Peter Dickinson - Death of a Unicorn

I took it as a warning. I knew it meant something, and I told myself it was his way of making sure I didn’t take my luck for granted. I didn’t, and I suppose that made me enjoy the happiness all the more, so it may have been worth it. (Apart from that it meant that B stopped trying to educate me and when we went to Private Views let me wander about eavesdropping on the perfectly extraordinary things people say to each other in art galleries.) That was the worst time. Usually I could cope with him by treating that part of our affair as a sort of game. If he didn’t like something—a dress for instance—he’d be brusque or even rude about it, and that meant I’d lost a point. If he was pleased he didn’t tell me, but I learnt to know, and scored myself one.

Though I’d signed the publisher’s contract and written and rewritten every comma and read the proofs and so on, somehow I never really believed Uncle Tosh was a real book until the publication party. We held it at the Night and Day offices in Shoe Lane. It was what Petronella would have called a hoot, because everyone seemed to think it was a perfect opportunity to work off hospitality debts, and the list grew longer and longer. We cleared the big middle room but it soon became obvious that that wasn’t going to be enough so I had the cheek to ask Mrs Clarke if we could use hers too, and she said yes. I’d been half hoping that B would subsidise the drinks—the publisher’s budget would have run to about half a glass each—but I couldn’t ask and he didn’t offer. In fact I didn’t even know whether he was coming—during our usual morning telephone confab he’d just said he was meeting someone and might perhaps bring him along. In the end Jack Todd authorised Accounts to help, and I topped up with some of my advance, but we were still short, so Ronnie mixed the drinks.

The drink, I mean. It was take-it-or-leave-it. Apparently left-wing politics make men expert in how to get stoned on a shoe-string. It was mostly Algerian white wine, with Moroccan brandy to give it a kick and a couple of other things to hide the taste and cochineal to turn it bright pink. We told the guests that it had been created specially for the occasion and was called Petronella. Jack Todd had used the party to invite a lot of his lame dogs—quite well-known names, some of them, in an is-he-still-alive sort of way—which gave the occasion what Tom called a certain cobwebby literary cachet. It made me giggle to see those mottled noses sniffing warily into their glasses, though I heard one of the old boys mutter that at least it was a bit stronger than what publishers usually produced.

Then the publicity man at the publishers had said it would be a good idea if I got some real debs along—the Susans, he nicknamed them. I chose ones who looked the part and could talk Petronella. One of the things that had happened during the summer was that she’d really caught on. For instance Selina had come back from a weekend in darkest Worcestershire and told me that two girls had physically fought over Night and Day when it arrived because they wanted to see whether Petronella had come up with anything new for them to work into their repertoire. Some of the Susans could talk Petronella for twenty minutes non-stop, which I certainly couldn’t; she came to me sentence by slow sentence on my typewriter in my little empty-feeling fiat at the top of Dolphin Square in the early morning. By now there was an accepted Petronella voice, a breathless but metallic quack, just right. A few young men tried to talk Uncle Tosh, but I never heard a good one.

And then there were the professionals, reviewers and gossip-columnists and even a few ordinary reporters who’d been sent along by their editors to do a story about this titled idiot who’d written a book. The jacket said ‘Uncle Tosh by Petronella’ but I’d sneaked in an Acknowledgement in which she thanked darling Margaret Millett for helping her with the speling. This was the first time we’d publicly admitted that I was the author of Petronella, though there’d never been any real mystery about it after the first few weeks. By the end of the Season I was getting invitations from women I’d never heard of saying it would be absolutely divine if Petronella would come and be foul about their party. I remember moaning to Mrs Clarke about how difficult it was to keep her innocent, and Mrs Clarke smiling in her seen-it-all way. But the press hand-outs for Uncle Tosh didn’t just use my name; they made a song and dance about the title, and the Cheadle inheritance and all that. I didn’t mind, because it was terrific publicity, though Mummy was going to loathe it when she saw the papers next morning. Anyway, these extraordinary men turned up at the party expecting me to be like Petronella. I suppose people who rely on facts really rather distrust the idea of anybody making things up out of their imagination. They feel threatened. So I threatened them a bit more by explaining that Petronella was best understood from a post-existentialist standpoint, and telling them about the underlying parallels with Camus. (I could keep that up because B had told me to read Camus.) Then I introduced them to one of the Susans, so they got their story after all.

I was talking to a Manchester Guardian journalist who had rather called my bluff by knowing about Camus and wanting to explore the parallels when Tom came up and said, ‘Mabs?’ You get used to the question mark when you have a twin sister. That was the first I knew that the family had arrived.

‘Jane, actually,’ I said.

He peered at me and shook his head.

‘I am forced to reject the imposture on external evidence,’ he said. ‘There’s a girl in Dorothy’s room in a gold dress like yours calling herself Margaret Millett and expounding the nuances of the dialect of your tribe. Journalists are taking notes of what she tells them. I have heard her declare that the word ‘potato’ has no plural. One speaks of a brace of potato. The scribblers are taking it for gospel. That’s not in your book, that I remember.’

(Tom had been an angel and copy-read Uncle Tosh for me. He’d made masses of useful little suggestions, but the thing that had really fascinated him, like a scab he couldn’t stop picking, was Uncle Tosh’s list of words. I’d only put this in to fill up the end of a chapter, dividing the words into ‘Us’ and ‘Ponsy’[1]—mostly quite obvious ones like saying ‘luncheon’ and not saying ‘toilet’. Things Mummy had always insisted on, though she’d made up her own rules—some of our friends, for instance, thought it was a bit ponsy to say ‘Mummy’ but she said that was nonsense.)

I felt a gush of fury that absolutely astonished me. By Tom’s eyes I could see I’d shown it. I snapped something at the Camus-man and began to shove my way out of the room. The crush slowed me down enough for me to feel I’d got some sort of control back by the time I’d pushed along the corridor to Mrs Clarke’s room. Jane was a few feet from the door, facing it. There were two men talking to her. One of them did have a notebook. She’d been watching for me, and smiled like a pig-faced cherub.

‘Hello, Jane darling,’ she said. ‘I hope you’re enjoying my party.’

I stared at her. I remembered she’d rung me to ask long or short, and I’d told her what I’d be wearing. She’d got hold of a gold frock from somewhere. I’d never seen it before and it looked a bit tight under the arms. It wasn’t the same as mine but near enough for a man not to notice. I have to explain that there was nothing unusual about this. We often played that kind of trick, on each other, on our friends. Jane had once come home to Charles Street and told me I was now engaged to a young man she knew I was utterly bored with. She’d shown me a ring to prove it. I’d got almost hysterical with panic, though I knew it couldn’t be true. (In the end it had turned out that she’d spent the evening trapping him into telling her how much he preferred me to Jane and how anyone who really cared for me could tell us apart at once, and then as he was paying the bill she’d told him who he’d been talking to.) Now I was perfectly well aware that Jane just thought she’d have fun doing something like that again—she couldn’t have understood how it mattered to me, in fact I hadn’t understood myself till that moment. Or perhaps I hadn’t realised how quickly my private self, the self that had nothing to do with family and Jane, had grown, and grown apart, since I’d left Charles Street.