Death of a Unicorn

by Peter Dickinson

  ‘Seago, of course,’ she said. ‘Flight Lieutenant Paul Seago. Not foreign at all, only Norfolk.’

  The card seemed to have a hypnotic effect on her. She stared at it like a hen on a chalk-line. I thought of Veronica Bracken, the first time I’d noticed her, at Queen Charlotte’s Ball three years ago. I was feeling nervous and ugly. White doesn’t suit me, and Mummy had decided the occasion was important enough to get the real sapphires out of the bank, the first time I’d worn them in public. I lined up in the famous queue next door to a blonde child. She turned to me.

  ‘Isn’t this super!’ she whispered.

  She flexed her bare brown shoulders like a cat in a patch of sun. Her hair shone. Her eyes were very dark brown. She seemed to be floating an inch above the floor . And within a year she’d had an abortion in Paris and put her head in a gas oven and been found just in time by the concierge, according to Mrs Clarke. And now she was going to marry Flight Lieutenant Paul Seago.

  ‘Have you got a card about me, Mrs Clarke? May I see?’

  ‘No, my dear. In any case I keep them in code. For safety, you know.’

  ‘Were you really at my parents’ wedding? I don’t mean that, but do you really remember it? You go to so many.’

  ‘It was the wedding of the year.’

  ‘I suppose so. I only remember my father a bit. I don’t feel as if I knew him. It’s so difficult to imagine them falling in love, and marrying, and so on, but here I am.’

  Mrs Clarke nodded, more like Nanny Bassett than ever. Certain sequences in the social order of things were as correct and perfect as a proof in Euclid. Without thinking I asked a typical nursery question.

  ‘Were they really in love, do you think? It could just have been Cheadle.’

  ‘They made a particularly handsome couple. Your mother looked radiant.’

  ‘I bet she did. I bet it rained buckets, too.’

  ‘Why should you say that?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. It was November, anyway. Mummy makes a fuss about the anniversary, and Jane and me were born in August, just in time to spoil the Twelfth.’

  Mrs Clarke nodded and went back to her room. I heaved the mechanical elephant into position and tried to think of a way of taking the funeral bits out of my Petronella piece without leaving it as flat as last night’s champagne, but the rain at my parents’ wedding kept getting in the way. Mrs Clarke had as good as told me they hadn’t married for love, but for Cheadle. I don’t know why I should accept her word on something like that, but I did. In any case I’d always known, just as I knew about the rain.

  When we were about fourteen we came back for one Christmas holidays on the same train. Mummy had organised that, though Jane went to a cheaper school. (‘It isn’t good for them to live in each other’s pockets the whole time.’) Mummy got extra petrol for being a magistrate, which meant she could fetch us from the station. It was a beast of a day, black and drenching. Jane and I were sitting together in the back. We came round the Saturn fountain and started up the avenue. I expect all children, coming back from three months away, automatically stare for the first real sight of home. I know I used to. All you see from the fountain is the portico, which goes right up the front of the house. The trees of the avenue hide the wings. On a day like that it’s only the pediment and pillars, with blackness behind them.

  ‘It looks like a great mouth, waiting to swallow us,’ I said.

  ‘Waiting to swallow you, darling,’ said Jane. ‘It’s a stone ogre. Once a generation it’s given a girl to eat.’

  I didn’t think Mummy had been listening, but she called out, ‘Nonsense! In any case, next time it’s going to be a man!’

  She accelerated up the avenue as though she couldn’t wait.

  I was brooding about this, and I suppose I was thinking about Veronica and my parents’ wedding and other disasters, and at the same time desperately trying to make my mind take an interest in Petronella, when I remembered what Tom had told me about finding what he called ‘another voice’. Almost without noticing what I was doing I invented an uncle for the little idiot, a cynical old brute to balance her innocent gush. A guardian angel to save her from Veronica’s fate. Uncle Tosh. He was running a book on the Season’s Engagement Stakes. I can’t pretend that I felt him, that very first morning, beginning to leap into life on the paper—he was just a way out of the mess I was in. When I showed the piece to Mrs Clarke she wasn’t specially interested, but remarked that if it were true she would win a lot of money off him. On the other hand Tom spotted the possibilities at once.

  ‘You’ll find he comes in handy,’ he said. ‘What about these odds? You’ll have readers writing in proving the fellow’s certain to lose.’

  ‘I was hoping you’d know about that.’

  ‘You’ve come to the wrong door. I’m one of your literary Irishmen. The winged horse is the beast I bestride. Sensitive my nature, daring and sweet my thought, but neither mathematical nor hippophatical my bent. Ronnie’s the fellow. His brother runs a racing stable. Ronnie!’

  ‘Just a moment,’ said Ronnie without looking up. Tom talked on cheerfully as though telling me an anecdote about some total stranger.

  ‘You know, when Ronnie came down from Oxford all eager to implement the revolution he tried for a job on the Daily Worker. Not the least interested in his Marxist fervour, they were, but the moment they found out his connections they snapped him up, gave him the petty cash and sent him out to put it on a horse. Doubled their fighting fund in a fortnight. Come and take a glass of lunch, Ronnie, and expound the intricacies of horse-race betting to little Mabs here.’

  We got back to the office two hours later. I’d eaten one flavourless chicken sandwich and drunk a bit less than my share of two bottles of Pommery. We’d ordered the second bottle on discovering that Ronnie was a connection of mine through one of those typical third-cousin-once-removed linkages which come up in the course of conversations about something else—in this case my great-great-uncle’s Gimcrack-winner Knobkerrie. He’d had it stuffed when it had to be put down after a training accident, and I think the earliest distinct memory I have of anything is being allowed to stroke its leg, in the billiard room. Tom had been delighted by the discovery and had kept calling cronies over to explain to them that Ronnie and I were related by way of a horse.

  There was a note on my desk. ‘I have tickets for Eugene Onegin at Sadler’s Wells tomorrow evening. Please come if you are free. AB.’ A telephone number but no address. I hadn’t seen the writing before but I knew who it was. I wasn’t free, but that didn’t matter. I was going. Ah, I could actually insist on going because I could tell Mummy it was part of my job. Uncle Tosh could take Petronella to the opera. Then I wouldn’t have to explain who Mr Brierley was.

  Still, it might be useful to know. I tapped on Mrs Clarke’s door and put my head round. It wasn’t a good moment. She was wearing proper spectacles and typing that week’s Round on a little white portable. (She used all her fingers, like a proper typist, and was very quick. Letters, even formal ones, she hand-wrote in purple ink on pale pink paper.) She looked up at me over the top of her spectacles—Nanny Bassett again, looking up from her darning, knowing we’d been up to some mischief.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘This is terrible cheek, but have you got a card for Mr Brierley?’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Could you tell me what’s on it?’

  ‘Certainly not. This is not an information parlour, Lady Margaret. I told you certain things this morning because it was necessary that you should know them, and I thought I could trust to your good sense to tell no one else. As for the gentleman you refer to, I know very little about him as yet, but I strongly advise you to have as little as possible to do with him.’

  ‘I’m dreadfully sorry,’ I said. ‘I know I shouldn’t have asked.’

  She nodded icily and went back to her typing.

  [1] This is still the case, and always has been. When Bartrand Millett built Cheadle in 1712 he effect
ively bankrupted all his heirs, in perpetuity. Looking through the account books I can see the same scrimping going on generation after generation. My mother and I are only the last two in a long line of cheeseparers. But I am the first, I think, ever to have put money in, not counting the heirs who did it by marrying money.

  IV

  ‘That’s all over,’ said Mr B.

  He spoke only just loud enough to hear, as usual, but the grate in his voice cut me short. He didn’t want to know. We were having dinner at Skindle’s at Maidenhead, at a table by the window overlooking the river. It was no kind of romantic evening though, typical June sulks, with squalls rocking the moored boats and hammering down on to the ruffled black water. What’s more Mr B had ordered my meal without consulting me, nothing special, though my half-bottle of hock was delicious. He had a plain omelette and an apple and drank weak whisky and soda. His chauffeur had driven us down in the Bentley while we sat in the back and talked about the magazine. We were still doing so.

  I’d been out twice with Mr B since the opera, to a private dinner given by a rich Greek at Claridge’s and to a weird evening in a huge white villa near Virginia Water where some of us played vingt-et-un for buttons in one room while next door they were playing chemmy with hundred-pound chips. I guessed that us button-players were there so that we could give evidence if there was a police raid that we hadn’t been playing for money, and to delay things a bit so that they had time to hide the equipment in the other room. All three evenings Mr B had been very kind to me, rescuing me from bores, introducing me to people who weren’t bores and telling me juicy gossip about them afterwards; he’d listened to what I’d said, too, and seemed amused. Supper after the opera had been oysters and champagne and I’d been thinking, ‘Oho, now there’ll be his new Bernard Buffet he wants me to see,’ when he’d said he’d got some work to do and asked if I’d mind if the chauffeur took me home.

  This evening was not like any of those. It was work all through. The magazine. He’d owned it for seven weeks, giving each department a shake in turn. There was a new advertising manager, three men had been sacked from Circulation and one from Accounts, and we’d got a new contract with our printers which they were rather sulky about. He’d left Editorial till last, apart from getting me my job. Now it was going to be our turn, and he was using me as a kind of spy, to tell him about everything before he made his move.

  It was extremely awkward. From his point of view, I owed him my job and I was obviously loving it, so why shouldn’t he get something back? Besides, we all knew, everyone knew, that something had got to be done. I suppose I’d known it even when I only used to read the magazine in the hairdresser’s. There was something dreary about it, something that made you feel mentally constipated. Now that I was on the inside I’d discovered that a lot of the articles and so on were actually pretty clever, pretty tricky to write, but that didn’t stop them being dreary. The opposite if anything. They were like an acrobat doing incredibly difficult stunts which everyone’s seen too often. The circulation was going down and down. Tom said he’d realised the writing was on the wall when his cronies stopped talking about seeing the magazine in the club and started talking about seeing it in the dentist’s. We were all in a way longing for something to happen.

  But that didn’t make it any easier being a spy. It wasn’t just because I liked the people I was spying on. I didn’t, not all of them. Bruce Fischer, for instance. Bruce was Art Editor, a big, doughy, blue-chinned man who wore half-transparent nylon shirts which let you see his string vest and hairy chest. A classic edger-up. Only that morning he’d edged me the whole length of the make-up table until I’d used the Gloy brush to write ‘No’ on his nylon shirt. He’d lost his temper. He was the one who drew the cartoons of the blondes in bed with sugar-daddies. It was a sort of tradition. Right back in the Thirties, in the very first issue, there’d been a terribly daring picture like that and Bruce was still doing them. They seemed to be popular. Readers wrote in with new twists. I thought they were unspeakably dreary, but would I have liked them more if I hadn’t thought Bruce was a pretty unpleasant person?

  Or Jack Todd? Mr Clarke had appointed him just before the war when the magazine was almost on the rocks, but it was saved by Adolf Hitler. Apparently wars are marvellous for the written word. Ronnie’s theory was that whenever civilisation is heading for the rocks everyone tries to reassert its values by doing the most civilised thing they can think of, like going to Myra Hess concerts in the National Gallery, but especially by settling down for a good read. Even so Jack must have had a pretty exhausting war and now he seemed almost like an editorial zombie some of the time, just going through the motions, laughing that awful laugh, buying dreary articles by writers he’d known when they were brilliantly promising, and so on. But then he’d hit a good patch, come up with a dozen fresh ideas, spot new talent . . . me, for instance. He’d liked Petronella, hadn’t he? And he was dotty about Uncle Tosh. He’d been so keen on their visit to the opera that he’d made me stretch it out to a whole page in the proper part of the magazine with an illustration by Sally Benbow, and that happened most weeks now. I couldn’t help thinking that Jack was a good editor, really, could I?

  And Tom? And Ronnie? Whom I did like, who treated me as a real person, junior member of the boys’ gang? Who’d taken my side when Bruce had lost his temper—not that Ronnie didn’t make the odd bit of accidental-seeming contact now and again . . .

  I was worried about both of them, for opposite reasons. Ronnie ran the review pages and wrote the parliamentary sketch. He knew a fantastic amount about what was going on. He could always tell you which ministers Mr Churchill was prepared to listen to and which made him pretend to go gaga the moment they opened their mouths and things like that, but somehow when he wrote it down it came out drab. Tom was the other way round. He was brilliant at noticing the surface of life, what people were wearing and eating and so on, and he had a lovely easy way of writing, but he wasn’t remotely interested in what was going on beneath the surface or why things happened. If he wanted to know whether the Viet Minh were on our side or theirs, for instance, he would have to ask Ronnie. I was specially worried about Tom because somehow I sensed that Mr B wouldn’t be interested in what he did.

  I liked Tom most of all. I had decided, tentatively, that he was ‘queer’. Powdering one’s nose before a dance of course one gossiped about the men who’d been in the dinner party and who were therefore going to provide most of one’s partners for the rest of the evening. All of them would have been to one of the big public schools, and as most of the girls had brothers, quite a bit of information got around. On the whole one welcomed the queers. They tended to like dancing and do it well. They noticed what one wore. They talked more amusingly. They weren’t possessive. Above all they didn’t behave as though they were going out to bat for the Men’s First XI in the great game of sex, all arrogance and nerves, in varying proportions but just as tiresome whatever the mixture. I’d known one of these queers since childhood as he lived only three miles from Cheadle and got asked about a lot, despite having been sacked from Harrow, because he was a good tennis-player. But even he, one vaguely assumed, was going to grow out of it.

  Tom (if I was right about him) was not. This made him seem different from anyone else I’d known. And then there was the danger, the daring, involved in that way of life. Only a fortnight before the supper at Maidenhead a well-known playwright had been sent to prison after being found in the arms of a guardsman under some bushes by the Serpentine. Jack Todd had become almost hysterical with excitement at the news, chain-laughing, thrilled by the man’s downfall, derisive of the hypocrisy of public life, but obviously inquisitive as a small boy and shocked as a great-aunt. Did he know about Tom? Was he in some way getting at him? Tom hadn’t seemed to notice but Ronnie had become very jumpy and tried to shut Jack up. Later he’d told me, ‘Jack’s got it in for old Tom. He needs him. Tom’s the flywheel, keeping the machine running when the engine’s off. But Ja
ck will do all he knows to stop Tom becoming editor when his own time’s up. In fact he’ll hang on to that chair till he keels over.’

  Now, how much of this could I tell Mr B? Of course I longed to tell him everything, to show how bright I was, how at home in my new adult world. Only I guessed he wouldn’t be all that impressed, so I stuck to what actually went into the paper. We were talking about ‘By the Way’. This was a series of unconnected paragraphs at the start of each week’s paper, beginning with a phrase like ‘We notice that . . .’ and going on to be ironic or witty or lightly sentimental about whatever Tom claimed to have noticed. He wrote most of them. They looked as easy as pie. You didn’t realise till you’d tried that they were incredibly difficult to get right. I was explaining this when Mr B interrupted.

  ‘That’s all over,’ he said.

  I looked up.

  ‘No time for that sort of thing. Not any more,’ he said.

  ‘He does them incredibly quickly.’

  Mr B gave me his toad look, pulled the mustard pot towards himself, took the spoon and began to smear parallel yellow lines on the table-cloth. I watched, shocked. There was something sacred about clean white linen, about the columns of folded table-cloths in Mrs Hamm’s cupboards at Cheadle, some of them stitched with my great-grandmother’s initials, as part of her trousseau, and therefore new in 1876, but still perfectly good thanks to the systematic rotation of the columns. Probably they’d all had mustard spilt on them over the years, but Mr B’s deliberate smearing was different. Each time he drew a line he reduced the space between it and the one before.

  ‘Our relationship with time is changing,’ he said. ‘We think of time as a constant, but it’s not. It is an accelerating process. In the Middle Ages . . .’