Dunbar (Hogarth Shakespeare) - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Edward St Aubyn was born in London. His superbly acclaimed Patrick Melrose novels are Never Mind, which won a Betty Trask Award, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother's Milk, which won the Prix Femina étranger and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and At Last. He is also the author of the novels A Clue to the Exit, On the Edge, which was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize and Lost for Words, which won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize.

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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 tranquilized 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 his 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...