Dunster (6 page)

‘It's stopped raining.' Laertes was looking up at the scudding clouds.

‘To the boats!' Benson shouted in his gravedigger's voice. ‘Women and children last!'

So off we set towards Magdalen Bridge, carrying macs and rugs, red plonk and an occasional bottle of whisky. Nan was among us, failing to dampen our spirits with congratulations like ‘Well, my children, you got through it, didn't you? One day I might persuade you to act the
real Hamlet.
The grown-up version.'

‘You mean the one where Osric falls for the ghost?' Benson asked. We knew we had done our own play. Nan, sitting alone in the rain, had suffered a severe disappointment, but we no longer needed her.

The actors were getting into punts, standing, rocking the boats on purpose, screaming in simulated terror, throwing in food and wine and scrambling to be together. I saw an empty boat and grabbed Beth's arm with some of the determination I had left over from my assault on King Claudius. ‘Come on,' I said, ‘that one's empty.' And I added, because we were still actors, ‘Darling.' She got in and lay back on damp cushions. I looked round and saw that the rest of the cast were all accommodated in other boats. I sat beside her and covered her with a rug. She said, ‘Who's going to drive this thing?' My heart sank as Laertes appeared from the darkness, stepped lightly on to the end of the boat and poled us expertly out into mid-stream, avoiding the punts with their loads of actors who tried to ram us. I held Beth's cold hand under the rug, she turned her face towards me and we kissed, disregarding the silently navigating Laertes. We lay still then and seemed to travel for a long time. I had no idea what was going to happen next.

Then I saw that the others had landed; there was a party going on and Laertes steered us towards it. Well, that, I thought, is the end of that, but when we were near the bank he jumped off, as quickly and as quietly as he had joined us. Neither of us moved and we drifted on, brushed by overhanging willow branches, into a cave of leaves where the intermittent moonlight was blotted out. We were stuck in mud and sheltered from the rain. I took off my glasses to kiss her properly. ‘Beth,' I told her, ‘I've been wanting to say this for so long.'

‘Don't say anything,' she said. ‘It'll be perfectly all right.'

‘What do we do now? Ring the bell for the porter?'

‘We climb in.'

‘There's an easy way, isn't there?' ‘Is that what you want?'

‘I've always heard there's an easy way. A sort of formality. So that they can keep up appearances.'

‘All right. We start up by the bicycle sheds.'

I followed him doubtfully. If there were an easy way of climbing into college, would it be in Dunster's character to take it? I didn't want to be with him on a mountaineering expedition without ropes in the darkness and persistent rain. I wanted to be alone, to remember what I now had to remember. I wanted a little peace and quiet to think of Beth making love, her competent hands, her body not altogether undressed under the blanket, her long hair wet against my face, her amused smile as we started, and the immense encouragement of her trembling later, and her small cry. Acting and making love, I knew then, were the two things I could do and forget my nature. And that night I had gone from one to the other without interruption, from death in the duel to another sort of obliteration in the boat under the willow tree.

The everyday Progmire, the one I know only too well, was still absent when we pushed the punt out of the mud and joined the party. Beth and I were careful to talk to other people and, as we separated, I felt we were even closer because of our shared and aloof performance. I was listening to a long complaint from Queen Gertrude about Nan's total failure to give her any direction whatsoever, devoting all her attention to Claudius, who, of course, needed it, the poor darling, and who looked, despite all our producer's efforts, less like a king than the manager of the local Abbey National. Then I saw, across the flames of the camp-fire lit on the edge of Parson's Pleasure, the pale face of Dunster, who was standing sharing a paper cup of wine with the large-breasted Prudence and looking at me with amusement.

‘What on earth are
you
doing here?' I felt, as I had so often, that he had intruded on my private territory.

‘Someone told us there was a party. So we thought we should come along. Do you want me to say, “You were wonderful, dahling”?'

‘Only if you thought it.'

‘Isn't the point of saying “You were wonderful, dahling” that you mean something entirely different?'

‘Then don't say it.'

‘I won't.'

In Dunster's presence feelings of anxiety began to return and I wanted some sort of reassurance from him. ‘But what
did
you think of it?'

‘I think' – Dunster looked more cheerful than I had ever seen him at Oxford – ‘I need notice of that question.'

Beth and I went back in a punt full of people, singing and splashing with paddles. Laertes, the expert with the pole, seemed to avoid us and had gone off in a boat with Gertrude. I walked Beth to her college, silently holding hands. More sensible than me. she had managed to get a pass to go to the party. Before she rang the bell I said, ‘We're going to do it again tomorrow.'

‘Are we? I wouldn't mind.' She had her arms round my neck, smiling.

‘Actually I meant
Hamlet
.'

‘Oh, that too, I suppose.'

So I went back to St Joseph's and arrived, twenty minutes later, to find Dunster in the street without Prudence and the doors locked.

‘Is this the easy way?'

‘Casanova!'

‘What?' Had Dunster guessed something? We climbed over the wall by the bicycle sheds and arrived on the flat roof of a building, some sort of outhouse. From there we could have scrambled down a tree into the small quad but Dunster would have none of it. ‘You'd be bound to make the most terrible row. Breaking branches. The porter'd be out flashing his torch in a second. You may be bloody rich but I'd like to keep my money in my pocket. Look up there.' He pointed, up a steep, tiled roof which looked about as easy to climb as the west col of the Eiger. ‘See that open window? By my calculations that's the loo on your staircase. Anyway, we can just ease ourselves in there and no one's going to hear us. Follow me, Progmire.'

So he started shinning up the roof, holding on to the bits of castellated masonry at its edge; and I came blindly after him, on my knees occasionally, and asking what the hell he meant by Casanova.

‘He made a daring escape from prison. Across the leads of a Venetian roof.' Dunster was full of unexpected knowledge, isn't he one of your heroes?'

‘It
isn't
the easy way.' I was sure of it.

‘Keep quiet, can't you? We're nearly there.'

I was always surprised by Dunster's agility. He was tall, angular and apparently uncoordinated, and he walked with loping strides and arms waving to express his strong opinions. But now he seemed to run up the tiles like a cat and stood gripping the top of an open window. As I struggled up to join him he slid the window up and whispered, ‘Jump in. We're home and dry.' He stood aside to let me go first, like a sergeant launching parachutists into the unknown. I stepped out into darkness and landed more softly than I expected on thick carpeting rather than on lavatory tiles. The room felt more spacious than a loo and from somewhere in the middle distance there came the sound of regular, heavy breathing. ‘Made it,' Dunster said as he landed beside me.

And then the bedside light went on and we were staring at the outraged figure of Sir Ninian Dobbs, sitting bolt upright in bed and wearing a hair-net.

‘You noticed the hair-net, of course?' Dunster said at breakfast the next morning as we speculated on the amount of likely fines. ‘That proved it, I hope, to your satisfaction.'

‘What did it prove?'

‘That I was absolutely right about him. Well,' Dunster added modestly, ‘I usually am right about people.'

‘Sid Vicious,' Cris said, ‘doesn't want us to do the
War
Crimes
series.'

‘I'm not all that surprised.' His wife Angie smiled at us from the other end of the dinner table.

‘He has the sentimental affection for war of someone who's never really taken part in the bloody thing.'

It was a couple of weeks after the board meeting and the discussion which had started me off on the remembrance of Dunster Past. Cris had suggested a weekend at Windhammer then, and shortly afterwards the date was fixed. In the old days Beth had been puzzled by my fondness for the Bellhangers. ‘Cris needs you because you're bloody good at figures,' she used to say. ‘He's not going to sack you if you don't travel miles to sit drinking gin with him and that elderly starlet. I don't know why you want to go, anyway.'

‘Because I enjoy it.'

‘Is that what you tell yourself? If you're doing that, I'll go and see Mum and Dad. I know you don't enjoy them terribly!' So we would go, on some weekends, our separate ways.

Windhammer, a ponderous statement of Gothic gloom built by Cris's ancestor in the 1850s, stood a few miles from the white beaches and treacherous tides of the North Sea. Icy blasts, after an uninterrupted journey from the steppes of Russia, besieged the walls and rattled the casement windows, but inside logs crackled in Arthurian fireplaces and the central heating rose comfortingly to the vaulted ceilings of the bedrooms. ‘Great-grandfather made railway engines,' Cris used to tell me. ‘I don't know why he saw himself as the Lady of Shalott.' There was still a gunroom where the weapons were kept clean and oiled, and a stable; but Cris said he never went shooting and only used his horse for hacking across the flat countryside. ‘I gave up killing things after the war,' he told me. it's made me an object of ridicule to the country set, but I can't say that breaks my heart. The great secret of living in the country is not to get on too well with your neighbours.'

The house was also warmed by the lady whom Beth called the ‘elderly starlet'. Cris's wife Angie was once Angela Downing, star of a couple of dozen wartime movies. She still had the wide eyes, high cheekbones and the impertinent charm which had made her unflappable WRENS and steadfast heroines of the French Resistance irresistible. She always greeted me with a welcome kiss, steered me to the fireside and asked about my acting career. If she started on the gin and tonics a long while before dinner, and drank quite a bit with it, if her voice became a little thicker and her memory unreliable by the end of the evening, she was no less charming as she set an unsteady course towards her bedroom, shedding spectacles and magazines and shawls on her way. ‘I suppose my lot enjoy drinking so much,' she used to say, ‘because it was so bloody hard to lay your hands on a decent drop during the war.'

War was what we talked about that weekend at Windhammer. Fighting had started in the desert, or rather an enormous number of bombing raids had started, dropping missiles which were said to be capable of rounding street corners, creeping down stairs and destroying carefully selected military targets in Baghdad. Cris, unlike the rest of the safe civilian population of England, spent no time discussing the campaign. He was still thinking of the board meeting we had had before hostilities started.

‘I'll say one thing for the war –' Angie held out her glass for a refill. The tide's gone down in this thing, darling. I mean, if it hadn't been for the war I might never have met Cris.'

‘War was jolly good on the movies.' Her husband was pouring wine, of which he also drank a good deal but with no apparent effect. ‘Especially Angie's movies. That's where the war ought to have stayed. In the local Odeons. Everyone could have gone and watched Sergeant Johnny Mills being brave and Corporal Dickie Attenborough getting the screaming hab-dabs in the tail-end of the bomber, Angie making tea through the Blitz and actors with clenched teeth and monocles playing Nazis. Then they could have gone home and felt brave without anyone having to die.'

‘He does talk nonsense!' Angie gave me the smile which had had such a devastating effect on Wing Commander David Niven in
Enemy Targets.
‘I was getting quite tired of going out with actors in uniform. I doubt if I'd've fallen for Cris if he hadn't been a real soldier. He was the only one who never talked about the war.'

‘Actually,' Cris told me, ‘she fell for me because I couldn't dance.'

‘Most of the actors and directors I went out with were terribly keen on dancing.' Angie sighed. ‘Round and round the floor. Fox-trotting away until all hours of the night. It used to leave me fit for nothing except a cup of Ovaltine and sleep. But when Cris took me out to dinner ...'

‘I told Angie I was absolutely no dancer,' Cris joined in. He and his wife enjoyed telling this anecdote as a team.

‘He said he was no dancer but it was still early, so what about going to bed together?' Angie confided in me, not for the first time.

‘I happened to have a room in the Regent Palace.'

‘Actually he'd booked it before he even asked me out!'

‘It only cost something like five quid.'

‘Quite a lot of money for those days.' Angie was the careful one. ‘And you know, the poor chap popped the question at breakfast the next morning.'

‘And she said she supposed she liked me a bit better than the fox-trot.'

‘Actually, I said I'd have to think about it very carefully and he'd better go away and ask me again when the war was over.'

‘Absolute balls! She jumped at the suggestion. Couldn't wait. We got married before my leave was up. Special licence. In the Guards Chapel. During an air raid.'

‘Did I ever tell you how we met?'