Dunbar Page 11

  All the things he had ever felt ashamed of seemed to have been distilled into the elixir of his own cruelty. An eye for an eye: that was the law. They were holding him down to clamp his head in a vice and slice his eyelids off. No, please, not that. As he climbed higher his vision grew more blurred, feeding his fear of being blinded by the venom of his accumulated crimes. He clutched his head between his powerful hands, to show how tightly trapped it was, but also in the hope of somehow finding the strength to wrench it aside, to avoid letting the corrosive liquid fall, drop by blistering drop, onto his precious, defenseless eyes. No, please, please, please. His heart was bursting with anguish. He scrambled up the last few yards on all fours and collapsed on the brow of the hill.

  For a moment his horror was eclipsed by a further insult to his despair. The slope on the far side was no steeper than the one he had just climbed, all very well for a person who wanted to twist an ankle or break a leg, but by no means adequate for the task he had in mind. Without the comfort of a cliff, there was nothing to do but suffer tamely; he didn’t even have the power to organize a swift and particular death. He would have to linger on, cattle-prodded through a labyrinthine slaughterhouse of hunger, exposure, infection, and insanity, or, worse, be rescued, so that he could be paraded at his daughters’ triumph, like a conquered king in chains, pelted with filth and rotten food by the jeering populace.

  It was true that in his time he had sacked both Megan and Abigail from key positions in the Dunbar Trust, but only to give them other positions later on and only, always, for their own good, in order to toughen them up and show that unless they could match the suavity and the savagery of his top executives, nepotism would not be allowed to prevail; at any rate, not until the end, when his need for a legacy would make—had made—dynastic considerations paramount. He could now see that if they had misunderstood his motives, the sackings might have set them on the path of revenge. Or perhaps they were angry to be deprived of their mother when they were still so young, perhaps they didn’t understand that he was trying to protect them from a mother who was as mad as a snake. He could feel their pain now; feel that if his daughters were monsters it was because he had made them that way. He had tried to make amends, he had given them everything, everything, but when they got it, all they could think of doing was to treat him as he had treated them. And yet he certainly never treated either of them as harshly as he treated Florence. If there was any reason to stay alive it was to sink to his knees to beg Florence’s forgiveness, but if there was any reason more pressing than the rest to throw himself off the non-existent cliff he had fondly imagined waiting for him at the top of the hill, it was to express the violence of his sorrow at having maltreated the person he loved most in the world, Catherine’s daughter, the only one of his children who had refused to conspire against him, although she had most reason to.

  He reached up to protect his eyes, but found that far from being hollowed out by liquid fire, they were wet with ordinary tears. He was surprised, a little indignant, but far too suspicious to be taken in. The fire had been temporarily put out so that his torture could be prolonged, like a hanged man who is cut down so that he can be killed more meticulously. He knew how the world worked: the fireman was an arsonist, the assassin came dressed as a physician, the devil was a bishop harvesting souls for his master, teachers entrusted with children filmed them in the shower and posted their naked bodies on the dark net; he had read the stories, he had read them every morning with his breakfast. Like a puppetmaster who pulls the strings but still has to do the voices for his puppets, Dunbar was partially, if superciliously, merged with his ideal reader: the person who hates chavs and welfare scroungers and perverts and junkies, but also hates toffs and fat cats and tax dodgers and celebrities, in fact the person who hates everybody, except the other people like him, who hate the things that make him feel fear or envy. Dunbar was the man who placed the wafer on their outstretched tongues, transubstantiating the corrosive passivity of fear and envy into the dynamic single-mindedness of hatred. As the high priest of this low practice, he had to admit that in his astonishing new circumstances the view from the altar rail was barely distinguishable from blindness.

  If he was not allowed to kill himself straight away, it was because he didn’t deserve to get away so lightly; if his eyes had been temporarily spared, it was so that images of a more intimate horror could imprint themselves on his fading vision and haunt his forthcoming blindness. He searched about for some way to evade his fate. He thought he could make out a talus in the distance, surmounted by a tiny cliff. In his current condition he would need a helicopter to get there, but the last thing he wanted was an amiable and trustworthy pilot encouraging him to admire the view and not to go too near the edge.

  He sat up on his knees and clambered painfully to his feet in order to take in a wider view of his surroundings. Neither the valley behind him nor the one ahead contained buildings or structures of any sort: no gates or stiles or walls. Even the Herdwick sheep that had accompanied him on most of his journey so far seemed to find these denuded hills and snowy peaks too remote to venture into. The phrase “in the middle of nowhere” came to Dunbar with the original force that underlies the destructive popularity of cliché. Yes, he was in the middle of nowhere—that was exactly the right phrase. He had always lived and worked in central locations of one sort or another and there was a certain sense of continuity in discovering that he had pulled it off again, even if the place he was in the middle of this time was nowhere, even if the satisfaction of finding an address could not entirely make up for the absence of any shelter, any protection from the icy air trickling through the cracks in his clothing, of any food, or any fire. He was starting to shiver and to feel that marrow numbness that made him dread the onset of night.

  “Help!”

  Dunbar knew that he was alone and was at a loss to explain the voice he had just heard.

  “What?” he called out.

  “Help!”

  He thought for a moment that it might be the helicopter pilot, the last person to have taken shape in his mind, but he saw no evidence of his existence—if he was a helicopter pilot, where was his helicopter? It just didn’t add up.

  His bewilderment turned to alarm as he watched what seemed to be a low mound crack open and take on a human shape. A man in a filthy brown overcoat, his beard loaded with earth, sat up, brushed some of the dirt from his face, and reiterated his request.

  “Help,” he said, “help me get these boots off. They’re killing me.”

  “Just like my daughters,” said Dunbar, amazed by the coincidence. With a rush of solidarity, he knelt down beside his groaning new acquaintance and started to unlace his mud-caked boots.

  “I can hardly feel my feet anymore and when I do, I wish I didn’t. Nothing but blisters.”

  “I have blisters on my eyes,” said Dunbar.

  “Can you see anything?”

  “Hardly a thing,” said Dunbar.

  “ ‘If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch,’ Matthew 15:14.”

  “Sounds like a sensible fellow,” said Dunbar. “You’re much better off with a guide dog.”

  “I was a vicar—the Reverend Simon Field—but I lost my way: I fell into that ditch of which Matthew speaks.”

  “You look more like a tramp than a vicar,” said Dunbar bluntly.

  “I am a hermit.”

  “That’s what you call a vicar who turns into a tramp,” said Dunbar. “Well, I’m a bum, that’s what you call a billionaire who turns into a tramp.”

  “My gambling got the better of me,” said Simon. “I let them strip the lead from the church roof to pay off my debts.”

  “Jesus,” said Dunbar, “look at the state of your feet, they’re bleeding.”

  “The copper piping went next,” said Simon. “I lost a bet on the outcome of the general election. I thought compassion would prevail, but we live in the age of aspiration, the amphetamine of the masses. After they carr
ied the big old radiators out of the church, I had to announce to the parish that we’d been robbed.”

  Dunbar tucked what remained of Simon’s socks into the neck of his boots, lowered his cupped hands into a clear puddle of fresh rainwater and poured the cool liquid over Simon’s traumatized feet.

  “My mistake was to confess to the chair of the Church Roof Committee. I thought we were in love, but he sold my story to the press.”

  “Gay Vicar Puts Lead in His Pencil,” said Dunbar, drying Simon’s feet with his scarf.

  “Oh, I see you’re familiar with the campaign,” said Simon. “ ‘Gay Vicar loses his frock…as bent as the lead he sold to cover his gambling debts…’ and so on and so forth.”

  “I know, I know,” said Dunbar, “we shouldn’t have hounded you that way. I’m glad the rumors about your suicide are untrue. My editor wrote to me saying, ‘I see that pouf priest topped himself. Good riddance.’ I told him that was going too far, I told him that was in very poor taste—we didn’t publish that, obviously.”

  “I don’t care about all that now,” said Simon. “I know of a cave nearby where we could rest for the night. It’ll give us some protection from the cold. I’ll show you the way, if you like.”

  “Thank you,” said Dunbar, helping to put Simon’s boots back on. “That’s very kind of you, especially considering—”

  “Never mind all that,” said Simon. “Let’s just make our way to the cave. Now that it’s stopped raining we might be able to get a fire going.”

  Dunbar gave Simon a hand and hoisted him to his feet. A gaudy sunset, like a drunken farewell scrawled in lipstick on a mirror, formed the background to their departure, but soon the color drained from the sky, leaving a glassy gray clarity in the air. Simon hobbled forward and with each halting step he looked as if he was about to go down on one knee but just managed to rise again at the last moment. Dunbar, who was in awe of his new companion, started to imitate his walk, and with each partial genuflexion, silhouetted against the ghostly light cast by the snow on the distant peaks, he imagined that he was going down on his knees to beg the forgiveness, one after another, of all the people he had harmed.

  At three in the morning, despite popping a couple of Klonopin, Dr. Bob was lying in bed staring at the ceiling like a man who had just been given an electric shock. He listened with disgust to an owl hooting in a nearby tree. To his movie-going, metropolitan ear it felt like the soundtrack that an idiotic, not to say malicious editor had failed to cut out of the harrowing scene in which the protagonist lies on his bed, understandably worried. It had been a hectic day, what with the immolation of Peter Walker (a reckless extravagance), and the fruitless rush to Nutting and to all the other places that Dunbar might conceivably have reached since his escape. He seemed to have spent the whole afternoon turning around in muddy yards after watching Kevin, through the rain-splattered windows of the Range Rover, interrogating concerned but clueless Cumbrians, their blue overalls, big sweaters, and bedraggled livestock forming the blurred background to the sharply delineated words “No Service” in the corner of his phone. Finding Dunbar was now incidental to his purposes; the arrival of Cogniccenti’s money was not.

  When he finally managed to get back to the King’s Head and was able to get on the internet, he discovered that his bank balance was unaltered since the six and a half million paid into it by the Dunbar Trust the week before. His Geneva bank was already closed, but his personal account manager, who had been primed for the arrival of twenty-five million dollars, had written an email offering to chase up the money, if Dr. Bob would kindly furnish him with a reference for its source. Given the service that Swiss banks were supposed to provide, he felt there was something highly unethical about being asked to divulge the origins of any assets whatsoever. He wrote back an austere email saying that he simply wished to be advised as soon as the funds arrived and that he would chase them up from “his end.” There had been no time, however, to call Cogniccenti before dinner and it would have been inept to leave the trace of an importunate email, although he was longing to dash off a dollar sign with twenty-five question marks after it.

  The weather cleared up in the late afternoon and the forecast was good for Tuesday, allowing Abigail to contact Jim Sage during dinner and tell him to pick up Kevin and J by helicopter in the morning from the Plumdale sports field, the only piece of flat ground they had been able to identify. Dr. Bob would be staying behind with Abby and Meg, ready to respond by car as soon as the helicopter team had located Dunbar. They would have plenty to do in the hotel, dealing with the questions that arose from the imminent Board meeting, and keeping the lines of credit in place for their buyout. In the meantime, a great deal of ingenuity had to go into hiding the latest trading figures out of China. If the market picked up any scent of those successes, the Dunbar share price would skyrocket before the sisters could buy them back, or indeed be outbid by an opponent in possession of the full facts. The pleasure of working so cunningly on Cogniccenti’s behalf was blunted by the absence of his twenty-five-million-dollar traitor’s fee.

  He would have to wait until he was sure that Abby and Meg were fully asleep before calling Cogniccenti. Fortunately, Abby had been too tired to summon him to her bed, while Meg was suffering from an undisguised hunger for Jesus’s muscle-bound caresses, and judging by the thudding of the bedhead on the party wall, as well as her rather ostentatious cries of startled pleasure, she was still fully aroused. Dr. Bob was of course relieved that Meg did not require his attention, and was naturally contemptuous of his noisy, knuckleheaded replacement, but he was rather surprised to find how jealous he felt as well. Both sisters belonged to him. He couldn’t stand either of them, indeed he was about to betray both of them, but that was no reason for them to stop desiring him or stop depending on him. There was no satisfaction in betraying people who had already defected. Like the demented sheepdog in Far from the Madding Crowd, he was planning to drive his little flock over the edge of a cliff, but however twisted his purpose he still took pride in his basic skill and could not complacently allow one of his victims to wander off on her own.

  What was he doing comparing himself to a sheepdog in a movie? It was true that they had seen a couple of sheepdogs during the day. Perhaps the Klonopin was loosening his thinking into a more associative, hypnagogic drift, but even the thought that this might be the case gave him a fresh shock of anxiety. How could he have been so naive? Cogniccenti needed nothing more from him: he knew the timing of the deal and was pre-empting it; Dr. Bob had provided one valuable detail after another: the banks the sisters were using, the Board members that were most risk averse, the size and terms of the debt that Eagle Rock would be incurring in its buyout. With an unprecedented lack of paranoia, he had given Cogniccenti everything, and the worst of it was that his enemy, as he had now started to think of him, knew that he was in no position to go back to the sisters. What would he say? “I was going to betray you, but now it looks like the guy I was going to betray you to is going to betray me, so I want to betray him.” It was not a confidence-inspiring pitch.

  That fucking owl, hooting again! The sheepdog was herding the falling sheep, falling asleep. The owl and the sheepdog jumped over the moon, or went to sea in a sieve, or the owl and the sheepdog fell over a cliff; they were all sheep falling over a cliff into sleep, falling into sleep through a steep gray space with no ground.

  —

  It was still dark when Dunbar woke up, but there was enough moonlight for him to see the steam from his breath melting in the bitter air. He realized that, just like Simon, he could no longer feel his feet. That was obviously what happened to people who lived out here. The hollow under a ledge of jutting rock was not quite the cave that Simon had promised, but it was a form of shelter, sloping downward and therefore drier than the surrounding ground.

  There had once been a man called Henry Dunbar, an expert on the glories and shortcomings of some of the greatest properties in the world, but he was barely discernible
now, familiar yet lost, like the pattern in a blind bleached by the sun; it was the man freezing to death under a ledge of rock who was the real Dunbar, with the numbness spreading from his hands and feet toward his heart, a heart that had never pumped so hard, or felt so much, but that would soon come to a stop on this frigid mountainside.

  “Simon!” he called out. “Simon!”

  There was no reply. Dunbar sat up, too cold to shiver. He fumbled for the torch in the inside pocket of his overcoat and managed to shine it around the little hollow. There was no one to be seen. Where had Simon gone? He was a religious man; he wouldn’t just abandon Dunbar. He must have gone to fetch help, or fetch some food he had hidden nearby. He had better come back soon, or Dunbar would die alone in this horrible darkness, alone and unforgiven.

  —

  Florence woke up with her heart pounding. Her father was in serious trouble; she could feel the life leaking out of him into the thirsty ground. She had dreamt that he was under a ledge of rock, freezing to death. She started to get dressed although it wouldn’t begin to be light for another hour and a half. The police and the mountain rescue were going to begin at dawn. They were bringing a helicopter and she was following in one of her own.

  —

  Mark didn’t blame Florence for her distrust, although he was a little hurt that she went to no trouble to disguise it. He could not convince anyone that he was siding against his wife rather than spying on her behalf, since honesty and deceit, in the absence of some crucial information or irreversible risk, would both take the same form: a fervent profession of sincerity. He longed to offer a concrete sacrifice or a crucial gift, but his cold war with Abby had long excluded him from her plans and projects. The two of them occasionally converged, barely exchanging a word in the back of the limo that delivered them to the fund-raising dinner or the award ceremony and barely exchanging impressions when it returned them to their vast apartment. The apartment itself was conveniently spread over three floors, with Mark’s set of rooms sharing the lowest floor with the kitchen and the pool, the gym and the guest bedrooms, and the screening room, while Abby occupied the penthouse. In between were the great entertainment spaces in which Mark was seldom seen. When they converged for Christmas, or Easter, or for a week at Home Lake in the summer, they showed the same practiced ennui as the representatives of enemy countries listening to translations of each other’s speeches in the United Nations General Assembly Hall.