“The waste of love,” repeated Dunbar, shattered by his daughter’s verdict and by the landscape it forced him to imagine.
“Oh, Daddy,” said Florence, speaking in an emphatic whisper, “I’m so glad we reconciled before it was too late.”
“But it is too late,” said Dunbar, unable to stop himself.
“I know…” she said. “The children—I can’t bear to let them down when they’re so young.”
Dunbar struggled to find an exonerating formula for his tormented daughter, but the effort of speaking proved too much for her and before he could relieve Florence of her blameless guilt, she closed her eyes again and lay motionless on the bed, barely breathing.
“She’s resting,” said Wilson, “let’s sit down for a while.”
Dunbar seemed to crumble as he sank into one of the armchairs in the corner of his daughter’s room. Above the formality of his polished black shoes and charcoal trousers, his abdomen and his chest were exposed in an incongruous streak of nakedness. He watched the tufts of white hair rise and fall with his breathing, as if he were observing someone else’s body for signs of life.
“No mercy,” said Dunbar, pressing his hands to his head, “in this world, or any other.”
He felt pain gripping his forehead like a metal band. Soon, a second belt of pain started tightening around his chest. He crossed his arms and clasped his sides, as if hugging himself after a long separation, and then slouched back into the chair, struggling to breathe. He felt the onset of that boundless dread, the untethered astronaut tumbling through the stale darkness of space. And then he felt a heavy flood in his head, like the time he flipped backward and cracked his skull on the path in Davos; he had seemed to be suspended on the thick threshold of passing out, registering the emergency with a strange detachment, his head flooding with a foretaste of oblivion.
Before he knew what was going on, the doctor was by his side, calling out instructions to the nurses. Dunbar heard the words “defibrillator” and “oxygen” and felt the atmosphere of alarm closing around him like the pain clutching at his head and heart.
“Don’t worry, Mr. Dunbar,” said the doctor, who was already holding a syringe at the ready. “We’re going to get rid of that pain right away.”
“Please don’t,” gasped Dunbar. “I’ve had enough; I’ve seen enough.”
“I know you’re very distressed at this moment…”
“What is it you don’t want me to miss?” said Dunbar. “Watching my daughter die in front of me?”
“And how is it you want her to spend the last few hours of her life,” the doctor replied: “watching you die in front of her?”
Dunbar recognized the truth of what the doctor had said, and resignedly held out his arm for the injection. He must stand by Florence as she died and pour whatever was left of his vitality and kindness into her, holding back his own annihilation.
“More life,” he muttered, as the clear liquid joined his bloodstream and dissolved the tension in his head and chest. “Do you mind if I have a word alone with Wilson and Chris?”
“Of course not,” said the doctor politely, as if there had never been a moment’s discord between them.
“Charlie,” said Dunbar, leaning forward to talk more privately to his friend. “I don’t want to talk about…I can’t talk about…”
“I understand,” said Wilson.
“But when this is over, can you stop these bastards from saving my life?”
“We could draw up a living will for you.”
“Make it happen,” said Dunbar, as if trying to remember a quotation. “Don’t let the girls get hold of the company. Help Cogniccenti, if that’s the only way to keep them from getting control. And find out if either of them was involved in poisoning Florence and, if so, then make sure that she spends the rest of her life in prison.”
“I’ll make sure of it,” said Wilson. “Abby’s already wanted by the British police in connection with Peter Walker’s suicide.”
Dunbar sank back in the chair a second time.
“He committed suicide?” he said.
“I’m sorry, I thought Florence had told you.”
“No,” said Dunbar, staring across the room, temporarily emptied by the surfeit of horror, as if there was no room left for thought or speech, or any specific grief. He could see Florence lying motionless on the bed, with her eyes shut. Chris sat beside her, watching her breathe.
“No, she didn’t tell me,” said Dunbar eventually. “Poor Peter, he was my friend. I couldn’t have made it without him.”
He looked at Wilson with passionate disbelief.
“How has it come to this, Charlie? Why is your son watching my daughter die? Why has everything been destroyed, just as I’ve started to understand it for the first time?”
“All of us will be blown to dust,” said Wilson, “but the understanding won’t be destroyed and it can’t be, as long as someone is left standing who still prefers to tell the truth.”
I want to thank my friend Dominic Armstrong for his expert collaboration in writing about the business and financial aspects of this story.
I am also grateful to John Rogerson for his help with some of the legal questions brought up by the plot of this novel.
I want to thank Monica Carmona for drawing my attention to the Hogarth Shakespeare series and Juliet Brooke for her excellent editing once I was invited to be a part of it.
I would also like to thank Jane Longman and Francis Wyndham for continuing to be my first and most encouraging readers.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Edward St. Aubyn was born in London. His superbly acclaimed Patrick Melrose novels are Never Mind, which won a Betty Trask Award; Bad News; Some Hope; Mother’s Milk, which won the Prix Femina étranger and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize; and At Last. He is also the author of the novels A Clue to the Exit; On the Edge, which was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize; and Lost for Words, which won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize.
He was not of an age, but for all time.
—Ben Jonson
For more than four hundred years, Shakespeare’s works have been performed, read, and loved throughout the world. They have been reinterpreted for each new generation, whether as teen films, musicals, science-fiction flicks, Japanese warrior tales, or literary transformations. The Hogarth Press was founded by Virginia and Leonard Woolf in 1917 with a mission to publish the best new writing of the age. In 2012, Hogarth was launched in London and New York to continue the tradition. The Hogarth Shakespeare project sees Shakespeare’s works retold by acclaimed and bestselling novelists of today.
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