Dunster (15 page)

I looked round the room. At some of the tables the interviews were continuing and the red lights of tape-recorders glowed by the side plates. On the walls fashion photographs were now being exhibited. Models, standing with their legs apart and facing a high wind, had ousted men in combat gear and crying children. War was something we didn't want to think about too often or brood about for long. But we were being led back on a surprise trip to a long-forgotten battlefield by a man who seemed prepared to tell us nothing at all about what we might expect to find when we got there.

‘So,' Peregrine Gryce said, ‘are you for the job?'

‘I don't know. I'll need time to think about it.'

‘I suppose you're a bit wary of leaving a nice safe desk in accounts. Is that it?'

‘Something like that,' I told him.

Although I had been offered a job as associate producer, I took my preferred option and did nothing. That is to say I stayed quiet, kept my head down and got on with my work. Tash came for her weekends and we went to the movies and had lunch at the Indonesian restaurants in Muswell Hill which she liked, and I willingly put up with Deng Deng Goreng and beanshoots for the pleasure of her company. During these visits Tash was in charge, cooking, on the evenings we stayed in, elaborate and rather good meals which she never washed up, employing a process which she called ‘leaving it in to soak'. I asked regularly, trying to drain my voice of all emotion, about her mother, and she would answer automatically. ‘Beth's all right,' and pass on to other subjects.

We hardly ever mentioned Dunster, mainly because I couldn't bring myself to say ‘How's your step-father?' I hadn't seen him since the wedding. Beth had remarried in Camden Town register office and invited most of the old cast of
Hamlet.
Dunster had written with an extraordinary suggestion. ‘I don't exactly know whether a best man's called for in the civil ceremony, but I wouldn't want anybody else but you, Progmire, old man.' I read the letter in the kitchen, dropped it into the tidy-bin and arranged to take a trip up the Nile at the time of the ceremony Most of the other passengers found that Egypt had an appalling effect on their stomachs and I sat alone on the deck of a boat which by then bore a striking resemblance to the
Mary Celeste.
I watched the muddy banks, the villages with their biblical appearance and television aerials, glide past and tried not to remember the punt under the willows, or the icy, rosette-hung bedroom in Blair Cottage.

Not long after my lunch with Peregrine Gryce, I got a telephone call from Major Jaunty Blair. He regretted the way we had ‘drifted apart' and suggested a meeting: ‘What about a spot of dinner at my club?' I should have declined the treat. My continued involvement with Beth's family was like picking at a scab which should have been allowed time to heal I didn't want to talk about her, hear about her, or be made to remember. All the same I went.

I had expected to find Jaunty half asleep in a leather armchair under a painting of the Battle of Inkerman in some dusty retreat for retired officers of the British Army, but I was mistaken. Dandini's, when I managed to find it tucked away behind Shepherd Market, had a white tie, top hat and silver-knobbed cane over the door, depicted in neon strips that had failed in patches. The doorman was a pale young man in a braided jacket many sizes too large for him, who was leaning against a wall playing, what we used to call at St George's, pocket billiards. When I asked if Major Blair was in the club he said, ‘There's only one old guy here yet. You better go and ask him.' Inside there was a lot of crimson flock wallpaper, stained in patches, pink-shaded lamps, tables round a minute dance floor and a number of dispirited girls in white ties, tails and fishnet tights engaged in low-key gossip. Jaunty was at the bar. When he saw me he drew back his lips and gave a low growl. I was reminded of the dogs at Blair Cottage that used to leap for my groin.

‘God, this place has gone off. Everything's gone off. Tracy!' This emerged as a bark at a girl at the far end of the counter who was very slowly polishing glasses. She was blonde with a face, I thought, like that of a very young white mouse. She was suffering from a severe cold and in the intervals of polishing dabbed at her nose with a tiny bundle of pink Kleenex. A closer view of her seemed to calm Beth's old father a little. ‘Another large G and T for me please, Tracy dear. And one for my guest.'

I said I'd prefer white wine and the girl was delighted to tell us that they didn't do white wines, not by the glass and it'd have to be a bottle.

‘Oh, come on, Tracy!' Jaunty's grin looked savage but it was meant, I suppose, to be ingratiating, ‘I've been a member here long enough, haven't I? And you always used to do it by the glass, didn't you, for any guest of mine?'

‘Anyway, I'm not Tracy.' As the girl advanced on us I saw, on the large plastic notice fixed to her lapel, the word, Tina. ‘We haven't got no Tracy.'

‘Tracy gone!' There was, in the Major's voice, a terrible note of doom, as though the meaning had also gone out of his life. ‘But you look so exactly like Tracy.'

‘I don't know, do I?' The girl was pouring gin from an upturned bottle on the wall. ‘I don't know what the girl might have looked like. Now. Do I have to open a bottle of white?'

‘No,' I reassured her, ‘I'll have a gin and tonic as well.' I didn't want to add to her problems.

When the drinks were poured things began to look up for my host. A big-breasted and motherly person carrying two huge menus in scarlet covers with gold tassels came up smiling and said, ‘As soon as you're ready, Major dear. I've kept a nice table for you and chef's put on the
caneton à l'orange.
Your favourite.'

‘There you are, you see.' Jaunty shot me a look of triumph from over the top of the menu. ‘They know me here. You know how to look after me, don't you, Marion?'

‘Marcia.' She smiled tolerantly and looked, I thought, like the nicest kind of hospital matron. ‘And will it be your usual, Major? It's the Barolo, isn't it?'

‘The Barolo Italiano.' Jaunty was now almost cheerful. ‘And another couple of generous gins, old girl. Prawn cocktail to kick off, Progmire? We're here to enjoy ourselves!'

‘Thank you, young man.' Marcia smiled at my host, took our menus and left us, a kind, top-heavy woman walking unsteadily on shiny high heels who had managed to remember Jaunty.

Later I was looking round at the Dandini club where we were almost the only diners. Three brawny men in suits who looked like plain-clothes police officers were having dinner with an elderly man similarly dressed. They were listening to his stories, laughing at his jokes, and I thought he might have been a retired superintendent and that it was some private reunion of a few privileged members of the Vice Squad. The duck
à l'orange
had not been hatched out long enough in the microwave and the Black Forest gâteau lingered cloyingly on the palate.

Jaunty said, ‘They know me here, of course. Know me well. I've only got to breathe the word and they'll make you a member. No other reference needed!'

‘I don't really think so.' Why did I feel, obscurely, that I didn't want to disappoint Jaunty? ‘It's a bit off my beaten track. I mean, it's rather a long way from Muswell Hill.'

‘It's a bloody long way from Exmoor but I've been a regular for years. I come here on leave, you might say, when things get a bit rough on the front line.' I wasn't sure what he meant by the front line, but I thought it must be the altogether peaceful presence of Mike. And then Jaunty gave me another of his unnerving grins. ‘I should think you might find a place like this pretty useful, living the sort of life you do now.'

‘What do you mean exactly?'

‘A geezer on his own. Unmarried. I don't need to spell it out, do I, Progmire?'

‘Is that why you asked me here?' I felt a wave of depression. Was that the way ahead? Tina with a cold or Marcia leading me gently and tactfully into the geriatric ward?

‘Well, no Not exactly.'

‘Why, then?' Tina had taken a tray of drinks over to the Vice Squad. As she set down their glasses, she bent her knees in a curious bobbing motion and smiled at their greeting.

‘It's about my blessed son-in-law. The new one, that is. He shouldn't be doing that job.'

‘Which job is that?'

‘The one he's got on for your people. I tried to tell Bethany. It's a war he knows absolutely nothing about. Too young for it. Most people are. Only just a few of us left. Only a very few of us understand what it was like exactly.' He looked at me in a way he never had before, as though he was asking me to feel sorry for him He filled my glass. ‘Barolo.' He rolled the word round his mouth with a sort of relish. ‘Reminds me of Italy. Not that we got it there in those days. Horse's pee mixed with red ink and paint-stripper. That's what the peasants gave us if we were very lucky. That was our tipple in those far-off days.'

‘Which far-off days were those?' I asked the question reluctantly, feeling that each word was a step further into a plot that no longer concerned me. But it apparently concerned Beth and so I asked the question.

‘Winter of 1944. In the High Apennines. Bloody bleak and bloody dangerous. The King of Italy had surrendered, but Mussolini was still kicking about in the north. Allied armies fighting their way all up the peninsula, which was a complete waste of effort, quite honestly. Germans fallen back on Florence, and in the hills ... Well, all sorts of odds and sods.'

‘Partisans, mainly communists,' I told him. ‘Italian fascists and some British SAS sections, dropped by parachute. Oh, and the Germans of course.'

He looked at me suspiciously, as though I was trying to trap him. ‘You seem to know a lot about it.'

‘I know something.'

‘Not how we felt, though, do you? None of you peace babies know that. Look, I wasn't much older than you both were when you put on that show at Oxford. What was it?'

‘
Hamlet
.'

‘Not much older than that when I was an army veteran. We'd fought across North Africa. We hadn't been home for – Oh, it seemed as long as anyone could remember. We were shagged out, tired of each other, tired of sleeping in our clothes. Most of all we were tired of being scared to death every waking hour from what I remember.' His hand was unsteady as he raised his brandy glass. For some reason, in the tacky surroundings of the Dandini club, wartime terror had returned to him. This was an entirely different Jaunty from the old man who had told me the army taught him everything he knew, and that war was the finest university. ‘Italy was the end, as far as I was concerned. The end of the bloody line.

‘To be absolutely honest with you, Progmire. I never understood what we were meant to be doing there. They dropped us in between the communists, who were busy getting ready to take over after the war, and the worst of the fascists, who were a gang of murderers on the way out. And then there was the German Army. Bloody good fighting-machine, you've got to hand it to them. What were we meant to do with six men and a boy? Frighten them out of their wits? Cut off their retreat? Best we could do was to keep our heads down, hide in some cave or in the pigsty of a peasant who'd betray you for the price of a bottle of grappa.'

So this was the setting of one of Dunster's scripts: the High Apennines, which Peregrine Gryce had said would make a ‘fun location'. This was the drama to be created by actors and extras and cameramen, which Jaunty Blair had acted out for real a lifetime ago. He took a gulp of brandy, coughed as it hit his chest and growled on. ‘Do you think everyone fought that scrap entirely according to the Queensberry Rules? Or the Geneva Convention, come to that? Do you? Do you think if they'd've bagged a group of Musso's cutthroats, they'd've built a nice comfortable prison for them and arranged for Red Cross parcels to be sent in? Do you honestly think they did that?'

By ‘they' did he mean ‘we'? I felt I was going to get some sort of confession and had no idea what I should do with it. I looked down and saw Jaunty's gnarled hand on my arm. He was looking at me beseechingly and I was reminded of all the animals he had hunted.

“An old geezer has nothing to do with what he was as a youngster. Progmire. We all change completely. We haven't got the same bloody fingernails. Our hair falls out. Our teeth aren't ours any more. You can't hold an old man responsible. Not for what happened when he was a different mind in a different body and scared shitless. Do you catch my drift, Progmire? Do you see what I mean, old son?'

‘I'm not sure I do.' What struck me most about this speech was that he had called me son, as though Beth and I were still together. But then he brought me back to reality.

‘Your friend Dunster,' he said, ‘can charm the birds out of the trees.'

‘He's not my friend exactly.'

‘No. No, of course not. Not under the circumstances." Jaunty seemed cheered up for a moment, and then his gloom returned ‘He got me talking one night, over a jar at Blair Cottage. Got me talking about the old days.'

‘When you were someone else?'

‘When we all were. Perhaps I had a jar too much. I don't know. We got out some old maps and started talking about that time in the mountains. He seemed so bloody interested. Led me on, I suppose Not that I told him anything, not anything sensational, believe me. But perhaps I set him off, inventing. And I want to tell you this, Progmire. He's got nothing to go on. No evidence at all, you understand? No use him poking about and trying to find a story.'

‘Is that what he's doing?'

‘Something he can sell for your geezers to put on the box. That's what he's after. You've got to tell your lot. There's nothing in it. No truth at all.'