Peter Dickinson - Death of a Unicorn

‘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 reached 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.