Dunster

by John Mortimer

  ‘Hullo, old man. It’s about the room.’

  ‘What room?’

  ‘Your room, of course. Benson’s wife’s left him at last and his girlfriend’s moving in with him. That’s my reliable information.’ It was true that our last lodger had been a quiet girl with tragic eyes who filled the unlikely role of mistress to Benson, the gravedigger. I’m absolutely bloody homeless. So I’ll come round.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘In the telephone box at the corner of your street.’

  ‘Beth’s away with her parents.’

  ‘Don’t worry, old man. I’ll do us a fry up.’

  He came with three bottles of Chianti and, for some extraordinary reason, I was glad to see him. It was as though I had gone for too long without the salt in the egg of my existence. We drank two bottles and I let him produce the smoking, partially blackened food and the heavy smell of bacon fat which was my memory of his childhood home. He was funny about the editor of the Informer, the left-wing journalist, who was apparently a closet golfer and a secret member of the local Rotary Club. He gave me all the details of the latest Washington sex scandal and described a helicopter journey with an army major who was terrified of flying and clutched a miniature teddy bear for comfort. He had, it seemed, penetrated the Church of England synod to detect some dirty work in the selection of a new archbishop; and lived with a gospel singer in Maryland to expose a racketeering faith-healer. He sat with his feet on a kitchen chair and said, ‘I envy you, Progmire. My God. I envy your success.’

  ‘What success is that?’

  ‘You’ve got a home. A family. You’ve become a cheerful old Muswell Hill-billy. Damn it all, you’re happy.’

  ‘I suppose I am.’ I was worried. Once you began to talk like that it might not last.

  ‘And I, old man, haven’t even got a roof over my head.’

  ‘How did you manage that?’ Not that, in Dunster’s case, I thought it would be difficult.

  ‘Living with this Jo Burton. Does the women’s rights page in the Informer. Militant, my dear old Progmire. ‘I can’t tell you how militant this Jo person is. She locked me out of the flat because I wouldn’t tell her I loved her.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t you?’

  ‘It wouldn’t have been true.’

  ‘So you’re out on the street?’

  ‘All my stuff,’ he said with dignity, ‘is in the left-luggage department at Euston Station.’

  ‘Then why couldn’t you say it?’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘Say you loved this Jo Burton. I mean, at least you wouldn’t have had to move your stuff out. And she might have liked it.’

  ‘Oh, Progmire.’ He looked at me sadly. ‘You have absolutely no sense of morality. Does that worry you at all?’

  ‘As a matter of fact it’s one of the few things that doesn’t.’

  ‘So are you going to let me your room?’

  ‘I’ll have to ring Beth.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. There’s a bottle left.’

  Later I telephoned and got Jaunty. He said, ‘Are you drunk? I’ll get Beth. She’s talking to her mother.’

  Beth said, ‘Dad says you’re drunk.’

  ‘I miss you.’

  ‘Did you ring up to tell me that?’

  ‘Yes. And Dunster’s here. He wants the room. I’m sure you think it’s a terrible idea.’

  ‘I don’t see why. Provided he’s good for the rent.’

  ‘Are you good for the rent?’ I asked Dunster.

  ‘Old man’ – Dunster looked at me sadly – ‘have I ever let you down?’

  So Dunster got his stuff – there was surprisingly little of it – from Euston Station and moved upstairs, where he lived rather quietly for about three months. He only came down in the evenings when we invited him, paid his rent regularly and seemed, so far as I could tell, to lead a life of celibacy. One day I came home from work and Beth told me he’d left for South America, where he was going to write some documentaries for television.

  ‘Isn’t that a bit sudden?’

  ‘Apparently they’d just got the money together. He didn’t expect it to happen so soon.’

  ‘Have you seen his bedroom? I bet it’s a tip.’

  ‘No. It’s remarkably tidy. And you know what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s actually made his bed.’

  We got postcards from various parts of the world, and I glanced through his articles. Then he wrote to tell us that his father had died and he had inherited the house in Camden Town which I used to visit as a boy. He invited us over for dinner some time, but a date was never fixed. I didn’t see Dunster again until he rang me at Megapolis and said, if I was driving home from work, could I meet him at Alexandra Palace, as he had something to tell me which he thought I would want to hear? As it turned out, he was entirely wrong about that.

  This was where we used to go when we were schoolboys and Dunster came to tea with me. We told each other that my parents had bugged my bedroom so we had to stand in the open air round the old Alexandra Palace to discuss the secret weaknesses and furtive misconduct of our friends and masters. It was there that we used to talk, looking out over London, near to the clouds, in a position in which we had always felt godlike, far above the small scurrying subjects of our ridicule and abuse. ‘Down there’ – Dunster would wave a schoolboy’s hand with ink-stained fingers – ‘is the house of ill fame into which old Dankwerts, the stinks master, is slinking on his way home. And, somewhere among the mist around Hampstead, Porker Plumstead is locked in the lavatory with Health and Beauty.’ And we would smile tolerantly down on them, sure, at least, that we would never be quite as disgusting.

  The most worrying sentence in the world to me is ‘I’d like to have a word with you about something.’ It leaves you in agonizing doubt about what exactly. The feeling of anxiety which started with Dunster’s telephone call had increased during the long, slow drive through the north London traffic. Obviously he needed help. What was it? Money, shelter? An alibi, perhaps, for some crime of violence? By the time I had parked and was walking up the hill towards him, I had steeled myself to lock him in the boot of the car and spirit him out of the country.

  The old glass palace of our childhood had been rebuilt in a more solid, less combustible version and there I found Dunster, standing under the reconstruction of a winged Victorian angel which was holding out a laurel wreath, as though to drop it on his head as some quite unmerited reward.

  ‘For God’s sake, Dunster. What’s all this secret business? What do you want me to do for you?’

  ‘Nothing for me, Progmire. I want to help you. I really mean that.’

  He was looking at me with the slightly reverent concern of a doctor who is going to tell a patient that he has about three months to live. The ‘poor old you’ expression was mixed with the superior look of a man who knows that he’s still as fit as a fiddle and likely to last forever.

  ‘I’m not sure I need any help. Not just at the moment.’

  ‘I think you do. In fact I think you always have.’

  It was then that I got a feeling of doom, at the thought of being helped by Dunster. I should have been warned, turned, driven rapidly away and listened no further. That is what I ought to have done.

  ‘You hide the truth from yourself, don’t you, old man? You tell yourself lies or just put off having to think about things. Well, what I want to tell you is that you can’t put off thinking about it any longer. It’s not fair to any of us.’

  ‘Who’s any of us?’ Even then I had no real idea of what he was talking about.

  ‘You and me, of course. And Beth.’

  I knew then, as a matter of fact. I suppose it was the way he said her name as though he possessed it. ‘What’s Beth got to do with it?’

  ‘Only that I’m in love with her. I told her that.’ I felt a small glimmer of hope. Was it all an absurd fantasy, a Dunster dream of unrequited love?

  ‘And what makes you
think she’s in love with you?’

  ‘I suppose the afternoons we’ve been having together. Oh, for quite a long time now. And the weekends, when she said she was going down to Jaunty in the country. I told her she was absolutely wrong.’

  ‘Wrong?’

  ‘Not to tell you, of course. So far as I’m concerned not telling you was the only bad thing about it. But she didn’t want to hurt you I suppose. I told her we’d all be far more hurt by lies.’

  We had fought when we quarrelled at school, rarely, and so far as I was concerned, inefficiently, struggling together, filled with impotent rage, pulling hair and pinching. I’m not sure how I attacked him then. I couldn’t have punched him neatly on the jaw like John Wayne in a saloon bar. I couldn’t even, as Beth had once advised me, have kneed him in the groin. But the lovers, the mothers with pushchairs, the girls sharing crisps and giggling together, the small dog that jumped up at us, saw two grown men grappling – one with his arms flailing, the other in retreat until he was by an iron railing and lay back against it, smiling.

  ‘Well done, old man!’ Dunster said, out of breath. ‘That’s just how I’d hoped you’d react.’

  I left him. I was not in the business of fulfilling any of Dunster’s hopes.

  ‘You’ll feel better now,’ he called after me. ‘Now you know the truth. Of course you will! You can live life as it really is. Not as you hoped it was going to be. We can all feel better. Now we’re honest with each other. Just take the truth out and look at it. Cope with it. You can’t kid yourself, old man. You can’t go on pretending that nothing exists unless you like it ...’

  There was probably more but I didn’t listen. I got into the car, slammed the door and drove away, down to where I lived. I wished to God the last half hour had never happened and that I could have lived on, even in my ignorance, forever.

  Chapter Eleven

  When I got home after my fight with Dunster on the parapet of Alexandra Palace I was astonished by the appearance of normal life continuing. If I hadn’t expected to find the house burnt down, utterly destroyed, I thought it would be empty, my wife and child gone and a note left on the kitchen table. But Beth was cooking the supper and Tash had her homework spread out and there was no sign of a note anywhere. The place was warm and inviting and smelt gently of stew. Beth said, ‘You’re late.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I met Dunster.’

  She was peeling potatoes, with an apron tied over her jeans, wearing one of my shirts with the sleeves rolled up. She seemed as beautiful as on the first day I met her, perhaps more beautiful after twenty years, with a few small lines at the corners of her eyes and no sign of grey in the strawberry hair. She was thin and straight-backed and competent, and seemed so uninterested in my meeting that I was able to hope again, with wild optimism, that the whole confession was a Dunster fantasy.

  ‘He asked me to meet him at Alexandra Palace. He had something he wanted to tell me.’

  ‘Damn!’ Beth blasted my hopes forever. Our daughter, said, ‘Do be quiet, you two. I’ve got yards and yards of history.’ She was going to be as beautiful as her mother and on the whole we got on very well, although she was inclined to boss me about. Tash was always keen to involve me in her homework, which I found hard to cope with after a long day in the accounts department.

  Anyway, I went upstairs, as I always did when I got back from work, and hung up the accountancy suit and put on a sweater and a pair of cord trousers. Back in the kitchen Beth had got the white wine out of the fridge and poured a glass for each of us.

  ‘I suppose we ought to talk.’ It was the last thing I wanted to do.

  ‘Later.’ Beth emptied her glass quickly. ‘When Madam’s gone to bed.’

  ‘That won’t be for hours!’ Tash assured us. ‘Not with all this work I’ve got to do.’

  I suppose it was hours. It seemed like a lifetime. We ate stew and mashed potatoes and cabbage and finished the bottle of wine. Tash demanded my help on an essay she was writing about a day in the life of a Norman peasant, but she rejected most of my suggestions with contempt. It was strained and pointless, like a game of cards with the warders to fill in time until the hour of execution. At last Tash started to pack up her books very slowly, made herself a mug of chocolate with enormous deliberation and performed a prolonged, dramatic exit. Her mother and I sat down on opposite sides of the kitchen table.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Beth looked at me and smiled faintly.

  ‘Sorry it happened?’

  ‘Sorry he had to tell you. I was afraid he would.’

  ‘He wanted to boast?’

  ‘Not that. He’s got this terribly awkward thing about telling the truth.’

  ‘Is that what you like about him?’

  ‘Do I like him?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘I’m not sure liking comes into it, exactly.’

  ‘Then why ...?’

  She didn’t answer but went and got another bottle of wine and started to open it.

  ‘Do you love Dunster?’ It had never, in my life until then, occurred to me that I would have to ask her such an extraordinary question. She pulled the cork and refilled our glasses. She pushed mine towards me. She was as gentle and solicitous as she had ever been during all our good times together

  ‘I can’t explain. It’s something in me I don’t like particularly. I’m rather afraid of it. It almost horrifies me. It’s what I feel out hunting, or with my father. What do you think it is?’

  ‘God knows.’ She sat and looked at me as though she really wanted an answer. I had none to give her. Every word was like a barefoot step across broken glass and I had no wish to stand still discussing the view.

  ‘Danger? Is that what it is? I suppose it might be what makes me feel close to my father. I mean, you wouldn’t really expect anyone to like my father, would you? Not in the normal course of events.’

  There was no answer to that. I said, ‘Is there any chance it might be over?’

  ‘Not much chance, I’m afraid.’ He’s infected her, I thought, with his awful habit of telling the truth. Then she looked down into her glass and said, ‘I don’t want to leave you, Philip.’

  ‘Then don’t.’

  She shook her head slowly, red-gold hair under the big bright light that hung over the kitchen table. ‘I couldn’t stay here. Not after he’s told you.’

  ‘You mean, you might’ve stayed if he hadn’t?’

  ‘I don’t know. Yes. I suppose I might.’

  ‘Is that why he told me?’

  ‘How can I tell? Perhaps he thought you ought to know.’

  ‘How bloody considerate of him!’ I wanted to be angry with her also. I wanted to shout at her, storm, break glasses. I couldn’t. There crept over me, like a disease, a fatal understanding of how she felt. I finished my wine; it tasted of nothing and was useless as an anaesthetic.

  ‘Now that’s happened,’ she said, ‘I’ll have to go.’

  ‘I’m asking you to stay.’

  ‘Not now. Don’t ask me that now. You can’t.’

  ‘He didn’t mind sharing you. Not for all that time. He put up with you being with me, didn’t he? He compromised. Made you tell lies. Let you be dishonest. He’s not so bloody pure and truthful, is he? Dunster!’ I remember that I was standing then, and shouting too, probably.

  ‘I’ll have to leave,’ she said, ‘It can’t go on.’

  Then I felt as if I’d been crying into the wind, alone on a beach with nobody listening. I also thought I’d aged at least ten years since Dunster told me.

  ‘No, I’ll leave,’ I said. ‘You’ll need the house.’

  ‘I don’t want to take anything that’s yours. Nothing.’

  Not yourself? but I didn’t say that. I said, ‘Not Natasha?’

  ‘Natasha’s ours,’ Beth said. ‘Of course we’ll share her. She needs both of us.’

  So that was it. It was over. What was left were the arrangements, practical and boring and heartless. When I went upstairs
I pushed open her bedroom door to look at Tash. She was asleep on her back, with one arm over her head and her hair spread out on the pillow – as she had slept as a small child and as her mother slept. I loved them both as much as ever and I thought I always would. That was why I behaved as I did, in the events which were to come.

  When the arrangements had been made, when we had parted and I was living alone in the house, and I had spent the weekend at the Zoo and the Natural History Museum and the cinema and the Hard Rock Café with Tash, overfeeding and over-entertaining her but not knowing what else to do, I was sitting alone in the canteen at Megapolis when the chairman in shirtsleeves once again put his lunch down beside mine.

  ‘Cheer up, Philip. It may never happen.’

  He was unloading his tray when I said, ‘I’m afraid it has.’ There was a silence while he laid out his fish and chips methodically, his roll and butter, his bottle of beer, and I cursed myself. Now both my parents were dead, I had no one to tell, and I hadn’t meant to tell Cris.

  ‘Your marriage?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t think it could be the share price, or even that bloody awful series about hairdressers I should never have let them do. You know they wanted to call it Who Did You Last? Well, I stopped that, at least.’ There was a silence. I could think of nothing to say to him.

  ‘Is it for good?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. For good and all.’

  ‘No hope?’

  ‘I’m sure not.’

  ‘Sometimes no hope’s better. At least you know where you are. You want one of these?’ He was pouring his bottle of beer carefully.

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘It just might not be the end of the world.’

  I had nothing to say to that either. I didn’t believe it. Cris took a long chip in his fingers, dipped it in tomato ketchup and ate it thoughtfully.

  ‘We’ve entered those ghastly hairdressers for the Golden Comedy Goblet. Can you imagine anything worse than the International Small Screen Festival in Nice?’