Dunster (11 page)

‘He's probably made all sorts of plans.'

‘Of course he hasn't. He never makes plans at all. He'll miss the train and arrive late and he won't have hired the suit.'

‘I don't suppose the suit really matters.'

‘And he'll probably quarrel with your father.'

“That might be interesting.'

‘Look. I don't want to stand up in church, vowing to love and honour you, or whatever it is, with the shadow of Dunster looming up behind me.'

‘Then you decide it, darling.' Beth smiled and kissed me. ‘You decide whatever man seems best for you.'

I tried to draft a number of letters rejecting Dunster's offer but they all sounded pompous. Dunster was right; years ago, when we were ink-stained schoolboys, we had taken each other for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness or in health, and there was nobody else I had known better or for so long. To ask Laertes or Benson, the gravedigger, to do the job would seem an insult to our long past. Anyway, Beth didn't mind and to accept Dunster would probably be less trouble than turning him down.

‘Nothing goes with Beth. No land, no cows. No diamond tiaras. You do realize that, don't you, Mister Progmire?'

‘Of course I do.'

‘I can't even give you much for a wedding present. There's a rather good saddle I might spare you, if you'd care for it.'

‘I don't think so.'

‘Not much use for it in Muswell Hill, eh?'

‘No. Not much use for it there.'

‘So. You'll have to keep Beth in the manner to which she's become accustomed.'

I can do better than that. I might even run to a decent central heating system – I might also have said that, but I didn't. In fact I said, ‘Of course I will.' But with a second in PPE and no immediate job prospects I wasn't quite sure how.

‘Beth needs a good deal of understanding. She's a lot like me.' I looked at the crafty, wrinkled face, the bald head and tufts of hair on the cheek-bones and I thought that nothing was ever less like Ophelia. We were sitting together after breakfast. Beth had gone into Tavistock with her mother to see about the bridesmaids' dresses and I was left at the mercy of Jaunty and the dogs.

‘There is one thing I
can
do for you. And I'm pleased to have the chance of helping the young hopeful.' He leant back in his chair and looked at me in a manner which seemed vaguely threatening. ‘How'd you like to work for a television company, Mister Progmire?'

‘Well, of course ...' I was more than a little astonished. ‘I've been in lots of plays. I'm sure I'd be able to direct.'

‘Not that exactly.'

‘You don't mean acting?'

‘God, no. Forget acting. You told me yourself you got slated by the critics. No. I mean in the accounts department. There's a fellow I know. He's a – Well ... he's a connection of mine. I suppose you think I'm just an old fart who spends his time knee-deep in horse shit. Well, let me tell you, young hopeful. I have connections. Everyone has, who's knocked about the world a bit.'

So that, strangely enough, was how I got started at Megapolis. Before then, I, Philip William Progmire, took Bethany Abigail Blair to be my lawful wedded wife. Dunster arrived the afternoon before the ceremony with his suit neatly packed in a box from Moss Bros. He was greeted by Beth's family with what I thought was unjustified respect. Even the dogs failed to leap at his crotch and slunk into their baskets, as though in the presence of a power which they, for some totally unknown reason, respected. That night I had a stag-party among the oak beams and horse-brasses of the Jolly Huntsman which Jaunty insisted on attending. He sat next to Dunster and listened to him attentively, his head cocked and an ear occasionally cupped in his hand, as though fearful of missing any of the pearls of wisdom likely to drop from my best man's lips.

‘I suppose you couldn't miss the stag-party because you're so tremendously fond of stags?' Dunster suggested to the Major, and I became exceedingly anxious.

‘Of course. Beautiful creatures. Everyone on the moor is extremely fond of them.'

‘Is that why you keep on killing them?'

‘Have to, of course. They need culling. For the good of the species.'

‘So you're doing them a kindness, really?'

‘Certainly we are.'

‘Keeping down the numbers?'

‘That's exactly it.'

‘So you find one grazing peacefully and chase it for miles. Then you kill it when it gets into a stream to cool down.'

‘Shot first, by the hunt servants. Then cut up, of course. That's the way it's done,' Jaunty agreed. In the pause that followed I hoped Dunster had done with the subject, but he had only been preparing the ground for attack. ‘Would you agree, sir,' he asked the Major politely, ‘that there are too many people in the world?'

‘Yes, of course, there are. Lanes clogged up with little men driving with their hats on. Moor covered with trippers in the summer. Far too many.'

‘Particularly old people. Some of them aren't much use, are they?'

‘Dunster!' I tried an interruption. ‘Has that bottle got stuck to the table?' My best man took absolutely no notice, but went on cheerfully.

‘So, Major Blair. If you were to spot an old-age pensioner on some lawn or other ...'

‘Say again?' Jaunty was, perhaps, feigning deafness.

‘If you found an old lady sitting in the sun somewhere,' Dunster shouted, quietening the noisy table.

‘I heard you the first time.'

‘I mean, you might decide to cull her. You might get the dogs to chase her across the moor for three or four hours. Then, when she cooled her feet in a stream somewhere, the hunt servants could shoot her and cut her up?'

You've done it again, Dunster, I thought. I can't even get married without you coming down and starting a violent argument with my father-in-law. But then I saw Jaunty looking at me and, for the first time in our acquaintance, he was smiling.

‘Your friend, Mr Dunster,' he said with apparent delight, ‘is extraordinarily entertaining company. He must cheer up all you frightfully serious geezers at Oxford.'

‘I do my very best,' Dunster agreed, it's not always appreciated.'

I got married in a cloud of pride and apprehension and I spent the evening in an alcoholic daze. Blair Cottage was warmed at last by the presence of innumerable bodies, young and old, beautiful and grotesque, some dancing, some clasped together in corners, some singing in the kitchen. There were hunt followers and Oxford thespians, Beth's countless cousins and Jaunty's band of creditors. Through it all Mike smiled patiently and Jaunty introduced my best man to all his friends and acquaintances as Mr Dunster: ‘First really bright fellow ever came out of Oxford. Brilliant raconteur, this one. Quite brilliant.' I was standing with Beth and her mother when someone came and told us that the girl groom was taking a bath with both Polonius and Guildenstem. ‘Oh, dear,' Mike said, with what I thought was admirable concern, ‘I'm afraid there's never very much hot water.'

Later, very much later, finding the lavatory occupied by a number of people, I wandered out on to the gravel. I was standing there in the moonlight when I heard voices and saw some lights from the stable block. There was a crash and the sound of hoof beats on concrete and Jaunty's neurotic grey hunter appeared with a dark figure aboard. At first I took the rider, who wore a black coat with flapping tails, for a waiter, but I should have known better. As the animal trotted, with increasing speed, from the yard, the moonlight fell on the determined face of Dunster. I'm sure that my best man had never ridden a horse before, but he kicked it with his heels, held the reins with one hand and the mane with another, and went cantering down the lane. Then, to my utter amazement, the horse gathered its wits together, paused for only a moment and then took the dark, ill-omened figure of Dunster crashing through the twigs and branches at the top of a hedge and on to the moor. As I watched them hurl themselves into the shadows I was conscious of Jaunty beside me, holding a dark tumbler of whisky, and I waited for the inevitable explosion.

‘My God!' he said, and I swear he was still smiling. ‘You've got to hand it to him. Your friend Mr Dunster has spunk!'

All these things happened a long time ago, in and around the period of
Hamlet
, a performance, which like the acting out of my own youth, may not have been entirely satisfactory but which yet gave me a great deal of pleasure. Now I was Trigorin, a middle-aged author, ‘charming perhaps but very inferior to Tolstoy'. By bullying the local businesses and incessantly begging for money, the Muswell Hill Mummers had built a small theatre, known to us, somewhat archly, as the Mummery. There we rehearsed, quarrelled, started up love affairs, had attacks of stage-fright and rare moments of triumph, and made most of our money from the bar and the sale of ice-cream in the intervals. We opened in January and came into immediate competition with the new hit show on television
Operation Dust Storm.
Generals strangely camouflaged, pointing at maps like schoolteachers, streams of tanks crossing the desert, spectacular firework displays and bombs with an unerring sense of direction and endless speculation as to what might or might not happen when the war really got going – these things provided the peace-loving citizens of Muswell Hill with a nightly entertainment far more spectacular and engrossing than
The Seagull.
The house on the first night was so thin that I had no difficulty in spotting Cris Bellhanger in the third row, next to the aisle, ‘I enjoyed it very much. In all sincerity.' I had found him standing alone with half a pint of lager in the bar after the show. The actors were calling each other darling and pretending to be professionals. ‘God, I was really down in the second act!' and ‘What about the Bath chair wheels sticking? Didn't you notice? We had to slide Dennis out in it, and he weighed about a ton.' Standing still among so much fluttering Cris said, ‘A man who can take a rational view of himself is a rare thing. I thought you managed that very well. I'll buy you a beer.'

We carried our half pints to a bench by the wall and sat under caricatures of leading Mummers, remote from the still over-excited actors. I said, ‘This
is
a surprise.'

‘You sent me an invitation."

‘I never expected you'd come.'

‘That was a mistake. If you do something, you should expect the consequences. Angie'll be sorry she missed it, stuck in the country.'

‘Just as well. She's a professional.'

‘She's watching television. Reminds her of her old war films, I suppose. Only thing that's missing is Johnny Mills.' His smile concealed, I thought a deep feeling of revulsion at the sight of another army on the move. As an old soldier he was, in contrast to Major Jaunty, more of a pacifist than I could be sure of being. ‘I wanted to talk to you,' he said, ‘out of the office. I wanted to ask your advice. You know a good deal about drama.'

Around us the actors were getting ready for the first-night party. Madame Arkadina was taking the cling film off the sandwiches and sausage rolls. She was a large and muscular physiotherapist who approached Chekhov's play as though it were a patient complaining rather too much about a slightly sprained ankle. Nina, now wearing jeans and a Muswell Hill Mummers T-shirt, came staggering in with a box of wine and smiled at me as she eased it on to the bar. She was called Lucy and had just qualified as a solicitor. We had giggled together a little during rehearsals about Pam the physio's briskly common sense approach to the play.

‘I don't know nearly as much as the professionals in the drama department at Megapolis.'

‘That's rubbish. The last three instalments of
Social Workers
have been complete garbage.' Cris lowered his voice a little, although none of the actors was paying us the slightest attention. ‘What I want to put to you, as a bit of an expert on the subject, is this. Drama and real life are totally different things, aren't they? Poles apart.'

‘Well, not exactly.'

‘Don't bother about all that “not exactly”.' Cris was always impatient of imprecise language at board meetings. ‘One is the truth and the other's fiction. Quite obviously.'

‘Well, I shouldn't have said it was absolutely obvious.'

‘You should never have acted Hamlet at Oxford. You seem incapable of coming to a clear view.'

‘Well, there you are, you see.'

‘Where am I?'

‘Drama and life. They do get mixed up. From time to time.' And bring you some good times, I thought, until the curtain comes down and you discover it was just a play.

I looked over to where Lucy, my Nina, was opening the box of wine. She was talking to someone I had seen in the audience – a small man with a pale, bald head and a healthy growth of black beard, so that his face was like one in those old comic drawings which would make sense which ever way up it was. Lucy was smiling modestly at him as he left her and I thought he must have been saying something complimentary about her performance. He nodded a little nervously at me as he went out.

Cris said, ‘Let's try to keep it simple, shall we? For the sake of the average punter who'll see
War Crimes
in the intervals between making love, or Nescafe or whatever.'

‘All right.'

‘What we're going to be making are documentaries. We want to tell it as it happened, don't we?'

‘I imagine that's the aim.'

‘Don't imagine anything. Plain, hard facts. That's what we're after.'

‘Well ...'

‘None of your gloomy Dane doubts about it. If it isn't true, it's not worth doing.'

‘I suppose not.'

‘The people we've got working on
War Crimes,
I'm afraid, may have a remarkable talent for invention. I'm just nervous they might like a good story better than a real story. We want reporters, not artists.'