Dunbar

by Edward St. Aubyn

  If Florence was now having trouble getting to sleep—and she was—it was partly from the prospect of being alone with Chris, driving through the reputedly ravishing Lake District, looking for a place called Meadowmeade. Neither of them had ever visited the Lake District before and despite the urgent and ominous nature of their journey, Florence couldn’t help thinking of the many excursions they had been on over the years, especially the years when they were going out together in their early twenties. Inconveniently, her most persistent memories and reimaginings of sexual passion belonged to her time with Chris. Right at the beginning there had been raw obsession; dressing was a tedious preliminary to undressing; they couldn’t make it through a party without eloping to the back seat of their car, returning glazed and disheveled to the near irrelevance, the elevator music of other people. When she was twenty-three they went on a tour of Europe and she could remember thinking that it must be impossible to feel more complete, staring out from their bedroom at the red-brick tower of San Giorgio, as it appeared and disappeared, while the thin white curtains bellied out in the breeze from the lagoon and sank back languidly into the frame of the French windows. She still daydreamed about the time they had trekked in New Mexico and found a pale ocher cave where the ground was so smooth and the dust so warm and soft and thick that it was impossible to find an uncomfortable position, although goodness knows they had tried, kneeling and twisting and rolling in the dirt. Oh, God, it was so long ago but still closer than anything else, at least at the moment, on this small plane, with only a flimsy partition between their rooms.

  It was out of the question to be unfaithful to Ben, or at any rate it had been so far. Was adultery with someone who had a claim older than the marriage worse than standard adultery, or was it just the restoration of a natural order that the marriage had interrupted? How could she even be asking? She loved Benjamin as a husband, as someone she had made children with. She had been dedicated to avoiding pregnancy with all her other lovers, all except Chris. The two of them had lived in an intermediate zone: too young and volatile to form a clear intention, too reckless and passionate not to expect an accident. In a sense the accident was that she didn’t get pregnant with Chris. By the time she could formulate her regret, they had definitively separated, as opposed to storming out of each other’s apartments, as they did every few weeks when they were going out.

  There was something faintly incestuous about the depth of her relationship with Chris. Her father had taken to his role as godfather enthusiastically and Chris had always been around during her childhood, spending a good part of the long summer holidays with the Dunbars at Home Lake. Despite the clashing teeth and colliding noses of their first late childhood kiss, Chris could easily have fallen into a brotherly role, or at least become too familiar to be alluring, if it hadn’t been for the crucial years in which they hardly saw each other, during the time that Wilson was in charge of the company’s European headquarters. Chris was sent to boarding school in England and started spending his summers in Italy and France. Although Dunbar continued to see his godson on his frequent trips to Europe, Florence missed the first half of his adolescence. Meeting him again when they were both seventeen, she had the strange thrill of feeling shy in front of someone she was used to thinking she knew all about; it was like discovering that the house she lived in had another wing she had somehow failed to notice but now longed to move into. Neither of them knew what to do with this confluence of contradictory currents. When, much later, they saw the “Meeting of the Waters” in Manaus, where the sluggish, yellow Amazon and the swift, cool Rio Negro run parallel for several miles without mingling, she had compared it to that summer, when her old, easy, fond feeling for Chris was joined by a new, sharp sense of desire and for a long time she could find no way to integrate them. It was only the following Christmas that they had started kissing for hours on end, and only the next summer that they made love for the first time. Florence was rather shocked to find herself thinking that in the face of such a primal connection, it was really her marriage that was the adulterous act. She must get some sleep now. As someone who almost never took a pill, she benefited fully from the impact of the Xanax she shook from its five-year-old tub and was very soon unconscious.

  The sound of knocking barely reached her down the well of her artificial sleep, but when the stewardess tentatively opened the door to say that they were coming in to land, Florence was able to thank her and ask if she could have a double macchiato along with her usual pot of green tea. She groped her way into her clothes, gulped down her coffee, fastened her seatbelt, and was soon dozing again in a stupendous leather seat.

  The weather in Manchester was foul, but from under the umbrella held for her by the driver Florence took a detached pleasure in the shivering puddles and the stray, refreshing drops of rain blown into her face as she crossed the tarmac to climb into the high back seat of a Range Rover. Chris got in beside her and, as if the fifteen years since they were together had been abolished, she mumbled, “I really need to get some more sleep,” and sank sideways onto him, resting her head in his lap. Chris welcomed this unexpected burden, wrapping an arm tenderly around her waist to protect her from being thrown forward in case the car stopped too abruptly.

  For the first few moments after she woke up, Florence had no idea where she was at all. When she worked out that her head was in Chris’s lap, she tried to be alarmed, but soon resigned herself to how sweet and natural it was to be there.

  “I’m sorry, I must have fallen asleep,” she said, heaving herself up.

  “You sort of asked permission,” said Chris.

  “So, you’re not going to sue me for violating your personal space and causing you mental anguish and loss of self-esteem?”

  “Not this time,” said Chris, “but we ought to draw up a contract and get it witnessed.”

  Florence squeezed his hand briefly but said nothing, feeling that it would be too provocative but also too superficial to banter with him.

  “Where exactly are we?” she asked the driver.

  “According to my satnav,” said the driver, preparing to serve her word back to her, “we are exactly nine point six miles from our destination.”

  “That sounds awfully close for someone who was in Wyoming thirty-six hours ago.”

  “I should say that you’ve done roughly ninety-nine point eight percent of your journey,” said Chris.

  “Only if he turns out to be there.”

  —

  Dr. Harris told them that he was in no mood to joke.

  “Surely your sisters have already told you what has happened.”

  “They have told me nothing,” said Florence. “We don’t communicate.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to say that they’ve been communicating all too much with me,” said Dr. Harris. “Yesterday, I had the honor of being insulted by them personally, but today they have handed over that task to some extremely aggressive solicitors in London.”

  “Braggs?” asked Florence.

  “Yes.”

  “I may be able to put a stop to that,” she said.

  “Well, in any case,” said Dr. Harris, refusing to be appeased, “two can play at that game. My failure to run a high security prison, which I have never offered to do, is going to look like a minor infraction compared to kidnapping one of my patients and, by his account, torturing him to extract information about Dunbar. When we found him an hour ago in Plumdale, he was in a state of abject terror. We’ve had to sedate him and put him in a Suicide Observation Room. Let’s see how that looks in court.”

  “Torturing?” said Florence. “Can I talk to him?”

  “What, so you can set light to him as well? I think he’s had quite enough contact with your family to last him a lifetime.”

  “I am not my family,” said Florence.

  “Well, I’ll be pondering the profundity of that remark for the rest of the day, I’m sure,” said Dr. Harris. “Nevertheless, if you ever feel the need for a private sanatori
um, please apply elsewhere.”

  “Dr. Harris, slow down,” said Chris.

  “I want to make it clear,” said Dr. Harris, rising from his chair and leaning across his desk toward his two visitors, “that I will not be bullied by your sisters or their representatives. I deeply regret your father’s disappearance, but not as much as I regret accepting him here in the first place. Celebrities are usually more trouble than they’re worth, but in the case of your father, who is also an immensely powerful man, his presence here has been a complete disaster.”

  “What have you been doing to find him?” said Chris.

  “We’re doing everything in our power,” said Dr. Harris, straightening up and folding his arms across his chest, “and were about to involve the police and mountain rescue when his daughters, his two other daughters,” he specified, “decided to take charge of everything themselves. I will not be held responsible for the consequences.”

  “We’re not interested in blame, just in getting Henry Dunbar to a safe place,” said Chris. “The reason he’s exposed himself to a storm in this mountainous country is that Abigail and Megan are more of a threat to him than lightning and frost and hypothermia. I’ve known him all my life and I know that he would have to lose himself entirely before he lost his tenacity and his instinct for power. Those are the things that have made him great.”

  “Unfortunately, people do lose themselves entirely,” said Dr. Harris, responding to Chris’s conciliatory tone with a calmer tone of his own, “we see it every day. Dunbar, although he was often deluded and extremely choleric, was certainly not worn down to that degree. All we know about his disappearance is that he was last seen yesterday afternoon in a car park on the shores of Merewater, heading toward a place called Nutting.”

  Dr. Harris walked over to an Ordnance Survey map on the wall of his office and pointed out to Florence the journey that Dunbar was supposed to have made. Chris stayed seated, texting on his phone.

  “It would be a hard walk for anyone at this time of year, let alone for an eighty-year-old man. At least the storm is dying down.”

  “That’s good,” said Florence, “but in any case, as Chris has said, my father is the most determined, not to say the most stubborn man you’re ever likely to meet.”

  “Okay,” said Chris, looking up from his phone, “we’re meeting my father in Nutting in half an hour and he’s going to get in touch with the police and the mountain rescue, and help deflect the killer emails from Braggs.”

  “But I thought he was checking out the other clinic, the one on the far side of Manchester,” said Florence.

  “I told him the moment we found out this was the right place,” said Chris. “He’s already on his way.”

  “Not Temple Grove?” Dr. Harris couldn’t help asking. “Dreadful place; I hope you’re not thinking of sending anyone there.”

  “We’re not thinking of sending my father anywhere,” said Florence, “we’re thinking of taking him home.”

  “Well, I guess we’d better head off,” said Chris, shaking hands with Dr. Harris.

  “Let me know how your patient is doing,” said Florence, “the one in the Suicide Observation Room. I’m horrified by what you’ve told me and want to do anything I can to help.”

  “I will,” said Dr. Harris. “I’m sorry I mistook you for the third wave of an apparently relentless attack,” he added.

  “A natural assumption after what you’ve been through,” said Chris, smiling firmly.

  “You’ve become so efficient,” said Florence as their car drew away from Meadowmeade. “I remember when you were…”

  “Totally chaotic,” said Chris.

  “Well, yes,” she laughed.

  “I think we got across the idea that Henry is a stubborn guy,” said Chris as cheerfully as he could.

  “Let’s hope he’s stubborn enough,” said Florence. She stared out of the window, not wanting to let Chris see that she was crying, and not knowing precisely what combination of emotions was making her cry. She reached blindly for his hand and raised it to her lips to kiss.

  “Oh, he’s stubborn enough,” said Chris, reversing the grip of their entwined fingers and bringing her hand to his lips.

  Dunbar tried to shake off the latest scrap of disjointed narrative that had taken over his mind like a hallucination, but he had been alone for too long and was now adrift in a compulsory daydream whose images were experts on what he did not want to feel and would rather not imagine. He had just seen an old circus tiger escape from its cage in a cold country and amble bemusedly through a crowd of screaming, fleeing citizens. He had felt the power of its alien gait and then, when it was standing on the edge of a sparse recreational wood where it had gone to look for food, he had seen a bullet crash into its skull in a scatter of blood and bone.

  How could he wake from a waking dream? It enveloped everything he thought and everything he looked at. The broken layer of brown and purple cloud scattered in the yellowing sky reminded him of his mother’s tortoiseshell comb when he used to close one eye and hold it up to the lamplight and stare at it for ages, until its mottled pattern of light and dark patches filled the whole visual field. That was when he was very little, before he started asking her difficult questions and questioning her easy answers, before they became opponents. Now everyone was his opponent, because he was not in his right mind.

  The hills, drenched by the storm, were gleaming and dripping in the afternoon light. How tactless of him to have insisted on bringing his lumbering body to this lovely, liquid scene, to dump it like a sack of cement, split open and hardened by rain, on this otherwise uncontaminated hillside.

  On the other hand, he felt such a sense of lightness and of hunger, such a threadbare connection to the rest of human life, that he could easily imagine slipping out of existence, as quietly as one of those bright drops of arrested rain that were falling from the bushes to the grass, and from the grass to the ground.

  How could he pit himself against his daughters when they had his whole organization at their command and he had no command of his own disorganization? Organization, disorganization: all these maddening words that treated him as their ventriloquist’s dummy, not to mention the images of humanely slaughtered tigers that flickered across the deep gray screen of his television mind, because some bastard, some sadistic sky-god who owned all the channels to all the minds of all living creatures everywhere was playing with the programing and the remote control.

  Why go on? Why drag his suffering body into the next valley? Why endure the anguish of being alive? Because endurance was what he did, thought Dunbar. He hauled himself up and straightened his body one more time and brought both his fists against his chest, inviting that child-devouring sky-god to do his worst, to rain down information from his satellites, to stream his audiovisual hell of white noise and burning bodies straight into Dunbar’s fragile brain, to try to split its hemispheres, if he could, to try to strangle him with a word-noose, if he dared.

  “Come on,” whispered Dunbar hoarsely. “Come on, you bastard.”

  The next thing that happened was that he forgot the last thing that happened. He let his hands fall to his side, completely absorbed in watching a raindrop change color as it swelled on the tip of a leaf and flashed into the ground. He longed for its fleeting iridescence; he longed to be absorbed into the earth, or, if the earth wouldn’t have him, to evaporate into the sky, to become part of everything, with no part in anything: no role, no point, no location, no pattern, and no mind.

  Nothing could be done to improve this place, except to remove him from it. He imagined being deleted, like obscene graffiti a teacher wipes off the blackboard before writing out the triumphant formula for a perfectly empty valley. Yes, yes, he must go. Although his knees were begging him to sit down and his lower back was begging him to lie down, and his muscles were begging to have him put down, he started to shuffle meekly through the wet grass, doing his best to get a move on, to respect the valley’s very understandable d
esire to get rid of him. He was a bad man polluting an enchanted space, and the least he could do was to absent himself.

  When he had been running a global empire, his cruelty and his vindictiveness and his lies and his tantrums were disguised as the necessary actions of a decisive commander-in-chief, but in his current naked condition the naked character of those actions screamed at him, like ex-prisoners recognizing their torturer in the street, “It’s him! It’s him! He tore out my fingernails, he splintered my kneecaps, he dissolved my marriage, he forced me to resign, he had me sent to prison…” He was too weak to cut their throats and too injured to run away. He was in the unaccustomed position of having to stand there and listen to their point of view. He couldn’t sack them or destroy them, they were not his employees or his opponents: they were his memories, recast in the strange light of destitution and vulnerability. It was no use trying to get an injunction against them, or telling his editors to send in the attack dogs to tear apart their reputations; he couldn’t even nominate them for ridicule when they were already so busy ridiculing him. All the people he had ever hurt—a veritable crowd, it turned out—were turning their wounds into weapons. He tried to quicken his pace, stumbling once or twice in the effort to escape the enemy memory that was chasing him from, well, from the center of his psyche. He might not be able to outrun what was erupting inside him, but perhaps at the top of this next hill there would be a precipice—if there was any justice or mercy in the world there would be a precipice at the top of the next hill—from which to throw himself head first onto some rocks, to dash his brains out, get his brains right out, perform the necessary surgery, get the trouble out of his head, in an unsparing acknowledgment that the only way to save his life was to end it.