Dunbar Read online

  “No outdoor activities for you today, not with that nasty cough,” said Nurse Roberts. “I don’t know why you’ve put on those great big boots. Wouldn’t we be more comfortable in our slippers?”

  “Not that again,” muttered Dunbar. He couldn’t bear the encroaching madness, but he couldn’t bear the encroaching asylum either. He needed Peter to help him get away. If he didn’t escape today, he might never be able to leave; he might die with Nurse Roberts patting his hand, in a room full of stinking lilies.

  “What was that, dear?”

  He must keep his temper; he must be a perfect hypocrite. Dunbar, famous for his directness, famous for his strong opinions, famous for his startling mergers and acquisitions, must learn to be a hypocrite.

  “No,” said Dunbar. “I’ll stay indoors today, huddled around the blue fire.”

  “The blue fire?” said Nurse Roberts, to whom the phrase sounded suspiciously pornographic.

  “The television,” said Dunbar. “It always looks like a blue fire flickering in the grate.”

  “Oh,” said Nurse Roberts, relieved, “that makes it sound very comforting.”

  “It is comforting,” said Dunbar, “especially if you own some of the channels and advertising revenues are going up because you have a hit show on your hands.”

  “Hmm,” said Nurse Roberts, wheeling Dunbar into the dining room. “Remember what Dr. Harris said. There’s no need to worry about business anymore, it’s in safe hands now, and all we need to do is have a lovely long rest.”

  The dining room was part of the Victorian country house that formed the core of the sanatorium. Its William Morris wallpaper had been carefully copied and some of the oak tables were mainly original, but its dimensions, generous as they were for a large Victorian household, could not keep up with the modern demand for a place in which to neglect the mad, the old, and the dying. A vast conservatory extended beyond the gloomy old room, increasing the dining capacity but also offering a cheerful and light-filled social space, its armchairs and sofas upholstered in bold floral motifs, with leaves and flowers of Amazonian proportions trumpeting the healing powers of nature. Glass-topped bamboo tables, small round ones ready to receive a glass of mango juice and large rectangular ones already laden with as many creased magazines as any dentist’s waiting room, were distributed among the tropical fabrics. In the summer the double doors opened on to a swaying meadow of tall grasses and wildflowers, but today the rain-beaded glass overlooked a field pitted with milky puddles, trampled stalks, and isolated tufts of dead grass. All year round, when it became visible in the intervals between fog and rain and snow, the rugged outline of a sublime lake completed the restful scene.

  Dunbar scanned the room, looking for Peter Walker, but at the same time carefully avoiding the appearance of any eagerness to join a companion regarded by Nurse Roberts as a troublemaker and a thoroughly bad influence.

  “Where would we like to go?” asked Nurse Roberts, answering her own question seamlessly, in case Dunbar had lost the power to speak. “We love the communal table, don’t we? Because it’s a chance to make new friends.”

  As she pushed him toward that precipice of haphazard social encounters, which Dunbar had so far managed to keep well away from, he glimpsed Peter standing by the conservatory’s distant outer doors, under a green sign with the words Fire Exit written on it, next to a sprinting figure who must be trying to escape the inferno of Nurse Roberts’s dating agency.

  “Oh, you lucky man,” said Nurse Roberts, almost indignant at so much good fortune being lavished on him, “there’s a place for you next to Mrs. Harrod.” She slid him into the empty space beside a conspicuously unhappy woman.

  “I’ve completely lost my memory,” said Mrs. Harrod, with the same acid self-assurance that she had shown in delivering the legendary put-downs that used to pepper her conversation. “Never apologize and never explain,” she added with mechanical vehemence.

  “Yeah, that’s what accountants are for,” said Dunbar, distractedly.

  “Conversation,” said Mrs. Harrod, “can be an Indian elephant, or an African elephant, but never both at the same time.”

  “Excuse me,” mumbled Dunbar, seeing that Nurse Roberts was powering her way out of the room on another pharmaceutical or matchmaking mission, “I’ve just spotted a friend of mine.” He rose to his feet, pushing back the obstructive wheelchair.

  “I no longer enjoy coming to London; it’s become like a foreign city,” said Mrs. Harrod. And then she reached out and clasped Dunbar’s arm.

  “Am I going to die here, or am I going somewhere first?” she asked.

  “I…I don’t know,” said Dunbar, recognizing the vertigo of the question.

  “My father used to say that he was born into the diplomatic service,” said Mrs. Harrod, regaining her poise for a moment, “making sure that his parents didn’t argue all day long.”

  Dunbar removed her hand as gently as he could.

  “Have I been to this place before?” she asked with piercing anguish.

  Dunbar hurried away, without attempting to answer.

  “Peter!” he started calling out, as he weaved his way toward the fire exit.

  “Ah, there you are, old man,” said Peter, turning around and pretending to punch Dunbar on the shoulder.

  “Are we going to die here, or are we going somewhere first?” asked Dunbar.

  “We’re going somewhere first,” Peter replied, setting off immediately. “To a pub in Windermere, or Grasmere, or Buttermere, or Meremere—I’m not going to argue about the details. My grasp of the local geography is a little shaky, but my passion for improving it is going to make Wordsworth look like a couch potato. Let’s fetch our coats and scarves, and then throw our jailers off their guard by doubling back through the kitchens.”

  “The kitchens?” said Dunbar, trying to keep up with Peter as he hurried into the intricately tiled hall.

  “Just act natural,” said Peter, in a clenched-jawed parody of high anxiety that immediately made Dunbar feel nervous.

  The two men found their overcoats on the numbered pegs where they belonged. Dunbar’s immense black coat, almost too heavy to wield, with its double-breasted buttons and fur collar, contrasted with Peter’s short green waterproof, with its Gore-Tex lining and sleek zip. While Dunbar wound several yards of cream cashmere around his neck, Peter tied a quick loop in a checkered Palestinian scarf.

  “Yes, indeed, the kitchens,” said thespian Peter. “Garry, the genius behind the Universal Sauce that glazes our every dish, without distinction of fish or fowl, not to mention the Cream of Soup, which makes it quite impossible, in a blind test, to tell the difference between the pea, the carrot, and the leek—my esteemed friend Garry allows me to pass through the kitchen to smoke an illicit cigarette. Just act natural,” he whispered urgently.

  “Please stop saying that, it’s making me anxious,” said Dunbar.

  “What’s making me anxious,” said Peter, “is cash. Mine was confiscated as part of my ‘treatment.’ Ill treatment,” intoned thespian Peter, “masquerading as treatment for the ill.”

  “I don’t have any cash,” said Dunbar, “and my cards have been canceled.”

  “What?” cried Peter, horrified. “But you’re a multibillionaire. I wasn’t expecting you to have a rabbit trap, to help us live off the land, or a hang glider, to take us from this fell hell, with its pretentious puddle of a lake, into the cobbled streets of a proper lakeside village packed with picturesque pubs, but I was counting on you for cash.”

  “There is one card,” said Dunbar, with furtive excitement, “that those thieving bitches didn’t know about—a Swiss account.”

  “The Swiss account,” said Peter, jumping up and down. “What’s the limit?”

  “There is no limit,” said Dunbar, suddenly frightened.

  “No limit!”

  “Please stop saying that,” said Dunbar.

  “We can hire a limo,” said Peter, putting his arm around Dunbar and le
ading him toward the swinging kitchen doors, “and get the hell out of this National Park. We can go to London! We can go to Rome and drink Negronis among some of the world’s greatest ruins!”

  “I don’t want the ruins,” said Dunbar, with a pulse of his old authority, “I want the empire back.”

  “Of course you do, old man,” said Peter, leading Dunbar into the kitchen, with his arm still round his shoulder, “and back you shall have it.”

  “Hello, Peter,” said Garry.

  “Maestro!” said Peter. “Behold the Escoffier of the Lakes!” he said to Dunbar.

  “Off to have one of your fags, are you?” said Garry, scraping amorphous bricks of scrambled egg into a silver dish.

  “I try to kick the habit, but the habit kicks harder,” said Peter.

  “All right then,” said Garry, “but you’ve got to do your Orson Welles first.”

  “My Orson Welles?” said Peter, in a perfect impersonation. “Why, I don’t know what you mean.” He staggered back two steps, looking from side to side, as if the great actor might be nearby, and then came to rest heavily against the stainless steel counter.

  “Do not ask me what I want to eat,” he said, with the rich modulations of Welles’s Othello, wavering eloquently between love and revenge, “when you know what I must eat.” He paused and then cried out, in a voice freighted with grief, “Grilled fish!”

  “Grilled fish,” said Garry, chuckling. “That always gets me.”

  “He wouldn’t have been allowed one of your delicious sauces,” said Peter, “because he was on a diet. That was a quotation from something he said to a waiter in Los Angeles, when he was having lunch with Gore Vidal.”

  “So, it’s a bit of history, then,” said Garry.

  “I’ll let you in on a little secret, Garry: everything is history. By the time you notice it, it’s already happened. That famous imposter, ‘the present,’ disappears in the cognitive gap. Mind the gap!” cried Peter, like a stationmaster warning passengers as train doors open.

  “Please don’t say that,” pleaded Dunbar, leaning on the counter for support.

  “All right then,” said Garry, “you go and have your smoke, but when you get back you’ve got to do your Leonardo di Caprio for me.”

  “That’s quite a tax rate you’ve got me on,” said Peter, trying to guide the bewildered Dunbar toward the back door.

  “Well, it’s the price of success, isn’t it, Peter?” said Garry.

  “You’ve got a deal,” Peter called out, as he turned the handle.

  “Don’t let that man cheat you,” said Dunbar, “there’s no need to pay more than an average of seven percent tax, if you get yourself organized.”

  “Maybe,” said Peter, zipping up his coat as the cold air defeated warmth on the threshold of the kitchen, “but I want more than seven percent of the hospital to be there when I get myself disorganized—in a car crash, for instance.”

  “Do we have a reliable driver?” asked Dunbar, alarmed by the vivid scene of mutilation that the words “car crash” formed in his imagination. He pictured his broken and bleeding body among the buckled metal and scattered glass, and the ambulance men standing by, looking at his tax return and shaking their heads. He hadn’t contributed enough to the Exchequer, he hadn’t honored his side of the social contract, he hadn’t given enough; they were going to leave him there to bleed to death.

  Peter put his finger to his lips and frowned.

  Dunbar suddenly remembered what they were doing. He had drifted off somewhere. Why had he mentioned the driver? He might have ruined everything. He felt like a fool, an utter fool. His mother used to frown at him like that; it was all she had to do to get her way. He thought he had forgotten the rule of shame, until his recent troubles blasted open those old mineshafts, long filled with the rubble of power and money. Now Peter’s frown was burning into him and making him want to become invisible, as if all those decades he had spent becoming more and more conspicuous, becoming Henry Dunbar, becoming a household name, were just impediments to a much deeper longing to disappear. What was going on? How could he forget himself like that? His sense of self was so fragile and contingent; it might dissolve like a watercolor in the rain.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said, following Peter outside, afraid he wouldn’t be allowed to come along because he was such an old fool. “I’m sorry. Am I allowed to come? Am I allowed?”

  “Of course you are, old man,” said Peter. “I just didn’t want anyone to catch on to our plans. They don’t like inmates to under-stay their welcome in this gulag. Jesus, it’s cold, I wish we did have a car and a reliable driver, but we’re going to have to walk. Cumbria in December—people flock here just for the hailstorms. It’s standing room only on Scafell Pike.”

  The two men walked past giant color-coded recycling bins toward a woodland path that offered the most discreet escape, cutting into the lane well below the driveway of the sanatorium. As they left the courtyard, they saw a quad utility vehicle parked behind the wall, with the keys still in the ignition.

  “How powerful are thy Thoughts, Oh, Mighty One!” said Peter, in epic voiceover. “In the beginning was the Thought, and the Thought was with Dunbar, and Dunbar thought car and behold there was a car, and he saw that it was good.”

  “Did I really do that?” said Dunbar incredulously, getting onto the bench next to Peter. “But what would happen if I thought something bad?”

  “Don’t worry, Henry, it’s not a perfect system: you haven’t manifested a reliable driver, for instance. Nobody has ever accused me of being one of those, especially when I go over the alcohol limit, which I sincerely hope to do later today, by a factor of at least twenty.”

  The noisy engine puttered into action and the quad lurched forward, toward the wood. As they bounced along the narrow, muddy path, Peter morphed into a car bore, shouting technical information with boyish enthusiasm over the roar of the engine, but Dunbar was not listening. He was considering the question of his special powers. He had always suspected he had some, but now that he had manifested the very vehicle that they needed in order to escape across this wild land, he was completely convinced for the first time. He felt the rush of destiny, like electricity shimmering down through his body from head to foot. He closed his eyes and experienced a moment of perfect serenity. He would get everything back and, with his power restored, he would punish his wicked daughters and leave the empire to Florence. He had always known that he was supposed to love his children equally, but couldn’t disguise that it was Florence who charmed and delighted him. She had inherited her mother’s beauty as well as her disarming sympathy. Just by listening to him, she could make the knots he tied himself in spontaneously loosen and unravel. She didn’t exercise this effect self-consciously; it was a natural phenomenon, like ice melting at a certain temperature. Apart from her virtues, he loved Florence simply because she was Catherine’s daughter, and Catherine was the great love of his life, a love, or at least an image of love, immortalized by death, sealed off from decay and habituation, from the mundane forces that turn admiration into tolerance, and tolerance into irritation. He could see now, in this moment of lucidity, that after Catherine was killed in the car accident, he had clung to Florence in a way that may have contributed to her desire for independence and her decision to have nothing more to do with his business. At the time he could only see it as a rejection and a second loss, a view encouraged by his other daughters, who had always resented his favoritism, and had spared no effort to please him by imitating his ruthlessness and his will to power. They persuaded him that Florence’s shares must be taken away and given to them, the loyal daughters who respected his achievement and would carry on his legacy. How blind he had been. In a way, he could see now that Florence was the one with the real stubbornness and pride. She had just walked away and never faltered.

  Surprised to feel the quad slow down, Dunbar opened his eyes and saw Mrs. Harrod standing in the middle of the path, beside a mossy outcrop
of gray rock, waving them down. Peter was forced to stop.

  “Are you a taxi?” asked Mrs. Harrod, coming round to Peter’s side.

  “Ursula!” said Peter. “Which way are you headed?”

  “I want to go home.”

  “That’s where we’re going, too!” said Peter. “Have you got the fare?”

  “I have my emergency money,” said Mrs. Harrod, pulling a crumpled envelope out of her overcoat pocket. Peter counted three fifty-pound notes.

  “The exact fare!” he said, tucking the envelope into his jacket. “Hop aboard.”

  “We can’t take her,” whispered Dunbar, “she’s as mad as a snake.”

  “Henry, Henry,” said Peter reproachfully, “we’re in a part of the world famous for its ‘little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.’ In any case, once you set sail in a ship of fools, there’s never any shortage of passengers!”

  “But there is a shortage of room,” said Dunbar, moving reluctantly along the bench.

  “Aha!” said Peter. “It’s a sign!”

  He pointed to a sign with the words Plumdale (Bridle Path Only) written on it.

  “With the traction on this baby,” said Peter, “we can handle the bridle path, but our jailers won’t be able to follow us in their cumbersome convoy of ordinary cars.”

  As the quad set off again, roaring along the new woodland path, Dunbar’s mood collapsed without warning or transition. He realized that he couldn’t rely on Peter, who was just off on a drunken escapade, and he certainly couldn’t rely on the demented Mrs. Harrod. He was going to have to escape alone. The leafless trees, with their black branches stretching out hysterically in every direction, looked to him like illustrations of a central nervous system racked by disease: studies of human suffering anatomized against the winter sky.