Dunster

by John Mortimer

  ‘Well. This rather special DJ arrived and apparently got left in a box on the hall table. And what do you think? Some wretched sneak thief got in and pinched it. Bit of a bloody cheek, don’t you think?’

  Beth gulped champagne and gave me a long and appealing look.

  ‘Thanks for the drink, Porker. We’d better go and dance.’ I was also anxious to be off.

  ‘Certainly,’ Beth said. ‘After all, we paid all that money to get in.’

  ‘But the mystery is – Well, you know what sneak thieves are. They’re pretty poor, and thin, and out of a job, and probably never been to a ball in their lives. Well, what the hell would a sneak thief want with a dinner jacket with mauve facings?’

  We left Porker then, unable to think of an answer to his question. We danced together for a little, but I’m not much better at it than Cris Bellhanger. Beth danced with a lot of other people, including Laertes, Osric, Horatio and Benson, the gravedigger. It was very late before she wanted to go home and I went to sleep quickly. I dreamed I was chasing her, a ghostly figure, across all the rooftops in Oxford. She was running very fast but her feet never touched the tiles. At last she rose high over the Radcliffe Camera and vanished into the night.

  Some time after the May Ball we had a thespians’ party in the flat, to which no Oh Gees had been invited. The next morning, leaving Beth sleeping, I wandered into the kitchen, put on the kettle and then went into the sitting-room to find some cups which I guessed would be filled with one-part cold instant coffee and two-parts cigarette butts. The curtains were still drawn, the room was dark and I had a strong feeling that I was not alone in it. My instinct was right. Dunster, looking pale and wearing his dark overcoat, was asleep on the sofa, having adopted the attitude of another pre-Raphaelite subject, the poet-forger Chatterton after poisoning himself. I kicked over an empty bottle and he spoke, ‘Oh, there you are. Progmire. What time is it?’

  ‘What do you mean, what time is it?’

  ‘I just want to know the time, old man. It seems a fairly simple question.’

  ‘And what the hell’s the idea of coming in here, without an invitation, to sleep on our sofa? And waking up to ask the time, just as if you owned the place?’

  ‘I just wanted to know’ – Dunster was sometimes able to sound maddeningly reasonable – ‘whether it’s time for breakfast.’

  ‘No, it’s not time for breakfast. Anyway, no one here’s going to have breakfast. They’re probably all sick with hangovers. How did you get in here, anyway?’

  ‘You left the window open. Don’t you know that it’s perfectly easy to climb up that ridiculous porch arrangement?’

  I felt like giving up. I was surrounded, apparently, by urban mountaineers. At which point Beth came in, shivering in her dressing-gown, and said, ‘Who’re you talking to?’

  ‘It’s Dunster,’ I said. ‘You remember. Otherwise known as Paul Pry.’

  She looked at him as he struggled to get to his feet and even performed some sort of bow to her. He spoke with rare courtesy. ‘I hope what I wrote about your acting didn’t cause you any sort of pain?’

  ‘Of course it bloody did!’ I made it clear to him. ‘I told you. We all suffered outrageously.’

  ‘Pain? Why ever should you think that?’ I was amazed to see that Beth was smiling. ‘I never took acting in the least seriously. In fact, I’ve given it up.’

  ‘That, if I may say so, Bethany, is a wise decision. I congratulate you on your very sound sense.’ I wondered why Dunster, that morning, was talking as though he were a character out of School for Scandal. I half expected him to say, ‘Ma’am, your most obedient!’ and bow his way out of the room.

  ‘So, you see, I didn’t mind at all about your notice. I’m afraid you upset Philip rather.’

  ‘Oh, Philip’s used to that. I’ve been upsetting him since we were snotty-nosed schoolboys together.’

  ‘I wasn’t all that upset,’ I told him. ‘As a matter of fact I don’t read notices.’ It was almost true as I had only managed a pain-filled glance at Paul Pry’s verdict on my Dane.

  ‘Oh, is that why you came to me in such a rage. After not having read it?’

  ‘I was naturally concerned about Beth.’

  ‘Well, I must say.’ He smiled triumphantly at both of us, all pretence of humility gone. Dunster was himself again. ‘You two show remarkable concern for each other. But just so long as I didn’t offend either of you.’

  ‘What do you think you’re doing here?’ I was determined to put Dunster back at his unusual disadvantage.

  ‘That idiot Porker threw me out of the house. What’s more, I can’t get back. He’s had the lock changed.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me in the least. I don’t know why you went to share with him in the first place.’

  ‘The poor fool was setting up a house for those he mistakenly believed to have been his friends at school. He’s so obscenely rich that I thought at least it’d be comfortable.’

  ‘And I suppose he chucked you out because of the appalling mess you take with you everywhere. Tell me, Dunster. Do you carry rubbish round with you in suitcases?’

  ‘No. He chucked me out because I stole his dinner jacket.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘There’s this chap who lives in the basement. He’s a protected tenant, so Porker can’t get him out. Red Ned, they call him. He’s a charge-hand up at the Cowley works. Mind if I have one of these?’ Dunster was helping himself to someone’s packet of cigarettes. ‘And if you’re making coffee ...’

  ‘Why on earth did you steal Porker’s clothes?’

  ‘I’m telling you. This Red Ned, for whom I have the most enormous respect, by the way, is involved in an unofficial dispute, so he and his supporters are getting no strike pay, although their claim is a 100 per cent justified. Well, he asked me to contribute to his fighting-fund.’

  ‘So you contributed Porker’s new tuxedo, with purple facings?’

  ‘Well, not directly. I went and sold it at that Worn Again clothes shop in the covered market.’

  ‘Dunster! That’s theft.’

  ‘Well, the tailor’s chap left it in a box on the hall table. I had a look. It was such a ludicrous garment. People’d’ve come up to Porker and asked him to call them a cab. I mean, he’d’ve looked like a hall porter in it. So you see. I’ve very kindly spared him a great deal of humiliation.’

  ‘But Porker’s found you out.’

  ‘Unfortunately. He spotted the damned thing hanging up in the covered market.’

  ‘Is he going to turn you in to the police?’

  ‘Naturally not. He’d only look more absurd than he does already: “Banker’s son unwittingly donates ornate dinner jacket to striking car-workers” I could write a wonderful paragraph about it for the Cherwell.’

  ‘I must say, he looked pretty sick at the May Ball. He’d had to hire one for the evening.’ Beth smiled a great deal and often looked amused, but her laughter was a rare sound, full-blooded and louder than might be expected.

  ‘Look here’ – Dunster was clearly pleased by Beth’s reaction – ‘let me earn my keep by helping you tidy up. Some people,’ he had the nerve to say as he looked round at the post-party confusion, ‘do make the most ghastly mess of their places, don’t they?’

  ‘Earn your keep? What do you mean?’ I asked him. ‘We’re not keeping you here, Dunster.’

  ‘Of course you’re not. And I wouldn’t dream of asking. Red Ned promised to let me in the basement when he gets back from the meeting. Porker’s mad if he thinks he’s seen the last of me. Anyway, Prudence is buying me lunch to cheer me up. So, I’ll just help you wash up and get the breakfast ...’

  I have to admit that Dunster was on his best behaviour that morning. He collected cups and glasses, he dried up and didn’t break anything. He asked Beth about her home, her horse and her essay on Jane Austen. He was reasonably funny about the latent snobbery of his Marxist tutor, and Porker’s increasingly desperate attempts to find a
girlfriend. He even told me that he thought I made a ‘very interesting Antonio’ in The Merchant and if he’d still been doing Paul Pry he’d have come out and said so. As he left us he said, ‘Well, my dear old Progmire. Thank God, we’re friends again I’ve felt something missing in my life without you.’ And when I heard that, my heart sank.

  After he had gone Beth said, ‘As a matter of fact, your friend Dunster seems all right.’

  ‘What do you mean “all right”?’

  ‘Well, quite entertaining, really. There doesn’t seem to be any real harm in him.’

  ‘Beth, you don’t know the man. He’s a disaster area. He’s a minefield. He invites every sort of catastrophe. He’s accident prone and his condition is highly contagious. My life has only been entirely happy since we stopped seeing each other.’

  ‘Didn’t you miss him?’

  ‘Do you miss toothache?’

  ‘Oh, Philip darling.’ Beth was sitting at the kitchen table, eating toast and marmalade, ‘I’m sure you’re exaggerating.’

  But, of course, I wasn’t.

  Chapter Eight

  ‘I think it’s about time I submitted you to the ordeal.’

  ‘What ordeal?’

  ‘The ordeal by fire and ice ...’

  ‘What’s that meant to mean?’

  ‘I think it’s time you met my dad.’

  ‘What about your mum?’

  ‘Oh, she’s not an ordeal at all.’

  ‘Does he want to meet me?’ I began to worry about a difficult confrontation when I might be asked about my intentions, or even about financial prospects. My only intention, I should have to say, was to hold on to Beth for as long as possible, which, at that time, I didn’t expect to be forever.

  ‘I shouldn’t think he wants to meet you in the least. He doesn’t often want to meet people. Anyway, not unless they’ve been Masters of Foxhounds. You haven’t ever been one of those, have you?’

  ‘Not so far as I remember.’

  ‘Then he won’t want to meet you.’

  ‘Then why ...?’

  ‘I think it’s only fair.’

  ‘What’s only fair?’

  ‘That you should know the worst about me.’

  So Beth drove me to Exmoor. The hedges were so high they towered over the roads which became green tunnels. We shot through little towns, full of gift shops and tea-rooms and elderly couples with rucksacks – the women in large flowered cotton dresses and the men wearing socks and sandals. Then we crossed the moorland and the wild ponies took fright, as I often did, at Beth’s driving. We turned up a lane where a poker-work notice, suspended from a sort of wrought-iron gallows, announced Blair Cottage.

  If this suggested a thatched roof and roses trailing across the porch, the truth was something quite other. It was less of a cottage and more of a house, and a gaunt, uncompromising house at that. At one time its plaster might have been bright yellow; now it was the colour of pale custard, baked and cracked with the passage of time. There were stables and a concreted yard but no flowers or flowerbeds, only a tide of gravel which flowed up to the walls. Our arrival produced an uproar of barking, yapping and over-excited squeals, together with feverish scratching at the other side of the front door. Beth said, ‘Do you mind dogs?’

  ‘I quite like them.’

  ‘You’re not going to like these.’

  At which moment the door opened, apparently with some difficulty, and an uncomfortable number of small animals came plunging out, as excited as though they had been starved for a considerable period and Beth and I were two overflowing bowls of Pedigree Chum. One deafening white bundle of hair left the ground like a Scud missile and, aiming itself at my groin, scored a direct hit. Others stood on their hind legs and scrabbled with uncut claws at my trouser legs. It was true, as I had told Beth, that I have absolutely no objection to dogs per se. What I can’t understand is why they all have such an irresistible desire to home in on my genitals. After the dogs came a tall, thin woman with reddish hair. In the shadow of the house I could have taken her for Beth’s sister, even for Beth herself if my late Ophelia hadn’t been standing beside me. And then, as she stepped out of the square of shadow, the sun hit her face unkindly and I saw a tracing of lines round her eyes like cracks on the varnish of an old painting.

  ‘Hullo, darling,’ she said to Beth, and to me, ‘I’m Mike Blair.’

  Michaela, Beth had told me, was her mother’s name. Mike was what her husband always called her. She was now lugging one of Beth’s bursting holdalls out of the boot. Despite my protests, she started to walk up to the house with it. She was a woman who seemed used to carrying things. Beth walked with her arm round her mother’s waist. Their heads were very close together, as though they were sharing secrets, but all I heard was: ‘How are things?’ from Beth, ‘Much the same’ from Mike, and ‘I’m sorry about that’ from her daughter as we walked into the house, the dogs yelping and bounding at our heels.

  This was the first of many visits to Blair Cottage and I never crossed its threshold without being amazed at the high degree of physical discomfort to which the English sportsman is prepared to submit himself and his family. I had always imagined that hunting went with the blazing log-fires, crumpets for tea and steaming baths after a long run. Not at all. Chez Blair always struck a chill into my bones, even on the hottest of summer days. In the winter I felt I needed an overcoat to go upstairs and in the mornings Beth and I often found ice on the inside of the bedroom windows. In the sitting-room, among the ponderous furniture with its faded chintz covers frayed by the worrying of generations of terriers, the single bar of an electric fire illuminated plastic coals without producing a great deal of comfort. The light was shed by the dimmest of bulbs, often covered in thick shades on which hunting scenes were depicted. On my visits to her parents, I felt that Beth had gone into a cold country where I would always be a stranger. She understood this and between the icy sheets of her bed, surrounded by rosettes and silver cups and the photographs of her jumping her ponies at local gymkhanas, she was always especially and actively loving to make up for the Spartan nature of her home.

  She was never able to tell me how her father, christened Jonathan, had acquired his nickname. Perhaps it was bestowed on him in some long disbanded mess as a cynical joke. I never saw him with his cap at an angle, sauntering along with his hands in his pockets or whistling gaily – my idea of jauntiness. The Major was short and square, with the wary and dangerous eye of an unpredictable horse and an expression of extreme discontent. He only cheered up slightly when talking to his daughter. They had, it seemed to me, a hidden understanding, although they never used anything like words of affection to each other. When he spoke to Mike, the Major’s scowl was especially pronounced.

  When I first met Jaunty he was sitting at the kitchen table, warming his hands on a cup of instant coffee and reading the local paper. He was wearing riding breeches, green socks and carpet slippers. One sleeve of his sweater was in an advanced state of disintegration, as though it had been chewed by rats or horses. At his feet lay a black lurcher which was, I was thankful to see, asleep.

  ‘So Mister Progmire. My daughter got you down here all in one piece, did she? Amazing!’ The Major had a curiously high, rasping voice and he always addressed me with sardonic formality.

  “As a matter of fact, sir.’ (“For God’s sake stop calling him ‘“sir”,’ Beth said when we were, at last, in bed. ‘It makes him even more impossible.’) ‘Beth drives very well.’

  ‘She drives as she rides. Like a maniac. You want a cup of Nescafe? It’s watery and revolting. The odd thing is,’ he confided in Beth, ‘in bloody nearly thirty years of marriage your mother’s never managed to give me a decent cup of Nescafe.’

  Mike spooned the powder into a mug with a stoic smile and her husband turned on me with a serious accusation.

  ‘I hear from Beth, Mister Progmire, that your family lives in Muswell Hill.’

  ‘Yes. We’ve been there all my life.’<
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  ‘Not much hunting country round Muswell Hill, I don’t suppose?’

  ‘Philip doesn’t ride,’ Beth said. ‘So, for heaven’s sake, don’t go on at him.’

  I was grateful to her. Some cousins had once persuaded me to go out with them in Epping forest. I had spent an anxious hour clinging to the animal’s mane while it demonstrated the highly neurotic nature of all horses by trembling at the sight of babies in pushchairs and side-stepping nervously at the threat posed to it by scraps of paper. When my position had been made clear by his daughter. Jaunty ignored me and I drank some perfectly adequate Nescafe. He and Beth discussed the animals, the extraordinary love life of the Field Master of the hunt, and the ‘jumped-up pox doctor’ (in fact, Beth told me later, a heart surgeon from Bristol) who was turning the cottage along the lane into a ‘kind of suburban knocking shop’ complete with a ‘vulgar little conservatory’ and other signs of urban decadence. I do, as I have made clear already, worry about many things, some of them are unimportant, but Major Blair was a serious cause for anxiety. Only the thought that Beth was always on my side kept me relatively calm during the time I spent going through an ordeal as daunting as that faced by any of the great lovers of history.

  That night we sat together in the Blair Cottage dining-room, which was decorated with parts of dead animals. The shrewd faces of decapitated foxes peered down from the walls and a stag’s hoof (‘It’s a slot,’ Beth corrected me later) set in silver was the centre-piece of the table. Jaunty carved us, with surgical precision, wafer-thin slices from a very small joint of beef. ‘You’re not a veggie, are you?’ The Major’s small, yellow eye regarded me with deep suspicion.

  ‘No, Dad. Philip eats meat.’

  ‘Thank God for that! We get the veggies out in force with the hunt. Wearing bobble hats. So bloody fond of animals that they string up wires for the horses to trip over and stub out cigarettes on the rumps of children’s ponies. You know, I feel sorry for your generation. Mister Progmire. Bad luck, really. Born without a war to go to.’