Death of a Unicorn

by Peter Dickinson

  In the evening I would go back to my own flat and change out of my office clothes. Then I would go down to B’s, shower, do my face and hair, put on a frock and read till he came home. I kept most of my clothes down there because he liked to watch me dressing and undressing. And he liked me to be well dressed when we went out, so he’d opened accounts for me at Victor Stiebel and Harrods and a few other places. I wasn’t extravagant with them. I walked a sort of tightrope in my own mind. For instance we’d slipped over to Paris so that Petronella could do the Autumn Collections and I’d fallen for a little Dior suit, dark grey silk with black lapels and cuffs. I longed for it, and I felt B guessed there was something I wanted, but I couldn’t ask. It wasn’t a question of his paying for it, even—I could actually have afforded it out of my own money, but I would have needed his help to work some kind of currency fiddle to buy it, and he was obsessive about that. He grumbled all the time about the £25 limit but he stayed inside it with a sort of obsessive stinginess which was quite out of character. At home he was generous without being lavish. He paid the rent of my flat and settled my accounts because doing so allowed us to live in the way he wanted, but the bargain between us didn’t lie in that, any more than it lay in my being young and reasonably intelligent and pretty in my piggy way. For me it lay in feeling happy and alive in his company. For him I suppose it lay in knowing that I didn’t think of him as an ugly little man.

  Not that it was all perfect, all the time. He could be desperately moody, and once or twice a total beast. I suppose I’d better put one of these times down, because I want him all, and that’s part of him too.

  We were due to go to the theatre. We had met by accident earlier in the day, because I’d gone to Sotheby’s to get material for a Petronella piece about a sale of Old Masters, and B had been there. I’d caught his eye across the room and smiled at him. He hadn’t smiled back, but he wouldn’t. So I was waiting for him in his flat that evening, already dressed for the theatre and eager to chat about the sale. I thought he’d be amused about my going to something like that on my own because I never used to until he started to try and educate me. When Jane and I were born the ovum seems to have split with all the aesthetic genes in her half. I expect that’s scientific nonsense, but it’s how it worked out. I got the words and she got the pictures. Of course I knew some names and could do a bit of simple chat, but I could never actually see that a Rembrandt self-portrait had anything more to it than a good coloured photograph. I’d gone to that particular sale because there’d been a couple of Canalettos in it. We’ve got six at Cheadle so I wanted to know what they fetched. ‘Selling the Canalettos’ is family shorthand for taking desperate measures in a financial crisis.

  When B came in I gave him his drink and asked whether he’d bid for anything. He went and stared out of the window, emptied his glass and poured himself another without saying a word. By then I knew that something was wrong, but I wasn’t prepared for it when he swung round and asked in his harshest voice why I hadn’t been at the office. I explained about the Petronella piece and was trying to say I thought we’d agreed not to talk about my job, but he went off on another tack, saying that it was pointless for me to write about pictures because I was too stupid to understand anything about them. The only pictures in the flat were a couple of sea-scapes, fishing-boats in rough seas, which I actually liked because they reminded me of a painting in one of the West Wing rooms at Cheadle where I used to hide under the bed to read. I made the mistake of saying so. B said they were rubbish and he was going to get rid of them next day. Then, deliberately I thought, he set about reducing me to tears. I thought he’d decided to ‘boot me out’ but after all that he insisted on going to the play, which turned out dire. He never referred to the incident again. It might almost have been some kind of brainstorm, except that he did get rid of the sea-scapes and next time he came back from Germany replaced them with a horrid little picture of the head of Christ, grey with death, and Mary’s head huddled against it, clumsy and grey with grief. Naturally I didn’t risk saying anything about it, or any of the other pictures and knick-knacks he began to import.

  I took it as a warning. I knew it meant something, and I told myself it was his way of making sure I didn’t take my luck for granted. I didn’t, and I suppose that made me enjoy the happiness all the more, so it may have been worth it. (Apart from that it meant that B stopped trying to educate me and when we went to Private Views let me wander about eavesdropping on the perfectly extraordinary things people say to each other in art galleries.) That was the worst time. Usually I could cope with him by treating that part of our affair as a sort of game. If he didn’t like something—a dress for instance—he’d be brusque or even rude about it, and that meant I’d lost a point. If he was pleased he didn’t tell me, but I learnt to know, and scored myself one.

  Though I’d signed the publisher’s contract and written and rewritten every comma and read the proofs and so on, somehow I never really believed Uncle Tosh was a real book until the publication party. We held it at the Night and Day offices in Shoe Lane. It was what Petronella would have called a hoot, because everyone seemed to think it was a perfect opportunity to work off hospitality debts, and the list grew longer and longer. We cleared the big middle room but it soon became obvious that that wasn’t going to be enough so I had the cheek to ask Mrs Clarke if we could use hers too, and she said yes. I’d been half hoping that B would subsidise the drinks—the publisher’s budget would have run to about half a glass each—but I couldn’t ask and he didn’t offer. In fact I didn’t even know whether he was coming—during our usual morning telephone confab he’d just said he was meeting someone and might perhaps bring him along. In the end Jack Todd authorised Accounts to help, and I topped up with some of my advance, but we were still short, so Ronnie mixed the drinks.

  The drink, I mean. It was take-it-or-leave-it. Apparently left-wing politics make men expert in how to get stoned on a shoe-string. It was mostly Algerian white wine, with Moroccan brandy to give it a kick and a couple of other things to hide the taste and cochineal to turn it bright pink. We told the guests that it had been created specially for the occasion and was called Petronella. Jack Todd had used the party to invite a lot of his lame dogs—quite well-known names, some of them, in an is-he-still-alive sort of way—which gave the occasion what Tom called a certain cobwebby literary cachet. It made me giggle to see those mottled noses sniffing warily into their glasses, though I heard one of the old boys mutter that at least it was a bit stronger than what publishers usually produced.

  Then the publicity man at the publishers had said it would be a good idea if I got some real debs along—the Susans, he nicknamed them. I chose ones who looked the part and could talk Petronella. One of the things that had happened during the summer was that she’d really caught on. For instance Selina had come back from a weekend in darkest Worcestershire and told me that two girls had physically fought over Night and Day when it arrived because they wanted to see whether Petronella had come up with anything new for them to work into their repertoire. Some of the Susans could talk Petronella for twenty minutes non-stop, which I certainly couldn’t; she came to me sentence by slow sentence on my typewriter in my little empty-feeling fiat at the top of Dolphin Square in the early morning. By now there was an accepted Petronella voice, a breathless but metallic quack, just right. A few young men tried to talk Uncle Tosh, but I never heard a good one.

  And then there were the professionals, reviewers and gossip-columnists and even a few ordinary reporters who’d been sent along by their editors to do a story about this titled idiot who’d written a book. The jacket said ‘Uncle Tosh by Petronella’ but I’d sneaked in an Acknowledgement in which she thanked darling Margaret Millett for helping her with the speling. This was the first time we’d publicly admitted that I was the author of Petronella, though there’d never been any real mystery about it after the first few weeks. By the end of the Season I was getting invitations from women I’d never hear
d of saying it would be absolutely divine if Petronella would come and be foul about their party. I remember moaning to Mrs Clarke about how difficult it was to keep her innocent, and Mrs Clarke smiling in her seen-it-all way. But the press hand-outs for Uncle Tosh didn’t just use my name; they made a song and dance about the title, and the Cheadle inheritance and all that. I didn’t mind, because it was terrific publicity, though Mummy was going to loathe it when she saw the papers next morning. Anyway, these extraordinary men turned up at the party expecting me to be like Petronella. I suppose people who rely on facts really rather distrust the idea of anybody making things up out of their imagination. They feel threatened. So I threatened them a bit more by explaining that Petronella was best understood from a post-existentialist standpoint, and telling them about the underlying parallels with Camus. (I could keep that up because B had told me to read Camus.) Then I introduced them to one of the Susans, so they got their story after all.

  I was talking to a Manchester Guardian journalist who had rather called my bluff by knowing about Camus and wanting to explore the parallels when Tom came up and said, ‘Mabs?’ You get used to the question mark when you have a twin sister. That was the first I knew that the family had arrived.

  ‘Jane, actually,’ I said.

  He peered at me and shook his head.

  ‘I am forced to reject the imposture on external evidence,’ he said. ‘There’s a girl in Dorothy’s room in a gold dress like yours calling herself Margaret Millett and expounding the nuances of the dialect of your tribe. Journalists are taking notes of what she tells them. I have heard her declare that the word ‘potato’ has no plural. One speaks of a brace of potato. The scribblers are taking it for gospel. That’s not in your book, that I remember.’

  (Tom had been an angel and copy-read Uncle Tosh for me. He’d made masses of useful little suggestions, but the thing that had really fascinated him, like a scab he couldn’t stop picking, was Uncle Tosh’s list of words. I’d only put this in to fill up the end of a chapter, dividing the words into ‘Us’ and ‘Ponsy’[1]—mostly quite obvious ones like saying ‘luncheon’ and not saying ‘toilet’. Things Mummy had always insisted on, though she’d made up her own rules—some of our friends, for instance, thought it was a bit ponsy to say ‘Mummy’ but she said that was nonsense.)

  I felt a gush of fury that absolutely astonished me. By Tom’s eyes I could see I’d shown it. I snapped something at the Camus-man and began to shove my way out of the room. The crush slowed me down enough for me to feel I’d got some sort of control back by the time I’d pushed along the corridor to Mrs Clarke’s room. Jane was a few feet from the door, facing it. There were two men talking to her. One of them did have a notebook. She’d been watching for me, and smiled like a pig-faced cherub.

  ‘Hello, Jane darling,’ she said. ‘I hope you’re enjoying my party.’

  I stared at her. I remembered she’d rung me to ask long or short, and I’d told her what I’d be wearing. She’d got hold of a gold frock from somewhere. I’d never seen it before and it looked a bit tight under the arms. It wasn’t the same as mine but near enough for a man not to notice. I have to explain that there was nothing unusual about this. We often played that kind of trick, on each other, on our friends. Jane had once come home to Charles Street and told me I was now engaged to a young man she knew I was utterly bored with. She’d shown me a ring to prove it. I’d got almost hysterical with panic, though I knew it couldn’t be true. (In the end it had turned out that she’d spent the evening trapping him into telling her how much he preferred me to Jane and how anyone who really cared for me could tell us apart at once, and then as he was paying the bill she’d told him who he’d been talking to.) Now I was perfectly well aware that Jane just thought she’d have fun doing something like that again—she couldn’t have understood how it mattered to me, in fact I hadn’t understood myself till that moment. Or perhaps I hadn’t realised how quickly my private self, the self that had nothing to do with family and Jane, had grown, and grown apart, since I’d left Charles Street.

  Jane saw what had happened. Her eyes stretched. Her nostrils widened into piggy pits. Sharp red blotches appeared on her cheeks. I knew that I must be wearing exactly the same hideous mask, but I couldn’t do anything about it. The men stared.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re up to?’ I snapped.

  Jane produced a grimace that was meant to be a smile.

  ‘I’m afraid Jane can be pretty stupid,’ she said to the man with the notebook.

  The man looked embarrassed, but eager and inquisitive too. His ratty little eyes flicked from face to face. I started to screech. I don’t know what I said.

  When something like that happens in the middle of a noisy crush there’s a funny effect of silence spreading away from the centre where the rumpus is, as more and more people realise that something’s up. This had just begun to happen. I was fighting to get back into sanity, but all I could see was Jane’s face, working like a spell, turning me against my will into a screeching pig. I was just about to ruin my own party. Jane’s face was framed against the back of a man with a large, pink, bald dome and yellow-grey hair trailing down over sticky-out red ears—one of Jack Todd’s mangy lions. He became aware of the pool of silence spreading over him and turned to see what the fuss was, but somebody shoved him aside and barged through. It was Mummy.

  The screech stuck. She came forward wearing the smile she uses when there are guests and everyone has just heard a pile of plates go down outside the pantry.

  ‘There you are, darling,’ she said. ‘What an interesting lot of people. Please introduce me to your friends.’

  ‘You’ll have to ask Jane,’ I said.

  Jane looked in the other direction. The pig-mask was melting away.

  ‘Your daughters are fantastically alike, Lady Er,’ said the man with the notebook. ‘Can anyone tell them apart?’

  ‘So people say,’ she said. ‘I think they’re quite different. This is darling clever Mabs, and this is darling clever Janey.’

  She put her arms round us and drew us close, uniting us in love on the maternal b.

  ‘I wonder if you could tell me, Lady Er, if your family always talk about, what was it, traddling?’

  ‘Traddling?’

  ‘And a brace of potato?’

  Mummy laughed.

  ‘Oh, dear no. That was only old Major Ackers. He was a bit . . .’

  The man twitched his notebook up.

  ‘A bit what?’ he said.

  Mummy stared at him.

  ‘Aposiopesis,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, Ar, Eff,’ said Jane at the same moment.

  ‘You mustn’t tease the poor man,’ said Mummy.

  I thought journalists were supposed to have thick skins. With real satisfaction I watched the sweatbeads glisten on his cheek. The unity of Family is extraordinary. My fury with Jane was still grinding away inside me and I was tense with Mummy’s touch, but for the moment the three of us were like some tribe who have caught an intruder on their sacred ground and are now dancing round him while he roasts alive. This was my ground, my party, my triumphant celebration of freedom from the thraldom of Cheadle; but suddenly here we were, the three of us, as if we’d been putting on our hats for church outside the Morning Room and agreeing without saying so that we were going to have to keep at arm’s length that pushy new family who’d just moved into the Old Rectory.

  The man put his notebook away. He was going to vote Labour for life, I could see, and what’s more he was going to write the cattiest story about me that he could get past his Features Editor. (I was wrong. It turned out an absolutely grovelling piece, as if he’d really loved what we’d done to him.)

  Mummy let go of Jane but not me and by swinging a few inches round managed to split us off completely from the others.

  ‘I hope you’ll introduce me to your friend, darling,’ she said.

  ‘Tom? He’s in the other room.’

  ‘The one who settles
your account at Harrods.’

  She smiled at me, the-witch-who-will-find-you-in-the-end. Ever since I could remember she’d been able to do this. The trick had two parts. The first was finding your secret, and the second was choosing the moment to tell you. There was a tone and look for it, a sad little voice, a sad little smile, eyes bright as glass beads. No anger, only contemptuous pity that you should think you could hide from her, ever, anywhere. Of course she never told you how she found out.[2] The punishment was usually fair and came with a great swoop of relief.

  I was nine again, reading Mumfie under the bed in King William’s Room when I was supposed to be helping Samson weed the Bowling Green path. Sick-mess in my throat and all my skin a layer of chilly rubber. I discovered that beneath my recent happiness and exultation—part of it, adding to its excitement—had been the certainty that this was going to happen. Of course I’d sometimes wondered what I’d do or say if she found out, but that’s not what I mean. The rhythms of my life decreed that she had got to find out. In dreams of escape you glance back along your secret path and see that at the entrance you have left your pullover, caught on a blackthorn, a huge and obvious clue for the lion-faced people to find. You left it there on purpose, though you didn’t know, because that is the logic of the dream.