Peter Dickinson - Death of a Unicorn

Mummy wanted everything as grand as possible (though also, of course, as cheap as possible) and the grandest thing of all was already there, laid on, cost free, in the shape of the Banqueting Hall. There’d been a minor leak in its roof, which wasn’t unusual—there’s always a bucket or two standing round somewhere to catch the latest drip. But this time when the builders came out from Bolsover to patch things up before the party they found a complete section of lead that had somehow never been replaced in the 1924 repairs and had been leaking for years on to the huge main bearing timbers, which had been soaking up the leaks so that they didn’t show up below, and now the timbers were rotten through, and a lot of the other woodwork as well. The architect Mummy got out said that there were tons of baroque plasterwork up there held in place by cobwebs, and the Banqueting Hall wasn’t safe to walk through, let alone to dance in. In fact we danced in the Long Gallery, which was much better anyway because the wooden floor is easier on your feet than marble, but for Mummy it wasn’t the same thing. It wasn’t part of the ritual, and in a mysterious way she decided that it was all somehow my fault.

It was my fault because I hadn’t been there and the ogre was sulky. Of course she didn’t say this—I sometimes think she hasn’t any imagination at all—but it was what she felt. Now it was my duty to leave London and come and help her in the crisis. We had three absolutely record rows, but she found she couldn’t beat me down any more. I was free. It was all happening outside me. (When I did get down to Cheadle I was much more interested in pumping Wheatstone for stories about my great-great-uncle, a truly fearsome old savage, which I could adapt for Uncle Tosh.) It was like one of those dreams when you are actually aware you are dreaming; monstrous things threaten you but they only frighten you on the surface because you know you can kill them by waking up. That’s what distinguishes a proper nightmare, like the Hansel-and-Gretel one I used to have. While it lasts, it’s real.

What was real for me was my happiness, my job, Petronella, my life with B. He was a congenital early riser, which I’d never been but took up because it was the only way I could cram everything in. We would get up at six, however late we’d got to bed, and off he would pad to his rowing machine and his sun-lamp. I would dress, switch my telephone through and go up to my flat and write for two hours and then have breakfast. He would telephone me at half-past eight to tell me where he would be during the day and what we were doing that evening. (If I had an engagement I’d have to have told him several days before.) He’d be very brisk, as though the only point in telling me at all was so that I’d know what to wear and whether to have my hair done. Then I’d catch a bus to Westminster and a tram along the Embankment and walk up through the Temple to Shoe Lane and the office. In spite of what B had said to me at Maidenhead nothing much had changed in the editorial department. Tom was still writing ‘By the Way’ and Bruce was drawing his sugar-daddies in bed with blondes (which now had a ghastly fascination for me, though I still didn’t think they were funny) and Mrs Clarke was writing the Round in the same unbelievable way. But, perhaps because I was so happy, I felt as if things were cheering up. The circulation was still falling, but not so fast, and I thought that fewer issues now had that musty, dead-mouse smell which used to hang around most of them when I’d first come to the paper.

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.