Dunster

by John Mortimer

  ‘I do my very best,’ Dunster agreed, it’s not always appreciated.’

  I got married in a cloud of pride and apprehension and I spent the evening in an alcoholic daze. Blair Cottage was warmed at last by the presence of innumerable bodies, young and old, beautiful and grotesque, some dancing, some clasped together in corners, some singing in the kitchen. There were hunt followers and Oxford thespians, Beth’s countless cousins and Jaunty’s band of creditors. Through it all Mike smiled patiently and Jaunty introduced my best man to all his friends and acquaintances as Mr Dunster: ‘First really bright fellow ever came out of Oxford. Brilliant raconteur, this one. Quite brilliant.’ I was standing with Beth and her mother when someone came and told us that the girl groom was taking a bath with both Polonius and Guildenstem. ‘Oh, dear,’ Mike said, with what I thought was admirable concern, ‘I’m afraid there’s never very much hot water.’

  Later, very much later, finding the lavatory occupied by a number of people, I wandered out on to the gravel. I was standing there in the moonlight when I heard voices and saw some lights from the stable block. There was a crash and the sound of hoof beats on concrete and Jaunty’s neurotic grey hunter appeared with a dark figure aboard. At first I took the rider, who wore a black coat with flapping tails, for a waiter, but I should have known better. As the animal trotted, with increasing speed, from the yard, the moonlight fell on the determined face of Dunster. I’m sure that my best man had never ridden a horse before, but he kicked it with his heels, held the reins with one hand and the mane with another, and went cantering down the lane. Then, to my utter amazement, the horse gathered its wits together, paused for only a moment and then took the dark, ill-omened figure of Dunster crashing through the twigs and branches at the top of a hedge and on to the moor. As I watched them hurl themselves into the shadows I was conscious of Jaunty beside me, holding a dark tumbler of whisky, and I waited for the inevitable explosion.

  ‘My God!’ he said, and I swear he was still smiling. ‘You’ve got to hand it to him. Your friend Mr Dunster has spunk!’

  Chapter Nine

  All these things happened a long time ago, in and around the period of Hamlet, a performance, which like the acting out of my own youth, may not have been entirely satisfactory but which yet gave me a great deal of pleasure. Now I was Trigorin, a middle-aged author, ‘charming perhaps but very inferior to Tolstoy’. By bullying the local businesses and incessantly begging for money, the Muswell Hill Mummers had built a small theatre, known to us, somewhat archly, as the Mummery. There we rehearsed, quarrelled, started up love affairs, had attacks of stage-fright and rare moments of triumph, and made most of our money from the bar and the sale of ice-cream in the intervals. We opened in January and came into immediate competition with the new hit show on television Operation Dust Storm. Generals strangely camouflaged, pointing at maps like schoolteachers, streams of tanks crossing the desert, spectacular firework displays and bombs with an unerring sense of direction and endless speculation as to what might or might not happen when the war really got going – these things provided the peace-loving citizens of Muswell Hill with a nightly entertainment far more spectacular and engrossing than The Seagull. The house on the first night was so thin that I had no difficulty in spotting Cris Bellhanger in the third row, next to the aisle, ‘I enjoyed it very much. In all sincerity.’ I had found him standing alone with half a pint of lager in the bar after the show. The actors were calling each other darling and pretending to be professionals. ‘God, I was really down in the second act!’ and ‘What about the Bath chair wheels sticking? Didn’t you notice? We had to slide Dennis out in it, and he weighed about a ton.’ Standing still among so much fluttering Cris said, ‘A man who can take a rational view of himself is a rare thing. I thought you managed that very well. I’ll buy you a beer.’

  We carried our half pints to a bench by the wall and sat under caricatures of leading Mummers, remote from the still over-excited actors. I said, ‘This is a surprise.’

  ‘You sent me an invitation."

  ‘I never expected you’d come.’

  ‘That was a mistake. If you do something, you should expect the consequences. Angie’ll be sorry she missed it, stuck in the country.’

  ‘Just as well. She’s a professional.’

  ‘She’s watching television. Reminds her of her old war films, I suppose. Only thing that’s missing is Johnny Mills.’ His smile concealed, I thought a deep feeling of revulsion at the sight of another army on the move. As an old soldier he was, in contrast to Major Jaunty, more of a pacifist than I could be sure of being. ‘I wanted to talk to you,’ he said, ‘out of the office. I wanted to ask your advice. You know a good deal about drama.’

  Around us the actors were getting ready for the first-night party. Madame Arkadina was taking the cling film off the sandwiches and sausage rolls. She was a large and muscular physiotherapist who approached Chekhov’s play as though it were a patient complaining rather too much about a slightly sprained ankle. Nina, now wearing jeans and a Muswell Hill Mummers T-shirt, came staggering in with a box of wine and smiled at me as she eased it on to the bar. She was called Lucy and had just qualified as a solicitor. We had giggled together a little during rehearsals about Pam the physio’s briskly common sense approach to the play.

  ‘I don’t know nearly as much as the professionals in the drama department at Megapolis.’

  ‘That’s rubbish. The last three instalments of Social Workers have been complete garbage.’ Cris lowered his voice a little, although none of the actors was paying us the slightest attention. ‘What I want to put to you, as a bit of an expert on the subject, is this. Drama and real life are totally different things, aren’t they? Poles apart.’

  ‘Well, not exactly.’

  ‘Don’t bother about all that “not exactly”.’ Cris was always impatient of imprecise language at board meetings. ‘One is the truth and the other’s fiction. Quite obviously.’

  ‘Well, I shouldn’t have said it was absolutely obvious.’

  ‘You should never have acted Hamlet at Oxford. You seem incapable of coming to a clear view.’

  ‘Well, there you are, you see.’

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘Drama and life. They do get mixed up. From time to time.’ And bring you some good times, I thought, until the curtain comes down and you discover it was just a play.

  I looked over to where Lucy, my Nina, was opening the box of wine. She was talking to someone I had seen in the audience – a small man with a pale, bald head and a healthy growth of black beard, so that his face was like one in those old comic drawings which would make sense which ever way up it was. Lucy was smiling modestly at him as he left her and I thought he must have been saying something complimentary about her performance. He nodded a little nervously at me as he went out.

  Cris said, ‘Let’s try to keep it simple, shall we? For the sake of the average punter who’ll see War Crimes in the intervals between making love, or Nescafe or whatever.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘What we’re going to be making are documentaries. We want to tell it as it happened, don’t we?’

  ‘I imagine that’s the aim.’

  ‘Don’t imagine anything. Plain, hard facts. That’s what we’re after.’

  ‘Well ...’

  ‘None of your gloomy Dane doubts about it. If it isn’t true, it’s not worth doing.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘The people we’ve got working on War Crimes, I’m afraid, may have a remarkable talent for invention. I’m just nervous they might like a good story better than a real story. We want reporters, not artists.’

  He didn’t mention the name Dunster, but I knew who he was talking about. The excitement of the first night, the adrenalin generated by the challenge of performance, the joyful relief at having got through it, had drained away. I was left with the certainty that I was about to hear bad news. I didn’t know then how bad. In fact I felt there was one thing Cris
needn’t worry, about; so far as I was concerned Dunster was no more an artist than I was Laurence Olivier.

  ‘I don’t want anyone to start inventing for the sake of dramatic effect.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘It’s particularly tricky, you see, when it comes to a war crime committed by our own people.’

  ‘Were there some?’

  ‘Of course.’ Our audience was leaving the bar now and the excitement of the actors was growing. There was a pop and a cry of delighted concern as the first sparkling champagne-style bottle was opened and shed froth. They didn’t get called crimes because no one was ever tried for them. Only the defeated commit crimes. But, oh yes, we did them. That’s why I want a programme about one. It’s the whole point of the series.’

  Another bottle exploded. Konstantin, in love with Nina, played by a dark and soft-voiced young man in computers, arrived with his new Indian girlfriend. It seemed worlds away from the hidden crimes of an almost-forgotten war.

  ‘They’ve got hold of a story about the Italian campaign. It’s something I remember.’

  ‘You told me.’

  ‘It was an incredibly confused situation. So many groups involved. The German Army, of course, and the Allies. And then you’ve got German SS chasing Communist partisans, some of our SAS groups in the mountains, and the Italian fascists who were the real bastards ... Well, it’s hard for someone of your age to get that lot sorted out. Hard for anyone, come to that.’

  ‘I can imagine.’ I was tired and my mouth was dry. I didn’t want to hear about Dunster’s problems.

  ‘It would be so easy to get the wrong idea. Perhaps accuse an innocent person. We might do a terrible injustice, land ourselves in huge libel damages.’ Cris smiled. ‘That should worry the accounts department.’

  ‘Is there a particular story?’ I asked him.

  ‘I’ve got an idea they’ve got hold of one. It concerns a Brit, I believe. Still alive. Chap who keeps his head down somewhere in the depths of the countryside. I wouldn’t want us to trouble his old age for nothing.’

  ‘What about a glass of bubbles?’ Nina, the solicitor, approached us as we sat with the tide of the party rising around us. ‘And wouldn’t your friend like to stay for the bash?’

  ‘No, no, thank you very much. It was a wonderful evening.’ Cris lied convincingly and said to me, with his hand on my shoulder, ‘You enjoy yourself.’

  ‘What do you want me to do about what you’ve told me?’

  ‘Nothing for the moment. I’ll have to think about it. What we really need is someone completely sensible to keep an eye on it. We’ve got to be so careful. I mean, for God’s sake. We don’t want to commit another war crime, do we?’

  ‘You think we might?’

  ‘It’s just possible. Is that the time?’ He had taken out the gold watch he kept on a chain in his waistcoat and looked amazed at what it told him. ‘Angie’ll think I’ve dropped dead. Have a terrific party. You deserve it. I didn’t mean to spoil your evening.’

  ‘Good-night, Cris.’

  He walked away from us and, when he reached the door, didn’t look round but raised his hand in a sort of distant salute. I thought it a gesture of sadness at the prospect of going home to another war on the telly.

  ‘I was terrible tonight.’ Nina, otherwise Lucy, had taken Cris’s seat after he had left.

  ‘No, honestly, I thought you were very good.’

  ‘You’re lying. I was terrible.’

  ‘Not a bit of it. You’ve got to remember, Nina was a bad actress. It takes a remarkable actress to play a bad actress well.’

  ‘You mean, I was just a bad actress playing a bad actress? I just wish you could tell me the truth for a change.’

  ‘I always do.’

  ‘Now you really are lying.’ She was right, of course. She was very young and had my daughter’s uncomfortable knack of getting at the truth. ‘Maurice Zellenek’s a client of ours,’ she went on, and the name meant nothing to me. ‘I helped him over a house and he promised to be in this evening. He thought you were terrific.’

  ‘You mean the little chap with all his hair under his chin?’

  ‘You’re so cool.’ She looked at me in a complimentary sort of way, ‘That’s what I admire so about your Trigorin. All that suave, middle-aged charm.’

  ‘That really was acting,’ I told her. ‘I’m not in the least cool. In fact I’m anxious most of the time, except when I’m playing a part.’ What about being middle-aged? I was forty-three, perhaps twenty years older than her, probably older than Chekhov’s writer when he seduced Nina in the play. My anxiety increased and, as soon as I reasonably could, I got up to dance with Pam, the physio. I’d had quite enough of becoming involved with people because we had met as characters in a play.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘There’s absolutely no point,’ Dunster had said that blustery spring morning – was it a few years or a lifetime before? – as we stood by the ruins of Alexandra Palace looking out over London. ‘No point at all, Progmire, in us trying to hide the truth from each other.’

  Since that day Dunster and I had hardly spoken. I had avoided him, although I don’t know if he had taken any trouble to avoid me. Sometimes I got him on the telephone, but only by mistake. Sometimes we met outside his house, or in his hallway, but that was also by mistake. I have no great appetite for living through that day again. I have, you must understand, lived through it often enough on bad nights and long, empty afternoons in the years between. But that day, and the time before and after it, had an effect on the production of War Crimes and I must do my best to make it all clear to you. It’s a story, I suppose, which has happened to a great many people. I just wish to God that it had never happened to me.

  The one thing that everyone knows about memory is that every day of your childhood and youth remains stuck in your mind forever, while what happened last week is instantly flushed down the drain of forgetfulness. I can see myself, tormented with embarrassment, while Dunster heckled the little evangelical at Speakers’ Corner with blinding clarity. So far as I am concerned

  Mrs Oakshott’s bathroom fittings will be with me until the day I die. Every line and every moment of that damp and dour Hamlet is still present, for pain and consolation. But the time after I got my job at Megapolis, the years of marriage and living in Muswell Hill, have faded and slipped away in patches, like a wall painting in a poor state of repair. And it’s bad luck that those greyish blots, where the damp got in, would no doubt have shown the best times: when Natasha was very young, and I started to work closely with Cris, and we bought the house in Grasmere Road. But if you were to ask me to remember exactly when Tash took her first staggering steps, or whose party it was at which Beth and I made up our first really serious quarrel under a pile of coats which were gradually removed by drunken guests who paid no attention to us, I would be hard put to remember. The brightest parts of the picture have vanished beyond hope of restoration.

  Perhaps what I should do is just give you the facts as far as I remember them. I went to work in the accounts department at Megapolis under Gary Penrose, who was then a youngish middle-aged man with a moustache and hair just over his ears, a gold metal watch-strap and an expression of perpetual anxiety. Every morning he would ask me, ‘How’s your car going, Philip?’ and look reassured when I told him that Beth’s Renault was quite undependable in rain or frost or hot weather. Gary advised me on how to survive in the company. ‘Don’t try to be a high-flier. High-fliers are due for a crash at Megapolis. You know what I’ve got myself, when it comes to wheels? Toyota. Middle-management vehicle. You’ll stick to middle-management vehicles, if you take my advice, Philip. And keep your head down.’

  Not long after I’d started work, to my surprise, Cris Bellhanger, in his shirtsleeves and braces, banged his tray down beside mine in the canteen. ‘Welcome to the madhouse, Progmire.’ He’d smiled at me. ‘I hear you starred in Hamlet at university. You’re just the type of fellow we need in accounts.
Put a bit of poetry into the balance sheets.’ I had no idea how he had got this information, and our conversation got me into some trouble with my immediate boss. ‘Chattering in the canteen to the chairman of the Board is hardly keeping your head down, Philip. I say, he didn’t mention anything about me and Andrea, did he?’ Gary was having a flagrantly obvious affair with his secretary, a brisk, unsmiling person who was older and a great deal less attractive than Mrs Penrose, whom he used to bring to our annual dinner in the Connaught Rooms. Fear that this romance might become known to his wife was another cause of Gary’s anxiety.

  Beth and I had been lucky. When we found the house, my father lent me some of the money for the deposit and the rest came, astonishingly enough, from Jaunty, ‘I have a few little goodies lying in various hidey-holes. No. I didn’t tell you that when we went through the accounts. I thought it might come as a bit of a sweetener for Mister Progmire if he ever took on a girl who has to be ridden on a particularly tight rein.’ When I asked Beth if she’d any idea that Jaunty had so much loose cash about him she said, ‘The only way to get on with Dad is to ask him as few questions as possible. I wouldn’t wish to know everything that goes on under that filthy old tweed cap of his.’ I didn’t inquire further. We decided that we could afford the mortgage repayments if we let off the top room, and our first tenant was Queen Gertrude, who’d come up to London to work in advertising. After her, our lodgers were all quiet, friendly and clean and, when Tash was born, ready to do occasional baby-sitting. Beth’s black moods departed; she seemed, to my surprise and gratitude, content with life in Muswell Hill to an extent which I wouldn’t have believed possible when we were at Oxford.

  Dunster became a memory, one of the things we laughed about together: the eccentric, the stealer of Plumstead’s dinner jacket, the too honest friend who gave us terrible notices, the lucky idiot who, totally unable to ride, jumped a hedge on Jaunty’s hunter and didn’t break his neck. He was writing articles for magazines and I would get an occasional blast of the Dunster anger and contempt from Africa, or Washington, or some town hall in the north-east of England. And then one evening, when Beth had taken Tash down to Exmoor, he rang up.