Peter Dickinson - Death of a Unicorn

She was talking now in a much less here-endeth-the-second-lesson style, but with her drawl more pronounced. I thought perhaps this was part of the story that she didn’t often tell.

‘It sounds lovely,’ I said. ‘Can we go and see it?’

‘Waste of time,’ said B. ‘Miss Millett is going to inherit an old house, Mother. That’s why she’s interested.’

‘Lay not up for yourself treasures upon earth,’ she said.

‘It seems to be more a case of laying up for yourself troubles upon earth,’ I said. ‘Besides, I didn’t do the laying up. It all happened before I was born. Perhaps one day I’ll run away for love, like you did.’

In fact B made very little fuss about driving me out to Halper’s Corner. I felt that he actually wanted to go, but at the same time not to seem to want to. It was difficult to be sure. He’d been more than usually unpredictable these last few days.

The house we were staying in—I never found out who it belonged to, but B said it wasn’t his, and it had a used feeling, half-full bottles in the drinks cabinet, recent copies of Life and Harpers, servants and a gardener—also provided a vast squashy American car, a convertible. We drove up the West Coast Road in the middle of the afternoon. B was in one of his withdrawn moods, so I fantasised about being a film star being taken by my director to look at the location for a lush plantation romance—brutal planter, sullen-seeming daughter, noble young missionary—there’d have to be an alternative lover, of course, spit image of Mark Babington—he would be the one who rode frantic to the quay as the ship sailed for England—finish in misty glow as lovers embrace at Liverpool with Salvation Army Silver Band for background, and skip the grinding years in Halifax—not Hollywood material . . .

Before I’d come to Barbados I’d created it vividly in my mind’s eye, white beaches and palms round the fringe, and a hinterland of steep jungly mountains, brilliant with parakeets and hibiscus. Quite wrong. It turned out to be a landscape rather like one of the duller English counties, rolling, undistinguished hills given over to farming. It obviously wasn’t England, because of the blueness of the sky and the blackness of the people and their crowdedness and poverty, and the height of the sugar cane in the fields; the beaches and hibiscus were there too. So one was abroad, but not very. Mrs Brierley’s flat still felt far more foreign than anything else I’d come across. Up the West Coast Road, where the land was poorer than elsewhere, there were certainly unfarmed patches, but even these had a scrubby, battered look. The sheer number of people on the island meant that there was almost nowhere really wild and lonely. It was all a bit like a town, with fields instead of houses. I had prepared myself to be disappointed well before B turned up a track between cane-fields. The lie of the low hills enclosed a flat triangular area. The sea dropped out of sight behind us and for once I felt here was a place of isolation. A black man on an old bicycle came bumping down the track towards us, pulled aside to let us pass and gaped as we went through. A hundred yards further on, as the track rose to one of the boundary hills, it was barred by rusted iron gates hanging askew between a pair of grand stone gateposts. B stopped and we climbed out.

The gates were padlocked, but a footpath had been beaten through a breach in the stone wall, so we followed it round and up what must once have been the sweep of a carriage drive but was now only a path one man wide and barely kept open, through the tangle of sweet-smelling undergrowth, lush with feeding on its own decay and raucous with insect life. The tops of three vast palms were visible above the bushes, but no sign of a roof or chimney.

I led the way until the path opened into a clearing. As I approached it I could see a tethered goat, but then a black boy leapt across the gap with his left elbow and shoulder angled forward and his right arm flung stiffly back, the hand clutching a battered old ball. A couple of seconds later I heard the snap of the ball on to a bat. I walked on into the clearing and there was the house. It was stone built, three storeys high. A double curve of stone steps rose to the broken front door, and the porch had been extended on either side to make a deep balcony the whole width of the house, the verandah where Mrs Brierley’s father used to sit and watch as she carried the Word of God to his labourers down below. There had been three grand Dutch-style gables at roof level, but the whole south-west corner of the house was in ruins. Once there had been four of the big palms, symmetrically planted at the corners of the building. Three great smooth trunks still rose in place,but the fourth had fallen and lay with half its roots in the air and its trunk slanting up through the wall of the house as if it had poked its head in through the window to see what was happening in the nursery. The falling masonry had smashed through the verandah roof that end, but on the other side it was still intact and the verandah seemed to be used now as an open-air kitchen, with the black iron chimney of the stove lashed to a filigree pillar. In the clearing two more goats grazed, and chickens clucked in dust baths. Beyond the corner of the house an old man was hoeing a vegetable patch. Nearer were the cricket players, two boys and a girl.

The girl saw me as she straightened from picking the ball up. Her hesitation made the bowler turn. He was black as a boot, but the girl was paler, as was the younger boy with the bat. Both of these were quite clearly Halpers. I realised that when Mrs Brierley had described her father as lustful she’d had some evidence to go on. The bowler stared at me for a moment, then turned and shouted to the man with the hoe, who shaded his eyes and gazed before coming slowly towards us.

‘The tree came down in the ’44 hurricane,’ said B.

‘It’s too sad. They must have been planted when the house was built.’

‘I should think so. Hello, you’re Philemon, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, please, Mr Halper. Glad to see your face, Mr Halper.’

‘My name’s Brierley,’ said B in a bored voice, watching the cricket, without seeming to be interested in that either.

‘Do you remember old Mr Halper?’ I asked.

‘Sure I see Miss Mary’s father.’

‘What was he like?’

The old man glanced towards B and pointed. Like that.

‘Die way he live,’ he said. ‘Drunk and cursing. Bring ruin on us all.’

‘Rubbish,’ said B, who couldn’t have seen the gesture. ‘He kept things going his own way till he was getting on ninety. It was my mother running off and leaving him with no one to help did the damage. She should have stuck it out here. Seen enough? Let’s go.’

‘You tell me what going to happen, sir?’ said Philemon. ‘Nobody know what going to happen.’

B gave him a bleak look.

‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ he said, and turned away. Philemon shook his head and hobbled back towards his vegetables.

Because of the narrowness of the track I couldn’t talk to B properly till we were in the car.

‘You didn’t have to be quite so foul to that old man,’ I said. ‘Surely you’ve got some idea. It’s his whole life, after all.’

‘I thought I did but now I don’t,’ said B.

‘You’re hating this, aren’t you?’

‘I decided you’d better see it.’

He didn’t start the car but sat brooding at the even acres of half-grown cane.

‘Apart from the house it doesn’t look all that run down,’ I said.

‘Not bad, I gather.’

‘Oh, I thought you’d sold it.’

‘Not yet. No point. Get nothing for it with the sugar market shot to hell. I’ve been waiting for a turn-up, paying off the mortgages and meanwhile working it up into a state where it will fetch something.’