Peter Dickinson - Death of a Unicorn

It was a magic door, a black slot for me to vanish through. Beyond it I found a dark passage leading back to the top of the stairs, but roped off that end to keep people out. I was already slipping off that way, intending to go and hide in the cloakroom for a bit—the utter last resort, really—when from behind me I heard a cork pop. Aha, I thought, they’re opening the next half-dozen botts. I’ll get some at source and then I can refuse to dance with Mark till I’ve finished it, in case someone pinches it. Saved!

A small, dark-panelled room, with bookcases. Fenella’s uncle’s study. Men playing bridge. The one facing me frowned as I came through the door, and the one who’d had his back to me at a side table turned and walked over, holding a bottle with froth bulging from the mouth. He was the one who’d spoken to me at the foot of the stairs.

‘Dotards only, I’m afraid, Lady Margaret,’ he said.

‘Oh, please,’ I said. ‘Can I hide for a couple of minutes? And may I have a drink?’,

Instantly—he didn’t seem to think about it—he went to the door and closed a little brass catch above the handle, then came back and filled my glass. It was far nicer champagne than they’d been giving us outside.

‘Thank you so much,’ I said: ‘Do go back to your bridge. I won’t stay more than five minutes and I won’t tell anyone else.’

He produced his terrific smile, on purpose, for my benefit.

‘My partner is in six diamonds in a lay-down two-way squeeze,’ he said. ‘He will take an absurd time to think it out and then get it wrong. I prefer not to watch.’

‘I don’t play,’ I said. ‘Ought I to learn?’

‘Have yourself taught by a professional. Or don’t start. How do you occupy the daylight hours, Lady Margaret? Work on your novel?’

I thought he wanted me to be impressed by his knowing my name, but it wasn’t difficult, once he’d recognised the sapphires.

‘I sell lampshades.’

‘For Mrs Darling in Beauchamp Place?’

‘They should have made her into lampshades herself.’

He raised his eyebrows a millimetre. I thought I was getting used to him. He liked to seem to know everything, my name, the sort of shop someone like me might have a job in, and so on. And he liked to make the smallest possible gestures and still get his meaning across. It was a way of showing how powerful he was, inside. The eyebrow-raising meant that I’d got something wrong, though nobody who’d worked for Mrs Darling for five minutes could possibly have a good word to say for her. But before I could ask I heard a click and squeak from the door, then a distinct thud, then Mark’s voice calling my name.

‘Obstinate?’ said the man.

‘Pretty.’

He smiled a different smile, thinning his lips so that I half expected a toad-tongue to flicker across them. He pointed to a place where a bookcase jutted from the inner wall. I slid over and tucked myself out of sight. Just like playing sardines at Cheadle. It struck me that I’d been hiding from Mark—versions of Mark—practically since I could walk, behind nursery curtains, in empty servants’ rooms along the bare top corridors, in cellars and stable lofts, and now at London dances.

I heard the bolt click and the hinges whimper, and shut my eyes to strain for the voices. Mark’s, angry, my name in a question. Man’s flat murmur. Mark angrier still . . .

‘Two down,’ called a man at the table. Automatically I opened my eyes to look. One player was turned towards the door, shuffling a pack, looking smugly amused. His partner was dealing. My man’s partner was leaning back in his chair, trying to frown his way through the misplayed hand. Above their heads, between the two windows, rose a narrow pier-glass, black-blotched with age but still with enough good patches for me to be able to see Mark standing in the doorway. He looked straight into my eyes above the man’s bald scalp. Anger and the contrast with the black and white of his clothes made his large face seem bright scarlet. He spoke to the man, who turned, nodded to my reflection in the glass and turned back to Mark. As far as I could hear he used the same tone as before, only four or five words. Mark’s face changed. He took a half-pace back, as though the man had shoved him in the chest. The man shut the door but didn’t bother to close the bolt.

‘Two down, Brierley,’ called the bridge player again.

‘One moment,’ he said.

I discovered I was quivering. A mixture of excitement and fright. Nothing much had happened. At any large dance there must be at least a dozen sticky moments like that when some girl is trying to get away from a man, but I felt as though I’d got sucked into something much more important. Mr Brierley topped up my glass without my asking. The cold patch effect was very strong. I thought he was going to tick me off for getting him caught out lying to Mark.

‘You’re a writer,’ he said.

‘Not really. Only beginning.’

‘You can explain that your friend interrupted me in the middle of offering you a job on my magazine.’

‘Did . . . Did I accept?’

‘Tomorrow afternoon, three o’clock, 83 Shoe Lane, Night and Day office. Ask for Mr Todd. You must make your own arrangements with Mrs Darling.’

‘Jane will stand in for me. Mrs D can’t tell us apart.’

‘Stay here as long as you wish. Don’t drink any more.’

He went back to the table, looked through his hand and when his turn came called without sorting it. It wasn’t even his house—Fenella’s uncle was the one with his back to the door. But here he was, telling another guest what she could and couldn’t do in it. Not just because I was young, either. He would have said the same to anyone, though he wasn’t even somebody’s father, just here because he wanted to be, to play bridge. It was typical.[2]

[1] Even now, after almost thirty years, not always.

[2] Really? I wrote that nearly thirty years ago, but even then I was looking back on an earlier self. Did I really perceive in those first few minutes what kind of person B might be? Me, twenty, far too self-absorbed to be perceptive or objective about anyone, myself included? Wasn’t I, as I wrote, already reading back later knowledge? I cannot now tell, though I agree that B’s behaviour had been typical, from his casual kindness to pretty girls, or to men who took his interest for other reasons, to his flabbergasting public rudeness to people who’d done even less than poor Mark to offend him. I saw that sort of thing happen again and again during the ten months I was his mistress.

II

‘Saw little Penny Millett looking sweet,’ I wrote, ‘and big sister Mabs (knew it wasn’t Jane because she was sporting the saphires) looking too too bored, poor darling.’

I hit the typewriter as hard as I could, furious and disgusted. The machine looked and felt like a spare part for a mechanical elephant. Later I used to think that I should have had it shot and hung it up somewhere as a trophy, so that I could tell people how it changed my life. The dusty, drab-yellow room smelt of nerves and unemptied ashtrays. The hem of my stupid pencil skirt caught my calves when I tucked my legs back under my chair, the way I used to, so I’d hoicked it up round my thighs and the hell with creases. I re-read what I’d written, sick with disappointment. The machine was slower than my fingers and kept typing letters on top of each other. It had only put one ‘p’ in ‘sapphires’, for instance. I rolled the carriage back to type it in and then thought, ‘Why not? I don’t want this job anyway.’ I left the word as it was and instead I exed out ‘sweet’ and wrote ‘delish’. A picture of Veronica Bracken came into my mind, incredibly pretty, incredibly stupid. I pulled the paper out and rewrote the paragraph about Fenella’s dance in pure, illiterate debutese. The words seemed to flow straight out through my fingers without my thinking about them at all.