Dunster

by John Mortimer

  ‘I think Philip’s going to take us through the financial report, Sydney.’

  Pollitter threw up both hands in an exaggerated gesture of surrender. ‘I am rebuked, Chairman. I am courteously but fairly rebuked. Of course the financial report is far more important. But can I just leave the thought in your mind. For you to dismiss as utter nonsense, of course. If you decide so to do.’

  ‘Bloody marvellous place, that Peninsular Hotel,’ Glasscock told us. ‘Soon as you go into your room a little old Chinese chap turns up with a trolley and offers you the choice of about thirty varieties of soap: Guerlain, Roger & Gallet, Chanel. My lady simply couldn’t believe it.’

  ‘Please, Philip’ – the moment had come for Cris to take over command and he did with authority – ‘the financial report. If you please.’

  I started to go through the figures which I knew by heart and the board members of Megapolis did their best to look as if they understood them.

  Up till then the meeting had followed its usual pattern; a boring formality in the work of the company. The hint of troubles to come, the cloud no larger than a man’s hand, appeared when Cris asked me to stay behind for a moment.

  ‘Sid Vicious,’ he said, ‘was especially unbearable this morning.’ I was surprised that Cris, well over seventy and only staying on by special dispensation of the Board, whose pop musical experience might have been expected to stop short at Cliff Richard, should have heard of anything like the Sex Pistols. But his knowledge of many matters was unexpected.

  ‘If only he’d stop apologizing,’ I agreed, ‘the board meetings’d take half the time.’

  ‘Talking about my war record!’ Cris was tall and lanky. His braces supported the trousers of a tweed suit of indeterminate age. He had clear features, blue eyes and wings of white hair brushed back over his ears. But he looked suddenly shy, at a loss, like a young man. it was bloody embarrassing!’

  Stories of Cris in the war circulated in the company. He had been parachuted behind the German lines in Italy with the odes of Horace in his pocket, He had fought in the desert wearing a silk scarf and a pair of old cricket trousers. He had been dropped into Yugoslavia with the ‘Balkan Air Force’. None of these were incidents I ever heard him mention.

  ‘My war record! Three quarters of the time I was bored to death and the rest I was scared shitless. We need to do these programmes so people like Sid Vicious can understand what war’s all about.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ At that time my feelings about War Crimes were neutral. I would have been more excited by Great Acting Moments to Remember.

  ‘Streetwise’ve come up with rather a bright treatment. Gary’s asked me to have a look at it. It seems to ask all the right questions.’ He was looking out of the boardroom windows, down the glittering river towards the suburbs and patches of green that might still be countryside. I was standing by the marble slab of the boardroom table that was as cold and as uninviting as a tomb.

  ‘The writer’s called Richard Dunster.’

  It was the last name I expected to have thrown at me, in that place, on that morning. When I was silent he asked, ‘Who is this fellow Dunster? Do you know anything about him?’

  ‘A little.’ Of course I knew a great deal about him. He just wasn’t anyone I wanted to think about, let alone discuss with Cris.

  Is he any good as a screenwriter?’

  ‘I don’t really know.’ I tried to sound as unapprehensive as possible. ‘I haven’t seen Dunster for years.’

  Chapter Two

  ‘And the ungodly shall be cast out into outer darkness when that day comes, my friends. And only those who have given their hearts and their souls to Jesus shall walk into the light.’

  ‘What about the Chinese?’

  ‘Only those who have stepped forward for Our Lord will be received into His company.’

  ‘And the Indians: Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists? Millions of them. Aren’t they going to walk into the light?’

  ‘Come on, Dunster,’ I said. ‘Please. We’ll miss the matinée.’

  ‘And how shall we know when the day is at hand? you ask.’

  ‘No,’ Dunster said. ‘I didn’t ask that. I asked about Buddhists.’

  ‘The signs will be a mighty rushing wind. Then shall there be an outbreak of small fires.’ The speaker, standing on a little stepladder at Marble Arch, was squat and grey-haired with glasses. He looked like a bank manager or an insurance salesman and uttered his dire warnings in a matter-of-fact voice, as though he were discussing the times of trains from Waterloo. It was Dunster, supposedly my best friend at school, who looked a fanatic: bright-eyed with a lock of dark hair fallen across his forehead, his unbuttoned mac flapping in the wind and a voice which trembled on the verge of indignation or sarcastic laughter – you could never be quite sure which would emerge. My idea of pleasure was to see Othello at the Old Vic, his was to heckle the orators at Speakers’ Corner. The man on the stepladder should have been grateful as, apart from a few released secretaries and their lovers who paused for a moment on their way to a vacant patch of grass and then walked on, quite uninterested in the end of the world, Dunster and I were his only audience.

  ‘What’s troubling you, young man?’ The speaker, unwisely, decided to confront Dunster.

  ‘All those Buddhists. Are they going to be cast out into darkness?’

  ‘Unless they have stood up for Jesus.’

  ‘They’ve probably never even heard of Jesus.’

  ‘That is why, young man, I have taken it upon myself to spread the word.’

  ‘Well, you’re not spreading it much here, are you? You’re not exactly surrounded by Buddhists waiting to be converted. In fact you would hardly have had anyone here at all if Progmire and I hadn’t turned up.’

  ‘Please, Dunster. Let’s go. We’re going to be late.’ I wanted to put an end to this scene. Not only did I find it embarrassing but I was sorry for the man on the stepladder. He seemed to me to have enough on his plate, what with the rushing wind and the small fires and the Day of Judgement, without having an argument with Dunster to contend with.

  ‘Oh, all right. You never want to do anything interesting.’ Dunster agreed to leave with a good deal of reluctance. I looked back at the preacher, who stood in silence on his stepladder for a moment, the wind disturbing his neat grey hair, before he drew breath and shouted after us, ‘Outer darkness, my young friends. I ask you to beware of the outer darkness. Just you mull it over!’

  We went to St George’s, a long-surviving London day school in the dark alleyways around the Guildhall and the Mansion House. When it was felt that we needed fresh air, we were bussed out to a set of rented playing-fields in Barnes where we stood and shivered and longed for the warm, dark ride back, the shared crisps and bottles of Coke and the aimless fights and sudden friendships. When we arrived, the headmaster lectured all new boys on the school’s history, which stretched back, more or less uneventfully, to the reign of Henry VIII. ‘What you will all get here,’ he said, as he looked out on an assortment which included a good many Indians, Jews and a smattering of Japanese, ‘is a sound Church of England education. St George’s has always been a school at the heart of English life, as the name of our patron saint will probably have made clear to you.’ ‘Absolute balls!’ – the boy beside me had a penetrating whisper – ‘St George was a Palestinian pirate and a brothel-owner. I thought everyone knew that.’ It was my first meeting with Dunster.

  I didn’t choose to become friends with him. When I look back on it, the number of actual choices I’ve made in my life seem minimal. As I have said, I didn’t choose to be an accountant. It was a disability I was born with. I didn’t choose Natasha’s mother. She chose me for reasons which I still find hard to explain. Looking back on my schooldays, it doesn’t seem to me that I chose my friend, any more than I chose my school, or the uniform of straw hats and red blazers we wore, or even the part of Rosalind into which I was forced with considerable terror at the age of thirteen – and which
I now look upon as one of my greatest achievements, more successful, in its way, than my Hamlet at university, which is another story entirely. So the fact of the matter is that I didn’t pick out Dunster but he did, deliberately and inexplicably, choose me. He became, as the years went by, inescapable.

  He always seemed to be closer to me than I really cared for. I thought, at times, that I was quite alone and then I would turn my head and there he would be, pale-faced and bright-eyed, his hair flopping down from under the ridiculous boater and his blazer buttons hanging by a thread (Mrs Dunster had left home and Dunster’s father and his son cared for, or neglected, each other). He was eager to tell me some disgraceful secret he had discovered: that our headmaster, Mr Sheldrake, had got a Fourth in History and was only chosen for his present post because he was a member of the Freemasons, or that the yapping little cocker spaniel of a man who tried to teach us football had been dismissed from a job at Borstal for suspected buggery and even – and this was a story which lasted with considerable embellishments throughout the whole of one long, wet summer term – that the angry stringbean of a man who taught us French had been a close friend of Burgess and Maclean and lived in daily terror of being arrested as an old Cambridge leftie and still-active Soviet spy.

  ‘That fish they give us,’ Dunster hissed into my ear as we stood in the cavernous school canteen in the basement under Threadneedle Street, ‘condemned throw-outs from Billingsgate. They bulk-buy and make a profit. I heard the bursar on the telephone.’

  I didn’t believe him. but I opted for the vegetarian plate. You never knew, with Dunster, whether his far-fetched allegations might not have some truth in them. Anyway. I had long ago given up arguing with him. If you argued, the story would be repeated endlessly, with more and more uncheckable evidence called in support. In time my nods of assent failed to convince him and he would say, ‘It’s true, but you don’t really want to hear about it, do you?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, to keep Dunster quiet. ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘No, you don’t. You don’t really care about anything very much, do you, old man?’

  ‘I care about acting,’ I told him. I, Philip Progmire, who had been Rosalind.

  ‘Rosalind!’ Dunster said with contempt. ‘You were a boy pretending to be a girl who was pretending to be a boy. I don’t call that anything very much to care about.’

  All of which will make it clear to you that Dunster and I were chalk and cheese, or creatures from different planets. And yet, at St George’s, we were thought of as great friends and inseparable. ‘“O. Wind,”’ the English master, Mr Cheesy Cheshire, who fancied himself as a wit, was fond of saying, ‘if Progmire comes, can Dunster be far behind?’ Dunster needed me, I suppose, as an audience: no one else would stand and listen so patiently when he started on some long and incredible revelation. He also, perhaps, hoped that some day, with some story, he would be able to shock me into saying, ‘Good God, Dunster. But that’s appalling! It’s a scandal! Can’t you get your dad to write about it in the Guardian?’ He may have been waiting for this satisfactory outcome to his confidences, but I never said anything like that. I could never bring myself to do so. But did I, in all truth and honesty, actually like Dunster?

  I suppose I needed him. A boy starting at school, even at St George’s from which he goes home in the evenings, needs a friend so that he has the consolation and protection of not standing alone, a target easily picked off, and Dunster offered his friendship almost too eagerly. But did I like him? Sometimes, as when he showed such a total lack of interest in my theatrical triumphs, I disliked him very much. And yet it was hard not to have some affection for Dunster. He was brave. His continual arguments brought him perpetual trouble. Masters would lose their tempers with him, fling books at him and turn him out of the room. Boys would make fun of him, lie in wait for him and attack him. He would put up with all this with a wan and contemptuous smile and he did not, I have to admit with shame, get much support from me.

  ‘I didn’t notice you coming to the rescue much when Porker Plumstead and his friends cornered me in the bogs.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You like to keep out of things, don’t you?’

  ‘If I can, I suppose I like to.’

  ‘There’s nothing much you want to stand up for, is there, old man?’

  ‘Well, not your idea that Whittington’s Bank is financing the slave trade in Madagascar.’ Porker’s father was on the Board of Whittington’s, which was why Dunster had started the argument.

  ‘You mean you don’t care about slaves?’

  ‘Well, yes. Of course I do. Everyone does. But I don’t see that being punched by Porker’s friends round the bogs is going to help the slaves in Madagascar.’

  ‘You don’t care much about slaves, and you don’t care at all about friendship.’

  ‘Oh, come off it. Dunster. Now you’re making me feel a shit.’

  ‘Good!’ He smiled at me with sudden, unexpected charm. ‘That is exactly how you ought to feel.’

  I suppose the truth was that I recognized in Dunster all that I wasn’t. Although I had no desire to be in the least like him, he made me feel timid, compromising, time-serving and, if not envious, in some way inferior. Here was I, waiting for Plays and Players each month to discover who was starring in what, dreaming of being an actor and settling for being a maths specialist because I found it easy. And there was Dunster, enormously concerned about the slave trade and the Race Relations Act and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, thriving on a series of head-on collisions with the masters and the boys which would have left me trembling with nervous exhaustion. And yet most of the time, to my amazement and occasional respect, Dunster seemed to achieve, in the centre of his frenzied universe, an absence of anxiety which I had never known. But then, as I have made it clear to you, I worry.

  Dunster and his journalist father occupied, in almost unbelievable chaos, the top two floors of a house in Camden Town which had been the Dunster matrimonial home. After Mrs Dunster moved out, the father let half the place to a man on the Financial Times who had recently married. The Dunsters despised this couple mainly because of their habit of taking regular meals and the orderliness of their existence. The Dunster cuisine consisted almost entirely of bacon and eggs, eaten with doorsteps of fried bread and cups of strong tea, so that about their home the smell of burning fat indicated that a traditional English breakfast was available at all hours of the day and night.

  I went to his house and sometimes I let Dunster visit mine. My parents lived, as I do now, in Muswell Hill, a high and windy part of north London, with pink and white Edwardian villas dominated by the curious fantasy of Alexandra Palace, from which you can see much of the city laid out like a map. When I was at school, it was the old glass palace with minarets, although the roof had been damaged by a flying bomb during the war and, during one hard winter, the organ in the Great Hall was covered with snow. When I was very small, a steam train from Highgate stopped at Muswell Hill on its way to the Palace and until I was twenty there was a racecourse in the suburb. When it closed, life there remained quiet until, in a moment of high drama, the old Palace was consumed by fire and has since been rebuilt. Communications with the area are difficult and many Muswell Hill inhabitants, like my parents, seldom left it in the evenings or at weekends, shopping there, seeing friends or regularly visiting the splendours of the local Odeon. One Saturday I warned them, ‘There’s a friend called Dunster coming this afternoon. As a matter of fact, he’s rather a menace.’

  ‘So far as I know,’ my father said, ‘Dunster’s a small town in Somerset that’s never been a menace to anyone.’

  I dreaded the Saturday afternoon visit. My parents’ house was disgracefully tidy; souvenirs of their holidays abroad – bronze statues from Greece, bits of pottery from Morocco – were arranged on shelves and carefully dusted. My father was a civil servant in the Home Office and clearly open to attack from Dunster. My mother was the person from whom I have inherited my talen
t for anxiety. She brought out our best tea service, the one my grandmother left us in her will, for Dunster, and gave him chocolate biscuits and small cucumber sandwiches, which he ate as though he hadn’t seen food for a month.

  ‘So you’re in the Home Office, sir,’ Dunster said to my father, with his mouth half full of cucumber sandwich. I had never heard Dunster call anyone ‘sir’ before, not even our masters, and he managed to make the title sound especially contemptuous. ‘I suppose you do your best not to notice the corruption in Scotland Yard?’

  ‘I wish to God we could. To be quite honest with you, Dick’ – my father’s use of his Christian name seemed to startle Dunster – ‘it worries the hell out of us. I wish your father’d write a series of his magnificent articles about it. We need all the public support we can get.’

  It was the first time I’d seen Dunster deflated. I loved my father then, and he was always my idea of a reasonable, tolerant human being who took life with a large pinch of salt and stood in no particular awe of anyone. Years later, when I came to work for Cris Bellhanger, I suppose I was attracted to him because he was the same sort of character.

  ‘Do your people come from that little town in Somerset? Sleepy sort of place.’ My father pressed home his advantage.

  We got that milk jug in Dunster’ – my mother, quite without meaning to, turned the knife in the wound – the one that’s shaped like a cow. We thought it was rather original.’

  ‘Wonderful cream teas in Dunster,’ my father remembered.

  ‘Is your dad going to write about Scotland Yard?’ I asked my guest when we had gone up to my room to smoke Gauloises Bleues, an activity which I’m sure my parents knew about but never mentioned.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so.’ And Dunster added mysteriously, ‘he’s got a much bigger fish than that to fry.’

  ‘Sex,’ Dunster said more than once, ‘I don’t know how people do it.’