Death of a Unicorn

by Peter Dickinson

  ‘What a romantic story! But what about the people who’d helped you?’

  She held up her pudgy, crook-fingered hand, palm forward. I realised this was a party piece, which had to be told in its proper order with its proper words, like a church ritual. She talked with a slightly nasal drawl, which didn’t sound American or like anything else I’d heard, and sipped purse-lipped from her glass between sentences. I could imagine black faces, fire-lit, ringing her, as she sat in a space between shanty houses, and the stars overhead, and the punctuating cries of ‘Hallelujah’ and ‘Praise the Lord’.

  ‘I sailed to England,’ she said, ‘and found my betrothed in Halifax, where I joined myself with him in the work of the Lord. Our son Amos was given to us. Ten years passed, and there was war and the breaking of nations, but we toiled on in the stony field the Lord had made our portion. For five and thirty years we toiled with small reward. Each year at the time of the Lord’s birth I wrote to my father and sent him tracts, begging and warning him to repent of his wicked ways, but he sent no answer. Then there was war again, and our son Amos was called to fight. Within a year there came a letter from a lawyer in Bridgetown saying that my father had died and Halper’s Corner was now mine, subject to heavy mortgages. I spoke with my husband and we made plans to return to the place where we had met and take up the work we had begun there, but because of the war we could not travel, and then within the year the Lord called him to His side and I was left desolate. My son Amos was in Italy. I had none to turn to. But at last the war ended and I gathered my possessions and sailed home to take up my inheritance. All was in ruin. Though the war had given fat years to sugar planters, there had been none to manage Halper’s Corner, and with peace the lean years came. Only one seed still prospered. The Word of the Lord that with my husband’s help I had sown among our people was now a strong green tree. Many remembered me and rejoiced at my return. They told me that my father had died as he had lived, ninety-five years old, raging in sin. They told me too that on my escape his fury had been terrible, so that he might have slain my helpers with his own hands, but foreseeing this they had persuaded the doctor from Holetown to come up, giving other reasons, and this man, though a feeble vessel, constrained my father by his presence. And the other landlords around were happy to thwart my father, so it was not difficult to hide my chief helpers, the boy who had carried my parasol, and the boy who had worn my dress. He stands before you now, my brother and servant Jeremy.’

  ‘The Lord shall deliver me from every evil work,’ said Jeremy.

  I hadn’t realised he was still in the room, but he was, standing by the door and listening eagerly to the story. He smiled again when I caught his eye. There was something familiar about the smile which made me blink inwardly, and see him with different eyes. The likeness was nowhere near as strong as that between B and his mother, but it was there. When Mrs Brierley had called Jeremy her brother, she had meant it. Stepbrother, anyway.

  ‘How marvellous!’ I said. Did you manage to get the plantation going again? Was it very beautiful?’

  She looked at me half-sideways over her glass. Knowing B as well as I did I thought she was pleased. I guessed he had brought me along because it would give her somebody new to tell her story to. Judging by the few words they’d said to each other so far, they didn’t find tête-à-têtes very easy.

  ‘If Amos had stayed we might have done it, with the Lord’s help,’ she said.

  ‘We’d have needed that,’ said B. ‘Sugar’s been in the doldrums for five years. The places which had built up a bit of fat during the war have managed to keep going, but Halper’s was run right down and mortgaged twice over.’

  ‘Now they are giving us the Commonwealth Sugar Agreement,’ said Jeremy. I expected him to add ‘Hallelujah,’ but he didn’t.

  B shot him one of his looks. I thought he was about to snap at him to clear out, but perhaps he wasn’t quite prepared to take that line with his step-uncle. Instead he just growled, ‘Too late. Tell Miss Millett what it looked like, Mother.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘It is an old house, built by my forebear Cleck Halper in the year of our Lord seventeen hundred and twelve. Built and well built, but my father neglected it. I did not think it beautiful when I was a child, but when I returned and saw it in its ruin my heart went out in grief. The fields around are fields of cane, with cuts between, beautiful in the green and gold of their season. And beyond the road is a little bay with a beach, where my mother used to take me when I was a child and teach me my letters in the sand. That was surely beautiful, according to the beauty of this world.’

  She was talking now in a much less here-endeth-the-second-lesson style, but with her drawl more pronounced. I thought perhaps this was part of the story that she didn’t often tell.

  ‘It sounds lovely,’ I said. ‘Can we go and see it?’

  ‘Waste of time,’ said B. ‘Miss Millett is going to inherit an old house, Mother. That’s why she’s interested.’

  ‘Lay not up for yourself treasures upon earth,’ she said.

  ‘It seems to be more a case of laying up for yourself troubles upon earth,’ I said. ‘Besides, I didn’t do the laying up. It all happened before I was born. Perhaps one day I’ll run away for love, like you did.’

  In fact B made very little fuss about driving me out to Halper’s Corner. I felt that he actually wanted to go, but at the same time not to seem to want to. It was difficult to be sure. He’d been more than usually unpredictable these last few days.

  The house we were staying in—I never found out who it belonged to, but B said it wasn’t his, and it had a used feeling, half-full bottles in the drinks cabinet, recent copies of Life and Harpers, servants and a gardener—also provided a vast squashy American car, a convertible. We drove up the West Coast Road in the middle of the afternoon. B was in one of his withdrawn moods, so I fantasised about being a film star being taken by my director to look at the location for a lush plantation romance—brutal planter, sullen-seeming daughter, noble young missionary—there’d have to be an alternative lover, of course, spit image of Mark Babington—he would be the one who rode frantic to the quay as the ship sailed for England—finish in misty glow as lovers embrace at Liverpool with Salvation Army Silver Band for background, and skip the grinding years in Halifax—not Hollywood material . . .

  Before I’d come to Barbados I’d created it vividly in my mind’s eye, white beaches and palms round the fringe, and a hinterland of steep jungly mountains, brilliant with parakeets and hibiscus. Quite wrong. It turned out to be a landscape rather like one of the duller English counties, rolling, undistinguished hills given over to farming. It obviously wasn’t England, because of the blueness of the sky and the blackness of the people and their crowdedness and poverty, and the height of the sugar cane in the fields; the beaches and hibiscus were there too. So one was abroad, but not very. Mrs Brierley’s flat still felt far more foreign than anything else I’d come across. Up the West Coast Road, where the land was poorer than elsewhere, there were certainly unfarmed patches, but even these had a scrubby, battered look. The sheer number of people on the island meant that there was almost nowhere really wild and lonely. It was all a bit like a town, with fields instead of houses. I had prepared myself to be disappointed well before B turned up a track between cane-fields. The lie of the low hills enclosed a flat triangular area. The sea dropped out of sight behind us and for once I felt here was a place of isolation. A black man on an old bicycle came bumping down the track towards us, pulled aside to let us pass and gaped as we went through. A hundred yards further on, as the track rose to one of the boundary hills, it was barred by rusted iron gates hanging askew between a pair of grand stone gateposts. B stopped and we climbed out.

  The gates were padlocked, but a footpath had been beaten through a breach in the stone wall, so we followed it round and up what must once have been the sweep of a carriage drive but was now only a path one man wide and barely kept open, through the tangle of sweet-smelli
ng undergrowth, lush with feeding on its own decay and raucous with insect life. The tops of three vast palms were visible above the bushes, but no sign of a roof or chimney.

  I led the way until the path opened into a clearing. As I approached it I could see a tethered goat, but then a black boy leapt across the gap with his left elbow and shoulder angled forward and his right arm flung stiffly back, the hand clutching a battered old ball. A couple of seconds later I heard the snap of the ball on to a bat. I walked on into the clearing and there was the house. It was stone built, three storeys high. A double curve of stone steps rose to the broken front door, and the porch had been extended on either side to make a deep balcony the whole width of the house, the verandah where Mrs Brierley’s father used to sit and watch as she carried the Word of God to his labourers down below. There had been three grand Dutch-style gables at roof level, but the whole south-west corner of the house was in ruins. Once there had been four of the big palms, symmetrically planted at the corners of the building. Three great smooth trunks still rose in place,but the fourth had fallen and lay with half its roots in the air and its trunk slanting up through the wall of the house as if it had poked its head in through the window to see what was happening in the nursery. The falling masonry had smashed through the verandah roof that end, but on the other side it was still intact and the verandah seemed to be used now as an open-air kitchen, with the black iron chimney of the stove lashed to a filigree pillar. In the clearing two more goats grazed, and chickens clucked in dust baths. Beyond the corner of the house an old man was hoeing a vegetable patch. Nearer were the cricket players, two boys and a girl.

  The girl saw me as she straightened from picking the ball up. Her hesitation made the bowler turn. He was black as a boot, but the girl was paler, as was the younger boy with the bat. Both of these were quite clearly Halpers. I realised that when Mrs Brierley had described her father as lustful she’d had some evidence to go on. The bowler stared at me for a moment, then turned and shouted to the man with the hoe, who shaded his eyes and gazed before coming slowly towards us.

  ‘The tree came down in the ’44 hurricane,’ said B.

  ‘It’s too sad. They must have been planted when the house was built.’

  ‘I should think so. Hello, you’re Philemon, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, please, Mr Halper. Glad to see your face, Mr Halper.’

  ‘My name’s Brierley,’ said B in a bored voice, watching the cricket, without seeming to be interested in that either.

  ‘Do you remember old Mr Halper?’ I asked.

  ‘Sure I see Miss Mary’s father.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  The old man glanced towards B and pointed. Like that.

  ‘Die way he live,’ he said. ‘Drunk and cursing. Bring ruin on us all.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said B, who couldn’t have seen the gesture. ‘He kept things going his own way till he was getting on ninety. It was my mother running off and leaving him with no one to help did the damage. She should have stuck it out here. Seen enough? Let’s go.’

  ‘You tell me what going to happen, sir?’ said Philemon. ‘Nobody know what going to happen.’

  B gave him a bleak look.

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ he said, and turned away. Philemon shook his head and hobbled back towards his vegetables.

  Because of the narrowness of the track I couldn’t talk to B properly till we were in the car.

  ‘You didn’t have to be quite so foul to that old man,’ I said. ‘Surely you’ve got some idea. It’s his whole life, after all.’

  ‘I thought I did but now I don’t,’ said B.

  ‘You’re hating this, aren’t you?’

  ‘I decided you’d better see it.’

  He didn’t start the car but sat brooding at the even acres of half-grown cane.

  ‘Apart from the house it doesn’t look all that run down,’ I said.

  ‘Not bad, I gather.’

  ‘Oh, I thought you’d sold it.’

  ‘Not yet. No point. Get nothing for it with the sugar market shot to hell. I’ve been waiting for a turn-up, paying off the mortgages and meanwhile working it up into a state where it will fetch something.’

  It didn’t sound at all B’s style, to pay off mortgages before he had to, but I didn’t say so.

  ‘What’s this sugar agreement Jeremy was talking about?’ I asked. ‘I noticed you shut him up.’

  ‘Commonwealth Sugar Agreement. Becomes operative next year. Should stabilise the market, and then I can sell and sort things out.’

  ‘Is it yours or your mother’s?’

  ‘Mine, effectively. I bought her an annuity in exchange. She got much better terms than she’d have done if she’d simply sold it then, so I don’t want her now getting it into her head that she should have hung on. None of us knew this agreement was coming up. It was only passed last year. Shall we go?’

  He sounded relieved, as though this was what he had brought me out here to tell me. For some reason it had been worrying him, and might even explain his recent edginess.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Can we look at the bay, though, first?’

  ‘What bay?’

  ‘The one where her mother used to teach her her letters in the sand.’

  ‘You don’t want to see that. It’s just a bay.’

  ‘Please. As we’re here. It was important to her, wasn’t it?’

  ‘You liked the old frump?’

  ‘I think she’s terrific. After a life like that.’

  ‘I don’t owe her anything.’

  ‘I expect other people’s mothers tend to seem OK. A lot of my friends can’t see what’s, wrong with mine. But don’t you have a hankering, darling, to see the house in order again?’

  ‘Not worth the effort.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant. Suppose your fairy godmother were to wave her wand and there it was, roof mended, garden spick, all four palm trees standing, and you sitting on the verandah smoking a cigar while a shiny black butler brought you your punch on a silver tray?’

  ‘No,’ he said, and started the engine.

  We drove bumpily down to the main road, headed north, and a quarter of a mile later turned left along a fresh-laid concrete track towards the sea. It wound between dunes, bare sand in some places, and in others spiky plants like yuccas, scrubby bushes and a few palm trees. At the shore-line—a dazzle of white beach between two wooded headlands—it curved back and climbed a low outcrop a hundred yards inland. Up there there were signs of work, obviously connected with the newness of the road. I could see a jeep, and the tip of a crane. Apart from that the bay was, as Mrs Brierley had claimed, beautiful according to the beauty of this world.

  ‘It’s a long way from the house,’ 1 said,, thinking what a release it must have seemed to mother and child, so far from the brutal troll who ruled the cane-fields.

  ‘My great-grandfather bought it to dredge so that he could ship his cane straight out,’ said B. ‘That was always the chief problem—too far from the factories. But he was caught by the 1876 slump.’

  ‘What’s happening up there?’

  ‘New hotel, mainly.’

  ‘How dreadful.’

  ‘Don’t be a snob.’

  ‘I am a snob. I can’t help it. It’s like the idea of trippers trooping round Cheadle. We do have open days, but the family all hide and pretend they aren’t happening. Don’t you feel that at all?’

  ‘Why should I? I was born and brought up in Halifax. People who live most of their lives in places like Halifax consider it an excellent idea that hotels should be built by otherwise useless beaches for them to stay at.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘I know. You’re trying to make me say that because my family have kept it as a wild bay for eighty years I should continue to do so. You forget that we originally bought it for commercial exploitation. In any case your whole idea is based on a misconception. I am the man who was born in Halifax. Any feelings
I have are appropriate to that man. In fact my feelings towards Halifax are that it was a place to get away from and never go back to. But the man I am could not have been born here. Suppose my mother had not run off and joined my father, she would most likely never have married. But if she had, and had then had a child, that child would not have become me. Even if the father had been my father, that is still true. We are who we are by the accident of a moment. ‘You ought to know that. You are one of a pair of twins because of a momentary readjustment of molecules in a uterus twenty-two years ago.’

  He lolled back on the soft bench-seat of the car, his brown face more toad-like than ever because of his impenetrable sun-glasses. His voice too had the reptilian creak which came when he was talking about something important to him. I had learnt more about him today than in all the rest of our friendship. I even knew his age, born ten years before the First World War, ‘not yet fifty’—just. I wondered if he guessed how effective it was, bringing Jane in. I’d often tried to imagine what would have happened if Jane and I had never separated, if we had been born as I. The idea was part of my fairy-tale world in which everything was all right; and now that world contained the image of a curious toad-like boy and his yellow toad-like mother coming to this bay so that she could teach him his letters in the sand. For some reason the mental picture, combined with B’s real face in front of me now, made me see something I hadn’t seen before.

  ‘You’ve got Negro blood, haven’t you?’ I said.

  He didn’t answer for several seconds. I cursed myself for my stupidity. Then he said, ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Not to me. Not a scrap, darling, honestly. It’s just interesting.’

  ‘The true reason why the other planters chose to have nothing to do with my grandfather was that he had married a quadroon. My mother is therefore an octoroon.’