Death of a Unicorn

by Peter Dickinson

  One week when no letter came—Fiona had had flu, it turned out—I thought of faking one but didn’t, mainly because it wasn’t worth the trouble, but also because I felt it would be a betrayal of Fiona to do so. Besides, I had an instinct that however accurately I did it my mother would somehow know. For the first time in my life I was feeling something that might be called fondness for my mother, beginning from our shared affection for my niece but existing, however vaguely, in its own right. Though she always complained and often wept at Fiona’s continued absence, I found these manifestations more tolerable than I would have six months earlier, because I could sympathise with them. Moreover, my mother maintained the improvement in her grasp of the world which Fiona had produced while she was with us, and I felt it my duty to both of them to try and see that this was at least not let slip. It was still impossible to hold anything like a coherent conversation (would I have welcomed that, I wonder?) but she usually called me by my own name and understood that Wheatstone was dead, and so on. She was more selective about what she watched on television, prodding her remote-control switch and rocketing from channel to channel until something promising showed up. She enjoyed American serials most, not the shoot-outs but the emotional traumas, sometimes displaying a definite understanding of the causes of that week’s row, and even remembering parts of what had happened the previous week. I forced myself to watch with her so that we should have something to talk about—duty or no duty I could not bring myself to chat, as Fiona did, about my own doings.

  One evening I was reading proofs while we waited for Dallas to come on. I had turned the sound down so as to be able to concentrate while my mother fidgeted with her control switch. Suddenly she said in a strong, clear voice, ‘Absolutely no dress sense. When I took my girls to dances . . .’

  I glanced up and saw it was an advertisement for toffee, which the manufacturers were trying to invest with snob appeal. I’d seen it before. Dancers at an Ivor Novello-ish ball twirled past the camera. In a few seconds the lens would zoom in on an ambassadorial figure, all ribbons and orders, who would push aside a vast offering of caviare and then surreptitiously take a packet of the advertiser’s toffee from his coat-tail pocket. As it is important to respond to my mother’s remarks but there is no need to maintain coherence I said the first thing that came into my head.

  ‘Do you know, I think Mrs Clarke may still be alive.’

  ‘Nonsense. I wore one of her own hats at her funeral.’

  We had all suffered mildly from my mother’s conviction that the daughter of a previous Cheadle head-gardener could make us more becoming hats in her little shop in Bolsover than anything we could buy in Sloane Street, and at a tenth of the price.

  ‘Not that one,’ I said. ‘I’m talking about the Mrs Clarke who used to write “The Social Round” in Night and Day. She signed herself Cynthia Darke.’

  ‘Tiresome woman.’

  Really she was alarmingly her old self this evening. Like many people of vehement opinions she had never had more than a few words to express them. Condemnation ran a gamut from ‘unreliable’ through ‘tiresome’ to ‘horrible’.

  ‘She was extremely kind to me,’ I said.

  ‘Expected me to sign a photograph,’ said my mother. ‘Of all things!’

  ‘You were almost the only countess she hadn’t got.’

  ‘Ridiculous. Useless woman. I admit she told me about that horrible man being up to no good on that island. Minnie was so interested. He got money from the Jews, you know.’

  She turned directly towards me and gave me the old witch-smile. It was like a story-book illustration which used to give one nightmares as a child, why one can no longer perceive.

  ‘Do you mean Amos Brierley?’ I said.

  Instantly she hid in the thickets of amnesia, letting her mouth sag open and her eyes blear, bringing senility deliberately on, though I could still sense a sharpness somewhere inside, watching me. Her fingers fumbled with the TV control and there were the towers of Dallas, cross-cut with the performers. I rose and turned the sound up, then went back to my chair. I found I was quivering, a faint, repulsive inward tremor. It happened that a few days before, looking for a container in which to pack some silver to send for repair, I had turned out a battered little cheap suitcase containing a jumble of Sally’s possessions dating from when she was about nine, blurred snaps taken with her first camera, crayons, scribbled exercise books, a broken mascot and so on. The pang of nostalgia over these trivial things had been most unpleasant, a blurred physical ache filling my throat and upper chest. I imagine almost all parents know the feeling. Now, I realised, I was going to have to go back to my own life with B and experience those sensations deliberately, over weeks or months, and perhaps with more painful intensity. It was necessary to know what had actually happened about the money for the roof and the whole nexus of events surrounding it. Not for my own sake, but for Fiona’s.

  No secrets. I must hold nothing back. Whatever had happened thirty years ago might be irrelevant, but it might not.

  Shortly before Wheatstone died he told me a secret that had been held back. The cause of the trouble in the Banqueting Hall roof had not been an accident or oversight, but a deliberate skimping on the part of the builders to save the price of new lead by re-using the old. My great-great-uncle’s overseer had been too friendly with the builders’ foreman and had allowed himself to be hoodwinked. If this had been realised in time the rafters and the elaborate plasterwork would have been saved, and the repairs of 1952 would have cost less than a twentieth of what they in the end did. Wheatstone had known something was wrong. He didn’t say as much to me, but I deduce it from the manner in which he insisted on telling me the story and the importance he gave it. Owing to some unexplained feud with the overseer he had decided that it was ‘not his place’ to attempt to warn my great-great-uncle. What this means, I have come to believe, is that in 1924 it had seemed necessary to Wheatstone that his enemy’s failure in duty should work itself out and be publicly demonstrated by the processes of decay. For the wrong to be then and there detected and put right, with no other damage done, would have been unsatisfying. Later, of course, his own failure must have troubled him, though still perversely mitigated by the general condemnation of his dead enemy. Telling me was a half-hearted attempt at confession.

  I was not having any of that. No hidden rots handed on unbudgeted for. It seemed to me that B, despite not having sold the necklace, had paid my mother for the roof repairs, and then my mother had not, in his words, ‘stayed bought’. She had learnt something from Mrs Clarke (how? when?) and had passed it on to Minnie Trenchard-Yates.

  And Minnie was dead. So was Sir Drummond, of a heart-attack in a Kensington brothel. It had been hushed up but I knew about it because, indirectly, it had been important to Mark’s career: two members of the government had been in the house at the same time and had resigned soon after ‘for personal reasons’, one of those minor tremors that foreshadowed the end of the Macmillan era. Mark had got his first ministerial job in the subsequent reshuffle. It had been the period of the first ‘sick jokes’. I remember wondering whether Bruce Fischer had begun to play necrophilic variations on his single theme.

  My mother had told Aunt Minnie something because she wanted it passed on to Sir Drummond. Aunt Minnie, shrewd as anyone behind her sugary manner, would have had her own reasons. She would have been aware of Sir Drummond’s blondes and prepared to tolerate them, provided he changed them frequently. But the one I had actually met in his company had struck me as something of a sticker. Though Aunt Minnie would not have cared for that, a direct counterattack would have been far from her style. She would have been more likely to embark on a series of gentle sappings, one of which could well have been to tell Sir Drummond something she had learnt about B, something which, as a representative of the City’s financial probity, he would have to act on. It would not just be a case of Aunt Minnie using his public duty to remind him of his private duty; she would also have mano
euvred him into letting down a fellow-member of that vague club of men who kept women, breaking the sense of mutual support and thus undermining Sir Drummond’s own confidence. It would all have been no more than a minor tunnelling in Aunt Minnie’s whole campaign—a campaign in which, to judge by the circumstances of Sir Drummond’s death, she had succeeded all too well. I wondered what had become of the blonde, poor thing.

  For a moment my attention was caught by the screen, at which I had so far been gazing unseeing. Two of those mysteriously implausible beauties drawled hate-words at each other. My mother was rapt by the conflict, all on the surface, visible, explainable.

  Mrs Clarke had told her something about B’s doings on Barbados. (But when had they met again? Surely they couldn’t have got that far at the Uncle Tosh party?) I had been aware from the first that B had been engaged in some kind of financial jugglery to do with the Halper’s Corner estate and the hotel in the bay, and had guessed from his obsession with the subject that he was trying to use it to evade the currency control regulations. Mrs Clarke, keeping her ears open as she used to say, might well have picked up a rumour on one of her West Indian expeditions. Or she might have written directly to some contact and asked—her file-card on B had been crammed with her coded writing when I last saw it. It was peculiar how vividly that scene in her office suddenly came back to me, though I had barely thought of it for thirty years. It was all written down in a manuscript somewhere, and locked away. I decided I’d better have a look through it and see whether there was anything in it I’d forgotten which might help me now . . .

  And what did that mysterious sentence about B getting money from the Jews mean? It sounded more like something out of my period, or earlier—the lavish life-style, the increasing debts, the sudden dash abroad. But not that death. No. That was something else.

  Besides, he had told me that he had plenty of money, only it was in the wrong place. And he seemed to have paid for the Banqueting Hall roof. Why on earth should he do that?

  You could get into real trouble for fiddling exchange controls, I seemed to remember. There’d been that fuss about the Dockers, hadn’t there? But B had done all his spending inside the sterling area. He’d kept complaining about having to. There’d been those knick-knacks he’d brought back from Germany, but apart from that . . . and it still wouldn’t get you killed, would it? Ruined, perhaps, but not shot. Gunned down in broad daylight in Rio?

  And why hadn’t he sold the sapphires?

  One moment. Ronnie had said something—he’d had a lead . . .

  I had heard nothing from Ronnie for about eight months. After his visit to Cheadle he had sent me a formal note of thanks, adding that he would have to consult his publishers about my terms for co-operation. Suppose I were to offer to mitigate those terms . . .

  ‘That girl is too clever by half,’ snapped my mother, smacking mental lips at the prospect of the character in question coming to grief.

  ‘They all strike me as complete numskulls,’ I said.

  ‘Her eyes are too blue. I expect she dyes them.’

  ‘They probably use a special filter. I’ll be seeing some film people next week. I’ll ask.’

  The dark one was in tears, in close-up. The camera tracked away and showed that she was by the swimming pool in the usual minimal swimsuit while beyond her one of the blonde ones was strutting away with a display of buttocks which would have done credit to an ape asserting its right to its territory.

  That would all fit in rather neatly, I thought. I could go and see Ronnie the same day.

  V

  It was a tall, narrow, peeling house in a terrace well north of Hyde Park. Ronnie had been resistant, even grudging, about meeting me. He had hurt his foot in some way, he said, which prevented him from getting out to keep appointments. When I had said I would see him at home he had tried to marshal secondary excuses, but I had over-ruled them. I assumed he was ashamed of his domestic circumstances, perhaps comparing them notionally with mine.

  It looked as though I’d been right. I picked my way down to a basement area containing some reeking dustbins and a rusty old motor-bike frame. The door opened before I could ring and I was confronted by a stout middle-aged Indian in a turban.

  ‘Mr Ronald Smith?’ I said.

  ‘He has injured his foot. It is ironic that so distinguished an intellectual should be susceptible to the frailties of fleshly nature. He can see no one.’

  ‘He is expecting me.’

  ‘One should expect only the unpredictable.’

  ‘I’m it. Are you going to let me in?’

  ‘Very well. Be kind enough to tell Ronnie I made my best endeavours.’

  He led me down a narrow passage partly barricaded with old gas cookers to the back basement room. He opened the door without knocking and said, ‘A bird of paradise has alighted on our withered bough, Ronnie.’

  ‘Mabs?’ said Ronnie’s voice.

  ‘Yes,’ I called. ‘Sorry I’m late—they’ve found a new place to dig up the M1 .’

  ‘Oh, well. Thanks, Fred. Push off, will you? Come in, Mabs. You find me at a decided disadvantage.’

  He was half lying in a low wicker chair which had itself begun to subside laterally. His bandaged foot rested on a cardboard carton full of what looked like loose sheets of Keesing’s Contemporary Archives. The room was a chaos of books, magazines, newspapers and jumbled objects, not apparently souvenirs or even knick-knacks but things which had washed up there—the handset of a telephone with no instrument attached, a child’s football boot, garden shears, a road-mender’s warning cone and so on, besides odd crockery, suitcases piled into a corner, plastic bags full of clothes. A roughly made bed lay against one wall. Beneath the window was a desk with modern electric typewriter and working papers neatly stacked, but all lightly powdered with dust. A pocket of civilisation, a city state of the intellect, but empty of its citizens. The hordes of disorder beyond its walls had only to find a ladder and it would be theirs. At eye-level through the window I could see the ruins of a garden half buried in junk. The room itself had that particular smell, musty, dank, slightly sweet, that hangs around the houses of old people who are losing their ability to cope. It wasn’t too bad yet.

  An enormous black cat rose from a basket and stumped across the room to inspect me.

  ‘I’m sorry to force my way in,’ I said. ‘Your friend did his best. And I haven’t even brought you any champagne.’

  ‘Not exactly the occasion, though it has been in my mind I might as well go back on the bottle.’

  ‘But I’ve brought you one of Pellegrini’s cold pheasant pies.’

  ‘Have you? Very thoughtful.’

  ‘Is there a fridge?’

  ‘Bust, like most other things. Let’s have some now.’

  ‘Not me. I’m just about to have a gross luncheon with a Chicago film executive.’

  ‘I thought you were smelling somewhat glamorous.’

  ‘I’m not looking bad, either. You have to live up to these people’s expectations of you.’

  ‘Live down it would be, in my case.’

  I found a knife and plate and cut him a slice of pie. Almost from habit, because of dealing so often with my mother’s food, I chopped it into smaller pieces for him. As soon as he took the plate from me he started to cram his mouth and chew as though he had been literally starving.

  ‘This might amuse you,’ he said, mumbling through crumbs. ‘I own this building. I inherited it from an aunt. You remember we’re some kind of distant cousins—well, I did a bit of research, and believe it or not you are at this moment standing in part of the Millett inheritance, a little dribble of property come down to me through dowries and jointures. You are still in a sense at Cheadle. I hope the thought doesn’t depress you.’

  In fact he clearly hoped the opposite. The cat came to his elbow, clawed at the chair and mewed. He dropped a piece of pie for it. I sat on the edge of the bed.

  ‘Do you still own the whole house?’ I said.
/>   ‘Yes. It’s all let. I’ve become a slum landlord in my old age. I seem to attract a peculiarly hopeless class of tenant. They’re almost all on supplementary and most of them owe me about six months’ back rent, but I haven’t the energy to go through the rigmarole of turning them out.’

  ‘What about your friend Fred?’

  ‘He does a few things for me in exchange for his rent.’

  ‘It doesn’t look to me as though he was worth it.’

  ‘Oh, he’s all right. You’ve caught me at a bad time. He’s such a bore that I can’t help being bloody to him, and now I’m stuck in here he can’t get in to do anything. The trouble is he’s read too much and tried to fit it all in. Marx, of course, Spengler, Toynbee, Weber, Levi-Strauss, Derrida, you name it. He’s a natural polytheist, always looking for another niche to fit a god into. Can I have some more of that pie? And a glass of water? Turn right outside the door and you’ll find a tap.’

  I cut him another large slice, found a tumbler and filled it in a greasy little hell-hole of a kitchen. I felt in danger of getting emotionally side-tracked. Ronnie clearly needed taking care of. He was teetering on the brink of that pit of non-coping into which old people so suddenly can fall, and from which there is so little chance of recovery. It shouldn’t be a long-term commitment. If the tenants were as badly behind with their rent as he said there should be no problem about getting them out. He could then sell the house well enough to buy a sizable annuity and could find a small modem flat somewhere . . . But that wasn’t what I’d come for. Later, perhaps. Meanwhile I’d have to find someone to keep an eye on him. But he had a daughter, didn’t he, damn it? Ask about her later. First things first. I was an hour behind schedule already, but still felt I couldn’t afford to rush straight in.