Death of a Unicorn

by Peter Dickinson

  I refused to meet her look. She still had her arm half round me, resting on my shoulder. Straight in front of me was Mrs Clarke, talking to a tall thin stooping man I didn’t recognise. Ronnie came up to them with a fresh-mixed jug of Petronella.

  ‘I do think I’d better talk to him, don’t you?’ said Mummy.

  I put my hand up and lifted hers off my shoulder. She didn’t resist, but let it fall.

  ‘He isn’t here yet, as far as I know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know if he’s coming.’

  ‘But when he does?’

  ‘If he does.’

  ‘Don’t forget, Mabs.’

  No punishment. None at all.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Come and meet this new cousin I’ve found.’

  I introduced her to Ronnie and Mrs Clarke, and the three of them hived off leaving me with the tall stooping man. He turned out to be the head of the firm which was nominally publishing Uncle Tosh, though we’d done all the real editing and so on in the office. I’d only met a couple of his underlings—Uncle Tosh must have seemed very small beer to a man used to publishing two-volume biographies of Rilke. He was an edger-up, but in a different dimension from Bruce Fischer. He used his height to crane over you and then came smiling down, like a rook eyeing turf for leather-jackets. Luckily my frock had a high collar. He told me that now the subscriptions were in he’d decided on a reprint. When something good happens in publishing, it is always the doing of whoever tells you about it; something bad is always the fault of the system, incurable. I tried to look starry-eyed with gratification. Mercifully one of the mangy lions came maundering up, with suggestions for an autobiography. Any other time I would have hung around to see how the publisher fought him off, but I edged away.

  Jane wasn’t even polite to the man she’d been pretending to talk to. She swung round and grabbed my wrist.

  ‘What was that fratch for?’ she said. ‘I was having fun.’

  ‘Sorry. You couldn’t have known. I tried not to.’

  ‘They didn’t know anything. I could have got away with . . .’

  ‘Careful, darling. It’s coming back.’

  ‘Oh, all right. You might have warned me when I rang up about the frock.’

  ‘Didn’t think of it. There’s such a lot of my own life . . .’

  ‘Who’s Mummy talking to?’

  The man with the jug is Ronnie Smith. He’s a sort of fourth cousin. A Communist. Works here. I like him.’

  ‘Mummy doesn’t. She’s in a filthy mood about something, Mabs.’

  ‘She’s found out about me and B.’

  ‘She hasn’t! How?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Nothing. I suppose she might try and have me declared insane, or something, or break the Trust in your favour, but I don’t think she’d get away with it.’

  ‘Anyway it’s you she wants, Mabs. You’ve always been the one. Is he here?’

  ‘Haven’t seen him. He may not come. He wasn’t sure. She says she wants to talk to him.’

  ‘What on earth about? Oh, if it were anyone else, Mabs, wouldn’t it be bliss to eavesdrop?’

  ‘She’ll tell him to give me back and he’ll say no. I don’t think she’s met anyone like him before. Listen, darling, suppose she reacts by making life hell for you . . .’

  ‘Why should she?’

  ‘She’ll have to take it out on someone. Anyway, you could come and live at my flat if you wanted. I’d have to ask B, of course.’

  ‘I don’t think . . .’

  Close by my shoulder I was aware of one of those minor jostlings you get when somebody tries to head for another part of a crowded room. It was my publisher, escaping the autobiographical lion. Jane and I had been standing at an angle so that we could mutter into each other’s ears, isolated by clamour. This stirring forced us to turn and I found myself face to face with Mrs Clarke, apparently waiting to come through between us. I’d last seen her in quite the other direction, talking to Mummy and Ronnie. She had a photograph in her hand.

  ‘Oh, Lady Margaret,’ she said. ‘Do you think your dear mother would be kind enough to sign a picture for my collection? I’ve been looking through the file for a good one.’

  She spoke perfectly naturally, as if she hadn’t overheard a thing. She’d had a lot of practice, of course, but I didn’t think she could have. Mummy was sure to say something unspeakable to her about the photograph. I tried to head her off.

  ‘She’s in rather a dicey mood just now,’ I said. ‘Have you met my sister Jane?’

  ‘I knew it must be,’ said Mrs Clarke. ‘You’re an art student, I believe, Lady Jane. Such a worthwhile accomplishment in a woman, being able to paint and draw beautiful things.’

  Jane’s ‘art’ at that stage consisted of welding iron bars and plates to each other until she’d got something like a section of gaunt skeleton with bits of machinery muddled in, and then dipping the result into acid baths to make it go into interesting pits and nodules. She could be very intense about it, and sniffy about pictures and sculptures ordinary people liked, but I’d told her I approved of Mrs Clarke so she was a saint and swallowed her aesthetic pride and talked about our great-grandmother’s watercolours of Italy which hung—hundreds of them—around Cheadle in back passages and bedrooms and were supposed to be rather good for an amateur. In spite of what I’d said to Jane I was really very shaken and worried and longing for B to come. I eased myself away and went off to look for him.

  The other room was just as crowded and even noisier. We had hooked the swing doors open, but it was as though they were still exerting their influence, separating the civilised from the rowdy. Most of the Susans were here, quacking away, and the men seemed to look younger too. I weasled my way round, but it wasn’t easy. For a start B was too short for me to see him over people’s heads, and then I was constantly being stopped and asked to settle arguments. It was amazing how that word-list had got everyone going. We’d put a stack of the book out on the landing, just to prove that it was real, but they’d all been snitched. People were holding them open and consulting them so that it looked like a roomful of foreigners trying to carry on conversations with the help of phrase-books. Then people tended to assume that the Susans knew all the answers, as if they’d been born with silver dictionaries in their mouths, when in fact some of them came from decidedly ponsy backgrounds—though girls have a fantastic knack for picking up tones of voice and getting them right. The extraordinary thing was that though I was really aching to find B, and though I also thought my word-list was just a bit of nonsense I’d shoved in to make up space, as soon as anyone asked me about a particular word I couldn’t help talking as though it really mattered. I got into a long argument with Priscilla Stirling, who certainly wasn’t one of the ponsy ones, about ‘mirror’. Perhaps because the Petronella drink was stronger than people realised no one seemed at all bashful about discussing the subject, though they did so with a kind of inquisitive glee, like schoolgirls talking about sex. It must have taken me twenty minutes to find out that B wasn’t there after all.

  I met Tom out on the landing. He raised one eyebrow at me, making his face look suddenly very Irish. Ronnie used to say that Tom was really a wild Celt who spent his time trying to pass himself off as an English gentleman-scholar. When he reverted like this it was a sign that he was moderately drunk, though a stranger mightn’t have known.

  ‘Mabs,’ I said. ‘Jane’s has got short sleeves and no collar.’

  ‘Easy as that?’

  ‘Unless we sneak off to the loo and swap.’

  ‘I shall write a thesis proving that Shakespeare was terrorised by the twins next door when he was a baby. It would explain quite as much as the usual theories about his mother. And then there was Casanova . . .’

  ‘Supposing it was true.’

  ‘Mabs, you ought not to know about that.’

  ‘It tends to come up. I didn’t think you, though . . .’

  �
��Cheap liquor cheapens the accompanying conversation. Haven’t you noticed? We are all going to have appalling hangovers.’

  He finished his glass and smacked it down on the table where the books had been. He was drunker than I’d realised, and upset about something too.

  ‘What’s the matter, Tom?’

  ‘Noticed Jack’s not here?’

  I hadn’t, though I should have. At a gathering like this the laugh would have been almost continuous, and audible too through the racket.

  ‘He’s leaving,’ said Tom.

  ‘Leaving?’

  ‘Told us not to tell you. Said he didn’t want to spoil your party.’

  ‘You mean resigning?’

  ‘Sacked.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Better for him, apparently. Allows him to claim compensation on his contract.’

  ‘But when . . .’

  ‘Been brewing. Letter on his desk this morning making it definite.’

  ‘From Mr B?’

  ‘Who else?’

  Then he must have written it yesterday. We’d eaten alone last night, at the Escargot in Greek Street. It sounds dull, but it had been a lively, easy evening with a lot of talk. We’d gone back to the flat, slept together, kissed when we woke. Surely he could have . . . Perhaps he didn’t want to spoil my party either . . . Then couldn’t he have waited one more day?

  ‘Who’s going to . . . I mean are you . . . ?’ I said.

  ‘Not been told. I’d like the job. When this sort of thing has happened in the other departments Brierley seems to have had a man ready.’

  ‘Oh. But you’ll stay, won’t you?’

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘Of course. If he’ll have me, I suppose. I absolutely adore being here.’

  ‘It may not be the same.’

  ‘Please stay, Tom. It certainly won’t if you go.’

  He laughed, but then his eyes left me. Some of the guests had started to go but others were still arriving, so the terrible old lift was groaning up and down almost continuously. I’d been standing with my back towards it but turned to see what Tom was looking at. B was coming out of the lift, talking to a youngish man whom I recognised but couldn’t put a name to for an instant. Then it came to me. On the stage, about a fortnight before, acting in a revue called Backbites, which I hadn’t thought specially funny but was being talked about because it was different—not just gently bitchy in a revueish way, but rude about real people as though it meant it. The Lord Chamberlain had refused to pass some of the sketches. This man, Brian something, was supposed to have written the unkindest bits as well as being one of the principal actors. B brought him towards us.

  ‘Brian Naylor, Tom Duggan, Margaret Millett,’ he said. ‘They’re on the literary side.’

  Mr Naylor was a round-faced, stupid-looking man with short gingery hair and small gold-rimmed spectacles. On stage he used a monotonous flat voice with drawling vowels—Midland, somebody had told me. His main joke was to apply this oafish-seeming approach to touchy subjects. For instance he’d done a monologue about how he didn’t mind his Jewish dentist poking around among his molars but he was disgusted by the idea of letting him hack divots out of his favourite golf-course. Part of his technique was not to smile at all. It all seemed such an act that I was surprised to hear him speak now in exactly the same voice.

  ‘This is a typical press day, I suppose,’ he said.

  Tom was looking greyish but answered in a normal voice.

  ‘It’s a party to celebrate the publication of Mabs’s book.’

  ‘So you’ve written a book, Margaret?’

  ‘Only a little one,’ I said. Wrong answer. Wrong tone. I felt totally bewildered.

  ‘A vade-mecum to the upper reaches of the class system,’ said Tom. ‘No social climber should be without it.’

  ‘Is there anything to drink?’ said Mr Naylor. ‘Scotch, for preference.’

  ‘Find Mr Naylor some scotch, Duggan, and introduce him to the rest of the staff,’ said B.

  He turned to me.

  ‘Congratulations,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you. It’s going very well.’

  He was actually about to move off when I stopped him. He was furious. Nobody else would have known, but I did. He thought I was going to say something about Brian Naylor.

  ‘Mummy’s here,’ I muttered. ‘She wants to meet you.’ His eyes opened very slightly.

  ‘I don’t know how,’ I said. ‘Something to do with my account at Harrods.’

  He nodded. He still wasn’t pleased, but it was better than if I’d tried to use our affair to interfere with office matters.

  ‘Look after me,’ I whispered. ‘Please.’

  ‘Out here, then.’

  She was near the door in Mrs Clarke’s room and had obviously been watching for me. As soon as I appeared she came forward. She had a horrid look of triumph.

  ‘Some woman has just asked me to sign a photograph, darling,’ she said.

  ‘Oh dear. I hope you were nice to her.’

  ‘I made it clear that I would do no such thing.’

  ‘A lot of your friends have. She’s got a whole collection.’

  ‘I am not a stamp. Are there any more of your interesting friends you’d like me to meet, darling?’

  ‘One more,’ I said.

  I led her back between the swing doors.

  ‘Is that him?’ she whispered. ‘Oh, darling, how could you?’

  ‘Very easily, if you want to know.’

  I introduced them formally and let them get on with it.

  [1] About three years later, when that U and Non-U business got going in Encounter, people remembered my book and asked me where the word ‘ponsy’ came from. I used to tell them that it was really ‘poncy’ but Petronella had spelt it wrong, and if they then said it didn’t mean that I explained that my great-great-uncle applied the word to anything he disapproved of, being a man of limited vocabulary, and that we’d picked it up and used it without knowing what a ponce was. The bit about my great-great-uncle was true, but in fact we’d adapted the word to fit poor Miss Pons, who had come to us as a governess and fully lived up to her superb references, except for insisting that we used a vocabulary my mother had absolutely forbidden. Many people assume that ‘real’ aristocrats are not snobs. This is rubbish in my experience. The truth is that they guard their exclusiveness ruthlessly, but in obscure ways. Though Miss Pons was much the nicest governess we were ever likely to get, all four of us agreed that my mother had done right to dismiss her. I couldn’t explain about Miss Pons in 1956 (was it?) because she was probably still alive.

  [2] I worked it out years later. It had been my fault for being too pig-headed about the nature of my relationship with B to give a false name for my accounts. My mother had one at Harrods but used it so seldom that I’d forgotten. Hers was in the name of Countess Millett, but she always referred to herself as Lady Millett and had done so when she’d ordered an emergency wedding present for someone; so the item had got on to my account, which B had settled without question. When my mother had telephoned to ask why she hadn’t had the bill the confusion had persisted long enough for somebody to try and clear things up by telling her who had signed the cheque.

  I have just been down to wake her up and give her her pill. It was one of the mornings when she doesn’t know me, except that she took it. If anyone else had tried to give it her, other than Fiona, she would have spat it out. Even so only about half the water I give her to wash it down with goes in. It struck me while I was mopping up that in all our lives together there had been two special rituals which had bound us to each other—when I was young, the witch-ritual; now the pill-ritual. Coming back to finish my stint I re-read the paragraph to which this footnote is attached and felt it to be almost extraordinary, a measure of my then freedom, that I had been able to write it in the past tense.

  VI

  Tom had been right about the hangovers. It was worse because the next day, Friday, was press day an
d there were proofs to read. We hung around and waited for them to arrive from the printers. Brian Naylor seemed to have made a bad impression on everyone, even Bruce Fischer, whom I’d stupidly assumed to be rather the same kind of person because they came from the same sort of provincial lower-middle-class background. Then Ronnie found a review of Uncle Tosh in the Spectator and I took it away to my desk outside Mrs Clarke’s room to read and re-read. It was only six lines at the end of a much longer review of Stephen Potter’s One-Upmanship but I didn’t mind. The man said it had made him laugh. I thought it was such a silly little book (no I didn’t, but I assumed everyone else would) that it was terrific to have it reviewed at all.

  When Mrs Clarke came through I jumped up and started to try and apologise for Mummy being foul to her about the photograph. She looked puzzled.

  ‘I am quite used to people being a little eccentric, my dear,’ she said. ‘It’s their privilege, I always say. I thought it was a very lively party. Isn’t it surprising what a mixture will go, sometimes? Did you meet this Mr Naylor?’

  ‘A bit of a skeleton at the feast, I thought.’

  ‘Oh, I do so agree.’

  ‘None of us are what you might call enthusiastic.’

  ‘Such a pity. I wonder if it mightn’t be possible for someone to explain to Mr Brierley what a mistake he’s making.’

  ‘Oh. It would be difficult. Once he’s made up his mind. I imagine.’

  She didn’t seem to notice my stammerings.

  ‘Such a pity,’ she said. ‘Quite the wrong person.’

  ‘Perhaps he’ll learn.’

  ‘Let us hope so. But oh, my dear, I’m so pleased for you that your book has turned out so popular.’

  ‘Isn’t it lovely? Absolutely super, in fact. Would you like a signed copy?’

  ‘That would be very touching, if you can spare one.’