Dunbar’s path ran parallel to a stream that coursed down the middle of the hill. The white noise of rushing water helped to camouflage the anxious murmur of his thoughts. He treated each step and each breath as an individual package of concentration, pausing briefly when both his feet were safely on the ground and then starting up again. The climb ahead was steep and indistinct, but all he had to do was take the next step, propelled by the relentless forward motion that had characterized his entire adult life. He had always stretched into the future, bringing his business to new continents and bringing new technologies to his business, not because he understood them in any detail, or enjoyed using them himself, but because they smelt of novelty. Although he was still driven forward by these dogged habits, his confidence was now so easily destroyed that he was trying to reduce the horizon of anticipation, keeping his eyes on the ground immediately in front of him, as if darkness had already fallen and he was being guided by a lantern that only cast a faint pool of light a few yards ahead of him.
As he heard the splashing water grow closer, he allowed himself to glance up and saw that the path would soon be crossing the stream on an improvised bridge of flat stones. He lowered his head again and pressed on, but this time he found that the more resolutely he narrowed his field of vision, the more complexity seemed to emerge from it: the gray rocks on the edge of the path were covered in patches of white and acid green lichen, and where water gathered in cracks and hollows there were pockets of dark velvety moss. The broken rock on the path itself showed traces of rusty red and sometimes the momentary glitter of crystal. Like a child on a beach, he wanted to pick up the smooth stone with a white mineral vein encircling its dark surface, but he knew there would be no one to show it to.
By the time he reached the stream, he no longer felt protected by his downward gaze; on the contrary, it seemed to be drawing him into a vertigo of detail, a microscopic world that he didn’t need a microscope to imagine, where every patch of lichen was a strangely colored forest of spores, their trunks rearing from the stony planet on which they lived. Freshly alarmed by how suggestible his mind had become, he decided to pause in the middle of the stream, needing to negotiate between the engulfing richness at his feet and accepting what until now had seemed to be the harder challenge of facing the scale of his isolation in such a wild and empty place.
He stood on the flat stones, facing downstream, imagining that the glassy water spilling over the gray rocks in front of him and tumbling into a foaming pool was also flowing through his troubled mind and washing away the confusion and dread that kept threatening to take it over. As it ran down the hill, the stream looked to him like an incision, a comparison that immediately gave him the mad feeling that a surgical knife was running down the center of his own torso. He moved his attention hurriedly on to the serene expanse of Merewater, but the sight of the now distant car park in which he had parted from Peter assailed him with a sense of bereavement that he didn’t want to dwell on either. When at last he dared to look up he saw a canopy of thin broken cloud and, behind it, the detached blue of the upper sky flooded with light. The clouds themselves appeared to be racing toward him, funneled by the high hills on either side of the lake toward the pass at his back, making him feel trapped at the convergence point of a horizontal V. Along with this disturbing illusion, he felt an incoherent sense of guilt, as if the broken clouds were fragments of an infinitely precious blue and white vase he had been entrusted with and had stupidly dropped, and that he must somehow glue back together before the owner returned.
“Please don’t let me go mad,” he muttered, and then, after a pause, he tried to cover his secondary confusion. Who was he asking to grant him this mercy? He bowed to the stream with exaggerated courtesy, hoping that his sarcastic formality would give him some relief, but his need was too urgent to play with.
“Please, please, please, don’t let me go mad,” he begged, not making fun of anything anymore, and promising he never would again, if only this feeling would go away.
He twisted round desperately, trying not to lose his balance on the stones but wanting to get some idea of how much farther he had to climb to the pass. All the while he muttered, “please, please, please,” hoping that his plea could imitate the fluency of the stream and, like the stream, flow into something greater and less agitated than itself.
The part of the hillside he stood on was already in shadow and although the pass was still sunlit, it was covered in snow. Some of the clouds were beginning to be stained by the sinking sun. As the light pushed its way through the polluted air closer to the ground, it shifted from the blue to the red end of the spectrum. That’s all a sunset was: an exultation of dirt and dust. Perhaps his grandchildren would live under a perpetually red sky, as a dying nature, like an animal dangling upside down with its throat cut, bled into the firmament.
“Dirt and dust,” Dunbar barked, relieved to find an external object of persecution, however briefly.
He crossed the stream, setting off at a faster pace, as if rapid movement might be able to peel away his terrifying thoughts. This presumptuous fantasy was immediately replaced by a sense of his own decrepitude, and then by the image of a man on fire who is trying to put out the flames by breaking into a run, but only succeeds in blazing more brightly. Nevertheless, he refused to give up, even under the relentless assault of his diseased imagination; he must get to the pass before dark, so as to see the shape of the next valley and get some idea of where he might find refuge for the night. The light was fading and the temperature falling but regardless of how he was feeling, he had to keep climbing, or he would die, he would really die—not just think he was dying, until Dr. Bob ran some tests to show that there was nothing fatal in the works, or paid a compliment to his constitution, or gave him a pill for his pillbox.
The thought of Dr. Bob forced Dunbar to pause, afraid that his heart could not stand the combination of such a fast climb and such breathless fury. His daughters, his flesh and blood and the man employed to minister to his flesh and blood, conspiring together. Betrayal was especially bitter since loyalty had always been one of the hallmarks of his astonishing ascent. Like Napoleon, who turned his sergeants into marshals, their mansions radiating from the Arc de Triomphe, he had taken Wilson and the rest of the original team with him as he rose from the provincial prosperity that came from inheriting the Winnipeg Advertiser to an unrivaled political influence in all the places that really mattered: the global power that was now being stolen from him by his daughters and his doctor, the diseases of his flesh and blood. How could he cure himself, except by opening his veins in this stream and letting out the disease with the blood? He felt the thick steel weight of the Swiss Army knife in his overcoat pocket and pictured himself kneeling in the stream, wisps of blood from his wrists curling and rushing down the hillside in the clear water. The animal slaughtered at sunset. The collision of ideas and images, the image of Catherine dead in a collision, the weird equivalence between what had really happened and what he had just imagined: they were all thoughts, all images fighting for control of his mind. It was not that past events, like Catherine’s death, seemed unreal, but rather that every thought seemed so real. Perhaps that was why the universe was expanding: because thoughts were real and there were more and more people having more and more thoughts, drop after drop pushing the envelope of space farther and farther outward.
“Please, please, please…” he sobbed. “No more big ideas, please.”
He wanted to sink to his knees, like a man in prayer, offsetting humiliation with humility, but he felt an even stronger desire to press forward, to move away from the disastrous frame of mind that now surrounded the ground on which he stood. If he knelt he would only sink more deeply into it, and so he set off again, glancing up from time to time to see where the intermittent shafts of sunlight were striking the snow-covered upper slopes. The light was now close to the summit and would soon overshoot the land altogether.
He could still remember the judgment of a journalist from a rival organization, it still throbbed in his forehead, like an old shrapnel wound, one of those stupid phrases purporting to summarize his career, not even elegant, but memorable for its injustice, “Cheap debt and plummeting standards.” It was so wrong, so untrue. What about hard work and loyalty, not to mention coolness and courage and charm? Why was there no one to flatter and reassure him when he needed it most? He knew what it was to be surrounded by a halo of hollow praise, but now even Peter had abandoned him. He had quickly grown used to Peter distracting him, entertaining him, and looking after him. He had been an audience for Peter and Peter had been an audience for him, without either of them being able to listen to each other in the full, traditional sense of the word, due to the immense demands made by their own thoughts and impressions. Still, it was simply better to know that there was somebody there, that was all, somebody else—a relationship, that’s probably what people would call it. There weren’t many living things to have a relationship with up here; the crows knew better than to come up so high in the gathering darkness, and even the famously rugged Herdwick sheep, a dark, shaggy, local breed that Peter had become something of an expert on, after his many visits to Meadowmeade (“too numerous to innumerate,” as he liked to say), hesitated to keep Dunbar company as he trudged toward the pass over the crunching snow.
As the ground flattened out, he came to a halt, arrested by an unexpected scene. The source of the stream, it turned out, was a small circular lake beneath the final ascent. Just to the left of the path, on the near side of the lake, was a perfect little beach, a natural resting place and contemplative opportunity, coated with snow. The water itself was covered in a thin, opaque sheet of ice, except where the pull of the stream kept it dark and liquid. A curved escarpment rose abruptly from the far shore, like a headdress on the brow of the lake. Dunbar found it piercingly beautiful, almost too beautiful, as if it had been choreographed for an exquisite death, a role that must have been reserved for him, since there was no one else for miles around. He hurried on superstitiously, like a pregnant woman who crosses herself as she realizes she is walking next to a cemetery wall, moving as fast as he dared over stones slippery with snow. The path circled the lake and then merged with the pass, which was now entirely in shadow. Only the very top of the mountain on the far side of the pass was still sometimes lit up with a splash of cold gold light.
There was nowhere, however lovely, that he couldn’t contaminate with his morbid thoughts and his perpetual fear. He was being punished; there was no other explanation, punished for his own acts of treachery. What a hypocrite he was, raging against his daughters and his doctor. He had betrayed a wife he adored, keeping mistresses in all his major centers of operation, lying about the state of his marriage to encourage women who hesitated on the edge of adultery; he had treated Florence vindictively, cutting her off, rejecting her and persecuting her for having ideas of her own. His crimes were far worse than Megan’s or Abigail’s, let alone Dr. Bob’s. He had betrayed the people he loved most, whereas his daughters presumably had the moral advantage of hating him, and poor Dr. Bob was just an opportunist who had seen an opportunity. In other circumstances, at a Sun Valley economic summit, or in conversation with a finance minister, he might have called it “enterprise” or “initiative.” It was he, the enraged father and the indignant patient, who knew most about the twisted nature of betrayal, and now he had been dragged by a just fate to this sacrificial slab of rock and ice. There was no need for a feathered priest to tear his treacherous heart from his chest when it was ready to burst out from the pressure of its own guilt and grief.
Sick with fear and desperate to put the evil lake behind him, Dunbar stumbled into the deeper snow on the final ascent to the pass. No one had used the path since the last snowfall and he had no idea where it lay under the windblown drifts. All he could do was choose the most direct route, hoping that the snow would support him against the sharp stones and sudden hollows that he imagined hidden under every collapsing step. Although he had taken the precaution of tucking his trousers into his boots, the snow soon started to insinuate itself in a band around his ankles and to cling to his lower trouser legs. By the time he reached the top of the pass, he was frozen from the knee down, while his upper body was pouring with sweat, his heart pounding and his ears singing with the rush of blood.
As the bowl of the next valley opened up before him, he took in its emptiness, lightly criss-crossed with drystone walls, but without tree, or lake or any kind of refuge from the sky. Where was Nutting? Where was the signpost to Nutting? It was beginning to grow genuinely dark, although the snow retained an eerie luminosity. That final glow gave him scant reassurance since he could only benefit from it by freezing to death. He turned around to have a last look at the valley he had been struggling across all day. He had tried to get away from it in the hope of finding some kind of safety; now, glancing back at the village and woodland car park, it looked like safety was what he was leaving behind. A bank of black cloud laden with rain and sleet and snow was replacing the broken, tinted cloud he had seen when he was straddling the stream lower down the hill. It was currently somewhere above the King’s Head on the far side of the lake, but it was chasing after him and would soon be raining its cold vengeance on his poor old head. To return would be as profitless as to press forward, only shelter mattered now, but there was no shelter to be found.