Dunster (17 page)

I remembered what Cris had seen in Italy, a town deserted and a mined church. Could it have been the same town, in the same campaign? Cris had certainly blamed the Germans; Dunster had a different solution.

‘
Fact
' he went on:

Two escaped British prisoners of war were shot by the Italian fascists in Pomeriggio's square only a week before the massacre. Had someone in the town betrayed their hiding-place – a cave high up above the Chiesa Nuova? There was certainly one British SAS (Special Air Service regiment) team in the area and probably more at the time of the massacre. "Those commandos didn't fight" one veteran campaigner told me [and here I recognized a quotation from Major Jaunty Blair] "by the Queensberry Rules or the Geneva Convention." Such teams contained a demolition specialist, used to blowing up munition dumps or supply centres. An ancient, little-used church would present no problems to such an expert.

I have researched this incident thoroughly [Where's the research? – someone, presumably Peregrine, had scrawled in red biro] and I have been fortunate enough to meet an ex-officer who was serving in the SAS in the area around Pomeriggio at the time. [Who? – from Peregrine) For very understandable reasons he wishes to remain anonymous. [We'll need an affidavit from him if we're to go on with this – Peregrine] I am also on the track of at least one witness still living in Italy whom I intend to visit. [Bring back statements, certified by a local notary] From these and other reliable sources [What sources?] I have been able to piece together the truth. [Here the red biro had merely placed a large question mark]

The SAS team knew that some villagers had betrayed our escaped prisoners. They may also have known that the fascists used the deserted Chiesa Nuova as their headquarters and for occasional meetings. They undoubtedly knew that everyone would be in the church on the Feast of Santa Magdalena [Can you prove this? Peregrine asked] and on no other day in the year.

Are we simple-minded enough to believe that taking reprisals was a form of warfare only practised by the Germans? Revenge fulfils a basic human need. The town was responsible for the deaths of two Britons, and so the town must pay the penalty. That is exactly what we did to Pomeriggio in the High Apennines.

It might be argued that there's no point in punishing a town unless you let everyone know who's done the punishing. [What about that? – Peregrine] The answer is that the town was extremely isolated and the SAS team responsible was moved back to Maltraverso immediately after the incident.

Historians of the campaign, and many people at the time, were misled by the murder of the German officer, which seemed to give the SS a motive. I think I know who strangled the German. [You know everything, don't you? Then why don't you tell us? – Peregrine] It was no one from the town.

I read all this through twice and then sat for a long time, postponing my involvement in a massacre that had happened so long ago, the repercussions of which seemed likely to last forever. Then I lifted the phone and asked Miss Pippa Marching to get me a line. ‘Dial 9 and do it yourself,' she rebuked me smartly, and so I called the number I usually avoided and heard Beth, sounding, as she always had, surprised and slightly out of breath.

‘Hullo.'

‘Oh, hullo. Is Dunster there?' Not Dick, not your husband, never anything but Dunster.

‘He's abroad.'

‘Not by any chance in the High Apennines, somewhere to the north of Florence?'

‘He might be. It's not the sort of thing he tells me much about.' I had a sudden hope that this was a criticism, but she sounded perfectly satisfied with the situation. ‘I suppose he may ring me, or just turn up. Why do you want to know? Is it about Natasha?'

‘No. Tash is the least of my worries.'

‘So why did you ring up? You don't usually.'

‘I've been thinking. We might have lunch.' In fact I had only just thought of it.

‘Because he's away?' I could imagine her smiling as she said it, but I knew it was no real encouragement.

‘Because I have something very important to tell you.'

There was a silence, so long that I thought she had left my voice on the hall table and abandoned me to go about her business. At last she said, ‘Where are you?'

‘Soho. We could go to Sophia's. Could you make it at one?'

‘All right then.' She rang off and I put down the telephone. It had seemed, when I came to do it, almost too easy.

Sophia is the small, grey-haired, soft-voiced Italian who makes Piero's in Greek Street such a pleasure to visit. Beth and I used to go there when we came up to the West End to a theatre or cinema, and because of that I hardly ever go there now. Sophia greeted me warmly when I arrived at ten to one and there I sat, crumbling bread and drinking too much white wine, until Beth arrived on the dot of half past. I rose to greet her, feeling just as I had when she walked into the Indian restaurant in the Turl when our love affair had just started – no different at all.

‘I'm sorry.' She smoothed the back of her skirt and sat down. ‘I don't know what happened to the time.'

‘That's all right' – I found myself lying – ‘I haven't been here long, really. I had a busy morning.'

Sophia brought another bottle of Orvieto and said, ‘It's wonderful to see you together again.' She went away smiling and neither of us said anything to disillusion her. We were silent because I couldn't think of how to begin, and then Beth said, ‘You've got something to tell me? I'm very glad.'

‘Why are you glad?'

‘Aren't you going to marry one of those Mummers of yours? I thought that was what you had to tell me.'

‘Would you like it to be?'

‘Of course. It'd be better all round. I'm sure Tash would like to see you settled.'

It was as though this beautiful, red-headed woman I loved so much had become a kindly aunt, hoping that I would put the dangerous days of my youth behind me and get married and start a family. Settled indeed! For a moment I was almost pleased to have news to disturb her

‘I have to talk to you,' I said, ‘about Dunster.'

‘What about him?'

‘He may be about to write something that's going to cause a lot of pain and suffering.'

‘Well,' Beth said, ‘he usually does.' She caught sight of herself in the tarnished mirror by our table. Her long, pale fingers pushed back her hair. It wasn't so much that she sounded as though she had lost interest, but she was retreating behind that wall of vagueness which I knew so well.

‘It's a bit more serious than the notice he wrote about our
Hamlet.
' I tried to imagine that we were back at Oxford, discussing another Dunster outrage.

Beth said, ‘You were upset about that, weren't you?'

‘And you,' I said, ‘wanted me to knee him in the groin.'

She was still looking at her reflection, smiling at herself as though she didn't believe me.

“This isn't just a bad notice,' I told her. ‘He's going to write about something your father did, or what Dunster thinks he did.'

‘What Jaunty did?'

‘Something terrible. In the war.'

‘Well, most people did terrible things then, didn't they? That's what they got called up for.'

‘But not to massacre an entire town. In a church!' If I had wanted to shock her, I failed. She had abandoned her reflection and was looking round the restaurant as though for ways of escape.

‘Jaunty didn't do that.' Her voice was a sort of a shrug, less a denial than a deliberate retreat.

‘I don't know. I told you, Dunster thinks he knows.'

‘I suppose none of us knows what happens. In wars.'

That year's war had finished quickly. The short burst of desert fighting was over. An almost bloodless victory, one of the newspapers had said; most of the people dying being assorted Arabs killed in air raids, or retreating, or slaughtering each other. If we cared so little about them, why should we concern ourselves with what happened in a scarcely used Italian church almost half a century ago? Perhaps I shouldn't have cared if Beth's father hadn't been attacked, or if Dunster hadn't been the attacker. I said, ‘Do you imagine Jaunty wants a film made about him, suggesting he's a mass murderer?'

‘No,' she agreed, ‘I don't think he wants a film about him at all.'

‘Then, can't you stop Dunster?'

‘If I could stop him,' she said, ‘I don't suppose I'd be with him now.'

And that, as far as I was concerned, was the bleak and honest truth of the matter.

‘I'll have to see Dunster when he gets back,' I told her. ‘I'll have to talk to him.'

‘I'm sure he'll be glad to see you.' And then we went on to discuss other things: Tash and her A-levels. her chances of getting into Manchester University which she thought was going to suit her much better than Oxford – a place she was sure would be too ‘false' for her tastes. This was an expression I was afraid she had learnt from her step-father We kissed in the street when we parted, a small, polite tribute to the past, and then she was gone, walking quickly towards the Tube Whatever drama was going to be put on, Beth, it was clear, wasn't up for a part in it.

It was Wednesday when I had met Beth and for the rest of that week Peregrine was away somewhere in the north of England, and Dunster didn't come back from Italy. Pippa Marching treated me with unyielding suspicion and I had nothing to do but sit in my cell and worry about how I was going to deal with Dunster. The more I thought about it, the more slender and unsubstantiated the story of the massacre seemed. At the best moments I felt sure that I could make him see reason and drop it, and then I had to remind myself that reason was something Dunster found invisible. On Friday I gave up and told Pippa I was going home early, news which she received with no interest whatever. Sunday was going to be my birthday and I had invited a selection of Mummers to lunch. On Saturday I went shopping for this occasion. I was going to give them smoked salmon, roast pork with apple sauce, and an open tart that I bought at Pierre's Pâtisserie in Muswell Hill. I meant to think about anything but Pomeriggio and the Feast of Santa Magdalena in Lachrimae.

The party consisted of Pam, the physio, who had played Madame Arkadina, and her husband, Dennis, the dentist. There was Martin, the bank manager, who had directed
The Seagull
, and his wife, Muriel, who did our publicity. Ken, who had played Konstantin, came with his girlfriend Ranee; and finally there was Lucy, the solicitor. I had not meant to ask her, afraid that my dramatic seduction and abandonment of her in the play might start a friendship at a level for which I was not prepared. However, she came into the Mummery bar when I was asking Pam and Dennis and it became impossible to leave her out. When not excited by the aftermath of a performance, she was a quiet, methodical girl with short, dark hair and attentive, watchful eyes. I thought she would do well in her chosen profession.

Martin and Muriel brought champagne and the others parcels. Lucy's was wrapped up in pink and green paper with a matching card. I opened it and found a bright yellow silk shirt of the sort which might have decked out Peregrine Gryce. I stood holding it, wondering exactly what idea she had of me and how much it must have cost her, when there was a ring at the door bell and there was Natasha, wearing an old pair of jeans with a carefully cultivated hole in the knee, accompanied by a stocky boy who she said was George. She looked disappointed to find the place full of Mummers, as though I should have been celebrating my birthday alone with the Sunday papers. All the same, she gave me her presents: a single rose, a packet of incense, a piece of soap in the shape of a woman's bottom and a small model aeroplane. George had brought a bottle of Spanish wine, for which my thanks were effusive.

‘Mum remembered it was your birthday,' Tash said. ‘So she suggested we came over.'

‘That was nice of her.'

‘Anyway, George wants to get into television. I told him you could be a big help. Now you're an associate producer. George thinks that all television's crap and he wants to do something about it.'

George said, ‘Television's the language of the future. No one can write a novel after George Eliot and poetry's completely finished. So are the movies, except for Roger Corman. So it's over to you, Mr Progmire. You should be speaking for
now,
but all you're doing is making crappy costume dramas about maids in Edwardian country houses.'

I tried to explain that it was a long time since
Upstairs, Downstairs
– and that hadn't been made by Megapolis – anyway. And that up to now I'd been in accounts and hadn't had much of a chance to speak the language of the future. At which George looked at me with considerable pity.

‘Associate producer.' Dennis, the dentist, who had a perpetual and artificial suntan, and glasses hanging on a chain round his neck, spoke with the quiet, concerned voice which he used to ask which tooth was giving the trouble, ‘Isn't that something of a departure?'

‘Philip's gone creative,' Pam, the physio, explained, it's what he's always wanted.'

‘Producers and directors' – as Muriel spoke, she blew out a little cloud of cocktail biscuit – ‘I can never remember the difference. Isn't the producer the chap that looks through the camera and says “cut”?'

‘No, darling. That's the director.'

‘Really?' Dennis, the dentist, looked astonished, ‘Is it
really
? What does the producer do then?'

‘I suppose,' I told him, ‘he worries about things.'

‘Oh, well.' Dennis raised his glass to me. ‘Congratulations and happy birthday.'

They all drank. George looked at me and said, ‘At your age, Mr Progmire, you must spend a lot of your time thinking about death.'