Dunster

by John Mortimer

  For the rest of that week events were suspended. I called in at Streetwise and told Peregrine Gryce that, although the series had been cancelled, all the work he had done would be paid for and I was taking possession of the files as Cris’s lawyers had asked for them. ‘I must say, Philip’ – he was looking extremely sulky – ‘nothing’s gone right since you came on to the artistic side. Why did you want to get us mixed up with lawyers? Lawyers simply don’t understand the creative imperative. Also they dress so terribly badly. Rather like you, actually.’

  ‘I didn’t get us mixed up with lawyers. Dunster did. Have you spoken to him at all?’

  ‘I keep leaving messages but he doesn’t return my calls.’

  ‘He’s probably busy trying other forms of expression. He seems to have lost his faith in television.’

  ‘This mess with Megapolis has shaken mine, rather.’

  ‘Goodbye then, Perry. We may meet again some time.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t expect so. I imagine you’ll sink back into accounts. You do look just a tiny bit out of place in Wardour Street.’

  Miss Pippa Marching didn’t look up from her copy of TV Quick to return my parting salute.

  Tash came for her weekend. On Sunday night she cooked me a surprisingly good dinner – a cheese soufflé and roast lamb – and left the kitchen looking as though we had been entertaining a group of some forty-five drunk and starving teenagers. As we sat over our coffee, getting on, I thought, rather better than usual, she said.

  ‘What’s the matter, Dad? Have you become a hippy or something?’

  ‘Have I changed as much as that?’

  ‘I mean, have you taken to wearing these?’ She put her hand in her jeans pocket and pulled out a pair of green earrings which I had last seen decorating Lucy.

  ‘Where did you find those?’

  ‘Top shelf in the bathroom. Didn’t you notice?’

  ‘I should have done but I’ve had a lot to think about.’

  ‘It wasn’t the pallid job who gave you the inappropriate shirt, was it?’

  ‘You mean Lucy? She was my Nina.’ I don’t know why I felt I had to add that as some sort of an excuse.

  ‘I don’t care what she was of yours. I’m just not going to make friends with her.’

  ‘It’d be nice if you could.’

  ‘Horrible! So many people at school have to do it. Go to awful chatty lunches with their father’s girlfriends. So they can discuss Dad as though he were a difficult child they were both crazy about, really. And so the girlfriends can be told his marriage was breaking up anyway and it’s not their fault.’

  ‘It had broken up long ago. And it certainly wasn’t Lucy’s fault.’

  ‘No. I know.’ She looked thoughtful and then she said, ‘I don’t think I’ll be coming to stay with you again, Dad. Not for some time, anyway.’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘It’s about Dick. He says you sacked him. You and that boss you seem so terribly fond of.’

  ‘I think he sacked himself.’

  ‘He wants to tell people about your boss being a war criminal.’

  ‘He’s got that idea into his head. It’s not true.’

  ‘He says there’s people to prove it.’

  ‘Let’s see how they stand up in court.’

  ‘Grandpa Jaunty’s one of them.’ Her use of that familiar childhood name made me feel how closely, and how uncomfortably, I was related to the Major, who was now a hostile witness.

  ‘We’ll have to see what he says too.’

  ‘Dad.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What’re you up to? Are you really just protecting your job? Or the establishment? Or something?’

  ‘Is that what Dunster says?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘And what does Mum say?’

  ‘She says I can make up my own mind about what I want to do.’

  ‘So you want to stay away from me?’

  Tash, like her mother, was vaguely retreating to a prepared position. ‘Dick believes things so passionately. You know, there’s a sort of purity about him. I don’t want to be disloyal to him.’

  ‘Only to me.’

  ‘It won’t be forever, Dad. Anyway, you don’t care about things like loyalty, do you?’

  ‘And I don’t believe in things passionately?’

  ‘Well, do you?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, yes. I believe quite passionately in not charging around the world causing people unnecessary pain.’

  ‘Dick would say that the pain’s very necessary.’ I hadn’t convinced her. ‘Justice has to be done.’

  ‘That’s what’s going to be decided.’

  When she went to bed she asked me to come and say good-night to her. She put her arms up and fastened them round my neck, reluctant to let me go. It was how she had behaved when she was a child, but I didn’t build too many hopes on it. I knew she would keep away from me and that I should be presumed guilty, at least until the case was over.

  ‘By the way,’ I said, as I drove her to college early on Monday morning, ‘how’s George?’

  ‘Oh, I sent him away to stay with his mother for the weekend. It’ll do him good. He can get rid of some of that embarrassing affection he seems to feel for everybody.’

  ‘Robbie Skeffington. Done all the right things. Scholarship at Eton or somewhere. Next year’s chairman of the Bar Council. Bound to get his bum on the High Court Bench in the next year or two. Terrific track record in libel. Managed to screw half a million from the Daily Planet for that Tory Minister in the gay wedding case. You couldn’t do better than Robbie.’ Sitting naked in bed beside me and sipping tea. Lucy had talked like an old lawyer, seasoned in the courts, weighing up barristers’ reputations over port and walnuts. When she was discussing the law, she adopted a tone of infallibility and became condescending to outsiders like me This, I discovered, was a characteristic of lawyers in general and of Robin Skeffington. QC in particular.

  From what Lucy had told me I had expected to meet some tall, smooth-haired operator with a voice like a coasting Rolls and well-tailored charm, a man who would purr at juries and deal tactfully with the judge. Robbie Skeffington had none of these so-called civilized qualities; he seemed to be a creature, when you first met him, who had only been house-trained with difficulty. He was small and hirsute and his eyebrows met in a single black line across eyes which would glint, as I later discovered, with such ferocious cunning that I wondered why the highest tribunals in the land placed so much faith in him. I never saw him woo the jury, what he could do was jostle them into accepting his most caustic comments and his most contemptuous treatment of opposing witnesses.

  He was a most untidy man. He sat at a desk on which briefs and books were balanced to form insecure towers and he had Dunster’s habit of keeping a half-drunk cup of tea cooling at his elbow. His fingernails, on some occasions, almost matched his black brows and he was a great biter of pencils. During all our meetings and throughout the trial itself, he either ignored me or treated me as though I were incapable of understanding what was going on. I soon came to the view that the only thing worse than having Robbie Skeffington on your side was having him against you.

  On our way up to the dizzy heights of the legal profession, on which Robbie sat like a gargoyle perched on top of a cathedral spire, Cris had not gone to young Charlie Glasscock, the solicitor on the Board who had looked longingly at the case, nor to Megapolis’s regular lawyers. He had consulted his family firm of Fanshawe, Glover, Mandelow & Singleton, who had advised the Bellhangers since their ancestor made his fortune out of steam engines and built Windhammer. Our case was in the care of Justin Glover, whom even the telephone girls called young Mr Justin. He was in his late thirties, prematurely balding and he looked at life through strong, gold-framed glasses. His apparently cheerful, even flippant manner covered a deep anxiety which I was able to recognize and often share. I was later to discover that his frequently haunted expression was caused not by the demands
of his legal practice but by a distracted wife and four talented but temperamental children, all under the age of ten. He had introduced us to our leading counsel rather as a nervous keeper might approach the cage of some rare but dangerous animal, inviting us to look and marvel but not to get our fingers too near the bars of the cage.

  ‘This is a most wicked libel and the damages will be immense.’ Like the early saints Robbie Skeffington seemed to have been born without any talent for doubt. In that respect, I thought, he was fairly matched with Dunster.

  ‘There’s some suggestion in the letter to the Board,’ Justin Glover dared to remind our leader, ‘that there may be an attempt to justify the charges.’

  ‘Is there any truth in them, Sir Christopher?’ Robbie used the tone of respectful commiseration with which he would always speak of his client to the jury.

  ‘It’s Crispin, actually.’ Cris hated being called Sir. ‘No truth whatever.’

  ‘Then let them try it, that’s all. If they attempt to justify they’ll inflame the award enormously.’

  ‘Damages,’ Cris said, ‘aren’t really the point.’

  ‘They are always the point. In any libel action. You must really allow your legal advisers to advise you.’ Robbie made a gesture, almost knocking over a pile of papers, which embraced not only Justin Glover but Marcus Beazeley, his junior barrister. He really was tall and elegant and no doubt had a Rolls-Royce voice to use if Robbie had ever allowed him to open his mouth, and was to sit through our case with an air of complete detachment, immense damages will be the measure of your high reputation. What is a man but his reputation? What are the words Crispin Bellhanger? Without reputation they are a meaningless jumble of syllables. They might mean a man of straw, a fraudster, a layabout, a nobody. Add reputation and those syllables mean a much-decorated ex-officer, a gentleman who fought heroically for his country, a patron of the arts, a chairman of a great public company, a tireless worker for a number of charities, a force for good in the community. That’s your reputation, Sir Crispin, and if the jury values it at less than half a million I shall consider I’ve cocked it up!’

  At this, Robbie retired behind his papers. ‘What a prize ass that scruffy Stuffington is!’ Cris, who made a point of getting our QC’s name wrong from then on, said afterwards. ‘Perhaps that’s what you need when you get involved in a libel action?’ Now he said, ‘This fellow Dunster hasn’t got a penny. Philip Progmire can tell you that.’

  ‘Progmire?’ Robbie looked straight at me and I felt invisible. ‘Which one is Progmire?’

  I owned up.

  ‘And you’re from Mr Glover’s office?’

  ‘From my office,’ Cris said. ‘He’s worked on the project. What’s more, he knows Dunster and the whole history of this case.’

  ‘My name’s not Progmire,’ Robbie told us, I thought unnecessarily. ‘I don’t know Mr Dunster, although I may make that gentleman’s acquaintance if he’s rash enough to enter the witness-box. I may not know the whole history of this case Yet. But I imagine it’s my opinion you’re paying for – and not Progmire’s – and I have to tell you that as soon as I opened the papers I smelled a winner. I got a sniff of very substantial damages indeed I form a view when I first get my nose near the papers and I’m not often wrong. Is that your experience too, Mr Glover?’

  Cris said, ‘What’s the point of immense damages if we can’t recover them?’

  ‘Recovering them is Mr Glover’s business. It’s a purely mechanical matter. Summonses, judgements, possession orders. The bargain basement of the profession. No need for you to concern yourself with that. Sir Crispin. You are shopping at Harrods. I fully expect you to top my record damages from the Planet, when the Junior Minister for Communications was alleged to have gone through a ceremony of marriage with a man from the Department of Trade and Industry. God send us a respectful judge and a more than half-witted jury and I am confident, sir, that we shall do it. Would you agree with that, Mr Glover? We shall overcome!’

  Cris, Justin Glover and I left the Temple and walked down Fleet Street, a place that seems dead now all the newspapers have packed up and departed for glass towers on the wharves round Megapolis. In time those papers would be full of the case of Bellhanger v. Dunster, but then they had only reported that a writ had been issued because of a letter to board members concerning the chairman’s war record. Cris led us into El Vino’s. The journalists had left there long ago to sit by their computer terminals down a traffic-clogged road far from the centre of government, the theatres and cinemas, the clubs and the sources of scandal. Now the lawyers were in sole possession of the wine bar: large, sombrely dressed figures who laughed loudly at the memory of things that had only seemed funny because they had happened in the hushed and oppressively serious courts of law. As we found a table among the mahogany and legal caricatures of the back room, some of the barristers smiled and raised their hands in greeting to Justin Glover, hoping that he would send them work. There was a pretty, dark-haired waitress who reminded me, for a moment, of better things, like Lucy. Cris ordered a bottle of the house champagne. ‘Not to celebrate the half million we’ll never see but because we’re out of that legal badger’s set. I thought that if he called me Sir Crispin again, I’d plead guilty just for the pleasure of depriving him of a brief.’

  ‘Robbie has an extraordinary effect on juries.’ Justin Glover did his best to sound reassuring.

  ‘And a pretty devastating one on clients.’

  ‘Robbie’s a fighter. You’ve got to allow him that.’

  ‘Now you’re reminding me of all I didn’t like about the army.’

  The girl came back and started to tussle with the champagne cork. Cris helped her and as he filled our glasses, I said, ‘About the damages ...’

  ‘I won’t ever try and get them out of him. However much they give us.’

  ‘I’m glad about that.’

  ‘Because of Beth?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Because of that.’

  ‘No costs, no damages.’ Cris raised his glass to me. ‘They’re not worth the trouble of enforcing.’

  So it was agreed, as I’d felt sure that it would be, given Cris’s good sense and generosity. And I said I’d give Justin Glover a full account of all that I knew about Dunster and the story which had apparently started with my ex-father-in-law. He wanted to know if the Major would give evidence and, if he did so, what he was likely to say. I told him that Jaunty’s behaviour was quite incalculable but that Dunster was now part of his family and that he’d been impressed by our opponent’s first ride on a horse

  A week later a privately printed pamphlet, setting out Dunster’s version of the events at Pomeriggio was distributed, free of charge, to all the employees of Megapolis, other television companies and most newspapers. Justin Glover told us that Robbie had been delighted at this development; it now being certain that the amount of damages would break all previous records.

  In due course Dunster’s solicitors filed their defence. It alleged justification and accused Cris of having commanded the party that blew up the church full of praying civilians. It also said that ‘shortly after this incident, the plaintiff said to a fellow officer, Lieutenant Jonathan Blair, “We will have to say that the Germans did it.”’ So the field of battle was defined, and the opponents prepared for war.

  THE TRIAL

  Chapter Twenty

  ‘He’s upstairs,’ Beth said when she opened the door of the house in Camden Town. ‘You’d better come up.’ The square looked peaceful in the sunlight; the traffic boomed in a familiar way from Kentish Town Road. Beth’s greeting was not hostile, and yet I felt I had crossed into enemy territory. As the door shut behind me and she led me up the staircase, I wondered if I should ever have undertaken this twelve o’clock mission to Dunster.

  When his father died, Beth’s husband – that was how I had to think of him for the purpose of this visit – had come in for the whole house, including the lower floors which used to be let out to the coupl
e from the Financial Times. The place looked reasonably tidy and the heavy and perpetual smell of burning bacon and fried bread had been banished. I tried to concentrate on something other than Beth, in jeans and a white shirt, her hair pulled back and tied with a small scarf, her face pale and free of make-up, walking in front of me. I might once have embraced her, put my hands on her breasts, kissed her pale face as she arched back towards me. Such conduct was now out of the question and quite inappropriate to my mission.

  The top room with windows looking out over the rooftops and back gardens, where Dunster’s father had written his articles and Dunster worked now, was far less of a tip than I had expected. There were relics of the past: signed caricatures of Michael Foot and Nye Bevan; photographs of John Dunster, younger than his son was now. shaking hands with Castro and Tito and Mendes-France; shelves of Fabian pamphlets and Left Book Club publications in battered yellow jackets; a Tribune poster with the headline THE END OF THE ESTABLISHMENT by John Dunster; and the old upright typewriter on which such forgotten diatribes were written. His son had added his own trophies: a fax machine and a word processor, books piled up against the wall and, blocking out the light from the windows, a bulging filing cabinet and a few hundred copies of what I could recognize as the pamphlet which he had entitled ‘SIR CRISPIN, WAR CRIMINAL: FROM A MASSACRE TO MEGAPOLIS.’

  Dunster was sitting behind the big writing-table as we came in. He rose to greet me, smiling in the way a head of state might have welcomed a journalist who, after prolonged negotiations, had been granted an interview.

  ‘A herald’ – Beth’s husband was clearly on top of his form – ‘come with a white flag and an offer of surrender! Is the distinguished old fart you work for prepared to admit the game’s up?’

  Beth said, ‘I’ll go and put the coffee on.’

  ‘No, you’d better stay.’ I stopped her. ‘This is important for both of you. It’s about the damages.’

  ‘Please, old man. Have a seat.’ Dunster waved me to an upright chair in the middle of the room. Beth moved some books, sank on to the cushions of a disintegrating wickerwork armchair and began a close study of her fingernails. Dunster sprawled behind his table and hit a thin paper knife on it, as though it were a tuning fork. I saw a map on the wall with a red-headed pin marking Pomeriggio. He seemed to be enjoying the whole thing like a military operation.