Dunster (20 page)

After lunch the next day, and after no further discussion. Cris drove me into Norwich to catch the train. When he'd stopped the car he said, ‘What do you think we ought to do?'

‘I think you ought to ditch the series.'

I had made the proposal and Cris agreed. He said, ‘Not because of me, you understand. I can cope with whatever anyone cares to throw at me. But I don't want Angie upset. Not in any way.'

‘Of course not.'

‘Do you think we might offer Dunster some other sort of work?'

‘We might try.'

‘You sound doubtful.'

‘Once he's set on something he's hard to shift. But I'll certainly try.'

‘You do that. Let me know how you get on, will you?'

And as I opened the car door he said, ‘That
Cosi.
Bloody marvellous, wasn't it?'

‘I thought they did it very well.'

‘I mean
what
they did, not how they did it. It was saying, what's it all matter in the end? Isn't that it? What's it all matter, anyway?'

Then we said goodbye and I caught the train back to London. I rang Dunster's number from Liverpool Street and Beth answered. She told me he was out and I wondered whose memory he was ransacking now.

‘I've been with Cris,' I told her. ‘I wanted to let Dunster know as soon as possible. Our series has been cancelled.'

‘That's a pity.' She sounded only moderately disappointed. ‘He's just bought himself this ghastly great motor bike.'

‘I know. I've seen it. And the jacket to go with it. He must be celebrating his perpetual adolescence. Oh, and could you tell him, we're going to try to find something else for him to work on. Will you tell him that?'

So I took the long journey back to Muswell Hill and called in at the Mummery to have a drink. That night, for the first time ever, I slept with Lucy, my ex-Nina, my coming Lady Blakeney. It seemed that the crisis caused by Dunster had awoken me from a long reverie into a burst of activity on all fronts. But I'd better explain exactly how it happened.

We sat drinking in the bar and one by one other Mummers turned up. Martin, the bank manager – whom I had to thank for Sir Percy – and his wife, Muriel, came in with Pam, the physio, who said I looked ‘tremendously tense' and began to knead the back of my neck in a way which made me feel I would settle for the tension. Her dentist husband was not altogether pleased by this attention and he asked Pam, rather sharply, if she couldn't leave her work behind when she visited the Mummery bar. Finally, Ken, who had played Konstantin, came in with his girlfriend Ranee. They wore identical gold bracelets on their slim wrists and looked at each other with melting eyes. They were so obviously in love that they seemed like creatures from another world, one of which I had inhabited so long ago that I had almost forgotten it, and I found myself looking at them with a kind of envy.

We talked about putting on the French Revolution with the small cast at our disposal and the problems of guillotining people. I let the familiar, safe conversation lap over me like bathwater after a hard day. ‘What you need, young man' – I knew Pam called even her most geriatric patients ‘young man', so I wasn't flattered by this, although I was relieved that she had stopped digging her fingernails into my neck – ‘is a square meal. What about us all going to the Swinging Bamboo?'

‘Do you know the story about the two girls who went for a Chinese?' Dennis, who had been drinking pink gins, spoke a little indistinctly. ‘The poor fellow died.' Nobody laughed and he explained how it had sounded quite funny when a patient told it to him.

‘You probably had your fingers half-way down his throat.' Pam was in an unsympathetic mood. ‘You didn't hear it properly.' Ranee turned large, sad eyes on the dentist and said, ‘That is a most terrible story!'

I sat opposite Lucy and watched her eating rice. She lifted very small morsels to her lips and ate with her head on one side like a bird, perhaps the seagull I had fatally wounded in a play. I felt that sharp moment of lust which Trigorin must have known to be irresistible and finally unimportant. I remembered promising myself that I would never again become involved with anyone who had been my lover in a play, but that night the declaration of war with Dunster had separated me further from the memory of Beth. It was as absurd to imagine that we were Trigorin and Nina, as that we should become that melodramic couple. Sir Percy and Lady Blakeney. I was an associate producer in television and she was a solicitor. The evening could start from there.

Lucy said. ‘You look tired. Overworked?'

‘Not too much work. But it's got a little difficult.'

‘More difficult now you've gone over to the artistic side?'

‘The trouble's not artistic. More, well, perhaps more legal, actually. I may be needing your advice.'

‘Oh, you can have that any time. It might help to talk it through. You might be able to see it in proportion, whatever it is.' She looked at me with all the wisdom of her youth, not a bad actress, not a wounded seagull, but the commonsense lawyer she was.

I had walked from my house to the Mummery, which was only a few streets away. Lucy had driven me to the Chinese restaurant and eventually she drove me home, as though I were her date and she were seeing me safely back to my front door. I asked her in for a drink. As I poured white wine I felt ashamed of my sitting-room, not because it was a tip but because it was too neat, the home of someone who had lived alone too long, who was too fussy about putting books and records back in their places and was too set in his ways.

‘Well,' Lucy said, ‘aren't you going to tell me the problem?' She sounded very judicial, like a schoolgirl playing Portia. She sat in an armchair, her legs crossed; her fingertips even seemed in danger of coming together like a lawyer's at the start of a conference.

‘No,' I decided, ‘I'd think we'd better go to bed together.'

‘Really?' She still had her young lawyer look. ‘I thought you'd never get around to asking. Can I finish my wine first?'

‘Of course you can. There's no special hurry.'

‘No.' She was smiling now. ‘There doesn't seem to be.'

While she was finishing her glass, the phone rang. I picked it up knowing what to expect. ‘So you've chickened out of
War Crimes
?' Dunster said.

‘We've decided to cancel the series. I told Beth, the chairman's going to suggest another subject for you.'

‘No thanks! I don't want to be another recipient of Bellhanger bribes. You can tell your chairman to save his money. He'll probably need it, by the time I've finished with him.'

‘What're you planning to do?' I did my best to sound unconcerned.

‘Don't bother your pretty little head, old man. I'll be working by myself from now on.'

He put down the phone then. A minute later it rang again. It was Cris's secretary to say that the chairman was organizing a special meeting of the Board for tomorrow afternoon. He particularly wanted me to be there.

‘You're very busy,' Lucy said.

‘A little. Just at the moment.'

‘Was that the difficult business you started to talk about?'

‘Yes. But it can wait until tomorrow.'

Upstairs Lucy undressed methodically and put her clothes, neatly folded, on a chair. She joined me in the bed where I had spent the years with Beth, but there was none of my ex-wife's faintly musky, red-headed smell, nor her scarcely controlled frenzy. Lucy was sensible, patient, considerate, generous, and yet, in spite of her cool and casual acceptance of my invitation, still a little formal. In complete silence, only breathing lightly, I felt she was giving me the advice she had promised, in a way that was far more valuable than any lecture on the law of libel. When we had come to rest and I had her head pillowed on me she said, ‘Of course you don't love me, do you?'

‘What do you want me to say?'

‘Exactly what you feel.'

‘It's because of Beth. I'm not sure if I can ever be in love again.'

I had told her the truth, just as Dunster would have done.

There we were again, around that great, black marble sarcophagus, the Megapolis boardroom table, high up over the river with views of cranes and long-untenanted office blocks, and warehouses tarted up into flats. Floating restaurants for business lunches gently chugged up towards the Thames barrier. The directors, having rushed their lunches and spent an hour in the traffic, looked as though they wished they hadn't come to an extraordinary meeting for which they weren't prepared and hadn't got written down in their diaries.

They sat, stony-faced and silent, from Charles Glasscock, the youngest member, a solicitor by profession, through to Lady Helena Mendip, a retired headmistress, who often talked a good deal of gruff commonsense, and Barnum, known as Barney, Fawcett, a wealthy old manager of touring companies, pantomimes and summer shows, who was meant to be a fountain of wisdom on the entertainment industry, and Sydney Polluter, with his hands folded in his lap and his eyes turned up to heaven in the attitude of an ancient cardinal about to embark on a peculiarly unpleasant process of excommunication. Only Gary Penrose, who had risen without trace to become managing director, did his best to smile as he shuffled through his papers. I sat beside Cris and tried to settle my nerves by thinking, with gratitude, of the night that was past.

‘I thought we should meet' – the chairman was his usual brisk and cheerful self, although he hadn't, on this occasion, stripped down to his braces – ‘so that I can explain the position we have reached on
War Crimes.
Simply this. I have decided to cancel the project. My reason for doing so is something I shall have to go into in a little detail. Then I hope you'll all agree that I have taken the only possible course.'

‘Chairman' – Sydney Pollitter coughed, tugged at his ear lobe and started up his engines – ‘I know that with your usual fairness and courtesy you will forgive what many of my colleagues, perhaps all of my colleagues' – here he gave a slightly wolfish grin around the table – ‘may well think to be a trivial, perhaps uncalled-for, and it may even be stigmatized by some as an impertinent, observation, but I had some considerable doubts about that particular programme when you first laid it before us.'

‘Yes, Sydney.' I was, as ever, astonished by Cris's patience and self-control, ‘I do remember.'

‘I knew you would, Chairman. I knew that with your amazing grasp of every tiny detail of whatever concerns us at Megapolis you wouldn't fail to recall that supremely unimportant moment of my, perhaps ill-phrased, interjection. But I must say this in all fairness and honesty to my colleagues, and to you, Chairman, of course. Please, all of you, do laugh me to scorn if you so desire, but the very first time I heard the words War Crimes I scented danger.'

‘Then you'll be very glad, Sydney, that the programme's been ditched.'

‘That, Chairman, is a matter of profound relief to myself. Of course, I do not speak for colleagues. Colleagues are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves. They will undoubtedly do so far more lucidly and effectively than I can pretend to. They have the eloquence. So,
War Crimes
has been ditched, to use our chairman's terse and pithy expression. “All well and good”, that may be said when it comes to the turn of others. What arises is what, if any, public explanation should be given?'

‘I wasn't intending to give a public explanation.' Cris was now ignoring Sydney and turning his full charm on the ex-headmistress, who appeared to soften a little, ‘I am intending to outline the course of events to the members of the Board, in confidence.'

‘I am rebuked by the chairman.' Sydney Pollitter looked round at the colleagues with a smile of considerable satisfaction. ‘The chairman rebukes me and he is perfectly right to do so. I do most respectfully suggest that the chairman be allowed to address us without further interruption.' Whereupon the colleagues who had been silent throughout looked somewhat bewildered. Cris said, ‘Thank you, Sydney,' and embarked on his statement.

He spoke clearly, crisply and without notes. He told them he had wanted to do the
War Crimes
series to show the senseless cruelties that all sides might commit in a war. He had wanted to include a British atrocity, if such an event could be proved to have occurred. He was familiar with the massacre at Pomeriggio because of his service with the SAS in the Apennines. He had no doubt that the church was blown up as a reprisal for the death of a German officer. He had been concerned when he discovered that the scriptwriter might suggest that this outrage was in fact a British reprisal because two of our escaped prisoners had been handed over to the fascists. He had then asked Philip Progmire, who knew the writer personally, to take over as associate producer. He wanted to be kept informed of the script's progress so that he could prevent potentially dangerous inaccuracies.

Only yesterday Progmire told him that he had seen the writer, Richard Dunster, and it was clear that this man thought he had discovered who had given the orders to blow up the church on a saint's day when almost the whole town had gone there for a service. The suggestion was that it was he, then a young captain in the SAS, who was responsible for this ghastly event. He hoped that the Board would accept his word that there was not the slightest truth in that allegation. He believed that war was always tragic but he had never overstepped what are generally called the ‘rules of combat' In the interests of truth and to maintain the high standards of our documentary output, and in no way to protect his own reputation, he had cancelled the series. Other than that, he intended to take no further action.

I thought that the headmistress was about to open her mouth in warm agreement but there were sinister signs from the other side of the table. During his chairman's speech, Sid Vicious had produced a letter from an inside pocket, unfolded it carefully and adjusted his spectacles to read again what I suspected he knew by heart. He now pulled his ear and thanked the chairman for his statement, which was as full and frank as they had all known it would be. ‘However, I have had a letter, and from the word or two I have been able to have with colleagues over the telephone I think we have all had this same communication.'