Dunster

by John Mortimer

  DUNSTER

  John Mortimer

  CHIVERS

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available

  This eBook published by AudioGO Ltd, Bath, 2012.

  Published by arrangement with the Author

  Epub ISBN 9781471302282

  Copyright © Advanpress Ltd, 1992

  The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  All rights reserved

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental

  Jacket illustration © iStockphoto.com

  John Mortimer is a playwright, novelist and former practising barrister. During the war he worked with the Crown Film Unit and published a number of novels before turning to the theatre with such plays as The Dock Brief, The Wrong Side of the Park and A Voyage Round My Father. He has written many film scripts and radio and television plays, including six plays on the life of Shakespeare, the Rumpole plays, which won him the British Academy Writer of the Year Award, and the adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. His translations of Feydeau have been performed at the National Theatre.

  Paradise Postponed, Summer’s Lease, Titmuss Regained and all the Rumpole books have been made into successful television series. John Mortimer lives with his wife and their two daughters in what was once his father’s house in the Chilterns.

  For Penny

  I am greatly indebted to Eric Morris, who told me about the SAS activities in the Italian mountains during the last war. He also traced the probable wartime histories of two old soldiers. These characters are, however, entirely fictional, as is the small town of Pomeriggio and the events that are described as having occurred there.

  Contents

  WHO IS THIS FELLOW DUNSTER?

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  THE QUESTION

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  THE TRIAL

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  THE ANSWER

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  WHO IS THIS FELLOW

  DUNSTER?

  So oft it chances in particular men

  That – for some vicious mole of nature in them,

  As in their birth, wherein they are not guilty,

  Since nature cannot choose his origin -

  Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,

  Being nature’s livery, or fortune’s star,

  His virtues else, be they as pure as grace,

  As infinite as man may undergo.

  Shall in the general censure take corruption

  From that particular fault. The dram of evil

  Doth all the noble substance of a doubt,

  To his own scandal -

  Hamlet

  Shakespeare

  Chapter One

  I worry a good deal. That’s my nature. Sometimes I tell myself that I have nothing to worry about, and then I worry about that too. At very rare moments, when I’m not actively worrying about Natasha, my daughter, or the overdraft, or the VAT man, or the next board meeting, or whether I’ll get the part of Trigorin in the Mummers’ production of The Seagull, or whether, if I did get it, I’d make a proper cock-up of it and get a filthy notice in the Muswell Hill Advertiser, or the strange, hysterical whining noise, much like an elderly person in pain, that the Volvo is making when I decelerate – on the rare occasions when I’m worrying about none of these things I start to worry about global warming or the future of the Russian economy. Then I take a poor view of myself because global warming and Russia are things I can do absolutely nothing about, so I lose patience with myself for wasting time worrying about them, and that makes me extremely worried.

  I started early that morning because I was going to drop Natasha at her tutorial college in Highgate on my way to the Isle of Dogs. I always feel at my best first thing, as though the day is going to pass by without any real cause for alarm. The first cup of tea is drunk in almost complete calm, but by the time I get out to the car I usually manage to think of something more or less appalling with which to become obsessed.

  ‘Put your foot down. Dad,’ Tash said. ‘I told you. I wanted to be at the Tute really early.’

  I didn’t tell her I’d been waiting for her for a quarter of an hour, from a now distant moment when the world seemed comparatively untroubled. Instead I turned out, as unobtrusively as possible, into the traffic of Muswell Hill. My daughter has two expressions, a rare smile and the more frequent scowl of a particularly stroppy and put-upon villein about to start the Peasants’ Revolt. At that time of the day she wasn’t smiling.

  ‘How’s college?’ I tried asking her brightly.

  ‘All right, I suppose.’

  ‘And how’s George?’

  ‘Pretty ghastly.’

  ‘I thought he was meant to be your boyfriend?’

  ‘So he is. But honestly, Dad, he’s so servile! He keeps asking what I’d like or what he can do for me. I told him he sounds like an airline hostess. I do really need someone who’s going to represent a bit of a challenge.’

  I slowed down in Muswell Road to avoid a swarm of killer cyclists, wearing dark glasses and those sort of gas masks which make you think that chemical warfare has broken out. Their bright yellow, walnut-shaped crash helmets were pulled down over their foreheads and, as they crouched low over the handlebars, their bottoms, in black Lycra shorts, rose into the air like gigantic squash balls.

  ‘I really feel I can do without people who represent a challenge,’ I told Tash. ‘I’ve had enough challenges to last a lifetime.’

  ‘I know, Dad. You would say that.’

  ‘Why would I?’

  ‘Well, let’s face it. You are a bit of a moral coward, aren’t you?’

  I looked at her sideways. She had the strawberry hair, wide eyes and pale beauty of her mother. I had changed her nappies and fed her with tins of spinach which she blew back at me in a soggy, green cloud from her high chair. I had been the first to tell her about cavemen and Queen Elizabeth and Vikings and Malvolio and The Merchant of Venice, and here she was, at the age of seventeen, passing judgement on me. Without mercy.

  ‘That’s a little bit unfair.’ A kamikaze cyclist, a girl in a chintz blouse and knee-length, green phosphorescent socks to go with her shorts, was bearing down on me, her gas mask lowered. I swerved to avoid her, like a matador in the path of a charging bull.

  ‘Oh, I’ve got used to you being a moral coward. It’s just you, isn’t it? Like the side parting, and the Y-fronts, and the Bob Dylan records. Anyway, why does this car squeal when it goes round corners?’

  ‘Tash,’ I said to change the subject, ‘they may be going to offer me Trigorin. In The Seagull.’

  ‘I know what Trigorin’s in.’ She thought the matter over and said, ‘I don’t think you’d be right for the part.’

  ‘Why? Don’t you think I’m old enough?’

  ‘You’re not a writer. Trigorin was a writer.’

  ‘Natasha. I hadn’t killed my uncle
when I did Hamlet all those years ago. I wasn’t even suffering from hereditary syphilis when I made what I believe to have been a reasonable shot at Ghosts at Oxford. I do have some vague idea of what acting’s all about ...’

  ‘It’s not just that you’re not a writer. You’re nothing like a writer, you’re an accountant.’

  My daughter has a remarkable talent for hitting you exactly where it hurts most.

  The offices of Megapolis Television plc occupy what I believe to be an unnecessarily large area on the Isle of Dogs. We no longer own Megapolis Studios near Slough, that grim area which was once the Hollywood of Britain, as most of our programmes are fanned out to independent producers. However, I regard my work as a branch, even though remote, of show business. Producers and directors often meet in our canteen, having called in to ask for Megapolis’s money, and I sometimes catch sight of actresses who are up for a part there. I usually recognize them, remember having seen them, and make some fatuous remark like ‘You were absolutely terrific in Social Workers’ I’m afraid that’s the Muswell Hill Mummer coming out in me. They look mystified and wonder if I’m someone important on the production side. But, as Natasha said, I’m in accounts. A talent for mathematics, a certain adroitness with figures, an ability to read a balance sheet and uncover its hidden meaning, are among the disadvantages I was born with. Without my childhood facility for doing sums I might have been arriving at Megapolis up for the part of some decent and long-suffering father falsely accused of child abuse in Social Workers, or even have become a director in an unstructured suit and Raybans, who would sit romancing his PA and drinking decaff in the corner of our canteen.

  Well, as I say, I was driving through that huge, messy development which was to be the triumphant creation of the Big Bang of British prosperity in the last decade, and now looked half-built, half-abandoned and prematurely depressed. Many of the office blocks were unused. In the apartments with views of the river, designed for occupation by double income co-mortgagees on a permanent curve of upward mobility, attractive waxwork dummies, young stockbrokers and commodity dealers, had been set in the windows to make passers-by believe that these desirable residences were greatly in demand and should be snapped up while stocks lasted. This device appealed to my sense of theatre. I admired the artificial tenants each morning as I drove past them and respected the estate agents for a rare display of imagination. All the same, the waxworks were a sure sign of the financial desperation which infected England during those uncertain times. Even in the balance sheets, which had much of the charm of works of fiction, Megapolis profits were down around 25 per cent.

  I parked the Volvo in the space with my name on it, a privilege I had enjoyed ever since I became the personal accountant working directly to the chairman. Sir Crispin Bellhanger, KCB, DSO, MC and so on, despite the handles to his name, was the most democratic of bosses. He had his lunch in the canteen every day with his coat off, exposing his bright blue braces and white shirt. He carried his tray and sat wherever there was a space available, beside a flurried typist, a visiting actress or the sullen oberfuhrer of the parking lot. No one, in his presence, remained tongue-tied for long. Everyone, for weeks afterwards, started sentences with ‘As Cris said to me the other day’ or ‘Cris was only just telling me up in the canteen.’ Everyone called him Cris, not because he had issued any sort of memo on the subject, that wouldn’t have been his style at all, but because we knew that was what he wanted and most of us were flattered to oblige him. From all this, you may have gathered that working for Cris was one of the pluses, together with a somewhat remote association with the performing arts, of life at Megapolis Telly.

  Our office block, built when the advertising revenue was at its height, had the fashionable look of an X-ray. Its bones, guts and arteries were on display to the outside world. Huge conduit pipes decorated the façade and the lifts, all glass, crawled up the building like glow-worms in the dark. I have no head for heights and as I went up to the top floor I paid careful attention to my feet. Anyway, I didn’t have much time to admire the view. Waiting for Tash and taking her to college had made me almost half an hour late and I’d have to hurry to get everything ready for the board meeting.

  ‘If I could waste a minute or two of the Board’s valuable time to make an interjection, which I’m sure you will all find laughably inept ... I mean, I know you, Chairman, will shoot me down in flames immediately. But all the same, one does speak, as an inhabitant of the real, sometimes uncomfortably real, world of men, women and money, with one eye on the balance sheet and one ear to the ground.’

  ‘That must make you a bit of a contortionist, Sydney.’ I was seated next to Cris and his mutter was meant for me alone.

  ‘I’m sorry, Chairman –’ Sydney Pollitter, head of the firm of City accountants Pollitter, Michaelson & Spratling, was giving his usual amateurish performance of humility. He was one of the unhappy few who refused to call Crispin Bellhanger, Cris and the most endlessly vocal member of the Board. He had long-lobed ears, which he tugged affectionately as he talked, and he wore, on the end of his nose, gold half-glasses. With a thatch of greying brown hair and a tendency to snuffle he looked at times like some cartoon animal, Mr Anteater, perhaps, dressed anthropomorphically in a three-piece suit. Unlike Cris, he never took off his jacket at meetings but kept it neatly buttoned. Often his lengthy, apologetic protests were about Megapolis programmes which he had found alarmingly erotic. Not that I mind for myself, of course. After a lifetime spent on the City’s golden mile one becomes used, unhappily, to hear of the sins of the flesh in all their, to coin a phrase, Chairman, which you may find inappropriately flippant ...’

  ‘Good God. Is he going to make the joke?’ Cris would mutter, his eyes fixed on the huge, operating theatre lights which hung over the black marble slab that formed our boardroom table.

  ‘... In all their 57 varieties!’ Sydney Pollitter delivered his punchline into a silence only broken by the eager laughter of the managing director, who had heard it all before but who was at pains to treat Sydney and Cris, who never agreed about anything, with equal respect. ‘It’s not I who am distressed, Chairman. But it’s the average housewife in Bexleyheath I’m concerned about. Does she really want to be treated to a view of the naked buttocks of some long-haired actor as he dives into bed with yet another promiscuous social worker?’

  That day, however, it was not sex that was uppermost in the Pollitter mind. It was war. After another endless apology for wasting the time of the Board on a trifling matter, which we might well, with our superior knowledge of the technicalities of programming and audience research, dismiss as of quite exaggerated importance, he suddenly said, ‘Isn’t it the duty of all of us not to do anything to undermine the morale of our young men as they go into battle in a distant land? I merely ask the question, Chairman, so that you may shoot me down.’

  ‘I don’t want to shoot you down, Sydney. I don’t want to shoot anybody down. I’ve seen quite enough shooting down to last a lifetime.’

  ‘I’m sure you have, Chairman. We all know your war record is impeccable. That goes without saying. And I’m sure everyone here will rebuke me for wasting the Board’s precious time by repeating it.’

  ‘I don’t really think a war record’ – Cris was smiling with more than his usual charm – ‘is a thing for anyone to be proud of, exactly.’

  ‘You say that, Chairman, of course. We all hear you say it and we all have the greatest respect for your modesty. But if I may just waste a further moment of your time, and I speak as one who served his country as a national serviceman, albeit in a clerical capacity.’

  ‘Pay Corps’ Cris wrote on his doodled-on copy of the minutes and nudged it in my direction.

  ‘I am just anxious, and you will no doubt tell me at once that I am unnecessarily anxious, that an intended programme suggesting that our own record in time of war may not have been, let us say, beyond criticism is not the sort of thing we should allow to creep into the schedules at this particula
r moment in our island story.’

  ‘No longer an island. Since the Channel tunnel,’ Charles Glasscock, partner in a firm of solicitors and the latest addition to the Board, piped up and was immediately ignored.

  ‘I mean, of course, War Crimes. Now let others speak. You must all be heartily sick of the sound of my voice. No. I mean that in all sincerity.’ At which Sydney Pollitter closed his eyes and appeared to compose himself for sleep.

  Gary Penrose, for the management, did his best to explain the situation. ‘War Crimes. We’re commissioning it from Streetwise. We see it as a late night show. Around eleven o’clock. Certainly when the kids have been put down for the night. It’s going to take the place of something like Great Hotels of the World.’

  “It’s quite far in the future, as I understand it,’ Cris said. ‘This war, if there is a war, will no doubt be over. Now, if we could move on to the financial report. Philip ...’ He looked hopefully at me, but his smile faded as Sydney Pollitter stirred, opened his eyes and started up his engines with another firm pull at his ear lobe. ‘May I. at the risk of being howled down by the rest of you, who no doubt have far more important things to talk about, just say that I think Great Hotels of the World an absolutely super programme. I mean, all sorts of perfectly ordinary, decent people, who could never hope to go to the Peninsular in Hong Kong, for instance, get a chance to see what a really luxurious hotel looks like.’

  ‘I’ve been to the Peninsular in Hong Kong –’ The newest arrival on the Board was clearly going to be a chatterer. Cris returned to a close study of the ceiling as Sydney Pollitter carried on.

  ‘That seems to me to be exactly the sort of thing we should be doing. Bringing glamour and excitement to the ordinary housewife in, let’s say for the sake of argument, Bexleyheath. But when I hear talk of a series apparently designed to show that all sides in a war can behave equally badly, then I wonder, in my probably quite uninformed and extremely naive way, if that’s exactly the sort of thing we should be concentrating on. Particularly in times of National Emergency.’