Dunster Read Online Free Page A

winter, the organ in the Great Hall was covered with snow. When I was very small, a steam train from Highgate stopped at Muswell Hill on its way to the Palace and until I was twenty there was a racecourse in the suburb. When it closed, life there remained quiet until, in a moment of high drama, the old Palace was consumed by fire and has since been rebuilt. Communications with the area are difficult and many Muswell Hill inhabitants, like my parents, seldom left it in the evenings or at weekends, shopping there, seeing friends or regularly visiting the splendours of the local Odeon. One Saturday I warned them, ‘There’s a friend called Dunster coming this afternoon. As a matter of fact, he’s rather a menace.’
    â€˜So far as I know,’ my father said, ‘Dunster’s a small town in Somerset that’s never been a menace to anyone.’
    I dreaded the Saturday afternoon visit. My parents’ house was disgracefully tidy; souvenirs of their holidays abroad – bronze statues from Greece, bits of pottery from Morocco – were arranged on shelves and carefully dusted. My father was a civil servant in the Home Office and clearly open to attack from Dunster. My mother was the person from whom I have inherited my talent for anxiety. She brought out our best tea service, the one my grandmother left us in her will, for Dunster, and gave him chocolate biscuits and small cucumber sandwiches, which he ate as though he hadn’t seen food for a month.
    â€˜So you’re in the Home Office, sir,’ Dunster said to my father, with his mouth half full of cucumber sandwich. I had never heard Dunster call anyone ‘sir’ before, not even our masters, and he managed to make the title sound especially contemptuous. ‘I suppose you do your best not to notice the corruption in Scotland Yard?’
    â€˜I wish to God we could. To be quite honest with you, Dick’ – my father’s use of his Christian name seemed to startle Dunster – ‘it worries the hell out of us. I wish your father’d write a series of his magnificent articles about it. We need all the public support we can get.’
    It was the first time I’d seen Dunster deflated. I loved my father then, and he was always my idea of a reasonable, tolerant human being who took life with a large pinch of salt and stood in no particular awe of anyone. Years later, when I came to work for Cris Bellhanger, I suppose I was attracted to him because he was the same sort of character.
    â€˜Do your people come from that little town in Somerset? Sleepy sort of place.’ My father pressed home his advantage.
    We got that milk jug in Dunster’ – my mother, quite without meaning to, turned the knife in the wound – the one that’s shaped like a cow. We thought it was rather original.’
    â€˜Wonderful cream teas in Dunster,’ my father remembered.
    â€˜Is your dad going to write about Scotland Yard?’ I asked my guest when we had gone up to my room to smoke Gauloises Bleues, an activity which I’m sure my parents knew about but never mentioned.
    â€˜I shouldn’t think so.’ And Dunster added mysteriously, ‘he’s got a much bigger fish than that to fry.’
    â€˜Sex,’ Dunster said more than once, ‘I don’t know how people do it.’
    I had often wondered, but I said nothing.
    â€˜Not it. Not the actual thing. That’s absolutely vital. For your health. I mean, you can’t do without the actual thing. Any more than you can do without breathing.’
    I didn’t keep a close watch on all of Dunster’s movements, but I had never known him to miss school, even for a cold. Was this because of his ardent and regular sex life? Was Dunster, during the hours we didn’t spend together, the Casanova of Camden Town? I found this hard to believe, but then it was unsafe to make any assumptions about Dunster, a boy who was full of