Peter Dickinson - Death of a Unicorn

Jane saw what had happened. Her eyes stretched. Her nostrils widened into piggy pits. Sharp red blotches appeared on her cheeks. I knew that I must be wearing exactly the same hideous mask, but I couldn’t do anything about it. The men stared.

‘What the hell do you think you’re up to?’ I snapped.

Jane produced a grimace that was meant to be a smile.

‘I’m afraid Jane can be pretty stupid,’ she said to the man with the notebook.

The man looked embarrassed, but eager and inquisitive too. His ratty little eyes flicked from face to face. I started to screech. I don’t know what I said.

When something like that happens in the middle of a noisy crush there’s a funny effect of silence spreading away from the centre where the rumpus is, as more and more people realise that something’s up. This had just begun to happen. I was fighting to get back into sanity, but all I could see was Jane’s face, working like a spell, turning me against my will into a screeching pig. I was just about to ruin my own party. Jane’s face was framed against the back of a man with a large, pink, bald dome and yellow-grey hair trailing down over sticky-out red ears—one of Jack Todd’s mangy lions. He became aware of the pool of silence spreading over him and turned to see what the fuss was, but somebody shoved him aside and barged through. It was Mummy.

The screech stuck. She came forward wearing the smile she uses when there are guests and everyone has just heard a pile of plates go down outside the pantry.

‘There you are, darling,’ she said. ‘What an interesting lot of people. Please introduce me to your friends.’

‘You’ll have to ask Jane,’ I said.

Jane looked in the other direction. The pig-mask was melting away.

‘Your daughters are fantastically alike, Lady Er,’ said the man with the notebook. ‘Can anyone tell them apart?’

‘So people say,’ she said. ‘I think they’re quite different. This is darling clever Mabs, and this is darling clever Janey.’

She put her arms round us and drew us close, uniting us in love on the maternal b.

‘I wonder if you could tell me, Lady Er, if your family always talk about, what was it, traddling?’

‘Traddling?’

‘And a brace of potato?’

Mummy laughed.

‘Oh, dear no. That was only old Major Ackers. He was a bit . . .’

The man twitched his notebook up.

‘A bit what?’ he said.

Mummy stared at him.

‘Aposiopesis,’ I said.

‘Oh, Ar, Eff,’ said Jane at the same moment.

‘You mustn’t tease the poor man,’ said Mummy.

I thought journalists were supposed to have thick skins. With real satisfaction I watched the sweatbeads glisten on his cheek. The unity of Family is extraordinary. My fury with Jane was still grinding away inside me and I was tense with Mummy’s touch, but for the moment the three of us were like some tribe who have caught an intruder on their sacred ground and are now dancing round him while he roasts alive. This was my ground, my party, my triumphant celebration of freedom from the thraldom of Cheadle; but suddenly here we were, the three of us, as if we’d been putting on our hats for church outside the Morning Room and agreeing without saying so that we were going to have to keep at arm’s length that pushy new family who’d just moved into the Old Rectory.

The man put his notebook away. He was going to vote Labour for life, I could see, and what’s more he was going to write the cattiest story about me that he could get past his Features Editor. (I was wrong. It turned out an absolutely grovelling piece, as if he’d really loved what we’d done to him.)

Mummy let go of Jane but not me and by swinging a few inches round managed to split us off completely from the others.

‘I hope you’ll introduce me to your friend, darling,’ she said.

‘Tom? He’s in the other room.’

‘The one who settles your account at Harrods.’

She smiled at me, the-witch-who-will-find-you-in-the-end. Ever since I could remember she’d been able to do this. The trick had two parts. The first was finding your secret, and the second was choosing the moment to tell you. There was a tone and look for it, a sad little voice, a sad little smile, eyes bright as glass beads. No anger, only contemptuous pity that you should think you could hide from her, ever, anywhere. Of course she never told you how she found out.[2] The punishment was usually fair and came with a great swoop of relief.

I was nine again, reading Mumfie under the bed in King William’s Room when I was supposed to be helping Samson weed the Bowling Green path. Sick-mess in my throat and all my skin a layer of chilly rubber. I discovered that beneath my recent happiness and exultation—part of it, adding to its excitement—had been the certainty that this was going to happen. Of course I’d sometimes wondered what I’d do or say if she found out, but that’s not what I mean. The rhythms of my life decreed that she had got to find out. In dreams of escape you glance back along your secret path and see that at the entrance you have left your pullover, caught on a blackthorn, a huge and obvious clue for the lion-faced people to find. You left it there on purpose, though you didn’t know, because that is the logic of the dream.

I refused to meet her look. She still had her arm half round me, resting on my shoulder. Straight in front of me was Mrs Clarke, talking to a tall thin stooping man I didn’t recognise. Ronnie came up to them with a fresh-mixed jug of Petronella.

‘I do think I’d better talk to him, don’t you?’ said Mummy.

I put my hand up and lifted hers off my shoulder. She didn’t resist, but let it fall.

‘He isn’t here yet, as far as I know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know if he’s coming.’

‘But when he does?’

‘If he does.’

‘Don’t forget, Mabs.’

No punishment. None at all.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Come and meet this new cousin I’ve found.’

I introduced her to Ronnie and Mrs Clarke, and the three of them hived off leaving me with the tall stooping man. He turned out to be the head of the firm which was nominally publishing Uncle Tosh, though we’d done all the real editing and so on in the office. I’d only met a couple of his underlings— Uncle Tosh must have seemed very small beer to a man used to publishing two-volume biographies of Rilke. He was an edger-up, but in a different dimension from Bruce Fischer. He used his height to crane over you and then came smiling down, like a rook eyeing turf for leather-jackets. Luckily my frock had a high collar. He told me that now the subscriptions were in he’d decided on a reprint. When something good happens in publishing, it is always the doing of whoever tells you about it; something bad is always the fault of the system, incurable. I tried to look starry-eyed with gratification. Mercifully one of the mangy lions came maundering up, with suggestions for an autobiography. Any other time I would have hung around to see how the publisher fought him off, but I edged away.

Jane wasn’t even polite to the man she’d been pretending to talk to. She swung round and grabbed my wrist.

‘What was that fratch for?’ she said. ‘I was having fun.’

‘Sorry. You couldn’t have known. I tried not to.’

‘They didn’t know anything. I could have got away with . . .’

‘Careful, darling. It’s coming back.’

‘Oh, all right. You might have warned me when I rang up about the frock.’

‘Didn’t think of it. There’s such a lot of my own life . . .’

‘Who’s Mummy talking to?’

The man with the jug is Ronnie Smith. He’s a sort of fourth cousin. A Communist. Works here. I like him.’