Peter Dickinson - Death of a Unicorn

We didn’t talk about this, directly. I told her we were going away for a week to Barbados and I’d give her a key of my flat in case she wanted to go and live there for a bit, and I tried to make her see that the best way to think of Mummy was as a sort of blood-curdling old witch who loses all her power as soon as you realise that none of her spells actually work. There was nothing, however she raged or wheedled, she could actually do. I didn’t tell Jane what B had said about Mummy being in a position to make a nuisance of herself just then—that was none of her business.

[1] And I, at least, still do. Not about the literally virgin bride, of course, but at a deep and primitive level something that has the same ritual meaning, something to do with innocence, and also with being chosen—not by my mother (or now by me) but absolutely. Chosen, like that. I accept that this is probably only a way of rationalising what I have now become, but that makes no difference to the nature of the feeling.

VII

‘You’d better come and meet my mother,’ said B.

It was one of his typical tricks, to spring something on you and watch you jump. I was used to it, but he caught me this time. We had been in Barbados five days and met a number of B’s acquaintances—a much more ramshackle and dubious collection than his friends in England, and not at all the sort of polo-playing Barbadian Mrs Clarke wrote about in her winter excursions to the islands, either. There’d been a numbingly boring American businessman who could only talk about expanding the island’s tourist facilities, an almost wordless lawyer, a voluble half-Indian building contractor, and so on. I hadn’t had any sense that B had enjoyed these meetings—in fact he disliked and despised the people as far as I could make out, but he was strangely patient with them and refused to tell me afterwards the sort of gossip about them which he would have amused me with after similar encounters in England. None of them had even hinted that his mother was on the island.

‘Take off that nail varnish and find something quiet to wear,’ he said.

‘Do you really want me to come? I’ll be perfectly happy . . .’

‘Yes. It’ll be a help.’

‘All right.’

She lived in a new block of flats overlooking the harbour at Bridgetown. The place was obviously expensive—bowls of flowers in the entrance lobby, thick carpet, the chill of air-conditioning, smooth-running lift. But when B opened the door of a top-floor flat with his own key I realised that I was crossing a frontier—between times, or civilisations, or something vaguer. The hallway reeked of spiced cooking. Its walls were white-painted, like those outside, but the furniture consisted of a monstrous black armoire, heavily carved, and beside it a cane chair with one of its legs mended with a splint. In the distance a strange big voice was ranting through shouts and bursts of music. We passed an open door where a small black man, grey and wrinkled, was stirring an old iron cooking-pot on a modern electric cooker. B raised a hand in greeting to him, and the man’s face, wreathed in the spicy steam, split into the traditional water-melon smile. I smiled back, of course, but the scene through the door heightened the sense of having moved into a country much more foreign than the Barbados outside. The worn old face, the smile, the stoop over the pot, the pot itself—older possibly than the man—belonged to an illustration to some book in the Cheadle nursery, one of Daddy’s perhaps, or going back even a generation beyond, a G.A. Henty about adventures in the American Civil War. Or pirate-hunting, a century before, among these very islands. Some images don’t change. The man in the kitchen was the old slave who happened to hold the clue to where the treasure lay.

B opened the door for me at the far end of the hallway. The voice came blasting through, recognisable now as that of an American revivalist preacher. The cries and music came from the congregation. B crossed the room and switched the wireless off. I stood by the door, peering through dimness made duskier still by the dazzle of morning sun between the slats of blinds. There seemed to be nobody in the room, but it was hard to be certain because of the clutter of furniture—screens, little tables, chairs, lampstands, a piano, sideboard, and vague shapes whose purpose I could only guess at because of the way everything drapable seemed to be draped in beautiful old silk shawls the colour of ivory, fringed and embroidered. Though most of the large furniture was as black and heavy as the armoire outside, the shawls seemed to light the dim room with their own vague luminescence, like snowfall in a winter wood at dusk. The room was stifling.

B strolled across to a chaise-longue and stood looking down at the muddle of cushions and shawls on it.

‘Wake up, Mother,’ he said.

‘I am wide awake,’ said a vigorous old voice, ‘and listening to the Word from the lips of the Reverend Patterson. Why did you silence him?’

‘Why don’t you use the air-conditioning? It’s far too hot in here.’

‘Noisy nuisance. Why did you silence him, Amos? Why will you always be deaf to the Word?’

‘I’ve brought a friend to see you.’

The chaise-longue arranged itself. A yellow hand emerged from the cushions and clawed a corner of shawl aside to reveal a large wrinkled face, even more toad-like than B’s, and some wispy yellow-grey hair. Surely if B had known he might find his mother in this kind of state he could have left me waiting in the passage and given her a moment to pull herself together, but being B he enjoyed such confrontations. I was cross enough with him already for making me take my nail varnish off just after I’d spent twenty minutes putting it on.

Mrs Brierley didn’t seem at all put out. Two or three of the cushions became her body as she heaved herself into a sitting position, slapping B’s hand aside when he tried to help her. She patted her hair, tugged her shawl, and then, sitting primly on the edge of the chaise-longue, rotated her head like an owl towards me and rotated it back as I walked round to stand where she could see me better.

‘Miss Millett, my mother,’ said B.

She inspected me. The whites of her eyes were yellow and bloodshot but the dark brown irises seemed unbleared. She was very short, but fat, and smelt pungently of Pears soap. The likeness to B was strong, not just in her general ugliness but also in the feeling of self-willed energy that beamed from her.

‘How do you do?’ I said.

‘You are welcome,’ she answered, not with the snap she’d used in speaking to B but with a slight drawl. She patted the chaise-longue.

‘What is your denomination, Miss Millett?’ she said as I sat down.

‘Church of England, I suppose.’

‘Neither hot nor cold, but better than nothing. Do you attend?’

‘When I’m at home. I haven’t found a church I like in London, I’m afraid.’

‘What do bricks and mortar count for? It is the preacher, the man with the Word on his lips.’

‘I like the singing best.’

‘You have never heard singing.’

‘Oh, I don’t know . . .’

‘A thousand Negro voices under the stars, gathered after labour to praise the great Creator.’

‘That must be terrific.’

‘It surely was. The Lord was there among us.’

‘Let’s have a drink,’ said B.

Mrs Brierley reached down to the floor, picked up a satin-covered shoe and used the heel of it as a mallet to strike the brass gong on the table beside her. The old black man must have been poised at the door, ready, because he came in immediately carrying a silver tray with three glasses on it. He was wearing a clean white jacket now, but the same old linen trousers, shredded at the ends like those of castaways in desert-island cartoons. His feet were bare. He held the tray for Mrs Brierley who sniffed at the glasses in turn.