“He’s asleep,” said Chris, coming out of Dunbar’s bedroom into the main cabin of the plane. “The doctor says that he’s happy to come down to London with us, but his passport is in Keswick so he can’t come on to New York. He thinks Henry is in reasonable shape physically, given what he’s been through, but that he’s quite delusional.”
“Well, surely he needs to get as much sleep as possible,” said Florence. “Do we really have to go via London?”
“Believe me, I’ve weighed it up carefully,” said Wilson. “I’ve persuaded the solicitors to come out to Farnborough airport, so Henry won’t even have to move from his bed, but there are certain things we can do legally, if we act quickly, that will potentially give us a significant edge over your sisters. Then he can sleep again. Half an hour of his time could save the company he’s spent fifty years building. Your sisters are hooligans. The police want to question them about a man who committed suicide, the comedian Peter Walker.”
“Oh, God,” said Florence. “He committed suicide? But they had him under observation.”
“He managed to hang himself in the shower,” said Chris. “He took the flex from his television and hid it around his waist.”
“I guess there’s always a way if you’re determined enough,” said Wilson. “For our purposes, one of the reasons to get the lawyers to meet us in London is to create a conflict of interest with your sisters. If we ask Braggs to make a case against Megan and Abigail for conspiring with Dr. Bob to imprison your father in Meadowmeade, then they can’t represent your sisters in the matter of Walker’s suicide, since I have presented Walker as a friend who tried to help your father escape. When two parties are in conflict, the ones to employ the lawyers first can exclude the others from being represented by the same firm.”
“What if Meg and Abby have already spoken to them?” asked Florence.
“They haven’t and now they can’t. I’ve made a preliminary request.”
“Well, if that’s already taken care of, why do we have to go to London?”
“There are still certain documents,” said Wilson, “that are lodged in London: a will for all his non-Trust property that could be changed in your favor. The Trust is incorporated in Delaware, but for historic reasons he made his private will over here.”
“I don’t want his property; I just want him to get well,” said Florence. “Anyhow, I don’t think the lawyers are going to agree to change anything in his current state.”
“Exactly,” said Wilson. “It’s a win–win: if we get what we appear to want, it will be to our advantage. We can change the will and get you a power of attorney, but if Braggs refuses to give it, we will insist on a document declaring that Henry is not of sound mind. I can use that to raise the question of whether he was fit to give away his power in the first place, and if he was fit, why he was put in a psychiatric clinic. In other words, I can make trouble and buy time for him to recover. I have allies on the Board who will insist that I come to the meeting if I can get that document.”
“So, we don’t really want what we’re asking for?”
“That’s the beauty of it—either result is good.”
“Half an hour?” said Florence.
“That’s all it should take. All the documents are ready, and we have a whole team coming: a senior partner, witnesses, and a very good American attorney to help us with the international implications—a British power of attorney won’t work in the States, so he has an American one prepared. After that Henry can sleep for ten hours and wake up in New York and it’ll still be Tuesday evening. He can have two more nights of rest before the meeting.”
“Okay, let’s do it,” said Florence.
“Shall I tell the pilot that we’re ready to go?” asked Chris.
“Go ahead,” said Florence. “I’m just going to sit with my father during the flight, in case he wakes up.”
Florence went into Dunbar’s bedroom, where she found the doctor standing at the foot of the bed with folded arms.
“Oh, hello,” he said. “He’s getting some sleep. The food rather knocked him out, after not sleeping for so long. I expect you’d like to be alone with him.”
“Yes, please,” said Florence. “Anyway, you should get a seat, we’re going to leave as soon as possible.”
Florence stretched out on the bed beside her father, ready to hold him in case the take-off disturbed his rest. The plane accelerated along the runway and made its steep and rapid ascent out of Manchester. Once its flight path flattened out, Florence sat up cross-legged, resting against the gray leather bedhead with a pillow in the small of her back. She looked down on her father’s face and realized that she had almost never seen it from above. In her eyes, he had always been towering over everyone. She had once been to visit him in Los Angeles when he was ill, but she had almost immediately, instinctively sat down in a chair next to his high bed to restore the natural order of things, looking up at him, raised among his pillows. When she was four or five, she could remember the time he had fallen asleep, stretched out on a sofa on the verandah at Home Lake, with a book spread open on his chest, and she went over and patted his face affectionately until her mother whispered to her to come away and let her father sleep. Now, his matted white hair was longer than she had ever seen it and three days of stubble covered his usually clean-shaven jaw. He had lost weight and looked older, with the lines on his forehead and around his eyes and in his sagging cheeks more deeply grooved than before.
She had hardly been able to speak with him since she retrieved him from that barren mountainside a few hours ago. Her father had refused to wear headphones on the helicopter, indeed he had recoiled from them, clutching his head, as if he were being offered a vice or some other instrument of torture. She decided to take the helicopter straight to Manchester airport, with Mark and Wilson following with the luggage by car. Although he mumbled to himself throughout the journey, what he said was inaudible, and what she was saying to Chris and the helicopter pilot was inaudible to him, which was just as well, since she was emphasizing the importance of landing on the far side of her plane in order to block the view of Global One. Her plane was parked as far away as possible, but there was nowhere on the tarmac from which Dunbar’s big old Boeing could not be seen, unless something was in the way. Global One had always been her father’s favorite toy. It was like another home to him, a home with no fixed address, decorated to his specifications; its astonishing paneled library, carpeted with a pale gold Persian rug, had still lifes by Chardin and William Nicholson hanging between the bookshelves. As a child, the room that amazed her most was the hammam, where she had watched the orange, green, and black geometric tiles on the walls and benches fade among clouds of steam, knowing that the plane was floating thirty thousand feet above the glaciers of Greenland or the deserts of New Mexico.
Florence thought that seeing his old plane and not being allowed on board would throw her father into a deeper turmoil, but once he was safely installed in her rented Gulfstream, she wondered if it would have made such a difference after all. Perhaps she had been trying to protect him from a confusion that he had already exceeded long ago. He seemed to be bewildered by simply being on a plane. He asked continually if Simon was safe and whether Peter had made it to London. She hadn’t known at the time that Peter was dead, nor had she said that he was at Meadowmeade because her father seemed so desperate to see him again. When she asked who Simon was, all Dunbar could say was that he was a religious man who had saved his life and that they must make sure that he was all right and to “put him on the payroll.” He seemed to recognize Florence as a beneficent figure who had found him when he was lost, but if he understood their relationship, he kept forgetting what it was.
Dunbar’s mumbling anxiety about the fate of the two men who had helped him to escape only yielded to other emotions when Wilson and Mark turned up by car an hour later. He stared at Wilson with an expression of irresolute intensity, trying to place the face, coming up with a theory and then seeming to dismiss it as altogether too improbable.
Mark, on the other hand, produced a reaction of instant rage.
“You! You!” shouted Dunbar, pointing at his sleek and slightly corpulent son-in-law. “No! Not you! Get him out of here! He has conspired against me and had me locked away. You can’t make me go back!” and with these words he leapt out of his chair and dashed with surprising alacrity down the corridor of the plane and locked himself in one of the bedrooms.
Wilson and Florence had no hesitation in asking Mark to go back to New York on another plane. Florence had the impression that Mark was more put out by the prospect of taking a commercial flight than he was by the way her father had responded to his arrival.
“Of course,” he said, with a tattered version of his habitual suavity. “Henry seems to be in a thoroughly confused state, poor man. I hope you’ll put him right about my role and explain that it was precisely my strong objection to his imprisonment that got me over here in the first place.”
While the doctor busied himself with his stethoscope and his blood pressure monitor, his torch and his reflex hammer, Dunbar slipped into an abstracted state, as if he were looking at a screen behind his eyes on which an alternative story was being projected. Florence felt that the plane, the plans, and all the people around him were not radically absent in his mind but, like the Exit signs in a darkened cinema, they couldn’t be expected to compete with something as absorbing as the film itself. After eating some chicken soup and some bread he fell asleep almost immediately.
Sitting beside him with a hand resting lightly on his shoulder, Florence felt relieved to have her father under her protection, but disturbed by the thought that the person she yearned to be reconciled with might never return from the mental exile he had been driven to by her sisters. She had flown into the Cumbrian wilderness to fetch him, but she had no idea how to retrieve him from the wilderness of his psyche. Nothing in his ascent to power had prepared him for the experience of the last weeks and in particular of the last few days, which seemed to have overrun his mind with a kind of knowledge that he was unable to make sense of. Like a deluge rushing onto a flat, rocky plain, with no slope to direct it or soil to absorb it, it had obliterated all familiar landmarks without bringing any new life in return. How could she reach him in the middle of that sterile flood?
As the plane hit a band of turbulence on its way down to London, Dunbar frowned in his sleep and then half opened his eyes. He looked up at Florence’s face with an incredulity verging on resentment.
“Has anyone told you that you look like my youngest daughter?” he asked, speaking with unexpected clarity, given the state he had been in before he fell asleep.
“I am your daughter,” she said. “I’m Florence.”
“No,” said Dunbar. “You can’t be, but it’s true that you do look like her.”
He raised his hands, bracketing the air around his head.
“I’ve been having trouble,” he said, his fingers testing the space, as if he were trying to locate the extent of a bruise, “getting my thoughts in order.”
“Yes,” said Florence.
“When you mustn’t walk on the cracks between the paving stones, but you can’t walk anywhere else…” he paused, his fingers continuing to explore, like a blind man reading a face, “…and the thing that you must avoid at all costs is the only thing that happens.”
“I understand,” said Florence, “but you’re safe now.”
“Safe?” said Dunbar bitterly. “If you think that, you’re a fool. Being alive is falling, once you know that, it never stops. Do you understand what I’m telling you? There is no ground, nothing to catch you…”
Florence could feel what he was saying, but could think of no way to respond. There was no point in trying to argue a person out of a feeling, and in the case of this particular feeling, that nothing was safe, reassurance would only sound like another argument in disguise. He seemed to have become more lucid after a little food and a little rest, but only in order to describe his confusion and his despair more lucidly. All she could do was to stay with him and to wish him well.
“What’s that?” said Dunbar, startled by the plane’s slightly bumpy landing.
“We’ve arrived in London,” said Florence.
“Is Peter here?” asked Dunbar anxiously.
“No, he stayed behind in Cumbria.”
“Silly fool,” said Dunbar, “we were going to go to Rome to drink Negronis, that’s what he said, among some of the most beautiful ruins in the world. He helped me to escape from the prison camp. We must put him on the payroll.”
“We will, Daddy,” said Florence, getting off the bed in preparation for the visitors her father would soon be receiving. She felt she should not be present when legal documents might be changed in her favor. It might seem like a subtle form of coercion, and besides the team that Wilson described wouldn’t be able to fit in her father’s room, even without her being there as well.
“What did you call me?” said Dunbar, “Florence, is that you?”
“Yes,” said Florence.
“I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” said Dunbar, holding his arms out.
Florence moved round to the far side of the bed and knelt down beside her father, kissing him on either cheek.
He reached out and tentatively touched the top of her head.
“Can you ever forgive me?” he said, “cutting you and your children off and giving everything to those two monsters? I have been proud and tyrannical and, worst of all, stupid.”
Florence looked up and saw that her father’s face was soaked in tears.
“Of course, of course,” she said, “I’m the one who has been proud. I should have made the first move long ago.”
“No,” Dunbar insisted, “it was my wretched temper that caused the trouble, and the habit of being in command. Ha!” he let out a short guffaw, full of disillusion. “I can’t even command—sometimes I reach the end of a thought and I have already forgotten where it started.”
“Well, we’re never going to fall out again,” said Florence, kissing her father’s forehead and briefly resting her head on his chest.
“Never again,” said Dunbar, holding her face tenderly in both his hands. “My darling Catherine,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief, “I thought I’d lost you, but you’re alive.”