Dunster (12 page)

He didn't mention the name Dunster, but I knew who he was talking about. The excitement of the first night, the adrenalin generated by the challenge of performance, the joyful relief at having got through it, had drained away. I was left with the certainty that I was about to hear bad news. I didn't know then how bad. In fact I felt there was one thing Cris needn't worry, about; so far as I was concerned Dunster was no more an artist than I was Laurence Olivier.

‘I don't want anyone to start inventing for the sake of dramatic effect.'

‘I suppose not.'

‘It's particularly tricky, you see, when it comes to a war crime committed by our own people.'

‘Were there some?'

‘Of course.' Our audience was leaving the bar now and the excitement of the actors was growing. There was a pop and a cry of delighted concern as the first sparkling champagne-style bottle was opened and shed froth. They didn't get called crimes because no one was ever tried for them. Only the defeated commit crimes. But, oh yes, we did them. That's why I want a programme about one. It's the whole point of the series.'

Another bottle exploded. Konstantin, in love with Nina, played by a dark and soft-voiced young man in computers, arrived with his new Indian girlfriend. It seemed worlds away from the hidden crimes of an almost-forgotten war.

‘They've got hold of a story about the Italian campaign. It's something I remember.'

‘You told me.'

‘It was an incredibly confused situation. So many groups involved. The German Army, of course, and the Allies. And then you've got German SS chasing Communist partisans, some of our SAS groups in the mountains, and the Italian fascists who were the real bastards ... Well, it's hard for someone of your age to get that lot sorted out. Hard for anyone, come to that.'

‘I can imagine.' I was tired and my mouth was dry. I didn't want to hear about Dunster's problems.

‘It would be so easy to get the wrong idea. Perhaps accuse an innocent person. We might do a terrible injustice, land ourselves in huge libel damages.' Cris smiled. ‘That should worry the accounts department.'

‘Is there a particular story?' I asked him.

‘I've got an idea they've got hold of one. It concerns a Brit, I believe. Still alive. Chap who keeps his head down somewhere in the depths of the countryside. I wouldn't want us to trouble his old age for nothing.'

‘What about a glass of bubbles?' Nina, the solicitor, approached us as we sat with the tide of the party rising around us. ‘And wouldn't your friend like to stay for the bash?'

‘No, no, thank you very much. It was a wonderful evening.' Cris lied convincingly and said to me, with his hand on my shoulder, ‘You enjoy yourself.'

‘What do you want me to do about what you've told me?'

‘Nothing for the moment. I'll have to think about it. What we really need is someone completely sensible to keep an eye on it. We've got to be so careful. I mean, for God's sake. We don't want to commit another war crime, do we?'

‘You think we might?'

‘It's just possible. Is that the time?' He had taken out the gold watch he kept on a chain in his waistcoat and looked amazed at what it told him. ‘Angie'll think I've dropped dead. Have a terrific party. You deserve it. I didn't mean to spoil your evening.'

‘Good-night, Cris.'

He walked away from us and, when he reached the door, didn't look round but raised his hand in a sort of distant salute. I thought it a gesture of sadness at the prospect of going home to another war on the telly.

‘I was terrible tonight.' Nina, otherwise Lucy, had taken Cris's seat after he had left.

‘No, honestly, I thought you were very good.'

‘You're lying. I was terrible.'

‘Not a bit of it. You've got to remember, Nina was a bad actress. It takes a remarkable actress to play a bad actress well.'

‘You mean, I was just a bad actress playing a bad actress? I just wish you could tell me the truth for a change.'

‘I always do.'

‘Now you really are lying.' She was right, of course. She was very young and had my daughter's uncomfortable knack of getting at the truth. ‘Maurice Zellenek's a client of ours,' she went on, and the name meant nothing to me. ‘I helped him over a house and he promised to be in this evening. He thought you were terrific.'

‘You mean the little chap with all his hair under his chin?'

‘You're so cool.' She looked at me in a complimentary sort of way, ‘That's what I admire so about your Trigorin. All that suave, middle-aged charm.'

‘That really was acting,' I told her. ‘I'm not in the least cool. In fact I'm anxious most of the time, except when I'm playing a part.' What about being middle-aged? I was forty-three, perhaps twenty years older than her, probably older than Chekhov's writer when he seduced Nina in the play. My anxiety increased and, as soon as I reasonably could, I got up to dance with Pam, the physio. I'd had quite enough of becoming involved with people because we had met as characters in a play.

‘There's absolutely no point,' Dunster had said that blustery spring morning – was it a few years or a lifetime before? – as we stood by the ruins of Alexandra Palace looking out over London. ‘No point at all, Progmire, in us trying to hide the truth from each other.'

Since that day Dunster and I had hardly spoken. I had avoided him, although I don't know if he had taken any trouble to avoid me. Sometimes I got him on the telephone, but only by mistake. Sometimes we met outside his house, or in his hallway, but that was also by mistake. I have no great appetite for living through that day again. I have, you must understand, lived through it often enough on bad nights and long, empty afternoons in the years between. But that day, and the time before and after it, had an effect on the production of
War Crimes
and I must do my best to make it all clear to you. It's a story, I suppose, which has happened to a great many people. I just wish to God that it had never happened to me.

The one thing that everyone knows about memory is that every day of your childhood and youth remains stuck in your mind forever, while what happened last week is instantly flushed down the drain of forgetfulness. I can see myself, tormented with embarrassment, while Dunster heckled the little evangelical at Speakers' Corner with blinding clarity. So far as I am concerned

Mrs Oakshott's bathroom fittings will be with me until the day I die. Every line and every moment of that damp and dour
Hamlet
is still present, for pain and consolation. But the time after I got my job at Megapolis, the years of marriage and living in Muswell Hill, have faded and slipped away in patches, like a wall painting in a poor state of repair. And it's bad luck that those greyish blots, where the damp got in, would no doubt have shown the best times: when Natasha was very young, and I started to work closely with Cris, and we bought the house in Grasmere Road. But if you were to ask me to remember exactly when Tash took her first staggering steps, or whose party it was at which Beth and I made up our first really serious quarrel under a pile of coats which were gradually removed by drunken guests who paid no attention to us, I would be hard put to remember. The brightest parts of the picture have vanished beyond hope of restoration.

Perhaps what I should do is just give you the facts as far as I remember them. I went to work in the accounts department at Megapolis under Gary Penrose, who was then a youngish middle-aged man with a moustache and hair just over his ears, a gold metal watch-strap and an expression of perpetual anxiety. Every morning he would ask me, ‘How's your car going, Philip?' and look reassured when I told him that Beth's Renault was quite undependable in rain or frost or hot weather. Gary advised me on how to survive in the company. ‘Don't try to be a high-flier. High-fliers are due for a crash at Megapolis. You know what I've got myself, when it comes to wheels? Toyota. Middle-management vehicle. You'll stick to middle-management vehicles, if you take my advice, Philip. And keep your head down.'

Not long after I'd started work, to my surprise, Cris Bellhanger, in his shirtsleeves and braces, banged his tray down beside mine in the canteen. ‘Welcome to the madhouse, Progmire.' He'd smiled at me. ‘I hear you starred in
Hamlet
at university. You're just the type of fellow we need in accounts. Put a bit of poetry into the balance sheets.' I had no idea how he had got this information, and our conversation got me into some trouble with my immediate boss. ‘Chattering in the canteen to the chairman of the Board is hardly keeping your head down, Philip. I say, he didn't mention anything about me and Andrea, did he?' Gary was having a flagrantly obvious affair with his secretary, a brisk, unsmiling person who was older and a great deal less attractive than Mrs Penrose, whom he used to bring to our annual dinner in the Connaught Rooms. Fear that this romance might become known to his wife was another cause of Gary's anxiety.

Beth and I had been lucky. When we found the house, my father lent me some of the money for the deposit and the rest came, astonishingly enough, from Jaunty, ‘I have a few little goodies lying in various hidey-holes. No. I didn't tell you that when we went through the accounts. I thought it might come as a bit of a sweetener for Mister Progmire if he ever took on a girl who has to be ridden on a particularly tight rein.' When I asked Beth if she'd any idea that Jaunty had so much loose cash about him she said, ‘The only way to get on with Dad is to ask him as few questions as possible. I wouldn't wish to know everything that goes on under that filthy old tweed cap of his.' I didn't inquire further. We decided that we could afford the mortgage repayments if we let off the top room, and our first tenant was Queen Gertrude, who'd come up to London to work in advertising. After her, our lodgers were all quiet, friendly and clean and, when Tash was born, ready to do occasional baby-sitting. Beth's black moods departed; she seemed, to my surprise and gratitude, content with life in Muswell Hill to an extent which I wouldn't have believed possible when we were at Oxford.

Dunster became a memory, one of the things we laughed about together: the eccentric, the stealer of Plumstead's dinner jacket, the too honest friend who gave us terrible notices, the lucky idiot who, totally unable to ride, jumped a hedge on Jaunty's hunter and didn't break his neck. He was writing articles for magazines and I would get an occasional blast of the Dunster anger and contempt from Africa, or Washington, or some town hall in the north-east of England. And then one evening, when Beth had taken Tash down to Exmoor, he rang up.

‘Hullo, old man. It's about the room.'

‘What room?'

‘Your room, of course. Benson's wife's left him at last and his girlfriend's moving in with him. That's my reliable information.' It was true that our last lodger had been a quiet girl with tragic eyes who filled the unlikely role of mistress to Benson, the gravedigger. I'm absolutely bloody homeless. So I'll come round.'

‘Where are you?'

‘In the telephone box at the corner of your street.'

‘Beth's away with her parents.'

‘Don't worry, old man. I'll do us a fry up.'

He came with three bottles of Chianti and, for some extraordinary reason, I was glad to see him. It was as though I had gone for too long without the salt in the egg of my existence. We drank two bottles and I let him produce the smoking, partially blackened food and the heavy smell of bacon fat which was my memory of his childhood home. He was funny about the editor of the
Informer,
the left-wing journalist, who was apparently a closet golfer and a secret member of the local Rotary Club. He gave me all the details of the latest Washington sex scandal and described a helicopter journey with an army major who was terrified of flying and clutched a miniature teddy bear for comfort. He had, it seemed, penetrated the Church of England synod to detect some dirty work in the selection of a new archbishop; and lived with a gospel singer in Maryland to expose a racketeering faith-healer. He sat with his feet on a kitchen chair and said, ‘I envy you, Progmire. My God. I envy your success.'

‘What success is that?'

‘You've got a home. A family. You've become a cheerful old Muswell Hill-billy. Damn it all, you're happy.'

‘I suppose I am.' I was worried. Once you began to talk like that it might not last.

‘And I, old man, haven't even got a roof over my head.'

‘How did you manage that?' Not that, in Dunster's case, I thought it would be difficult.

‘Living with this Jo Burton. Does the women's rights page in the
Informer.
Militant, my dear old Progmire. ‘I can't tell you how militant this Jo person is. She locked me out of the flat because I wouldn't tell her I loved her.'

‘Why wouldn't you?'

‘It wouldn't have been true.'

‘So you're out on the street?'

‘All my stuff,' he said with dignity, ‘is in the left-luggage department at Euston Station.'

‘Then why couldn't you say it?'

‘Say what?'

‘Say you loved this Jo Burton. I mean, at least you wouldn't have had to move your stuff out. And she might have liked it.'

‘Oh, Progmire.' He looked at me sadly. ‘You have absolutely no sense of morality. Does that worry you at all?'

‘As a matter of fact it's one of the few things that doesn't.'

‘So are you going to let me your room?'

‘I'll have to ring Beth.'

‘That's what I thought. There's a bottle left.'

Later I telephoned and got Jaunty. He said, ‘Are you drunk? I'll get Beth. She's talking to her mother.'

Beth said, ‘Dad says you're drunk.'

‘I miss you.'