Peter Dickinson - Death of a Unicorn

‘I don’t know. I haven’t had time to get used to it, and I’m not going to this morning. I shall have to be off in ten minutes, Ronnie. I’ll tell you one thing, though. I simply don’t believe in Nazi art-hoards. People didn’t realise what that sort of thing was going to be worth. I know, because we have a phrase in my family about selling the Canalettos. We say it whenever some hideous expense crops up and we’ve got to find money to meet it, so I know what that sort of thing used to fetch. Mr B sometimes brought little objects back from his trips to Germany, and I think he may have sold quite a few at Sotheby’s and places, but we’re talking about hundreds of pounds, or thousands, not hundreds of thousands.’

‘Oh, I quite agree. You’ve got to remember that until the last year or so those people didn’t think they were going to lose the war. They might have got hold of a few bearer bonds, by way of insurance, but a corrupt middle-rank official, say, would be much more concerned to conceal what he was doing from the German authorities. He would cover his tracks by bureaucratic means. His loot would be shops and factories and houses and so on, absolutely valueless in 1946, but beginning to be worth something by the Fifties. Do you know, I think one might be able to construct quite a reasonable documentary out of all this. I wonder whether I have the energy.’

‘Of course you have. It would be terribly interesting.’

‘It would be particularly interesting, my dear Mabs, if you were to appear on it and tell the world in the discreetest of possible ways some of what you have just told me.’

‘Ronnie!’

‘Brood on it, my dear. As one who has some experience of public soul-baring, I can tell you that it can be a therapeutic experience. But we have drunk from the same cup and eaten from the same cold pie and I will keep faith. Kipling, in spite of everything, is still the only British writer fit to stand in the same room as Shakespeare. Oh, my dear Mabs, I am glad you came. I did my best to fight you off, you know. I should have known Fred was not much use as a Maginot Line against the Millett blitzkrieg.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. I’m going to put the fear of God into him on my way out. I am also going to arrange for regular meals to arrive for you for the next fortnight, and for a doctor to come and look at your foot.’

‘This is all quite unnecessary.’

‘It’s absolutely no use your making a fuss, Ronnie. I invariably get my way over things like this. Ask your friend Eric Martleby. I may say he is the kind of creature who arouses the tigress in me—a man who is barely fit to sell detergent powder trying to tell someone like you what he may and may not write! I’ve got to go now and watch this American chewing his way across a vast slab of beef and drinking black coffee with it, but next time I come you will be able to tell me exciting things about how you are getting on with your script.’

‘You make me feel like Boadicea’s husband.’

‘Don’t say that. I do feel a bit manic at the moment, but it’s only because I think you’ve told me what I wanted to know.’

‘Don’t put much trust in my lucubrations. Journalists have a notorious weakness for detecting non-existent conspiracies.’

‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ I said. ‘You sound a bit livelier too, if I may say so.’

‘Oh, yes, I think so. I’m glad you came, Mabs. I think I might very well give this thing a go.’

‘If you don’t you really are going to find out how it felt to be Boadicea’s husband. I’ll come and see you again in about a fortnight. I’ll give you a ring first.’

‘Right. Take it easy with Fred, Mabs. He’s not a bad chap.’

VI

I shall never get used to Americans. My mogul turned out to be one of the absurdly over-civilised sort. He had a Dutch-sounding name but ordered in easy Italian a very well-judged meal at a restaurant where he was obviously a valued customer, and so on. But still there was that sense of almost manic competitiveness about him, as though doing these things was a way of scoring points in an immensely elaborate game. I suppose we all do that more or less, but the difference is that in his culture they seem to regard the game as actually winnable, whereas in ours it is more in the nature of a ritual, whose function, if any, we’ve somehow forgotten.

I didn’t mind. In fact, being of a competitive nature myself I took part with gusto and the meeting was going extremely well until, with no reference to anything we’d been talking about, something in my mind clicked. A silly little discrepancy. ‘He got money from the Jews, you know.’ But Mrs Clarke believed that B got his funds from the Kremlin. So how had my mother known? Oh, there were lots of possible explanations, but it would be nice to tidy it up and not leave it to nag away.

I smiled at my American, widening my eyes to acknowledge the elegance of his latest score, whatever it may have been, and returned to the arena with zest. I had to let him win in the end, of course, for business reasons. We were both perfectly aware of that, but he was a magnanimous victor.

After luncheon I telephoned Ronnie for Mrs Clarke’s address, then my agent to report on my luncheon and cancel my appointment with her for that afternoon, then Cheadle to say I would miss supper and be late home. A traffic warden, pad at the ready, was approaching my car when I reached it, marvellous omen. In fact the whole day seemed to be going with a cohesive impetus in my favour, and the thing was to let it take me, to surf the wave of good fortune. I had turned out to be rather good at surfing, thirty years ago.

You do not have much time to meditate on a surf-board, but in the lull of driving down to Haywards Heath it struck me that my behaviour was quite uncharacteristic of the person I am now. My ostensible reason for not checking with Mrs Clarke to see whether she was in was that I didn’t want to have to cope with a very deaf and elderly person on the telephone, or to seem to make too much of my visit. It was better to turn up and pretend to have been in the neighbourhood, then see how the land lay. I was at least partly aware that this was only a pretext to myself and that I was for some reason acting in a manner which would have been quite normal for the girl who worked thirty years before on Night and Day. Certainly I felt quite light-hearted as I drove, though I now wonder why I failed to perceive that the sense of urgency, of the wave rolling onwards, must, though it felt like something happening outside me, really indicate a subconscious compulsion, a foreknowledge of the shore-line I was riding towards on that slowly darkening afternoon.

I started to wonder about Ronnie’s theory. Not whether it was true, but whether it mattered. Certainly it mattered that the money which he paid for the repairs to the Banqueting Hall seemed to have come from the sale of Halper’s Corner, and so morally and legally had belonged to B. No doubt the plantation had had a lot of misery and wickedness in its past, but the filter-beds of the generations had washed it clean. There was no taint now. The same could not be said of B’s other finances. Those horrors had happened well within my lifetime. What did I feel about that? If it had been anyone else, perhaps . . . But he was like a boy who has unearthed pirate gold. As he carries the jar of ducats home he isn’t expected to think of the decks slopping with blood and the screams of the women in the cabins. There has been a break, and the coins belong to no one. So though that money may have paid for my year of happiness, and therefore in a sense helped to shape me into what I am now, the awareness of where it had ultimately come from didn’t seem to tarnish the afterglow.

The house was one of a row lining a wide undulating road, neither town nor country. A dark brick bungalow with an over-imposing roof-line, which made it look as though a two-storey house had been bodily shoved into the ground, leaving only the upper floor visible. I rang the bell and was answered by a screaming klaxon. I remembered Ronnie had said she was very deaf. There was no answer. I rang two or three times and then started to peer through windows. I tried the side-door in a narrow alley. It opened into a kitchen which showed obvious signs of recent use. Encouraged, I went out again and on down the alley, hoping to be able to attract Mrs Clarke’s attention at one of the windows that side.