Death of a Unicorn

by Peter Dickinson

  ‘I told you he needn’t worry. Mr Todd tried to fob me off on Mrs Clarke and Mrs Clarke is putting her foot down. It doesn’t look as if I’m going to pollute your lives either way.’

  Mr Smith had come back while I was speaking and stood glowering inside the door. Neither of them seemed to notice the bitchiness of my tone. Mr Duggan explained what I’d said. Mr Smith blew out a contemptuous smoke cloud.

  ‘Of course Brierley has told Jack what he wanted,’ he said. ‘Jack wouldn’t take Dorothy on without his backing. She lost her majority on the board when Colonel Stackhouse’s executors sold out, but she’s still got thirty-eight per cent. No. Jack’s persuaded Brierley that the first thing is to do something about the Round. Interesting.’

  He sounded thoroughly excited. His eyes glistened behind his thick lenses and his breathy hoot of emphasis—usually on improbable syllables—had become much more marked.

  ‘I only met him late last night,’ I said.

  Mr Duggan laughed.

  ‘And were at once swept up into portentous events,’ he said. ‘The end of an era, to coin a phrase.’

  ‘Did Mrs Clarke own Night and Day?’ I said.

  ‘She had an effective veto,’ said Mr Smith. ‘The paper was founded in 1936 by a gang of literary adventurers with the idea of imitating The New Yorker and doing Punch down, but it ran on to the rocks after six months. There was a libel case and other difficulties. It was then rescued by one Cyrus Clarke, a paper manufacturer with some publishing interests, in particular a society magazine called The Social Round, which was edited by his wife. Neither paper prospered, and shortly before the war he amalgamated them.’

  ‘Most of the staff left in protest,’ said Mr Duggan. ‘That was when Jack Todd came in.’

  ‘The point is that on Clarke’s death Mrs Clarke inherited his shareholding, and with the backing of another major shareholder was able to insist on total independence. That chap died a few months ago. Next thing we hear, only last week, is that a totally unknown financier has acquired a majority shareholding. A. J. Brierley, Esquire.’

  ‘It makes it difficult to concentrate on the nuances of humour for next week’s issue,’ said Mr Duggan. ‘But if it means something’s going to be done about the Round . . .’

  ‘Is he really a mystery man?’ I said. ‘He sounds like one when you talk to him, but I’ve always assumed that people who talk like that are really utterly boring when you get to know them.’

  ‘He is a man of some mystery, but not total,’ said Mr Smith. ‘Naturally we have asked around. He appears to have been on the Control Commission in Germany. Two years ago he acquired a number of small companies specialising in the by-products of the sugar-refining industry, reorganised them into a group and sold them at a considerable profit. He is unmarried, but . . .’

  He was interrupted by a bellow from along the corridor, only slightly muffled by the swing doors.

  ‘The laceration of laughter at what ceases to amuse,’ said Mr Duggan.

  He waited for the sound of footsteps and then called, ‘In here, Jack, if you’re looking for Miss Millett.’

  Mr Todd came shambling in, holding my paragraph at arm’s length in front of him, like a reprieve from the scaffold.

  ‘Get that set, Tom,’ he said. ‘Type as for Round, but a couple of ems less. I want it in a box, fancy rules, so readers learn to pick it out. Give it a lead in, make it clear it’s not by Cynthia Darke but is part of the Round. Right? And the girl’s got to have a name. Be with you in a second, Lady Margaret.’

  He flapped out.

  ‘Stand-off,’ murmured Mr Duggan.

  ‘More like partial victory,’ said Mr Smith. ‘Jack has surprising resources of will. This is decidely interesting.’

  Mr Duggan had started to read my paragraph. He looked up and glanced at me.

  ‘Decidedly,’ he said.

  He went on reading. My heart was thudding absurdly. Whatever had happened between Mr Todd and Mrs Clarke, I realised that he hadn’t been only pretending to like what I’d written. Readers were going to learn to pick it out. That meant next week, and the week after . . . I felt I was living through one of the most crucial moments in my life.[1] It seemed desperately important that Mr Duggan should like it too, but he gave no sign. When he’d finished he looked up.

  ‘Did I hear right, what Jack called you?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  He nodded, apparently unimpressed, which was good, then picked up a pencil and made a couple of small marks on what I’d written.

  ‘She’d know there was a “c” in “luscious” wouldn’t she?’ he said. ‘She’d try and get it in somewhere.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘What about a name?’

  ‘She’s based on a girl called Veronica.’

  ‘Libel. Ronnie, name for an illiterate young socialite. -ite, not -ist.’

  ‘Petronella.’

  ‘All right,’ I said.

  ‘You sound doubtful.’

  ‘I expect I’ll get used to it.’

  ‘We go to press Monday, so you’ve time to change your mind unless Bruce decides to order special type for the heading.’

  ‘What do you think? I mean, is it all right? Mr Todd seemed to like it.’

  ‘Jack’s got to keep his job,’ said Mr Smith.

  I didn’t mind. He hadn’t read it. Mr Duggan had gone back to writing on the sheet of paper. He folded it carefully and put it in a brown manilla envelope, which he weighed in his hand.

  ‘I’ll pass an opinion when you’ve done six of them,’ he said, and tossed the envelope into a wire tray on the roll-top.

  [1] I have just looked the paragraph up. There is nothing to it at all. Mysterious business. Once it must have been impregnated with the odour of its time, now clean gone. This is always the case. Writing my own books about the Edwardian period I have to mark each page with some pungent signal—a brand name, song, form of speech, public person or event in the news—in an attempt to bring the odour of period to life. Cheating, of course. Few people living in a period notice such things. Their real sense of their time is as unrecapturable as the momentary pose of a child.

  III

  It was a real job. I adored it from the very beginning.

  This wasn’t only because it was new and interesting, though it was. But I’d had my row with Mummy, worse than I could have imagined, about taking it on, and for the first time ever I’d won. So it seemed like the beginning of freedom.

  She hadn’t minded me working for Mrs Darling, because that wasn’t a real job; it certainly didn’t pay enough for me to be able to afford to live anywhere except at Charles Street. If anyone thinks it peculiar that the heir to a vast house and estate in Leicestershire, and another house in Mayfair, should have needed to think about things like that, all I can say is that Cheadle ate almost everything[1], and the rest was taken up with what Mummy thought important, such as bringing my sisters out. I had an allowance from the Trust till I was twenty-five, when I was due to inherit, but the Trustees were completely under Mummy’s thumb. She could stop it whenever she wanted. In fact she threatened to when I said I was going to Night and Day until I explained that Mr Todd was going to pay me as much as my allowance and Mrs Darling put together. I could actually have afforded (just) to rent a tatty little room in Pimlico or somewhere and move out of Charles Street altogether. I could have got away.

  Of course Mummy’s argument was that the job was ‘completely impossible’ because of the cartoons of naked models and blondes in bed and so on, but in a funny way she made me feel as though the real reason was that she had magically known all along that this was going to happen, and that was why she’d banned the magazine—like Sleeping Beauty’s parents trying to avert her doom by banishing anything sharp from the palace. My finding the door in the alcove at Fenella’s dance had been like Sleeping Beauty discovering the room at the top of the turret with the old fairy at her spinning-wheel. She gave in all of a sudden. At one mom
ent she was saying that she was going to have me made a ward of court, and the next she was ringing up Mrs Darling and apologising for my letting the old hag down. I started work next morning.

  In theory my desk was the one outside Mrs Clarke’s room, but there was nothing for me to do there except answer the telephone when she was out. She had her job totally organised and didn’t need or want any help with it, so in practice I spent most of my time in the middle room with Tom and Ronnie. I read the articles sent in by casual contributors and weeded out the hopeless ones; I read the rough proofs from the printers and learnt how to correct them; I sorted the books that came in for review on to the shelves behind Ronnie’s desk and kept his file of publication dates in order; I scissored and glued for Tom when he and Bruce Fischer were working out which articles and cartoons were going on to which pages of next week’s paper; and on Thursday mornings I lugged the mechanical elephant along to my desk and wrote another Petronella paragraph.

  ‘It was a lot harder this time,’ I said when I handed Tom my second piece with the magic letters ‘OK. JT’ scrawled across the top. He looked it through and nodded.

  ‘You’ll be needing to find a variation,’ he said. ‘Always the trouble with these jejune vocabularies. They weary the ear. You want another voice, for contrast.’

  ‘But I’ve hardly got going with this one,’ I said. ‘There’s a mass of things for her to do. Ascot and a Garden Party and Cowes and the Twelfth . . .’

  ‘The material’s there, no doubt. That’s never the problem. It’s the means.’

  ‘But provided there’s something new for her to rattle on about . . .’

  ‘All matter is illusion. Only the Word—cap doubleyou—gives it reality, by allowing it to persist beyond the transient series of events which composed its apparent existence.’

  ‘Words have got to be about something, haven’t they, or they don’t mean anything?’

  ‘In this imperfect world. But I tell you, Mabs, when the trumpets sound for you and you come dripping from the river and shake the final impurities of matter out of your ears, the first sound you will hear will be the fine tenor voice of the Blessed Thomas Duggan celebrating the glory of God in a language infinitely rich in vocabulary and syntax but utterly purged of all gross content of meaning.’

  ‘I can’t wait.’

  ‘Meanwhile, look for an answering voice, a different kind of idiocy from that of this little idiot. Something worldly wise, perhaps.’

  He tucked the paragraph in an envelope and flipped it into the wire tray. That, I suppose, was the moment at which Uncle Tosh began to come into existence, utterly out of keeping. Of course I cribbed parts of him from Nancy Mitford, and parts from things that Wheatstone had told me about my great-great-uncle. And I didn’t think I’d taken any notice of what Tom had said until the following Thursday when I had to think of something new in a hurry. I’d finished my paragraph but Mr Todd had a crony with him and Ronnie was interviewing a would-be reviewer in the middle room, so I was at my own desk, rejecting manuscripts, when Mrs Clarke came out.

  ‘Have you finished, my dear?’ she said. ‘May I please see?’

  I gave her the page. She read it and sighed.

  ‘I do wish you liked her,’ I said.

  It was true. I really longed for Mrs Clarke to approve. I think it was because she reminded me more and more of Nanny Bassett, who had meant so much to me until Mummy had suddenly fired her while I was away at school. They were both people you couldn’t help liking, whatever they did or said, and Nanny had the most extraordinary opinions about people and things, which nothing could persuade her out of. They both had quiet but extremely strong personalities—Nanny was one of the very few people at Cheadle who regularly stood up to Mummy. And they both, in Nanny’s words, ‘knew how to behave’. This wasn’t the same thing as having good manners, or rather it meant having inner good manners, having standards, however dotty, and sticking to them without fuss. I felt Petronella didn’t conform to Mrs Clarke’s standards. She wasn’t meant to, but that’s not the point.

  ‘It isn’t that, my dear,’ she said. ‘I have agreed with Mr Todd that what you write is his concern, but I think it my duty to tell you that Mrs Brett-Carling is dying.’

  ‘She can’t be! I mean Corinna was talking last night . . .’

  ‘Corinna does not know. Her mother is determined not to spoil her season. She’s an extremely brave woman. But it is a fact.’

  ‘That’s awful!’

  I looked through what I’d written, feeling sick. The dance had been held at the Dorchester, which Petronella had christened ‘The Mourg’, and I’d let her pretend she’d been to a funeral there. I knew Corinna wouldn’t mind—she’d have given anything to be back with her horses in Worcestershire—and I’d worked in a lot of little undertakery details which I thought were funny in a bad-taste way—but not if you knew Corinna’s mother was dying. She’d always looked a bit death’s-doorish, beautiful, glassy-pale, dazed.

  ‘I must ask you not to say anything to Corinna, or any of your friends,’ said Mrs Clarke. ‘Very few people know.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, without thinking about it. ‘Hell! What am I going to do? I went to Minna Tully’s cocktail party, but I didn’t make mental notes. Hell!’

  ‘Mrs Turner is looking after Minna,’ said Mrs Clarke.

  ‘There was a crowd of arty-hearties there. I suppose Petronella . . . Do you think I could say anything about Mrs Turner taking fees for bringing people out?’

  ‘I think it would be most unwise.’

  ‘You mean after what happened to Veronica Bracken? But that wasn’t Mrs Turner’s fault. She had flu. And Veronica really was incredibly stupid. You know there was a story going round that she put her head in an oven but she didn’t realise it had to be gas.’

  ‘But it was gas,’ said Mrs Clarke. ‘The concierge found her just in time. That was just after the abortion.’

  ‘Abortion? But Veronica wouldn’t know how . . .’

  ‘Mrs Turner would.’

  She didn’t snap or raise her voice. She didn’t need to.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t realise.’

  ‘Of course you didn’t. Tell me, has it ever struck you, when you go to these parties and dances, what it must be like to be one of the fathers?’

  ‘Not specially.’

  ‘A man still in his own mind in the prime of life, having to sit and watch the girls swing past in the arms of their partners, all those clear young eyes, those bare shoulders, when his own wife . . . You understand?’

  ‘But everyone said it was a chap in the Coldstream.’

  ‘It was a man old enough to be your father, a director of several companies. One of those companies was a tin-mining business. During that year they opened a new seam which turned out to be unexpectedly rich, and the value of the shares went up to seven times what they’d been. Mrs Turner spends her winters in Monte Carlo. She played in the high-stake room that year, which she cannot normally afford to.’

  ‘Golly! Are you sure?’

  ‘I know a very great deal about the people I write about, my dear. I need to, so that I do not make mistakes. And I must tell you that you would be doing society a serious disservice if you were to write anything which might make other parents feel that Mrs Turner was a suitable person to help bring their daughters out.’

  ‘Golly! How do you know all this?’

  ‘I keep my ears open. I think about it. My husband was a very clever man, so I have friends in the City who tell me where the money is coming from. Nothing can be done without money. You see, my dear, though I know you and your friends probably laugh at it, I happen to believe that what I do is extremely important, so I take it seriously.’

  ‘I know you do. They only sort of half-laugh, Mrs Clarke. They always turn there first . . . I wonder what’s happened to Veronica. Modelling, I suppose, though I don’t think I’ve seen her picture anywhere. She’s really incredibly pretty.’

  �
�That type of looks does not always wear. Didn’t I see—was it that Bournemouth paper?—a Flight Lieutenant—the name will come to me—not Suarez, but something foreign-sounding . . .’

  She slipped back into her room. For somebody so dignified she had a habit of moving around very unobtrusively. You could easily imagine her picking up snippets of gossip because people didn’t notice she was there. I went and stood in her doorway and watched her unlock the top drawer of her commode and begin to walk her fingers along one of the racks of filing-cards that filled it. My telephone rang. I went back to my desk and answered it in the bright-girl-on-the-make voice I was developing for the purpose.

  ‘Cynthia Darke’s suite.’

  ‘Is she now?’ said Tom’s voice. ‘On whom?’

  ‘I’m terribly sorry. I’m going to have to do it again. It seems I’ve trodden on a sort of social land-mine. Can it wait till the next messenger?’

  ‘I will hold the roaring presses. Doing anything for lunch, Mabs?’

  ‘Rewriting Petronella, by the look of it.’

  ‘You’ve got an hour. I was thinking you ought to see the inside of a Fleet Street wine bar. Purely as part of your training, mind.’

  ‘Provided we go dutch.’

  ‘I was willing the thought into your mind. Think you’ll have done by one-thirty?

  ‘Oh, God, I hope so.’

  I put the telephone down. Mrs Clarke was in the doorway, reading a filing-card with the help of her hand-held eyeglasses.