Dunster

by John Mortimer

  The former Head of our college, long since retired, was a wasted, stooping figure, his hands trembling but his white hair, yellowing like old paintwork, was still luxuriant and carefully brushed. It seemed that all our fives, mine and Dunster’s, were a journey towards this trial, including the night we had arrived, uninvited, on this old man’s bedroom floor. Ken Prinsep, examining him, asked him, ‘Have you ever heard of the massacre at Pomeriggio?’

  ‘Oh, yes. There were, unfortunately, a number of such outrages, when reprisals were taken against a civilian population.’

  ‘Do you know who the German commanding officer in that area was at the time?’

  ‘Oh, yes. It was a Captain Kreutzer.’

  ‘After the war there were a number of trials of war criminals?’

  ‘Yes, there were.’

  ‘Have you been able to discover whether Captain Kreutzer was ever prosecuted for a war crime?’

  ‘I have made sure, my Lord, that he never was.’

  Robbie’s cross-examination was short. ‘And have you ever heard it suggested before, in any document not prepared by Mr Dunster, that this crime was the work of anyone connected with the British Army?’

  ‘No, my Lord. I have not.’

  ‘Thank you, Sir Ninian Dobbs,’ Robbie said in a voice which meant ‘That’s seen you off, I think’. As the witness shuffled cautiously from the box, with a tentative foot searching for the step, a trembling hand feeling for the rail, the usher brought me a note scribbled by Dunster. ‘How do you imagine I got the old fart to come here? Do you think I threatened to tell the world about the hair-net?’

  At two o’clock in the afternoon on the tenth day of the trial Ken Prinsep called his last witness. When he entered the box, Mr Midgeley declined to take the oath, to Robbie’s obvious delight.

  ‘Is that because you have no religious beliefs?’ The judge was disapproving.

  ‘No, indeed. My religious beliefs are too profound to be used for such a purpose as this.’

  Mr Justice Sopwith, although not best pleased at the suggestion that God would not care to take part in the proceedings in Queen’s Bench Court Five, said, ‘Very well, then you may affirm,’ and ex-Trooper Midgeley told his story. He did so in flat, nasal tones which betrayed no shadow of doubt on any subject. When he had finished, Robbie Skeffington rose to cross-examine.

  ‘Mr Midgeley. You are a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament?’

  ‘Indeed I am.’

  ‘And have been for many years?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And also of the Peace Pledge Union?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Does that mean you’re against all forms of war?’ Robbie was a great one for spelling things out; he didn’t have much respect for the intelligence of juries.

  ‘I am completely and utterly opposed to war in any shape or form.’

  ‘When did you become a pacifist?’

  ‘I think I became sure of my beliefs when we were fighting in Italy. After I was demobilized I decided to do all I could to stop anything like that ever happening again. I have devoted my life to the cause.’

  ‘By “anything like that”, you mean war?’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’

  ‘Any sort of war?’

  ‘Any sort. Whatsoever.’

  ‘Even ordinary, legitimate fighting ...?’

  ‘I don’t believe there is any such thing as legitimate fighting. The conception of a just war is denied in the Ten Commandments.’

  ‘Mr Midgeley. I don’t think we need you to come here and give us Bible lessons.’ Robbie had, in fact, been the first to introduce the Scriptures into the case.

  ‘I thought you needed exactly that, Mr Skeffington: “Thou shalt not kill.” Had that one slipped your memory?’

  The jury smiled and the judge told the witness he mustn’t ask learned counsel questions, whereupon Derek Midgeley looked disapproving, as though he was now convinced that the proceedings were profoundly irreligious.

  ‘So even the heroic actions of soldiers in defence of their country would be called a war crime by you?’ Robbie deftly steered clear of the Ten Commandments.

  ‘“All they that take the sword shall perish by the sword.” Matthew 26, verse 52.’

  ‘So, in your view, all warlike acts are criminal acts?’

  ‘It is not my view. It is the view of the Holy Bible, as I am trying my best to remind you, Mr Skeffington.’

  ‘So, ever since you joined this Peace Pledge Party ...’ Robbie, delighted at having persuaded the witness to be at least moderately rude to him, carried on cheerfully.

  ‘Union.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s called the Peace Pledge Union. That’s its correct title.’

  ‘Mr Midgeley. Let’s not trouble the jury with unnecessary detail.’ Robbie gave us his patient and long-suffering look. ‘Let’s get down to the vital issues in this case. Ever since you joined this pacifist pressure group, you have done your best to persuade us all that war is a horrible and brutal business.’

  ‘I should have thought that was obvious.’

  ‘That it turns ordinary people into criminals.’

  ‘It leads them to do terrible things. Yes, indeed.’

  ‘Then this case must have come to you as a heavensent opportunity.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Oh, come, come, Mr Midgeley. You’re an intelligent man.’ As Robbie said it, intelligence sounded like a serious character defect. ‘Here was your great chance to tell the world that even such a decent, honourable character as Sir Crispin Bellhanger might commit a terrible atrocity in time of war. Now, wouldn’t that be a wonderful bit of pacifist propaganda?’

  ‘That thought never occurred to me.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Mr Midgeley. Don’t you write a regular column for World Peace? Robbie picked up a magazine with well-acted distaste. ‘I won’t bore the jury with this, my Lord, but Mr Midgeley is the author of a monthly diatribe against war. If Sir Crispin is guilty, that will really give you something to write about, won’t it?’

  ‘I only came here’ – Mr Midgeley was not going to fight back, no doubt on principle – ‘to tell the truth as I remember it.’

  ‘As you remember it! And can you swear that you remember Sir Crispin’s exact words, spoken in the middle of the night, nearly half a century ago?’

  ‘He and Lieutenant Blair were talking about something that had happened in the town. Bombs had been planted in the church. Captain Bellhanger said, “We must say the Germans did it.” ’

  ‘So you believed he was responsible for a terrible crime.’

  ‘I’m afraid I did.’

  ‘So did you accuse him to his face – or just denounce him to his superior officers?’

  The answer, when it came in the flat, gloomy tone, was strangely chilling. ‘I was prepared to leave Sir Crispin Bellhanger to his conscience and to the final judgement. I didn’t think any man-made punishment could be more severe than that.’

  ‘Isn’t the truth of the matter’ – Robbie clearly had no interest in any law courts other than in the solid and earth-bound building we were occupying – ‘that you did nothing because you weren’t sure of what you heard?’

  ‘Not sure?’ The witness seemed puzzled by the suggestion.

  ‘Oh, I’ve no doubt you’ve persuaded yourself now. You’re sure you heard something which comes in very useful for your peacenik propaganda. But might his words on that night have been “The Germans must have done it”?’

  “‘The Germans must have done it”,’ Mr Midgeley repeated the suggestion; his thoughts were, no doubt, a long way away, in a cave on the cold mountainside. And then he said, as though he were quoting Holy Writ, ‘No. Indeed not. “We must say the Germans did it.” I feel sure of that.’

  ‘But you weren’t prepared to swear to it on that Holy Bible you set such store by, were you, Mr Midgeley?’ Robbie grinned triumphantly at the jury and sat down.

  When I t
hink back to those days, the sight of Mr Midgeley in the witness-box is the last thing I can clearly remember. The closing speeches, Ken’s attack on the establishment, frequently interrupted from the Bench, and Robbie’s diatribe against Dunster, listened to in respectful silence, were predictable. More unexpected was the judge’s summing up, which was perfectly fair, perhaps, as Robbie suggested, because the old friend whom he now called ‘Soppy’ Sopwith, revealing another layer of intimacy, kept a wary eye on the Court of Appeal. The jury must give what emphasis they thought right to the evidence of Mr Midgeley, his Lordship told them. He had seemed very certain but it was all a long time ago. They must also remember that the German captain had never been prosecuted and that Lance Corporal Sweeting had clearly told two contradictory stories. If the plea of justification failed, the amount of damages was a matter entirely for them. They shouldn’t go wild with someone else’s money, but could they imagine a more serious libel on a man of the highest possible reputation? They should go to their room now and take all the time they needed. No one was going to hurry them in any way.

  Cris and I spent the next hours drinking too many cups of coffee in the canteen under the Gothic arches. During that time he seemed unworried. He was entertaining, talking about everything except the case and he treated our long wait as a minor irritation, like a delayed flight from Heathrow.

  At last the jury came back. To my surprise the young man in the cotton jacket and the leather tie had been elected foreman. He announced that they had found in favour of the plaintiff, Sir Crispin Bellhanger, and awarded him £500,000 worth of damages. It was a sum no doubt far in excess of the worldly goods of all those who had died at Pomeriggio.

  When we came out of court we had to push our way through a crowd of reporters. Dunster was addressing them as though he had emerged victorious. Beth was standing on the edge of the group, silent, expressionless and remote. I went up to her and said, ‘I’m sorry,’ but she turned away from me and didn’t speak. When I last saw her she was managing a smile for the journalists, as she stood by her husband’s side, her arm linked in his.

  Cris said, ‘No celebrations. Absolutely no celebrations of any sort.’ He nodded a brief goodbye to Robbie and then we walked with Justin to the back entrance of the Law Courts, the one that leads into Carey Street, ‘I’m going down to Windhammer now,’ he said. ‘I promised Angie I’d bring her a full report. Then I might take a bit of time off. That’d be all right, wouldn’t it, Philip?’

  I couldn’t imagine why he was asking my permission, but I said that was exactly what I thought he should do. All the cheerfulness with which he entertained us while the jury was out had drained away. Since the verdict he had been looking pale and now he seemed almost like the ghost of his old, upright, military self. When we got to the Carey Street entrance he said, ‘Don’t bother about me. I’ll find myself a taxi. Thanks for everything.’

  As he walked down the steps, one of the photographers spotted him and several of them ran forwards, their cameras flashing. He walked on, stopping for no one, and, as he went, raised his hand to us in a sort of salute. I never saw him again.

  THE ANSWER

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  There are certain productions in which everything goes wrong, mainly ambitious ones in which the Mummers try to do something spectacular and create a vivid theatrical moment. For these we call on the services of Mr Webber who runs the Handyman shop in Muswell Hill. Greeting every challenge with a cheerful ‘No probs!’, Mr Webber, with all the tools at his command, made us a revolving bed for Feydeau, the end of a swimming-pool for Alan Ayckbourn and an indoor menagerie for The Wild Duck. These devices, as temperamental as the most nervous actors, all performed admirably at the dress rehearsals and were subject to alarming attacks of stage-fright when in front of an audience. The water, I remember, once mysteriously gurgled away from the swimming-pool; the bed spun round long before its cue or remained sullenly immobile; and the rabbits, on a special Senior Citizens’ matinée, escaped from captivity and bounded into the stalls.

  Mr Webber’s guillotine looked magnificent when erected. Its hardwood blade was painted to imitate steel and it slid down to decapitate the small band of aristos in the spectacular opening that Martin, the bank manager, had produced. The victims were to kneel with their backs to the audience, the blade would fall and a dummy head drop into a basket which would then be held up in a dim light by Harry Smithson from the Aurora Garage. On our opening night Mark, a stylist from Crowning Glory, playing the First Aristocrat, knelt in position and the blade resolutely refused to descend, in spite of pulls, jerks and whispered imprecations from Harry the executioner, and his sans-culotte assistant, Colin from the fishmongers. After all his efforts had failed, they were moved to improvise. ‘Sacre-bleu, Citizen!’ Harry said. ‘Madame Guillotine is a tired old whore. She’s not coming down for anyone else this evening.’

  ‘All right, Citizen Executioner’ – Colin was not to be upstaged – ‘we’ll get the rest of them aristos done over tomorrow.’ This exchange got a bigger laugh than any of the subsequent proceedings.

  After this the Mummers never quite recovered their nerve. Chauvelin (Dennis, the dentist) cut a whole page of dialogue in his scene with Marguerite and, when he had realized his mistake, went back on it, an unnerving situation which Lucy dealt with admirably by adding the line, ‘ ’pon my little life, Citizen, how you oft times do repeat yourself!’ I had managed to cope with Sir Percy without forgetting the words or falling over the furniture, but had been early alarmed, while in my disguise as an old hag, by the sight of the bald-headed Mr Zellenek, the film producer, in the front row. My future as an actor, my first chance to do something as a professional, hung in the balance, at the mercy of Mr Webber from the Handyman shop. I found myself thinking about various subjects unconnected with the French Revolution, such as whether Mr Zellenek, if he wanted me badly enough, could help me to an Equity card, so my poem about the ‘demned elusive Pimpernel’ went off at half-cock. I tried to make up for this by plenty of play with the eye-glass and inane upper-class laughter, but I could see Zellenek leaning forward, staring closely up at the stage, his brow furrowed with anxiety

  In Act Two things began to settle down; that is until I had to make an entrance into the Lion d’Or tavern near Calais, where, unknown to me, the villainous Chauvelin is eating soup. Sir Percy’s arrival is signalled to the audience by his whistling ‘God Save the King’ outside the tavern door. Chauvelin utters the line, ‘The Pimpernel!’ and I enter, or I should have done if the door hadn’t stuck, and I was pushing desperately, whistling a longer, fainter and even more out-of-tune version of the national anthem. Once again the invention of the Mummers was called upon. Chauvelin called for Brogard, the ghoulish hunchbacked landlord (someone called Pete Pershaw in life insurance), and said, ‘Citizen Landlord, there is a passing wayfarer demanding entrance,’ – something the audience had been aware of for quite a while. Brogard said,

  ‘Mon dieu, my wife has left the key in the cellar!’ and went off to fetch it. As soon as he was gone, the door gave up all resistance and I made a precipitate entrance before Chauvelin could pull his hat over his eyes in case I recognized him.

  Instead of a party in the Mummery bar I had invited the cast back to my house. I wanted to be occupied, to forget those long days in court and everything to do with Dunster, even that defeat which I had every reason to believe he would come to think of as a triumph. The case had died out of the newspapers, Cris was still in retreat at Windhammer and I had taken the afternoon off to run through my words and prepare for the party. Despite the disasters the Mummers were cheerful, relieved that we’d got through it somehow, their glands still bubbling with adrenalin.

  ‘I think we got over the reluctant guillotine bloody well!’ Harry, the executioner, was satisfied.

  ‘All that about the old whore not going down on anyone else. I mean, I don’t think Baroness Orczy would write a line like that.’

  ‘“Coming down”, th
at’s what I said.’

  ‘We haven’t all got filthy minds, Mark.’

  ‘Sorry about our scene, darling.’ Dennis, the dentist, let his glasses swing round his neck and put a hairy and short-sleeved arm round Lucy’s shoulders.

  ‘It was fascinating’ – Lucy liberated herself when it was polite to do so – ‘like an action replay on television.’

  Mr Zellenek had left as soon as the play ended. Lucy said, ‘I’m sure he’ll call you. I know how interested he is.’

  ‘Not after tonight.’

  ‘You were perfectly fine, in the circumstances.’

  ‘Oh? Thank you very much.’ I suppose I am a natural Mummer. Anything but exaggerated praise sounds like an insult.

  ‘Cheer up, anyway. They loved it, didn’t they?’

  ‘Oh, yes. They had a marvellous evening. Particularly when the door stuck.’

  ‘Let’s have a drink.’

  I began to enjoy the party. After all, when I came to think about it, a stuck door in the last act of The Scarlet Pimpernel was nothing much compared to what I’d lived through. I was, I thought, amazingly lucky to have that as the present number-one worry. Even if you added Mr Zellenek’s rapid departure to it, you couldn’t describe it as a grand-scale cause for anxiety. Anyway, it was probably insane to think of going into the profession at my age.

  Mark, the stylist, had brought his Madonna tapes and the Mummers were dancing with varying degrees of skill and enthusiasm. Dennis, the dentist, was singing along with ‘Like a Virgin’, and then the telephone rang and Pam, the physio, picked it up.

  ‘It’s for you,’ she said. ‘Justin someone or other.’

  I went to the phone in the kitchen, away from the noise of Mummers celebrating.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ Justin sounded disapproving, as though I had been wasting my time in some frivolous occupation. He was probably right.

  ‘We had a first night. And now we’re having a party.’

  ‘Oh, you were acting!’