Dunbar

by Edward St. Aubyn

  The part of the hillside he stood on was already in shadow and although the pass was still sunlit, it was covered in snow. Some of the clouds were beginning to be stained by the sinking sun. As the light pushed its way through the polluted air closer to the ground, it shifted from the blue to the red end of the spectrum. That’s all a sunset was: an exultation of dirt and dust. Perhaps his grandchildren would live under a perpetually red sky, as a dying nature, like an animal dangling upside down with its throat cut, bled into the firmament.

  “Dirt and dust,” Dunbar barked, relieved to find an external object of persecution, however briefly.

  He crossed the stream, setting off at a faster pace, as if rapid movement might be able to peel away his terrifying thoughts. This presumptuous fantasy was immediately replaced by a sense of his own decrepitude, and then by the image of a man on fire who is trying to put out the flames by breaking into a run, but only succeeds in blazing more brightly. Nevertheless, he refused to give up, even under the relentless assault of his diseased imagination; he must get to the pass before dark, so as to see the shape of the next valley and get some idea of where he might find refuge for the night. The light was fading and the temperature falling but regardless of how he was feeling, he had to keep climbing, or he would die, he would really die—not just think he was dying, until Dr. Bob ran some tests to show that there was nothing fatal in the works, or paid a compliment to his constitution, or gave him a pill for his pillbox.

  The thought of Dr. Bob forced Dunbar to pause, afraid that his heart could not stand the combination of such a fast climb and such breathless fury. His daughters, his flesh and blood and the man employed to minister to his flesh and blood, conspiring together. Betrayal was especially bitter since loyalty had always been one of the hallmarks of his astonishing ascent. Like Napoleon, who turned his sergeants into marshals, their mansions radiating from the Arc de Triomphe, he had taken Wilson and the rest of the original team with him as he rose from the provincial prosperity that came from inheriting the Winnipeg Advertiser to an unrivaled political influence in all the places that really mattered: the global power that was now being stolen from him by his daughters and his doctor, the diseases of his flesh and blood. How could he cure himself, except by opening his veins in this stream and letting out the disease with the blood? He felt the thick steel weight of the Swiss Army knife in his overcoat pocket and pictured himself kneeling in the stream, wisps of blood from his wrists curling and rushing down the hillside in the clear water. The animal slaughtered at sunset. The collision of ideas and images, the image of Catherine dead in a collision, the weird equivalence between what had really happened and what he had just imagined: they were all thoughts, all images fighting for control of his mind. It was not that past events, like Catherine’s death, seemed unreal, but rather that every thought seemed so real. Perhaps that was why the universe was expanding: because thoughts were real and there were more and more people having more and more thoughts, drop after drop pushing the envelope of space farther and farther outward.

  “Please, please, please…” he sobbed. “No more big ideas, please.”

  He wanted to sink to his knees, like a man in prayer, offsetting humiliation with humility, but he felt an even stronger desire to press forward, to move away from the disastrous frame of mind that now surrounded the ground on which he stood. If he knelt he would only sink more deeply into it, and so he set off again, glancing up from time to time to see where the intermittent shafts of sunlight were striking the snow-covered upper slopes. The light was now close to the summit and would soon overshoot the land altogether.

  He could still remember the judgment of a journalist from a rival organization, it still throbbed in his forehead, like an old shrapnel wound, one of those stupid phrases purporting to summarize his career, not even elegant, but memorable for its injustice, “Cheap debt and plummeting standards.” It was so wrong, so untrue. What about hard work and loyalty, not to mention coolness and courage and charm? Why was there no one to flatter and reassure him when he needed it most? He knew what it was to be surrounded by a halo of hollow praise, but now even Peter had abandoned him. He had quickly grown used to Peter distracting him, entertaining him, and looking after him. He had been an audience for Peter and Peter had been an audience for him, without either of them being able to listen to each other in the full, traditional sense of the word, due to the immense demands made by their own thoughts and impressions. Still, it was simply better to know that there was somebody there, that was all, somebody else—a relationship, that’s probably what people would call it. There weren’t many living things to have a relationship with up here; the crows knew better than to come up so high in the gathering darkness, and even the famously rugged Herdwick sheep, a dark, shaggy, local breed that Peter had become something of an expert on, after his many visits to Meadowmeade (“too numerous to innumerate,” as he liked to say), hesitated to keep Dunbar company as he trudged toward the pass over the crunching snow.

  As the ground flattened out, he came to a halt, arrested by an unexpected scene. The source of the stream, it turned out, was a small circular lake beneath the final ascent. Just to the left of the path, on the near side of the lake, was a perfect little beach, a natural resting place and contemplative opportunity, coated with snow. The water itself was covered in a thin, opaque sheet of ice, except where the pull of the stream kept it dark and liquid. A curved escarpment rose abruptly from the far shore, like a headdress on the brow of the lake. Dunbar found it piercingly beautiful, almost too beautiful, as if it had been choreographed for an exquisite death, a role that must have been reserved for him, since there was no one else for miles around. He hurried on superstitiously, like a pregnant woman who crosses herself as she realizes she is walking next to a cemetery wall, moving as fast as he dared over stones slippery with snow. The path circled the lake and then merged with the pass, which was now entirely in shadow. Only the very top of the mountain on the far side of the pass was still sometimes lit up with a splash of cold gold light.

  There was nowhere, however lovely, that he couldn’t contaminate with his morbid thoughts and his perpetual fear. He was being punished; there was no other explanation, punished for his own acts of treachery. What a hypocrite he was, raging against his daughters and his doctor. He had betrayed a wife he adored, keeping mistresses in all his major centers of operation, lying about the state of his marriage to encourage women who hesitated on the edge of adultery; he had treated Florence vindictively, cutting her off, rejecting her and persecuting her for having ideas of her own. His crimes were far worse than Megan’s or Abigail’s, let alone Dr. Bob’s. He had betrayed the people he loved most, whereas his daughters presumably had the moral advantage of hating him, and poor Dr. Bob was just an opportunist who had seen an opportunity. In other circumstances, at a Sun Valley economic summit, or in conversation with a finance minister, he might have called it “enterprise” or “initiative.” It was he, the enraged father and the indignant patient, who knew most about the twisted nature of betrayal, and now he had been dragged by a just fate to this sacrificial slab of rock and ice. There was no need for a feathered priest to tear his treacherous heart from his chest when it was ready to burst out from the pressure of its own guilt and grief.

  Sick with fear and desperate to put the evil lake behind him, Dunbar stumbled into the deeper snow on the final ascent to the pass. No one had used the path since the last snowfall and he had no idea where it lay under the windblown drifts. All he could do was choose the most direct route, hoping that the snow would support him against the sharp stones and sudden hollows that he imagined hidden under every collapsing step. Although he had taken the precaution of tucking his trousers into his boots, the snow soon started to insinuate itself in a band around his ankles and to cling to his lower trouser legs. By the time he reached the top of the pass, he was frozen from the knee down, while his upper body was pouring with sweat, his heart pounding and his ears singing with the rush of b
lood.

  As the bowl of the next valley opened up before him, he took in its emptiness, lightly criss-crossed with drystone walls, but without tree, or lake or any kind of refuge from the sky. Where was Nutting? Where was the signpost to Nutting? It was beginning to grow genuinely dark, although the snow retained an eerie luminosity. That final glow gave him scant reassurance since he could only benefit from it by freezing to death. He turned around to have a last look at the valley he had been struggling across all day. He had tried to get away from it in the hope of finding some kind of safety; now, glancing back at the village and woodland car park, it looked like safety was what he was leaving behind. A bank of black cloud laden with rain and sleet and snow was replacing the broken, tinted cloud he had seen when he was straddling the stream lower down the hill. It was currently somewhere above the King’s Head on the far side of the lake, but it was chasing after him and would soon be raining its cold vengeance on his poor old head. To return would be as profitless as to press forward, only shelter mattered now, but there was no shelter to be found.

  Under different circumstances the four-poster bed, the leaded windowpanes, and the tiny roses tumbling down the wallpaper of her bedroom in the King’s Head would have enchanted Megan. She was not alone among the brutal in cherishing her sentimental side. Dogs and horses had been spared her enthusiasm and dirndls left her cold, but she was helpless in the face of an English country house hotel. The King’s Head was her idea of unpretentious heaven, right down to the card in the fireplace urging guests not to light a fire. It was all the better for being a make-believe fireplace in a country house hotel that had never been a country house. Sentimentality offered her a holiday from the harshness of the rest of her personality, a chance to kick off her shoes and wriggle her toes and watch something stupid on television, just like ordinary people, as she imagined them, a vast blur of undifferentiated banality beyond the ramparts of her own vicious and thrilling world.

  It was all the more maddening, on this intemperate Monday morning, with the rain pelting against the leaden panes and the wind thudding and whistling in the empty fireplace, and her father still missing, that she was not able to enjoy a moment of cosy Englishness before whisking him off to a secure facility among the altogether more convincing mountains of Austria, mountains with jagged peaks, and glacial passes, not these low, interlocking, round-backed mountains, like a litter of sleeping puppies, into which it was evidently all too easy to escape. Megan felt cheated of a well-deserved treat. She decided to use her positive visualization technique to bring about the outcome she longed for: Daddy, after being sedated by Dr. Bob, looking on in foolish admiration as she spread melting butter and strawberry jam on the cratered, lunar surface of a well-toasted crumpet, while unspoilt Lake District girls fell over themselves (and one another) to bring extra clotted cream and finger sandwiches, their own strawberry and cream complexions blushing uncontrollably at her appreciative glances, sensing what she had in mind while being too innocent to be really sure. Oh, God, it was so unfair! That selfish old man was spoiling everything! Megan opened her eyes and surged out of her chair. She couldn’t afford to get too worked up. Dr. Bob seemed to be on strike sexually, and as far as she could tell the staff here consisted of two bored Polish waiters, an Australian barman, and a respectable female bookkeeper with short gray hair, not quite the St. Trinian’s meets Boucher tableau she had just positively visualized.

  The problem with men was that so few of them could play at her level and none could stay there. She liked a man to be totally in charge, in the wider context of being her slave, obviously, and only in order to facilitate her favorite role as a bewildered beginner, who looked up anxiously to ask, “Am I doing it right?” as she gripped him expertly with her hands or legs or mouth. She loved to whisper, “This is my first time,” as she took up a position she had been in a thousand times before, with her legs nervously clenched. Given the chance, she would wince and gasp and bite her lip, as if she were being hurt by her big, rough assailant but didn’t dare complain. The men who immediately got the boot were the ones who stopped at this point to ask if there was anything wrong; but those who thrived during the first week of repeated deflowering and faux initiations were taken deeper into the dungeon of her inversion of pain and love. In her view, pain was the gold standard to which the paper currency of love needed to be pegged. Pain could be measured, whereas love often couldn’t even be located. Why not gradually exchange something that was not much better than a rumor for something real? Why not turn a fleeting emotion, always on the verge of reversing itself, into a repeatable sensation?

  The place she was going to wipe off the face of the earth, when she could find a moment, was Meadowmeade. Dr. Harris and some ridiculous nurse, who was the last member of the staff to have seen Dunbar, had not been as obsequiously apologetic as she and Abby required. They had apologized of course, but without giving the impression that the Mariana Trench would be too shallow a grave for their shame and that, after finding Dunbar, they would both naturally be committing suicide as a small token of amends; in fact, after the third wave of daughterly indignation, Dr. Harris started to make remarks about not being part of the prison service, and Dunbar’s medical condition having been misrepresented to him by Dr. Bob and his Hampstead colleague. In other words, he started to get uppity. She had sat in his office yesterday afternoon, staring at the paperweight on his desk and imagining bringing it down on his smug English skull with “extreme prejudice,” as people said in the movies when they were ordering an official murder. The thick-ankled nurse then weighed in, saying that there was no need to “read us the Riot Act,” that they were all well aware of the gravity of the situation, had already recaptured the two patients Dunbar had escaped with and had learnt from the one who was not already senile that Dunbar had been trying to hitchhike his way to Cockermouth. As well as sending two members of staff to Cockermouth, she assured them that the local police were fully alerted and well aware of the need for discretion. The thought of Daddy hitchhiking seemed to her an impossibly false note and she demanded to see the witness, who turned out to be the comedian Peter Walker. He made no attempt to disguise the nature of his difficulties.

  “I’ve got a terrible alcohol problem,” he said, sobbing wretchedly as he came into Dr. Harris’s office, “I’ve run out of alcohol!” He slapped his thighs, wheezing with laughter. “The old ones are still the best,” he said.

  She and Abby insisted on taking him for a stroll around the grounds in order to hear his boisterous account of his adventures with Dunbar. They then did something rather naughty, luring him back to the King’s Head, with promises of alcohol, so as to get him under their control and find out what had really happened. By the time they reached the Plumdale street corner where Walker claimed to have parted from Dunbar, adding the cunning detail that he thought he had seen him get into a silver Vauxhall Astra, it was beginning to grow dark and the storm that was still blustering outside had started to roll in. On a Sunday night in midwinter the King’s Head turned out to have plenty of spare rooms and so they had taken the three best rooms for themselves and four “classic” rooms for the two bodyguards, the driver, and Peter, ignoring the texts and missed calls from Meadowmeade asking if they had any idea of his whereabouts.

  Over dinner they gave Peter all the whisky he wanted, as well as a potion from Dr. Bob’s medicine bag, which he definitely would not have wanted, if he’d been given any choice in the matter or had known what was in it. He started to drink even more rapidly to cope with the disinhibiting effects of a drug he didn’t know he had taken. The more anxious he became, the more he became anxious to please.

  “Those who know,” he said, embarking unsteadily on his Jack Nicholson impersonation, “know that your father is the man—you know what I’m saying?”

  “Not really,” said Abby irritably.

  “Given that he’s the man,” said Dr. Bob, intercepting Abby’s hostility with an understanding smile, “we’d better find out where
he is. If he’s caught in this storm, he could be suffering terribly right now, and none of us wants that. You know what I’m saying?”

  “I do,” mumbled Peter, no longer certain that Dunbar’s daughters were worse than the storm, and distraught about possibly putting his friend’s life at risk.

  “Because if you’re not sure that you saw him get into that silver car,” said Dr. Bob in a voice that couldn’t reasonably be expected to carry any more warmth and empathy than it already did, “and you have any other ideas about where he might be, I would love to hear them, so we can reach out and make sure he’s safe.”

  “I’m feeling really strange,” said Peter with a directness none of them had seen before, “and I’m speaking as somebody—”

  “Who really knows what he’s talking about,” Dr. Bob finished his sentence for him, with a peal of tuned-in, heartfelt laughter. “When it comes to strange, you’re the man.”

  “I’m…I’m the man,” said Peter, nervous of accepting the compliment.

  “Would you like a Valium?” said Dr. Bob.

  “Oh, yes, yes, yes,” said Peter, “I would really like a Valium.”

  “Well, I can give you one, I’m a doctor!” said Dr. Bob. “I know you need to get a good night’s sleep, ‘sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care.’ ”

  “Oh, I need to knit that raveled sleeve,” said Peter, “I really do.”

  “I know what you’re saying,” said Dr. Bob, picking up the briefcase by his chair, “and I’m going to give you what you need, and if you can think of anywhere else we might look for Henry, just let me know.”

  “Nutting,” mumbled Peter.

  “Well, you’re going to have to give us something if you want the Valium,” said Abby angrily.