Death of a Unicorn

by Peter Dickinson

  B and I were sitting under an awning in a foreign street. I was parched with thirst. B had ordered champagne. He was doodling cartoons of Them on a paper napkin, glancing sideways over my shoulder as he did so, so that I knew They must be there, sitting at another table behind me. At last the waiter came with our drinks, and slid the bill under B’s glass. B glanced at it, and his hand started shaking so much that he couldn’t pour from the bottle. It was only orange squash anyway. B looked at me. He said, ‘You’re the only person I can trust.’ He folded the napkin he’d been drawing on and slipped it into my handbag. The chairs scraped at Their table. I thought I was going to faint and put out my hand to touch his arm. He’d been getting up to go, but it was as if my touch had given him an electric shock. He sat down and told me to shut my eyes. Through the fog of my eyelids I saw him pick up my handbag, take the napkin out and put something else in. He stood up and walked away. I needed my handkerchief to blow my nose and stop myself crying, but when I opened my handbag all there was in it was a pair of my old school knickers. There was something wrapped in them. My necklace. If I ran after him and gave it to him then everything would be all right, but the catch had got hooked into the felted grey wool of the knickers. I wrestled to get it free. My name-tape was on the knickers. Huge red letters. M. MILLETT. If They saw that . . . The cloth seemed to smother me, billowing like a blanket. Far down the street They stood and waited in the glaring sun. B had vanished. He was in the hotel. I heaved and fought with the grey cloth. Light glinted from the hotel front as the revolving door began to turn.

  I was in a strange, soft bed in a medicine-smelling room. The air was full of fog. All my body ached. Something was fastened to my head to stop my neck moving. My right eye was gummed shut. In a clear patch in the fog I could see a young woman with a brown face under a sort of cowl. She was leaning over me and holding my hands to stop me tearing at my blanket, but she saw me looking at her and smiled.

  ‘He couldn’t do it, you see,’ I said. ‘Not with me. Anything else. He’d gamble with anything. Except me.’

  ‘Hello, Mums,’ said the woman.

  ‘Are you awake now?’ She had a slightly chi-chi accent to go with her brown skin. I thought she was some kind of nurse, but she had one of those faces you feel you know in dreams. She was there so that I could tell her what I had seen. It was all lucid in my mind, like a book just after you have written it, all the connections and mechanisms linked and sliding in their grooves. I had to get it out before I lost it. I began to gabble. The woman made shushing noises but she couldn’t stop me.

  ‘It began in Hamburg,’ I said. ‘He was on the Control Commission after the war, getting Jewish property back to its owners. He came across some property, quite a lot of it, which had been very cunningly stolen. I think it must have been a whole group of Nazi officials, covering up for each other. He was in their shoes now, and he saw that if he went on covering up he could have some of the loot. They’d gone to South America, but they’d left a contact behind so he was able to get in touch with them. The property wasn’t worth much then, with everything smashed after the war, but they could afford to wait because they’d taken trouble to see that all the real owners were dead. He was going to sell it for them when it became valuable again, and take a commission. That was his side of the bargain. Their side was that if he cheated them they would send someone to kill him.’

  ‘Take it easy, Mums,’ said the woman.

  ‘He did cheat them, of course,’ I said. ‘He took more than his share. He needed the money to help buy Night and Day and things like that, but he thought it would be all right provided he paid them back in time. That’s why he had a deadline. It was always difficult with exchange control. You weren’t allowed to send money out of the sterling area. But he thought he could get round that by selling Halper’s Corner. Barbados was in the sterling area too, of course, but he was going to sell it in two parts. There’d be the sale of the plantation to show the Treasury. Plantations were cheap then. It wouldn’t be much. But he could use it as a cover for what he was doing at the bay, selling the land and joining in a deal to build a holiday hotel. All that would be in dollars, which he could use to pay the people in South America. It was quite safe provided nobody told the Treasury there was something funny going on. They’d find out if they started to investigate, but they didn’t usually. That’s why he was so careful about not spending more than our travel allowance in Paris—he didn’t want to draw attention to himself, the way the Dockers did.

  ‘It was all going along fine until Mummy found out about him and me and threatened to blackmail him. Then, suddenly, it was more of a risk. It wasn’t because of Mummy knowing anything—it was because of Aunt Minnie being her best friend and Sir Drummond being a Director of the Bank of England. He thought it was probably still all right, but he began to get worried. He was such a coward, you see. When we went to Barbados he was screwing himself up to take the risk .

  I saw the woman’s eyes leave me and look with a query in them at somebody on the other side of the bed. I couldn’t turn my head that way to see who it was, but I wasn’t in any case interested. I waited impatiently till she was looking at me again.

  ‘Then I offered to sell the necklace,’ I said. ‘B jumped at it. I don’t suppose it was worth everything he owed them, but a hundred and fifty thousand pounds was a lot then, almost a million now. It would have been an instalment. The point was it was small, so he could smuggle it out, and the sale wasn’t on anyone’s books, so the Treasury wouldn’t know, and I had the replica to wear, so no one need realise it had gone. He could do the whole Halper’s Corner deal in sterling and use the money to buy the necklace by paying for the roof. He did that because if he hadn’t he would have been cheating me. It wasn’t because of Mummy blackmailing him. She didn’t know anything, not then.

  ‘Mrs Clarke did, though. She’d picked something up on one of her West Indies tours, keeping her ears open, the way she used to. Isn’t it odd she’s the one who’s gone deaf, and Ronnie’s the one who’s gone blind? She tried to warn me, and I told Jane, and Jane went to see her pretending to be me. Jane said I’d found out about the screaming saint coming from a Jewish collection—he never sold it because he knew it could be traced, you see—and that was why I’d turned against him. So Mrs Clarke told Jane about Halper’s Corner, and Jane told Mummy about both things and Mummy told Aunt Minnie, and so on. Of course there wasn’t anything to find out about Halper’s Corner, not any longer, but now it was the screaming saint and what had happened in Hamburg—that was what really mattered. Our people started to investigate. They must have asked questions in Hamburg, and somebody there guessed why they were asking and told the people in South America, and they sent for B.

  ‘I wish I knew what I said or did when we said goodbye. He was going to take the sapphires, you see, and suddenly he decided not to. He’d written a letter to me, telling me all about them, in case they turned nasty. He was terribly frightened. But he thought if they knew there was someone he trusted in England who knew about them, they wouldn’t risk hurting him. The letter was in the jigsaw. And then, at the last minute, he changed his mind. They were my sapphires, you see. They were valuable because of that, because of the Mary stone. If he was going to persuade them to take the sapphires as an instalment, he had to explain what they were worth, and that would mean telling them about me. And then they might guess who he’d left the letter with, and send someone to get rid of me. I told you, he wasn’t prepared to risk it. He got in a sort of panic and dashed off, hoping he could talk them into giving him more time.

  ‘Of course they were going to kill him anyway, whether he took the necklace or not.’

  I closed my eyes and tried to sink back into the dark. A fearsome, throbbing pain started at the side of my neck. I wondered whether it hurt as much as that, being shot. Slowly the pain slid away and I opened my eyes again.

  ‘He wasn’t used to it, you see,’ I said. ‘If you’re going to be that sort of creature
and live that sort of life, love is too dangerous. You daren’t love anyone, because then there’s a hostage. You’ve got to stay wild, with the whole world your enemy. You mustn’t let yourself be tame for anybody. It was all my fault, letting him love me. There was only one of him in the whole world, ever. Only one in all the world.’

  ‘Marge even dreams romantic,’ said Terry’s voice. He was the person I couldn’t see on the other side of the bed.

  ‘It’s all true,’ I said. ‘Ages ago, but all true.’

  ‘I keep telling her she wants to stop living in the past,’ he said, ‘The only time is now.’

  The woman glanced towards him again. Something characteristic about the slant of her face made me see that it was Sally. My heart leapt.

  ‘It’s better not to live in time at all,’ she said.

  VIII

  I have implied that I do my stint of conducting visitors round Cheadle. This is not strictly true, because I don’t have the time. But the fact that I may be acting as guide does encourage more parties to book than otherwise would; members of Women’s Institutes and similar bodies are among my most loyal readers; they come clutching copies of my books for me to sign, a problem I have solved to my satisfaction if not theirs by selling autographed Cheadle book-plates in the souvenir shop, where they can also buy my books. I always buy up remaindered editions and find it immensely satisfying to be taking ninety per cent of the published price instead of the usual minuscule royalty.

  Of course, parties try to book me as their guide. Within the limits of my own commitments I play fair, taking pot luck, although my own preference is for working-class pensioners, women with the print of time on them, brave poverty-weathered faces. I like the way they think that because they have paid their fee they have a right to their money’s worth. I like their sense of acceptance of transience, which in itself has the quality of endurance, and echoes what I feel about my house. Sometimes these parties include splendid old ladies who used to be in service themselves and reminisce about backstairs life, the appalling long hours, the incredible restrictions on their freedom, the tiny wages, but in no complaining tone, in fact with a scholar-like sense of reconstructing lost ways of life. I prefer such groups to middle-class women who drop quiet hints to each other that in childhood they were at home in surroundings like Cheadle.

  When I could walk after my accident I took on a bit more of this work, to show my visitors and prove to myself that I was now up to it. One Wednesday afternoon I had an outing from Dorset. A mixed bag from a market town, no trouble but not very interesting. The tour ends in the kitchens so that visitors have to go out through the shop, which is in the old brewhouse. I had said goodbye to them and was waiting to see that they did all in fact leave when a woman came up to me. I had noticed her during the tour, younger than most of the others, plump but trim, wearing a too-smart pale violet coat and bouffant blonde hair, a style that would have better suited someone twenty years younger. But she carried herself with confidence and did not at all look as though she had sat in a coach all morning, had a picnic luncheon and then trailed for an hour round a huge house. I had noticed too that the other women showed the usual unconscious signs of deference to her, so when she approached me I assumed she was the President of their WI and was about to say thank you on their behalf. Then I saw she was clutching a book.

  I had already explained about not signing autographs because of the time it takes and the need to be fair to other parties, so I was irritated that this apparently educated woman had not got the point.

  ‘You won’t remember me, Lady Margaret,’ she said. ‘I was so hoping it might be you. You see, a million years ago I lined up next to you at Queen Charlotte’s Ball.’

  ‘You’re not Veronica Bracken!’

  ‘How clever of you. I haven’t forgotten, of course, but I didn’t dream you’d remember.’

  ‘You’re Mrs . . . Seago now, isn’t it?’

  ‘Lady Seago, actually. Paul got his K in the New Year Honours.’

  ‘Congratulations. He’s still in the Air Force then?’

  ‘It’s too brilliant of you to know all this. How on earth do you do it with everything else to think about?’

  ‘Oh, I suppose it’s just one of the things that stick. After all, you were easily the most beautiful girl in our year. Or in any year ever, as far as I’m concerned.’

  She looked pleased, and younger now. I could sense rather than see it was the same woman. Handsome, certainly, but of course the unbelievable bloom had gone. Still, an innocence remained that had been part of it.

  ‘I’ve read all your books,’ she said. ‘I think they’re marvellous. But I’m afraid this is still my favourite.’

  She had been carrying it clutched between two hands in such a way that I hadn’t had a clear sight of it, beyond noticing that it was a hardback and well worn. Nowadays my books go straight into paperback. When she lifted her left hand from the cover I saw that she had needed to hold it like that because it was falling to bits. It was Uncle Tosh.

  I took it from her and leafed delicately through. It was like a child’s favourite book. The very paper seemed to have been worn soft with perusal. The pages were torn, taped, stained. I understood that I was holding a talisman.

  ‘It’s been all over the world with me,’ she said. ‘That’s why it’s in such a state. I read it whenever I’m low and it cheers me up. She’s so wonderful, isn’t she? I can’t spell, either.’

  I found it difficult to say anything. The rest of her party were milling gently through the brew-house door, but a few were glancing back, inquisitive. It is so easy to give in to cheap emotion. After all, people who dislike the kind of book I write say that my stock-in-trade is to trigger such automatic easy responses, and there’s some truth in the criticism. All I can answer is that at that moment and in those circumstances I felt I was in the presence of one of those simple, pure, totally unconsidered expressions of something essential to human nature, such as you get in certain movements of children, and to which you respond with an emotion that may be easy but cannot be called cheap. If someone else had put that book into my hand I would have been interested, might have been moved, but not in the same way.

  ‘Tell me about your family,’ I said. ‘Have you got one, I mean?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Three boys. Two in the Air Force and David at Theological College.’

  ‘That sounds satisfactory.’

  ‘Luckily they’ve got Paul’s brains.’

  I thought I could imagine the relationship. Four thoroughly male men, and this little woman whom they managed to treat as half way between a pet and a person, but adored on that basis. Good for her.

  ‘Didn’t you want a daughter?’ I said.

  She frowned. It was a most charming expression, suggesting both the difficulty of the question and the difficulty of the process of thought. I could see that if I had been a man it would instantly have aroused my protective warrior instincts, a response almost as automatic as that of insects or birds to particular innate stimuli.

  ‘Paul longed for one,’ she said. ‘I was never sure. It isn’t easy for girls. I’ve had a lovely life, but then I’ve been terribly lucky. I could so easily . . . But of course you’re different, Lady Margaret.’

  She reached out for the book.

  ‘I’ll sign it for you if you like,’ I said. ‘Nobody’s looking.’

  ‘Oh . . . I only brought it to show you.’

  Obviously she didn’t want me to. I guessed that I seemed less real to her than the girl who had stood beside her at Queen Charlotte’s, and that that girl in turn was less real than the purely imaginary Petronella. The book had properties of personal magic, which might be exorcised by my attaching my name—the counter-magic of a formidable middle-aged woman—to her key to the unicorn’s garden where only youth belongs. She gazed up at me, apparently perfectly content.

  ‘I mustn’t keep the others waiting,’ she said.

  Reading Group Discussion Questions


  by Jenny Terpsichore Abeles

  In what ways is this story a classic “whodunit”? How does it surprise the reader’s expectations of the mystery genré?

  “Death of a Unicorn” is the image of the puzzle B. gives the young Mabs to kill time while he is away. Which character is best correlated with the unicorn and why? How do themes and images associated with unicorn myths connect to themes and images of the novel? When and how does the “puzzle” come to be completed?

  The narrator of this novel is herself a writer, a young and dazzling journalist in the first half of the book, and a successful, middle-aged romance writer in the second half, the older voice often interrupting the younger one in the form of footnotes. How does her writerly voice change over the course of her career? Her self-image and self-representation? What features or traits bridge the two periods of her life?

  Explain your reactions to the central romance—referred to at one point as “the bargain”—in this book between Mabs and B. How do their roles, lifestyle, and feelings for each other surprise or confirm your notions of romance and relationships? Inasmuch as this is a love story, what kind of love story is it?