and the houses…”

  “I think we’ve got enough already,” said Florence, hesitating a little, so as to make it clear that she was touched by his intention. “Why don’t we make a foundation? Buy some land and not build on it.”

  “You certainly know how to provoke an old capitalist,” said Dunbar.

  “It’s a fair trade,” said Florence: “for every acre you develop, buy a hundred acres and leave them just as they are.”

  “I’ll think about it,” said Dunbar, already knowing he would agree. “Just being useless,” he added.

  “Useless to us,” said Florence.

  “Yes,” said Dunbar, “I understand,” he trailed off. “Your sisters,” he said, anchoring himself back in more established ground, “have a lust for power, and I can’t pretend I don’t know where it comes from, but right now I don’t see any reason not to let them have what they want. The Dunbar Trust will still be one of the greatest companies in the world, whoever runs it. That’ll be my legacy…”

  Dunbar stopped. There was a look of excruciating pain on Florence’s face as she pressed her hand against the side of her neck.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, reaching out to hold her arm.

  “I’m sorry. I just suddenly felt this sharp pain in my neck. It was like a bee sting, but the bees can’t be awake at this time of year.”

  “Let me have a look; you never know with these crazy seasons.”

  Florence unclasped her hand.

  “There’s a little trickle of blood,” said Dunbar.

  “It’s probably some kid with a BB gun,” said Florence, sounding unconcerned but looking pale and upset.

  “We must get a doctor to have a look at it,” said Dunbar, his heart pounding violently and his ears suddenly deafened by internal ringing.

  “Oh, there’s no need for a doctor,” said Florence, “I’ll just put some disinfectant on it and have a rest while you’re talking to Wilson.”

  “Let’s go back in,” said Dunbar, no longer feeling as solid as he had claimed to be only a few minutes before.

  —

  Abby had decided, without having the time to look into the matter thoroughly, that she was having the worst day of her life. She had been on the phone hour after hour talking to the senior management of the Trust and to the directors who were due at the Board meeting at ten o’clock the next morning. In the midst of this extraordinary crisis, Meg had failed to answer her phone until three o’clock and was then amazed to hear the news, which everyone else had been talking about nonstop since the moment it came on the wire just before the opening of the stock market. When they finally spoke, Abby found it hard to believe that Meg had no idea about Unicom, and she even entertained the suspicion that Meg might have sold her shares to Cogniccenti at the high premium he was offering. It would be an insane thing to do, but then Meg was capable of almost anything.

  She and Meg each had fifteen percent of the Trust’s stock (the ten they had originally received and the half of Florence’s share they had each been given when she turned her back on the company) and they only had to get just over twenty percent more to block the majority that was needed for a merger to be forced on the company. Still, it was maddening to be thinking of defensive actions when they had been quietly planning to take the company private the next day, at what now turned out to be a considerably lower price than Unicom was offering the shareholders. She was beginning to think that it might be more skillful to present Eagle Rock’s privatization of the company as a white knight that just happened to be on hand, fully armed and ready to buy the company in order to save it, but any attempt to present Eagle Rock’s bid as a contingency plan that had been in place for a long time, ready to deal with just such an emergency, was impossible in view of the second-worst piece of news she had heard that day: Dunbar had reinstated Wilson as his counsel and they were both attending tomorrow’s Board meeting.

  The most fundamental problem, however, was money. She and Bild would have to raise more debt. Eagle Rock already had big lines of credit with JP Morgan, Citibank, and Morgan Stanley, but they might have to start selling off some non-core assets to raise the money to buy the rest of the company. It was all getting crushingly complicated. Why hadn’t Bild returned her endless calls? He was the only one who could work out what to do and make it happen.

  —

  Dunbar thanked Wilson one more time as the doors of the elevator closed in the hall of Florence’s apartment. His apology to Wilson had been as effortless and natural as Wilson’s dismissal of any grievances. During their meeting over the last three hours, Wilson had persuaded Dunbar to go into battle one more time. The news of Unicom’s tender offer and the rumors coming from some of the directors, whose loyalty to Dunbar and Wilson exceeded their discretion, that Abby and Megan were trying to take the company private, convinced Dunbar to postpone the announcement of his complete retirement.

  He was eager to see Florence, who had been resting since their walk in the Park. He knew there was something radically different about his attitude toward tomorrow’s battle, something about himself that he didn’t recognize. The idea of the Trust that bore his name being devoured by Unicom was theoretically repulsive to him, as was the prospect of his two older daughters privatizing the company by incurring massive debt, sacking thousands of employees, and spinning off some of its less profitable, but most influential and visible holdings. Nevertheless, there had been something missing in his response to this calamitous news. He puzzled over what had happened and then suddenly realized that he wasn’t feeling furious. Like a familiar painting that only gets noticed because it has been removed, leaving a bare hook and silhouette of dirt on the wall, only the absence of his fury could make him see just how much of his famous “energy” used to be derived from a more or less perpetual argument with the unsatisfactory nature of things, briefly appeased by the occasional big victory, but always renewed by a boundless sense of frustration. His reconciliation with Florence seemed to have given him a sense of peace that was too deep for a corporate war, even such a personal one, to disturb. He and Wilson would go in tomorrow and try to get control out of the hands of his greedy and selfish daughters and give it to his two most trusted senior executives; they would say their piece and join forces one last time to try to save the compan
y, but he would leave the results to the directors and to fate and, whatever happened, he would head out with Florence tomorrow for a life of family and philanthropy. He had been recast in some furnace that he had neither sought nor devised and now he seemed to have no fury or ambition left, only love. Dunbar reached out his hand and leant against the wall to support himself, his breath catching in his throat as he took in the magnitude of what had happened to him and the thought that he might have died without experiencing it.

  Despite his exhaustion, Dr. Bob’s anxiety had robbed him of sleep. With a groan and a curse, he threw aside the bedclothes and swung his legs to the floor. It was only five o’clock, but he might as well get up. This was going to be one of the most fraught and crucial days of his life. He just needed to get to the end of it. Between Cogniccenti and the Dunbar girls, he had enough money to retire and become his own personal physician, the sole recipient of his extravagant prescriptions and his expert care, but he needed to walk away without Abby and Megan knowing for sure that he had betrayed them and without Cogniccenti’s chilling disappointment at his failure to get rid of Dunbar having any occasion to grow stronger. He had taken the precaution of buying a ticket for the nine o’clock flight to Zurich that evening. But right now he needed to be sharp. He shook a couple of thirty-milligram Adderall into his palm and washed them down with the water on his bedside table. Then, reflecting on how ineffective they had become recently, he took a third.

  —

  “What the fuck, Dick? You didn’t answer my calls all day yesterday and now you call me at six-thirty in the morning.”

  “Abby,” said Dick Bild, “I sincerely apologize, but yesterday was the worst ambush of my career. Unicom was a grenade in the swimming pool. We were carrying people out on stretchers; I saw some of the toughest traders in the business with tears in their eyes. I had the whole office focused on the single purpose of acquiring the extra twenty percent of the stock that would get Eagle Rock across the line and at least block the Unicom merger. We were supposed to be hitting a home run today. And now we can only succeed by building a second tower of debt next to the one we’ve already built.”