Dunster (30 page)

‘Let me get you chaps a proper drink.' The cheerful Natty now became an expansive host. Business was suspended while the smiling girl from the bar brought us a bottle of grappa. Justin Glover didn't take a sip until he had asked the half-a-million-pounds' worth of damages question.

‘What we have come all this long way to ask, Signor Andreini, is whether you can confirm Sir Crispin's account of the events?'

‘Of course I can. I remember that ammunition dump. I left one of the bags behind there. Well, it was only an empty bag. We'd brought the charges in it. Sergeant Blaker was absolutely unreasonable about it.'

‘So you had nothing to do with the affair at Pomeriggio?'

Natty poured himself another grappa, knocked it back and looked round at us, his sheep's eyes full of innocence. ‘Do I look,' he asked plaintively, ‘like a chap who goes around blowing up churches?'

‘So it follows that Sir Crispin had nothing to do with it either?'

‘Of course it does.' At last he said the words we had come to hear: ‘Everyone knew the Germans did it.'

So Justin Glover and I, unencumbered with children, stopped off at Florence to look at the pictures. Walking past the ‘Primavera' I remembered, as other pictures had made me remember, Beth's face and was filled with a sudden bitterness at the thing that had parted us, which was the same, irrational, irresistible force that had taken us to Italy. Soured by this unwelcome moment of recognition I said to Justin, ‘You don't think old Natty Suiting's going to do us the slightest bit of good, do you?'

‘Why not? He's made a statement, signed and certified by the notary.'

‘You know perfectly well why he did that. He thinks we can get him some sort of amnesty.'

Justin Glover stood still, surrounded by virgins and nymphs dancing in paradise. ‘Let's face it' – he was giving his best dry, old family solicitor performance, which was fairly absurd, I thought, in someone younger than I was – ‘Andreini isn't going to come to England to give evidence until he knows he's absolutely safe from the possibility of arrest. It's an obvious precaution for us to make sure his position is cleared up before the trial starts.'

‘You mean, it's an obvious inducement to him to say what we want him to say?'

‘Robbie was right when he told you to trust your legal advisers. Lawyers have to live in the world as it is, Philip. Not as we might like it to be. You'd be much better off leaving the practical side of things to us.'

Which coming from a man whose family life was in such chaos that he could only escape from his house with difficulty, struck me as a bit rich.

‘We like Lucy.'

‘So do I.'

‘We wouldn't dream of interfering. Not in any way. But Angie was saying how glad she was to see you settled.'

‘I don't think I'm that exactly. Perhaps I won't ever be. Not again.'

‘You're living in the past.' Cris was the man who had, that autumn, the best reason for visiting that unhappy region. ‘You've got to put all that behind you. My God, she's young though, isn't she? Just imagine anyone having all that future! The thought of it makes me feel quite dizzy.'

It would have made me dizzy too if I'd thought about it. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to see me settled: Lucy's mother and Angie, Mrs Oakshott and Beth, especially Beth. I was glad that I had brought Lucy for the weekend at Windhammer, glad that everyone seemed to like each other, but being settled wasn't a subject I felt able to pursue. So I asked if there was any more news about the case.

‘Nothing much. We found out who was the German captain in the Pomeriggio district. Got it out of the MOD information files. Well, the Minister will do almost anything to get his face on television.'

‘Does the ex-captain own a garage?'

‘I'm afraid not.' Cris smiled, as though the evidence were completely unimportant. ‘His name was Kreutzer. Captain Ernst Kreutzer. No relation to the sonata.'

‘He went to Wales?'

‘Not as far as we know. He went back to Hamburg and became a headmaster. He retired and died there ten years ago.'

‘So Jaunty was telling us a load of rubbish?'

‘Jaunty was never going to be a reliable witness.' That was the verdict on the man who couldn't lie any more, for better or for worse.

It was near the end of September, with low, welcome sunshine and air touched with freshness and the smell of bonfires. We were walking the long way round through the woods while Lucy and Angie sat by the logs in the mock baronial grate and waited for us to join them for tea. As the trees ended at the edge of a field, a pheasant rose with a great fuss and chatter from a tangle of brambles and bracken and flapped off into a clear sky. ‘I sometimes wonder,' Cris said, ‘whether to take up shooting again.'

‘I thought you'd decided against it.'

‘Such a contradiction! People who know about animals, understand them, really get to love them in a way, are those who kill them. Foxes aren't specially likeable little brutes, but huntsmen get a sort of respect for them. My old father was that sort. Always noticed the leaves or the water moving and he'd sniff at the wind and know which way the birds'd fly – and he killed things a lot. I suppose the truth of it is, with a gun in your hand you become one of them. Red in tooth and claw. I don't know whether I'll ever do it again. I suppose I might.'

So we started the walk back, across the flat countryside, and Cris asked me about Natasha. I told him what I knew, except for her decision not to visit me again. ‘She's got a boyfriend who knows everything.'

‘Everything about what?'

‘How to run a television company. Oh, and about death.'

‘What's he know about that?' Cris was smiling.

‘That when people get to my age they practically think of nothing else. As a matter of fact, I don't think about it at all.'

‘Neither do I. No point in it. You know what I believe? We're born with a clock inside us. It's set for the time we're going to pop off, and it can't be altered. Absolutely nothing we can do about it, so why worry?'

And when we came in sight of Windhammer among the trees of an open stretch of parkland he said, ‘Rotten luck on Angie we could never make children. Perhaps that's why we're enjoying having you here. You and your Lucy. You must bring Natasha down some time too, if she'd ever agree to it.'

I said yes, although I didn't think she ever would.

Nothing could have been so unperturbed, so apparently imperturbable, as Cris that weekend. He made my anxiety ridiculous, and I worried about having worried so much about a possible Dunster victory. And yet, when I thought about it on that calm walk through the woods in the autumn sunshine, there seemed no real danger of Dunster leaving the battlefield crowing with victorious delight and Cris being convicted of an atrocity. Natty Suiting was no longer, for whatever reason, a witness for the defence. Jaunty would never enter a witness-box again and whatever he'd heard would be forever locked inside him. And there was something else. When Dunster lost (I no longer said, even to myself,
if
Dunster lost), would Beth's eyes be open at last? Would she see what she had taken on, an addict who gets his highs by causing wanton suffering to the innocent in the heady name of public morality? Was that the hope that kept me going, as well as my concern for Cris, during the long months of waiting for the trial? And was it that faint possibility, that result which nothing she had said or done gave me any particular reason to hope for, which still made me reluctant to settle – which meant, I suppose, settling for Lucy?

‘Did you take her there?' Lucy asked when I said we might go down to Windhammer for the weekend.

‘Who?'

‘Your wife, of course.'

‘Sometimes. Beth didn't like it very much. She used to go off and see her parents.'

‘Why didn't she like it?'

‘She couldn't understand why I was so fond of Cris and Angie.'

‘Was she jealous?'

‘I don't think so. She just thought it was a bit creepy, for anyone to be fond of his boss. I tried to tell her I'd've liked him whoever he was.'

‘Will they compare us? Her and me, I mean.'

‘Of course not.'

You're sure?'

‘Absolutely. That's not the sort of thing they do. I know they'll like you very much.'

‘I suppose it'll be interesting' – Lucy was still hesitant -    ‘to meet someone who's going to be in a really important case.' So Cris was a sort of star to her. To the up-and-coming young solicitor, big criminals, bank robbers and murderers were stars, as were those cool gamblers who played for enormous stakes in libel actions. I said, ‘Forget the case. He may not want to talk about it at all."

‘What on earth am I going to wear?'

‘Don't worry. There's absolutely nothing smart about Cris and Angie.'

When Cris and I got back from our walk they were sitting on the sofa, looking at old photograph albums. Their heads were close together, one dark and smoothhaired, the other blonde going grey; a woman at the start of her life and another getting to the end of hers, laughing together over some story of Angie's about her life in the old days of British movies ‘Not a casting couch in sight when we were doing
Sound the Alert
, not when we were playing girls in the ack-ack emplacements. As my friend Cissie Watts said, “You'd be lucky if you got a casting sandbag.” I'm joking, of course. The director was Ronnie Deering and he had no interest in any starlet without a beard or a moustache and a dirty great pint ...' The word floated across the room as we came in and then Angie twisted round on the sofa to greet her husband, while Lucy went on turning the pages of the album, smiling in amazement at a world that was so unlike anything she had ever known.

‘It was a war, wasn't it? I mean, bombs were dropping on London. Knocking down houses. Killing people. She lived there and Cris was away fighting. Listening to her you'd think all they did was to make jokes about it.' Lucy was lying in the bath, the steam rising round her; long white legs and a triangle of black hair. Her eyebrows were arched upwards but she spoke in admiration rather than criticism of Angie.

‘She's like that. Cris took it more seriously. He hates it now.'

‘And we won't ever know how we'd've behaved. In a war.'

‘Aren't you glad about that?'

‘I suppose so.' Cris had sent us upstairs with a bottle of champagne to drink while we got ready for dinner. She put out her hand for a glass blurred with steam and icy wine. ‘It's funny, though. When I was looking at all those photographs I couldn't help envying her. It can't have been dull, can it? I'm sure she wasn't afraid of anything. Except insects.'

‘Insects?'

‘Didn't you know? It seems they really upset her. That's why she wouldn't come out for a walk with you. “Awful buzzing things, hurling themselves at your face the whole time. I think you and I can do without that, can't we, Lucy?” That's what she said. All those stories about the things they got up to out watching for firebombs on the roof of Pinewood Studios and she's scared to death of horseflies!'

After dinner Cris sat down at the piano under the big stained-glass window in which a pre-Raphaelite girl stood palely loitering while a young knight knelt at her feet. The girl was dark and not red-headed, Jane Morris and not Elizabeth Siddal, and I felt no pang of regret on that untroubled weekend.

He was playing I don't know what – Schubert, Chopin, something he knew by heart and could do without the music, with an apologetic but insistent melody. Suddenly he struck a different chord, grinned and pounded the Steinway as though it were a pub piano. The tune was familiar; my father used to sing it in the car on family outings, and then, in a clear, unexpectedly young voice. Angie began to sing as I had never heard her sing before:

 

There'll be bluebirds over

The white cliffs of Dover

Tomorrow when the world is free.

She got up and stood leaning against the piano and gave us a performance at the end of which we clapped. Then her husband called out, ‘Come along, everyone. Sing along with Angie.' So we took our drinks and stood by the piano too and did our best to join in songs I only half knew and Lucy didn't know at all. I realized exactly where we were, in a London pub during the war, with Cris on leave and Angie back from a hard day on the set. We went through all the tunes of the time: ‘Run. Rabbit'. ‘We're Going to Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line', ‘Somewhere in France with You', ‘You are My Sunshine'. ‘Lili Marlene' and ‘Wish me Luck as You Wave me Goodbye', which Angie ended with a high operatic trill.

‘Well done,' Cris told her. ‘Almost as good as Gracie Fields!' At which Lucy delighted him by saying, ‘Who's Gracie Fields?' He played another great crashing chord and went into ‘Yesterday', to the strains of which, I suppose. Lucy might just about have been born.

‘One thing I'm sure about,' she said as I turned out our bedside light, ‘he couldn't possibly have done what they say he did.'

‘I know.' I said. ‘The idea's ridiculous. So we're going to win, aren't we?'

‘Of course.' She gave me her considered legal opinion. But at that time neither of us knew of the existence of a Mr Derek Midgeley, who was, during the days we had been singing about, a trooper in the Special Air Services regiment.

I had never been in a court of law before Cris's trial opened, not even to contest a parking ticket, and I don't know if you ever have. Although no one escapes a visit to the doctor or the dentist, or a punishment session with some such beefy physio as Pam from the Mummers, not everyone has seen the Great British Legal System at work. I must say it came as something of an eye-opener to me.