Dunbar

King Lear retold

EDWARD ST AUBYN

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Epub ISBN: 9781781090404

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Copyright © Edward St Aubyn 2017

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First published by Hogarth in 2017

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

1

‘We’re off our meds,’ whispered Dunbar.

‘We’re off our meds/ we’re off our heads,’ sang Peter, ‘we’re out of our beds/ and we’re off our meds! Yesterday,’ he continued in a conspiratorial whisper, ‘we were drooling into the lapels of our terry cloth dressing gowns, but now we’re off our meds! We’ve spat them out; we’ve tranquillised the aspidistras! If those fresh lilies you get sent each day …’

‘When I think where they come from,’ growled Dunbar.

‘Steady, old man.’

‘They stole my empire and now they send me stinking lilies.’

‘Oh, you had an empire, did you?’ said Peter, in the voice of an eager hostess, ‘you must meet Gavin in Room 33, he’s here in disguise, but his real name,’ Peter lowered her voice, ‘is Alexander the Great.’

‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ grumbled Dunbar, ‘he’s been dead for years.’

‘Well,’ said Peter, now a Harley Street consultant, ‘if those troubled lilies were suffering from schizophrenic tendencies; tendencies, mind you, a little penchant for the schizoid, not the full-blown thing, their symptoms will have been mitigated with a minimum of fatal side effects.’ He leant forward and whispered, ‘that’s where I put my dead meds: in the vase with the lilies!’

‘I really did have an empire, you know,’ said Dunbar. ‘Have I ever told you the story of how it was stolen from me?’

‘Many times, old man, many times,’ said Peter dreamily.

Dunbar heaved himself out of his armchair and after a couple of stumbling steps, straightened up, squinting at the strong light that slanted through the reinforced glass of his premium cell.

‘I told Wilson that I would stay on as non-executive chairman,’ Dunbar began, ‘keeping the plane, the entourage, the properties and the appropriate privileges, but laying down the burden—’ he reached over to the large vase of lilies and lowered it carefully to the floor, ‘laying down the burden of running the Trust from day to day. From now on, I told him, the world will be my perfect playground and, in due course, my private hospice.’

‘Oh, that’s very good,’ said Peter, ‘“the world is my private hospice”, that’s a new one.’

‘“But the Trust is everything”, Wilson told me.’ Dunbar grew more agitated as he moved into the story. ‘“If you give that away,” he said, “you’ll have nothing left. You can’t give something away and keep it at the same time.”’

‘It’s an untenable position,’ Peter cut in, ‘as R. D. Laing said to the Bishop.’

‘Please let me tell my story,’ said Dunbar. ‘I told Wilson that it was a tax measure, that we could get around the inheritance tax by giving the girls the company straight away. “Better pay the tax,” said Wilson, “than disinherit yourself.”’

‘Oh, I like this Wilson,’ said Peter. ‘He sounds like a sound fellow, he sounds like a man with his meds screwed on, I mean his heads screwed on.’

‘He only had one head,’ said Dunbar impatiently, ‘he wasn’t a monster; it’s my daughters who are the monsters.’

‘Only one head!’ said Peter. ‘What a dull fellow! When I get anti-depressed I have more heads on my head than bees in a bonnet.’

‘Very well, very well,’ said Dunbar. He looked up at the ceiling and then boomed down in the voice of Wilson, ‘“You can’t cling to the trappings of power, without the power itself. It’s just,”’ he paused, trying to avoid the word, but eventually letting it fall on him from the plaster above, ‘“decadent”.’

‘Oh, decadence, decay and death,’ said Peter in his thespian tremolo, ‘descending, syllable by syllable, into a narrow grave. How lightly we have tripped down those stairs, like Fred Astaires, twirling a scythe instead of a cane!’

‘God in heaven,’ said Dunbar, his face flushing, ‘will you please stop interrupting me? People didn’t used to interrupt me; they listened to me meekly. If they spoke, it was to flatter me, or to make lucrative insinuations. But you, you …’

‘Okay, guys,’ said Peter, as if addressing an angry mob, ‘give the man some space. Let’s hear what he’s gotta say.’

‘“I can do what I bloody well like!”’ cried Dunbar, ‘that’s what I told Wilson. “I am informing you of my decision, not asking your advice. Just make it happen!”’

Dunbar raised his eyes to the ceiling again.

‘“I’m not only your lawyer, Henry; I’m your oldest surviving friend. I’m saying these things to protect you.”

‘“You presume too much on our friendship,” I thundered. “I will not be lectured on the company that I alone created.”’ Dunbar raised his fist to the ceiling and shook it. ‘At that point, I seized a Fabergé egg that lay in a nest of tissue paper on my desk – it was the third one that month: how monotonous the Russians were with their imperial pretensions; bunch of jumped-up Jewish kleptocrats, pretending to be Romanov princes, I didn’t need their: “Bloody Russki trash!” I shouted, flinging the egg into the fireplace behind my desk, scattering pearls and fragments of enamel across the hearth. “What do my daughters call it?” I asked Wilson. “Bling! Bloody Russki bling!”

‘Wilson remained impassive; these “infantile tantrums” had become almost daily occurrences, causing some worry to my medical team. You see,’ said Dunbar to Peter excitedly, ‘I can read his thoughts now. I’ve got …’

‘I’m afraid to say that you’ve got psychotic insight,’ said Peter, the Harley Street consultant.

‘Oh, pish, stop pretending to be a doctor.’

‘Who shall I pretend to be?’ asked Peter.

‘Just be yourself, for heaven’s sake.’

‘Oh, I haven’t got that one down yet, Henry. Give me someone easier to impersonate. How about John Wayne?’ Peter didn’t wait for an answer. ‘We’re goin’ to bust out of this joint, Henry,’ he drawled, ‘and by sundown tomorrow we’ll be walkin’ into the Windermere Saloon and ordering a couple of drinks from the bartender, like a couple of real men in charge of their own destinies.’

‘I must tell my story,’ wailed Dunbar. ‘Oh, God, let me not go mad.’

‘You see,’ said Peter, ignoring Dunbar’s distress, ‘I am, or I was, or I used to be – who knows whether I’m history or not? – a famous comedian, but I suffer from depression, the comic affliction, or the tragic affliction of the comic, or the historic affliction of tragic comedians, or the fiction of the tragic affliction of historic comedians!’

‘Please,’ said Dunbar, ‘I’m getting confused.’

‘Oh, I’m anti-depressed /I’m anti-depressed’, sang Peter, leaping from his chair, locking arms with Dunbar and encouraging him to spin, ‘I’m so anti-depressed/ that I’m manic!’ He stopped suddenly and let go of Dunbar’s arm. ‘Sound of Screeching Tyres,’ he cut in, in his voiceover voice, beginning to mime, ‘as he wrestles manfully with the steering wheel on the verge of a precipice.’

‘I have seen your many faces,’ said Dunbar vaguely, ‘on many screens.’

‘Oh, I don’t claim to be unique,’ said Peter, with a swagger of modesty, ‘I’m not the only one. In fact in 1953, when I was ejected into this vale of tears by my careless mother, there were already two hundred and thirty-one Peter Walkers in the London telephone directory alone; well, not alone so much as overcrowded.’

Dunbar stood frozen in the middle of the room.

‘But I digress,’ said Peter jovially. ‘Tell me about your “medical team”, old man.’

‘My medical team,’ said Dunbar, grasping at the handrail of a familiar phrase in the pitch and roll of his thoughts. ‘Yes, yes; only the day before I announced my decision to Wilson, Dr Bob, my personal physician, had taken Wilson aside to tell him that I had been experiencing some “little cerebral incidents”. He told Wilson there was “nothing to get unduly worried about”.’

‘Is there ever anything to get unduly worried about,’ Peter couldn’t help asking, ‘when there are so many things to worry about duly?’

Dunbar waved him aside, like a man discouraging a persistent fly.

‘But,’ Dunbar resumed, ‘according to the glib doctor – that gilded serpent, that dodecahedron – who should have been an expert, since his only patient was me, or I, or at any rate, myself, Henry Dunbar,’ he said, pounding his chest, ‘Henry Dunbar.’

‘Not Henry Dunbar, the Canadian media mogul!’ asked Peter, seemingly all agog. ‘One of the world’s richest, and arguably the world’s most powerful man?’

‘Yes, yes, that’s me, or I, or at least my name – my grammar slips a little around certain ideas, spins around, around certain whirlpools. Anyway, according to that hateful traitor, my physician, it would be better to keep my tantrums “to a minimum”; for my entourage not to engage with them, or appear to take them too seriously.’

‘Tantrums will be at a maximum tomorrow afternoon,’ Peter announced, ‘as Hurricane Henry moves through the Lake District. Viewers are advised to crawl into a basement and chain themselves to a rock.’

Dunbar flailed his arms around, warding off more and more flies.

‘I … I. Where was I? Oh, yes, after my little show of rage, Wilson remained impassive, thinking it was the right thing to do. Meanwhile, I noticed the egg; its surface turned out to be chipped and spoilt, but the interior was made of gold and the whole thing had failed to shatter in the way that my mood demanded. I walked over to it and brought my pitiless hell down on the maddening toy, but it was more resistant than I had imagined and the egg slid from under my shoe. I just caught the mantelpiece in time to save myself from an ignominious fall. I saw loyal Wilson rise from his chair and subside again. The moment of shock jolted me out of my fury and into a more fragile frame of mind.

‘“I’m getting old, Charlie,” I said to Wilson, picking up the toy egg and pushing down the sense of dread I’d carried ever since that stupid, stupid accident in Davos: the constant fear of falling over again, of no longer being able to trust my treacherous body. “I don’t want that level of responsibility any more,” I said. “The girls will look after me, there’s nothing they love more than fussing over their old father.”’

‘In short,’ said Peter, in a thick Viennese accent, ‘“he turned his daughters into his mother!” As Freud said to the Bishop, on the corner of Heimatstrasse and Wanderlust.’

‘I opened the window nearest to me,’ Dunbar persisted, ‘and posted the egg into the air. “That’ll make someone’s day,” I said.’

‘“As long as it doesn’t crack their skull,” said Wilson. “Heads are more brittle than gold.”’

‘Oh, what a wise Wilson it is,’ said Peter.

‘“I think we would have heard the cry of alarm by now,” I assured him, sitting back down behind my desk. “People are better at hiding their glee than their agony. Here,” I said, offering Wilson a gift, “why don’t you have one of these? I’ve got enough of this Russki bling to make a Fabergé omelette.” I opened my drawer and tossed a glittering bauble through the air. Wilson, who had been playing catch with me and my family for several decades, since that first Sunday lunch when he found us all playing baseball in the garden like a normal family – like a family playing at being a normal family – caught it neatly, glanced down at the lattice of tiny diamonds that criss-crossed its crimson surface and rolled it without comment on to the table beside his armchair, where it came to rest unsteadily next to his empty Meissen coffee cup.’

‘I’m loving the detail, darling,’ said Peter, the ecstatic theatre director, ‘loving it.’

‘“You should at least hold back a block of shares,” said Wilson, “and I’m telling you right now that you won’t be allowed to keep Global One. No private citizen has his own 747.”

‘“Allowed?” I thundered, “allowed? Who is it will deny Dunbar his wishes? Who is it will deny Dunbar his whims?”’

‘Why Dunbar, of course,’ said Peter. ‘Only he has the power, or had the power, or used to have the power.’

‘I’ll make it a condition of the gift! By God, I’ll have my way!’

A knock on the door made Dunbar fall abruptly silent. A hunted look came over his face.

‘Quickly,’ said Peter, leaping up and hurrying to his side. ‘Remember, old man: pretend to take your meds, but don’t swallow them,’ he whispered. ‘Tomorrow is the great escape, the great jailbreak.’

‘Yes, yes,’ whispered Dunbar, ‘the great escape. Enter!’ he called out grandly.

Peter, who had started quietly humming the theme music of Mission Impossible, gave Dunbar a wink.

Dunbar tried to return the wink, but found he could not control his eyelids separately and blinked a few times instead.

Two nurses entered the room, pushing a trolley loaded with medicine bottles and plastic cups.

‘Good afternoon, gentlemen,’ said Nurse Roberts, the older of the two. ‘How are we today?’

‘Has it ever occurred to you, Nurse Roberts,’ asked Peter, ‘that we might have more than one emotion within us, let alone between us?’

‘Up to your old tricks again, Mr Walker,’ said Nurse Roberts. ‘Have we been to our meeting today?’

‘We have been to our meeting, and I am happy to report that we experienced a warm sense of fellowship with our fellow fellows.’

Nurse Muldoon couldn’t help giggling.

‘Don’t encourage him,’ said Nurse Roberts with a disapproving sigh. ‘We’re not going to try to run away to the pub again, are we?’

‘What do you take me for?’ asked Peter.

‘A raging alcoholic,’ said Nurse Roberts sarcastically.

‘What on earth could persuade a person to leave this notorious beauty spot,’ said Peter returning to his thespian tremolo, ‘this haven of natural tranquillisers, this valley through which the milk of human kindness flows like a silken river, healing the troubled minds of its already well heeled clientele?’

‘Hmmm,’ said Nurse Roberts, ‘we’ve got our eye on you.’

‘Here at Schloss Meadowmeade,’ said Peter, metamorphosed into a German Kommandant, ‘we have ninety- nine point nine per cent security! The only reason it is not one hundred per cent is because you fellows locked one of your own officers on the window ledge overnight and he lost a finger to frostbite!’

‘That’s enough of your nonsense,’ said Nurse Roberts. ‘What’s this vase doing on the floor? Nurse Muldoon, would you mind? And then, will you please accompany Mr Walker back to his room. Mr Dunbar needs his afternoon rest. It’s time to say goodbye and let him get a little peace and quiet.’

‘See ya round, partner,’ said John Wayne, giving Dunbar a wink.

Dunbar blinked back several times to show that he understood.

After the others had left, Nurse Roberts led the way into the bedroom with her trolley.

‘I don’t think Mr Walker is a good influence on you, personally,’ she said. ‘He just gets you agitated.’

‘Yes,’ said Dunbar humbly, ‘you’re quite right, Nurse. He’s a bit all over the place. I find him quite frightening sometimes.’

‘I’m not surprised you do, dear. To tell you the truth, I never liked The Many Faces of Peter Walker – always used to change channels. Give me Danny Kaye any day. It was a more innocent age. Or Dick Emery, oh, he used to make me laugh,’ said Nurse Roberts, plumping Dunbar’s pillows while he sat on the edge of the bed, the very picture of a dazed old man.

‘Now it’s time for us to take our afternoon medicine,’ said Nurse Roberts. She set aside two bottles, lifting a plastic cup from the column of cups in the corner of the trolley.

‘We’ve got our nice green and brown one that makes us feel all warm and fuzzy,’ she explained in language simple enough for poor old Dunbar to understand, ‘and then we’ve got our big white one that stops us having silly ideas about our daughters not loving us, when they’re paying for us to have a lovely long holiday here at Meadowmeade, and to get the rest we deserve after being a very, very busy and very important man.’

‘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, authorised to take samples of Dunbar’s blood and urine, to check him for prostate cancer, to shine torchlight on to 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 gynaecologist, 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 cancelled by the perfect civil war of omnipotence and impotence that gridlocked his body and his mind.

2

‘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 savour 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 rumour 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 rumour.’

‘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 on to 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 FOR EVER.”’

‘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 sentimental 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 anaesthetise 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 moulded 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 marvelled 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 per cent 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 ribcage and down to his hipbone. 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 the 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.

3

‘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.