Peter Dickinson - Death of a Unicorn

It didn’t sound at all B’s style, to pay off mortgages before he had to, but I didn’t say so.

‘What’s this sugar agreement Jeremy was talking about?’ I asked. ‘I noticed you shut him up.’

‘Commonwealth Sugar Agreement. Becomes operative next year. Should stabilise the market, and then I can sell and sort things out.’

‘Is it yours or your mother’s?’

‘Mine, effectively. I bought her an annuity in exchange. She got much better terms than she’d have done if she’d simply sold it then, so I don’t want her now getting it into her head that she should have hung on. None of us knew this agreement was coming up. It was only passed last year. Shall we go?’

He sounded relieved, as though this was what he had brought me out here to tell me. For some reason it had been worrying him, and might even explain his recent edginess.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Can we look at the bay, though, first?’

‘What bay?’

‘The one where her mother used to teach her her letters in the sand.’

‘You don’t want to see that. It’s just a bay.’

‘Please. As we’re here. It was important to her, wasn’t it?’

‘You liked the old frump?’

‘I think she’s terrific. After a life like that.’

‘I don’t owe her anything.’

‘I expect other people’s mothers tend to seem OK. A lot of my friends can’t see what’s, wrong with mine. But don’t you have a hankering, darling, to see the house in order again?’

‘Not worth the effort.’

‘That’s not what I meant. Suppose your fairy godmother were to wave her wand and there it was, roof mended, garden spick, all four palm trees standing, and you sitting on the verandah smoking a cigar while a shiny black butler brought you your punch on a silver tray?’

‘No,’ he said, and started the engine.

We drove bumpily down to the main road, headed north, and a quarter of a mile later turned left along a fresh-laid concrete track towards the sea. It wound between dunes, bare sand in some places, and in others spiky plants like yuccas, scrubby bushes and a few palm trees. At the shore-line—a dazzle of white beach between two wooded headlands—it curved back and climbed a low outcrop a hundred yards inland. Up there there were signs of work, obviously connected with the newness of the road. I could see a jeep, and the tip of a crane. Apart from that the bay was, as Mrs Brierley had claimed, beautiful according to the beauty of this world.

‘It’s a long way from the house,’ 1 said,, thinking what a release it must have seemed to mother and child, so far from the brutal troll who ruled the cane-fields.

‘My great-grandfather bought it to dredge so that he could ship his cane straight out,’ said B. ‘That was always the chief problem—too far from the factories. But he was caught by the 1876 slump.’

‘What’s happening up there?’

‘New hotel, mainly.’

‘How dreadful.’

‘Don’t be a snob.’

‘I am a snob. I can’t help it. It’s like the idea of trippers trooping round Cheadle. We do have open days, but the family all hide and pretend they aren’t happening. Don’t you feel that at all?’

‘Why should I? I was born and brought up in Halifax. People who live most of their lives in places like Halifax consider it an excellent idea that hotels should be built by otherwise useless beaches for them to stay at.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘I know. You’re trying to make me say that because my family have kept it as a wild bay for eighty years I should continue to do so. You forget that we originally bought it for commercial exploitation. In any case your whole idea is based on a misconception. I am the man who was born in Halifax. Any feelings I have are appropriate to that man. In fact my feelings towards Halifax are that it was a place to get away from and never go back to. But the man I am could not have been born here. Suppose my mother had not run off and joined my father, she would most likely never have married. But if she had, and had then had a child, that child would not have become me. Even if the father had been my father, that is still true. We are who we are by the accident of a moment. ‘You ought to know that. You are one of a pair of twins because of a momentary readjustment of molecules in a uterus twenty-two years ago.’

He lolled back on the soft bench-seat of the car, his brown face more toad-like than ever because of his impenetrable sun-glasses. His voice too had the reptilian creak which came when he was talking about something important to him. I had learnt more about him today than in all the rest of our friendship. I even knew his age, born ten years before the First World War, ‘not yet fifty’—just. I wondered if he guessed how effective it was, bringing Jane in. I’d often tried to imagine what would have happened if Jane and I had never separated, if we had been born as I. The idea was part of my fairy-tale world in which everything was all right; and now that world contained the image of a curious toad-like boy and his yellow toad-like mother coming to this bay so that she could teach him his letters in the sand. For some reason the mental picture, combined with B’s real face in front of me now, made me see something I hadn’t seen before.

‘You’ve got Negro blood, haven’t you?’ I said.

He didn’t answer for several seconds. I cursed myself for my stupidity. Then he said, ‘Does it matter?’

‘Not to me. Not a scrap, darling, honestly. It’s just interesting.’

‘The true reason why the other planters chose to have nothing to do with my grandfather was that he had married a quadroon. My mother is therefore an octoroon.’

‘How lovely. That’s a word I’ve never come across except in crossword puzzles.’

‘It is a word which has ruined lives.’

‘I suppose so. But it’s nothing compared to the Halper side of you, is it? That must be fantastically strong. If we had a baby I wonder whose face it would have.’

‘Mine, of course. That’s why we’re not going to.’

‘I think we’d get a slightly yellow Millett. You can see this piggy nose in the Long Gallery, snuffling out under wigs and over ruffs for generations. Even old Lely couldn’t do much about it.’

‘The Halpers would win all the same.’

‘Got you!’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Whatever you say you’re secretly proud of your family.’

‘My family is still alive, in me.’

‘It won’t be much longer unless you start doing something about the next generation.’

‘Haven’t you noticed? My grandfather did quite enough to let me off the obligation.’

‘You’re scared of losing to the Milletts. I bet you . . .’

‘Don’t be a fool.’

‘I’m serious, I think. I mean . . . you see, I’ve been wondering why you let me bully you into coming out here. You’ve hated it, haven’t you? I think it might be your way of telling me what you think about me and Cheadle. That it isn’t worth it, I mean. I ought to get loose from it and do something else with my life. Like . . . Do take those beastly specs off. I can’t see what you’re thinking.’

‘I am thinking that if you say anything more about babies I shall boot you out.’

Booting me out was a running joke, though the possibility of it being true always gave me a slight kick, and him too, I think, reminding us of the tricky balance we’d set up and the certainty that we were going to fall off the wire one day—though when it happened it was not going to be anything like this.

‘I’ve thought of a new and thrilling revenge,’ I said. ‘I shall picket your bridge club and proclaim the story of my wrongs on a sandwich board.’

‘The police will move you on.’