Dunster

by John Mortimer

  The everyday Progmire, the one I know only too well, was still absent when we pushed the punt out of the mud and joined the party. Beth and I were careful to talk to other people and, as we separated, I felt we were even closer because of our shared and aloof performance. I was listening to a long complaint from Queen Gertrude about Nan’s total failure to give her any direction whatsoever, devoting all her attention to Claudius, who, of course, needed it, the poor darling, and who looked, despite all our producer’s efforts, less like a king than the manager of the local Abbey National. Then I saw, across the flames of the camp-fire lit on the edge of Parson’s Pleasure, the pale face of Dunster, who was standing sharing a paper cup of wine with the large-breasted Prudence and looking at me with amusement.

  ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ I felt, as I had so often, that he had intruded on my private territory.

  ‘Someone told us there was a party. So we thought we should come along. Do you want me to say, “You were wonderful, dahling”?’

  ‘Only if you thought it.’

  ‘Isn’t the point of saying “You were wonderful, dahling” that you mean something entirely different?’

  ‘Then don’t say it.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  In Dunster’s presence feelings of anxiety began to return and I wanted some sort of reassurance from him. ‘But what did you think of it?’

  ‘I think’ – Dunster looked more cheerful than I had ever seen him at Oxford – ‘I need notice of that question.’

  Beth and I went back in a punt full of people, singing and splashing with paddles. Laertes, the expert with the pole, seemed to avoid us and had gone off in a boat with Gertrude. I walked Beth to her college, silently holding hands. More sensible than me. she had managed to get a pass to go to the party. Before she rang the bell I said, ‘We’re going to do it again tomorrow.’

  ‘Are we? I wouldn’t mind.’ She had her arms round my neck, smiling.

  ‘Actually I meant Hamlet.’

  ‘Oh, that too, I suppose.’

  So I went back to St Joseph’s and arrived, twenty minutes later, to find Dunster in the street without Prudence and the doors locked.

  ‘Is this the easy way?’

  ‘Casanova!’

  ‘What?’ Had Dunster guessed something? We climbed over the wall by the bicycle sheds and arrived on the flat roof of a building, some sort of outhouse. From there we could have scrambled down a tree into the small quad but Dunster would have none of it. ‘You’d be bound to make the most terrible row. Breaking branches. The porter’d be out flashing his torch in a second. You may be bloody rich but I’d like to keep my money in my pocket. Look up there.’ He pointed, up a steep, tiled roof which looked about as easy to climb as the west col of the Eiger. ‘See that open window? By my calculations that’s the loo on your staircase. Anyway, we can just ease ourselves in there and no one’s going to hear us. Follow me, Progmire.’

  So he started shinning up the roof, holding on to the bits of castellated masonry at its edge; and I came blindly after him, on my knees occasionally, and asking what the hell he meant by Casanova.

  ‘He made a daring escape from prison. Across the leads of a Venetian roof.’ Dunster was full of unexpected knowledge, isn’t he one of your heroes?’

  ‘It isn’t the easy way.’ I was sure of it.

  ‘Keep quiet, can’t you? We’re nearly there.’

  I was always surprised by Dunster’s agility. He was tall, angular and apparently uncoordinated, and he walked with loping strides and arms waving to express his strong opinions. But now he seemed to run up the tiles like a cat and stood gripping the top of an open window. As I struggled up to join him he slid the window up and whispered, ‘Jump in. We’re home and dry.’ He stood aside to let me go first, like a sergeant launching parachutists into the unknown. I stepped out into darkness and landed more softly than I expected on thick carpeting rather than on lavatory tiles. The room felt more spacious than a loo and from somewhere in the middle distance there came the sound of regular, heavy breathing. ‘Made it,’ Dunster said as he landed beside me.

  And then the bedside light went on and we were staring at the outraged figure of Sir Ninian Dobbs, sitting bolt upright in bed and wearing a hair-net.

  ‘You noticed the hair-net, of course?’ Dunster said at breakfast the next morning as we speculated on the amount of likely fines. ‘That proved it, I hope, to your satisfaction.’

  ‘What did it prove?’

  ‘That I was absolutely right about him. Well,’ Dunster added modestly, ‘I usually am right about people.’

  Chapter Five

  ‘Sid Vicious,’ Cris said, ‘doesn’t want us to do the War Crimes series.’

  ‘I’m not all that surprised.’ His wife Angie smiled at us from the other end of the dinner table.

  ‘He has the sentimental affection for war of someone who’s never really taken part in the bloody thing.’

  It was a couple of weeks after the board meeting and the discussion which had started me off on the remembrance of Dunster Past. Cris had suggested a weekend at Windhammer then, and shortly afterwards the date was fixed. In the old days Beth had been puzzled by my fondness for the Bellhangers. ‘Cris needs you because you’re bloody good at figures,’ she used to say. ‘He’s not going to sack you if you don’t travel miles to sit drinking gin with him and that elderly starlet. I don’t know why you want to go, anyway.’

  ‘Because I enjoy it.’

  ‘Is that what you tell yourself? If you’re doing that, I’ll go and see Mum and Dad. I know you don’t enjoy them terribly!’ So we would go, on some weekends, our separate ways.

  Windhammer, a ponderous statement of Gothic gloom built by Cris’s ancestor in the 1850s, stood a few miles from the white beaches and treacherous tides of the North Sea. Icy blasts, after an uninterrupted journey from the steppes of Russia, besieged the walls and rattled the casement windows, but inside logs crackled in Arthurian fireplaces and the central heating rose comfortingly to the vaulted ceilings of the bedrooms. ‘Great-grandfather made railway engines,’ Cris used to tell me. ‘I don’t know why he saw himself as the Lady of Shalott.’ There was still a gunroom where the weapons were kept clean and oiled, and a stable; but Cris said he never went shooting and only used his horse for hacking across the flat countryside. ‘I gave up killing things after the war,’ he told me. it’s made me an object of ridicule to the country set, but I can’t say that breaks my heart. The great secret of living in the country is not to get on too well with your neighbours.’

  The house was also warmed by the lady whom Beth called the ‘elderly starlet’. Cris’s wife Angie was once Angela Downing, star of a couple of dozen wartime movies. She still had the wide eyes, high cheekbones and the impertinent charm which had made her unflappable WRENS and steadfast heroines of the French Resistance irresistible. She always greeted me with a welcome kiss, steered me to the fireside and asked about my acting career. If she started on the gin and tonics a long while before dinner, and drank quite a bit with it, if her voice became a little thicker and her memory unreliable by the end of the evening, she was no less charming as she set an unsteady course towards her bedroom, shedding spectacles and magazines and shawls on her way. ‘I suppose my lot enjoy drinking so much,’ she used to say, ‘because it was so bloody hard to lay your hands on a decent drop during the war.’

  War was what we talked about that weekend at Windhammer. Fighting had started in the desert, or rather an enormous number of bombing raids had started, dropping missiles which were said to be capable of rounding street corners, creeping down stairs and destroying carefully selected military targets in Baghdad. Cris, unlike the rest of the safe civilian population of England, spent no time discussing the campaign. He was still thinking of the board meeting we had had before hostilities started.

  ‘I’ll say one thing for the war –’ Angie held out her glass for a refill. The tide’s gone down in this thing, darling. I mean, if it hadn’t b
een for the war I might never have met Cris.’

  ‘War was jolly good on the movies.’ Her husband was pouring wine, of which he also drank a good deal but with no apparent effect. ‘Especially Angie’s movies. That’s where the war ought to have stayed. In the local Odeons. Everyone could have gone and watched Sergeant Johnny Mills being brave and Corporal Dickie Attenborough getting the screaming hab-dabs in the tail-end of the bomber, Angie making tea through the Blitz and actors with clenched teeth and monocles playing Nazis. Then they could have gone home and felt brave without anyone having to die.’

  ‘He does talk nonsense!’ Angie gave me the smile which had had such a devastating effect on Wing Commander David Niven in Enemy Targets. ‘I was getting quite tired of going out with actors in uniform. I doubt if I’d’ve fallen for Cris if he hadn’t been a real soldier. He was the only one who never talked about the war.’

  ‘Actually,’ Cris told me, ‘she fell for me because I couldn’t dance.’

  ‘Most of the actors and directors I went out with were terribly keen on dancing.’ Angie sighed. ‘Round and round the floor. Fox-trotting away until all hours of the night. It used to leave me fit for nothing except a cup of Ovaltine and sleep. But when Cris took me out to dinner ...’

  ‘I told Angie I was absolutely no dancer,’ Cris joined in. He and his wife enjoyed telling this anecdote as a team.

  ‘He said he was no dancer but it was still early, so what about going to bed together?’ Angie confided in me, not for the first time.

  ‘I happened to have a room in the Regent Palace.’

  ‘Actually he’d booked it before he even asked me out!’

  ‘It only cost something like five quid.’

  ‘Quite a lot of money for those days.’ Angie was the careful one. ‘And you know, the poor chap popped the question at breakfast the next morning.’

  ‘And she said she supposed she liked me a bit better than the fox-trot.’

  ‘Actually, I said I’d have to think about it very carefully and he’d better go away and ask me again when the war was over.’

  ‘Absolute balls! She jumped at the suggestion. Couldn’t wait. We got married before my leave was up. Special licence. In the Guards Chapel. During an air raid.’

  ‘Did I ever tell you how we met?’

  ‘No.’ I lied, knowing that Angie would like to tell me again. Cris leant back in his chair and looked at his wife with considerable pride as she described how she hadn’t known him from Adam when she went to some awful party in Kensington in aid of the Red Cross, and he came pushing past her with a glass of red plonk.

  ‘Black market Communion wine, probably.’ Cris filled in the details. ‘At some of those parties people used to mix it with spirits and call it gin and altars!’

  ‘He bumped into me and the stuff went all over my dress.’

  ‘A total accident.’

  ‘You don’t believe that, do you, Philip?’

  ‘No,’ I reassured her, ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘It was all done so that he could winkle my address out of me. He said he wanted to send me flowers.’

  ‘I thought that was rather a gallant gesture?’ Cris asked me to confirm his gallantry.

  ‘Gallant gesture indeed! All he had in mind was rogering me. In the Regent Palace hotel!’ Her eyes closed then, apparently in happy recollection of that night half a century ago. She was still smiling as Cris helped her to the staircase, picking up her dropped possessions and promising not to stay up too late talking to me.

  After Angie had gone to bed we moved to the library, a long room with a stained-glass window done by some minor pre-Raphaelite, giving it a dim, religious appearance. There were shelves of leather-bound books – ‘Great-grandfather bought them by the yard. They’re on such fascinating subjects as the geology of Tibet’ – and also Cris’s larger, far more interesting, collection. There was an elaborate sound system and a grand piano at which Cris sat and played for a little. He broke the silence after the music arrived at its inevitable conclusion. ‘A war crime is something that’s done by the defeated. The Germans are supposed to have committed all the war crimes. We just liberated people, even if it meant killing large numbers of them to do it.’

  ‘We’re not suggesting that the Germans didn’t commit war crimes, are we?’ We were talking about history, a period which would seem as remote to my daughter as the Norman Conquest or the Napoleonic Wars, and I didn’t know what surprises our proposed programme might contain.

  ‘Oh, yes. Of course. They committed them.’ He frowned and moved uncomfortably in his chair. Unusually for Cris, words weren’t coming easily to him. ‘Let me tell you something. We got to a little town when we were fighting our way up Italy. It doesn’t matter where exactly. Anyway. Typical Italian town. Perched on a steep hillside. An old wall round it. Nothing much inside. A square where they had a market once a week. A church. A bar. A few narrow streets. No great paintings in the church. A place of no importance to anyone. Well, when we got there it was empty. Nothing. A ghost town. No sign of life. Flies buzzing over the meat going bad in the butcher’s. Grocer’s empty. Café deserted. And where a church had been, nothing.’

  ‘Bombed?’

  ‘Not as respectable as that. No. Some German had been killed. An officer. Not even in the town. Somewhere outside the walls. Anyway, that’s where they found his body. Well, everyone in the village went to church on a saint’s day. Men, women and children. Babies in their mothers’ arms. So when everyone was inside, German soldiers locked the doors. They’d laid the charges the night before, we imagined. Their commanding officer yelled out some sentence of death over a loud hailer. That’s what they heard instead of the Mass. Then the soldiers cleared off and everyone was blown to pieces, old and young – everyone in the village who’d gone there to pray.’

  He shook himself, as though to escape from a memory. ‘A small incident perhaps, but those people didn’t start the war. Probably they had no particular interest in it, except for praying for it to stop. So they went to church and were blown to kingdom come. What the hell can you prove by killing people?’

  I said nothing. War is something of which I have had absolutely no experience.

  ‘That’s why I want to do this series, in spite of anything Sid Vicious may have to say about it. I want people to understand. Look ...’ He went over to a desk in the corner and came back with a typescript, neatly bound, ‘I’d like to know what you think of it. An outline for a series of six.’

  As I took it, I saw Dunster’s name on the cover and was filled with unreasonable foreboding. I read it in bed. It was clearly set out but contained no surprises. Lidice and My Lai, the French in Algeria, the Germans in Hungary, the Russians in Poland: the tales of horror seemed far away from the warm, fake castle in the flat countryside where the elderly couple, still in love, lay sleeping, I imagined, in each other’s arms. I wondered, now a new war had started, why Cris was so anxious to remember these old atrocities. As I finished reading and switched out the light, I realized there was something missing in that simple account of war crimes. It was the sound of anger and denunciation which I had been hearing since I was a schoolboy, the authentic voice of Dunster.

  Chapter Six

  The Absent Prince

  by Paul Pry

  No one was able to tell us where Prince Hamlet was last night. He was, perhaps understandably, staying on in college in Wittenberg to avoid the embarrassing proceedings which were going on in the gardens of St Joseph’s. He did send an understudy, perhaps some remote relative of Horatio’s who had once been in a school play. This unfortunate stand-in, referred to in the programme as one Philip Progmire, was clearly unable to afford a decent suit of mourning and came on wearing a well-used tweed jacket and jeans. He had also forgotten to have his glasses mended. Progmire’s idea of acting seemed to be to stand about reciting the lines as though they were poetry or familiar quotations, a style of Shakespearian performance which you might think had long gone out of fash
ion, even in Denmark. His advice to the players was fairly well spoken; the only trouble was that he seemed unable to take any of it himself. Far from holding the mirror up to nature, he seemed to be holding it up to some hammy performance he once saw at the Old Vic.

  It can’t be said that the supporting cast was much help to the substitute Hamlet. Bethany Blair’s Ophelia, straight down from Roedean, played the mad scene as though she’d had one too many glasses of claret cup at a May Ball. Her experience of ‘country matters’ was clearly confined to huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’. King Claudius and his ‘lady wife’ seemed a typical suburban couple, only slightly worried by the mortgage repayments and an outbreak of greenfly on the roses in the front garden. This pair of innocents probably thought that incest was something that Catholics bum in church.

  Was there a bright spot in these gloomy goings-on, you may well ask? Just one. Paul Adams’s Laertes struck exactly the right note of single-minded determination. He appeared to be the only passionate person at Court, although in this Hamlet the duel scene was about as exciting as a fight between an Olympic fencer and a short-sighted member of the Campaign for the Abolition of Sword-fighting.

  It is worth noting that Nan Thorogood, who knows how Shakespeare should be acted, sat watching her production and was looking as unhappy as I felt. The gods passed their verdict by pissing on this production from a great height; it rained heavily in the second act.