Peter Dickinson - Death of a Unicorn

He flapped out.

‘Stand-off,’ murmured Mr Duggan.

‘More like partial victory,’ said Mr Smith. ‘Jack has surprising resources of will. This is decidely interesting.’

Mr Duggan had started to read my paragraph. He looked up and glanced at me.

‘Decidedly,’ he said.

He went on reading. My heart was thudding absurdly. Whatever had happened between Mr Todd and Mrs Clarke, I realised that he hadn’t been only pretending to like what I’d written. Readers were going to learn to pick it out. That meant next week, and the week after . . . I felt I was living through one of the most crucial moments in my life.[1] It seemed desperately important that Mr Duggan should like it too, but he gave no sign. When he’d finished he looked up.

‘Did I hear right, what Jack called you?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

He nodded, apparently unimpressed, which was good, then picked up a pencil and made a couple of small marks on what I’d written.

‘She’d know there was a “c” in “luscious” wouldn’t she?’ he said. ‘She’d try and get it in somewhere.’

‘Oh, yes, I suppose so.’

‘What about a name?’

‘She’s based on a girl called Veronica.’

‘Libel. Ronnie, name for an illiterate young socialite. -ite, not -ist.’

‘Petronella.’

‘All right,’ I said.

‘You sound doubtful.’

‘I expect I’ll get used to it.’

‘We go to press Monday, so you’ve time to change your mind unless Bruce decides to order special type for the heading.’

‘What do you think? I mean, is it all right? Mr Todd seemed to like it.’

‘Jack’s got to keep his job,’ said Mr Smith.

I didn’t mind. He hadn’t read it. Mr Duggan had gone back to writing on the sheet of paper. He folded it carefully and put it in a brown manilla envelope, which he weighed in his hand.

‘I’ll pass an opinion when you’ve done six of them,’ he said, and tossed the envelope into a wire tray on the roll-top.

[1] I have just looked the paragraph up. There is nothing to it at all. Mysterious business. Once it must have been impregnated with the odour of its time, now clean gone. This is always the case. Writing my own books about the Edwardian period I have to mark each page with some pungent signal—a brand name, song, form of speech, public person or event in the news—in an attempt to bring the odour of period to life. Cheating, of course. Few people living in a period notice such things. Their real sense of their time is as unrecapturable as the momentary pose of a child.

III

It was a real job. I adored it from the very beginning.

This wasn’t only because it was new and interesting, though it was. But I’d had my row with Mummy, worse than I could have imagined, about taking it on, and for the first time ever I’d won. So it seemed like the beginning of freedom.

She hadn’t minded me working for Mrs Darling, because that wasn’t a real job; it certainly didn’t pay enough for me to be able to afford to live anywhere except at Charles Street. If anyone thinks it peculiar that the heir to a vast house and estate in Leicestershire, and another house in Mayfair, should have needed to think about things like that, all I can say is that Cheadle ate almost everything[1], and the rest was taken up with what Mummy thought important, such as bringing my sisters out. I had an allowance from the Trust till I was twenty-five, when I was due to inherit, but the Trustees were completely under Mummy’s thumb. She could stop it whenever she wanted. In fact she threatened to when I said I was going to Night and Day until I explained that Mr Todd was going to pay me as much as my allowance and Mrs Darling put together. I could actually have afforded (just) to rent a tatty little room in Pimlico or somewhere and move out of Charles Street altogether. I could have got away.

Of course Mummy’s argument was that the job was ‘completely impossible’ because of the cartoons of naked models and blondes in bed and so on, but in a funny way she made me feel as though the real reason was that she had magically known all along that this was going to happen, and that was why she’d banned the magazine—like Sleeping Beauty’s parents trying to avert her doom by banishing anything sharp from the palace. My finding the door in the alcove at Fenella’s dance had been like Sleeping Beauty discovering the room at the top of the turret with the old fairy at her spinning-wheel. She gave in all of a sudden. At one moment she was saying that she was going to have me made a ward of court, and the next she was ringing up Mrs Darling and apologising for my letting the old hag down. I started work next morning.

In theory my desk was the one outside Mrs Clarke’s room, but there was nothing for me to do there except answer the telephone when she was out. She had her job totally organised and didn’t need or want any help with it, so in practice I spent most of my time in the middle room with Tom and Ronnie. I read the articles sent in by casual contributors and weeded out the hopeless ones; I read the rough proofs from the printers and learnt how to correct them; I sorted the books that came in for review on to the shelves behind Ronnie’s desk and kept his file of publication dates in order; I scissored and glued for Tom when he and Bruce Fischer were working out which articles and cartoons were going on to which pages of next week’s paper; and on Thursday mornings I lugged the mechanical elephant along to my desk and wrote another Petronella paragraph.

‘It was a lot harder this time,’ I said when I handed Tom my second piece with the magic letters ‘OK. JT’ scrawled across the top. He looked it through and nodded.

‘You’ll be needing to find a variation,’ he said. ‘Always the trouble with these jejune vocabularies. They weary the ear. You want another voice, for contrast.’

‘But I’ve hardly got going with this one,’ I said. ‘There’s a mass of things for her to do. Ascot and a Garden Party and Cowes and the Twelfth . . .’

‘The material’s there, no doubt. That’s never the problem. It’s the means.’

‘But provided there’s something new for her to rattle on about . . .’

‘All matter is illusion. Only the Word—cap doubleyou—gives it reality, by allowing it to persist beyond the transient series of events which composed its apparent existence.’

‘Words have got to be about something, haven’t they, or they don’t mean anything?’

‘In this imperfect world. But I tell you, Mabs, when the trumpets sound for you and you come dripping from the river and shake the final impurities of matter out of your ears, the first sound you will hear will be the fine tenor voice of the Blessed Thomas Duggan celebrating the glory of God in a language infinitely rich in vocabulary and syntax but utterly purged of all gross content of meaning.’

‘I can’t wait.’

‘Meanwhile, look for an answering voice, a different kind of idiocy from that of this little idiot. Something worldly wise, perhaps.’

He tucked the paragraph in an envelope and flipped it into the wire tray. That, I suppose, was the moment at which Uncle Tosh began to come into existence, utterly out of keeping. Of course I cribbed parts of him from Nancy Mitford, and parts from things that Wheatstone had told me about my great-great-uncle. And I didn’t think I’d taken any notice of what Tom had said until the following Thursday when I had to think of something new in a hurry. I’d finished my paragraph but Mr Todd had a crony with him and Ronnie was interviewing a would-be reviewer in the middle room, so I was at my own desk, rejecting manuscripts, when Mrs Clarke came out.

‘Have you finished, my dear?’ she said. ‘May I please see?’