Dunster

John Mortimer

CHIVERS

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available

This eBook published by AudioGO Ltd, Bath, 2012.

Published by arrangement with the Author

Epub ISBN 9781471302282

Copyright © Advanpress Ltd, 1992

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental

Jacket illustration © iStockphoto.com

John Mortimer is a playwright, novelist and former practising barrister. During the war he worked with the Crown Film Unit and published a number of novels before turning to the theatre with such plays as
The Dock Brief, The Wrong Side of the Park
and
A Voyage Round My Father.
He has written many film scripts and radio and television plays, including six plays on the life of Shakespeare, the Rumpole plays, which won him the British Academy Writer of the Year Award, and the adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's
Brideshead Revisited.
His translations of Feydeau have been performed at the National Theatre.

Paradise Postponed, Summer's Lease, Titmuss Regained and all the Rumpole books have been made into successful television series. John Mortimer lives with his wife and their two daughters in what was once his father's house in the Chilterns.

For Penny

I am greatly indebted to Eric Morris, who told me about the SAS activities in the Italian mountains during the last war. He also traced the probable wartime histories of two old soldiers. These characters are, however, entirely fictional, as is the small town of Pomeriggio and the events that are described as having occurred there.

WHO IS THIS FELLOW DUNSTER?

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

THE QUESTION

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

THE TRIAL

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

THE ANSWER

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

 

So oft it chances in particular men

That – for some vicious mole of nature in them,

As in their birth, wherein they are not guilty,

Since nature cannot choose his origin -

Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,

Being nature's livery, or fortune's star,

His virtues else, be they as pure as grace,

As infinite as man may undergo.

Shall in the general censure take corruption

From that particular fault. The dram of evil

Doth all the noble substance of a doubt,

To his own scandal -

Hamlet

Shakespeare

I worry a good deal. That's my nature. Sometimes I tell myself that I have nothing to worry about, and then I worry about that too. At very rare moments, when I'm not actively worrying about Natasha, my daughter, or the overdraft, or the VAT man, or the next board meeting, or whether I'll get the part of Trigorin in the Mummers' production of
The Seagull
, or whether, if I did get it, I'd make a proper cock-up of it and get a filthy notice in the Muswell Hill
Advertiser
, or the strange, hysterical whining noise, much like an elderly person in pain, that the Volvo is making when I decelerate – on the rare occasions when I'm worrying about none of these things I start to worry about global warming or the future of the Russian economy. Then I take a poor view of myself because global warming and Russia are things I can do absolutely nothing about, so I lose patience with myself for wasting time worrying about them, and that makes me extremely worried.

I started early that morning because I was going to drop Natasha at her tutorial college in Highgate on my way to the Isle of Dogs. I always feel at my best first thing, as though the day is going to pass by without any real cause for alarm. The first cup of tea is drunk in almost complete calm, but by the time I get out to the car I usually manage to think of something more or less appalling with which to become obsessed.

‘Put your foot down. Dad,' Tash said. ‘I told you. I wanted to be at the Tute really early.'

I didn't tell her I'd been waiting for her for a quarter of an hour, from a now distant moment when the world seemed comparatively untroubled. Instead I turned out, as unobtrusively as possible, into the traffic of Muswell Hill. My daughter has two expressions, a rare smile and the more frequent scowl of a particularly stroppy and put-upon villein about to start the Peasants' Revolt. At that time of the day she wasn't smiling.

‘How's college?' I tried asking her brightly.

‘All right, I suppose.'

‘And how's George?'

‘Pretty ghastly.'

‘I thought he was meant to be your boyfriend?'

‘So he is. But honestly, Dad, he's so servile! He keeps asking what I'd like or what he can do for me. I told him he sounds like an airline hostess. I do really need someone who's going to represent a bit of a challenge.'

I slowed down in Muswell Road to avoid a swarm of killer cyclists, wearing dark glasses and those sort of gas masks which make you think that chemical warfare has broken out. Their bright yellow, walnut-shaped crash helmets were pulled down over their foreheads and, as they crouched low over the handlebars, their bottoms, in black Lycra shorts, rose into the air like gigantic squash balls.

‘I really feel I can do without people who represent a challenge,' I told Tash. ‘I've had enough challenges to last a lifetime.'

‘I know, Dad. You would say that.'

‘Why would I?'

‘Well, let's face it. You are a bit of a moral coward, aren't you?'

I looked at her sideways. She had the strawberry hair, wide eyes and pale beauty of her mother. I had changed her nappies and fed her with tins of spinach which she blew back at me in a soggy, green cloud from her high chair. I had been the first to tell her about cavemen and Queen Elizabeth and Vikings and Malvolio and
The Merchant of Venice,
and here she was, at the age of seventeen, passing judgement on me. Without mercy.

‘That's a little bit unfair.' A kamikaze cyclist, a girl in a chintz blouse and knee-length, green phosphorescent socks to go with her shorts, was bearing down on me, her gas mask lowered. I swerved to avoid her, like a matador in the path of a charging bull.

‘Oh, I've got used to you being a moral coward. It's just you, isn't it? Like the side parting, and the Y-fronts, and the Bob Dylan records. Anyway, why does this car squeal when it goes round corners?'

‘Tash,' I said to change the subject, ‘they may be going to offer me Trigorin. In
The Seagull.'

‘I know what Trigorin's in.' She thought the matter over and said, ‘I don't think you'd be right for the part.'

‘Why? Don't you think I'm old enough?'

‘You're not a writer. Trigorin was a writer.'

‘Natasha. I hadn't killed my uncle when I did
Hamlet
all those years ago. I wasn't even suffering from hereditary syphilis when I made what I believe to have been a reasonable shot at
Ghosts
at Oxford. I do have some vague idea of what acting's all about ...'

‘It's not just that you're not a writer. You're nothing like a writer, you're an accountant.'

My daughter has a remarkable talent for hitting you exactly where it hurts most.

The offices of Megapolis Television plc occupy what I believe to be an unnecessarily large area on the Isle of Dogs. We no longer own Megapolis Studios near Slough, that grim area which was once the Hollywood of Britain, as most of our programmes are fanned out to independent producers. However, I regard my work as a branch, even though remote, of show business. Producers and directors often meet in our canteen, having called in to ask for Megapolis's money, and I sometimes catch sight of actresses who are up for a part there. I usually recognize them, remember having seen them, and make some fatuous remark like ‘You were absolutely terrific in
Social Workers
' I'm afraid that's the Muswell Hill Mummer coming out in me. They look mystified and wonder if I'm someone important on the production side. But, as Natasha said, I'm in accounts. A talent for mathematics, a certain adroitness with figures, an ability to read a balance sheet and uncover its hidden meaning, are among the disadvantages I was born with. Without my childhood facility for doing sums I might have been arriving at Megapolis up for the part of some decent and long-suffering father falsely accused of child abuse in
Social Workers,
or even have become a director in an unstructured suit and Raybans, who would sit romancing his PA and drinking decaff in the corner of our canteen.

Well, as I say, I was driving through that huge, messy development which was to be the triumphant creation of the Big Bang of British prosperity in the last decade, and now looked half-built, half-abandoned and prematurely depressed. Many of the office blocks were unused. In the apartments with views of the river, designed for occupation by double income co-mortgagees on a permanent curve of upward mobility, attractive waxwork dummies, young stockbrokers and commodity dealers, had been set in the windows to make passers-by believe that these desirable residences were greatly in demand and should be snapped up while stocks lasted. This device appealed to my sense of theatre. I admired the artificial tenants each morning as I drove past them and respected the estate agents for a rare display of imagination. All the same, the waxworks were a sure sign of the financial desperation which infected England during those uncertain times. Even in the balance sheets, which had much of the charm of works of fiction, Megapolis profits were down around 25 per cent.

I parked the Volvo in the space with my name on it, a privilege I had enjoyed ever since I became the personal accountant working directly to the chairman. Sir Crispin Bellhanger, KCB, DSO, MC and so on, despite the handles to his name, was the most democratic of bosses. He had his lunch in the canteen every day with his coat off, exposing his bright blue braces and white shirt. He carried his tray and sat wherever there was a space available, beside a flurried typist, a visiting actress or the sullen
oberfuhrer
of the parking lot. No one, in his presence, remained tongue-tied for long. Everyone, for weeks afterwards, started sentences with ‘As Cris said to me the other day' or ‘Cris was only just telling me up in the canteen.' Everyone called him Cris, not because he had issued any sort of memo on the subject, that wouldn't have been his style at all, but because we knew that was what he wanted and most of us were flattered to oblige him. From all this, you may have gathered that working for Cris was one of the pluses, together with a somewhat remote association with the performing arts, of life at Megapolis Telly.

Our office block, built when the advertising revenue was at its height, had the fashionable look of an X-ray. Its bones, guts and arteries were on display to the outside world. Huge conduit pipes decorated the façade and the lifts, all glass, crawled up the building like glow-worms in the dark. I have no head for heights and as I went up to the top floor I paid careful attention to my feet. Anyway, I didn't have much time to admire the view. Waiting for Tash and taking her to college had made me almost half an hour late and I'd have to hurry to get everything ready for the board meeting.

‘If I could waste a minute or two of the Board's valuable time to make an interjection, which I'm sure you will all find laughably inept ... I mean, I know you, Chairman, will shoot me down in flames immediately. But all the same, one does speak, as an inhabitant of the real, sometimes uncomfortably real, world of men, women and money, with one eye on the balance sheet and one ear to the ground.'

‘That must make you a bit of a contortionist, Sydney.' I was seated next to Cris and his mutter was meant for me alone.

‘I'm sorry, Chairman –' Sydney Pollitter, head of the firm of City accountants Pollitter, Michaelson & Spratling, was giving his usual amateurish performance of humility. He was one of the unhappy few who refused to call Crispin Bellhanger, Cris and the most endlessly vocal member of the Board. He had long-lobed ears, which he tugged affectionately as he talked, and he wore, on the end of his nose, gold half-glasses. With a thatch of greying brown hair and a tendency to snuffle he looked at times like some cartoon animal, Mr Anteater, perhaps, dressed anthropomorphically in a three-piece suit. Unlike Cris, he never took off his jacket at meetings but kept it neatly buttoned. Often his lengthy, apologetic protests were about Megapolis programmes which he had found alarmingly erotic. Not that I mind for myself, of course. After a lifetime spent on the City's golden mile one becomes used, unhappily, to hear of the sins of the flesh in all their, to coin a phrase, Chairman, which you may find inappropriately flippant ...'