Peter Dickinson - Death of a Unicorn

‘Before, Mabs.’

‘All right. In that case my attitude is that I’ll tell you anything I can about my time on Night and Day. I always kept that absolutely separate from the other thing. He would have been furious if I’d done anything else. We never talked about it at all. I don’t see that you need to know a single thing about my life outside the office. Put it like this: I’m prepared to walk round my private garden with you. I’m not prepared to let you bring a spade and start digging for bones.’

‘I’m afraid there’s . . .’

‘And if you are intending to mention the relationship, or even to hint at it, in your book, I completely withdraw my co-operation. I won’t even talk about Night and Day.’

The problem is this, Mabs. Brierley is of crucial importance to the book. He introduced Naylor, who, whatever we may think of him, has been a very successful editor. Without some such change the paper was doomed. I may as well tell you that the line I had expected to take when I first spoke to you was that you were, so to speak, the first swallow, a sign of Brierley’s flair that he was able to spot someone who was going to turn out a hugely successful writer at such an early stage. This was then going to be evidence that his choice of the not immediately obvious Naylor was more than a fluke.’

‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t still take that line. I met him at a dance for about five minutes. To extricate me from a ludicrous little social embarrassment he told me to tell the other person concerned that we had been discussing the possibility of my working at Night and Day. I didn’t see him again until Jack Todd had taken me on and let me start writing my Petronella pieces. And I’m almost certain it wasn’t because Mr B had told him to.’

‘Your arrival appeared to us at the time to be a mechanism for beginning to prise Dorothy out. When he met you at the dance Brierley could well have been on the look-out for a girl of unimpeachable social authority and with some pretensions to be a writer.’

‘Oh. I suppose so. I hadn’t thought of that. You were extraordinarily nice to me in the circumstances.’

‘You were a fetching child, Mabs. I wish I could see you more clearly. My impression is that it’s still there.’

‘Bless your bad eyesight. What are we going to do, Ronnie? I’d genuinely love to help, but I’ve got to get this cleared up before we go on.’

‘I will continue to put my cards on the table. Histories of weekly magazines do not command a wide sale—the larger libraries and other institutions, and a few honest citizens whose names occur in the index. The publishers would not have taken the project on in these hard times if they had not thought they could do better than that. I need hardly tell you, Mabs, that they are pinning their hopes on Amos Brierley.’

‘Typical.’

‘His death—is it painful if I talk about that?’

‘Not after all these years, but I can tell you absolutely and categorically that I know nothing about it. Nothing whatever.’

‘Has anyone ever asked you before?’

‘Not since . . . No.’

‘Does not that in itself strike you as peculiar?’

‘Not specially. There wouldn’t be any point. I don’t know anything.’

‘It strikes me as very peculiar indeed. How is anyone to know what you know? Brierley’s death, being a matter of mystery, still retains considerable interest. It is in fact two mysteries: first, why was he killed; and second why the authorities both here and in Brazil made so little effort to answer that question. Journalists have told me that investigations by them were actively discouraged. I happen to have a lead of a sort which I’ve not been able to pursue, but I now see that it might well tie in with this singular failure of anyone to ask you whether you have anything to contribute. If I’m right, then your closeness to Brierley is of definite moment.’

‘In a history of Night and Day? Really, Ronnie!’

‘This is an imperfect world, in which books need to be sold by often spurious means. My publishers expect me to devote a disproportionate amount of space to Brierley. My excuse is that though he controlled the paper for barely a year, that year was a turning-point. His reorganisation of the managerial side, which had been more than moderately chaotic, was described to me as masterly. And he brought Naylor in, of course.’

‘Well, Ronnie, for old times’ sake . . . let me put it like this: I’m prepared to talk to you, in this room, for this hour, as though I may have been what you call close to Mr B, but I must make it clear that if the slightest hint about this appears in the book I shall sue. No, let me go on. You may think you could do it in such a way that I wouldn’t have a case, but I promise you I’d sue all the same. The kind of publisher who would do a history of Night and Day is much too stuffy and timid to risk it, I promise you. I’ve won three libel cases in the last fifteen years, all settled out of court. They’d be scared stiff of me.’

Ronnie grunted, peered about the table, reached for the champagne bottle and unclipped his gadget. I put my hand over my glass.

‘I shall have to think about that,’ he said. ‘Meanwhile let’s talk about something else.’

I took my hand away and let him pour me another glass. We both did our best but the mood would not come back. There was one brief moment when I’d been explaining how I organised my life these days.

‘You take a lot on, Mabs,’ he said.

‘It has taken me. I try not to whinge, that’s all.’

He shook his head.

‘When you were on the paper you didn’t exactly leave stones unturned or avenues unexplored. You came as Dorothy’s assistant, but not a week had gone by before you had Tom’s glue-pot in your hands.’

‘Only as a defence against Bruce Fischer.’

‘Momentarily. But you had your finger in every pie, and you were writing a book. I say nothing of your extra-curricular activities.’

‘It was the best year in my life. I knew at the time I had to make the most of it. I breathed happiness all the time. Didn’t you notice anything different? I don’t mean because of me. Just in the air.’

‘Morale in any organisation has its own mysterious ups and downs. My impression is that we were near the bottom of a trough when you arrived, which we then began to climb out of. But you know, Mabs, everybody has his own personal Golden Age. One of the weaknesses of the English is that for too many of them it is located in their early childhood. Mine ended when I was sent to prep school.’

‘Is that why you became a Communist?’

‘In part, no doubt.’

‘What happened to Bruce, by the way.’

‘Naylor gave him the boot after a couple of years. Row over who controlled the art side. Drove his car into a bridge a few years later. Deliberately, it was thought.’

I tut-tutted vaguely. Bruce Fischer. Blood all over the nylon shirting. The mood died.

I had said goodbye to Ronnie and was on my way to my appointment with the man from Burroughs—less than five minutes late after all—when it struck me that I should at least have asked him who had told him about my affair with B. He had seemed quite sure of his ground. Not Jane? No, of course not. Who else had known? . . . But she couldn’t still be alive, surely.

I told Simon about the divorce at supper. I chose to do it because Terry was there and I felt a need for human contact. As far as I am concerned, although Simon is my son he might as well be an elf-child. I mean that I have no idea at all what it can be like to be him, though he has my eyes as well as the Millets nose (much more unfortunate, for some reason, on a man than a woman). He is not simply a stranger; I see plenty of strangers, doing the occasional stint of conducting a tour round the house; I make a point of studying faces, trying to imagine inner lives, and usually succeed in constructing a coherent personality, not necessarily the true one but credible to me. I cannot do the trick with Simon. He lived inside me for nine months and his birth was an immense satisfaction. A happy baby, smiling and active. A busy, inquisitive, pleasing child, enough trouble at times not to seem unnatural. And then, about seven, the first awareness on my part of this alien-ness, an only faintly worrying sense of oddness in him, a little patch, spreading in the next five years, inexorable as a disease, until the whole personality was absorbed. I suppose he was about fourteen when I gave up attempting to persuade myself that I loved him.