Dunster (26 page)

I have already made it clear that I am not particularly proud of my seduction by Mrs Oakshott in her pale pink Gloucester Crescent bathroom, but, looking back on it after so many years, I feel that, on the whole, it was kind of her to take the trouble – especially on a busy night when she had a house full of guests.

Lucy said, ‘Who is this Marguerite Oakshott?'

‘A strange sort of woman. Rich and supposed to be left-wing. She's got an original Dufy. Her parties were quite interesting, I seem to remember. It might be fun to go.'

‘I suppose it could take your mind off this great libel action.'

But, as it so happened, it didn't take my mind off that at all.

The house was familiar, but not so Mrs Oakshott. Who was this charming, totally respectable, grey-haired lady in her sixties who greeted me as though she were a devoted auntie, welcoming her favourite nephew home from a long spell in the tropics? She had fought no battle against time, surrendering her neck to loose skin and her eyes to wrinkles, but she still smelt of sweet powder, her breasts were still plump and her ankles slender. She still leant back on her heels and tried to look down on us – an exercise which her shortness made impossible – but now she was peering through thick-rimmed spectacles. I thought her acceptance of old age creditable, although it made me feel as though I had lost my virginity an alarmingly long time ago.

She kissed me and said, ‘Great to have you back at one of my parties. And who's this you've got hold of?'

‘Lucy Cattermole,' I told her.

‘Sweet. Really very sweet and, I should have thought, rather suitable. It's time you settled down. I want to get all the dirt from you about this great war crimes trial, now you've become so famous! Are you really the
éminence grise
of Crispin Bellhanger? And don't you think he must have done
something
?'

‘I'm quite sure he didn't,' I said. ‘And I'm not in the least famous.'

‘He was always so modest, even when he was a child,' Mrs Oakshott, who sounded as though she had kept in close touch with me all my life, told Lucy. ‘Didn't you read all about him in the
Informer
?'

‘Yes, I did,' Lucy said. ‘He's thinking of suing them.'

‘How tremendously exciting! You must tell me everything that's been happening to you. Now we've found you again.'

‘I was wondering how you managed that?' I was a long way from buying the house in Muswell Hill on the night that Mrs Oakshott and I met on the bathroom floor.

‘That friend of yours ...' she said, peering vaguely past me at some new arrivals. ‘Oh, my God! Did I invite them?'

When she had left us Lucy said, ‘Is she related to you?'

‘I'll tell you about it some time. Let's go and find a drink, for God's sake. We needn't stay long.'

The place was full of those people that any girl journalist working on the Mr Chatterbox column would have rung up to ask not only about their first sexual experience but about their ten best books, their favourite films, the way they spent Sundays, what they thought of a common European currency, where they took their holidays and what they customarily had for breakfast. Their faces were either well known from newspapers or television, or vaguely and maddeningly familiar, like the people who come and greet you and know all about you but whose names you have forgotten. They looked, these well-nourished, smiling men and younger – but not quite so young as they would like to be – women, as if they were all closely related. They were like a family, all the members of which were bored with each other, had grown to hate each other and yet had to go on meeting, on and on, because every evening was yet another family reunion at the opera, or some embassy or other – or at Mrs Oakshott's because she was rich and knew them all, even though they might not have recognized her husband who was quite uninteresting and worked for a bank. And I thought how desperately they hoped to meet someone new, anybody who would tell them things they hadn't heard before, even someone like me, whose claim to fame was having played a few leading roles with the Muswell Hill Mummers and having been mentioned, in an extremely unfavourable manner, in that week's
Informer.

I also knew that Cris's reputation would be totally unsafe in their hands. The story of the Pomeriggio massacre had come to them like an extra treat in a dull season, a promise of something more dramatic than federal Europe, or a Cabinet reshuffle, to speculate about and get to know its inside story. But just as unsuccessful plays and bad books and disastrous marriages provided more pleasurable conversation – and were easier to make jokes about – than hits, or masterpieces, or people who lived happily together, so the great libel action would only be interesting if Cris were guilty. For that reason he already was guilty for them, because there was never any smoke without a fire, and because once something terrible had been suggested, or written about in a newspaper, it had better be true as life would become so very dull if it weren't. I felt a stab of pity for Cris, who was going about his business and home to Windhammer, caring for Angie and listening to Schubert, in the belief that the case in court would decide things one way or another, when this laughing, champagne-drinking, canapé-eating tribunal had decided that he was already guilty as rumoured.

As we stood holding our glasses, Lucy looked round and whispered the names of the faces she recognized. She then covered her mouth with a flat hand, like a child suppressing a giggle, as she recognized an extremely distinguished-looking elderly gentleman whom her firm had defended on a serious fraud charge at the Old Bailey. ‘I sat in court for three weeks with him, but he won't recognize me. Our litigation partner says clients never do.' Then a penetrating girl's voice squealed, ‘Lucy Cattermole! I can't believe it!' and there was someone called Amanda with whom Lucy had been at school and who had come with her dad. As they went on a brief trip down memory lane I started on the familiar journey to Mrs Oakshott's bathroom.

There were couples sitting on the stairs and the front door kept opening to admit more guests. I had obviously been invited to one of the Oakshotts' more all-embracing parties. Of course I had more than half expected, almost known, that Dunster would be there. Perhaps I thought he would be there with Beth and I wanted to prove something to both of them. I wanted to show her that Lucy and I were now a couple, an item, and getting on perfectly well, thank you. And I wanted to show Dunster that he had drawn no blood at all, that his most vicious lunge, designed as a rapier to the heart, hadn't even grazed the skin. The suggestions in his article were so absurd they could only produce laughter, not pain. Perhaps it was childish of me to wish for this demonstration but it was at least part of the reason for accepting Mrs Oakshott's invitation.

The pink bathroom revisited produced no sort of drama. As I left it there had been another intake of new arrivals and an all-too-familiar voice called up from the hall, ‘There you are, old man! I thought you might be here.' He came bounding eagerly upstairs towards me. I waited for him on the landing, not wanting to talk to Dunster in the middle of the party.

I told him his latest article was the most ludicrous in a long line of absurdities.

‘
My
article? Bright of you, old man. You saw through my little joke.'

‘It wasn't hard. And it wasn't tremendously funny either.'

‘You spotted me as Laertes.'

‘Don't flatter yourself. You're nothing like Laertes.'

‘Don't you think so?'

… I, with wings as swift

As meditation or the thoughts of love.

May sweep to my revenge.'

Dunster didn't often quote poetry.

‘Laertes didn't say that. Hamlet said it.'

Two women, look-alikes, red glossy lips and white breasts crammed into black cocktail dresses, came towards us arm in arm and one said, ‘Are you two guarding the door or something?'

We moved aside to let them into the bathroom to gossip or whatever they had to do. Dunster was leaning against the wall of the landing, looking at me with his most intolerably amused expression.

‘You remember when they wanted me for Laertes to your terrible Hamlet?' He now seemed proud of this fact. ‘That was what I was thinking of when I wrote the piece for the
Informer.
'

‘You do surprise me. It read as though you thought I was a person who went around terrorizing witnesses.'

‘Well, Beth is extremely upset about what you did to poor old Jaunty. You must have scared the wits out of the old devil.'

‘Where is Beth?'

‘Not coming.' He looked at me. ‘She didn't want to meet you.'

The noise of the party rose several decibels. A girl sitting on the stairs started to laugh helplessly, no doubt at a wonderfully new piece of gossip. A man came up to try the bathroom door and went away frustrated. I tried to convince Dunster of the absurdity of his ideas.

‘Jaunty Blair was about to make a statement which would have cleared Cris completely. Do you honestly think I wanted to stop him doing that?'

He still looked back at me with that infuriating amusement, as though he knew everything and I were a child who couldn't understand.

‘I don't think there's any end to the dirty tricks Bellhanger's lot would get up to. He was trained to that sort of thing in the war. Bloody well trained too. You're just his newest recruit, old man. Perhaps you're not fully involved yet. He may not tell you everything.'

‘What's that mean?'

‘I expect Cris's lot had it in for Jaunty, for some reason or another. Maybe they scared him into making that very favourable statement you're talking about and went a bit too far. But Jaunty's not their number one target.'

‘Who is then?'

‘Who do you think?'

‘I've no idea.'

‘Me.'

I looked at him and tried my own superior smile. Dunster, I thought, you never cease to overestimate your own importance.

‘I'm not kidding myself. I'm a thorn in Cris Bellhanger's flesh. I'm out to get him. Of course, he wants to get me first. It's perfectly natural.'

‘You're joking!'

‘It's not really funny, old man. I live in a rather quiet sort of square.'

‘I know exactly where you live.'

‘I came out of the house. Yesterday morning. Quite early. I was crossing the road to get to my car. Some maniac in a red Cortina came round the corner and drove straight at me. I just managed to jump between the parked cars, but it was a bloody near thing. Luckily the milkman came pottering round and he scarpered.'

The party and the party noise now seemed a long way away. I think the girls in black dresses came out of the bathroom and pushed past us. Down in the hall an early leaver was shouting goodbye. I said, ‘Did you get a look at the driver?'

Dunster was smiling now, more confidently than ever. ‘Why, old man?' he asked me. ‘Is he a friend of yours?'

That night I couldn't sleep. I usually find that people who tell you that end up by also giving you detailed accounts of their dreams, or they have lain beside you dead to the world while you were careful not to breathe too loudly in case they woke up. I'm sure I did, in fact, sleep for a bit on the night of Mrs Oakshott's party, but I also spent quite a lot of time downstairs, listening to the World Service on the kitchen radio and worrying.

It was the red Cortina that started it all off. I saw a red Cortina turning round in Jaunty's yard. Could it have been to liberate him, or to discover if he'd learnt whatever lesson his incarceration in the luton was meant to have taught him? A red Cortina was driven at Dunster in Camden Town, if Dunster were to be believed. It was not that he told deliberate lies – he might have seemed more human and fallible if he did – he merely made huge assumptions which then became Holy Writ, part of the unchallengeable Gospel according to Dunster. And yet I had never mentioned the red Cortina at Blair Cottage to him. Was its presence in both places too much of a coincidence?

I made tea in the cold kitchen. Some listener to the World Service in Africa was requesting ‘Spread a Little Happiness' with a dedication ‘to my cousin Joseph Okimbo in the Department of Justice'. There must be millions of red Cortinas, one of the most common cars in the country. One belonged to a tourist who'd lost his way and turned round at Blair Cottage. Another to a careless, or even dangerous, driver in a hurry, going round a square in Camden Town. And then I had a memory of something I hadn't thought of in connection with either of these two incidents. When Jaunty had taken me to dinner at his appalling club, when he was troubled and wanted me to help him avoid trouble, there had been a man dominating one of the other tables. I began to remember a large, elderly man with a bald head fringed with grey hair and a broken nose who had been at the bar when we left and who had, perhaps or was I imagining it from a great distance – exchanged looks with Jaunty as I was leaving. The car turning in Jaunty's yard had been driven by a bulky, elderly man, who looked like a Roman emperor.

If this was the same character, who was he? I had thought in Dandini's that he might have been an ex-superintendent of police, out with members of the Vice Squad. Then I remembered that Lucy said that she had noticed that policemen, and those who committed serious crimes, looked, when young, like professional footballers and as they grew older they acquired the same bulky respectability, so that in the court canteen it was often difficult to tell them apart. Had a professional killer been hired in the case of
Bellhanger
v.
Dunster
? What had he been hired to do and who the hell did I suppose had hired him?

Lucy and I were patrials of Muswell Hill. My parents lived there, as did hers, in Coniston Road. When she passed her solicitors' exam and got her job as an assistant in a firm which did a good deal of crime, she went on living in her mother's house (her parents had long been separated) and when we slept together she often walked over, or took a short bus ride, from her place to mine with a bag slung over her shoulder. By now my wardrobe contained some of the sombre and businesslike clothes appropriate to her profession, as well as the jeans, sweaters and T-shirts she changed into in the evenings. We weren't really living together. There was an unspoken agreement between us that we were not committed to each other in that way, and perhaps never would be. Lucy came to me on visits, and her mother, whom I met quite often in the Mummery bar and who helped out in the ticket office, would often speak wistfully of the time when Lucy would be leaving home and starting a family, like her brother Seb, to which Lucy would say, ‘Not yet, Mum. You'll have to put up with me for a few years yet!' On the nights when she did stay with me, I often drove her early to the City on my way to work, just as I used to drive Tash to her tutorial college. On that morning, when I was stopping and starting down the Farringdon Road, I asked her a question about something which might have arisen from time to time in the legal profession.