Dunster (34 page)

Cris and I spent the next hours drinking too many cups of coffee in the canteen under the Gothic arches. During that time he seemed unworried. He was entertaining, talking about everything except the case and he treated our long wait as a minor irritation, like a delayed flight from Heathrow.

At last the jury came back. To my surprise the young man in the cotton jacket and the leather tie had been elected foreman. He announced that they had found in favour of the plaintiff, Sir Crispin Bellhanger, and awarded him £500,000 worth of damages. It was a sum no doubt far in excess of the worldly goods of all those who had died at Pomeriggio.

When we came out of court we had to push our way through a crowd of reporters. Dunster was addressing them as though he had emerged victorious. Beth was standing on the edge of the group, silent, expressionless and remote. I went up to her and said, ‘I'm sorry,' but she turned away from me and didn't speak. When I last saw her she was managing a smile for the journalists, as she stood by her husband's side, her arm linked in his.

Cris said, ‘No celebrations. Absolutely no celebrations of any sort.' He nodded a brief goodbye to Robbie and then we walked with Justin to the back entrance of the Law Courts, the one that leads into Carey Street, ‘I'm going down to Windhammer now,' he said. ‘I promised Angie I'd bring her a full report. Then I might take a bit of time off. That'd be all right, wouldn't it, Philip?'

I couldn't imagine why he was asking my permission, but I said that was exactly what I thought he should do. All the cheerfulness with which he entertained us while the jury was out had drained away. Since the verdict he had been looking pale and now he seemed almost like the ghost of his old, upright, military self. When we got to the Carey Street entrance he said, ‘Don't bother about me. I'll find myself a taxi. Thanks for everything.'

As he walked down the steps, one of the photographers spotted him and several of them ran forwards, their cameras flashing. He walked on, stopping for no one, and, as he went, raised his hand to us in a sort of salute. I never saw him again.

There are certain productions in which everything goes wrong, mainly ambitious ones in which the Mummers try to do something spectacular and create a vivid theatrical moment. For these we call on the services of Mr Webber who runs the Handyman shop in Muswell Hill. Greeting every challenge with a cheerful ‘No probs!', Mr Webber, with all the tools at his command, made us a revolving bed for Feydeau, the end of a swimming-pool for Alan Ayckbourn and an indoor menagerie for
The Wild Duck.
These devices, as temperamental as the most nervous actors, all performed admirably at the dress rehearsals and were subject to alarming attacks of stage-fright when in front of an audience. The water, I remember, once mysteriously gurgled away from the swimming-pool; the bed spun round long before its cue or remained sullenly immobile; and the rabbits, on a special Senior Citizens' matinée, escaped from captivity and bounded into the stalls.

Mr Webber's guillotine looked magnificent when erected. Its hardwood blade was painted to imitate steel and it slid down to decapitate the small band of aristos in the spectacular opening that Martin, the bank manager, had produced. The victims were to kneel with their backs to the audience, the blade would fall and a dummy head drop into a basket which would then be held up in a dim light by Harry Smithson from the Aurora Garage. On our opening night Mark, a stylist from Crowning Glory, playing the First Aristocrat, knelt in position and the blade resolutely refused to descend, in spite of pulls, jerks and whispered imprecations from Harry the executioner, and his
sans-culotte
assistant, Colin from the fishmongers. After all his efforts had failed, they were moved to improvise. ‘
Sacre-bleu,
Citizen!' Harry said. ‘Madame Guillotine is a tired old whore. She's not coming down for anyone else this evening.'

‘All right, Citizen Executioner' – Colin was not to be upstaged – ‘we'll get the rest of them aristos done over tomorrow.' This exchange got a bigger laugh than any of the subsequent proceedings.

After this the Mummers never quite recovered their nerve. Chauvelin (Dennis, the dentist) cut a whole page of dialogue in his scene with Marguerite and, when he had realized his mistake, went back on it, an unnerving situation which Lucy dealt with admirably by adding the line, ‘ 'pon my little life, Citizen, how you oft times do repeat yourself!' I had managed to cope with Sir Percy without forgetting the words or falling over the furniture, but had been early alarmed, while in my disguise as an old hag, by the sight of the bald-headed Mr Zellenek, the film producer, in the front row. My future as an actor, my first chance to do something as a professional, hung in the balance, at the mercy of Mr Webber from the Handyman shop. I found myself thinking about various subjects unconnected with the French Revolution, such as whether Mr Zellenek, if he wanted me badly enough, could help me to an Equity card, so my poem about the ‘demned elusive Pimpernel' went off at half-cock. I tried to make up for this by plenty of play with the eye-glass and inane upper-class laughter, but I could see Zellenek leaning forward, staring closely up at the stage, his brow furrowed with anxiety

In Act Two things began to settle down; that is until I had to make an entrance into the Lion d'Or tavern near Calais, where, unknown to me, the villainous Chauvelin is eating soup. Sir Percy's arrival is signalled to the audience by his whistling ‘God Save the King' outside the tavern door. Chauvelin utters the line, ‘The Pimpernel!' and I enter, or I should have done if the door hadn't stuck, and I was pushing desperately, whistling a longer, fainter and even more out-of-tune version of the national anthem. Once again the invention of the Mummers was called upon. Chauvelin called for Brogard, the ghoulish hunchbacked landlord (someone called Pete Pershaw in life insurance), and said, ‘Citizen Landlord, there is a passing wayfarer demanding entrance,' – something the audience had been aware of for quite a while. Brogard said,

‘
Mon dieu,
my wife has left the key in the cellar!' and went off to fetch it. As soon as he was gone, the door gave up all resistance and I made a precipitate entrance before Chauvelin could pull his hat over his eyes in case I recognized him.

Instead of a party in the Mummery bar I had invited the cast back to my house. I wanted to be occupied, to forget those long days in court and everything to do with Dunster, even that defeat which I had every reason to believe he would come to think of as a triumph. The case had died out of the newspapers, Cris was still in retreat at Windhammer and I had taken the afternoon off to run through my words and prepare for the party. Despite the disasters the Mummers were cheerful, relieved that we'd got through it somehow, their glands still bubbling with adrenalin.

‘I think we got over the reluctant guillotine bloody well!' Harry, the executioner, was satisfied.

‘All that about the old whore not going down on anyone else. I mean, I don't think Baroness Orczy would write a line like that.'

‘“Coming down”, that's what I said.'

‘We haven't
all
got filthy minds, Mark.'

‘Sorry about our scene, darling.' Dennis, the dentist, let his glasses swing round his neck and put a hairy and short-sleeved arm round Lucy's shoulders.

‘It was fascinating' – Lucy liberated herself when it was polite to do so – ‘like an action replay on television.'

Mr Zellenek had left as soon as the play ended. Lucy said, ‘I'm sure he'll call you. I know how interested he is.'

‘Not after tonight.'

‘You were perfectly fine, in the circumstances.'

‘Oh? Thank you very much.' I suppose I am a natural Mummer. Anything but exaggerated praise sounds like an insult.

‘Cheer up, anyway. They loved it, didn't they?'

‘Oh, yes. They had a marvellous evening. Particularly when the door stuck.'

‘Let's have a drink.'

I began to enjoy the party. After all, when I came to think about it, a stuck door in the last act of
The Scarlet Pimpernel
was nothing much compared to what I'd lived through. I was, I thought, amazingly lucky to have that as the present number-one worry. Even if you added Mr Zellenek's rapid departure to it, you couldn't describe it as a grand-scale cause for anxiety. Anyway, it was probably insane to think of going into the profession at my age.

Mark, the stylist, had brought his Madonna tapes and the Mummers were dancing with varying degrees of skill and enthusiasm. Dennis, the dentist, was singing along with ‘Like a Virgin', and then the telephone rang and Pam, the physio, picked it up.

‘It's for you,' she said. ‘Justin someone or other.'

I went to the phone in the kitchen, away from the noise of Mummers celebrating.

‘Where've you been?' Justin sounded disapproving, as though I had been wasting my time in some frivolous occupation. He was probably right.

‘We had a first night. And now we're having a party.'

‘Oh, you were
acting
!'

‘Yes, I'm afraid so.'

‘Well. I didn't want to leave a message. It's something I felt I had to break to you. Before you hear it on the news or read about it in the papers.'

‘What is it, for God's sake?'

And then he told me.

When I put the phone back on the kitchen wall, I was shivering. The room seemed to have become darker and the music loud, strident and unendurable. I had no idea exactly what Justin's news meant, and I was afraid to guess.

‘It was an accident.'

Yes, my dear, darling Angie, yes. I'm sure it was. Of course it was. What else could it have been? – Even to say that, to agree as fervently as that, might have seemed to cast doubt on her statement of a simple certainty.

‘A horrible, stupid, unnecessary accident.'

We were sitting side by side on the sofa in the library at Windhammer, under the pre-Raphaelite stained-glass window, by the silent piano and elaborate sound system. I held her hand, as it seemed a natural thing to do. Angie looked like a young woman who had stumbled at long last into old age.

The doctor said it was an accident. And they said it was an accident on the television news, and in
The Times.
Did you see
The Times
?'

‘Yes. I saw all the papers.'

‘He should never have taken up that wretched shooting business again.'

‘He told me he was thinking of it.'

‘He told you that?' Was she grateful for a small piece of evidence to back up everyone's interpretation of that terrible event?

‘He told me that before the trial,' I assured her.

‘Dr Megarry said that when people kill themselves with a shotgun they put the muzzle in their mouths, then they reach down to pull the trigger. They're usually standing up or sitting when they do it. With Cris it wasn't like that at all.'

‘In the papers it just said it was an accident. That's all it said.'

‘He'd gone down on his hands and knees. He'd got under a hedge and pulled the gun after him. Some sorts of guns can go off, apparently, if you do that. Dr Megarry shoots a lot round here. He knows all about it.'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘I'm sure he does.'

‘A bloody stupid accident.'

‘No one's suggested anything else.' No one had, but I could think of someone who very well might, someone who could say that this event justified him and proved that all he'd said in the case he had lost had been the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

‘Of course it was an accident,' Angie repeated. She looked at me, wide-eyed and innocent. ‘What else could it be?'

‘Nothing,' I said. ‘Nothing at all.'

‘Such a terrible waste,' she said. ‘Such a waste of Cris.'

‘Cris wasn't wasted.' It's so much easier to console than be consoled. ‘He had a long, marvellous life. We all had so much from him, you more than any of us. This can't take that away. Not all the years you've had together. Not all the years I've known him either.'

‘He wanted me to stay young, you see. He'd fallen for me when I was young and that's how he wanted me to be always. Young and rather helplessly heroic. But, as a matter of fact, I'm old and frightened of insects. They even get indoors.' Her hand flapped at the air round the sofa which, so it seemed to me, was completely insect-free. ‘We're battling against nature in here.'

I had arrived by the earliest train and I said yes, of course, I'd stay for lunch and for the night if that was what she wanted. I poured her a large gin and tonic and she became braver, less prone to slap at imaginary insects. When we went into the dining-room I took her arm; she needed help and she walked stiffly, much more slowly than usual.

‘You remember that evening when you and your girl Lucy were here and we all sang silly old wartime numbers?'

‘Of course I remember.'

‘Cris was so happy that night. I don't think I've ever seen him happier than that.'

Before I left Windhammer I said Lucy and I would come down and stay with Angie again, as often as we could. I'm sure I meant it, but I knew that our visits would diminish and she would be left, like so many people who are old and unhappy, for most of the time alone.

I went back to London and took a taxi to Megapolis from Liverpool Street Station. There was a gloomy excitement about the place, which seems to be the usual reaction to news of death. I tried to avoid most of my colleagues and the pitying looks they gave me. I sat at my desk, doing nothing, lost and lonely, staring straight in front of me. Then I got three phone calls: good, bad and extraordinary.

The first was from Mr Zellenek, who said he was sorry he'd had to rush away ‘to call LA', but he'd had a fantastic evening, my performance had triumphed over all technical difficulties and would I lightly pencil in a Tuesday in three weeks' time for a lunch at the Malibu Club? My mind was on other things but I saw no particular reason not to accept.