Dunster

by John Mortimer

  ‘The little shit!’

  We had bought the Cherwell at a newspaper shop in the Turl and were on our way towards the High Street and coffee. Beth was reading as she walked. The wind lifted her strawberry blonde hair and her forehead was furrowed.

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘Paul Pry!’

  ‘It’s not a good review?’ I was beginning to get the message.

  ‘Not exactly a rave. You could say that.’ She aimed the Cherwell in my direction. I caught it and found the page. I only saw the headline, knew it would be a stinker about me and decided to spare myself the unnecessary pain of reading more of Paul Pry on Hamlet, and skipped to Ophelia.

  ‘It’s ridiculous,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, yes? I’ve been laughing ever since I bought the bloody thing.’

  ‘You never even went to Roedean.’

  ‘Of course I didn’t! You don’t think that idiot writes the truth, do you? He wouldn’t even know what the truth was when he saw it. He’s only interested in hurting people. Causing pain. That’s what gives the little squirt his kicks.’

  ‘Don’t take it seriously,’ I advised her.

  ‘Seriously? Of course I don’t take it seriously! I take it as being absolutely and entirely beneath contempt.’

  ‘That’s good then. We’ll go and have a coffee.’

  ‘What’s the use of coffee! We’ll go to the White Horse.’

  After a large whisky Beth said, ‘What’re you going to do to him, Philip?’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said, what’re you going to do to the little creep? At the very least punch his nose, I imagine.’

  ‘All real pros get bad notices,’ I told her, ‘and they rise above them.’

  ‘To begin with I’m not a real pro. And, to go on with, I have no intention of rising above it. One too many glasses of claret cup, indeed? I wouldn’t be seen dead drinking claret cup. Look here. If you’re not going to punch his nose for him, I will. I only know one thing. He’s not going to get away with this.’

  ‘Have another whisky.’

  ‘All right. Then we’ll plan the assault. What do you say we go and lie in wait for him? Both of us. May God forgive me if I don’t knee him in the groin!’

  I went to the bar and got her another whisky, hoping this would give her time to cool off. I made it a small one this time and put in a good deal of soda water. However, when I got back to the table where Beth was still crouched in fury, the cooling-off time had not been enough.

  ‘We’ll do that, won’t we?’ she said. ‘Jump him in the dark and get a knee in there.’

  ‘There’s only a slight problem.’

  ‘I don’t see one.’

  ‘We don’t have the slightest idea who he is.’

  ‘What on earth are you talking about? He’s Paul Pry, isn’t he?’

  ‘That’s what he writes under. I don’t believe it’s his real name.’

  ‘You mean’ – she looked up at me and I could see that her eyes had been full of tears – ‘that the creep is hiding under an alias?’

  ‘That’s about the size of it.’

  ‘Typical!’ There was a pause while she drank. ‘This whisky,’ she said, ‘doesn’t taste as good as the last one.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘But you’ll find out who he really is, won’t you?’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘You’ll succeed. And then you’ll do something awful to him. You promise me that?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. Anything for a quiet life, but I had never kneed anyone in the groin before.

  I found the office of the Cherwell on a top floor in Holywell. The editor was an eager, sharp-nosed, scurrying sort of person who seemed only to lack the courage to wear a green eye-shield and shout ‘Hold the front page!’ down a telephone. Long, flapping proofs were pinned up like Christmas decorations and in the background two mournful girls were pasting up pages in a martyred manner.

  ‘Who is Paul Pry?’ the editor said. ‘I bet that fellow who played Hamlet would like to go and punch him on the nose.’

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t think so,’ I lied. ‘It’s just we’d like his name and college so we can send him an invitation to our next show.’

  ‘Send the tickets here. That’s the proper, professional way of doing it. And as for Paul Pry, you know we journalists never disclose our sources. Anyway, it’s up to us to protect him from physical attack. Lots of actors threaten it. Come on, girls. The deadline’s almost on us. We’ve got to get next week’s paper to bed.’

  When I left, the girls were plying their paste-brushes no faster than when I had arrived. I could think of only one other source of information.

  ‘I mean, you write articles for all the magazines. You must know.’

  ‘Must know what?’

  ‘Who the little shit is who reviewed Hamlet.’

  ‘I can’t remember’ – Dunster was looking at me with some amusement – ‘ever having seen you angry before, old man. Is this a breakthrough?’

  ‘You think I’m angry. I’m almost completely calm compared to ...’ I hesitated.

  ‘Compared to who?’

  ‘Compared to other members of the cast.’

  ‘You mean compared to Bethany Blair?’

  ‘Naturally, she’s extremely upset.’

  ‘And you’re upset because she’s your girlfriend.’

  ‘Well ...’

  ‘Oh, come on. Don’t think it wasn’t obvious. “There is a willow grows aslant a brook, That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream ... Don’t look so pleased with yourself, Progmire.’

  ‘No one could look pleased with themselves after that notice.’

  ‘But you’ve got to admit, quite honestly, you weren’t all that good?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘But you wanted praise.’

  ‘Of course I did. Everybody does.’

  ‘So everybody expects a critic to lie.’

  ‘Well, at least to look for the best things in a performance.’

  ‘Why should he? Why shouldn’t he look for the worst things if he wants to?’

  ‘Because it’s brutal. It causes unnecessary suffering.’

  ‘To your girlfriend?’

  ‘And to me, I suppose. If I’ve got to be honest.’

  ‘Have you? I thought you didn’t believe in honesty. Isn’t honesty something rather beastly that hurts people’s feelings?’ He was sitting at his desk, among an indescribable mess of books and papers. There were at least three mugs of cold, half-drunk Nescafe and a paper plate smeared with yellow rice, a relic of some hastily snatched take-away, among the illegible, unfastened pages of an essay which had drifted on to the chairs around him and then fluttered on to the floor. He looked up and favoured me with one of his rare smiles.

  ‘It’s because you’re my friend,’ he said, ‘that I expected so much more of you, Progmire. Because you’re my friend I had to apply the highest possible standards.’

  ‘You ...?’ Of course I should have known it all along. I had half guessed when I came into the room, but I put it past him. I was wrong. Nothing should be put past Dunster. ‘You’re bloody Paul Pry!’

  ‘A well-kept secret, don’t you think?’

  ‘So you wrote all that poison, about me and Beth?’

  ‘Don’t you understand, Progmire?’ Dunster was still smiling as he explained it, as though to a child. ‘I couldn’t write something I didn’t believe was true, just because we’re friends. Could I?’

  ‘I really don’t see why not. It wouldn’t’ve cost you anything.’

  ‘It would have cost my integrity.’

  ‘I don’t give a fart about your integrity,’ I had to tell him.

  He looked at me then, very sadly, and refreshed himself from one of the cups of cold Nescafe. ‘Progmire, you’ve always lived in a world of make-believe with absolutely no idea of morality.’

  ‘Is it morality to make people miserable?’

  ‘Sometimes it
has to be.’

  ‘If your precious integrity’s so valuable to you, why didn’t you get someone else to review Hamlet? Why not send one of those sad-looking girls from the office? They might have been glad of a night out.’

  ‘They might not have told the truth. They might have thought I wanted them to go easy on my friend.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ I hope I sounded bitter. ‘I’m sure no one could have suspected you of any decent, human, merciful feeling like that.’ I had reached another point in my life when I was absolutely and entirely through with Dunster.

  ‘I wanted to write the notice myself,’ he said with maddening solemnity, ‘because it was quite clearly my duty to do so.’

  ‘“I was only doing my duty.” That sounds like a sort of hangman’s excuse.’

  ‘Honestly, Progmire.’ Dunster got up then and came over to me. He looked, as always, pale, overworked, untidy, uncombed, his long wrists and hands dangling from the sleeves of the jacket which had always been too small for him. ‘I know you’re a kind of actor, but don’t try to dramatize everything. You haven’t been sentenced to death. You’ve just got a bad notice. That’s all. Perhaps acting just isn’t your thing. I haven’t written a word of criticism about your economics.’

  ‘I suppose I should have taken Beth’s advice and struck him then. But I wanted to be out of the room, and I didn’t want to touch him.

  ‘You said we were friends,’ I told him. ‘Well, we’re not any longer.’

  ‘Why?’ He was smiling again, maddeningly. ‘Because you didn’t get what you wanted out of me?’

  ‘Because you’ve hurt someone I happen to love.’

  ‘Nonsense. No one asked Bethany Blair to act Ophelia. If she didn’t want to be criticized, she should’ve stayed at home reading the Horse and Hound.’

  ‘Go and find someone else to be friends with,’ I said. ‘Some unfortunate bugger you can enjoy telling the truth to all the time. Give him my heartfelt sympathy, why don’t you?’

  I left him then. He was standing in the middle of the room looking, I was disgusted to see, not at all displeased with himself.

  ‘Did you hit him?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘What does that mean? Did you knee him in the groin?’

  ‘As a matter of fact I couldn’t bring myself to.’

  ‘What did you do to him, then?’ Beth asked.

  ‘I insulted him. I made him feel an absolute worm. I told him I never wanted to see or hear from him again and that our friendship was over. I must say, he looked pretty miserable about it.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m glad your friendship’s over. He was sorry about that, was he?’

  ‘I think he realized exactly what I thought of him. Oh, and I told him he’d hurt the one person in the world I really loved.’

  ‘What did he say to that?’

  ‘Not much. He had a hangdog expression. All the arrogance had gone out of him.’

  ‘So’ – to my great relief Beth looked satisfied with what I’d told her – ‘you made him suffer.’

  ‘Absolutely. I made him suffer.’

  We were in her college room having tea. She had bought a Swiss roll and chocolate biscuits, which were spread out on the rug in front of the electric fire. It was a treat, apparently meant for a returning warrior, although the battle had been bloodless.

  ‘And you told him I was the one person in the world you loved?’ she repeated, interested.

  ‘And I meant it.’ I took off my glasses, always, with me, a sign of sincerity.

  ‘Well, then,’ she said. ‘I suppose we might as well.’

  She went to the door and locked it.

  When we had made love and were lying together on her narrow bed she said, ‘I don’t think I’m cut out to be an actress.’

  ‘Nonsense. You were brilliant.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t. I wasn’t very good at all. I’m certainly not going to bother about the stage.’

  ‘What’re you going to be then?’

  ‘Don’t ask me that!’ Her face had changed, or I saw it, as I lay beside her, from an entirely different angle. She looked like a furious child, much younger and less beautiful.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry, for God’s sake. Nothing. I’ll probably be nothing. Why should we always be thinking about what we’re going to be? What’s it matter?’ And then she was holding me tightly, her nails digging into my back, renewing our love-making with desperation, as though together we were galloping away from a black and threatening place she never wanted to see again. At last she lay quiet, her hair spread over the pillow and her beauty, so far as I could see, restored.

  In the time that followed the wounds inflicted on us by Paul Pry healed slowly.

  Chapter Seven

  There followed a period of freedom from Dunster. Of course I saw him. He seemed, as usual, to be everywhere. He was in hall when I had dinner with the thespians, he was in the street, in the White Horse, in the library when I went there to work, waving at me cheerfully from a distance. I didn’t return his greetings and, in the vacation, when he rang me up at home I got my mother to tell him I was out. She hated lying and blushed like a young girl when she did so. She only undertook the task after I had shown her Dunster’s notice of Hamlet. ‘Pay no attention,’ she said. ‘He was probably jealous.’ And she maintained her hostility to Dunster long after we had become, in some sort of way, reconciled.

  My life was now centred entirely on Beth, whom I found a greatly preferable, but hardly more predictable, companion than my impossible school friend. For long periods, and for no apparent reason, Beth was aloof; she was busy with an essay, or writing home, or washing her hair. She wanted an early night or to be left alone for a week. Sometimes she went missing. Her room was empty and her friends confessed to not having seen her for days. Then, as suddenly, she would reappear, tell me how much she had missed me, open my jacket and burrow inside it saying she hoped we would not be apart again. I’d take her to the Indian restaurant and she’d stop in mid curry so that we could rush off to make love – in her room, my room, or even in the battered Renault some friend who lived near her in the West Country had lent her. She was so impatient that she would start undoing buttons and zips as she drove, much too fast. I was, of course, flattered and delighted by this, although being a worrier I had visions of us being found impaled on some tree or lorry, stone dead with our zips undone. When we arrived at our destination she would control her impatience and proceed with the slow and deliberate expertise which always amazed me.

  At the end of my second year I put my name down for a flat in a pink North Oxford mini chateau with a spire over the upstairs loo. I spent unnecessary days wondering how I was going to ask Beth to join me there, but as soon as she heard of it she assumed she was coming and asked Laertes and Gertrude to join us. My own acting career had peaked with Hamlet’, it was then downhill all the way and I did pretty thankless roles, like Antonio in The Merchant of Venice – a miserable sod and not the sort of person you’d ever invite to a party – and Oliver de Boys, brother of the more famous Orlando, in As You Like It. Beth came to the thespian parties, gave us considerable encouragement but was no longer available for casting. I had hoped that when we moved into the flat everything would be different. It wasn’t, altogether. Often she would go away in her car, saying she was meeting friends from home in London. Her departures were sudden and unpredictable, as were the times when she seemed remote, a strange girl who looked different as she sat, apparently drained of all energy, peering disconsolately into some bleak future she felt was inescapable.

  She wanted to go to a May Ball, which I thought, with the expense of the flat and my mounting overdraft, would cost us too much. ‘What the hell!’ Beth brightened considerably at the thought of our poverty. ‘We’ll climb into Magdalen. You don’t think I want to dance with all those rich twits, do you? Climbing in’s the best part of the evening.’

&n
bsp; She proved to be an altogether more reliable guide than Dunster. We drank a bottle of wine in the flat and then set off for the base camp under cover of darkness. Beth tucked up her long skirt, gave me her shoes to put in my pockets and we climbed from the roof of her parked Renault across some low battlements. I followed her white dress, climbing unsteadily, while she seemed to move insubstantially as a ghost, a blur of ectoplasm with long legs in tights. Then she dropped into the safety of a shrubbery and held my hand as I scrambled down after her. We joined a crowd going into a tent and there we saw my other old school acquaintance, Porker Plumstead, sitting mournfully in a corner with a cold collation on his knees.

  ‘Progmire!’ he called in the fruity upper-class voice he had cultivated since leaving school. ‘Why aren’t you living with us in the Cowley Road? We’re all OGs together there.’

  ‘Oh Gees ...?’ I was puzzled. ‘Sounds like a lot of rather outdated Americans.’ Perhaps it was evening dress that made me slip into my Noël Coward manner.

  ‘Old Georgies. Have you entirely forgotten your school? There’s quite a nest of us. Self, your friend Dunster and one or two others.’

  ‘He’s not my friend, actually.’

  ‘Glad to hear that. He does make an incredible mess everywhere. You know what? He left his bloody pen in the marmalade. Odd sort of thing to do, wasn’t it? But why aren’t you living with us?’

  ‘I suppose I like it better living with Beth.’

  ‘Beth?’ He looked worried. ‘I don’t remember any Beth at St George’s.’

  ‘No. This is Beth. She’s a girl. In case you hadn’t noticed.’

  Beth had spotted an open bottle of champagne at Porker’s feet and was busily filling some used glasses she had found on a nearby table.

  ‘I say, Beth,’ Porker confided in her, ‘I’ve had a bloody miserable evening. See this dinner jacket. Hopeless fit. I had to hire it. And I’d had a specially beautiful one made at Hall’s, with sort of pale mauve lapels. My own design, actually. I say, you two. Do have a drink.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Beth was looking at his upturned, discontented face decorated with a touch of mayonnaise on the chin. ‘We’ve got one.’