Death of a Unicorn

by Peter Dickinson

  ‘Less changed than you sound on the telephone,’ he said.

  ‘I have to be a dragon in working hours, but this is time off. Sorry I’m late. Did you have any trouble getting here?’

  ‘Fred drove me. I have a sort of arrangement with him so that I can get about at all. He’s gone on to visit some cousins in Nottingham.’

  ‘Nottingham seems to be entirely inhabited by Indians these days.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Oh, Ronnie, you’ve brought the champagne after all! I should have realised . . . you see, if you aren’t having any and I’ve got to work this afternoon . . .’

  With a trembling hand he took from his pocket a brass gadget on which a rubber washer nestled between two flanges.

  ‘June suns, you cannot store them to warm December’s cold,’ he said. ‘But Cyril Ray tells me that with this device you can.’

  ‘What’s happened to Tom?’ I said, following a natural train of thought from the quotation. ‘He wasn’t on the mast-head last time I saw a copy.’

  Ronnie put the bottle on the table and answered in jerks as he unwired it. I could see that he was already used to doing such tasks by feel rather than eyesight.

  ‘Not very good. Stuck Naylor for twenty years. Does the odd piece still. Bit of book-reviewing here and there. Lives with a sister in Kent. Goes around wearing an old tweed coat and skirt of hers. A peculiarly dislikable woman. Shouts at him as if he were deaf. But she sees he doesn’t starve.’

  ‘How dreadful. And Naylor is still editor. Who could have believed it, that evening we first met him?’

  Ronnie grunted, working his thumbs round the cork to ease it up. I knew it wouldn’t do to offer to help. The pop came at last. I held my glass for him as he poured with a quivering hand. He took only a mouthful for himself, then clipped his gadget on to the bottle to seal the pressure in.

  ‘Cyril tells me it will keep a fortnight in the refrigerator,’ he said. ‘You can have a glass whenever the necessity strikes you.’

  It was Krug, and somehow he had managed to keep it cold on the journey. I was absurdly moved that he should have understood that it would have such meaning for me.

  ‘Sealed in blood,’ I said as I lowered my glass.

  ‘You will have to explain.’

  ‘I nearly put you off at least three times. I’m not sure what it’s going to do to me, bringing up those old days. But I couldn’t. So much of me was longing to see you.’

  ‘My dear Mabs . . .’

  ‘I’m a bit hysterical this morning. I got a letter from my husband saying he wanted a divorce.’

  ‘Did you now?’

  He managed to make his voice condole, but the near-blind eyes were still able to gleam.

  ‘No nice scandal, I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘He’s just found a pleasanter woman to live with. I’ve known it was coming for ages. But that’s not all, Ronnie. I’ve had a piece of terrific financial news.’

  ‘Enough to cure heartache, by the sound of it.’

  ‘Almost. You won’t have read a book of mine called The Gamekeeper’s Daughter.’

  ‘I don’t think so. But I assure you I have read some of the others. You must give a lot of people pleasure, Mabs.’

  ‘A tactful way to put it.’

  ‘Not intended as such. I count myself among them. But that one, I take it, came just after the Chatterley trial.’

  ‘Palest of pale blue by today’s standards. It’s being made into a film.’

  ‘Congratulations. But I was under the impression you’d had several.’

  ‘Five. This one is going to be a big one. Top stars and so on. But that isn’t the point. I’ve been fighting for years to get some of the running expenses of Cheadle allowed against my income from writing for tax purposes. The tax people have always said they were two separate businesses, but I maintain that they aren’t. They depend on each other. I integrate them as much as possible. I keep Cheadle exactly in the period I write about. Visitors who come to see it see a great Edwardian house being got ready for a big house party, and so on, but the tax people have always said I can only claim the proportion I actually use for writing, which is a couple of rooms. They think they’re being generous allowing me two per cent. My own accountants have been perfectly infuriating too. They keep saying I’ll never get away with it.’

  ‘I can imagine. Where does the film come in?’

  ‘I put a clause in the contract that it had to be shot here. I did it for the publicity, mainly, but just on the off chance I forced my accountants to argue with the tax people that it showed the two businesses weren’t separate, and believe it or not they’ve given in at last. Just like men. It wasn’t a real argument, but they’d got tired of fighting me and they only wanted an excuse for saying yes without losing face.’

  ‘Well done. A lesson to us all.’

  ‘But that’s not the best of it. I’m going to be able to claim back tax for years and years. I’ve got a huge bonanza coming. When I took over here, you see, it was absolute touch and go. If it hadn’t been for my turning out best sellers Cheadle would have gone bankrupt. I made a lot of money those days, even after tax, and the house hadn’t really begun to bring the visitors in. It still runs at a loss, of course, and these have been bad times for writers . . .’

  ‘Don’t I know it! I hadn’t thought of you, Mabs, as the Walter Scott of our era.’

  ‘Oh, but I am. “This good right hand shall do it.” And all before breakfast, too, like him. Do you know, Ronnie, it looks as though I shall be able to take a whole year off and not turn out a single word!’

  ‘Dangerous.’

  ‘But exciting. Let’s eat. I’ve got somebody coming at 2.15 but I propose to keep him hanging around for a bit.’

  Pellegrini is an inconceivable nuisance in many ways, a quarreller, liar and cheat with no apparent sense of shame. It is as though all his capacity for honour has been absorbed by his cooking. He would not dream of producing even the simplest snack for some unimportant visitor without making it look and taste and smell as good as it was possible with those ingredients. My mother notices at once and complains when her meals have been prepared by someone else. I couldn’t remember Ronnie’s attitude to food. Most of my meals with him and Tom had consisted of burgundy or champagne, with a few dry and savourless sandwiches. As I put the food on to his plate it struck me that I had been babbling away about my private concerns to a man whom I really hardly knew at all. Even in the old days I had seen only one aspect of his complex existence. Tom and I had talked, and he had responded, as though his membership of the Communist Party had been an aberration of youth, retained as little more than a convenient stance from which to view the British political scene as an outsider. I only learnt from his later television appearances that his involvement at the very time I knew him had been a good deal stronger and more intricate. I had also gathered that he had been married but was separated from his wife and living with someone else. I had never met her. He had once, I remembered, asked my advice about a birthday present for his daughter, then around seventeen.

  The sense of ancient intimacy renewed was an illusion. The intimacy had never been there. What had been there was a girl who was prepared to take the world on trust, and she no longer existed.

  Ronnie ate with slow relish. It was I who had to suggest that we had better start talking about the purpose of the visit. He sighed. I could sense a mental squaring of shoulders.

  ‘I have to tell you that I am here, not exactly on false pretences,’ he said, ‘but at least on a somewhat different basis from that which seemed to be the case when I telephoned you.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I have learned in the interim that you were, shall we say, somewhat better acquainted with Amos Brierley than I, at least, at the time realised.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘What is your attitude to this? I should point out that I need not have told you that I knew.’

  ‘In that case I will point out that you could qui
te well have told me beforehand that you were going to want to talk about this.’

  ‘I could have. I thought you might refuse to see me.’

  ‘I certainly should have.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Oh dear . . . Just tell me one thing before I answer. When did you decide to bring the champagne? Before or after you learnt about me and Mr B, I mean?’

  ‘Before, Mabs.’

  ‘All right. In that case my attitude is that I’ll tell you anything I can about my time on Night and Day. I always kept that absolutely separate from the other thing. He would have been furious if I’d done anything else. We never talked about it at all. I don’t see that you need to know a single thing about my life outside the office. Put it like this: I’m prepared to walk round my private garden with you. I’m not prepared to let you bring a spade and start digging for bones.’

  ‘I’m afraid there’s . . .’

  ‘And if you are intending to mention the relationship, or even to hint at it, in your book, I completely withdraw my co-operation. I won’t even talk about Night and Day.’

  The problem is this, Mabs. Brierley is of crucial importance to the book. He introduced Naylor, who, whatever we may think of him, has been a very successful editor. Without some such change the paper was doomed. I may as well tell you that the line I had expected to take when I first spoke to you was that you were, so to speak, the first swallow, a sign of Brierley’s flair that he was able to spot someone who was going to turn out a hugely successful writer at such an early stage. This was then going to be evidence that his choice of the not immediately obvious Naylor was more than a fluke.’

  ‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t still take that line. I met him at a dance for about five minutes. To extricate me from a ludicrous little social embarrassment he told me to tell the other person concerned that we had been discussing the possibility of my working at Night and Day. I didn’t see him again until Jack Todd had taken me on and let me start writing my Petronella pieces. And I’m almost certain it wasn’t because Mr B had told him to.’

  ‘Your arrival appeared to us at the time to be a mechanism for beginning to prise Dorothy out. When he met you at the dance Brierley could well have been on the look-out for a girl of unimpeachable social authority and with some pretensions to be a writer.’

  ‘Oh. I suppose so. I hadn’t thought of that. You were extraordinarily nice to me in the circumstances.’

  ‘You were a fetching child, Mabs. I wish I could see you more clearly. My impression is that it’s still there.’

  ‘Bless your bad eyesight. What are we going to do, Ronnie? I’d genuinely love to help, but I’ve got to get this cleared up before we go on.’

  ‘I will continue to put my cards on the table. Histories of weekly magazines do not command a wide sale—the larger libraries and other institutions, and a few honest citizens whose names occur in the index. The publishers would not have taken the project on in these hard times if they had not thought they could do better than that. I need hardly tell you, Mabs, that they are pinning their hopes on Amos Brierley.’

  ‘Typical.’

  ‘His death—is it painful if I talk about that?’

  ‘Not after all these years, but I can tell you absolutely and categorically that I know nothing about it. Nothing whatever.’

  ‘Has anyone ever asked you before?’

  ‘Not since . . . No.’

  ‘Does not that in itself strike you as peculiar?’

  ‘Not specially. There wouldn’t be any point. I don’t know anything.’

  ‘It strikes me as very peculiar indeed. How is anyone to know what you know? Brierley’s death, being a matter of mystery, still retains considerable interest. It is in fact two mysteries: first, why was he killed; and second why the authorities both here and in Brazil made so little effort to answer that question. Journalists have told me that investigations by them were actively discouraged. I happen to have a lead of a sort which I’ve not been able to pursue, but I now see that it might well tie in with this singular failure of anyone to ask you whether you have anything to contribute. If I’m right, then your closeness to Brierley is of definite moment.’

  ‘In a history of Night and Day? Really, Ronnie!’

  ‘This is an imperfect world, in which books need to be sold by often spurious means. My publishers expect me to devote a disproportionate amount of space to Brierley. My excuse is that though he controlled the paper for barely a year, that year was a turning-point. His reorganisation of the managerial side, which had been more than moderately chaotic, was described to me as masterly. And he brought Naylor in, of course.’

  ‘Well, Ronnie, for old times’ sake . . . let me put it like this: I’m prepared to talk to you, in this room, for this hour, as though I may have been what you call close to Mr B, but I must make it clear that if the slightest hint about this appears in the book I shall sue. No, let me go on. You may think you could do it in such a way that I wouldn’t have a case, but I promise you I’d sue all the same. The kind of publisher who would do a history of Night and Day is much too stuffy and timid to risk it, I promise you. I’ve won three libel cases in the last fifteen years, all settled out of court. They’d be scared stiff of me.’

  Ronnie grunted, peered about the table, reached for the champagne bottle and unclipped his gadget. I put my hand over my glass.

  ‘I shall have to think about that,’ he said. ‘Meanwhile let’s talk about something else.’

  I took my hand away and let him pour me another glass. We both did our best but the mood would not come back. There was one brief moment when I’d been explaining how I organised my life these days.

  ‘You take a lot on, Mabs,’ he said.

  ‘It has taken me. I try not to whinge, that’s all.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘When you were on the paper you didn’t exactly leave stones unturned or avenues unexplored. You came as Dorothy’s assistant, but not a week had gone by before you had Tom’s glue-pot in your hands.’

  ‘Only as a defence against Bruce Fischer.’

  ‘Momentarily. But you had your finger in every pie, and you were writing a book. I say nothing of your extra-curricular activities.’

  ‘It was the best year in my life. I knew at the time I had to make the most of it. I breathed happiness all the time. Didn’t you notice anything different? I don’t mean because of me. Just in the air.’

  ‘Morale in any organisation has its own mysterious ups and downs. My impression is that we were near the bottom of a trough when you arrived, which we then began to climb out of. But you know, Mabs, everybody has his own personal Golden Age. One of the weaknesses of the English is that for too many of them it is located in their early childhood. Mine ended when I was sent to prep school.’

  ‘Is that why you became a Communist?’

  ‘In part, no doubt.’

  ‘What happened to Bruce, by the way.’

  ‘Naylor gave him the boot after a couple of years. Row over who controlled the art side. Drove his car into a bridge a few years later. Deliberately, it was thought.’

  I tut-tutted vaguely. Bruce Fischer. Blood all over the nylon shirting. The mood died.

  I had said goodbye to Ronnie and was on my way to my appointment with the man from Burroughs—less than five minutes late after all—when it struck me that I should at least have asked him who had told him about my affair with B. He had seemed quite sure of his ground. Not Jane? No, of course not. Who else had known? . . . But she couldn’t still be alive, surely.

  I told Simon about the divorce at supper. I chose to do it because Terry was there and I felt a need for human contact. As far as I am concerned, although Simon is my son he might as well be an elf-child. I mean that I have no idea at all what it can be like to be him, though he has my eyes as well as the Millets nose (much more unfortunate, for some reason, on a man than a woman). He is not simply a stranger; I see plenty of strangers, doing the occasional stint of conduct
ing a tour round the house; I make a point of studying faces, trying to imagine inner lives, and usually succeed in constructing a coherent personality, not necessarily the true one but credible to me. I cannot do the trick with Simon. He lived inside me for nine months and his birth was an immense satisfaction. A happy baby, smiling and active. A busy, inquisitive, pleasing child, enough trouble at times not to seem unnatural. And then, about seven, the first awareness on my part of this alien-ness, an only faintly worrying sense of oddness in him, a little patch, spreading in the next five years, inexorable as a disease, until the whole personality was absorbed. I suppose he was about fourteen when I gave up attempting to persuade myself that I loved him.

  Now he opened his eyes wide and produced his charming but meaningless smile.

  ‘Poor Mums, that’s tough on you.’

  ‘High time, if you want my opinion,’ said Terry.

  ‘For Mark or for me?’

  ‘For the both of you. How long before you start feeling old? Ten, fifteen years, if you’re lucky. Why waste it? Sir Mark can marry this Julia who seems to think he’s the best thing since the Beatles, and that’s something you’ve never been able to do for him. Now you can stop feeling guilty about it.’

  ‘Is that all I get out of it?’

  ‘You want me to find you a man, Marge?’

  ‘Providing he’s a roofing specialist.’

  ‘An arsonist would be more to the point,’ said Simon.

  Terry shook his head, as usual treating the banter as if it were in earnest.

  ‘Not after all the work she’s put in,’ he said. ‘Trouble is, what kind of a man would take you on?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Come off it. You know what I mean. For looks you can still knock spots off most women, and you’ve got brains and guts with it, only you expect such a hell of a lot of anyone. My theory, if you want to know, is that you were spoilt for men by somebody way back. I don’t think it was ever Sir Mark, though.’