Death of a Unicorn

by Peter Dickinson

  ‘You can keep it in the loo to show people what you think of it.’

  ‘I shall keep it among my proudest possessions.’

  Being an author was turning out an expensive affair. You get six free copies, and at least twenty people seem to expect you to give them one. So you keep having to buy your own book to give away. We smiled at each other through our hangovers and I felt I’d partly made up for Mummy’s beastliness about the photograph. Actually I doubt if Mrs Clarke had a hangover—she was far too experienced a party-goer—but she didn’t look well. She was wearing her powder like snowfall on the Pennines, deep drifts softening the ridges and wrinkles, but they were still much more obviously there than usual. If I hadn’t been so preoccupied with my own inner weather I might have realised that she’d had a bad night, or something, and so was less in control than usual. She half turned as if to go on to her room, but then faced me again.

  ‘My dear,’ she said. ‘I have become very fond of you. I think you are a sweet, clever girl. But I think I must say this. It is very important to know where money comes from.’

  ‘Are we talking about a friend of mine?’

  ‘I believe so. You see, everything that we care about depends on the right people having the money. The world you and I value will cease to exist without that.’

  ‘Do you think so? I mean it’s often all started with wrong people, hasn’t it? The original Millett was a master dyer, but he really made his pile out of loot when the monasteries were dissolved. And even now, well, look at the Lanners. So respectable you could stuff sofas with them. But old Greg Lanner was just a South African bandit who was lucky not to get himself hanged several times before he found that gold-mine. I bet you half the people you write about in the Round really owe their money to ancestors who weren’t much better than him.’

  ‘I do not think it is fair to hold that against the present Lord and Lady Lanner.’

  ‘But it’s still where the money came from, isn’t it? I suppose you could say the system’s a bit like a glorified sewage farm. You put in dirty money one end and as it washes through the generations—you know, like filter-beds, with those arm things going round and round—it gradually gets cleaner and cleaner until it’s fit to set before the king.’

  I thought this was a lovely image—it had come to me on the spur of the moment. Pity I’d finished Uncle Tosh. It would have been just right for him. Mrs Clarke sighed.

  ‘My late husband was very clever about money,’ she said. ‘He had a lot of excellent friends in the City. Naturally, I have been asking them what they know about the gentleman of whom we are speaking.’

  ‘I thought it was sugar. Something to do with by-products. And before that there was a plantation in Barbados. I thought.’

  ‘I know Barbados quite well. I go to the West Indies most winters. They like to read my accounts of their doings. But I can tell you that although there was some money to be made from plantations during the war, since then it has been very difficult. And in any case it was only the well-managed estates . . . There is some very strange blood, besides . . .’

  She was obviously finding it difficult. So was I. Luckily at that moment the boy arrived from the printers with several pages of achingly tiny type about next week’s cinemas and theatres for me to check and correct.

  B had said nothing to me about Mummy after the party and I hadn’t asked. We’d talked about other things, but I’d known from small signs that he felt I’d gone beyond the terms of our contract. Mummy had left without saying goodbye. I’d have liked to try and make contact with Jane, but she was going down to Cheadle for the weekend, while B and I were off to a bridge congress in Hastings.

  This turned out totally dire. It sheeted with rain. B was playing with an unfamiliar partner and they kept having misunderstandings which he couldn’t grumble to me about because I wouldn’t have understood a word. There were no reviews of Uncle Tosh in any of the Sunday papers. We got back to London, both in a vile mood, at three o’clock on Monday morning. B got up at six to do his exercises, so out of sheer obstinacy I went up to my flat to write. I’d started straight off on another book as soon as I’d finished Uncle Tosh, not because I had a passion to write it but simply out of the habit of doing that sort of thing then. It had begun as a kind of cod romance, set in Edwardian times, strongly influenced by Cold Comfort Farm but peopled with marchionesses and sinister millionaires; then, mysteriously, I’d found myself actually believing more and more in my own grotesques and I was beginning to think that I would have to take the leg-pulling element out and turn it into a proper novel.

  There was a folded scrap of paper on my doormat. Jane’s writing. A page from a pocket diary.

  ‘Where are you? Must talk. Can’t ring from Ch. St. Will come to N & D 10.30 Monday.’

  Blearily I settled down at my typewriter, but I’d done less than a couple of pages when the telephone rang. It was B.

  ‘You’re early,’ I said.

  ‘Can you come down? Now.’

  ‘All right.’

  He was in his dressing-gown reading a company report. A large cup of very pale coffee steamed beside his armchair—he was waiting for it to get completely tepid and then he would drink it. On the low table beside him were several neat piles of letters and other papers. The ripped envelopes lay on the floor. He picked up one of the letters and glanced through it. Mummy’s handwriting was large and jagged. You could recognise it from yards away.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said. ‘It really isn’t fair on you.’

  He did his toad smile.

  ‘Believe it or not she’s trying to blackmail me.’

  ‘But it hasn’t got anything to do with you. It’s entirely my look-out.’

  ‘For money.’

  ‘Oh. How much am I worth to her?’

  ‘No exact figures. She appears to think that as I have taken something out of the Cheadle estate I ought to put something back, in the shape of a new roof to the Banqueting Hall.’

  ‘She’s disgusting.’

  ‘There is a hint of other elements in the transaction.’

  ‘I’ve a good mind to go straight down to Cheadle and beat her up.’

  She appears to be still in Charles Street.’

  ‘Terrific. I can . . .’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You aren’t going to take her seriously!’

  ‘I am not going to take her proposal seriously. But she might be in a position to make a nuisance of herself at this particular moment.’

  ‘Oh.’

  People keep saying it’s a small world, when really it’s a lot of small worlds, with less overlap than you’d think. Moving in with B I had changed from one small world to another, though to outsiders they might have seemed almost identical. The fathers of many of my friends might sit on the boards of companies on which B’s allies and enemies also sat, but they were not the same sort of people. My friends’ fathers, whether they said so or not, were waiting for England to return to the kind of place it had been before the war. Mr Churchill belonged to that period and Mr Eden, and now that they were in power my friends’ fathers were impatient for it to happen. The war itself and the struggles afterwards had been only an interruption. But for men like B the Thirties were dead history—deader even than they were for me because of my connection with those times through Cheadle and the people there, such as old Wheatstone. For these men the war and the period since had been the start of things. That was when they had begun, one way and another, to spot their opportunities and make the most of them. They were impatient too, but to go on, not back. They weren’t impressed by Churchill and Eden. Their hope lay in the younger politicians who were going to clear away all the left-over restrictions of wartime—B had a particular bee in his bonnet about currency control—and let those who could get rich.

  Of course there were occasional overlaps. These could be embarrassing, and hilarious. There’d been one dinner-and-night-club evening at which Sir Drummond Trenchard-Yates turned up
with a marvellously bosomy and brassy blonde, the sort Bruce Fischer kept drawing. Aunt Minnie Trenchard-Yates was really no relation of ours but that’s what we’d always called her because she was Mummy’s closest friend, a tiny, smiling, sweetly tough woman I’d known since I could remember. Sir Drummond had got rather grand, Director of the Bank of England and so on, and he huffed and puffed a bit when he saw me, rather as though bringing his blonde had been like coming to the party wearing a black tie when he should have been in tails. He kept explaining that the blonde was his secretary, and that she was wonderful at putting his spelling right. Later that evening, having apparently decided that I was the other kept woman in the party—the remaining three seemed to be more or less wives—she poured out her heart to me. It was too sad. She seemed really fond of Sir Drummond and was longing for Aunt Minnie to divorce him so that she could marry him and become what she called ‘a real person’. I hadn’t the heart to tell her that Aunt Minnie would never let it get that far.

  That sort of thing didn’t happen often, and though the men mightn’t be as awkwardly placed as Sir Drummond, they still behaved as if they all belonged to a sort of huge, vague club, whose basic rule was that the members didn’t tell their wives about each other. But clubs have snags, as well as advantages. Suppose Mummy were to talk to Aunt Minnie about me, and then Aunt Minnie snapped her fingers at Sir Drummond—well, I couldn’t imagine Sir Drummond sitting on one of his boards and putting forward a coherent financial argument against some enterprise of B’s, but I could imagine him going a bit red and pulling his moustache and saying, ‘Don’t care for the feller myself. Heard something the other day . . .’ And that might be enough. It was what Sir Drummond was for, after all, being a sound chap and hearing things.

  I’m only using Sir Drummond as an instance. There were a dozen people Mummy could get in touch with, any of whom might have been able to put a spanner in B’s works. The point is that B couldn’t afford it. Though I gathered things had been going rather well these last months he was still always desperately short of money. He had a huge overdraft. He lived like a rich man, spent like a rich man, but if he’d been forced to sell up at certain moments he’d probably have been bankrupt. It was other people’s money, and it all depended on other people’s confidence.

  He was reading the letter again.

  ‘I never really believed you, you know,’ he said. ‘I put her down as a stupid woman.’

  ‘Oh, she is, in some ways. But she’s brilliant at people. If you’ve got a weak spot she’ll find it. What are you going to do?’

  He caressed a little bronze sculpture he’d brought back from his last trip to Germany—more like an egg than a head, though it had a nose and eyebrow-ridges.

  ‘Nothing for the moment,’ he said. ‘Don’t let’s talk about it any more. I’ve got work to do.’

  ‘Just one thing. I’m terribly sorry. It’s family still. Jane. I found a rather desperate-sounding note from her when I got downstairs. I think Mummy may be giving her hell. I wondered if you’d mind if she came and lived in my flat for a bit.’

  He tested his coffee with his finger and licked it clean, glanced for a moment at Mummy’s letter and then stared at me, slowly, all over. I was baffled. He might have been irritated or furious, even, but it wasn’t like that. It was more as though he was seeing me for the first time and making up his mind whether to buy me.

  ‘It is gratifying to feel that there is one person in the world who trusts me,’ he said.

  I didn’t understand at once, though Jane and I were used by now to the idea that some men get excited about twins. Casanova wasn’t the only one. I felt myself do one of my pillar-box blushes, but I made the words come.

  ‘If you really wanted to,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what she’d say.’

  I had to wait while he took a long swig at his disgusting coffee. He did it on purpose, for pleasure, getting his own back in a small way for what Mummy had done to him. It struck me that he might even want to show her what he thought of her attempt to blackmail him by taking Jane away from her too.

  ‘I think it’s time we had a treat,’ he said at last. ‘Thank God Barbados is still in the sterling area.’

  Mondays were always a bit desultory. The true week began on Tuesday, when the outside contributors came in for the editorial conference and Jack Todd made up his mind about the main features of next week’s issue. Haggard from the weekend at Hastings I read would-be-funny manuscripts—always an extra large batch in the Monday post—and passed on about one in ten to Tom. Ronnie found, in the Daily Worker of all places, a review of Uncle Tosh, treating it as a text for a satiric blast at the moral bankruptcy of capitalism. I guessed Ronnie had used his connections to get it mentioned at all, but I was still pleased, though it wasn’t a review that was going to sell many copies. The others were more interested in a gossip-column paragraph in the News Chronicle about Jack Todd leaving and Brian Naylor taking over. It hadn’t been officially announced yet.

  Jane turned up wearing her art-student uniform—ponytail, chunky sweater, wide corduroy skirt. She looked about as haggard as I felt. Coffee came round at that moment. Although she’d been so urgent about talking to me she didn’t pick up my hint about moving off to somewhere private, but lolled against the make-up table in the middle room, leafing contemptuously through the proofs of not-yet-used cartoons which she’d found in an open drawer. Nellie came in and said that Jack Todd had decided to take the day off because of not wanting to be pestered by journalists ringing up to ask about the News Chronicle piece; but poor Tom—he’d obviously had a bad weekend and now had a greyish, sweaty look, as though he was going down with flu—was pretty well anchored to his telephone, fending off inquisitive Fleet Street cronies. I let Jane finish her coffee and then dragged her away to look for somewhere where we could talk.

  The waiting-room was occupied by a pipe-puffing cartoonist who’d come to show his portfolio to Bruce Fischer. Mrs Clarke was in her room. My desk, out in the corridor, seemed far too public. Then I remembered what Nellie had said about Jack Todd not coming in so I put my head round the secretaries’ door and asked if we could use his room for twenty minutes. Nellie said she supposed so.

  As soon as we were alone I put my arm round Jane’s shoulders. She didn’t respond.

  ‘Darling, I’m desperately sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sure it’s all my fault.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Whatever’s happening.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. I suppose you couldn’t have known.’

  ‘I guessed.’

  She loosed herself from my arm and moved away.

  ‘You guessed this?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought she’d written to him.’

  ‘He didn’t show me the letter.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I gather she wants him to pay for the Banqueting Hall roof.’

  A long pause. I sensed a deep reluctance in her. Apparently she’d been expecting I would have read Mummy’s letter. For some reason it was difficult for her to begin without that.

  ‘Do you do everything he says?’ she asked.

  Quite unreasonably the thought crossed my mind that she was about to make the same ghastly suggestion I’d thought B’d been hinting at that morning. I couldn’t see any possible connection between this and our problems with Mummy.

  ‘Almost,’ I said.

  ‘If he told you to go away?’

  ‘That’s part of the bargain.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But if I thought he was doing it because of Mummy, I’d fight.’

  ‘I thought you would.’

  ‘What did she say to him at the party? Do you know?’

  ‘She asked if he was going to marry you. He said of course not. He said you understood that. She told him he’d got to send you home. I don’t know what he said. She was raging.’

  ‘He’s ruder than anyone I’ve ever met when he wants to be. What do you think, Janey? About B and me, I mean?
Do you mind?’

  This was something we’d decided without discussion not to talk about. It was too tricky. In spite of our endless rows, Jane was the only person I’d ever properly loved until I met B, but I knew I couldn’t count on her feeling the same. It was so much easier for me. Almost everything that had happened to us, all our lives, had been unfair on Jane, and the only excuse had been that I was the sacrifice. In the end she might be free, but I never would. Even that makes it sound a better bargain for her than it really was—nobody could call inheriting Cheadle a specially painful sort of sacrifice. And now, well, part of the unwritten contract was that the central ritual of the sacrifice would take place on the day I married, and thus brought a man home to look after Cheadle and sire another generation on me, so that the sacrifice could be repeated in thirty years’ time; and a vital part of the magic was that I must go spotless to that altar. It may seem a bit loopy to talk like this, in this day and age, but though Mummy would have been completely incapable of expressing herself in those terms, it was how she thought, and so, in spite of ourselves, the way Jane and I thought too.[1] By having an affair with B I had broken the contract and spoilt, or at least risked spoiling, the magic, but I was still going to inherit Cheadle. And on top of all that I was having a glorious time. Jane wouldn’t have been human if she hadn’t minded.

  ‘She wants him to let you go and have me instead,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘She hasn’t actually said so, but that’s what she wants.’

  I didn’t understand at once. It was such an obviously impossible suggestion, she must mean something else. Then I remembered B saying ‘There is a hint of other elements in the transaction.’ I remembered him looking me over, like a slave merchant, after I’d made the suggestion about Jane moving in upstairs. He’d been wondering whether I knew, somehow, about Mummy’s idea, was part of the scheme, and was making a first move towards bringing it off. And then he’d decided that I wasn’t, and he’d said what he had about being trusted. The extraordinary thing was that when I did understand I didn’t blaze into one of my rages with Jane. I was appalled. Sick. Chilly with shock. Jane was watching me.