Dunbar Read online

  “I know they love me, really,” said Dunbar, accepting the little cup. “I just get confused.”

  “Of course you do,” said Nurse Roberts, “that’s why you’re here, dear, so we can help you.”

  “I have another daughter…” Dunbar began.

  “Another daughter?” said Nurse Roberts. “Oh, dear, I’ll have to have a word with Dr. Harris about your doses.”

  Dunbar tipped the pills into his mouth and took a sip of water from the glass proffered by Nurse Roberts. Smiling gratefully at his caregiver, he lay down on the bed and, without another word, closed his eyes.

  “You have a nice little nap,” said Nurse Roberts, wheeling her trolley out of the room. “Sweet dreams!”

  The moment he heard the door close, Dunbar’s eyes shot open. He sat up and spat the pills into his hand, hoisting himself out of bed and shuffling back into his sitting room.

  “Monsters,” he muttered, “vultures tearing at my heart and entrails.” He pictured their ragged head feathers streaked with gore and offal. Treacherous, lecherous bitches, perverting his personal physician—the man appointed to examine Dunbar’s body, authorized to take samples of Dunbar’s blood and urine, to check him for prostate cancer, to shine torchlight onto his tender tonsils; it didn’t bear thinking about, didn’t bear thinking about—perverting his personal physician into their, into their all too personal gynecologist, their pimp, their copulator, their serpent dildo!

  He thrust the pills down the neck of the vase with his shaking thumbs.

  “You think you can castrate me with your chemicals, eh?” said Dunbar. “Well, you’d better watch out, my little bitches, I’m on my way back. I’m not finished yet. I’ll have my revenge. I’ll—I don’t know what I’ll do yet—but I’ll…”

  The words wouldn’t come, the resolution wouldn’t come, but the rage continued to swell up in him until he started to growl like a wolf preparing to attack, a low, slowly intensifying growl with nowhere to go. He hoisted the vase above his head, ready to fling it against his prison window, but then he froze, unable to smash it or to put it down, all action canceled by the perfect civil war of omnipotence and impotence that gridlocked his body and his mind.

  “But why won’t you tell me where he is?” said Florence. “He’s my father, too.”

  “Darling, of course I’ll tell you where he is,” said Abigail, in a husky voice whose Canadian accent had been overlaid with the thick varnish of an English education. She wedged the phone in place with her tilted head while she lit a cigarette. “I just can’t remember the name of the wretched place for the moment. I’ll get someone to email it to you later today—promise.”

  “Wilson followed Henry to London because he was so worried about him,” said Florence, “and got sacked the day he arrived. After forty years…”

  “I know, isn’t it dreadful?” said Abigail, gazing vacantly at sunlit blocks of Manhattan through the bedroom window. “Daddy’s become so vindictive.”

  “Wilson said he had never seen him so upset,” said Florence. “Apparently, he was raving at passers-by on Hampstead High Street after some kind of psychiatric evaluation you sent him to. The cash machines swallowed all his cards and when he discovered that his phone was cut off as well, he was so angry that he threw it under a passing bus. I don’t understand how that could have happened.”

  “Well, you know how impatient he is.”

  “I don’t mean that, I mean how his cards and his phone could—”

  “Darling, he had a complete fit and was found by the police inside a hollow tree on Hampstead Heath, talking to himself.”

  “If everyone who talked to themselves got put in a psychiatric hospital, there wouldn’t be anyone left to look after them.”

  “Now, you’re really beginning to annoy me,” said Abigail. “Dr. Bob,” she continued, smiling down at him, to savor the dramatic irony of his mention, “saw that Daddy was having a quite serious psychotic break.”

  Dr. Bob held up two thumbs to congratulate her on the use of this impressive phrase.

  “And now he’s been put in the very best and most comfortable sanatorium in Switzerland,” said Abigail. “Oh, I wish I could remember its name, it’s on the tip of my tongue. To be perfectly honest, when I saw the website,” she confided, “I quite wanted to check myself in: it looked like complete heaven. I’m sorry if I sounded annoyed earlier, but it’s not as if we love Daddy any less than you do; in fact, we’ve been at it rather longer than you, so we might arguably be said to love him more—from an accumulated income point of view. But seriously, markets still see him as the figurehead of the Trust and if a rumor gets out that Henry Dunbar has lost the plot, we could all wake up tomorrow with a couple of billion dollars wiped off the value of the shares, and another two the next day—that’s all it takes: a rumor.”

  “I don’t care about the share price; I just want to make sure that he’s all right. If he’s in trouble, I want to help.”

  “Oh, how noble of you!” said Abigail. “Well, some of us have already been helping him to run the Dunbar Trust, which, in case you hadn’t noticed, is what he’s actually been doing all our lives. I know you chose to opt out of that ‘sordid power game’ in order to become an artist and bring up your children in ‘a sane environment.’ God forbid you should pay attention to anything as crass as a share price—so long as your portfolio income comes rolling into your account every month.”

  “Oh, stop ranting, Abby. I just want to see him, that’s all,” said Florence. “Please email me the address as soon as you can.”

  “Of course I will, darling. Let’s not argue, it’s too…Oh, she’s hung up,” said Abigail, switching her phone off and sending it clattering onto the bedside table. “God, that girl gets on my nerves,” she said, allowing her dressing gown to slip to the floor as she clambered back into bed. “I sometimes think I could kill her with my bare hands.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” said Megan, who was lying on the other side of Dr. Bob, looking dangerously bored. “Get a professional.”

  “Do you think we could get it off tax?” said Abigail. “ ‘For professional services.’ ”

  Megan, who was quite proud of her sullenness, nevertheless allowed herself a smile.

  “Girls!” said Dr. Bob, in mock horror, “we’re talking about your sister.”

  “Half-sister,” Megan corrected him.

  “We’d be perfectly happy if you’d surgically remove the part of her that’s not a Dunbar, wouldn’t we, Meg?”

  “That seems like a very reasonable compromise,” said Megan.

  “She’s got her mother’s long legs,” said Abigail.

  “And her mother’s eyes,” said Megan.

  “Anyhow, we only have to string her along for another five days, until the meeting on Thursday,” said Abigail. “Then we’ll have the Board behind us. It’s time to strip Daddy of his role as ‘non-executive chairman’—that was like asking for non-wet water—all those fucking memos!”

  “I loved your email,” said Megan, suddenly animated, “ ‘Didn’t you get the memo? DADDY IS GOING TO LIVE FOREVER.’ ”

  “I know I shouldn’t laugh,” said Abigail, “but I can’t help thinking of him on Hampstead High Street, shouting, ‘Just make it happen! Just make it happen!’ ”

  “That’s the sum of his emotional intelligence to date,” said Megan: “shouting, ‘Just make it happen!’ and either having his way or getting someone sacked. Do you remember his face when we told him he couldn’t have Global One to go to London?”

  “ ‘Why do you need a 747?’ I asked,” said Abigail. “ ‘You can use one of the Gulfstreams—they’re so much cosier.’ I thought he was going to have a heart attack right there and then.”

  “ ‘A Gulfstream,’ ” said Megan, impersonating her father, as if he were a petulant child. “ ‘Who do you take me for? Who do you? Who do you mistake me for? One of the merely rich?’ ”

  “He always told us not to be sentimen
tal about business, and we’re just doing what we were told,” said Abigail obediently. “He certainly wasn’t sentimental when it came to having Mummy sectioned during the custody battles. Well, now he can have a taste of his own medicine. And of your medicine,” she added, as if Dr. Bob might be feeling left out. “What was it you gave him?”

  “A non-specific disinhibitor. It was designed to make him more suggestible, basically more paranoid, if bad stuff was happening around him,” said Dr. Bob, hoping the room was not bugged.

  “It’s rather pathetic that it took so little,” said Megan. “Where are your inner resources, Dunbar?” she asked mockingly. “No money, no phone, no car, no entourage, a few harsh questions from our friend the psychiatrist, and a little bit of enhanced paranoia—that’s all it took to drive him whimpering on to Hampstead Heath and cowering in a hollow tree.”

  “He was lucky to find a hollow tree,” said Abigail, like a nanny telling her little charge to stop complaining and start counting his blessings.

  “The best bit is that he sacked his most loyal ally,” said Megan. “It beggars belief. We would have had real trouble getting rid of Wilson, but to regretfully accept our father’s last sane command and have his attorney removed from the Board is a dream come true.”

  “Well,” said Dr. Bob, eager to move away from the subject of his former patient’s downfall, “I just want to say that I must be the luckiest man in the world.” He started to beat out a rhythm on his raised thighs, and then launched into a song from Cabaret that he hadn’t been able to get off his mind.

  “ ‘Beedle dee, dee dee dee,

  Two ladies,

  Beedle dee, dee dee dee,

  Two ladies,

  Beedle dee, dee dee dee,

  And I’m the only man, ja!’ ”

  “Please stop singing that awful song,” said Megan. “The last thing we need is a theme tune for our expedient ménage à trois.”

  “That’s right,” said Abigail, pretending to stub and twist her cigarette in the imaginary ashtray of Dr. Bob’s chest, but then resigning herself to using the real one on the bedside table.

  “You two are as thick as thieves,” said Dr. Bob. “A man could get to feel threatened around you.”

  “Don’t deny that you enjoy feeling a little threatened,” said Abigail, gripping one of his nipples and twisting it hard.

  Dr. Bob caught his breath and closed his eyes.

  “Harder!” he gasped.

  Megan joined in hungrily, plunging her teeth into the other side of his chest.

  “Jesus!” said Dr. Bob, “that’s too much!”

  Megan looked up at him, laughing.

  “Jesus,” he repeated, wriggling his way down the middle of the bed, away from the cruel parentheses of the women’s reclining bodies.

  “Sissy,” said Abigail.

  “Excuse me while I sew my nipple back on,” said Dr. Bob. “I don’t want to end up as the only man in America with an involuntary breast implant.”

  Picking up what appeared to be a luxurious briefcase rather than a medical bag, Dr. Bob hurried into the bathroom, naked. Looking in the mirror to assess the damage to his chest, he saw, through the strange blue tinge (such a delicate side effect) that stained his vision, the Viagra flush darkening his face. He was being wrecked by the demands of the voracious sisters. The side effect he dreaded most was priapism.

  The inside of the case gave him an immediate and sorely needed sense of reassurance. In the upper half, small bottles of injectable liquids were held in place by leather belts with Velcro buckles: ketamine, diamorphine, and what he needed straight away, lidocaine hydrochloride, to anesthetize his chewed nipple while he sewed it back in place. He took out the bottle of lidocaine from the middle of the second row and placed it on the edge of the basin. A tray in the lower section of the case contained a set of instruments—scalpels, retractors, cannulas, a bone saw, a stethoscope, arterial clamps, and so forth—each nestling in its own purple velvet niche. He lifted the tray, revealing a lower layer of molded purple velvet, housing tightly packed rows of medication in uniform orange plastic cylinders. He shook out a couple of Percocet and knocked them back, and then on impulse, to counteract the narcotic effects of the painkiller, took a Dexedrine to keep him alert. A man couldn’t afford to get dozy around the Dunbar sisters.

  After injecting the lidocaine into his pectoral muscle, Dr. Bob opened a special compartment in his briefcase and took out a pair of powerful half-moon glasses. He switched on the band of light around the vanity mirror and started to examine the magnified and brightly lit wound. It was a tricky operation to perform on himself: keeping the wound open with forceps and then sewing its edges using a needle holder and black thread, but Dr. Bob’s skill and experience soon resulted in a beautiful set of stitches with only a thin piece of thread emerging neatly from the end of the suture.

  He marveled again at Megan’s viciousness; she was the one who ought to be in a sanatorium, not her father. Dr. Bob could imagine (dimly) making a future with Abigail, except that she was getting too old and had the slightly absurd mannerisms of someone who had been over-impressed by the atmosphere of languid entitlement in her British boarding school. She was mostly amoral, sometimes conventionally moral, and often opportunistically immoral—in other words, normal, like him. Megan, on the other hand, was a fucking psychopath, whose displays of affection should be confined to a hospital that was equipped to deal with the consequences. In the end, he would dispense with them both. In the meantime, he had accepted their bribe of a seat on the Board, a six-and-a-half-million-dollar salary, and share options representing one point five percent of the Dunbar stock. That was his price for certifying that an eighty-year-old man in an artificially heightened state of anxiety was no longer fit to run one of the most complex business empires in the world. Not a bad deal. He had been slowly acquiring stock over the last twelve years. The old man used to give him some as a Christmas bonus, and he had invested all his spare money in the Trust as well.

  A knock on the bathroom door made Dr. Bob reach for his roll of plaster, feeling the need for additional protection.

  “Can I come in?” said Megan quietly, almost remorsefully.

  “Okay,” said Dr. Bob, hastily cutting a large section from the strip.

  Megan walked into the bathroom and kissed him on the shoulder.

  “I’m sorry, I know I went a bit too far,” she said.

  “I forgive you,” said Dr. Bob.

  She ran her nails lightly over his rib cage and down to his hip bone. The Viagra kicked into action.

  “Here,” said Megan, sitting on the edge of the marble counter and wrapping her legs around Dr. Bob’s waist. “Take me here.”

  Dr. Bob put down the plaster and clasped the back of Megan’s legs, just above the knee. She lowered her strong thighs on to his hands, trapping them on the counter and then, with one swift movement, like a bird of prey, she pecked at the wound in his chest with her sharp teeth.

  “Got you,” she said, laughing triumphantly.

  Dr. Bob recoiled, dragging his hands free.

  “You mad bitch!” he shouted.

  “Don’t ever talk to me like that,” said Megan, “or I’ll have you gutted like a fish.”

  Dr. Bob counted to ten, as he had so often fruitlessly advised Dunbar to do, in the hope of controlling his temper.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I should hope so, too,” said Megan, hopping down from the counter and standing in front of him. She pinched the tail of black thread protruding from his stitches and gave it a sharp tug.

  “That’s what you get for calling me horrid names,” she said.

  “I totally deserved that,” said Dr. Bob, blood trickling from the reopened wound.

  “Okay, my little lovebirds,” said Abigail, putting her head round the bathroom door, “I’ve got to get back to my ghastly husband.”

  “And I have to get back to my husband’s ashes,” said Megan, slipping past her into th
e hall.

  “Don’t forget that you’re coming to dinner tonight,” said Abigail to Dr. Bob.

  “How could I forget?” said Dr. Bob. How could he ever forget? The three of them were inseparable now, like mountaineers roped together at sunset on the same icy cliff face.

  “Who am I?”

  “You’re Henry Dunbar, of course,” said Nurse Roberts, opening the curtains.

  “I don’t mean my name, you stupid, stupid woman,” growled Dunbar, “I mean who can tell me who I am, who I really am?”

  “I don’t appreciate being called stupid, thank you very much,” said Nurse Roberts, “and who you ‘really are’ this morning is a very rude old man who owes Nurse Roberts an apology.”

  “I’m sorry, Nurse Roberts,” said Dunbar, clinging to his fragmented sense that something very important was happening that day and that he must try to stay out of trouble.

  “That’s better,” said Nurse Roberts. “We’re only human and we all have mornings when we wake up on the wrong side of the bed, don’t we?”

  “We certainly do,” said Dunbar, “almost every day.”

  “Now, are we going to have a lonely breakfast in our room, or are we going to make the extra effort to go to the dining room and have a nice chat with some of the other guests?” asked Nurse Roberts.

  “We’re going to make the extra effort,” said Dunbar.

  “That’s what I like to hear,” said Nurse Roberts, throwing her weight behind Dunbar’s unnecessary wheelchair and setting off through the thick carpet, as he leant back to smile at her pathetically.

  Worried that his morning pills would start dissolving under his tongue, he faked a coughing fit and managed to spit them into his handkerchief. He was feeling more vigor without his meds, but also more rage and outrage. As the wheels of speculation and desire started to spin faster he could feel them generating more power, but he had no idea whether they could be stopped before they flew off altogether. He couldn’t go back to the anguish he had felt after seeing that psychiatrist in Hampstead. Not that again, please, the feeling that there was nothing solid at all, that the ground he stood on was no more than a half-finished jigsaw puzzle, which was about to be pulled apart by a cruel and impatient child and that, worst of all, he was the child—there was no one else to blame for the treachery of everything; the horror, in the end, the horror was the way his mind worked.