Peter Dickinson - Death of a Unicorn

‘It’s been a good day,’ I said. ‘I thought we’d have some champagne.’

‘Any excuse, Fiona,’ said Simon. ‘It’s her Achilles heel. Good days we celebrate, and bad days we need cheering up.’

‘It happens about once a month,’ I said. ‘Even with Ronnie’s gadget. I think I’ve been fantastically abstemious.’

‘Is there another glass?’ said Fiona. ‘So I can take some to Granny?’

‘I’ve only put one bottle to chill.’

‘Just a mouthful, Aunt Mabs.’

‘Oh, all right.’

When she came back she said, ‘There’s something I wanted to ask you, Aunt Mabs. I don’t get it. I was reading one of the old account books, 1952, all about repairing the roof on the Banqueting Hall. Gee, they did things cheap those days.’

‘I was paid four pounds a week for my first job,’ I said.

‘On a joke mag,’ explained Simon.

‘No, I got ten pounds for that. This was selling lampshades for a frightful old harridan in Beauchamp Place. I haven’t thought of her for years, thank heavens. What about the roof ?’

‘Where did the money come from?’

The question ambushed me.

‘How much?’ said Terry.

‘Round a hundred and forty thousand pounds,’ said Fiona. ‘All it says in the book is “Cheque”.’

‘Christ!’ said Simon. ‘That wasn’t cheap! That was money those days! We must have sold some Canalettos.’

‘It would say in the books,’ said Fiona. ‘It doesn’t.’

‘Are you OK, Mums?’ said Simon.

‘Nose trick,’ I said. ‘Always worse with champagne. No, for God’s sake don’t slap me—I can’t stand that. I’ll be all right.’

I prolonged my recovery while Fiona prattled on about her search through the account books. I had in fact no idea what transactions had taken place between B and my mother. I had got the necklace out of the bank and given it, to him. A few days later he had presented me with a cheque for a hundred and forty-eight thousand pounds, signed by a man I had never heard of. I had paid this into my account—oh, blessed days before the Tax Inspectors thought my statements worth inspecting—and written B a cheque for the same amount. He had said nothing at all and I’d had no wish to talk or think about it. I had bought my freedom, or so I believed. Until I found the necklace in the jigsaw box I assumed that he had paid the money to my mother. Afterwards I deliberately refused to brood on any of the events surrounding his death. I wrote down what I knew and put it in a drawer. Since nothing could bring him back, nothing that had happened to take him away mattered any more. I put it out of my life. My mother never mentioned it either. It was evident that he had kept the necklace, perhaps always intending to give it back to me when the affair was over. It had, so I thought, cost him nothing, and he may merely have wished to gratify me by letting me believe I had made the sacrifice for him, and gratified himself by the knowledge that I had thought it worth it. He had presumably decided that my mother was not after all in a position to do him any damage, and it was certainly unlike him to allow himself to be blackmailed.

‘Honestly I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Mummy ran everything. I didn’t inherit till I was twenty-five and I’d married Mark before that, and there was his career, and then Sally. I didn’t really start taking an interest till you came along, Simon. I imagine we must have sold something. It wouldn’t be Canalettos, because they’re all still there and, besides, the art market didn’t start exploding for another ten years or so. You’d have had to sell a couple of dozen to get anywhere near that.’

‘Besides, that kind of thing would be in the books, uh?’ said Fiona.

‘Do you really want to know?’ I said.

“Oh, I guess not. Only curiosity. I’m only looking through them to try to spot the odd-ball items that might crop up again and tie a knot in our programme, but I keep getting fascinated. I asked Granny and she just said, “That horrible man”.’

‘The architect I should think,’ said Simon. ‘She was always fratching with architects.’

‘But you should have seen the way she smiled, Aunt Mabs. I guess she won the argument.’

A few days before Fiona left I chose a suitably vile morning and walked with her down the avenue between the statues of the Enemies of Zeus. I noticed some fiend of a visitor had climbed up and put a fruit-flavoured yoghurt pot into the upstretched hand of Tantalus. We rounded the fountain and stood looking up at the house while the wind thumped my umbrella. The sky was all fast-moving, sagging clouds and the squalls came and went unpredictably. The leaves of the limes had barely begun to yellow but even so the wind was stripping the first few away. The spray from the fountain whipped to and fro. At the far end of the avenue the portico stood unmoved.

‘Take a good look,’ I said. ‘Pity it isn’t November.’

Fiona stared earnestly. I had kept my inward vow and not once hinted at my intentions, but we had by then reached such a level of rapport that I was sure she knew.

‘Looks kind of like it was waiting to eat someone,’ she said.

‘We used to call it the stone ogre look. Your mother and I, I mean. I can’t see it any more. It just looks grim and enduring now. Remember to tell her I showed you, won’t you, darling?’

‘Right.’

IV

Fiona addressed her weekly letters to my mother, with a short covering note for me. They were several pages long and full of things my mother couldn’t possibly grasp, about her own doings and those of all her friends, but they were an extraordinary help. At first I simply re-read the latest one to my mother morning after morning until the next arrived, but as soon as a stock built up I read the old ones, for variety. They were not in any normal sense good letters; the child could neither spell nor punctuate and had no literary talent whatever, no ability to give the feeling of a place or personality or event, and a rather limited vocabulary. She simply rattled unselfconsciously on, not writing down because she was addressing a senile mind, not trying to maintain a false cheerfulness. If she was bored or unhappy she said so. I was amused (and encouraged) to notice that she had stopped calling her frequent arguments with Jane ‘fights’ and had adopted the Millett word ‘fratches’.

One week when no letter came—Fiona had had flu, it turned out—I thought of faking one but didn’t, mainly because it wasn’t worth the trouble, but also because I felt it would be a betrayal of Fiona to do so. Besides, I had an instinct that however accurately I did it my mother would somehow know. For the first time in my life I was feeling something that might be called fondness for my mother, beginning from our shared affection for my niece but existing, however vaguely, in its own right. Though she always complained and often wept at Fiona’s continued absence, I found these manifestations more tolerable than I would have six months earlier, because I could sympathise with them. Moreover, my mother maintained the improvement in her grasp of the world which Fiona had produced while she was with us, and I felt it my duty to both of them to try and see that this was at least not let slip. It was still impossible to hold anything like a coherent conversation (would I have welcomed that, I wonder?) but she usually called me by my own name and understood that Wheatstone was dead, and so on. She was more selective about what she watched on television, prodding her remote-control switch and rocketing from channel to channel until something promising showed up. She enjoyed American serials most, not the shoot-outs but the emotional traumas, sometimes displaying a definite understanding of the causes of that week’s row, and even remembering parts of what had happened the previous week. I forced myself to watch with her so that we should have something to talk about—duty or no duty I could not bring myself to chat, as Fiona did, about my own doings.