Dunster

by John Mortimer

  ‘Do shut up, Dad,’ Beth told her father. ‘Philip and I aren’t in the least interested in wars.’

  ‘I pity you. I saw the last war coming. All the signs were there. Joined up. Lied about my age. Commissioned when I was twenty. Best years of my life, quite honestly. Soldiering.’

  There was no reaction from Mike, dishing out the vegetables, to the fact that the best years of her husband’s life hadn’t included her.

  ‘You don’t know what’s in a geezer,’ Jaunty told us, ‘until you’ve watched him advancing up a hill towards a few other geezers with machine-guns. The great thing about war is that it shows up character.’

  ‘It seems a bit of an expensive way of doing it. Some people might rather stay alive than have their characters shown up!’ Beth never seemed to take her father seriously.

  ‘A lot of them were like that.’ The Major was not smiling at me and yet his nearest eye appeared to wink, ‘I’m sure you’d understand that, Mister Progmire. A lot of them much preferred to stay alive. A good many of them turned tail and ran. They keep quiet about that in the military histories. Anyway, that’s why I feel sorry for geezers like you, Mister Progmire. You’ve never had your courage tested.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it. He’s played Hamlet in St Joseph’s College gardens. That’s a bit like being under fire.’ Beth showed me the consideration due to a foreigner in a strange land.

  ‘No comparison!’ Jaunty was certain of it. ‘There’s always been wars. Wars have been going forever. And how long’s Hamlet been going?’

  ‘Only about three centuries.’ I felt something warm between my thighs, not Beth’s hand but the lean head of the lurcher. Now awake, it was carrying out the usual doggish inspection of my private parts.

  ‘I got my education in the barracks at Catterick, followed by a pretty hairy spell in the desert. Ever been in a tank, Mister Progmire? Little tin oven. Desert heat. Geezers got trapped in those when they were shelled. The sands were crowded with pranged tanks and dead geezers still in them.’ The Major produced a crumpled silk handkerchief as though, even in his icy dining-room, he sweated at the memory. ‘After that a rather hairy time in Italy.’ He seemed relieved to pass on to another campaign. ‘Kick that bloody dog away if she’s troubling you.’

  ‘No. It’s perfectly all right.’ I pushed away the questing mouth and crossed my legs.

  ‘If I had my way, this wimpish government wouldn’t waste our money on universities. What the hell was wrong with National Service?’

  Beth said, ‘Come off it, Dad. You mean you’d rather I was a lance corporal for three years? Square-bashing!’ I often wondered if the Major were playing an elaborate game, designed to deter his daughter’s lovers. No one, I thought, could actually hold his opinions. In the end I had to admit that he probably could and did.

  ‘What do you learn there, anyway, Mister Progmire? Apart from Hamlet?’

  ‘Philip does economics,’ Beth told him.

  ‘Oh, yes? Are you going to be a banker?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I’ll probably end up as an accountant.’

  For the first time Jaunty looked at me as though I were not a bobble-hatted vegetarian and hunt saboteur.

  The next day it rained steadily. Mike and I sat in the kitchen and watched as Beth and her father put their animals into the lorry to drive off to the meet. Jaunty’s mount looked enormous to me. It was a grey which snorted, tossed its head and backed in panic each time it approached the horsebox. At last Beth led the huge animal round the yard, patting its nose and apparently speaking to it in a conciliatory way. On the last lap it danced up the ramp for her. The Major slammed the door shut. For a moment he and his daughter hugged each other in triumph and I thought they looked like children after a successful game. Then they got into the lorry and drove away.

  Mike said, ‘I’m so glad Beth got to know you. It’s a thoroughly good thing.’ I was feeling a glow of appreciation when she added, ‘At least I’ll have someone to talk to when they’re out hunting.’

  We sat for a while in silence and then she said, ‘You seem so calm. Beth’s never been calm. Neither has Jaunty.’ Calm! I wondered how Beth’s mother could be so easily mistaken as I sat, a bundle of nerves, in that strange household, disconcerted by the Major, ill at ease with the dogs, deeply distrustful of the horses and even worried about the night to come, because it occurred to me that so much pleasure so easily given might vanish unexpectedly. As I thought of the future, I heard Mike’s gentle voice telling me her troubles, ‘It’s not us that’s extravagant. It’s the horses. They eat so much and they’re always ill. I can’t understand it. Jaunty and I have hardly had a day’s illness since we married. And Beth was never sick, not even as a child. But those great horses hardly draw a well breath. Their medical bills are quite terrifying. It’s not just the vets. It’s the physio. It’s the injections. The ultrasound. Sometimes I think it’s a whole lot of fuss about nothing. I think those damn horses are hypochondriacs. Jaunty’s almost dead with worry about it all.’

  ‘But if they’re so expensive, couldn’t he give them up?’

  ‘You don’t understand. Jaunty wouldn’t be Jaunty, not without horses. Do help him if you can spare the time, Philip. He seems to have the most terrible difficulty adding up.’

  No more was said about help for Jaunty then, or for a long time to come. I read in the kitchen, keeping warm by the cooker, and the dogs, having grown bored, no longer abused me. Mike ironed a number of Jaunty’s shirts and after tea Beth came back. Her jacket, waistcoat and even the white stock at her throat (she told me to call it a hunt tie) were spattered with mud. ‘I fancied you when you went out,’ I told her, ‘but the mud’s made it suddenly more urgent.’

  ‘A lot of men say that.’ Beth smiled. ‘It’s really rather disgusting of them.’ Later she said, ‘I think you’ve passed the ordeal.’

  ‘You don’t mean your father likes me?’ I was incredulous.

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t go so far as that. But he seems to think you’ll do.’

  It was not until I had paid Blair Cottage a number of visits that Jaunty asked me to help him with his accounts.

  ‘I have this bloody man,’ he said, ‘who’s meant to be an accountant. But he’s in trouble himself. Woman trouble.’

  I told him I was sorry to hear it.

  ‘Two on the side and one at home who’s threatening legal action. That is when she’s not taking the law into her own hands, slashing his tyres and so forth. Anyway, he’s up to his eyes in the smelly stuff, so he wants me to do my own VAT, work out my own expenses. I thought you paid these fellows to invent the expenses, at the very least.’

  We were in his office, a small downstairs room which might have been used as a refrigerator, it’s no use complaining,’ Beth said, ‘Dad simply doesn’t feel the cold.’ There was a bulging bureau, its top piled high with yellowing back numbers of the Field and Horse and Hound and its interior stuffed with forgotten bills, unopened bank statements and letters of almost pathetic complaint from the Inland Revenue. I took the whole lot into the kitchen, warmed my hands on the cooker and started, for the first time, a sort of filing system. Jaunty had decided to put all his faith in an undergraduate with a head for figures who had come into his home to make love to his daughter. After I had gone through his bank statements and made some sense of the scribbled invoices, I had a more or less clear idea of his financial situation.

  As a matter of fact he was reasonably well off. The stables, built on a grander scale than the house, accommodated a number of horses at livery. His charges were high and might have brought him in a reasonable income if he’d had any regular system for sending out the bills. Most of the stable work was done by dedicated girls whose wages he’d forgotten to pay. Apart from the livery business he had his army pension, increased by compensation for a wound in his right leg which didn’t seem to prevent him riding regularly to hounds. In addition to that his bank accounts showed a regular payment in, which I asked him to explain.
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  ‘Chap I used to soldier with. He took a shine to me. He knew I only had my pension, until I got this place and started the stables working. So he remembered me.’

  ‘You mean, it’s money he left you?’

  ‘You could put it that way, I suppose. I say, aren’t you sweating hot, sitting hunched up by that cooker?’ He threatened to open the window but I told him I couldn’t afford to have the scattered clues to his income blown away. In my researches at that time I never learned any more about Jaunty’s useful source of income. My university economics course didn’t include tax reduction schemes, but I had a bank manager uncle who told me that if Jaunty’s stables became a private company he would save on his payment of bank interest. I don’t know if he ever adopted this idea, but when I suggested it he looked at me as though I were the Delphic Oracle, and after that he often asked my advice on money matters and treated me with increased respect.

  After we’d done our finals Beth and I took a punt and tied it up under the willow tree where I had first made love to Ophelia.

  ‘It’s all over,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I was worried.

  ‘I don’t mean us. I mean this part of it. Oxford and all that. You know when you asked me what I was going to be ...’

  ‘And you didn’t want to think about it.’

  ‘Well. I’ve thought about it lately.’

  ‘So what is it then?’

  ‘I suppose ...’ She was busy eating a greengage and now she spat the stone into the river. ‘A wife and mother. Some sort of nonsense like that.’

  ‘I never thought of anything so permanent.’ I honestly hadn’t.

  ‘You mean you don’t want to get married?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  And as we lay on the worn, much-used velvet cushions she said, ‘It wasn’t to be expected that you’d be such a terrific hit with Dad.’

  Before we left Oxford I had a letter from Dunster.

  Dear Progmire

  I bumped into Beth Blair the other day. I mean literally. She was crossing Banbury Road and I was coming back from a boring party on my bicycle. I managed to brake and it was only a minor sort of contact. I promised to pay for her tights. Anyway, she said she’d proposed marriage to you and you’d blushed a bit and said yes. She said that in the pub where I took her for a bit of a stiffener as she seemed rather shaken after contact with the bike. I told her that as your best friend over many years, in fact by my calculation, and discounting those insufferable actors you chose to associate with, your only friend, I had no doubt you would be asking me to be your best man. Now I have very little patience with the idea of dressing up in some sort of undertaker’s suit and taking part in the sanctified sale of young women into slavery, or at least hard, unpaid labour in the kitchen as well as in the maternity ward. All the same, I told Beth, to whom I felt I owed something after the collision, which may have been caused because I was greatly preoccupied with the murder of Allende as I pedalled along, that I would hire the rig-out and make sure the ring was in my waistcoat pocket, and generally give you the moral support which you’d need if you weren’t going to change your mind about thirty times on your way to the altar. She seemed absolutely chuffed when I agreed to do the necessary and said of course I could stay with her family and all I needed was a good deal of tolerance. It seems her father is a rather tricky piece of work so we ought to get on like a house on fire.

  Don’t bother to thank me, old man. The fact that you’ve actually made up your mind about something in your life simply has to be celebrated. See you in church.

  Everlastingly yours Dick Dunster

  ‘Don’t bother to thank him? I’ll thank him to keep away from my wedding.’

  ‘Don’t do that,’ Beth said. ‘He seemed so excited about it all.’

  ‘I’m not getting married,’ I told her. ‘for the purpose of exciting Dunster.’

  ‘He’s probably made all sorts of plans.’

  ‘Of course he hasn’t. He never makes plans at all. He’ll miss the train and arrive late and he won’t have hired the suit.’

  ‘I don’t suppose the suit really matters.’

  ‘And he’ll probably quarrel with your father.’

  “That might be interesting.’

  ‘Look. I don’t want to stand up in church, vowing to love and honour you, or whatever it is, with the shadow of Dunster looming up behind me.’

  ‘Then you decide it, darling.’ Beth smiled and kissed me. ‘You decide whatever man seems best for you.’

  I tried to draft a number of letters rejecting Dunster’s offer but they all sounded pompous. Dunster was right; years ago, when we were ink-stained schoolboys, we had taken each other for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness or in health, and there was nobody else I had known better or for so long. To ask Laertes or Benson, the gravedigger, to do the job would seem an insult to our long past. Anyway, Beth didn’t mind and to accept Dunster would probably be less trouble than turning him down.

  ‘Nothing goes with Beth. No land, no cows. No diamond tiaras. You do realize that, don’t you, Mister Progmire?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘I can’t even give you much for a wedding present. There’s a rather good saddle I might spare you, if you’d care for it.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Not much use for it in Muswell Hill, eh?’

  ‘No. Not much use for it there.’

  ‘So. You’ll have to keep Beth in the manner to which she’s become accustomed.’

  I can do better than that. I might even run to a decent central heating system – I might also have said that, but I didn’t. In fact I said, ‘Of course I will.’ But with a second in PPE and no immediate job prospects I wasn’t quite sure how.

  ‘Beth needs a good deal of understanding. She’s a lot like me.’ I looked at the crafty, wrinkled face, the bald head and tufts of hair on the cheek-bones and I thought that nothing was ever less like Ophelia. We were sitting together after breakfast. Beth had gone into Tavistock with her mother to see about the bridesmaids’ dresses and I was left at the mercy of Jaunty and the dogs.

  ‘There is one thing I can do for you. And I’m pleased to have the chance of helping the young hopeful.’ He leant back in his chair and looked at me in a manner which seemed vaguely threatening. ‘How’d you like to work for a television company, Mister Progmire?’

  ‘Well, of course ...’ I was more than a little astonished. ‘I’ve been in lots of plays. I’m sure I’d be able to direct.’

  ‘Not that exactly.’

  ‘You don’t mean acting?’

  ‘God, no. Forget acting. You told me yourself you got slated by the critics. No. I mean in the accounts department. There’s a fellow I know. He’s a – Well ... he’s a connection of mine. I suppose you think I’m just an old fart who spends his time knee-deep in horse shit. Well, let me tell you, young hopeful. I have connections. Everyone has, who’s knocked about the world a bit.’

  So that, strangely enough, was how I got started at Megapolis. Before then, I, Philip William Progmire, took Bethany Abigail Blair to be my lawful wedded wife. Dunster arrived the afternoon before the ceremony with his suit neatly packed in a box from Moss Bros. He was greeted by Beth’s family with what I thought was unjustified respect. Even the dogs failed to leap at his crotch and slunk into their baskets, as though in the presence of a power which they, for some totally unknown reason, respected. That night I had a stag-party among the oak beams and horse-brasses of the Jolly Huntsman which Jaunty insisted on attending. He sat next to Dunster and listened to him attentively, his head cocked and an ear occasionally cupped in his hand, as though fearful of missing any of the pearls of wisdom likely to drop from my best man’s lips.

  ‘I suppose you couldn’t miss the stag-party because you’re so tremendously fond of stags?’ Dunster suggested to the Major, and I became exceedingly anxious.

  ‘Of course. Beautiful creatures. Everyone on t
he moor is extremely fond of them.’

  ‘Is that why you keep on killing them?’

  ‘Have to, of course. They need culling. For the good of the species.’

  ‘So you’re doing them a kindness, really?’

  ‘Certainly we are.’

  ‘Keeping down the numbers?’

  ‘That’s exactly it.’

  ‘So you find one grazing peacefully and chase it for miles. Then you kill it when it gets into a stream to cool down.’

  ‘Shot first, by the hunt servants. Then cut up, of course. That’s the way it’s done,’ Jaunty agreed. In the pause that followed I hoped Dunster had done with the subject, but he had only been preparing the ground for attack. ‘Would you agree, sir,’ he asked the Major politely, ‘that there are too many people in the world?’

  ‘Yes, of course, there are. Lanes clogged up with little men driving with their hats on. Moor covered with trippers in the summer. Far too many.’

  ‘Particularly old people. Some of them aren’t much use, are they?’

  ‘Dunster!’ I tried an interruption. ‘Has that bottle got stuck to the table?’ My best man took absolutely no notice, but went on cheerfully.

  ‘So, Major Blair. If you were to spot an old-age pensioner on some lawn or other ...’

  ‘Say again?’ Jaunty was, perhaps, feigning deafness.

  ‘If you found an old lady sitting in the sun somewhere,’ Dunster shouted, quietening the noisy table.

  ‘I heard you the first time.’

  ‘I mean, you might decide to cull her. You might get the dogs to chase her across the moor for three or four hours. Then, when she cooled her feet in a stream somewhere, the hunt servants could shoot her and cut her up?’

  You’ve done it again, Dunster, I thought. I can’t even get married without you coming down and starting a violent argument with my father-in-law. But then I saw Jaunty looking at me and, for the first time in our acquaintance, he was smiling.

  ‘Your friend, Mr Dunster,’ he said with apparent delight, ‘is extraordinarily entertaining company. He must cheer up all you frightfully serious geezers at Oxford.’