Dunster

by John Mortimer

  I had no doubt at all what I felt about Beth, and as little idea of what she felt about me. We sympathized with each other, praised each other, did our best to cheer each other up; but this was the way with all actors as the terror of the opening performance drew near. In this she behaved no differently to me than she did to the rest of the cast. She smiled at us all and often laid her hand gently on our arms while she was speaking to us.

  When I took her back to her North Oxford college after our dinner, she gave me her cheek to kiss, offering it with a vague politeness which made me feel she was thinking of something else. This good-night happened in the college entrance. I thought that undated girls were peering down from the windows above us and I only wished that we were putting on a better show. I wondered who else bought Beth tandoori chicken and took her home to this public farewell – Laertes, Horatio, King Claudius, or even the gravedigger? We went out quite often, although there were always plenty of dates she couldn’t manage. We talked all the time, about our fears, the other actors and the awfulness of Nan. I thought she was less obsessed with acting than I was. It was just one of many activities which included riding, hunting, dancing and a certain amount of rough shooting with her father, Major Jaunty. Acting, Beth said once, was something she got into because a friend asked her ‘and you might as well try everything’.

  ‘Who was the friend?’ I forced myself to ask.

  ‘Oh, just someone I knew. He’s not important.’

  ‘How’s Hamlet going?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’ll probably be a complete disaster.’ It was my way then, as now, to expect the very worst in the faint hope that things might not turn out to be quite as ghastly as I had predicted.

  ‘Well, so long as you know that,’ Dunster said cheerfully, ‘you won’t be disappointed.’

  The extraordinary thing was that we had met at the Experimental Theatre’s production of The Ghost Sonata. I had invited Beth, and Dunster was there with a girl who looked very young, had large breasts and seemed scared of him. He said her name was Prudence and that she had a taste for Strindberg which he found ludicrously masochistic. When Beth asked him if he’d be coming to see Hamlet he said, ‘I’m not sure. I may have an essay to write.’

  ‘We’re on for four nights.’

  ‘I suppose that’s what you hope.’

  She took my arm then, something I was very glad Dunster had seen her do, and we went back to our seats. ‘Is that a friend of yours?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, I’ve known him forever.’

  ‘He didn’t sound like much of a friend.’

  So the long, wet and over-excited summer term continued. There were no lazy afternoons on the river for us, no strawberries and Chablis in the sun. There were only glistening pavements and rehearsals and grey clouds. The heads of the philosophers round the Sheldonian seemed to dissolve even more rapidly in the rain, and cyclists pedalled even faster to avoid a soaking but arrived at lectures with their hair plastered down and their notebooks soggy. Not only had we our unreliable memories, our minor talents, our nervousness to contend with but we had the added horror of an open-air performance. Hamlet in St Joseph’s gardens was even more alarming than Hamlet indoors. We faced the doubtful future as courageously as we could and even arranged a first-night party in punts. We were not greatly encouraged by a brutal notice of The Ghost Sonata: ‘A new terror has been added to death,’ Paul Pry wrote, ‘by the fear that we might be compelled to return to earth in a production as absurd as this. The Ghost Sonata, as the Experimental Theatre presents it, is not to be recommended to any audience, alive or dead.’

  But we kept our worries to ourselves, hoped for the best and, as we sat at our table in hall, we told theatrical jokes. Benson, the gravedigger, knew most of the old actor-laddie stories and, a week or so before Hamlet was due to hit the turf, he told us what I now know to be one of the oldest of all. It was about the actor-manager who was asked if, in his opinion, Hamlet actually slept with Ophelia. ‘When I was on tour,’ he is supposed to have answered, ‘I invariably did.’ I don’t suppose Benson thought for a moment about me and Beth when he told the story; but it gave me a vision of a new world, more likely to be fantasy than fact, with an old tradition which I was, I still thought, unlikely to live up to.

  Chapter Four

  I wouldn’t want you to think that at the time of the run up to Hamlet I was totally inexperienced. I mean so far as sex was concerned. I’ve already made it clear that I’d done a certain amount of acting.

  I’d met quite a lot of girls at parties, especially at those rather ostentatious affairs given by Porker Plumstead in his father’s mock Tudor mansion somewhere to the north of Hampstead Heath. These do’s always led to a good deal of panting activity in the corners of darkened rooms with girls from various highly priced London schools who danced invitingly to Joe Cocker records but showed an increasing reluctance as the new-found friendship developed. The first time I made love was to a Mrs Oakshott, who lived in a house in Gloucester Crescent and was a warm supporter of the Labour Party. My relationship with her – although it turned me from a worried virgin to a slightly more worried experienced person – is not something I am particularly proud of. It doesn’t show me in a good light, but then if I confined myself to incidents that did that, I don’t suppose this story would ever get told. If I’m going to make you understand it properly, I think you should know that when Beth and I got together I was someone who had lost his tenuous grasp on virginity in Mrs Oakshott’s bathroom.

  ‘Marguerite Oakshott,’ Dunster said, ‘is a well-known figure of the Left. She has evenings.’

  ‘Well, so do I. So does everyone. I have mornings too, as a matter of fact. And the occasional afternoon.’ It was our final term at school and I was rehearsing The Importance of Being Earnest, so I had a tendency to shoot my cuffs, smoke Turkish cigarettes and speak in a languid drawl.

  ‘I mean,’ Dunster, unamused, explained as though to a child, ‘she has evenings when all sorts of people get invited. Politicians. Famous journalists. TUC leaders. They discuss serious subjects.’

  ‘How extremely frivolous of them.’

  ‘Old man, when is that Oscar Wilde play over?’

  ‘Next Tuesday.’

  ‘Thank God for that. Mrs Oakshott’s evening’s in exactly two weeks’ time. My dad was invited and he asked if he could bring me because I’m interested in politics. Now’s he’s going to be away doing a story about anarchists in Amsterdam. But she’s said I can go and bring a friend. So I thought of you, Progmire, immediately. I’m trying to give you some idea of what the world’s all about. My ambition is to educate you.’

  In this last aim Dunster, I suppose, achieved some success. He was obviously extremely impressed with our invitation and had shaved and plastered down his hair with water. I wore my suit and a purple shirt, which I thought went with my Yellow Book period, although I doubt whether Oscar Wilde would have been seen dead in it. When I asked Dunster what he thought the party was going to be like, he had to admit that his father had never actually been to one of Mrs Oakshott’s evenings, although he had been asked quite often. He thought someone probably gave a paper, after which there would be a free-ranging discussion over quiche and vin ordinaire. It might, he said, be a thoughtful gesture to bring a bottle. So Dunster and I arrived at Gloucester Crescent with a Carafino red from the off-licence.

  ‘Children,’ Mrs Oakshott said vaguely as we made our presentation, ‘how terribly touching. But we do have our own stuff, actually.’

  Even in the dimly lit sitting-room I noticed that her own stuff consisted largely of champagne. I caught a glimpse of the pictures – a couple of Lowrys, a Graham Sutherland, John drawings and something that looked suspiciously like a Dufy – on the walls. The room was full of older men and younger women and they were laughing a good deal and talking in high, excited voices, no doubt about the Race Relations Act or the reform of the House of Lords.

  ‘A tragedy your father couldn’t come. I’m su
ch a fan of his column in the Listener.’

  ‘The Guardian.’ Dunster was always a stickler for the truth.

  ‘I love it, anyway. Now ...’ Mrs Oakshott looked around the room. She was, I noticed, a small, curvaceous, still-pretty woman with dark hair and bright brown eyes. She had a way of leaning back her head and trying to look down at us, which, as both Dunster and I were a good deal taller than her, was not a complete success. ‘Now, shall I find you someone rather beautiful to talk to?’

  ‘Is that Malcolm McCabe?’ Dunster had spotted the one Labour Minister who still retained the respect of the Left, despite an uneasy compromise over private education. He was large, florid and Scots, with watery blue eyes and a mane of iron-grey hair. He didn’t look, as he held court in a corner of the room, especially beautiful.

  ‘Well, yes. But he seems a little occupied at the moment.’ McCabe’s audience consisted, I thought, of better-off girls from the Royal College of Art. Not to be deterred, Dunster moved purposefully in the direction of the politician. Mrs Oakshott squeezed my arm, murmured, ‘See you later, cherub,’ and I was left holding the bottle of Carafino. I saw Dunster work his way through the attendant art students and stand uncomfortably close to McCabe, who ignored him for as long as possible. I put our gift down among the superior bottles and no one spoke to me until a fairly friendly girl in a black dress asked me for a match and started to chat as I failed to make my lighter work. I looked terribly learned, she said, and was I going into politics? I was still trying to think of the correct Wildean answer to this line when another girl said, ‘Come on, Michelle, the professor wants you,’ and they went off towards a learned-looking fellow with a pale, domelike forehead, standing at the other end of the room.

  ‘It’s disgusting!’ Dunster was back with me.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ I told him, although the distant professor did appear to be leading Michelle upstairs.

  ‘McCabe. He was drinking champagne!’

  ‘Quite a lot of them seem to be.’

  ‘And so I tackled him about private education.’

  ‘Well, you should know all about that. Seeing we pay fees at St George’s.’

  But Dunster was hard to disconcert. He went on with great intensity. ‘I told him I felt thoroughly bad about that. I also said he ought to be ashamed of drinking champagne while the class system remains intact.’

  ‘I bet that really got to him.’

  ‘No, it didn’t. That’s the point. He said his brand of socialism meant that champagne would be freely available to all. But until that bright day dawned, at least it would be available to socialist Cabinet Ministers. That man’ – Dunster came to the inevitable conclusion – ‘is completely false. I’m leaving.’

  I might have gone with him if I hadn’t wanted to go to the loo. I plucked up courage to ask directions of a lofty person in a dark suit, but he said, ‘God knows. I only came with the catering.’ So I started on a fatal journey up the staircase to the upper reaches of the house. Doors were open into darkened rooms and I heard, from one of them, the sound of suppressed laughter. Then I saw a light on gleaming tiles and went in.

  Mrs Oakshott’s bathroom, perhaps appropriately, was pale pink. It was comfortably furnished with fleecy rugs, book shelves and pots of dried-out petals. Either because I was in a hurry or because of some defect in the lock, the door wasn’t fastened and I became conscious, as I washed my hands in the pink basin, that I was not alone. ‘I do love those films where the chap takes the glasses off the librarian and she looks like a real woman, don’t you?’ Mrs Oakshott said as she removed my specs and put them carefully on a glass shelf. ‘There now, you really look quite pretty.’ I saw the world blurred, like an Impressionist painting, but it was clear to me that her shirt had become unbuttoned. She had a sweet, powdery smell which mingled with the rose petals – and the change in my life, such as it was, took place mid-way between the gold-tapped bidet and the end of the bath.

  ‘So oft it chances in particular men

  That – for some vicious mole of nature in them,

  As in their birth, wherein they are not guilty,

  Since nature cannot choose his origin –’

  It was quite early in the play but, in spite of Nan Thorogood’s dire warnings and strict injunctions, the poetry showed through and I felt there was nothing much I could do about it. I heard my voice, nowhere near as incisive as Olivier’s and much less melodic than Gielgud’s, untrained, amateurish but still doing the same job. The rhythm of the words took me over and for those hours in St Joseph’s gardens I forgot myself. Playing a character full of doubt, I was strangely certain; pretending to be a man beset with anxiety, I had forgotten my worries.

  The day had started with unusual sunshine and we preened ourselves on our luck. Summer had begun at last, and especially for us. As we dressed, we were trying to cheer each other up, like a party of criminals waiting to come up for sentence. I felt short of breath and went to the loo frequently, unaccompanied. The play opened in low, evening sunshine with a cool wind flustering the trees. I saw my mother and father sitting together in the front row. They had brought a rug and I was grateful that my mother wouldn’t have to put on the plastic pixie hood that I always found embarrassing. So the ghost, a pallid figure in a khaki greatcoat, walked in the daylight while we crowded in the JCR, the girls chattered and I stood in a corner trying to retch as quietly as possible. Then I came on with the court but sat alone, like Dunster, I thought, in sullen isolation. ‘A little more than kin, and less than kind’: I heard my first line with surprise, as though it were spoken by someone a long way off. In due course I rejected Ophelia with ruthless determination, firmly believing that I had, according to tradition, slept with her but intended to give it up. As the daylight died and a colder wind stirred the branches, the pointed arches of the college were lit with the amber lights we’d hired at enormous expense and I welcomed the Players with what I thought was true princely condescension. And then, when I announced that the play was the thing wherein to catch the conscience of the King, I felt a heavy drop of water on my hand and the rain began to fall like muted applause.

  The second half seemed timeless, like a dream. The rain stopped for a while and then set in heavily when Benson did his gravedigger jokes. The amber beams were full of water and the audience began to thin out. During ‘Alas, poor Yorick’ I saw my mother in her pixie hood. I took off my glasses when I put on the fencing mask and Laertes became an active blur as we fought, sliding on the wet grass. I didn’t drop on the King like an avenging angel from a great height in the Olivier manner. I skidded towards him, full of purpose, and then let the venom do its work. When I died in the arms of Horatio, and as the four captains were bearing me to the stage, and the soldiers were ordered to shoot, I felt all my anxieties had been set at rest. The rattle of clapping from the wet survivors on the benches, although only just satisfactory by any theatrical standard, did nothing to diminish my confidence. I wasn’t even worried about the party to come. It didn’t occur to me that Beth would wander among the cast, laying a gentle hand on every arm, kissing most of them and treating us all as equals. I was still Prince Hamlet, although deceased, and Ophelia and I would go as a couple.

  ‘It’s stopped raining.’ Laertes was looking up at the scudding clouds.

  ‘To the boats!’ Benson shouted in his gravedigger’s voice. ‘Women and children last!’

  So off we set towards Magdalen Bridge, carrying macs and rugs, red plonk and an occasional bottle of whisky. Nan was among us, failing to dampen our spirits with congratulations like ‘Well, my children, you got through it, didn’t you? One day I might persuade you to act the real Hamlet. The grown-up version.’

  ‘You mean the one where Osric falls for the ghost?’ Benson asked. We knew we had done our own play. Nan, sitting alone in the rain, had suffered a severe disappointment, but we no longer needed her.

  The actors were getting into punts, standing, rocking the boats on purpose, screaming in simulated te
rror, throwing in food and wine and scrambling to be together. I saw an empty boat and grabbed Beth’s arm with some of the determination I had left over from my assault on King Claudius. ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘that one’s empty.’ And I added, because we were still actors, ‘Darling.’ She got in and lay back on damp cushions. I looked round and saw that the rest of the cast were all accommodated in other boats. I sat beside her and covered her with a rug. She said, ‘Who’s going to drive this thing?’ My heart sank as Laertes appeared from the darkness, stepped lightly on to the end of the boat and poled us expertly out into mid-stream, avoiding the punts with their loads of actors who tried to ram us. I held Beth’s cold hand under the rug, she turned her face towards me and we kissed, disregarding the silently navigating Laertes. We lay still then and seemed to travel for a long time. I had no idea what was going to happen next.

  Then I saw that the others had landed; there was a party going on and Laertes steered us towards it. Well, that, I thought, is the end of that, but when we were near the bank he jumped off, as quickly and as quietly as he had joined us. Neither of us moved and we drifted on, brushed by overhanging willow branches, into a cave of leaves where the intermittent moonlight was blotted out. We were stuck in mud and sheltered from the rain. I took off my glasses to kiss her properly. ‘Beth,’ I told her, ‘I’ve been wanting to say this for so long.’

  ‘Don’t say anything,’ she said. ‘It’ll be perfectly all right.’

  ‘What do we do now? Ring the bell for the porter?’

  ‘We climb in.’

  ‘There’s an easy way, isn’t there?’ ‘Is that what you want?’

  ‘I’ve always heard there’s an easy way. A sort of formality. So that they can keep up appearances.’

  ‘All right. We start up by the bicycle sheds.’

  I followed him doubtfully. If there were an easy way of climbing into college, would it be in Dunster’s character to take it? I didn’t want to be with him on a mountaineering expedition without ropes in the darkness and persistent rain. I wanted to be alone, to remember what I now had to remember. I wanted a little peace and quiet to think of Beth making love, her competent hands, her body not altogether undressed under the blanket, her long hair wet against my face, her amused smile as we started, and the immense encouragement of her trembling later, and her small cry. Acting and making love, I knew then, were the two things I could do and forget my nature. And that night I had gone from one to the other without interruption, from death in the duel to another sort of obliteration in the boat under the willow tree.