Dunster

by John Mortimer

  He had a face like a puzzled sheep, a turned-down nose and bewildered eyes, crowned with a woolly mat of grey hair. He was shapeless and clumsy and he had cut himself shaving. There was blood on his collar, although his white shirt was otherwise carefully laundered and ironed. What surprised me most was his voice; it was a middle-class bleat, rising at times to a high note of complaint, at others inviting us to join him in laughing at his own misfortunes.

  We sat round a table near the ‘Toilette’ in the shadowy recesses of the Bar della Luna, away from the sunlight and the zinc bar, the hissing coffee-machine and the big glass doors letting in the sunlight. We were shut away behind a white coffin full of ice-cream and a glass cabinet in which the cakes and paninis were ranged like geological specimens. On the wall a glossy print ‘Christ, the Light of the World’ looked gravely down on us, the Pope smiled in a knowing fashion and the Maltraverso football team looked grimly determined.

  ‘I was a hopeless sort of a soldier, anyway. My father was terribly disappointed when I didn’t get a commission. Dropped my rifle on the parade-ground. I was always doing things like that so I had to go in through the ranks. “Rank outsider”, that’s what my father called me. I don’t think he was joking. What I’m trying to tell you is this.’ Words came pouring out of him; it was as though he had spent years in solitary confinement. ‘I was always hopeless. I never managed to please them, even when we were in the mountains when you wouldn’t think they’d have been bothered about all the rules and regulations. And I was always losing things. Or not keeping up when we started to run. You see, I’m sure they were glad to see the back of me. So they wouldn’t hold it against me now, that I wandered off, as you might say. I don’t think I could stand prison. Not at my age. Prison must be very much like the army. Don’t you think it must be like that?’

  Natty Suiting was not talking about the deaths of the churchgoers but about the fact that he had abandoned his previous existence in favour of the calm, grey-haired woman who sat watching us, unable to understand a single word we were saying. She must once have been as urgently desirable as their youngest daughter, a girl with long, naked arms, shiny black hair and brown eyes, who was laughing as she served a group of admiring young men. The choice between her and carrying on a terrifying war with Cris and Sergeant Blaker, now dead, and Jaunty Blair must have been a clear one. He was right; it would have been hard to punish this elderly Italian for what he might have done when he was someone else entirely.

  ‘We haven’t come about your desertion,’ Justin Glover said. ‘No one wants to see you in prison, Mr Sweeting.’

  ‘Signor Andreini’ He smiled round at us apologetically but insisted on his new identity.

  ‘I beg your pardon. Mr Andreini,’ Justin corrected himself. ‘You have absolutely nothing to fear from us.’

  Natty seemed reassured and was silent for a moment. Then he looked at me and I thought I detected, behind the sheep-like innocence, a sort of cunning, which he might have picked up during long years of running the Bar della Luna. ‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘what are you interested in exactly?’

  ‘My firm acts for Sir Crispin Bellhanger.’ Justin Glover took charge of the meeting, it’s been suggested that he was in command when you and Sergeant Blaker and another man called Lester Maddocks blew up the church.’

  ‘There ought to be a pardon issued. A free pardon. From the Queen or someone like that.’

  ‘You mean a pardon for blowing up a church?’ Justin Glover’s voice had acquired a note of professional irritation.

  ‘I think,’ I said, ‘Signor Andreini is still worried about the desertion.’

  ‘Desertion? You couldn’t call it that. I was no good to them. No good at all. I was just’ – Natty invited me to join in the joke – ‘just relieving them of my company. I did that one night. I ran then. You can’t believe how I ran. I got here and the first person I met was Constanzia.’ He looked across at the old woman and stopped smiling. ‘She was outside her house. It was very early in the morning and she was filling a bucket from a tap. I made all sorts of signs to her. I was hungry and tired and she took me in. Her and her family. I couldn’t understand it. I’d never had much success with girls in Dorking. That was where we lived. My father was a headmaster. Very keen on the army, my father. I remember he gave me toy soldiers at Christmas and I never played with them. They always got broken though. Now I think Constanzia and her family knew the war was ending and they wanted me to marry her and take her to England. But I couldn’t go back, could I, because I’d broken the law? You understand. Constanzia never picked up any English. Other people taught me Italian. I took to it quite easily. Well, I didn’t have much choice.

  ‘My father’s dead, of course. But I’ve got a married sister in Dorking. I’d like to go back. I’d really like to. I’m getting tired of all this Andreini business. I’d like to be myself again. Not pick up where I left off. I could never do that. You mentioned Captain Bellhanger. He could help in my case, if anyone could.’

  ‘I think he wants you to help in his,’ I told him.

  ‘Let’s hope we can help each other. The man who was here before you, he promised he’d look into my case. Let on he’d get questions asked in Parliament. I had high hopes, but he’s done nothing whatever about it. Just my luck.’

  So Dunster had sat there, in the shadows at the back of the Bar della Luna, by the paninis and the ice-cream and ‘Christ, the Light of the World’, and offered the one bribe that meant anything to its owner. Knowing Dunster, I didn’t believe that he’d offered it deliberately or with intent to deceive, but he was enthusiastic and had promised too much, over-excited by being told the story that, above all others, he wanted to hear.

  ‘Would Captain Bellhanger help with the free pardon side of things? Would he? He was always kind to me. You know he called me Natty Suiting, because I was so hopeless with the spit and polish.’

  ‘I don’t think we can promise anything.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s always a “but”, isn’t there? You can’t promise me but...’

  ‘I feel we can go so far as to say this –’ Justin Glover, who didn’t, it seemed, intend to come all this way just for a trip round the Uffizi, offered his sweetener in the most judicial language possible. ‘My firm would represent you in any application you wish to make to the proper authorities. And I’ve no doubt Sir Crispin would be prepared to give you a good character and speak highly of your war service. That is, until you saw fit to leave the army.’

  ‘I told you I promised to take Constanzia to England. I’ve disappointed her and I’m not sure she’s ever forgiven me, to be quite honest with you.’ Signora Andreini sat with her hands folded in her lap, gazing into the middle distance without expression. ‘That’s the trouble with me, I’m afraid I disappoint people. I suppose I disappointed Captain Bellhanger too, that night I ran away. It’s very decent of him. He wants to help me, do you say?’

  ‘Our client Sir Crispin Bellhanger tells us’ – the lawyers’ phrases sounded more than usually ridiculous in the back of the bar where the proprietor was lost in dreams of Dorking – ‘that on the night the church was blown up he and you and the others were destroying an enemy ammunition shed some miles to the south of Pomeriggio.’

  ‘Let me get you chaps a proper drink.’ The cheerful Natty now became an expansive host. Business was suspended while the smiling girl from the bar brought us a bottle of grappa. Justin Glover didn’t take a sip until he had asked the half-a-million-pounds’ worth of damages question.

  ‘What we have come all this long way to ask, Signor Andreini, is whether you can confirm Sir Crispin’s account of the events?’

  ‘Of course I can. I remember that ammunition dump. I left one of the bags behind there. Well, it was only an empty bag. We’d brought the charges in it. Sergeant Blaker was absolutely unreasonable about it.’

  ‘So you had nothing to do with the affair at Pomeriggio?’

  Natt
y poured himself another grappa, knocked it back and looked round at us, his sheep’s eyes full of innocence. ‘Do I look,’ he asked plaintively, ‘like a chap who goes around blowing up churches?’

  ‘So it follows that Sir Crispin had nothing to do with it either?’

  ‘Of course it does.’ At last he said the words we had come to hear: ‘Everyone knew the Germans did it.’

  So Justin Glover and I, unencumbered with children, stopped off at Florence to look at the pictures. Walking past the ‘Primavera’ I remembered, as other pictures had made me remember, Beth’s face and was filled with a sudden bitterness at the thing that had parted us, which was the same, irrational, irresistible force that had taken us to Italy. Soured by this unwelcome moment of recognition I said to Justin, ‘You don’t think old Natty Suiting’s going to do us the slightest bit of good, do you?’

  ‘Why not? He’s made a statement, signed and certified by the notary.’

  ‘You know perfectly well why he did that. He thinks we can get him some sort of amnesty.’

  Justin Glover stood still, surrounded by virgins and nymphs dancing in paradise. ‘Let’s face it’ – he was giving his best dry, old family solicitor performance, which was fairly absurd, I thought, in someone younger than I was – ‘Andreini isn’t going to come to England to give evidence until he knows he’s absolutely safe from the possibility of arrest. It’s an obvious precaution for us to make sure his position is cleared up before the trial starts.’

  ‘You mean, it’s an obvious inducement to him to say what we want him to say?’

  ‘Robbie was right when he told you to trust your legal advisers. Lawyers have to live in the world as it is, Philip. Not as we might like it to be. You’d be much better off leaving the practical side of things to us.’

  Which coming from a man whose family life was in such chaos that he could only escape from his house with difficulty, struck me as a bit rich.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  ‘We like Lucy.’

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘We wouldn’t dream of interfering. Not in any way. But Angie was saying how glad she was to see you settled.’

  ‘I don’t think I’m that exactly. Perhaps I won’t ever be. Not again.’

  ‘You’re living in the past.’ Cris was the man who had, that autumn, the best reason for visiting that unhappy region. ‘You’ve got to put all that behind you. My God, she’s young though, isn’t she? Just imagine anyone having all that future! The thought of it makes me feel quite dizzy.’

  It would have made me dizzy too if I’d thought about it. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to see me settled: Lucy’s mother and Angie, Mrs Oakshott and Beth, especially Beth. I was glad that I had brought Lucy for the weekend at Windhammer, glad that everyone seemed to like each other, but being settled wasn’t a subject I felt able to pursue. So I asked if there was any more news about the case.

  ‘Nothing much. We found out who was the German captain in the Pomeriggio district. Got it out of the MOD information files. Well, the Minister will do almost anything to get his face on television.’

  ‘Does the ex-captain own a garage?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’ Cris smiled, as though the evidence were completely unimportant. ‘His name was Kreutzer. Captain Ernst Kreutzer. No relation to the sonata.’

  ‘He went to Wales?’

  ‘Not as far as we know. He went back to Hamburg and became a headmaster. He retired and died there ten years ago.’

  ‘So Jaunty was telling us a load of rubbish?’

  ‘Jaunty was never going to be a reliable witness.’ That was the verdict on the man who couldn’t lie any more, for better or for worse.

  It was near the end of September, with low, welcome sunshine and air touched with freshness and the smell of bonfires. We were walking the long way round through the woods while Lucy and Angie sat by the logs in the mock baronial grate and waited for us to join them for tea. As the trees ended at the edge of a field, a pheasant rose with a great fuss and chatter from a tangle of brambles and bracken and flapped off into a clear sky. ‘I sometimes wonder,’ Cris said, ‘whether to take up shooting again.’

  ‘I thought you’d decided against it.’

  ‘Such a contradiction! People who know about animals, understand them, really get to love them in a way, are those who kill them. Foxes aren’t specially likeable little brutes, but huntsmen get a sort of respect for them. My old father was that sort. Always noticed the leaves or the water moving and he’d sniff at the wind and know which way the birds’d fly – and he killed things a lot. I suppose the truth of it is, with a gun in your hand you become one of them. Red in tooth and claw. I don’t know whether I’ll ever do it again. I suppose I might.’

  So we started the walk back, across the flat countryside, and Cris asked me about Natasha. I told him what I knew, except for her decision not to visit me again. ‘She’s got a boyfriend who knows everything.’

  ‘Everything about what?’

  ‘How to run a television company. Oh, and about death.’

  ‘What’s he know about that?’ Cris was smiling.

  ‘That when people get to my age they practically think of nothing else. As a matter of fact, I don’t think about it at all.’

  ‘Neither do I. No point in it. You know what I believe? We’re born with a clock inside us. It’s set for the time we’re going to pop off, and it can’t be altered. Absolutely nothing we can do about it, so why worry?’

  And when we came in sight of Windhammer among the trees of an open stretch of parkland he said, ‘Rotten luck on Angie we could never make children. Perhaps that’s why we’re enjoying having you here. You and your Lucy. You must bring Natasha down some time too, if she’d ever agree to it.’

  I said yes, although I didn’t think she ever would.

  Nothing could have been so unperturbed, so apparently imperturbable, as Cris that weekend. He made my anxiety ridiculous, and I worried about having worried so much about a possible Dunster victory. And yet, when I thought about it on that calm walk through the woods in the autumn sunshine, there seemed no real danger of Dunster leaving the battlefield crowing with victorious delight and Cris being convicted of an atrocity. Natty Suiting was no longer, for whatever reason, a witness for the defence. Jaunty would never enter a witness-box again and whatever he’d heard would be forever locked inside him. And there was something else. When Dunster lost (I no longer said, even to myself, if Dunster lost), would Beth’s eyes be open at last? Would she see what she had taken on, an addict who gets his highs by causing wanton suffering to the innocent in the heady name of public morality? Was that the hope that kept me going, as well as my concern for Cris, during the long months of waiting for the trial? And was it that faint possibility, that result which nothing she had said or done gave me any particular reason to hope for, which still made me reluctant to settle – which meant, I suppose, settling for Lucy?

  ‘Did you take her there?’ Lucy asked when I said we might go down to Windhammer for the weekend.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your wife, of course.’

  ‘Sometimes. Beth didn’t like it very much. She used to go off and see her parents.’

  ‘Why didn’t she like it?’

  ‘She couldn’t understand why I was so fond of Cris and Angie.’

  ‘Was she jealous?’

  ‘I don’t think so. She just thought it was a bit creepy, for anyone to be fond of his boss. I tried to tell her I’d’ve liked him whoever he was.’

  ‘Will they compare us? Her and me, I mean.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  You’re sure?’

  ‘Absolutely. That’s not the sort of thing they do. I know they’ll like you very much.’

  ‘I suppose it’ll be interesting’ – Lucy was still hesitant - ‘to meet someone who’s going to be in a really important case.’ So Cris was a sort of star to her. To the up-and-coming young solicitor, big criminals, bank robbers and murderers were stars, as wer
e those cool gamblers who played for enormous stakes in libel actions. I said, ‘Forget the case. He may not want to talk about it at all."

  ‘What on earth am I going to wear?’

  ‘Don’t worry. There’s absolutely nothing smart about Cris and Angie.’

  When Cris and I got back from our walk they were sitting on the sofa, looking at old photograph albums. Their heads were close together, one dark and smoothhaired, the other blonde going grey; a woman at the start of her life and another getting to the end of hers, laughing together over some story of Angie’s about her life in the old days of British movies ‘Not a casting couch in sight when we were doing Sound the Alert, not when we were playing girls in the ack-ack emplacements. As my friend Cissie Watts said, “You’d be lucky if you got a casting sandbag.” I’m joking, of course. The director was Ronnie Deering and he had no interest in any starlet without a beard or a moustache and a dirty great pint ...’ The word floated across the room as we came in and then Angie twisted round on the sofa to greet her husband, while Lucy went on turning the pages of the album, smiling in amazement at a world that was so unlike anything she had ever known.

  ‘It was a war, wasn’t it? I mean, bombs were dropping on London. Knocking down houses. Killing people. She lived there and Cris was away fighting. Listening to her you’d think all they did was to make jokes about it.’ Lucy was lying in the bath, the steam rising round her; long white legs and a triangle of black hair. Her eyebrows were arched upwards but she spoke in admiration rather than criticism of Angie.

  ‘She’s like that. Cris took it more seriously. He hates it now.’

  ‘And we won’t ever know how we’d’ve behaved. In a war.’

  ‘Aren’t you glad about that?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Cris had sent us upstairs with a bottle of champagne to drink while we got ready for dinner. She put out her hand for a glass blurred with steam and icy wine. ‘It’s funny, though. When I was looking at all those photographs I couldn’t help envying her. It can’t have been dull, can it? I’m sure she wasn’t afraid of anything. Except insects.’