Dunster (3 page)

‘That fish they give us,' Dunster hissed into my ear as we stood in the cavernous school canteen in the basement under Threadneedle Street, ‘condemned throw-outs from Billingsgate. They bulk-buy and make a profit. I heard the bursar on the telephone.'

I didn't believe him. but I opted for the vegetarian plate. You never knew, with Dunster, whether his far-fetched allegations might not have some truth in them. Anyway. I had long ago given up arguing with him. If you argued, the story would be repeated endlessly, with more and more uncheckable evidence called in support. In time my nods of assent failed to convince him and he would say, ‘It's true, but you don't really want to hear about it, do you?'

‘Oh, yes,' I said, to keep Dunster quiet. ‘Of course I do.'

‘No, you don't. You don't really care about anything very much, do you, old man?'

‘I care about acting,' I told him. I, Philip Progmire, who had been Rosalind.

‘Rosalind!' Dunster said with contempt. ‘You were a boy pretending to be a girl who was pretending to be a boy. I don't call that anything very much to care about.'

All of which will make it clear to you that Dunster and I were chalk and cheese, or creatures from different planets. And yet, at St George's, we were thought of as great friends and inseparable. ‘“O. Wind,”' the English master, Mr Cheesy Cheshire, who fancied himself as a wit, was fond of saying, ‘if Progmire comes, can Dunster be far behind?' Dunster needed me, I suppose, as an audience: no one else would stand and listen so patiently when he started on some long and incredible revelation. He also, perhaps, hoped that some day, with some story, he would be able to shock me into saying, ‘Good God, Dunster. But that's appalling! It's a scandal! Can't you get your dad to write about it in the
Guardian
?' He may have been waiting for this satisfactory outcome to his confidences, but I never said anything like that. I could never bring myself to do so. But did I, in all truth and honesty, actually like Dunster?

I suppose I needed him. A boy starting at school, even at St George's from which he goes home in the evenings, needs a friend so that he has the consolation and protection of not standing alone, a target easily picked off, and Dunster offered his friendship almost too eagerly. But did I like him? Sometimes, as when he showed such a total lack of interest in my theatrical triumphs, I disliked him very much. And yet it was hard not to have some affection for Dunster. He was brave. His continual arguments brought him perpetual trouble. Masters would lose their tempers with him, fling books at him and turn him out of the room. Boys would make fun of him, lie in wait for him and attack him. He would put up with all this with a wan and contemptuous smile and he did not, I have to admit with shame, get much support from me.

‘I didn't notice you coming to the rescue much when Porker Plumstead and his friends cornered me in the bogs.'

‘No.'

‘You like to keep out of things, don't you?'

‘If I can, I suppose I like to.'

‘There's nothing much you want to stand up for, is there, old man?'

‘Well, not your idea that Whittington's Bank is financing the slave trade in Madagascar.' Porker's father was on the Board of Whittington's, which was why Dunster had started the argument.

‘You mean you don't care about slaves?'

‘Well, yes. Of course I do. Everyone does. But I don't see that being punched by Porker's friends round the bogs is going to help the slaves in Madagascar.'

‘You don't care much about slaves, and you don't care at all about friendship.'

‘Oh, come off it. Dunster. Now you're making me feel a shit.'

‘Good!' He smiled at me with sudden, unexpected charm. ‘That is exactly how you ought to feel.'

I suppose the truth was that I recognized in Dunster all that I wasn't. Although I had no desire to be in the least like him, he made me feel timid, compromising, time-serving and, if not envious, in some way inferior. Here was I, waiting for
Plays and Players
each month to discover who was starring in what, dreaming of being an actor and settling for being a maths specialist because I found it easy. And there was Dunster, enormously concerned about the slave trade and the Race Relations Act and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, thriving on a series of head-on collisions with the masters and the boys which would have left me trembling with nervous exhaustion. And yet most of the time, to my amazement and occasional respect, Dunster seemed to achieve, in the centre of his frenzied universe, an absence of anxiety which I had never known. But then, as I have made it clear to you, I worry.

Dunster and his journalist father occupied, in almost unbelievable chaos, the top two floors of a house in Camden Town which had been the Dunster matrimonial home. After Mrs Dunster moved out, the father let half the place to a man on the
Financial Times
who had recently married. The Dunsters despised this couple mainly because of their habit of taking regular meals and the orderliness of their existence. The Dunster cuisine consisted almost entirely of bacon and eggs, eaten with doorsteps of fried bread and cups of strong tea, so that about their home the smell of burning fat indicated that a traditional English breakfast was available at all hours of the day and night.

I went to his house and sometimes I let Dunster visit mine. My parents lived, as I do now, in Muswell Hill, a high and windy part of north London, with pink and white Edwardian villas dominated by the curious fantasy of Alexandra Palace, from which you can see much of the city laid out like a map. When I was at school, it was the old glass palace with minarets, although the roof had been damaged by a flying bomb during the war and, during one hard winter, the organ in the Great Hall was covered with snow. When I was very small, a steam train from Highgate stopped at Muswell Hill on its way to the Palace and until I was twenty there was a racecourse in the suburb. When it closed, life there remained quiet until, in a moment of high drama, the old Palace was consumed by fire and has since been rebuilt. Communications with the area are difficult and many Muswell Hill inhabitants, like my parents, seldom left it in the evenings or at weekends, shopping there, seeing friends or regularly visiting the splendours of the local Odeon. One Saturday I warned them, ‘There's a friend called Dunster coming this afternoon. As a matter of fact, he's rather a menace.'

‘So far as I know,' my father said, ‘Dunster's a small town in Somerset that's never been a menace to anyone.'

I dreaded the Saturday afternoon visit. My parents' house was disgracefully tidy; souvenirs of their holidays abroad – bronze statues from Greece, bits of pottery from Morocco – were arranged on shelves and carefully dusted. My father was a civil servant in the Home Office and clearly open to attack from Dunster. My mother was the person from whom I have inherited my talent for anxiety. She brought out our best tea service, the one my grandmother left us in her will, for Dunster, and gave him chocolate biscuits and small cucumber sandwiches, which he ate as though he hadn't seen food for a month.

‘So you're in the Home Office, sir,' Dunster said to my father, with his mouth half full of cucumber sandwich. I had never heard Dunster call anyone ‘sir' before, not even our masters, and he managed to make the title sound especially contemptuous. ‘I suppose you do your best not to notice the corruption in Scotland Yard?'

‘I wish to God we could. To be quite honest with you, Dick' – my father's use of his Christian name seemed to startle Dunster – ‘it worries the hell out of us. I wish your father'd write a series of his magnificent articles about it. We need all the public support we can get.'

It was the first time I'd seen Dunster deflated. I loved my father then, and he was always my idea of a reasonable, tolerant human being who took life with a large pinch of salt and stood in no particular awe of anyone. Years later, when I came to work for Cris Bellhanger, I suppose I was attracted to him because he was the same sort of character.

‘Do your people come from that little town in Somerset? Sleepy sort of place.' My father pressed home his advantage.

We got that milk jug in Dunster' – my mother, quite without meaning to, turned the knife in the wound – the one that's shaped like a cow. We thought it was rather original.'

‘Wonderful cream teas in Dunster,' my father remembered.

‘Is your dad going to write about Scotland Yard?' I asked my guest when we had gone up to my room to smoke Gauloises Bleues, an activity which I'm sure my parents knew about but never mentioned.

‘I shouldn't think so.' And Dunster added mysteriously, ‘he's got a much bigger fish than
that
to fry.'

‘Sex,' Dunster said more than once, ‘I don't know how people do it.'

I had often wondered, but I said nothing.

‘Not it. Not the actual thing. That's absolutely vital. For your health. I mean, you can't do without the actual thing. Any more than you can do without breathing.'

I didn't keep a close watch on all of Dunster's movements, but I had never known him to miss school, even for a cold. Was this because of his ardent and regular sex life? Was Dunster, during the hours we didn't spend together, the Casanova of Camden Town? I found this hard to believe, but then it was unsafe to make any assumptions about Dunster, a boy who was full of surprises.

‘It's the lies you have to tell people. Leading up to sex.'

‘Lies?'

‘All that “you're so beautiful”, “you're such a marvellous person”, “you're the only one I've ever felt like this about during my whole life”. It's all the lies you're expected to tell. I don't know how people manage to do that, all the time.'

I wonder now whether it was not having any lies told to her that caused Mrs Dunster to leave home.

Friendship with Dunster was a full-time occupation, and nobody else seemed anxious to join our group. I was an only child and, in the holidays, if I wanted to go up to the West End it had to be with Dunster. He was prepared to compromise by joining me at the theatre provided I bought the tickets and we did what he wanted for the rest of the day. So that's how we found ourselves at Speakers' Corner on our way to the Old Vic.

Othello came on to the stage in a white robe and dark brown make-up with a rose between his teeth, walking cat-like on the balls of his feet. When he said, ‘Keep up your bright swords, for the dew may rust them', my senses swam with the nobility of it all. Dunster said, ‘This is ridiculous. He's not even black.'

‘Of course not. He's Laurence Olivier.'

‘It's all completely false.'

‘Will you shut up or else go?' For once I said something decisive to Dunster.

With the maximum of disturbance he went, stumbling over feet, causing muttering customers to half rise in their seats, and failing to apologize. When he had gone, I decided that once and for all I was finished with Dunster. I stared after him angrily, siding with all those whose toes he'd trodden on and whose knees he'd bumped against. Then I sat until Othello drew his hidden sword.

‘And say besides, that in Aleppo once,

Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk

Beat a Venetian and traduc'd the state,

I took by the throat the circumcised dog.

And smote him thus.'

So the actor died in a manner Dunster would have said was false, but which seemed utterly truthful to me. So all alone, and thankful to be so, I set off for Muswell Hill. Home was boring, uneventful perhaps, but better than Dunster. I sat in the Tube re-reading the programme and then I heard an awful rustling beside me, eager breathing and a mac flapping like the wings of an ill-omened bird.

‘I saw you coming out of the theatre, old man. I ran to catch up with you.'

‘You needn't have bothered.'

‘Do you want to know where I've been?'

‘Not particularly.'

‘I went back to see that silly sod at Speakers' Corner.'

‘Whatever for?' I made the mistake of showing an interest and knew, with a sinking of the heart, that I would never be rid of him. He smiled triumphantly and moved uncomfortably close.

‘I took him out to tea. We had bacon and eggs.'

‘That must have made a change for you.'

‘I wanted to prove my point about all the Buddhists in the world. I couldn't let him get away with the nonsense he was talking, could I?'

Why not? I wanted to say. However do you imagine you're going to stop all the nonsense being talked in the world, single-handed?

‘In the end I think he saw my point.'

Or he gave in, as I had given in, for the sake of peace.

‘Hamlet, let's face it, for God's sake, was a complete drip. I hope we're all going to agree about that?' Nan Thorogood (‘My mother wanted to call me Nanette. What sort of a God-awful name is that? Did she expect me to go around in a short black skirt with a feather duster? Ooh la bloody la!') taught English at St Joseph's College. We all agreed she was brilliant, bringing the fresh and revolutionary air of the seventies to blow around the dusty subject of Shakespearian studies. I didn't do Shakespearian studies, of course. I read economics, which was a fact I tried to keep as quiet as possible, but I joined the college dramatic society the moment I arrived, and I'd already done
Ghosts
in my first term, mainly because the boy slated for Oswald suffered a nervous
crise.
Whether or not this was brought on by the gloomy nature of the role it provided my great opportunity; I did an audition at a desperate last moment and got the part.

My Oswald was a modest success and even attracted a perfectly decent notice in the
Cherwell.
But that was before an anonymous hatchet man, who cowered under the name of Paul Pry, took up reviewing and everyone went in fear of his passionate abuse.