Dunster by John Mortimer Page A

you’ve passed the ordeal.’
    â€˜You don’t mean your father likes me?’ I was incredulous.
    â€˜Oh, I wouldn’t go so far as that. But he seems to think you’ll do.’
    It was not until I had paid Blair Cottage a number of visits that Jaunty asked me to help him with his accounts.
    â€˜I have this bloody man,’ he said, ‘who’s meant to be an accountant. But he’s in trouble himself. Woman trouble.’
    I told him I was sorry to hear it.
    â€˜Two on the side and one at home who’s threatening legal action. That is when she’s not taking the law into her own hands, slashing his tyres and so forth. Anyway, he’s up to his eyes in the smelly stuff, so he wants me to do my own VAT, work out my own expenses. I thought you paid these fellows to invent the expenses, at the very least.’
    We were in his office, a small downstairs room which might have been used as a refrigerator, it’s no use complaining,’ Beth said, ‘Dad simply doesn’t feel the cold.’ There was a bulging bureau, its top piled high with yellowing back numbers of the Field and Horse and Hound and its interior stuffed with forgotten bills, unopened bank statements and letters of almost pathetic complaint from the Inland Revenue. I took the whole lot into the kitchen, warmed my hands on the cooker and started, for the first time, a sort of filing system. Jaunty had decided to put all his faith in an undergraduate with a head for figures who had come into his home to make love to his daughter. After I had gone through his bank statements and made some sense of the scribbled invoices, I had a more or less clear idea of his financial situation.
    As a matter of fact he was reasonably well off. The stables, built on a grander scale than the house, accommodated a number of horses at livery. His charges were high and might have brought him in a reasonable income if he’d had any regular system for sending out the bills. Most of the stable work was done by dedicated girls whose wages he’d forgotten to pay. Apart from the livery business he had his army pension, increased by compensation for a wound in his right leg which didn’t seem to prevent him riding regularly to hounds. In addition to that his bank accounts showed a regular payment in, which I asked him to explain.
    â€˜Chap I used to soldier with. He took a shine to me. He knew I only had my pension, until I got this place and started the stables working. So he remembered me.’
    â€˜You mean, it’s money he left you?’
    â€˜You could put it that way, I suppose. I say, aren’t you sweating hot, sitting hunched up by that cooker?’ He threatened to open the window but I told him I couldn’t afford to have the scattered clues to his income blown away. In my researches at that time I never learned any more about Jaunty’s useful source of income. My university economics course didn’t include tax reduction schemes, but I had a bank manager uncle who told me that if Jaunty’s stables became a private company he would save on his payment of bank interest. I don’t know if he ever adopted this idea, but when I suggested it he looked at me as though I were the Delphic Oracle, and after that he often asked my advice on money matters and treated me with increased respect.
    After we’d done our finals Beth and I took a punt and tied it up under the willow tree where I had first made love to Ophelia.
    â€˜It’s all over,’ she said.
    â€˜What do you mean?’ I was worried.
    â€˜I don’t mean us. I mean this part of it. Oxford and all that. You know when you asked me what I was going to be ...’
    â€˜And you didn’t want to think about it.’
    â€˜Well. I’ve thought about it lately.’
    â€˜So what is it then?’
    â€˜I suppose ...’ She was busy eating a greengage and now she spat the stone into the river. ‘A wife and