‘I can try.’
Then I got up and left him, sitting on the bench under the guns and enjoying the situation. I walked quickly to the gate and got into my car, but Dunster wasn’t far behind me and as I started the engine, which responded with a complaining whine, I saw him unfasten a crash helmet from a motor bike as formidable as Jaunty s horse. This was a new interest in his life, which I supposed he had bought with his earnings from Cris Bellhanger.
I had told Dunster I’d try to stop him. At that time I thought I could.
Chapter Seventeen
‘Good news! You’ve got Sir Percy Blakeney.’ Dennis, the dentist, picked up the spectacles that hung round his neck, elevated them to his nose and looked at me closely, as though doubting whether I was an appropriate choice for the Scarlet Pimpernel in the light-hearted romp that was to be the Mummers’ big autumn production.
‘And we’ll be playing opposite each other again,’ Lucy said in her quiet and businesslike manner, ‘I’ve got Marguerite. Martin was trying to get hold of you to tell you all about Pimpernel.’
‘I’m sorry. I’ve been out of London.’ I had been down to Windhammer and had called in at the Mummery for a drink, hoping to find something to talk about other than long-ago deaths in the High Apennines. So I discovered that I was to play, for the first time, a positive hero engaged, despite his languid and flippant manner, in springing aristocrats from the guillotine. I would be raising a weary eye-glass and saying lines like, “Odds my life, Lady Blakeney! I have spent the entire morning in the perfection of me demned cravat.’ Dunster would have found that entirely ridiculous, but then I no longer cared what Dunster thought about anything. I was now at war with Dunster. I had talked to Cris and made up my mind that, at whatever cost, Dunster had to be defeated.
When I had paid my first visit – and I hoped to God it was my last – to the Imperial War Museum and got back to the Streetwise office, I had found Peregrine Gryce agitating because on his return from the North of England I wasn’t waiting in my cell, staring at the back wall of the Malibu Club, breathing in the smells of last night’s dinner and eager for instructions. ‘Pippa tells me you’ve been looking through the files. I hope you’ve come up with some ideas?’
‘Yes, I have. I’ve also been talking to our writer.’
‘And did you manage to get any sense out of him?’
‘I don’t think so. I hope not.’
‘Tell me.’
‘I’ll tell you what I can, after I’ve spoken to Cris, Pippa, get me Megapolis, will you? The chairman’s secretary.’
Miss Pippa Marching looked at Peregrine for confirmation and then made the telephone call. You have seen from this passage that I was, in some ways, a different associate producer. It was as though Dunster, riding away on his huge black motor bike, had left me some of his determination to act, whatever the consequences. I felt frustrated when Pippa got me through to Megapolis and I discovered that the chairman was spending a couple of days at Windhammer, when once I should have been relieved at the postponement of an almost impossible meeting. I left Peregrine Gryce protesting at my going to Cris over his plaintive little head and I took a taxi to Liverpool Street Station.
I sat in the corner of a dusty railway carriage, looking out at the trailing farewell of London, the back gardens full of weeds and broken toys and grimy, lean-to greenhouses, and the new but already shabby suburban stations. Then came the flat countryside on the way to that sham Gothic castle which Cris treated, as he did so many things in his life, as some sort of a modest joke. I wondered exactly how I was going to ask the man who had given me my job, and taken me away to forget my pain over Beth and Dunster, and who had always been more like an exceptionally companionable father than an employer to me, whether he happened to recall having taken part in a massacre.
My life, as you will have understood by now, has been much concerned with the performing arts, not to mention make-believe. Only Dunster, my former friend and long-time enemy, has shunned pretence and invention and shown an unreasonable addiction to what he felt to be the truth. My own happiest moments, at Oxford, at Megapolis and with the Mummers, have been theatrical. Drama surrounded me, so it wasn’t a surprise to discover that what had kept Cris at home was a touring opera company’s performance of Cost fan tutte in the baronial hall of Windhammer for the benefit of Angie’s favourite charity, the local branch of the War Widows’ Association.
When I arrived she greeted me even more warmly than usual. She kissed my cheek and made the small noise of ‘mmmnyah’ as her lips departed. She was clearly as excited by the preparations going on around her as she had been when she first came on to the set in Pinewood Studios to act the part of an intrepid ATS girl in the war her husband had been fighting in bitter reality. She stood in the hall and watched curtains being hung, lights set up, props assembled. She organized cups of tea and sandwiches with the efficiency of a film unit caterer as the singers went through their exercises and the small orchestra tried out the more difficult moments in the overture. Cris was with her working, as always, in his snow-white shirtsleeves and blue braces, and he was still smiling when I told him we had to have a serious discussion on the subject of war crimes. ‘We’ll go outside and talk,’ he said. When he told Angie we were going to look at the garden, she said she wouldn’t come with us because of early clouds of midges.
There were sheets of butter-yellow daffodils and white narcissi in the rough grass under the beech trees. The first azaleas were coming out in the borders and there was the start of blossom and fresh green leaves on the tall Japanese cherries. As we walked away from the house we heard the faintest sound of the quartet ‘May the Wind be Gentle’ As you can see, the setting couldn’t have been more inappropriate for the business in hand.
Down the broad, grass walk between the long beds of flowers preparing for their annual display, I started on my story and Cris listened. I tried to tell him all I felt about Dunster, how our lives together had seemed a long, comical-tragical preparation for that morning’s meeting. We stopped in a grassy circle, surrounded by a tall yew hedge, with a moss-covered sundial in the centre – a place as quiet and private as a room. There I told him about Dunster’s account of a late-night, brandy-inspired conversation with Jaunty. I said Jaunty had spoken about a dynamited church packed on a saint’s day. Jaunty had nothing to do with this atrocity.
‘Of course not,’ Cris said, ‘the Germans did it, after one of their officers was found strangled.’ So it was the same church, the same ghost town, that he had told me about after dinner as we sat together and he had played the piano. I was troubled by that for a moment but then relieved. Cris’s simple sentence sounded a hundred times more convincing than Dunster’s over-excited account of Jaunty’s drunken confidence, or his contact with an unnamed deserter gone native in the Apennines.
‘You said my ex-father-in-law fought the war in a way you didn’t approve of?’ I asked Cris, postponing the final question.
‘I couldn’t be sure but I had my suspicions. That garrotted officer had the mark of Jaunty about him. We shouldn’t have held that against him, only it had such terrible consequences.’
‘So Jaunty’s section was there when the incident happened.’ I knew it was ridiculous to try to protect ourselves by calling it an incident.
‘Oh, yes. He was well established over and above Pomeriggio at the time.’
‘And you?’ I had to ask.
‘We’d had a job to do, further south, towards Monte di Speranza. We only joined up with the support group, Jaunty’s lot, after the church business was over.’
Relief again, a tide sufficiently strong to allow me to launch the great attack. ‘Dunster says Jaunty told him you were there, before it happened.’
‘Does he?’ Cris’s eyes were blue and clear, their corners wrinkled by his customary smile. He seemed not in the least perturbed.
‘And that Jaunty said you commanded the church parade.’
‘Me and who else?’ Cris asked, wi
thout a pause.
‘I’m not quite clear. Three or four others. A sergeant who was killed later.’
‘Blaker.’
‘And someone who deserted and married an Italian girl. Dunster’s been to see him in Italy.’
‘Lance Corporal Nathaniel Sweeting. “Natty Suiting” I used to call him because he was always such a bloody mess. He must have a defective memory after all those years on the run. Or one that can be altered if the price is right.’
It hadn’t occurred to me that Dunster might have paid for his information. I might once have thought that for him to do so would have been out of character; now I was prepared to believe him entirely ruthless. But I still had to say, ‘There’s even a suggestion that you’ve been paying Jaunty all these years – I suppose to keep him quiet about what happened. I went through his accounts once, and he does seem to have some mysterious source of income.’
‘Me pay Jaunty Blair?’ Cris seemed to find the idea entirely comic. ‘I’d rather contribute to the Pit Bull Terriers’ fighting-fund. Please don’t ask me to explain Jaunty’s finances.’
‘No. I wouldn’t.’ By now I felt able to smile. I had been worrying about Cris’s pay-off to Jaunty going into my down payment on Muswell Hill.
‘There might be a hundred explanations. Good, bad or indifferent.’
‘Of course there might.’
Well, then.’ Cris was standing with his hands in his pockets, his face turned up gratefully towards the sun. ‘The whole thing’s the most complete and utter balls, then, isn’t it?’
‘That’s exactly what I told Dunster.’
‘I’m sure you did.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ I assured him, ‘I didn’t believe it for a moment.’
‘Your friend’s just looking for a sensational story.’
He’s not my friend. He’s my enemy. And I’m sure that’s what he’s after.’
‘Yes.’ Cris looked down at the grass now, at the carefully shined brogues planted firmly apart on the short grass. ‘We’ll have to think what we ought to do about it.’
‘I’ll do anything,’ I told him. ‘Anything I can to kill this absurd story.’
‘We’ll talk about it when we’re back in the office. Meanwhile, you will stay tonight, won’t you? You wouldn’t want to miss the Mozart.’
So, that evening I sat next to Cris and Angela Bellhanger and listened to the opera which informs us that our personalities are irrelevant, and indeed interchangeable, that one lover is really quite as good as another, that all women do it and it all comes to the same thing in the end. And this hard lesson is set to music of such perfection that war crimes slipped out of my mind for a little while. I even forgot to worry about Cris letting it all wait until we met again in London, which seemed a rather too laid-back way of dealing with the problem.
After lunch the next day, and after no further discussion. Cris drove me into Norwich to catch the train. When he’d stopped the car he said, ‘What do you think we ought to do?’
‘I think you ought to ditch the series.’
I had made the proposal and Cris agreed. He said, ‘Not because of me, you understand. I can cope with whatever anyone cares to throw at me. But I don’t want Angie upset. Not in any way.’
‘Of course not.’
‘Do you think we might offer Dunster some other sort of work?’
‘We might try.’
‘You sound doubtful.’
‘Once he’s set on something he’s hard to shift. But I’ll certainly try.’
‘You do that. Let me know how you get on, will you?’
And as I opened the car door he said, ‘That Cosi. Bloody marvellous, wasn’t it?’
‘I thought they did it very well.’
‘I mean what they did, not how they did it. It was saying, what’s it all matter in the end? Isn’t that it? What’s it all matter, anyway?’
Then we said goodbye and I caught the train back to London. I rang Dunster’s number from Liverpool Street and Beth answered. She told me he was out and I wondered whose memory he was ransacking now.
‘I’ve been with Cris,’ I told her. ‘I wanted to let Dunster know as soon as possible. Our series has been cancelled.’
‘That’s a pity.’ She sounded only moderately disappointed. ‘He’s just bought himself this ghastly great motor bike.’
‘I know. I’ve seen it. And the jacket to go with it. He must be celebrating his perpetual adolescence. Oh, and could you tell him, we’re going to try to find something else for him to work on. Will you tell him that?’
So I took the long journey back to Muswell Hill and called in at the Mummery to have a drink. That night, for the first time ever, I slept with Lucy, my ex-Nina, my coming Lady Blakeney. It seemed that the crisis caused by Dunster had awoken me from a long reverie into a burst of activity on all fronts. But I’d better explain exactly how it happened.
We sat drinking in the bar and one by one other Mummers turned up. Martin, the bank manager – whom I had to thank for Sir Percy – and his wife, Muriel, came in with Pam, the physio, who said I looked ‘tremendously tense’ and began to knead the back of my neck in a way which made me feel I would settle for the tension. Her dentist husband was not altogether pleased by this attention and he asked Pam, rather sharply, if she couldn’t leave her work behind when she visited the Mummery bar. Finally, Ken, who had played Konstantin, came in with his girlfriend Ranee. They wore identical gold bracelets on their slim wrists and looked at each other with melting eyes. They were so obviously in love that they seemed like creatures from another world, one of which I had inhabited so long ago that I had almost forgotten it, and I found myself looking at them with a kind of envy.
We talked about putting on the French Revolution with the small cast at our disposal and the problems of guillotining people. I let the familiar, safe conversation lap over me like bathwater after a hard day. ‘What you need, young man’ – I knew Pam called even her most geriatric patients ‘young man’, so I wasn’t flattered by this, although I was relieved that she had stopped digging her fingernails into my neck – ‘is a square meal. What about us all going to the Swinging Bamboo?’
‘Do you know the story about the two girls who went for a Chinese?’ Dennis, who had been drinking pink gins, spoke a little indistinctly. ‘The poor fellow died.’ Nobody laughed and he explained how it had sounded quite funny when a patient told it to him.
‘You probably had your fingers half-way down his throat.’ Pam was in an unsympathetic mood. ‘You didn’t hear it properly.’ Ranee turned large, sad eyes on the dentist and said, ‘That is a most terrible story!’
I sat opposite Lucy and watched her eating rice. She lifted very small morsels to her lips and ate with her head on one side like a bird, perhaps the seagull I had fatally wounded in a play. I felt that sharp moment of lust which Trigorin must have known to be irresistible and finally unimportant. I remembered promising myself that I would never again become involved with anyone who had been my lover in a play, but that night the declaration of war with Dunster had separated me further from the memory of Beth. It was as absurd to imagine that we were Trigorin and Nina, as that we should become that melodramic couple. Sir Percy and Lady Blakeney. I was an associate producer in television and she was a solicitor. The evening could start from there.
Lucy said. ‘You look tired. Overworked?’
‘Not too much work. But it’s got a little difficult.’
‘More difficult now you’ve gone over to the artistic side?’
‘The trouble’s not artistic. More, well, perhaps more legal, actually. I may be needing your advice.’
‘Oh, you can have that any time. It might help to talk it through. You might be able to see it in proportion, whatever it is.’ She looked at me with all the wisdom of her youth, not a bad actress, not a wounded seagull, but the commonsense lawyer she was.
I had walked from my house to the Mummery, which was only a few streets away. Lucy had driven me to the C
hinese restaurant and eventually she drove me home, as though I were her date and she were seeing me safely back to my front door. I asked her in for a drink. As I poured white wine I felt ashamed of my sitting-room, not because it was a tip but because it was too neat, the home of someone who had lived alone too long, who was too fussy about putting books and records back in their places and was too set in his ways.
‘Well,’ Lucy said, ‘aren’t you going to tell me the problem?’ She sounded very judicial, like a schoolgirl playing Portia. She sat in an armchair, her legs crossed; her fingertips even seemed in danger of coming together like a lawyer’s at the start of a conference.
‘No,’ I decided, ‘I’d think we’d better go to bed together.’
‘Really?’ She still had her young lawyer look. ‘I thought you’d never get around to asking. Can I finish my wine first?’
‘Of course you can. There’s no special hurry.’
‘No.’ She was smiling now. ‘There doesn’t seem to be.’
While she was finishing her glass, the phone rang. I picked it up knowing what to expect. ‘So you’ve chickened out of War Crimes?’ Dunster said.
‘We’ve decided to cancel the series. I told Beth, the chairman’s going to suggest another subject for you.’
‘No thanks! I don’t want to be another recipient of Bellhanger bribes. You can tell your chairman to save his money. He’ll probably need it, by the time I’ve finished with him.’
‘What’re you planning to do?’ I did my best to sound unconcerned.
‘Don’t bother your pretty little head, old man. I’ll be working by myself from now on.’
He put down the phone then. A minute later it rang again. It was Cris’s secretary to say that the chairman was organizing a special meeting of the Board for tomorrow afternoon. He particularly wanted me to be there.
‘You’re very busy,’ Lucy said.
‘A little. Just at the moment.’
‘Was that the difficult business you started to talk about?’
Dunster Page 15
