Peter Dickinson - Death of a Unicorn

Now he opened his eyes wide and produced his charming but meaningless smile.

‘Poor Mums, that’s tough on you.’

‘High time, if you want my opinion,’ said Terry.

‘For Mark or for me?’

‘For the both of you. How long before you start feeling old? Ten, fifteen years, if you’re lucky. Why waste it? Sir Mark can marry this Julia who seems to think he’s the best thing since the Beatles, and that’s something you’ve never been able to do for him. Now you can stop feeling guilty about it.’

‘Is that all I get out of it?’

‘You want me to find you a man, Marge?’

‘Providing he’s a roofing specialist.’

‘An arsonist would be more to the point,’ said Simon.

Terry shook his head, as usual treating the banter as if it were in earnest.

‘Not after all the work she’s put in,’ he said. ‘Trouble is, what kind of a man would take you on?’

‘Thank you.’

‘Come off it. You know what I mean. For looks you can still knock spots off most women, and you’ve got brains and guts with it, only you expect such a hell of a lot of anyone. My theory, if you want to know, is that you were spoilt for men by somebody way back. I don’t think it was ever Sir Mark, though.’

He studied me, candid and serious. He wasn’t being inquisitive, let alone prurient, but typically just wanting to check his ideas out. I have got used to Terry and now thoroughly approve of him. If only he were a woman he could have married Simon and I could have worked on the assumption that he would take over running Cheadle when the time came. The fact that Simon is at best only faintly interested in the house would not have mattered. Not that Terry is in love with Cheadle, any more than I was thirty years ago, but he (she) would have recognised the need.

Mark, of course, cannot stand him. He says that living with Terry is like living with a mental nudist—company acceptable in a nudist camp but not where everyone else walks around with their minds fully clothed. Though he speaks with a mid-Atlantic accent he is English, one of a large family whose parents run a bakery in Doncaster. He is eight years older than Simon, his curly dark hair thinning fast, and though he and Simon jog ritually round the park every morning his weight is getting out of hand. They act the parts of footmen when the house is open, but I shall soon have to promote Terry to butler, rather than go to the expense of new livery. They spend their spare time perfecting programmes for computer games, always ending up with something far too sophisticated for commercial exploitation. Another reason why I approve of Terry is that Simon seems not to be an alien to him, nor he to me, so I still have indirect contact.

‘If it were true I wouldn’t tell you,’ I said. ‘Let’s change the subject. You might like to know that the financial outlook is suddenly a good deal rosier than it’s been for ages. I can actually see a future.’

I explained about the tax repayments, speaking to Terry because Simon always shuts off when anything serious to do with Cheadle comes up. It took me by surprise when I discovered that this time he had actually been listening.

‘Well done, Mums,’ he said. ‘You mean you could give up your smouldering heroines if you wanted, and the old place would still chug on?’

‘For a few years, yes, I think so.’

‘In that case it sounds like a good time to break it to you that I’ve decided to abdicate in favour of one of the Duncans.’

He was looking at me half-sideways. There is somebody there behind that pretty-pig mask. For an instant I experienced one of our rare occasions of almost-touching as he watched to see how I would take the suggestion—not, alas, with apprehension or eagerness, just curiosity.

‘Is he serious?’ I asked.

‘I reckon,’ said Terry.

He too was watching me. Clearly this was something they had discussed, more than once perhaps. My sister Jane is married to Angus Duncan, a Canadian insurance executive, and has three children, the eldest two years younger than Simon. Jane has always tended to find excuses not to visit us so I haven’t seen a great deal of them, but Simon knew them better, having stayed six months in Canada when he left school. The possibility of transferring Cheadle to my nephew or one of my nieces had occurred to me often since Sally left, but it had always been something I had refused to think about, I suppose because it would mean accepting decisively that she would never come home. I yearn for my daughter with a passion that disgusts me when I allow it to happen. Last October I drove back from the annual jamboree of the Romantic Novelists’ Association in Cheltenham, and because of something one of my colleagues had told me I made a detour to see the monuments in Crome d’Abitot church, but took a wrong turning and found myself winding down the drive to the house itself. There had been a board up at the gate—Something-ishi Foundation—but I was through before it registered. It was a heavy, hazy morning. The house, as large as Cheadle but much plainer, lay looking out over flat and almost treeless parkland below the ridge I had descended. On the grass a number of cattle were tethered. Near the spot where I began to turn my car a thin young man in a long coat and a sort of skull-cap was inspecting from a distance of a few feet a large fly-infested sore below the eye-socket of one of these animals. He carried a briefcase and looked Western enough in a mildly eccentric way until I realised that beneath the skull-cap his head was close-shaven and that the coat was in fact a robe. His thinness and stoop suggested undernourishment, and he seemed to study the sore with a resignation indistinguishable from despair. Very likely I am doing him and his organisation a complete injustice and his bag was stuffed with fly-repellants and antibiotics which he was about to administer, but in the few seconds it took to get the car round I was gripped with a fit of the horrors. His hopelessness, and the hopeless patience of the animal, spread and filled the valley, drowning the splendid house like one of those villages lost under new-built reservoirs. I think anyone might have felt it, but to me with my preoccupation with Cheadle and my longing for my daughter apparently dead to me in her Sri Lankan ashram the scene was a particular hell.

Sally was born before Simon. I had always intended that she should inherit, though my mother and Mark tried to insist on Simon’s right as first-born male. Sally, almost as soon as she was aware of the possibility, rejected it, continued to do so more and more firmly as she grew up, and on her eighteenth birthday gave me a document prepared by solicitors formally renouncing any claim. She writes long and friendly letters from her sanctuary, never with any hint of return. Suppose, I asked myself as I drove home from Crome d’Abitot, I offered her Cheadle; and suppose the money were available from rich converts to maintain it in however threadbare a fashion as an -ishi establishment; would I pay that price to have her back? It would be a life of a sort for the house, wouldn’t it, arguably more genuine than that provided by the sightseers who now flood through it, so transient as to seem less material than its own old ghosts?

I sighed and looked at Simon.

‘Have you thought what you would live on?’ I asked. ‘Every penny goes with the house. It has to.’

‘We’d get by, Mums. That doesn’t matter. Why don’t you write to Aunt Jane? Don’t let her push Gavin at you—he’s an oaf. Fiona’s the one to go for.’

‘She can’t be more than sixteen.’

‘Eighteen more like. In fact, don’t write to Aunt Jane. Write to Fiona direct. Invite her over. Offer her a job for the summer.’

‘I’ll think about it.’