Death of a Unicorn

by Peter Dickinson

  Table of Contents

  Cheadle 22 October, 1983.

  PART ONE 1952–1953

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  PART TWO 1982–1983

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  Reading Group Discussion Questions by Jenny Terpsichore Abeles

  About the Author

  DEATH OF

  A UNICORN

  PETER

  DICKINSON

  Small Beer Press

  Easthampton, MA

  By the Same Author

  Skin Deep

  The Old English Peep Show

  The Seals

  Sleep and His Brother

  The Lizard in the Cup

  The Green Gene

  The Poison Oracle*

  The Lively Dead

  King and Joker

  Walking Dead

  One Foot in the Grave

  A Summer in the Twenties

  The Last Houseparty

  Hindsight

  Tefuga

  Skeleton-in-Waiting

  Perfect Gallows

  Play Dead

  The Yellow Room Conspiracy

  Some Deaths Before Dying

  Children’s Books

  The Weathermonger

  Heartsease

  The Devil’s Children

  Emma Tuppers Diary

  The Dancing Bear*

  The Gift

  The Blue Hawk

  Annerton Pit

  The Flight of Dragons

  Tulku

  City of Gold

  The Seventh Raven*

  Healer

  Eva

  Merlin Dreams

  AK

  A Bone from a Dry Sea

  Shadow of a Hero

  The Kin

  Touch and Go

  The Lion Tamer’s Daughter

  The Ropemaker

  The Tears of the Salamander

  The Gift Boat

  Angel Isle

  Earth and Air*

  Picture Books

  The Iron Lion

  Hepzibah

  Giant Cold

  A Box of Nothing

  Mole Hole

  Time and the Clock Mice, Etcetera

  Chuck and Danielle

  *Available or forthcoming from Small Beer Press.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed

  in this book are either fictitious or used fictitiously.

  Death of a Unicorn copyright © 1984 by Peter Dickinson (peterdickinson.com). All rights reserved. First published in the UK by the Bodley Head Ltd., London.

  First Small Beer Press edition published in 2013.

  Death of a Unicorn reading group discussion questions copyright © 2013 Small Beer Press. All rights reserved.

  The Unicorn Leaps across a Stream. The Hunt of the Unicorn. ca. 1495-1505. Wool warp, wool, silk, silver, and gilt wefts. 12 ft. 1 in. x 14 ft. (368.3 x 426.7 cm). Gift of John D. Rockefeller Jr., 1937 (37.80.3). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Photo Credit: Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

  Small Beer Press

  150 Pleasant Street #306

  Easthampton, MA 01027

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  Distributed to the trade by Consortium.

  ISBN: 9781618730404 | ebook: 9781618730411.

  First edition 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  Original edition Library of Congress—Cataloging in Publication Data

  Dickinson, Peter, 1927—Death of a unicorn.

  I. Title.

  PR6054.135D4 1984 823’.914 84-42700

  ISBN 0-394-53947-8

  0-394-74100-5 (pbk)

  Text set in Minion.

  Paper edition printed on 50# Natures Natural 30% PCR Recycled Paper in the USA.

  Cheadle

  22 October, 1983.

  My dear Fiona,

  I do not yet know whether I shall leave this manuscript for you to find, or whether it will be you I shall leave it for. We are a long-lived family, and a lot may yet happen in both our lives. But assuming I do, and it is you, I think you may find it easier to understand if I tell you how it came into existence.

  It was written in two stages, the first almost thirty years before the second. In the summer of 1953 I had an absolute need to get the events of the previous ten months out of my system so that I could start creating some sort of a life for myself again. So I wrote the first part of this manuscript, put it in the bottom of a drawer, and let other unwanted papers accumulate on top of it.

  Last year, partly as a result of your coming to stay at Cheadle, I found I needed to reconsider the details of those ten months, so I got the old manuscript out and read it through. It struck me, doing so, that I might show it to you to help you in the decision I was hoping you would make, but then, as more old history came to light, I discovered something which meant that it would be extremely unfair on my part to use it in an attempt to influence you. You will see why when you read it.

  What I discovered was a considerable shock, though very different from the simple, primitive event I believed I was coping with in 1953. Besides, I had been a simple, primitive person then, and am no longer. But it still seemed necessary to use the same old simple magic. Write it out. Put it in a drawer. Bury it. Only this time for you (perhaps) to find.

  I have been unable to refrain from adding a few modern footnotes to the older part of the manuscript, for instance where the gulf of time struck me most forcibly. I would not dare do this in my other books, for fear of irritating my readers, but here I have no one to please but myself.

  And you. I mean this. I take great pleasure in pleasing you, so if you do read it, read it for pleasure, my dear.

  Your loving aunt, M M

  PART ONE

  1952–1953

  I

  It began with a yawn.

  I knew Mummy could see me, though she was pretending to listen to Lady Fosse, so I made a meal of it. I raised my hand, white-gloved to the elbow, just far enough for the tip of my middle finger to reach my mouth and yawned like a waking cat.

  ‘Bored already?’ said a man’s voice beside me.

  I was standing at the bottom of the stairs in Fenella’s uncle’s house, waiting for Jane and Penny to emerge from the cloak-room. Penny was wearing an off-the-shoulder dress which had been made for me two years ago, when I’d had a lot of puppy-fat. It was supposed to have been altered by one of Mummy’s little women, but as Penny had been taking off her coat it had suddenly become obvious that the alterations hadn’t been drastic enough. Mummy had given Jane the sacred ring of safety-pins she always took to dances and told her to do something, and we would wait for them at the bottom of the stairs. So the rest of our party had to wait too. Other people I knew and half-knew—Dickies and Susans and Cordelias and Lizzies and Pauls and Tommies and Henriettas—trudged past us up the stairs and I exchanged wide-eyed glances with the girls and little smiles with the men. Signals. We be of one blood, thou and I. Our party was a bit of an obstruction, especially after Mummy had trapped Lady Fosse in order to give herself a reason for hanging around there. She was watching me because she knew I was in a bolshie mood. She’d always been good at that, totally unsympathetic but totally aware. Would I ever, I wondered, be able to look at her without a rubbery little knot suddenly tightening in my stomach?[1] As a kind of counter-magic I produced the yawn, and the
voice, summoned by my spell, spoke at my elbow. I turned.

  It was a frog prince. No, not really. In fact it was obviously somebody’s father, a hideous little man, shorter than I was but broad-shouldered. Glossy brown skin, too smooth to be the remains of a ski-tan. Almost bald. A bit pop-eyed. A wide mouth like a toad’s.

  ‘Not as bored as I’m going to be,’ I said.

  The pop eyes looked me over. There was something chilly about him, like the cold patch on the landing which you’re supposed to find in haunted houses, though I’ve never felt one at Cheadle. His inspection paused at my necklace and I could see he knew what it was—the real one stayed in the bank practically all the time because of the insurance. He made me feel as though I was one of those jeweller’s trays on which the famous sapphires were displayed for him to inspect.

  ‘If you had stayed at home,’ he said, ‘you would be doing an old jigsaw with three pieces missing.’

  His voice was quiet, almost a whisper, but grainy.

  ‘In fact I would be at my desk rewriting the third chapter of my novel,’ I said.

  He gave a minute nod, recognising what I was in the same way that he’d recognised what the sapphires were—the literary one of the family who’d started to try and live up to her idea of herself and was finding that the knack of writing amusing letters to aunts wasn’t going to be enough.

  ‘I’ll go and buy a jigsaw tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I suppose you’d like me to do The Hay-Wain.’

  The cold patch vanished. He smiled. It was like that trick where the conjuror makes dozens of gaudy umbrellas explode out of a small black box. Charm, interest, excitement, danger flooded out of him. It was difficult to understand that nobody else in the crowd had noticed the shock of change—except, perhaps, Mummy.

  ‘Mabs!’ she called. ‘Do go and see why those girls are being such a time!’

  I shrugged to the man, making the sapphires crawl slightly on my skin. He raised a small brown hand, letting me go. He still looked really amused, as though he understood exactly what was going on, even that Mummy was now punishing me for the yawn. She could just as easily have sent Selina, who wasn’t talking to anyone, and she must have known what would happen if I tried to help Jane fix Penny’s dress.

  It happened. I’d told myself as usual that if Jane exploded I wasn’t going to react, but as usual it didn’t work. Pink-cheeked, blotchy, wide-nostrilled, we hissed at each other across Penny’s bare shoulders while other girls, and mothers or chaperones, went in and out and pretended not to be interested. Penny burst into tears. In the end Jane said, ‘Well, it’s your bloody dress, you fix it!’ and threw the pins on the floor. She’d undone the ring and I had to scrabble about for them. It turned out she’d practically finished so I put a couple more pins in, told Penny to keep breathing in and re-did her face for her. She wasn’t grateful. She and Selina always take Jane’s side. It’s only natural.

  Jane was born twenty minutes after me. Identical twins. When we were small we were dressed alike and had our hair done alike and were treated almost as though we were a single person who happened to be living in two bodies. Selina came two years later and Penny a year after that. Then there was a gap. I don’t imagine my parents really expected to have another child, but there was always the faint chance a boy would be born until my father was killed on the beach at Dunkirk. At that point it became certain that I was going to inherit Cheadle, and Mummy changed the rules. I became the elder sister and the other three were younger. They wore my old frocks and dresses. Later I did everything a year before Jane was allowed to—put on nail varnish, had my hair permed, went to finishing school, drank gin, came out and so on. Mummy was bringing out Selina and Penny in the same season, despite their being a year apart, to save money. But there’d been no question of that with me and Jane. She’d actually used Jane’s clothing coupons to get me grown-up clothes. It was totally unfair, and I sometimes said so, or tried to, but I knew it wasn’t any good. Besides, I liked being treated, outwardly at least, as a grown-up. So I ate my cake and had it still.

  It was different for Jane. Once, my first season, Jane had to come up to London suddenly to see a dentist. Most of the house in Charles Street was still let and we had to share a bed. There is something about touching, about closeness. We lay awake and talked and cried and made promises and blamed Mummy and I suppose it was some use. But still Mummy knew she only had to lift a finger to set us clawing away at the scar-tissue of the wound where she ripped us apart, and from time to time she made it happen on purpose. Not because she enjoyed it, oh no. It was her duty to keep reminding me that I was not like anyone else, especially not like Jane, though nobody outside the family could tell us apart. Jane was not going to inherit Cheadle.

  When I’d tidied up Penny I looked at myself in the glass. I was still piggy with the after-effects of rage. The Millett family face is like that. Penny and Selina took after Mummy, but Jane and I had round plump faces and noses so snub that the nostrils face forwards. That makes us sound repellent, but actually we’ve got good complexions, big mouths, long-lashed brown eyes, and can look really fetching when we’re not in a foul temper. I can just remember my great-great-uncle in his wheelchair, glaring at me because I wasn’t a boy. He looked like a rabid little hog. I wasn’t going back with that look still on my face, so I told Penny to tell them to go on up while I finished collecting the pins. Next time I looked it wasn’t too bad, though I was still in a filthy mood. The necklace had fallen skewy and as I was putting it straight I had an impulse to hide it and tell Mummy I’d flushed it down the loo. Although it was only the replica it was still worth several hundred pounds.

  I didn’t, of course. Actually I was extremely fond of the necklace, though it meant choosing half my dresses to go with the sapphires and not with my eyes. Daddy left it to me direct, and not as part of the Trust. Mummy was furious because it meant we had to pay death duties on it. She brought this up whenever there was a money crisis. But I hadn’t got much of my own to remember Daddy by, and besides, it was useful for things like keeping the conversation going with dismal partners, showing them the stone that had belonged to Mary Queen of Scots, and so on. But at the same time, in Mummy’s eyes, it was a sort of price label. For sale, with wearer. Condition of sale, that the purchaser undertake to maintain Cheadle Abbey and estates in good order for a period of one generation.

  Around midnight I was hiding from Mark Babington and trying to get squiffy. Hiding wasn’t too difficult because Fenella was having her dance on the cheap and her uncle’s house, just north of Hyde Park, wasn’t really big enough for the crush they’d invited. Girls who were actually longing for their next partner to find them weren’t having much luck. But for the same reason getting squiffy was difficult—the caterers only released fresh supplies of champagne every half-hour and you couldn’t always get to where the bottles were in time for a first glass, even. Mark had insisted on checking my card to see that I’d got his dances down right, so he must have known I wasn’t keen, but that didn’t put him off. He was used to having his own way. He told people that he was going to make a lot of money before he was forty and then go into politics. He was the reason why Mummy had made me wear the necklace that night.

  By now he had me cornered. I was in a sort of enlarged alcove off one of the sitting-out areas. Round a pillar I saw him push through a gang of that year’s debs and speak to Selina. She pointed her fan towards my alcove. It was between dances, and a rumour was on that another ration of champagne was being got ready, so there were a lot of people milling to and fro between us. I was screwing myself up for a row—I could feel the blotchy look beginning to come—when I noticed a crystal door handle on one of the painted panels of the alcove. Probably locked. Probably only a cupboard anyway.

  It was a magic door, a black slot for me to vanish through. Beyond it I found a dark passage leading back to the top of the stairs, but roped off that end to keep people out. I was already slipping off that way, intending to go and hide in the cloak
room for a bit—the utter last resort, really—when from behind me I heard a cork pop. Aha, I thought, they’re opening the next half-dozen botts. I’ll get some at source and then I can refuse to dance with Mark till I’ve finished it, in case someone pinches it. Saved!

  A small, dark-panelled room, with bookcases. Fenella’s uncle’s study. Men playing bridge. The one facing me frowned as I came through the door, and the one who’d had his back to me at a side table turned and walked over, holding a bottle with froth bulging from the mouth. He was the one who’d spoken to me at the foot of the stairs.

  ‘Dotards only, I’m afraid, Lady Margaret,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, please,’ I said. ‘Can I hide for a couple of minutes? And may I have a drink?’,

  Instantly—he didn’t seem to think about it—he went to the door and closed a little brass catch above the handle, then came back and filled my glass. It was far nicer champagne than they’d been giving us outside.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ I said: ‘Do go back to your bridge. I won’t stay more than five minutes and I won’t tell anyone else.’

  He produced his terrific smile, on purpose, for my benefit.

  ‘My partner is in six diamonds in a lay-down two-way squeeze,’ he said. ‘He will take an absurd time to think it out and then get it wrong. I prefer not to watch.’

  ‘I don’t play,’ I said. ‘Ought I to learn?’

  ‘Have yourself taught by a professional. Or don’t start. How do you occupy the daylight hours, Lady Margaret? Work on your novel?’

  I thought he wanted me to be impressed by his knowing my name, but it wasn’t difficult, once he’d recognised the sapphires.