Death of a Unicorn

by Peter Dickinson

He drew a line on the table, a foot back from where he’d started.

  ‘. . . it might be a century between one serious change in society and the next. It made sense to plant oak trees.’

  He began to move the spoon slowly across the rows, an inch above the cloth.

  ‘By the industrial revolution the gap was a generation, by the First World War a decade. Soon we will stop thinking in years and think in months. It affects us all. When our cities were built we invested in a hundred-year future, with sewers and roads and bridges and warehouses that would last. What businessman today will invest in a ten-year future?’

  ‘I’ve got a friend—the man you rescued me from at that dance, as a matter of fact—who says he’s going to be a millionaire by the time he’s forty.’

  ‘Perfectly possible, provided he remembers there is no future and therefore no past. The only time is now.’

  ‘What’s it got to do with what Tom Duggan writes?’

  ‘He is writing for here,’ said Mr B, pointing to a space two mustard-lines back.

  ‘A lot of people probably still think they are living there.’

  ‘Do you watch the television?’

  ‘We haven’t got one. There’s a set at one of my friends’. They can’t tear their eyes from it.’

  ‘Exactly. Your people who you think are living in the past are bored with the past, without knowing it. They will move on, all of a sudden, leaving Duggan stranded.’

  ‘In that case, why did you buy the paper?’

  He swung round and beckoned to a waiter, then pointed to the mess on the cloth. The waiter took a clean napkin from the empty table next door and spread it over the mess, blotting it out. But I could still feel it was there, shocking, between the snowy layers.

  ‘Why did I buy Night and Day?’ said Mr B when he’d gone. ‘Have you surfed ever?’

  ‘Brrr, no thanks. I’ve watched people doing it at Brancaster but it takes a north-easter to get the waves up. I don’t see the fun in waiting around in a wind that’s come from Finland so that you can lie on your turn in the water and let a wave push you ashore.’

  ‘In Barbados we have learnt to do it on our hind legs. It is a healthy activity. You should come to Barbados and try.’

  ‘Oh, I’d love to.’

  I don’t think I spoke with any special gush. I liked England, and because of the war and problems afterwards I hadn’t been abroad much. Two seasons skiing, and bicycles in Normandy, that was all. A squall threshed along the river. The idea of sun and blue waves and warm beaches made my skin crawl with imagined pleasure. I saw Mr B looking at me with his pop eyes half hidden by lowered lids.

  ‘Will you come and live with me?’ he said.

  Of course my heart gave a bump and I felt my eyes widen. I suppose I blushed, because I do. But in a funny way I wasn’t surprised, though I certainly hadn’t been expecting him to say anything like that. As I’ve said, I’d half expected it my first evening out with him, but then I’d come to the conclusion that he liked my company occasionally because I was young and amusing and had a bit of snob appeal, but he’d want somebody much more sophisticated for a lover. And if you’d asked me, when he wasn’t there, how I’d react to such a proposal, I’d probably have said that my chief problem would be trying to hide my disgust at the idea. But he was there.

  ‘Be your mistress, you mean?’ I said.

  ‘If you choose to put it that way.’

  ‘How long for?’

  Now he did the smile.

  ‘Hard to say,’ he said. ‘Nina left me after two years to marry a farmer in Mull. I kicked another girl out after six weeks and she tried to sell her story to the press.’

  ‘Tried?’

  ‘Stick to the point.’

  ‘You know I’m a minor?’

  ‘Until the tenth of August. I have considered that, but I would like your answer in principle.’

  I thought about it. No, I didn’t, but I felt I had to pretend to. I could have said no—he hadn’t made it seem difficult. I looked at the sodden willows and two swans on the dark water for about ten seconds.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘In principle.’

  ‘You don’t want a day or two to think it over?’

  I shook my head. Now I was shocked, astonished, frightened. It was him knowing my birthday. It meant he’d been thinking about it in his cold way. The name of the town we were in crossed my mind and that made me go scarlet. He was watching me and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I wouldn’t have guessed you liked puns,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t . . . oh, I see. If it will set your mind at rest I hadn’t intended to make the suggestion this evening. But you looked so delicious at that moment . . .’

  ‘It was thinking about Barbados.’

  ‘We won’t be going there for some months, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I don’t mind. What shall I call you?’

  ‘My first name is Amos.’

  ‘Does anyone call you that?’

  ‘Only my mother.’

  ‘Is she still . . .’

  I could have bitten my tongue off. I don’t think a muscle or line in his face changed but I could feel he was hurt and furious. I reached across the table and took his hand. It was as small as mine, but dry and hard.

  ‘I haven’t had any practice,’ I said. ‘I’m bound to be clumsy at first.’

  He squeezed my hand, turned it over, looked at it and let it go.

  ‘I’m an ugly little man,’ he said. ‘Try not to remind me. But I am not yet fifty.’

  ‘You are the most exciting person I’ve ever met.’

  He patted my hand and pushed it away.

  ‘I want to talk about ways and means,’ he said. ‘I implied just now that I was able to keep my affairs out of the newspapers, but there are, of course, limits. We may have reached them. The combination of British prurience and British snobbery may prove too strong.’

  ‘I wouldn’t care.’

  ‘You would, when it happened. Furthermore there is your mother and Cheadle Trust.’

  ‘She can’t do anything except persuade the Trustees to cut off my allowance, and that’s a pittance. It’s all entailed and I inherit when I’m twenty-five.’

  ‘So I gather. But I hear your mother is a formidable woman, and in any case there is no point in creating problems where they can be avoided. I myself am not anxious for publicity. I am not a particularly rich man, though like your friend I intend to be. I operate by persuading richer men that they can trust me to use their money to their profit, and if they were to see my name all over the gossip-columns their confidence might be less. So what I propose is this: you will have to move out of Charles Street . . .’

  ‘I couldn’t possibly afford anywhere you could bear.’

  ‘Let me finish. I will of course pay the rent, but you will need to explain where the money is coming from. Todd tells me that these little pieces you’ve been doing are very popular with readers . . .’

  ‘All I know is people have started sending in grisly imitations.’

  ‘All successes have their drawbacks. But they appear to have caught on. I see no reason why you shouldn’t produce a little book on those lines. If you judge it right you might do very well. There is a certain type of essentially non-literary small volume which people give each other by the tens of thousands for Christmas. A sensible publisher, recognising the possibilities, might well offer you a fair-sized advance to complete the work in time for him to get it out for the Christmas market. In any case the general public is absurdly ignorant about publishing finances. I don’t think any of your family or friends would question the possibility that your advance enabled you to set yourself up in a small flat in the block where I happen to live. The need to have total peace so that you can write the book in a hurry would be your reason for leaving Charles Street.’

  ‘Is this real?’

  ‘You seem markedly more stimulated by the idea than by my previous proposal.’

  I laughed and reach
ed for his hand again. He shook his head. We had started to live our secret life, even if the other people in the room were only waiters, or stockbrokers out with their wives or floozies. Hard to tell which was which. There wasn’t going to be much doubt in my case. It was extraordinary, now, how much I needed to touch him, to show him I meant yes with something that wasn’t just words. To show myself, too, I suppose.

  ‘It’s the way I’ve grown up,’ I said. ‘Family. You don’t let on about feelings that really matter. Except with Jane, of course. She’s different.’

  ‘Your sister?’

  ‘I’ve got two others, but she’s my twin. We have unspeakable rows, but we mind about each other dreadfully too. Is it all right if I tell her?’

  ‘Is it necessary?’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  Once more my hand reached towards his but I managed to stop it. Instead I smoothed with my fingers at the napkin. The mustard was gluing it to the table-cloth now, and the yellow lines were soaking faintly through. I looked straight at him.

  ‘Did you ever meet a girl called Veronica Bracken?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think so. Why?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘It sounds as if it mattered to you.’

  ‘It might have. Please forget I asked.’

  ‘If you wish.’

  He turned to order coffee. I felt shivery and ill, not because of what I’d agreed to but because of the sudden notion that he might have been the man in Veronica’s story. My instinct was to go back, for safety, back to the first half of the evening.

  ‘You haven’t told me why you bought Night and Day,’ I said. ‘You were saying something about surfing and that got us on to Barbados and then this . . . other thing came up.’

  He was lighting a cigar. (The time before, when we’d dined alone, after the opera, he’d asked my permission.) He answered between sucks and inspections of the glowing tip.

  ‘It’s the hollow before the wave that matters,’ he said. ‘If you let that go past you’ve missed the wave. Then you’ve got to work like blazes to get your board moving as the wave itself comes. And then you can get up and find your balance and ride the wave. In the sea, of course, you can look over your shoulder and see the wave coming and decide whether it’s worth waiting for a better one. But in the metaphor I’m using, where time itself is the wave, all that is hidden and you have only the feel of the hollow to go by. I met a fellow who wanted to sell some shares privately because he thought they were going down and down. I made some inquiries and decided this might be only the hollow before a wave. Now I have to get the board moving. The pun is not intentional.’

  ‘And if there isn’t a wave after all?’

  ‘I shall be in serious trouble. As your friend who also wishes to be a rich man could no doubt tell you, it is necessary to take risks. Mostly I risk other people’s money, and their trust in me not to lose it, but in order to underwrite that trust, and also to maximise my own share of the eventual profits, I have to risk the capital I have been able to accumulate by riding previous waves.’

  ‘What was the first one? I mean how do you start? I wish some of the Milletts had known. I feel like a sort of mermaid born to sit on a gloomy old rock while your waves come chuntering past. It’s worse than that because it’s rather a soft rock, and the waves are slowly wearing it away. Sometimes I think I’ll be the last mermaid who’ll ever sit there.’

  I was rather pleased by the way I’d picked up his image and made something of it, but he seemed not to notice.

  ‘It’s not so much of a risk to begin,’ he said. ‘You’ve little to lose, but you need to see your chance and take it. In my case I was able to help some influential people just after the war and they . . .

  ‘You were on the Control Commission, weren’t you?’

  He looked at me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It comes of belonging to a big family. You get used to interrupting each other. I’ll try and behave.’

  He nodded, still watching me.

  ‘Go on,’ I said.

  ‘I think we had better have a definite understanding that we avoid the subject both of my work and yours. Otherwise, where they overlap, you will find yourself in an invidious position. We will begin from this moment.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I’ve told you the only thing that concerns you. I seem to be riding the wave successfully at the moment, but I may suddenly lose my balance and go under.’

  ‘It won’t matter. I’ll pull you on to my rock.’

  Rather charmingly he let me hold his hand all the way back to London while we talked about the Petronella book, but he didn’t want to kiss me before he dropped me at Charles Street. Because of the chauffeur, I assumed, though I imagined he must have been used to that sort of thing.[1]

  [1] I am relieved to find that this is almost as far as I chose to go in writing about my sex life. The omission would seem perverse if I had been writing the same story in these days, but in those it would have been extraordinary if I had gone into detail. I do not propose to do so now, but feel an impulse to deal briefly with the question of whether I loved B. The answer is certainly yes. Suppose we were to meet now (I as I am, he as he was) I would probably dislike and distrust him, with good reason. For all his magnetism I would not think him a pleasant or worthwhile person. He was not. But in spite of that, in spite of all changes, I cannot deny that I still, however irrationally, feel for him what can only be called love. Did he love me, though? He never said so. Perhaps that is what this book has turned out, after all these years, to be about.

  V

  To my amazement, Mummy decided at the last minute that she was coming to the publication party for Uncle Tosh, and bringing the family too. I’d hardly seen her all summer, once the Season was over, because she’d gone home to Cheadle. I got my news from Jane who if she was in London came round to my flat on Tuesdays, which were B’s regular bridge evenings. Jane knew about B, because I’d told her, but we behaved as if she didn’t. I’d untidy the flat to make it feel as if somebody actually lived there, and let her find me doing something domestic like starching my petticoats. I’d cook an omelette, with peaches out of a tin for pudding, and we’d chat in a jerky way, read Vogue and House and Garden, or play our old private game in which Jane drew Cheadle characters in unlikely situations and I put in the words coming out of their mouths.

  I had to go home once, for my twenty-first birthday. It was Jane’s too, of course, but you wouldn’t have known. By a lucky fluke B had a business trip to Hamburg that weekend. It turned out a thoroughly dire occasion. Mummy hadn’t really minded my staying away before the party, though she groused a bit of course, but it meant that she could have a free hand doing things her own way. She wanted a mighty celebration, although I wasn’t actually going to inherit for another four years. For instance, I had to get the real sapphires out of the bank to wear, not that anyone would have known, but she wanted to be able to tell her friends. We didn’t ask many of my friends, that wasn’t the point, because it wasn’t really a party, it was a ritual. And it wasn’t for me, either, it was for Cheadle. So the guests were mostly the mothers and fathers of other Leicestershire families, gathered to be witnesses at the betrothal of the old stone ogre to his new bride. Then, at the last minute, the ogre turned nasty.

  Mummy wanted everything as grand as possible (though also, of course, as cheap as possible) and the grandest thing of all was already there, laid on, cost free, in the shape of the Banqueting Hall. There’d been a minor leak in its roof, which wasn’t unusual—there’s always a bucket or two standing round somewhere to catch the latest drip. But this time when the builders came out from Bolsover to patch things up before the party they found a complete section of lead that had somehow never been replaced in the 1924 repairs and had been leaking for years on to the huge main bearing timbers, which had been soaking up the leaks so that they didn’t show up below, and now the timbers were rotten through, and a lot of the other woodwork
as well. The architect Mummy got out said that there were tons of baroque plasterwork up there held in place by cobwebs, and the Banqueting Hall wasn’t safe to walk through, let alone to dance in. In fact we danced in the Long Gallery, which was much better anyway because the wooden floor is easier on your feet than marble, but for Mummy it wasn’t the same thing. It wasn’t part of the ritual, and in a mysterious way she decided that it was all somehow my fault.

  It was my fault because I hadn’t been there and the ogre was sulky. Of course she didn’t say this—I sometimes think she hasn’t any imagination at all—but it was what she felt. Now it was my duty to leave London and come and help her in the crisis. We had three absolutely record rows, but she found she couldn’t beat me down any more. I was free. It was all happening outside me. (When I did get down to Cheadle I was much more interested in pumping Wheatstone for stories about my great-great-uncle, a truly fearsome old savage, which I could adapt for Uncle Tosh.) It was like one of those dreams when you are actually aware you are dreaming; monstrous things threaten you but they only frighten you on the surface because you know you can kill them by waking up. That’s what distinguishes a proper nightmare, like the Hansel-and-Gretel one I used to have. While it lasts, it’s real.

  What was real for me was my happiness, my job, Petronella, my life with B. He was a congenital early riser, which I’d never been but took up because it was the only way I could cram everything in. We would get up at six, however late we’d got to bed, and off he would pad to his rowing machine and his sun-lamp. I would dress, switch my telephone through and go up to my flat and write for two hours and then have breakfast. He would telephone me at half-past eight to tell me where he would be during the day and what we were doing that evening. (If I had an engagement I’d have to have told him several days before.) He’d be very brisk, as though the only point in telling me at all was so that I’d know what to wear and whether to have my hair done. Then I’d catch a bus to Westminster and a tram along the Embankment and walk up through the Temple to Shoe Lane and the office. In spite of what B had said to me at Maidenhead nothing much had changed in the editorial department. Tom was still writing ‘By the Way’ and Bruce was drawing his sugar-daddies in bed with blondes (which now had a ghastly fascination for me, though I still didn’t think they were funny) and Mrs Clarke was writing the Round in the same unbelievable way. But, perhaps because I was so happy, I felt as if things were cheering up. The circulation was still falling, but not so fast, and I thought that fewer issues now had that musty, dead-mouse smell which used to hang around most of them when I’d first come to the paper.