Hunting Unicorns

by Bella Pollen

  ‘I’ll see you Sunday.’

  ‘Yes.’ There was a pause.

  ‘I have wanted to be with you,’ he said heavily.

  I hesitated. ‘Me too.’

  * * *

  I couldn’t sleep. Thoughts crowded and turned in my mind like colliding planets. Finally I took the comforter off the bed and opened the doors to the terrace. It was a desolately beautiful night. There was a half-moon, a dense stillness despite the icy wind which swayed the leafless branches of trees. Hunched up, I stared out over the railing. At two a.m. in New York, the city would be sleeping with its eyes open and its heart beating. People would be talking, fighting, eating, fucking. But London was truly asleep.

  * * *

  I felt lonely, out of sync with where I was, with who I was. A stranger to myself. I struggled for a little perspective but I was appalled at how much grey area Rory had introduced into the black and white of my objective. I cursed myself for committing the most heinous of crimes. Never get involved. Never. This … thing with Rory, whatever it was, had no foundations, no future, it made no sense. Jay made sense. Getting this story made sense.

  The middle of the night is a dangerous time to put your life in order. As minutes concertina, hours spin away and the possibility of sleep recedes ever further, it’s easy to make a pact with any devil who’s on hand. Forget the sentimental soliloquy, I had no choice but to chase this story. I would get it and pump it for all it was worth and then I would get the hell out of England.

  Three dirty Germans crossed the Rhine, parlez vous –

  Three dirty Germans crossed the Rhine, parlez vous –

  Three dirty Germans crossed the Rhine,

  Fucking the women and drinking the wine,

  Inky pinky, parlez vous.

  – Bawdy trench song

  daniel

  Where had Grandpa been when she was up before? Surely there all the time? In the house, in his bedroom – sitting in his green wing-backed chair listening to his Beethoven and books on tapes. No, wait, I remember now, he’d been out for the day somewhere, but it doesn’t matter. All I can tell you is that when my father picked up the telephone to find Maggie Monroe on the other end, it took him less than fifteen seconds to confirm that the Marquess of Danby was alive and well and living at Bevan. As soon as she asked the question, you might have thought my father would smell a rat. However there is no one less Machiavellian, thus he is incapable of recognizing the telltale signs in anyone else. Besides it’s thrown into the conversation casually enough and when she goes on to tell him whatever fib she’s invented about needing more footage, he’s happy for her to return to Bevan. Moreover, unaware that all sorts of gaskets are about to blow, he insists that this time she and the crew spend the night.

  It’s not that he’s pathologically naïve. It’s just that he’s lived with this particular family secret for sixty-odd years and hasn’t thought about it for thirty. Within his circle of acquaintances there are plenty of skeletons in many a prominent closet. The baby in the bathwater, Lucan, the Beast of Glamys. There are countless stories of incest and bad behaviour about which our family, like many others, have closed ranks. It would never occur to my father that hushing up a scandal was an abuse of power and class. He considers it a matter of loyalty. He’s as likely to betray family or friends as – let’s say – be made Chancellor of the Exchequer. Despite the scorn universally heaped upon it this is one of the plus sides to old school tie nepotism.

  As a child my father had played with his royal cousins. He could vividly remember having to be on time for every meal. After the ‘unpleasantness’, as his mother had called it, he never saw them again. He has no shame about his father’s role in the scandal. Everyone knew that Edward was weak and had flaws but Grandpa had loved him and the idea of him being exiled was the worst possible thing he could have imagined. Home and hearth are what make the English function. My father believes, as Rory and I do, as my grandfather does, that it is right to make sacrifices for those you love. He understands, too, that there exists a time before any war when the spy, the ally and the enemy are indistinguishable from one another.

  So when Maggie and her crew turn up, his overriding concern is simply one of temperature – that they be warm for the bonfire that evening. After giving them mugs of Nescafé, he herds them into the cloakroom and is rifling through the dozens of mismatched boots and coats that hang by the gun cupboard when Grandpa himself pushes through the outside door.

  ‘Ah, here’s my father now,’ Alistair says.

  And Maggie exchanges a look with her crew.

  Grandpa, as is customary, is dressed in full military outfit. His trousers are beautifully pressed by Nanny, and he wears a jacket buttoned over a shirt and tie, all in the same khaki brown. A leather strap is fastened diagonally over one shoulder. His boots are polished and three medals are pinned in vertical symmetry down the length of his chest.

  ‘Just landed, just landed,’ he announces to no one in particular. He puts one foot in the bootpull and leans stiffly against the wall for balance.

  ‘Any action?’ He peers beadily around the cloakroom.

  ‘Good journey, Pa?’ enquires my father.

  ‘Little bumpy,’ Grandpa says. ‘Otherwise, a damn good bit of flying.’

  He notices the presence of strangers and his eyes light up. ‘Prisoners of war?’ he asks hopefully.

  maggie

  The Marquess of Danby strode around the drawing room picking out various objects of interest for our inspection. Two grand pianos, surfaces muddled with sheet music faced each other across the room, and from underneath he pulled out a box of musical instruments: a ukulele, a mouth organ, a guitar, its guts snapped and curled, some cymbals and a tambourine. ‘We all used to play in the old days,’ he turned them over nostalgically in his hands, ‘the girls painted beautifully, everyone danced. Once a troupe of Russian gymnasts came to stay, awfully limber they were.’ He unlocked a display case and removed a pair of Chinese figurines from the glass shelves. ‘See these?’ The Marquess had pianist’s hands, his fingers were long and tapered, but the knuckles were crudely distorted by age. ‘Collected by my grandfather on his grand tour…’

  I was about to make appropriate noises about their beauty when he added, ‘Hideous aren’t they? Always longed to smash them.’

  ‘Why don’t you then?’

  ‘Perhaps I will one day.’ He turned the two figures to face each other. ‘Hello there charming little Oriental lady,’ he mimicked. ‘What a very pretty fan you’re carrying.’ He dipped the female figure in coquettish deference. ‘Oh how kind you are Honourable Sir.’ The pitch of his voice changed to female, ‘but not nearly as pretty as my drawers.’

  Wolf and Dwight caught my eye.

  ‘Perhaps,’ continued the old man, advancing the male figure closer, ‘If Honourable Lady could just lift her skirt then Honourable War Lord can—’ He broke off. ‘Good God,’ he exclaimed in disgust as rain splattered against the windows, ‘this weather really makes you want to go to Tahiti and horse about with one of those Wahinis like whichever one of those painter fellows it was … Gauguin, I think.’

  ‘Why are you wearing a uniform?’ I said.

  ‘Plane crashed on the lawn once to great excitement,’ he looked out dreamily at the darkening sky. ‘Kept Italian prisoners here for a while. Nice bunch of fellows, good with the tractor. My mother taught them to play Up Jenkins. They don’t teach young people about the war,’ he said sadly, ‘they just don’t think it’s important, I suppose,’ his eyes became fierce, ‘but I think it’s important, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said truthfully, ‘I do.’

  ‘Good girl.’ He patted my shoulder clumsily. ‘I have rather good memorabilia you know – travelled all over the place, the Japanese were awful,’ he waved his hand in Wolf’s direction, ‘Pearl Harbour – long before your day of course. So many stories … but most people are no longer interested in such things.’

  ‘Try me,’ I said.
>
  ‘Where shall I start?’ the Marquess said eagerly. He winked and like a spider casting out its sticky web, I smiled back encouragingly.

  ‘With your trips to Germany before the war.’

  daniel

  My mother sits at the green baize card table, a large gin and tonic in her hand. She finishes off the last three clues of the Telegraph crossword while Nanny completes her weekly lottery ticket. Grandpa sleeps, head lolling against the winged edge of his favourite chair, his feet resting on the matted dreadlocks of Lurch’s back.

  A small bird, a starling, is flying round the room. Trapped, it bumps itself against the heavy damask curtains then flies in increasingly frenzied circles until Alistair unlocks the window latch and pulls down on the sash. The bird smells freedom in the cold air and makes its bid. Reluctantly Alistair closes the window after it.

  ‘Sun’s over the yardarm,’ says Alistair, surveying the uniformly beige sky outside, ‘so how about a drink?’ He pours a glass of whisky from a decanter and hands it to Maggie.

  He’s worried his guests are bored and doesn’t know what to do with them. He’s also nervous about the imminent arrival of Rory and begins only now to question the balance of money against the wisdom of inviting a television crew actually to stay the night – however much they are prepared to pay for the pleasure.

  ‘Now,’ he says, ‘how many for supper?’ He begins counting heads, ‘One, two, three of us … then there’s you lot, four, five, six.’ He whips the glasses off Grandpa’s nose then casually holds them to Grandpa’s open mouth. ‘Seven,’ he announces, apparently satisfied from an inspection of the lens, that Grandpa is still alive. ‘Seven for dinner is that right? Oh, and Robert,’ he says, ‘with Robert that makes eight.’

  maggie

  We sat on the twin beds up in Wolf’s bedroom and studiously avoided eye contact.

  ‘And you’re sure you got it?’ I asked.

  ‘Quite sure.’ Wolf nodded his big head.

  ‘His reaction and the photograph in the same shot?’

  ‘It’s all there, Maggie.’

  ‘Good,’ I said, ‘great.’

  ‘Well, you wanted a story,’ Wolf looked at me, ‘and now you’ve got one.’

  ‘I did, didn’t I.’ I scraped the toe of my shoe against the floor, ‘which you know … is great, so, um, high five and all that.’

  ‘Yeah, high five, crack open the champagne, let’s smoke a cigar,’ Wolf said.

  Now it was Dwight’s turn to look accusingly at me, ‘But…’

  ‘But what?’ I snarled.

  ‘He’s so…’

  ‘Sweet.’ I finished it for him. ‘Yeah, I know.’ I sighed, rubbing the goosebumps on my arms. ‘Hey, life’s a bitch, right?’ But a quote of Don Hewitt’s, creator of 60 Minutes kept popping unbidden into my head. ‘The public’s right to know doesn’t translate into the media’s obligation to broadcast.’ The Marquess and his family were not the only people I’d found myself liking over the last few weeks. I didn’t know what to think any more. Were the English aristocracy a class that deserved to be wiped out or an eccentric but splendid remnant of a tribe under threat? For some reason I remembered a story Alan once told me. Why, I don’t know, because it was hardly a parallel – the son of a friend of his, a young soldier had been in Bosnia only forty-eight hours before he was sent into a building. The Serbs inside were taken by surprise. This boy, terrified, shot wildly around the room, killing everyone. He’d run into the kitchen to find another soldier facing him. The man had no gun. Instead he held a crumpled picture of his child and pushed it into the boy’s face with shaking fingers. Overcome with guilt and horror at what he’d already done, the boy let him go. In the basement of that building they’d found three girls, dead, covered in ejaculate. The boy had gone after the Serb, found him and shot him dead. ‘Try people fairly,’ Alan said, ‘then you needn’t shed tears for them.’ The Marquess of Danby might be a sweet old man now but he was also a Nazi sympathizer and a traitor.

  Dwight and Wolf were still looking at me. I shivered, ‘Jesus,’ I dragged myself to my feet, ‘I’m going to find a sweater before I die.’

  * * *

  The gunshots came moments after I’d left the room. I headed towards the noise, along a corridor, up a staircase, through a passageway. There was another shot, this time louder. At the end of the passageway was a closed door, a faded picture nailed to it. It was a child’s drawing of a skull and crossbones – or what was left of it. Droplets of blood were crayoned around the warning. ‘Enter here at your peril.’

  I turned the key, took a step into the room and then the floor just swallowed me up. My legs buckled and my arm ripped against something sharp. A stinging pain, then my feet made contact with something solid. When my eyes acclimatized to the dark I realized I’d fallen through the floorboards to a half level below. Cautiously I hoisted myself back up to the floor and sat down, dabbing at my bleeding forearm and looking around. In this part of the house there could be no pretence at normal living. Wallpaper hung off the walls in great brownish curls. It was bitterly cold, but not hard to see why. The room had shadows of furniture but the walls beyond them ended in disjointed brickwork – there was no roof. Birds wheeled and squawked in the night sky above. I craned my neck up but there was another crack from a gun and something thudded onto the floor close to where I was sitting. ‘Hey,’ I yelled. From the other side of the ruin a man stepped out. He lowered his gun, the scanty light from the moon caught his face and I stopped breathing.

  ‘Maggie,’ he said. ‘Maggie! You’re here, you came, I don’t believe it!’ He hurried across the room.

  I didn’t get it. Didn’t even come close. ‘What are you doing here?’ I clutched at my arm as the memory of Rory appearing bootfaced at Roxmere came back to me. ‘Oh no, they didn’t send for you did they?’

  He stopped. ‘No, they didn’t send for me.’

  And still I didn’t get it.

  ‘Then why are you here?’

  He gave me a measured look, then he opened the gun and dropped the cartridges into his hand.

  ‘I live here, Maggie.’

  I stared at him stupidly. Then, like live wires crossing, snippets of information began sparking through my brain. Pop, Rory’s determination for us not to come to Bevan. Pop, Massey reading from Burke’s peerage, eldest son recently deceased. Pop, Rory in the fish and chip restaurant, he had a fight with a bus, he lost, I lost him. Nanny saying, there’s only the baby left now. Oh for Christ’s sake, Rory’s agency contacts, the foot through all those doors. Robert, Rory for short, was the 38-year-old baby. I didn’t want it to be true but it seemed so obvious. A radish could have put it together quicker than I had.

  ‘Your last name’s different … that’s why I didn’t get it, Bevan’s the…’

  ‘Title … one of them. The family name is Lytton-Jones. I dropped the Lytton. It does tend to confuse.’

  ‘So the Viscount Lytton-Jones who died tragically—’

  ‘Was my brother. Daniel.’

  For some reason I just felt angry. ‘All that time … All those things I said to you, and all the time you were … you were … well, one of them.’

  ‘One of them,’ he repeated flatly.

  ‘But why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Wait a minute.’ He took a step towards me. ‘Who didn’t tell whom? Why would you come here when I specifically told you not to?’

  ‘Everyone told me this was one of the great houses,’ I faltered, ‘I was just doing my job.’

  And only then did realization slam into me. My job … my job. For crying out loud, how could I have been be so stupid? I’d put the growing unease I’d felt over the last week down to confusion over my feelings, down to guilt about Jay, my lack of loyalty, spending too much time rooting around in other people’s lives, down to anything but its real cause. ‘Give them enough rope and they’ll hang themselves,’ Jay had said. I thought of all the footage sitting in its neatly marked reels back in our hotel ro
om. I’d gone out of my way to get the most controversial footage I could. Anything I could make satirical or mocking. Leaving aside Rory’s grandfather, I hadn’t a single frame I could possibly describe as the puff piece I had sold Stately Locations and Rory on.

  In this business, there’s always a certain amount of professional crapping on people, but you have to keep some kind of integrity. You have to believe in some kind of truth. My justification was that I believed something about these people and I had sought out and found behaviour to prove my point. But in the way witnesses at a murder trial will have conflicting accounts of the same event, the truth is mercurial. ‘If there’s more than one version of the truth, there is no truth.’

  ‘Maggie, this is my family home for Christ’s sake, and you’re a journalist.’

  ‘Meaning what?’ I turned on him defensively, ‘I can’t be trusted?’

  ‘Well can you? Why are you here? How long have you been here? And just what have you filmed so far?’

  I felt my face morph into a blank screen, incriminating footage running all over it.

  ‘My parents? My grandfather?’

  ‘Your dad showed us around. We had tea with Nanny. Nanny made me drink milk. I haven’t drunk milk since the fourth grade.’ But even as I said it guilt flooded through me, because there is one thing I do know – however many different kinds of truth there are in this world, there is only one kind of lie – and that’s a dirty one.

  ‘You’ve seen how we work. We don’t really set anything up. We don’t tell people how to behave, we just film what we see.’

  ‘So you keep telling me, Maggie,’ he said tightly. ‘But what exactly is it that you do see?’

  * * *

  I film what I see.

  What a load of BS that is. The truth is angles and shadows. In an editing room the truth can be moulded and squeezed into whatever shape you want it to be. As a journalist, you are as responsible as your subject for how they appear on film.