Dunster (7 page)

‘No.' I lied, knowing that Angie would like to tell me again. Cris leant back in his chair and looked at his wife with considerable pride as she described how she hadn't known him from Adam when she went to some awful party in Kensington in aid of the Red Cross, and he came pushing past her with a glass of red plonk.

‘Black market Communion wine, probably.' Cris filled in the details. ‘At some of those parties people used to mix it with spirits and call it gin and altars!'

‘He bumped into me and the stuff went all over my dress.'

‘A total accident.'

‘You don't believe that, do you, Philip?'

‘No,' I reassured her, ‘I don't believe it.'

‘It was all done so that he could winkle my address out of me. He said he wanted to send me flowers.'

‘I thought that was rather a gallant gesture?' Cris asked me to confirm his gallantry.

‘Gallant gesture indeed! All he had in mind was rogering me. In the Regent Palace hotel!' Her eyes closed then, apparently in happy recollection of that night half a century ago. She was still smiling as Cris helped her to the staircase, picking up her dropped possessions and promising not to stay up too late talking to me.

After Angie had gone to bed we moved to the library, a long room with a stained-glass window done by some minor pre-Raphaelite, giving it a dim, religious appearance. There were shelves of leather-bound books – ‘Great-grandfather bought them by the yard. They're on such fascinating subjects as the geology of Tibet' – and also Cris's larger, far more interesting, collection. There was an elaborate sound system and a grand piano at which Cris sat and played for a little. He broke the silence after the music arrived at its inevitable conclusion. ‘A war crime is something that's done by the defeated. The Germans are supposed to have committed all the war crimes. We just liberated people, even if it meant killing large numbers of them to do it.'

‘We're not suggesting that the Germans didn't commit war crimes, are we?' We were talking about history, a period which would seem as remote to my daughter as the Norman Conquest or the Napoleonic Wars, and I didn't know what surprises our proposed programme might contain.

‘Oh, yes. Of course. They committed them.' He frowned and moved uncomfortably in his chair. Unusually for Cris, words weren't coming easily to him. ‘Let me tell you something. We got to a little town when we were fighting our way up Italy. It doesn't matter where exactly. Anyway. Typical Italian town. Perched on a steep hillside. An old wall round it. Nothing much inside. A square where they had a market once a week. A church. A bar. A few narrow streets. No great paintings in the church. A place of no importance to anyone. Well, when we got there it was empty. Nothing. A ghost town. No sign of life. Flies buzzing over the meat going bad in the butcher's. Grocer's empty. Café deserted. And where a church had been, nothing.'

‘Bombed?'

‘Not as respectable as that. No. Some German had been killed. An officer. Not even in the town. Somewhere outside the walls. Anyway, that's where they found his body. Well, everyone in the village went to church on a saint's day. Men, women and children. Babies in their mothers' arms. So when everyone was inside, German soldiers locked the doors. They'd laid the charges the night before, we imagined. Their commanding officer yelled out some sentence of death over a loud hailer. That's what they heard instead of the Mass. Then the soldiers cleared off and everyone was blown to pieces, old and young – everyone in the village who'd gone there to pray.'

He shook himself, as though to escape from a memory. ‘A small incident perhaps, but those people didn't start the war. Probably they had no particular interest in it, except for praying for it to stop. So they went to church and were blown to kingdom come. What the hell can you prove by killing people?'

I said nothing. War is something of which I have had absolutely no experience.

‘That's why I want to do this series, in spite of anything Sid Vicious may have to say about it. I want people to understand. Look ...' He went over to a desk in the corner and came back with a typescript, neatly bound, ‘I'd like to know what you think of it. An outline for a series of six.'

As I took it, I saw Dunster's name on the cover and was filled with unreasonable foreboding. I read it in bed. It was clearly set out but contained no surprises. Lidice and My Lai, the French in Algeria, the Germans in Hungary, the Russians in Poland: the tales of horror seemed far away from the warm, fake castle in the flat countryside where the elderly couple, still in love, lay sleeping, I imagined, in each other's arms. I wondered, now a new war had started, why Cris was so anxious to remember these old atrocities. As I finished reading and switched out the light, I realized there was something missing in that simple account of war crimes. It was the sound of anger and denunciation which I had been hearing since I was a schoolboy, the authentic voice of Dunster.

The Absent Prince
by Paul Pry

No one was able to tell us where Prince Hamlet was last night. He was, perhaps understandably, staying on in college in Wittenberg to avoid the embarrassing proceedings which were going on in the gardens of St Joseph's. He did send an understudy, perhaps some remote relative of Horatio's who had once been in a school play. This unfortunate stand-in, referred to in the programme as one Philip Progmire, was clearly unable to afford a decent suit of mourning and came on wearing a well-used tweed jacket and jeans. He had also forgotten to have his glasses mended. Progmire's idea of acting seemed to be to stand about reciting the lines as though they were poetry or
familiar quotations
, a style of Shakespearian performance which you might think had long gone out of fashion, even in Denmark. His advice to the players was fairly well spoken; the only trouble was that he seemed unable to take any of it himself. Far from holding the mirror up to nature, he seemed to be holding it up to some hammy performance he once saw at the Old Vic.

It can't be said that the supporting cast was much help to the substitute Hamlet. Bethany Blair's Ophelia, straight down from Roedean, played the mad scene as though she'd had one too many glasses of claret cup at a May Ball. Her experience of ‘country matters' was clearly confined to huntin', shootin' and fishin'. King Claudius and his ‘lady wife' seemed a typical suburban couple, only slightly worried by the mortgage repayments and an outbreak of greenfly on the roses in the front garden. This pair of innocents probably thought that incest was something that Catholics bum in church.

Was there a bright spot in these gloomy goings-on, you may well ask? Just one. Paul Adams's Laertes struck exactly the right note of single-minded determination. He appeared to be the only passionate person at Court, although in this
Hamlet
the duel scene was about as exciting as a fight between an Olympic fencer and a short-sighted member of the Campaign for the Abolition of Sword-fighting.

It is worth noting that Nan Thorogood, who knows how Shakespeare should be acted, sat watching her production and was looking as unhappy as I felt. The gods passed their verdict by pissing on this production from a great height; it rained heavily in the second act.

‘The little shit!'

We had bought the
Cherwell
at a newspaper shop in the Turl and were on our way towards the High Street and coffee. Beth was reading as she walked. The wind lifted her strawberry blonde hair and her forehead was furrowed.

‘Who is?'

‘Paul Pry!'

‘It's not a good review?' I was beginning to get the message.

‘Not exactly a rave. You could say that.' She aimed the
Cherwell
in my direction. I caught it and found the page. I only saw the headline, knew it would be a stinker about me and decided to spare myself the unnecessary pain of reading more of Paul Pry on Hamlet, and skipped to Ophelia.

‘It's ridiculous,' I said.

‘Oh, yes? I've been laughing ever since I bought the bloody thing.'

‘You never even went to Roedean.'

‘Of course I didn't! You don't think that idiot writes the truth, do you? He wouldn't even know what the truth was when he saw it. He's only interested in hurting people. Causing pain. That's what gives the little squirt his kicks.'

‘Don't take it seriously,' I advised her.

‘Seriously? Of course I don't take it seriously! I take it as being absolutely and entirely beneath contempt.'

‘That's good then. We'll go and have a coffee.'

‘What's the use of coffee! We'll go to the White Horse.'

After a large whisky Beth said, ‘What're you going to do to him, Philip?'

‘What did you say?'

‘I said, what're you going to do to the little creep? At the very least punch his nose, I imagine.'

‘All real pros get bad notices,' I told her, ‘and they rise above them.'

‘To begin with I'm not a real pro. And, to go on with, I have no intention of rising above it. One too many glasses of claret cup, indeed? I wouldn't be seen dead drinking claret cup. Look here. If you're not going to punch his nose for him, I will. I only know one thing. He's not going to get away with this.'

‘Have another whisky.'

‘All right. Then we'll plan the assault. What do you say we go and lie in wait for him? Both of us. May God forgive me if I don't knee him in the groin!'

I went to the bar and got her another whisky, hoping this would give her time to cool off. I made it a small one this time and put in a good deal of soda water. However, when I got back to the table where Beth was still crouched in fury, the cooling-off time had not been enough.

‘We'll do that, won't we?' she said. ‘Jump him in the dark and get a knee in there.'

‘There's only a slight problem.'

‘I don't see one.'

‘We don't have the slightest idea who he is.'

‘What on earth are you talking about? He's Paul Pry, isn't he?'

‘That's what he writes under. I don't believe it's his real name.'

‘You mean' – she looked up at me and I could see that her eyes had been full of tears – ‘that the creep is hiding under an alias?'

‘That's about the size of it.'

‘Typical!' There was a pause while she drank. ‘This whisky,' she said, ‘doesn't taste as good as the last one.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘But you'll find out who he really is, won't you?'

‘I'll try.'

‘You'll succeed. And then you'll do something awful to him. You promise me that?'

‘Of course,' I said. Anything for a quiet life, but I had never kneed anyone in the groin before.

I found the office of the
Cherwell
on a top floor in Holywell. The editor was an eager, sharp-nosed, scurrying sort of person who seemed only to lack the courage to wear a green eye-shield and shout ‘Hold the front page!' down a telephone. Long, flapping proofs were pinned up like Christmas decorations and in the background two mournful girls were pasting up pages in a martyred manner.

‘Who is Paul Pry?' the editor said. ‘I bet that fellow who played Hamlet would like to go and punch him on the nose.'

‘Oh, I shouldn't think so,' I lied. ‘It's just we'd like his name and college so we can send him an invitation to our next show.'

‘Send the tickets here. That's the proper, professional way of doing it. And as for Paul Pry, you know we journalists never disclose our sources. Anyway, it's up to us to protect him from physical attack. Lots of actors threaten it. Come on, girls. The deadline's almost on us. We've got to get next week's paper to bed.'

When I left, the girls were plying their paste-brushes no faster than when I had arrived. I could think of only one other source of information.

‘I mean, you write articles for all the magazines. You must know.'

‘Must know what?'

‘Who the little shit is who reviewed
Hamlet
.'

‘I can't remember' – Dunster was looking at me with some amusement – ‘ever having seen you angry before, old man. Is this a breakthrough?'

‘You think
I'm
angry. I'm almost completely calm compared to ...' I hesitated.

‘Compared to who?'

‘Compared to other members of the cast.'

‘You mean compared to Bethany Blair?'

‘Naturally, she's extremely upset.'

‘And you're upset because she's your girlfriend.'

‘Well ...'

‘Oh, come on. Don't think it wasn't obvious. “There is a willow grows aslant a brook, That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream ... Don't look so pleased with yourself, Progmire.'

‘No one could look pleased with themselves after that notice.'

‘But you've got to admit, quite honestly, you weren't all that good?'

‘Probably not.'

‘But you wanted praise.'

‘Of course I did. Everybody does.'

‘So everybody expects a critic to lie.'

‘Well, at least to look for the best things in a performance.'

‘Why should he? Why shouldn't he look for the worst things if he wants to?'

‘Because it's brutal. It causes unnecessary suffering.'

‘To your girlfriend?'

‘And to me, I suppose. If I've got to be honest.'

‘Have you? I thought you didn't believe in honesty. Isn't honesty something rather beastly that hurts people's feelings?' He was sitting at his desk, among an indescribable mess of books and papers. There were at least three mugs of cold, half-drunk Nescafe and a paper plate smeared with yellow rice, a relic of some hastily snatched take-away, among the illegible, unfastened pages of an essay which had drifted on to the chairs around him and then fluttered on to the floor. He looked up and favoured me with one of his rare smiles.