Death of a Unicorn

by Peter Dickinson

  He studied me, candid and serious. He wasn’t being inquisitive, let alone prurient, but typically just wanting to check his ideas out. I have got used to Terry and now thoroughly approve of him. If only he were a woman he could have married Simon and I could have worked on the assumption that he would take over running Cheadle when the time came. The fact that Simon is at best only faintly interested in the house would not have mattered. Not that Terry is in love with Cheadle, any more than I was thirty years ago, but he (she) would have recognised the need.

  Mark, of course, cannot stand him. He says that living with Terry is like living with a mental nudist—company acceptable in a nudist camp but not where everyone else walks around with their minds fully clothed. Though he speaks with a mid-Atlantic accent he is English, one of a large family whose parents run a bakery in Doncaster. He is eight years older than Simon, his curly dark hair thinning fast, and though he and Simon jog ritually round the park every morning his weight is getting out of hand. They act the parts of footmen when the house is open, but I shall soon have to promote Terry to butler, rather than go to the expense of new livery. They spend their spare time perfecting programmes for computer games, always ending up with something far too sophisticated for commercial exploitation. Another reason why I approve of Terry is that Simon seems not to be an alien to him, nor he to me, so I still have indirect contact.

  ‘If it were true I wouldn’t tell you,’ I said. ‘Let’s change the subject. You might like to know that the financial outlook is suddenly a good deal rosier than it’s been for ages. I can actually see a future.’

  I explained about the tax repayments, speaking to Terry because Simon always shuts off when anything serious to do with Cheadle comes up. It took me by surprise when I discovered that this time he had actually been listening.

  ‘Well done, Mums,’ he said. ‘You mean you could give up your smouldering heroines if you wanted, and the old place would still chug on?’

  ‘For a few years, yes, I think so.’

  ‘In that case it sounds like a good time to break it to you that I’ve decided to abdicate in favour of one of the Duncans.’

  He was looking at me half-sideways. There is somebody there behind that pretty-pig mask. For an instant I experienced one of our rare occasions of almost-touching as he watched to see how I would take the suggestion—not, alas, with apprehension or eagerness, just curiosity.

  ‘Is he serious?’ I asked.

  ‘I reckon,’ said Terry.

  He too was watching me. Clearly this was something they had discussed, more than once perhaps. My sister Jane is married to Angus Duncan, a Canadian insurance executive, and has three children, the eldest two years younger than Simon. Jane has always tended to find excuses not to visit us so I haven’t seen a great deal of them, but Simon knew them better, having stayed six months in Canada when he left school. The possibility of transferring Cheadle to my nephew or one of my nieces had occurred to me often since Sally left, but it had always been something I had refused to think about, I suppose because it would mean accepting decisively that she would never come home. I yearn for my daughter with a passion that disgusts me when I allow it to happen. Last October I drove back from the annual jamboree of the Romantic Novelists’ Association in Cheltenham, and because of something one of my colleagues had told me I made a detour to see the monuments in Crome d’Abitot church, but took a wrong turning and found myself winding down the drive to the house itself. There had been a board up at the gate—Something-ishi Foundation—but I was through before it registered. It was a heavy, hazy morning. The house, as large as Cheadle but much plainer, lay looking out over flat and almost treeless parkland below the ridge I had descended. On the grass a number of cattle were tethered. Near the spot where I began to turn my car a thin young man in a long coat and a sort of skull-cap was inspecting from a distance of a few feet a large fly-infested sore below the eye-socket of one of these animals. He carried a briefcase and looked Western enough in a mildly eccentric way until I realised that beneath the skull-cap his head was close-shaven and that the coat was in fact a robe. His thinness and stoop suggested undernourishment, and he seemed to study the sore with a resignation indistinguishable from despair. Very likely I am doing him and his organisation a complete injustice and his bag was stuffed with fly-repellants and antibiotics which he was about to administer, but in the few seconds it took to get the car round I was gripped with a fit of the horrors. His hopelessness, and the hopeless patience of the animal, spread and filled the valley, drowning the splendid house like one of those villages lost under new-built reservoirs. I think anyone might have felt it, but to me with my preoccupation with Cheadle and my longing for my daughter apparently dead to me in her Sri Lankan ashram the scene was a particular hell.

  Sally was born before Simon. I had always intended that she should inherit, though my mother and Mark tried to insist on Simon’s right as first-born male. Sally, almost as soon as she was aware of the possibility, rejected it, continued to do so more and more firmly as she grew up, and on her eighteenth birthday gave me a document prepared by solicitors formally renouncing any claim. She writes long and friendly letters from her sanctuary, never with any hint of return. Suppose, I asked myself as I drove home from Crome d’Abitot, I offered her Cheadle; and suppose the money were available from rich converts to maintain it in however threadbare a fashion as an -ishi establishment; would I pay that price to have her back? It would be a life of a sort for the house, wouldn’t it, arguably more genuine than that provided by the sightseers who now flood through it, so transient as to seem less material than its own old ghosts?

  I sighed and looked at Simon.

  ‘Have you thought what you would live on?’ I asked. ‘Every penny goes with the house. It has to.’

  ‘We’d get by, Mums. That doesn’t matter. Why don’t you write to Aunt Jane? Don’t let her push Gavin at you—he’s an oaf. Fiona’s the one to go for.’

  ‘She can’t be more than sixteen.’

  ‘Eighteen more like. In fact, don’t write to Aunt Jane. Write to Fiona direct. Invite her over. Offer her a job for the summer.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  I was in the kitchen making my hot Bovril before going to bed, when I realised Terry was in the doorway, watching me.

  ‘Must be feeling kind of down about Sir Mark, Marge,’ he said.

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘Would you like me to come along to your room tonight?’

  I am still able to blush. On the other hand I didn’t spill my Bovril. Nothing is surprising, coming from Terry.

  ‘No, thank you. It’s very kind of you . . .’

  ‘Come off it. I wouldn’t be suggesting it if I didn’t fancy you.’

  I wondered whether he had cleared the idea with Simon. Quite likely. He would have told me if I’d asked, too.

  ‘I belong to a different time, Terry.’

  ‘You belong now, Marge. You have to. There’s no place else to belong.’

  I shook my head.

  III

  Fiona was one of us. It was obvious the moment she came into the office. Jane had sent the occasional Christmas photograph but I hadn’t seen my niece in the flesh for six years, and though family traits had then been apparent, these had been half-formed and tending to come and go, as they do with children, almost from day to day. I didn’t remember the sense of kinship striking me with such force. Perhaps because she had grown away from the mould in some respects the remaining points of likeness stood out. Jane and I at Fiona’s age had been tallish, big-boned, a bit gangling but not lumpy—promising in fact to become reasonably good lookers quite soon. The same could not be said of Fiona. She was not merely a chunky young woman. She was a chunk. Three or four inches shorter than I am but broad across the shoulders with a naturally high colour and tight-curling dark red hair. ‘Young woman’ is right. Any stages such as Jane and I had had still to go through before hardening into our final cast Fiona had already behind her.


  But she was one of us all the same. It wasn’t merely the forward-facing nostrils, broad-set eyes and wide mouth. Recognition leaped between us, in a way it never does between me and Simon, though he has those features too. Of course in her case she would already have been used to my looks in Jane. The same thought must have struck her.

  ‘I can’t help wanting to say “Hi, Mom”,’ she said. ‘Only she does her hair different, uh.’

  She had a little light voice, the modem girl’s twitter, equivalent to the modem young man’s mumble. The Canadian accent was quite marked.

  ‘I do hope you’ll feel at home here,’ I said.

  She laughed.

  ‘Be like feeling at home in the Grand Canyon,’ she said. ‘I’d reckoned it might look smaller now I’ve grown up, but it’s still big, big.’

  ‘We came in by the portico,’ said Simon. ‘I thought Fiona ought to make a grand entrance.’

  It being Monday that was possible, but I thought unwise. One didn’t want to frighten the child.

  ‘We live upstairs really,’ I said. ‘In ordinary little rooms. That’s home. The rest of it . . . well, sometimes it seems more like a factory. This is the office. Places like the Banqueting Hall and the Long Gallery are what you might call plant. Sightseers are the raw material. We suck them in through the portico and extrude them through the brew-house.’

  ‘Mums has a passionately romantic attitude towards Cheadle,’ said Simon. ‘You mustn’t let her con you with the way she talks about it.’

  ‘Mom warned me,’ said Fiona.

  ‘How is she?’ I said.

  ‘Fine. She got her pilot’s licence. She’s into a new form of art with a bunch of crazy kids who do abstract sky-writing.’

  ‘I’ll write and tell her you arrived intact,’ I said.

  ‘Right. I better warn you she and me had a fight about me coming here in the first place. Mom reckons you might be trying to take me over, uh?’

  I was looking directly at her and saw, at the memory of the argument, a slight flaring of the nostrils, a patchiness in the pink of the cheeks. At the same time I experienced, not all that far down inside me, a quite irrational spurt of rage with my sister that she should attempt to thwart me. I looked quickly away.

  ‘I’ll mind my step,’ I said.

  It turned out to be less of a case of my taking over Fiona than of Fiona taking over Cheadle, and me with it. I cannot remember anyone in my generation, male or female, who had even the beginnings of her kind of assurance. Some, myself included, had been self-confident by our own standards, but these were not the same. Fiona’s style seemed devoid of either brashness or naivety, without any pose of cynicism. Some of her views and arguments might be naive, but the mode in which she thought and felt was wholly mature, as far as I could see. Theoretically she was with us three and a half months, and my idea had been that she should spend ten weeks doing a series of jobs at Cheadle, ostensibly for the sake of variety but really so that she should learn as much as possible about the place and its workings. She would then have accumulated enough money to pay for a month in Europe. Some time in the following year, supposing I had made up my mind that she was the right person, I would find a way of suggesting that she should come to Cheadle on a permanent basis, and eventually inherit.

  Fiona’s timetable was far less leisurely. I dare say that whatever project she had joined for the vacation (she had in fact given up going with friends to continue the excavation of an old French fort in northern Quebec) she would have thrown herself into with the same energy, inquisitive, coherent, unabashed, assertive. She had no hesitation in telling me what she wanted to do with her time, and this did not include either touring round Europe or dressing up in housemaid’s uniform in order to stagger past each group of tourists on the back stairs with loaded coal-scuttles for two of the bedrooms. (The coal is of course blackened polystyrene and weighs nothing.)

  ‘I’m not that keen on pretending,’ she said.

  ‘You want real coal?’ said Terry, who had been gazing at her with his usual open interest almost throughout that first supper. Fiona took the question seriously—it is hard to tell with Terry.

  ‘It would still be kind of sham. I guess if I was taking it up for a real fire which was going to get lit for someone to dress in front of, that would be OK.’

  ‘But the whole place is sham, in that sense,’ I said. ‘Apart from the few rooms we live in it doesn’t exist for any purpose except to be looked at. In one sense it never did. Nobody built the portico, for instance, to keep the rain off a visitor ringing the front doorbell. Sometimes I think of myself as the stage manager of a very, very slow play. Each act takes about a century. Cheadle itself is the star. We are now well into the last act, the old age of the hero. There’s nothing I can do to alter the plot, but I am doing my best to see that the performance isn’t a shambles.’

  ‘See what I mean about Mums and the high romantic line?’ said Simon. ‘You’ve read some of her books, I take it.’

  ‘Cheadle’s much more important than my books,’ I said. ‘But it’s an example of an art-form, just as they are. It’s not any more real, in the sense Fiona was talking about.’

  ‘I guess I read quite a few,’ said Fiona.

  ‘You don’t have to like them,’ I said quickly. I always say that. It has the advantage of being true. If I were a better writer—or at least someone who thought of herself as a “great” writer, I expect I should find it hard to sympathise with readers who didn’t respond to my work. As it is, to assume that every intelligent person must enjoy what I write seems to me as vulgar an attitude as to assume that guests have something wrong with them if they don’t enjoy zabaglione.

  ‘I liked some of them all right,’ said Fiona. ‘Times when I want to give up and forget, they’re great for that. Other times, though, I guess I get impatient. All those girls. Why’s it always got to be some man who sorts our their problems for them?’

  ‘Hear, hear,’ said Simon.

  ‘Why indeed?’ I said. ‘I suppose the only answer is that it’s a convention of the art-form. I’ve tried to get away from it occasionally. There was a girl I made chuck over both men and go and be a nurse in Ethiopia.’

  ‘I remember cheering,’ said Simon.

  ‘At least I didn’t have her pegged out and eaten by ants,’ I said. ‘But my publishers were full of doom and gloom. I didn’t mind, but the next book sold much worse, and that did matter.’

  ‘Mums always talks about sales figures when she’s near the romantic bone,’ said Simon. ‘Or roof repairs. It means she feels she’s let you get too close to her secret garden.’

  ‘Where would we be without sales figures?’ I said. ‘Secret gardens don’t pay plumbers.’

  ‘But they do,’ said Simon. ‘Your books don’t sell because you’ve put exactly the right number of dots on the heroine’s veil for 1911. They sell because somehow or other underneath all that there’s this utterly romantic place which you’re the only person’s got the key to.’

  ‘Oh, really!’ I said. ‘We’re not here to try and analyse my sources of inspiration. My sources of inspiration are the account books for Cheadle.’

  ‘See what I mean, Fiona?’ said Simon.

  ‘I guess account books can be pretty romantic,’ said Fiona. ‘They must go back years and years, uh?’

  ‘Lord, yes,’ said Simon. ‘If you want to know what a hundredweight of horse-shoe cleats cost in 1796, it’s all there.’

  ‘Can’t I help with the accounts, Aunt Mabs?’ said Fiona. ‘I get pretty good grades in math and I’m aiming to major in economics.’

  ‘I suppose you might,’ I said. ‘I hadn’t thought . . . You see, the accounts are done by an outside firm called Burroughs and I’ve been having endless discussions with one of their men about getting it all on to Maxine’s new computer. That’s what I bought it for, after all. The trouble is it involves somebody sitting down and actually doing it. If I let Burroughs it will cost the earth and then
they’ll get it all wrong. There’s no one here I can trust and spare. It’s worse than that because my own mind goes blank. I’m frightened of ending up with a system I don’t understand, which’ll mean I’m in somebody else’s hands. I’m not having that. Simon and Terry could do it, but they won’t . . .’

  ‘Dead boring,’ said Simon. ‘Nothing to it. Endless, endless entries. Stock control. Oh, God!’

  ‘We could write you a basic programme, Marge,’ said Terry. ‘But after that . . .’

  ‘The man from Burroughs keeps talking about basic programmes. They have this one they sell to farms which he thinks will work with a bit of adapting. I simply can’t believe it’s not going to turn out more trouble than it’s worth.’

  ‘Listen, Aunt Mabs,’ said Fiona. ‘Why don’t Simon and Terry and me put our heads together? They write the programme, I do the entries. That kind of thing really turns me on, getting it all cleaned up and running. We did a lot of work with computers, tenth grade.’

  Even Simon seemed interested, probably not in the task itself—he takes a very blase attitude to the workaday uses of computers—but in making me see that Fiona was going to be an asset to Cheadle. I did not believe I had shown any hint of the bond I felt between myself and the child, had felt from the moment Simon had brought her into the office that morning. I knew it was vital to keep all that side hidden, to pretend even to myself that Fiona was only in England for a vacation job, in exchange for Jane’s hospitality to Simon a couple of years earlier, but I couldn’t keep my eyes off her as the three of them started on micro-chat. Simon, sulkily, had helped me to choose Maxine’s machine but had made it obvious that he wasn’t going to let it become a means of sucking him into the digestive processes of the Cheadle-ogre. I wondered if he knew what he had paid for his escape. I’m not talking about his homosexuality, though I’m aware of what they say about too-dominant mothers. No, it was what I felt to be a kind of spiritual numbness, not merely to me, but to the world in general. You can imagine a small boy, growing up in the innards of the ogre and in his childishness treating it as no more than the place where he happened to live, but then, around the age of seven, beginning to realise from things that his father had said, and his grandmother, what his relationship with it was supposed to be and deciding with that mysterious inward astuteness children possess that somehow he was going to withdraw from a bargain he had never made. He would begin, wouldn’t he, by building a fence between himself and the priestess of the ogre, me. He would make the facets of himself that turned towards me numb, numb to my demands or offers, to my anger, to my love.