Peter Dickinson - Death of a Unicorn

I gave her the page. She read it and sighed.

‘I do wish you liked her,’ I said.

It was true. I really longed for Mrs Clarke to approve. I think it was because she reminded me more and more of Nanny Bassett, who had meant so much to me until Mummy had suddenly fired her while I was away at school. They were both people you couldn’t help liking, whatever they did or said, and Nanny had the most extraordinary opinions about people and things, which nothing could persuade her out of. They both had quiet but extremely strong personalities—Nanny was one of the very few people at Cheadle who regularly stood up to Mummy. And they both, in Nanny’s words, ‘knew how to behave’. This wasn’t the same thing as having good manners, or rather it meant having inner good manners, having standards, however dotty, and sticking to them without fuss. I felt Petronella didn’t conform to Mrs Clarke’s standards. She wasn’t meant to, but that’s not the point.

‘It isn’t that, my dear,’ she said. ‘I have agreed with Mr Todd that what you write is his concern, but I think it my duty to tell you that Mrs Brett-Carling is dying.’

‘She can’t be! I mean Corinna was talking last night . . .’

‘Corinna does not know. Her mother is determined not to spoil her season. She’s an extremely brave woman. But it is a fact.’

‘That’s awful!’

I looked through what I’d written, feeling sick. The dance had been held at the Dorchester, which Petronella had christened ‘The Mourg’, and I’d let her pretend she’d been to a funeral there. I knew Corinna wouldn’t mind—she’d have given anything to be back with her horses in Worcestershire—and I’d worked in a lot of little undertakery details which I thought were funny in a bad-taste way—but not if you knew Corinna’s mother was dying. She’d always looked a bit death’s-doorish, beautiful, glassy-pale, dazed.

‘I must ask you not to say anything to Corinna, or any of your friends,’ said Mrs Clarke. ‘Very few people know.’

‘Of course,’ I said, without thinking about it. ‘Hell! What am I going to do? I went to Minna Tully’s cocktail party, but I didn’t make mental notes. Hell!’

‘Mrs Turner is looking after Minna,’ said Mrs Clarke.

‘There was a crowd of arty-hearties there. I suppose Petronella . . . Do you think I could say anything about Mrs Turner taking fees for bringing people out?’

‘I think it would be most unwise.’

‘You mean after what happened to Veronica Bracken? But that wasn’t Mrs Turner’s fault. She had flu. And Veronica really was incredibly stupid. You know there was a story going round that she put her head in an oven but she didn’t realise it had to be gas.’

‘But it was gas,’ said Mrs Clarke. ‘The concierge found her just in time. That was just after the abortion.’

‘Abortion? But Veronica wouldn’t know how . . .’

‘Mrs Turner would.’

She didn’t snap or raise her voice. She didn’t need to.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t realise.’

‘Of course you didn’t. Tell me, has it ever struck you, when you go to these parties and dances, what it must be like to be one of the fathers?’

‘Not specially.’

‘A man still in his own mind in the prime of life, having to sit and watch the girls swing past in the arms of their partners, all those clear young eyes, those bare shoulders, when his own wife . . . You understand?’

‘But everyone said it was a chap in the Coldstream.’

‘It was a man old enough to be your father, a director of several companies. One of those companies was a tin-mining business. During that year they opened a new seam which turned out to be unexpectedly rich, and the value of the shares went up to seven times what they’d been. Mrs Turner spends her winters in Monte Carlo. She played in the high-stake room that year, which she cannot normally afford to.’

‘Golly! Are you sure?’

‘I know a very great deal about the people I write about, my dear. I need to, so that I do not make mistakes. And I must tell you that you would be doing society a serious disservice if you were to write anything which might make other parents feel that Mrs Turner was a suitable person to help bring their daughters out.’

‘Golly! How do you know all this?’

‘I keep my ears open. I think about it. My husband was a very clever man, so I have friends in the City who tell me where the money is coming from. Nothing can be done without money. You see, my dear, though I know you and your friends probably laugh at it, I happen to believe that what I do is extremely important, so I take it seriously.’

‘I know you do. They only sort of half-laugh, Mrs Clarke. They always turn there first . . . I wonder what’s happened to Veronica. Modelling, I suppose, though I don’t think I’ve seen her picture anywhere. She’s really incredibly pretty.’

‘That type of looks does not always wear. Didn’t I see—was it that Bournemouth paper?—a Flight Lieutenant—the name will come to me—not Suarez, but something foreign-sounding . . .’

She slipped back into her room. For somebody so dignified she had a habit of moving around very unobtrusively. You could easily imagine her picking up snippets of gossip because people didn’t notice she was there. I went and stood in her doorway and watched her unlock the top drawer of her commode and begin to walk her fingers along one of the racks of filing-cards that filled it. My telephone rang. I went back to my desk and answered it in the bright-girl-on-the-make voice I was developing for the purpose.

‘Cynthia Darke’s suite.’

‘Is she now?’ said Tom’s voice. ‘On whom?’

‘I’m terribly sorry. I’m going to have to do it again. It seems I’ve trodden on a sort of social land-mine. Can it wait till the next messenger?’

‘I will hold the roaring presses. Doing anything for lunch, Mabs?’

‘Rewriting Petronella, by the look of it.’

‘You’ve got an hour. I was thinking you ought to see the inside of a Fleet Street wine bar. Purely as part of your training, mind.’

‘Provided we go dutch.’

‘I was willing the thought into your mind. Think you’ll have done by one-thirty?

‘Oh, God, I hope so.’

I put the telephone down. Mrs Clarke was in the doorway, reading a filing-card with the help of her hand-held eyeglasses.

‘Seago, of course,’ she said. ‘Flight Lieutenant Paul Seago. Not foreign at all, only Norfolk.’

The card seemed to have a hypnotic effect on her. She stared at it like a hen on a chalk-line. I thought of Veronica Bracken, the first time I’d noticed her, at Queen Charlotte’s Ball three years ago. I was feeling nervous and ugly. White doesn’t suit me, and Mummy had decided the occasion was important enough to get the real sapphires out of the bank, the first time I’d worn them in public. I lined up in the famous queue next door to a blonde child. She turned to me.

‘Isn’t this super!’ she whispered.

She flexed her bare brown shoulders like a cat in a patch of sun. Her hair shone. Her eyes were very dark brown. She seemed to be floating an inch above the floor . And within a year she’d had an abortion in Paris and put her head in a gas oven and been found just in time by the concierge, according to Mrs Clarke. And now she was going to marry Flight Lieutenant Paul Seago.

‘Have you got a card about me, Mrs Clarke? May I see?’

‘No, my dear. In any case I keep them in code. For safety, you know.’

‘Were you really at my parents’ wedding? I don’t mean that, but do you really remember it? You go to so many.’

‘It was the wedding of the year.’

‘I suppose so. I only remember my father a bit. I don’t feel as if I knew him. It’s so difficult to imagine them falling in love, and marrying, and so on, but here I am.’