Peter Dickinson - Death of a Unicorn

‘My dear,’ she said. ‘I have become very fond of you. I think you are a sweet, clever girl. But I think I must say this. It is very important to know where money comes from.’

‘Are we talking about a friend of mine?’

‘I believe so. You see, everything that we care about depends on the right people having the money. The world you and I value will cease to exist without that.’

‘Do you think so? I mean it’s often all started with wrong people, hasn’t it? The original Millett was a master dyer, but he really made his pile out of loot when the monasteries were dissolved. And even now, well, look at the Lanners. So respectable you could stuff sofas with them. But old Greg Lanner was just a South African bandit who was lucky not to get himself hanged several times before he found that gold-mine. I bet you half the people you write about in the Round really owe their money to ancestors who weren’t much better than him.’

‘I do not think it is fair to hold that against the present Lord and Lady Lanner.’

‘But it’s still where the money came from, isn’t it? I suppose you could say the system’s a bit like a glorified sewage farm. You put in dirty money one end and as it washes through the generations—you know, like filter-beds, with those arm things going round and round—it gradually gets cleaner and cleaner until it’s fit to set before the king.’

I thought this was a lovely image—it had come to me on the spur of the moment. Pity I’d finished Uncle Tosh. It would have been just right for him. Mrs Clarke sighed.

‘My late husband was very clever about money,’ she said. ‘He had a lot of excellent friends in the City. Naturally, I have been asking them what they know about the gentleman of whom we are speaking.’

‘I thought it was sugar. Something to do with by-products. And before that there was a plantation in Barbados. I thought.’

‘I know Barbados quite well. I go to the West Indies most winters. They like to read my accounts of their doings. But I can tell you that although there was some money to be made from plantations during the war, since then it has been very difficult. And in any case it was only the well-managed estates . . . There is some very strange blood, besides . . .’

She was obviously finding it difficult. So was I. Luckily at that moment the boy arrived from the printers with several pages of achingly tiny type about next week’s cinemas and theatres for me to check and correct.

B had said nothing to me about Mummy after the party and I hadn’t asked. We’d talked about other things, but I’d known from small signs that he felt I’d gone beyond the terms of our contract. Mummy had left without saying goodbye. I’d have liked to try and make contact with Jane, but she was going down to Cheadle for the weekend, while B and I were off to a bridge congress in Hastings.

This turned out totally dire. It sheeted with rain. B was playing with an unfamiliar partner and they kept having misunderstandings which he couldn’t grumble to me about because I wouldn’t have understood a word. There were no reviews of Uncle Tosh in any of the Sunday papers. We got back to London, both in a vile mood, at three o’clock on Monday morning. B got up at six to do his exercises, so out of sheer obstinacy I went up to my flat to write. I’d started straight off on another book as soon as I’d finished Uncle Tosh, not because I had a passion to write it but simply out of the habit of doing that sort of thing then. It had begun as a kind of cod romance, set in Edwardian times, strongly influenced by Cold Comfort Farm but peopled with marchionesses and sinister millionaires; then, mysteriously, I’d found myself actually believing more and more in my own grotesques and I was beginning to think that I would have to take the leg-pulling element out and turn it into a proper novel.

There was a folded scrap of paper on my doormat. Jane’s writing. A page from a pocket diary.

‘Where are you? Must talk. Can’t ring from Ch. St. Will come to N & D 10.30 Monday.’

Blearily I settled down at my typewriter, but I’d done less than a couple of pages when the telephone rang. It was B.

‘You’re early,’ I said.

‘Can you come down? Now.’

‘All right.’

He was in his dressing-gown reading a company report. A large cup of very pale coffee steamed beside his armchair—he was waiting for it to get completely tepid and then he would drink it. On the low table beside him were several neat piles of letters and other papers. The ripped envelopes lay on the floor. He picked up one of the letters and glanced through it. Mummy’s handwriting was large and jagged. You could recognise it from yards away.

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said. ‘It really isn’t fair on you.’

He did his toad smile.

‘Believe it or not she’s trying to blackmail me.’

‘But it hasn’t got anything to do with you. It’s entirely my look-out.’

‘For money.’

‘Oh. How much am I worth to her?’

‘No exact figures. She appears to think that as I have taken something out of the Cheadle estate I ought to put something back, in the shape of a new roof to the Banqueting Hall.’

‘She’s disgusting.’

‘There is a hint of other elements in the transaction.’

‘I’ve a good mind to go straight down to Cheadle and beat her up.’

She appears to be still in Charles Street.’

‘Terrific. I can . . .’

‘No.’

‘You aren’t going to take her seriously!’

‘I am not going to take her proposal seriously. But she might be in a position to make a nuisance of herself at this particular moment.’

‘Oh.’

People keep saying it’s a small world, when really it’s a lot of small worlds, with less overlap than you’d think. Moving in with B I had changed from one small world to another, though to outsiders they might have seemed almost identical. The fathers of many of my friends might sit on the boards of companies on which B’s allies and enemies also sat, but they were not the same sort of people. My friends’ fathers, whether they said so or not, were waiting for England to return to the kind of place it had been before the war. Mr Churchill belonged to that period and Mr Eden, and now that they were in power my friends’ fathers were impatient for it to happen. The war itself and the struggles afterwards had been only an interruption. But for men like B the Thirties were dead history—deader even than they were for me because of my connection with those times through Cheadle and the people there, such as old Wheatstone. For these men the war and the period since had been the start of things. That was when they had begun, one way and another, to spot their opportunities and make the most of them. They were impatient too, but to go on, not back. They weren’t impressed by Churchill and Eden. Their hope lay in the younger politicians who were going to clear away all the left-over restrictions of wartime—B had a particular bee in his bonnet about currency control—and let those who could get rich.

Of course there were occasional overlaps. These could be embarrassing, and hilarious. There’d been one dinner-and-night-club evening at which Sir Drummond Trenchard-Yates turned up with a marvellously bosomy and brassy blonde, the sort Bruce Fischer kept drawing. Aunt Minnie Trenchard-Yates was really no relation of ours but that’s what we’d always called her because she was Mummy’s closest friend, a tiny, smiling, sweetly tough woman I’d known since I could remember. Sir Drummond had got rather grand, Director of the Bank of England and so on, and he huffed and puffed a bit when he saw me, rather as though bringing his blonde had been like coming to the party wearing a black tie when he should have been in tails. He kept explaining that the blonde was his secretary, and that she was wonderful at putting his spelling right. Later that evening, having apparently decided that I was the other kept woman in the party—the remaining three seemed to be more or less wives—she poured out her heart to me. It was too sad. She seemed really fond of Sir Drummond and was longing for Aunt Minnie to divorce him so that she could marry him and become what she called ‘a real person’. I hadn’t the heart to tell her that Aunt Minnie would never let it get that far.