Hunting Unicorns

by Bella Pollen

  When the car cruised to a stop in front of a deserted warehouse, Audrey looked out the window and remarked, ‘But this is not at all where my friends live.’

  ‘Sowhat, Lady?’

  ‘Well,’ she’d said severely, ‘They’d be most awfully upset if I were late for dinner.’

  The Puerto Ricans were so taken aback by this apparent lack of concern regarding her forthcoming rape and brutal murder that they promptly drove her to the address she’d given and firmly refused a tip.

  From time to time Rory strokes Lurch’s head as the dog trots by his side. Above their heads, rooks are screaming and cawing, the spiky pods of their nests lodged in the leafless boughs of the sycamores. The sky rumbles with an approaching storm. The path narrows and mud squelches under his feet. It’s wet. Again. Grey, wet and warm. Not that I approve of Rory’s disinterest in the English countryside but global warming really has seen an end to decent weather. Newspapers are apt to quote statistics about average temperatures remaining the same, but God knows, seasons used to know how to behave themselves. Winters were cold, summers were hot. There were Christmases when the countryside froze. You can’t conceive how beautiful Bevan is in the snow. That moment when you turned into the front drive was like stepping through the back of the cupboard into The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The magic kingdom of Bevan, preserved in ice, ignored by road gritters, untouched by the outside world. There are so many memories here, so many of them good. We used to toboggan down this bank off the church walk. We built a launching pad at the top. We’d start screaming, end crashing, wind caught in our throats. God but we were brilliant too. Headfirst, sitting, backwards, kneeling, crouching, we’d steer straight for obstacles, the bigger the better. Rory blinking back tears of fear because we were the Bevan Boys Daring Double Act. The fearless undisputed champions of the sled. And then there were the summers – when the air was thick and hazy with the smell of roses and burnt hay, when the heat drugged you, when you could only just muster enough energy to collapse on the lawn or lie in the boat listening to the water slap against the bottom.

  As he walks alongside the wall, Rory touches the velvety edges of emerald moss on the stone. I will him to peel it off, to remember how it feels – as satisfactory as a scab off the knee – Christ, how can Rory not think about these things? If he were to stop right now, if he were to just try, he might hear the drone of the hornets, he would remember clipping sweet peas into a basket, remember licking their sticky dew off his finger. He would remember crawling under the strawberry net in the kitchen garden – but Rory doesn’t stop and he doesn’t remember. Rory doesn’t do nostalgia at the moment.

  The avenue before the church was once a topiary of yews planted by my great-grandmother’s gardener, Bindey. Bindey was a hunchback and famous locally for his ability to hold the largest number of clothes pegs in one hand, winning first prize at the village fête for thirty years running. He was a splendid character, almost a distillation of old England really and he used to fuss over the yew trees as if they were the batch of unruly children he’d failed to conceive with his wife. Mrs Bindey worked in the house and Bindey was inconsolable when she died. Up until that point the bushes had always been the best-tended things on the Estate. Now they’ve been left to grow into bouffant affros, but when we were children they were clipped into precise shapes, peacocks and pheasants, hollowed out in the centre, some large enough to hide in.

  ‘Seen the boys, Bindey?’ Great-Grandpa would ask.

  ‘No sir,’ Bindey would lean on his shears, ‘given you the slip have they?’

  My great-grandfather was a passionate gardener. He spent all his time in the potting sheds and greenhouses. He walked the grounds with his stick every morning checking for frost damage. A gentle man, he reserved most of his aggression for the deer that ate the bark off his trees. He smoked sixty cigarettes a day and nicotine had streaked the skin yellow on his fingers. When he talked, he had to interrupt himself to cough. He refused to accept that there was any connection between his cough and the amount he smoked: ‘It’s a little cold I’ve picked up,’ he would say, or ‘The pollen count is high.’ One winter, he became very bad. The doctor told him he had a clear choice – give up smoking or die of emphysema. Great-Grandpa listened quietly. As soon as the doctor left, he went to the gardening shed and smoked ten cigarettes in a row. Two years later he was dead.

  Rory stands now before the headstone in the churchyard. The flowers from his previous visit have drooped tiredly over the edge of the jar as if, having realized the impossibility of being decorative any longer, they might as well take a well-earned rest. I’ve been wondering lately about this custom of leaving flowers on graves. Why not something more interesting? Photographs or favourite foods for instance. An apple and game pie from Paxton & Whitfield, or even potted shrimps would go down nicely but Rory has picked me some early crocuses. He props them up in the jar and whistles for Lurch who is conscientiously digging up Mrs Bindey a few rows away.

  On his way back to the house he meets Alistair trudging up the hill, his walking stick making soft plops in the mud. Since Rory’s arrival he’s drunk a half bottle of whisky but this does not make him completely unaware of his son’s disapproval. Awkward in each other’s company neither speak till they reach the car.

  ‘Are you coming down this weekend?’ Alistair asks.

  ‘Probably not, Pa.’

  ‘Right then.’ Alistair is a little disappointed, but at the same time, a little relieved.

  * * *

  Rory’s got the engine started and is crunching gears into reverse when there’s a knock on the window. Alistair’s face looms comically close.

  Rory rolls down the window. ‘Quick,’ Alistair says, ‘before your mother sees.’

  From behind his back he hoists an item which at first glance resembles a tree stump but on closer inspection turns out to be the waste paper basket from the South bedroom. It’s about a foot and a half high and made from a scooped-out rhinoceros hoof. There are no words to describe the depths of its hideousness.

  Alistair glances anxiously towards the drive. ‘Take it up to London, could you?’

  ‘Dad, keep it, it’s worthless.’

  ‘You know, I do believe that old urn has got a crack.’ Alistair squints towards the pillar by the back drive where the urn has sat, cracked, since 1971.

  ‘Dad, honestly, you might as well put it back.’ Rory doesn’t begrudge Alistair’s selective deafness, believing it to be one of the great perks of old age.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Alistair says stoutly. ‘If Sotheby’s got a couple of hundred for that moose’s head this’ll definitely be worth a little something.’

  Rory knows this is a fight he will not win. He hears Lurch barking. Audrey, on the home-stretch of her afternoon walk, will appear any minute around the bend in the drive.

  Sighing heavily, he pings the lock on the boot.

  * * *

  The pigeons are still swinging from their makeshift gallows when Rory arrives back at Connelly Mews. He unhooks the string and drops the birds into the rhino bin before humping them up the stairs and into his flat where he casts helplessly around for an available corner.

  In the home decorating style favoured by our mother, things do not get thrown away. The verbs to jettison or to discard are against her religion, which decrees that objects, irrespective of size and state of repair were invented to be accumulated. In fact it would be fair to say that Audrey does not officially acknowledge the concept of mess.

  Take the kitchen worktop at Bevan. At any given time you might find the following: a selection of chipped porcelain items, a damp sock, a dozen virtually empty jars with accompanying fungus of marmalade and chutney beneath their lids, one dead animal. Amongst these larger objects nestle old coins, (shillings, farthings) matchboxes, a nob of rancid butter, tiny exotic-looking shells, shreds of paper with illegible, though vital telephone numbers and inky pen tops – all of which are welded together by that special sticky paste made f
rom dust, cooking grease and decomposed flies found exclusively in large English houses left uncleaned for twenty years. On top of all of this there would be the normal debris from daily food preparation. It’s a wonder we didn’t both die of E-coli as children.

  As a result, Rory has always kept his flat white and gloriously possession free – at least until now. Lately ghosts from Bevan have begun taking up residence here. These days there’s scarcely room to move amongst the plaster busts, stuffed birds and varying Dutch watercolours. On the table by the sofa sits the vase Rory sold for three hundred pounds and in the corner stands the card table that a private dealer from Cheltenham bought only last month. Those moose antlers, hanging on the wall and currently making themselves useful as a tie rack, recently fetched four hundred pounds at Sotheby’s. Except they didn’t, any of them. It’s a game Rory and Alistair play. A humiliation-free method of inter-family money laundering. See, this is what happens with our parents, you nail your foot to the ground, then spend the next twenty years trying to gnaw it off again.

  Rory gives the bin a considered kick. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that the chief of the Zulus once urinated in it during a full moon and it’s an irreplaceable African artefact that by rights should be attracting millions of visitors in the British Museum. ‘Who would have believed it,’ Rory will be able to say to the newspapers, ‘and to think, we just kept rubbish in it.’

  maggie

  ‘Now let’s see,’ Dwight said, ‘An earl is more important than a marquess, but a lord is more important than a sir…’

  It was early evening and we were propping up the hotel bar having a drink. Dwight, my sound recordist, was a spry little man from Brooklyn prone to name dropping, preppy clothes and the occasional aggressive outburst. He was reading the copy of Burke’s Peerage I’d purloined from Massey and acting like he was thrilled to be this close to a title, even if it was only on the printed page.

  ‘Look. It’s like poker,’ I told him.

  ‘How’s that?’ The barman, with whom I’d been flirting madly, was one of those Australian boys with a cherubic smile who was probably happier tossing sheep than shaking cocktails. He poured another shot of Jack Daniel’s into my glass.

  ‘Well see, a marchioness beats a viscount, which beats a sir. A full house of lords over earls is better than a couple of honourables – providing of course they aren’t a pair of queens. A straight flush is better than a hot flush, but a royal flush,’ I downed the bourbon in one, ‘a royal flush scoops the board every time.’

  The barman shook his head admiringly. ‘I’ve never been able to get the hang of those.’

  ‘Oh it’s one of the few skills I’m really proud of.’

  ‘Let’s not forget baton twirling,’ said Wolf. He emptied a bunch of photos out of a brown envelope. ‘For you. Arrived Fed-Ex,’ he raised one shaggy eyebrow, ‘executive suggestions.’

  I flicked through them quickly. English tourist scenes, even including one of the changing of the guard. ‘Hmm, I think I might just manage to recognize the queen without a visual aid.’ I dropped them into the bin behind the bar.

  ‘Interested in the royal family are you?’ The barman slid over a dish of monkey nuts.

  ‘Why?’ I asked, ‘you friendly with them?’

  ‘If I was, would I be working my hairy arse off in a bar?’

  ‘I don’t know. You could be their token peasant friend.’

  ‘Poor Queenie,’ the barman said. ‘A nice lady with a bum job.’

  ‘Yeah, poor Queenie,’ Wolf said. ‘Try to think of her as a downtrodden little woman who needs rescuing from her dysfunctional family…’

  ‘I’ll try,’ I grinned, ‘but it won’t be easy.’

  ‘Bishops, marquesses’ younger sons, earls’ elder sons, viscounts of England, Scotland then Great Britain … this is amazing,’ Dwight said. ‘It says here, one family can have up to ten different titles … ten!’

  ‘Disgraceful, where’s the guillotine when you need it.’

  I swivelled my stool. It took me a second to realize that the man who’d spoken was Rory from Stately Locations. He looked different. He was dressed for a start. Black pants, grey turtleneck and heavy-soled boots. He had a deep frown line in the middle of his forehead which didn’t dissolve when he smiled.

  ‘Would you a like another whisky?’ he asked.

  ‘Bourbon? Sure, great, thanks.’

  In his office I’d put him around late thirties. But there something really boyish about him. When he moved to the bar stool, I noticed his limbs were so loose they seemed attached to one another by holes and string.

  I introduced the crew. ‘Wolf, Dwight, this is Rory…?’

  ‘Jones,’ he said.

  The three of them shook hands and I watched Rory Jones, like everybody else who’s ever come across Wolf, trying to deconstruct his nationalities feature by feature. Wolf, a Japanese, Jewish American, is positively bizarre looking. Every feature he has is contradicted by another – a long ponytail at the back, a bald forehead at the front, the nose and the heavy skin of his Jewish father but the delicate almond eyes of his mother.

  ‘Drink?’ Wolf asked Rory.

  ‘I don’t, thanks.’

  I was going to be facetious and say – what, never? Then I realized that ‘don’t’, coupled with ‘drink’ always did mean never.

  ‘So are we all set?’ I said instead.

  He undid a bulging envelope. ‘We’re all set. The good news is that the Duke of Roxmere has changed his mind. He’s opening his house to the public next spring so this is a good time to get him. Also, if things go well, it will be easier for me to get you in elsewhere.’

  ‘Fantastic.’ This was a real scoop.

  Researchers at Newsline had come up with the following: Roxmere family came from one of the most obscurantist sections of the English nobility. He was a diehard conservative who’d written several papers lamenting the loss of power and prestige of the aristocracy. He believed that the Empire’s gravest error was to place political power in the hands of the lower classes. Thinking about Jay’s sound bite, he seemed like a great candidate for snobbery.

  Rory unpinned the envelope. ‘Start with this. Map. Explanation of the house. History of the house. History of the family. Plenty of pomp and circumstance for you at Roxmere, dozens of servants, hundreds of staircases, wonderful pictures and … well, anyway, they’re expecting us for lunch tomorrow.’

  ‘Us?’ I caught Wolf’s eye. ‘Oh no, there must be some mistake.’

  ‘No mistake,’ Rory said cheerfully. ‘That’s our job, read our brochure. We accompany people.’

  ‘Well,’ I said doubtfully, ‘we work alone.’

  He looked at me carefully. ‘I don’t think you quite understand. My clients are deeply distrustful of … er … journalists.’

  ‘No problem,’ Wolf said. ‘Maggie’s entirely used to that.’

  ‘Plus the language in these places can be a little … oblique.’

  ‘Oh I’m sure I can manage without an interpreter.’

  ‘The point is,’ Rory went on, ‘it’s a lot easier than you might imagine to put your foot in it.’

  ‘So you’re suggesting we “Americans” should be on best behaviour.’ I was kidding, trying to keep things light.

  ‘I’m simply suggesting that these people can require a little subtle handling.’

  ‘You have my word. I won’t snap my bubblegum between courses.’

  His frown line only deepened. ‘I think you’re missing the point.’

  I wasn’t missing the point at all. The last thing we needed was somebody breathing over our shoulder.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Fine,’ he relaxed.

  ‘Maybe it would be better for both of us if we found someone else to work with.’

  I was startled by the flash of real anger behind his eyes. For a moment I thought he was going to tell us to go to hell, but I’d seen his offices; I had no idea wha
t the English paid to film shampoo commercials in manor houses but I imagined it wasn’t all that much.

  He backed down. I could tell he didn’t like it one bit but he covered it well. He secured the envelope with its metal pin. ‘I’m sure you’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘Good luck.’ He shook hands with Dwight and Wolf. Then he put the envelope on the bar and walked out.

  At the door he turned on his heel. ‘Just one small word of advice.’ The smile was back, lurking behind his eyes and for some reason it made me nervous, ‘Be nice to all pets and for God’s sake … don’t be late for meals.’

  * * *

  ‘You look like you slept in the back of a truck,’ Dwight said to me the following morning.

  ‘Uhuh?’

  ‘Want me to drive?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Because you know, if you’re tired I’m very happy to drive.’ He peered anxiously at the verge of the road. Dwight is a terrible passenger, always sucking in nervous intakes of breath and ostentatiously folding away side mirrors, but then I’m not much better myself. I’m visually dyslexic, I pretend to like to drive, but the real story is I have the greatest trouble reading maps. Not just maps either, architectural plans, Lego instructions. It’s the reason I never did ballet. I always pirouetted anti-clockwise.

  ‘I’m good thanks.’ Really though I was tired. Unable to sleep, I’d spent half the night talking to Jay. ‘I’m going to send you a screen saver with little computerized sheep leaping fences,’ he yawned.

  ‘Yeah right, you can’t even work a computer.’

  ‘I’ll have one of the young people in my office see to it,’ he said loftily.

  ‘Sometimes a person can be tired without even knowing,’ Dwight ventured.

  I hit the brake. ‘Dwight, Jesus, if you feel more comfortable driving, just say so.’

  ‘I would feel more comfortable driving,’ he said meekly.

  I pulled the van over and we changed places without another word.