Peter Dickinson - Death of a Unicorn

One evening I was reading proofs while we waited for Dallas to come on. I had turned the sound down so as to be able to concentrate while my mother fidgeted with her control switch. Suddenly she said in a strong, clear voice, ‘Absolutely no dress sense. When I took my girls to dances . . .’

I glanced up and saw it was an advertisement for toffee, which the manufacturers were trying to invest with snob appeal. I’d seen it before. Dancers at an Ivor Novello-ish ball twirled past the camera. In a few seconds the lens would zoom in on an ambassadorial figure, all ribbons and orders, who would push aside a vast offering of caviare and then surreptitiously take a packet of the advertiser’s toffee from his coat-tail pocket. As it is important to respond to my mother’s remarks but there is no need to maintain coherence I said the first thing that came into my head.

‘Do you know, I think Mrs Clarke may still be alive.’

‘Nonsense. I wore one of her own hats at her funeral.’

We had all suffered mildly from my mother’s conviction that the daughter of a previous Cheadle head-gardener could make us more becoming hats in her little shop in Bolsover than anything we could buy in Sloane Street, and at a tenth of the price.

‘Not that one,’ I said. ‘I’m talking about the Mrs Clarke who used to write “The Social Round” in Night and Day. She signed herself Cynthia Darke.’

‘Tiresome woman.’

Really she was alarmingly her old self this evening. Like many people of vehement opinions she had never had more than a few words to express them. Condemnation ran a gamut from ‘unreliable’ through ‘tiresome’ to ‘horrible’.

‘She was extremely kind to me,’ I said.

‘Expected me to sign a photograph,’ said my mother. ‘Of all things!’

‘You were almost the only countess she hadn’t got.’

‘Ridiculous. Useless woman. I admit she told me about that horrible man being up to no good on that island. Minnie was so interested. He got money from the Jews, you know.’

She turned directly towards me and gave me the old witch-smile. It was like a story-book illustration which used to give one nightmares as a child, why one can no longer perceive.

‘Do you mean Amos Brierley?’ I said.

Instantly she hid in the thickets of amnesia, letting her mouth sag open and her eyes blear, bringing senility deliberately on, though I could still sense a sharpness somewhere inside, watching me. Her fingers fumbled with the TV control and there were the towers of Dallas, cross-cut with the performers. I rose and turned the sound up, then went back to my chair. I found I was quivering, a faint, repulsive inward tremor. It happened that a few days before, looking for a container in which to pack some silver to send for repair, I had turned out a battered little cheap suitcase containing a jumble of Sally’s possessions dating from when she was about nine, blurred snaps taken with her first camera, crayons, scribbled exercise books, a broken mascot and so on. The pang of nostalgia over these trivial things had been most unpleasant, a blurred physical ache filling my throat and upper chest. I imagine almost all parents know the feeling. Now, I realised, I was going to have to go back to my own life with B and experience those sensations deliberately, over weeks or months, and perhaps with more painful intensity. It was necessary to know what had actually happened about the money for the roof and the whole nexus of events surrounding it. Not for my own sake, but for Fiona’s.

No secrets. I must hold nothing back. Whatever had happened thirty years ago might be irrelevant, but it might not.

Shortly before Wheatstone died he told me a secret that had been held back. The cause of the trouble in the Banqueting Hall roof had not been an accident or oversight, but a deliberate skimping on the part of the builders to save the price of new lead by re-using the old. My great-great-uncle’s overseer had been too friendly with the builders’ foreman and had allowed himself to be hoodwinked. If this had been realised in time the rafters and the elaborate plasterwork would have been saved, and the repairs of 1952 would have cost less than a twentieth of what they in the end did. Wheatstone had known something was wrong. He didn’t say as much to me, but I deduce it from the manner in which he insisted on telling me the story and the importance he gave it. Owing to some unexplained feud with the overseer he had decided that it was ‘not his place’ to attempt to warn my great-great-uncle. What this means, I have come to believe, is that in 1924 it had seemed necessary to Wheatstone that his enemy’s failure in duty should work itself out and be publicly demonstrated by the processes of decay. For the wrong to be then and there detected and put right, with no other damage done, would have been unsatisfying. Later, of course, his own failure must have troubled him, though still perversely mitigated by the general condemnation of his dead enemy. Telling me was a half-hearted attempt at confession.

I was not having any of that. No hidden rots handed on unbudgeted for. It seemed to me that B, despite not having sold the necklace, had paid my mother for the roof repairs, and then my mother had not, in his words, ‘stayed bought’. She had learnt something from Mrs Clarke (how? when?) and had passed it on to Minnie Trenchard-Yates.

And Minnie was dead. So was Sir Drummond, of a heart-attack in a Kensington brothel. It had been hushed up but I knew about it because, indirectly, it had been important to Mark’s career: two members of the government had been in the house at the same time and had resigned soon after ‘for personal reasons’, one of those minor tremors that foreshadowed the end of the Macmillan era. Mark had got his first ministerial job in the subsequent reshuffle. It had been the period of the first ‘sick jokes’. I remember wondering whether Bruce Fischer had begun to play necrophilic variations on his single theme.

My mother had told Aunt Minnie something because she wanted it passed on to Sir Drummond. Aunt Minnie, shrewd as anyone behind her sugary manner, would have had her own reasons. She would have been aware of Sir Drummond’s blondes and prepared to tolerate them, provided he changed them frequently. But the one I had actually met in his company had struck me as something of a sticker. Though Aunt Minnie would not have cared for that, a direct counterattack would have been far from her style. She would have been more likely to embark on a series of gentle sappings, one of which could well have been to tell Sir Drummond something she had learnt about B, something which, as a representative of the City’s financial probity, he would have to act on. It would not just be a case of Aunt Minnie using his public duty to remind him of his private duty; she would also have manoeuvred him into letting down a fellow-member of that vague club of men who kept women, breaking the sense of mutual support and thus undermining Sir Drummond’s own confidence. It would all have been no more than a minor tunnelling in Aunt Minnie’s whole campaign—a campaign in which, to judge by the circumstances of Sir Drummond’s death, she had succeeded all too well. I wondered what had become of the blonde, poor thing.

For a moment my attention was caught by the screen, at which I had so far been gazing unseeing. Two of those mysteriously implausible beauties drawled hate-words at each other. My mother was rapt by the conflict, all on the surface, visible, explainable.

Mrs Clarke had told her something about B’s doings on Barbados. (But when had they met again? Surely they couldn’t have got that far at the Uncle Tosh party?) I had been aware from the first that B had been engaged in some kind of financial jugglery to do with the Halper’s Corner estate and the hotel in the bay, and had guessed from his obsession with the subject that he was trying to use it to evade the currency control regulations. Mrs Clarke, keeping her ears open as she used to say, might well have picked up a rumour on one of her West Indian expeditions. Or she might have written directly to some contact and asked—her file-card on B had been crammed with her coded writing when I last saw it. It was peculiar how vividly that scene in her office suddenly came back to me, though I had barely thought of it for thirty years. It was all written down in a manuscript somewhere, and locked away. I decided I’d better have a look through it and see whether there was anything in it I’d forgotten which might help me now . . .