Dunster by John Mortimer Read Free Book Online

She was, I noticed, a small, curvaceous, still-pretty woman with dark hair and bright brown eyes. She had a way of leaning back her head and trying to look down at us, which, as both Dunster and I were a good deal taller than her, was not a complete success. ‘Now, shall I find you someone rather beautiful to talk to?’
    â€˜Is that Malcolm McCabe?’ Dunster had spotted the one Labour Minister who still retained the respect of the Left, despite an uneasy compromise over private education. He was large, florid and Scots, with watery blue eyes and a mane of iron-grey hair. He didn’t look, as he held court in a corner of the room, especially beautiful.
    â€˜Well, yes. But he seems a little occupied at the moment.’ McCabe’s audience consisted, I thought, of better-off girls from the Royal College of Art. Not to be deterred, Dunster moved purposefully in the direction of the politician. Mrs Oakshott squeezed my arm, murmured, ‘See you later, cherub,’ and I was left holding the bottle of Carafino. I saw Dunster work his way through the attendant art students and stand uncomfortably close to McCabe, who ignored him for as long as possible. I put our gift down among the superior bottles and no one spoke to me until a fairly friendly girl in a black dress asked me for a match and started to chat as I failed to make my lighter work. I looked terribly learned, she said, and was I going into politics? I was still trying to think of the correct Wildean answer to this line when another girl said, ‘Come on, Michelle, the professor wants you,’ and they went off towards a learned-looking fellow with a pale, domelike forehead, standing at the other end of the room.
    â€˜It’s disgusting!’ Dunster was back with me.
    â€˜Not necessarily,’ I told him, although the distant professor did appear to be leading Michelle upstairs.
    â€˜McCabe. He was drinking champagne!’
    â€˜Quite a lot of them seem to be.’
    â€˜And so I tackled him about private education.’
    â€˜Well, you should know all about that. Seeing we pay fees at St George’s.’
    But Dunster was hard to disconcert. He went on with great intensity. ‘I told him I felt thoroughly bad about that. I also said he ought to be ashamed of drinking champagne while the class system remains intact.’
    â€˜I bet that really got to him.’
    â€˜No, it didn’t. That’s the point. He said his brand of socialism meant that champagne would be freely available to all. But until that bright day dawned, at least it would be available to socialist Cabinet Ministers. That man’ – Dunster came to the inevitable conclusion – ‘is completely false. I’m leaving.’
    I might have gone with him if I hadn’t wanted to go to the loo. I plucked up courage to ask directions of a lofty person in a dark suit, but he said, ‘God knows. I only came with the catering.’ So I started on a fatal journey up the staircase to the upper reaches of the house. Doors were open into darkened rooms and I heard, from one of them, the sound of suppressed laughter. Then I saw a light on gleaming tiles and went in.
    Mrs Oakshott’s bathroom, perhaps appropriately, was pale pink. It was comfortably furnished with fleecy rugs, book shelves and pots of dried-out petals. Either because I was in a hurry or because of some defect in the lock, the door wasn’t fastened and I became conscious, as I washed my hands in the pink basin, that I was not alone. ‘I do love those films where the chap takes the glasses off the librarian and she looks like a real woman, don’t you?’ Mrs Oakshott said as she removed my specs and put them carefully on a glass shelf. ‘There now, you really look quite pretty.’ I saw the world blurred, like an Impressionist painting, but it was clear to me that her shirt had become unbuttoned. She had a sweet, powdery smell which mingled with