Dunbar

by Edward St. Aubyn

  With so much distance between them it was hard to get excited about a separation. Mark was from a family whose money was so old that by the time he met Abby most of it had disintegrated and turned to dust. His pedigree suited her and her immense fortune suited him. One of Mark’s ancestors (the first Mark Rush) had been a Puritan dissenter who crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower. How could he have known, as he lurched from side to side on that creaking deck, in his dreary black clothes, muttering prayers and scolding his family, that he was on board one of the most fashionable ships in all of history, one that would leave Cleopatra’s barge languishing in the perfumed air as an exotic irrelevance? The great-grandson of that Mayflower passenger decided to try his hand at farming on Manhattan. The farm was only a marginal success until his grandson started harvesting streets and squares from the fields and orchards whose traditional crops had yielded such a mediocre income. The family’s fortune peaked in the late nineteenth century, but was large enough to withstand several generations of elegant mismanagement and, when they became all the rage, expensive divorces.

  By the time the twenty-three-year-old Abby Dunbar met the latest Mark Rush, he turned out to be a weak but emphatically handsome, immensely well-connected, and officially well-educated bachelor, with a big family house up the Hudson that he hadn’t been forced to sell yet. It was a combination of qualities that seemed to suit Abby perfectly, and she soon decided that she would much rather be a Rush than some French or Italian countess, or the recently married heiress who was supposed to renew the three-acre roof of an inherited headache in England.

  Despite its enthusiastic beginning, Mark’s marriage very soon lost all its vitality and finally expired with the discovery that Abby was unable to have children. After that, without either of them being in the least permissive by nature, they granted each other the freedom to do what the hell they liked. Indifference and opportunity did the work that tolerance might have done in other circumstances. Mark would often fly down to South Carolina to shoot quail with old friends, taking Mindy, his long-standing mistress, whose old family fortune had shaded even more emphatically than Mark’s into new family poverty, but whose company was reminiscent of the uncomplicated days when his parents’ friends dropped their children round to the house to play with him in the garden or the nursery. She felt like the most natural companion in the world.

  Although Mark would have been prepared to maintain this state of affairs indefinitely, Abby had managed to disrupt his complacency by kidnapping her father and locking him up in a sanatorium. It just wasn’t right. When Mark’s own grandfather, a foul-tempered tyrant, had become increasingly eccentric and fundamentally forgetful, the family had kept him in the old place upstate, because it was the right thing to do. What you did in a situation like that was to create a marvelous fund of grandfather anecdotes—the time he fell asleep at the wheel and drifted into a neighbor’s field, killing his prize racehorse; the time he insisted on climbing onto the roof, wearing his quilted silk dressing gown from Turnbull & Asser in London, to clean out the gutters with Harold, the old caretaker; the time he shot at the postman, mistaking him for a Japanese soldier; priceless stories that more than made up for the strains of taking the high road.

  When something wasn’t right, it wasn’t right. An impulse, partly moral, partly ancestral, and partly caused by the discharge of a long-withheld hatred for his wife, had made him step up to the plate and try to help rescue that old patriarch, his father-in-law, to whom, in the end, they all owed their supremely comfortable lives. If only he could be more useful, thought Mark regretfully, picking up the phone to place his breakfast order. He wanted to share his troubles with Mindy; she often had terrific ideas and practical advice, but it was too early to call her yet, so he might as well have some poached eggs and kippers sent up to the room. He hadn’t had kippers for ages.

  —

  The sunlight crept into the hollow where Dunbar’s almost frozen body lay curled up in his immense overcoat. The faint heat from the rays landing on the uncovered parts of his face and the pink light irradiating his eyelids made him realize that he was alive.

  He could not have given any account of his mental life over the last few hours, although he was convinced it had not consisted of sleep, just blankness without rest.

  He opened his eyelids tentatively; they fluttered for a while until he was able to squint steadily at the opening of his shallow cave. There seemed to be someone kneeling there.

  “Simon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where have you been?” asked Dunbar in an urgent, reproachful whisper. “I almost died last night. I doubt I’ve got the strength to move.”

  “Come on,” said Simon, “it’s time to leave. I’ve come to take you to a better place. This was just a little shelter for the night. We have hot food waiting for us in a farmhouse nearby. I’ve been sent to collect you. It’s less than a mile.”

  “I can’t move. To be honest, I wish I had slipped away during the night.”

  “You can slip away another time; right now you should have some breakfast. ‘To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.’ Ecclesiastes 3:1.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Dunbar impatiently; “they always read that at funerals. Now give me a hand, will you?”

  Simon helped him to his feet. Dunbar staggered about for a while, trying to get his balance.

  “I can hardly stand,” he protested. “Ah, my feet, my feet are stinging me. It’s as if my boots were full of scorpions. Ah, damn and blast, my feet!”

  “That’s a good sign: the blood is coming back, you won’t be losing any of your toes. Come on, it’s this way,” said Simon, setting off slowly. “There’s a farmhouse just around the corner at the bottom of the hill.”

  “And they’re expecting us?” asked Dunbar.

  “Oh, yes, everything is being made ready.”

  Dunbar rested a hand on Simon’s shoulder and started to hobble forward. He found that it took all his concentration to walk and he was unable to go on talking at the same time. Simon tactfully fell in with Dunbar’s state of mind and the two men carried on in silence.

  —

  J was a total fucking cunt, in Kevin’s opinion, and a duffer, a complete fucking duffer, shagging that bitch all night and turning up at breakfast like a zombie, a zombie with a fucking grin on his face. They had all done it, obviously. Kevin had banged her brains out, nympho bitch, got her screaming, but not on the night before a big op. Now he had to give J a couple of Modafinil to keep his eyelids unstuck, stupid fucking cunt. Dr. Bob made your nasty neighborhood dealer look like the vicar at a treatment center: he’d give you anything you asked for, plus a lot of things you hadn’t even heard of, but he wouldn’t be resupplying them until they got back to the States, and the truth was that Kevin had been chucking back the Modafinil like a kid with a tube of Smarties. He liked to be wired, liked to be sharp, hated coming down, and he was pissed off with J for bleeding his supply—fucking cunt.

  “Yo, Kevin,” said J coming back into the lobby with his rucksack on his back, dressed for action, “I’m feeling a whole lot better. Fact is, I feel great.”

  “You don’t say?” said Kevin, approaching J and lowering his voice. “Could that be because you nicked my last two fucking speed pills?”

  Kevin had eight left, which would just be enough to get him back to New York.

  “I thought they were for both of us.”

  “They’re for me to distribute as and when I see fit,” said Kevin.

  “Like to yourself, the whole time,” said J, light-heartedly.

  “Don’t you fucking question my orders,” hissed Kevin, coming in close to J’s ear. “You may have just shagged the boss, but in this little army I’m your commanding officer.”

  “Yes, sir,” said J.

  Kevin was too wired to know whether J’s obedience was sarcastic or no
t, but in either case the lobby of the King’s Head was not the place to take him apart.

  The two men walked out of the hotel and crossed the road to the playing fields. Jim Sage was there with a helicopter, talking to a woman in an overcoat and scarf.

  “Hi, there, boys,” said Jim, opening the door of the helicopter, “welcome aboard. I was just explaining to this lady that I had to make an emergency landing so that we could effect a rescue.”

  Kevin piled into the helicopter without a word.

  “Yo, Jim, my man!” said J, giving the avuncular pilot a virile hug. “That’s right, ma’am,” he said, turning to the local resident, “we’ve got a life to save.”

  His eyes misted over for a moment and then he punched himself in the chest surprisingly hard.

  “Feel the love,” he gasped.

  “Get in the fucking chopper before I throw up,” said Kevin.

  —

  Poor Henry, thought Wilson, no one was more ill suited to a crash course in self-knowledge, especially one that was being imposed on him so late in life. What was it that Richard the Second said, “I was not born to sue, but to command”? That was old Dunbar in one line, except that he preferred “Just make it happen,” the command without the commentary. In fact, you might say that Richard’s line should have been, “I was not born to command but to comment.” Dissipating his initiatives in perfect descriptions of his woeful states had never been Henry’s problem. In fact, he had always lived in the future; rushing ahead so fast he didn’t have time to even sketch what was happening along the way, let alone beguile it with rhetoric. The goals were always clear, but the experience around them hazy. Wherever Henry was, Wilson just hoped he had a map. If he had a map, he would have a target, and if he had a target he’d make it.

  Hearing someone knock, Wilson got up to open his door. He vaguely expected to see Florence or Chris, but soon resigned himself to welcoming Mark into his room instead.

  “Oh, wow, this is a great view of Buttermere,” said Mark, moving over to the bay window in Wilson’s room. “I guess we have Abby to thank for introducing us to another charming hotel,” he added with a facetious chuckle.

  “What’s on your mind?” asked Wilson.

  “I’ve been talking to my friend Mindy,” Mark began.

  “I know Mindy,” said Wilson, irritated by the epithet “friend” for a woman Mark had been in a parallel marriage with for ten years.

  “Well, she just reminded me of something I told her a couple of weeks ago. You know better than anyone how one gets used to seeing and hearing some pretty big sums in this family, so I forgot about it just as soon as I told her.”

  “Yes?”

  “I happened to be in Abby’s study, I wasn’t snooping; I was looking for a print cartridge. Anyhow, I saw a little notepad on her desk and one of the things on it was ‘6.5’ and an arrow and then B. Now, I just have a hunch, and it’s only a hunch, that she was making a big payment to Dr. Bob.”

  “She was,” said Wilson; “we know about that. It was all done in the open. He’s going to join the Board and on top of the usual payment to Board members he was given a bonus for ‘years of devoted service’ as Dunbar’s personal physician.”

  “Oh,” said Mark, “you knew about that.”

  “I’m on very good terms with most of the Board and they’re keeping me in the loop. What would be really useful is any evidence of malpractice on Dr. Bob’s part, proof that the devoted service has been to Abby and Meg, not to Henry.”

  “Well, how on earth am I supposed to get that?” asked Mark.

  “Why don’t you ask your friend Mindy,” said Wilson, leading the crestfallen Mark back to the door. “I’ve got to talk to Florence before she takes off. We’ve got a helicopter coming to help look for Henry.”

  “Can I go along?” asked Mark.

  “It’s only got three seats. We’re just following the police in case they find him. Florence and Chris are on board and we just can’t afford to ditch the pilot,” said Wilson, “even for you.”

  —

  With any luck, thought Abby, as she watched Jim’s helicopter disappear down the valley toward Nutting, they would find her father dead. That would be the simplest solution. Chasing after him was taking up a lot of time and they really ought to be back in New York by now, preparing for the most important moment in the company’s history: taking the Dunbar Trust private again, in a move that would put one of the most powerful media organizations on the planet entirely under their control. It was time for old Dunbar to move on, to stop clinging to power and stop obstructing what he really ought to be proud of, his two oldest daughters taking the company back in hand. They had it all planned: thirty percent of the employees would be invited to reimagine their futures, sentimental titles would be sold off, and the whole company would become a minting machine, granting them the universal access that their father had earned but jealously guarded for himself. They would seek the approval of the Board on Thursday and, after signing a few legal forms, the directors would be free to leave the building in the knowledge that they would be considerably richer when the deal closed and that they would be in serious trouble if they breathed a word to anyone of what was going on.

  Abby heard her telephone purring from the table behind her. She glanced at it and saw that the call was from Dr. Harris. He was the last person she wanted to speak to, but the authorities might have contacted him with some important information—preferably the discovery of her father’s dead body.

  “Yes, Dr. Harris, what can I do for you?”

  “Well, Mrs. Rush, the best thing you can do for yourself would be to call the police and offer to cooperate fully.”

  “Cooperate with what?” asked Abby. “The inquiry into your incompetence?”

  “The inquiry into the part you have played in the events leading to Peter Walker’s suicide.”

  “Suicide?”

  “Yes, I’m sorry to say that, despite all our precautions, Peter hanged himself in the shower early this morning. It’s an appalling and quite unnecessary death for which I am determined to hold you to account.”

  “You’re holding me responsible,” said Abby, instantly furious, “for letting a tormented alcoholic escape from your sanatorium, dragging my old and, let’s face it, extremely important father with him and endangering both their lives! Let’s hope my father isn’t found dead as well, or you’ll be on trial for two counts of manslaughter. Please don’t hesitate to put your accusations in writing, Dr. Harris, so I can sue you for defamation of character.”

  “Oh, I have put them in writing, Mrs. Rush, and so has Nurse Roberts—”

  “That idiot! I can’t wait to see a pack of QCs unkenneled on her—”

  “Peter told us what you did to him, Mrs. Rush,” Dr. Harris interrupted her quietly but firmly, “and we have no doubt that he was telling the truth. He was an alcoholic, but he was a highly intelligent man and in no way psychotic.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, he was a famous mess,” said Abby, “who couldn’t speak in his own voice—except to whimper.”

  “Well, I’m sure you know all about that,” said Dr. Harris.

  Abby immediately ended the call and dropped her phone on the table.

  “Fuck!” she shouted at the top of her voice. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

  Why was this happening? What had she done to deserve a complication like this when she was on the verge of a great victory? It was so unfair!

  —

  Dunbar lost his balance on some loose stones and almost toppled over.

  “Mind where you’re going,” he grumbled to Simon; “it’s too steep along here. I can hardly walk on level ground, let alone down this sort of landslide you’ve got us on.”

  Ever since that stupid, stupid accident a year ago in Davos, what he dreaded most, or at least one of the things he most dreaded, was falling over. It was a bad idea in the first place to gather all the most important people in the world and pack them into the icy streets of a skiing
resort in January, for a summit, or a “Forum” as they liked to call it—exactly the wrong word, really, since no one ever needed a special invitation or one of those fought-over white badges to go to a public square or a marketplace. He had arrived in Davos that afternoon two hours later than scheduled and was hurrying to a crucial meeting, an off-Forum, behind-the-scenes meeting, the only sort that mattered. The snow was pelting down softly, which normally would have helped, but some Forum zealot had scraped away all the fresh powder, leaving a patch of black ice on the path to Zhou’s chalet. Dunbar was powering up to the front door when he flipped over and fell on his back, hitting his head on the ground. He had been made to look ridiculous; he had lost face in front of a bloody Politburo face merchant. His obsession with punctuality had cost him six weeks in hospital, and he hadn’t got the satellite broadcasting deal he had spent a year setting up. Things had never been quite the same since that time. That’s when his real fall started: the slow-motion fall that he’d been in over the last year, the one he was still trying to avoid bringing to a fatal conclusion on this slippery wreck of a hillside.

  “You don’t seem to have much to say for yourself today,” said Dunbar, tightening his grip on Simon’s shoulder. “I don’t know how you cope with all this walking.”

  If the clutching muscles and weeping tendons in his legs got any worse, he would have to stop moving altogether. He was now fully committed to Simon’s peculiar buckling gait, the concession made to knees that could not stand the next obligatory step. If only his exhaustion could overwhelm his fear, he would willingly lie down and die, but for the moment his fear was overwhelming his exhaustion and he must keep moving.