Peter Dickinson - Death of a Unicorn

I’d been out twice with Mr B since the opera, to a private dinner given by a rich Greek at Claridge’s and to a weird evening in a huge white villa near Virginia Water where some of us played vingt-et-un for buttons in one room while next door they were playing chemmy with hundred-pound chips. I guessed that us button-players were there so that we could give evidence if there was a police raid that we hadn’t been playing for money, and to delay things a bit so that they had time to hide the equipment in the other room. All three evenings Mr B had been very kind to me, rescuing me from bores, introducing me to people who weren’t bores and telling me juicy gossip about them afterwards; he’d listened to what I’d said, too, and seemed amused. Supper after the opera had been oysters and champagne and I’d been thinking, ‘Oho, now there’ll be his new Bernard Buffet he wants me to see,’ when he’d said he’d got some work to do and asked if I’d mind if the chauffeur took me home.

This evening was not like any of those. It was work all through. The magazine. He’d owned it for seven weeks, giving each department a shake in turn. There was a new advertising manager, three men had been sacked from Circulation and one from Accounts, and we’d got a new contract with our printers which they were rather sulky about. He’d left Editorial till last, apart from getting me my job. Now it was going to be our turn, and he was using me as a kind of spy, to tell him about everything before he made his move.

It was extremely awkward. From his point of view, I owed him my job and I was obviously loving it, so why shouldn’t he get something back? Besides, we all knew, everyone knew, that something had got to be done. I suppose I’d known it even when I only used to read the magazine in the hairdresser’s. There was something dreary about it, something that made you feel mentally constipated. Now that I was on the inside I’d discovered that a lot of the articles and so on were actually pretty clever, pretty tricky to write, but that didn’t stop them being dreary. The opposite if anything. They were like an acrobat doing incredibly difficult stunts which everyone’s seen too often. The circulation was going down and down. Tom said he’d realised the writing was on the wall when his cronies stopped talking about seeing the magazine in the club and started talking about seeing it in the dentist’s. We were all in a way longing for something to happen.

But that didn’t make it any easier being a spy. It wasn’t just because I liked the people I was spying on. I didn’t, not all of them. Bruce Fischer, for instance. Bruce was Art Editor, a big, doughy, blue-chinned man who wore half-transparent nylon shirts which let you see his string vest and hairy chest. A classic edger-up. Only that morning he’d edged me the whole length of the make-up table until I’d used the Gloy brush to write ‘No’ on his nylon shirt. He’d lost his temper. He was the one who drew the cartoons of the blondes in bed with sugar-daddies. It was a sort of tradition. Right back in the Thirties, in the very first issue, there’d been a terribly daring picture like that and Bruce was still doing them. They seemed to be popular. Readers wrote in with new twists. I thought they were unspeakably dreary, but would I have liked them more if I hadn’t thought Bruce was a pretty unpleasant person?

Or Jack Todd? Mr Clarke had appointed him just before the war when the magazine was almost on the rocks, but it was saved by Adolf Hitler. Apparently wars are marvellous for the written word. Ronnie’s theory was that whenever civilisation is heading for the rocks everyone tries to reassert its values by doing the most civilised thing they can think of, like going to Myra Hess concerts in the National Gallery, but especially by settling down for a good read. Even so Jack must have had a pretty exhausting war and now he seemed almost like an editorial zombie some of the time, just going through the motions, laughing that awful laugh, buying dreary articles by writers he’d known when they were brilliantly promising, and so on. But then he’d hit a good patch, come up with a dozen fresh ideas, spot new talent . . . me, for instance. He’d liked Petronella, hadn’t he? And he was dotty about Uncle Tosh. He’d been so keen on their visit to the opera that he’d made me stretch it out to a whole page in the proper part of the magazine with an illustration by Sally Benbow, and that happened most weeks now. I couldn’t help thinking that Jack was a good editor, really, could I?

And Tom? And Ronnie? Whom I did like, who treated me as a real person, junior member of the boys’ gang? Who’d taken my side when Bruce had lost his temper—not that Ronnie didn’t make the odd bit of accidental-seeming contact now and again . . .

I was worried about both of them, for opposite reasons. Ronnie ran the review pages and wrote the parliamentary sketch. He knew a fantastic amount about what was going on. He could always tell you which ministers Mr Churchill was prepared to listen to and which made him pretend to go gaga the moment they opened their mouths and things like that, but somehow when he wrote it down it came out drab. Tom was the other way round. He was brilliant at noticing the surface of life, what people were wearing and eating and so on, and he had a lovely easy way of writing, but he wasn’t remotely interested in what was going on beneath the surface or why things happened. If he wanted to know whether the Viet Minh were on our side or theirs, for instance, he would have to ask Ronnie. I was specially worried about Tom because somehow I sensed that Mr B wouldn’t be interested in what he did.

I liked Tom most of all. I had decided, tentatively, that he was ‘queer’. Powdering one’s nose before a dance of course one gossiped about the men who’d been in the dinner party and who were therefore going to provide most of one’s partners for the rest of the evening. All of them would have been to one of the big public schools, and as most of the girls had brothers, quite a bit of information got around. On the whole one welcomed the queers. They tended to like dancing and do it well. They noticed what one wore. They talked more amusingly. They weren’t possessive. Above all they didn’t behave as though they were going out to bat for the Men’s First XI in the great game of sex, all arrogance and nerves, in varying proportions but just as tiresome whatever the mixture. I’d known one of these queers since childhood as he lived only three miles from Cheadle and got asked about a lot, despite having been sacked from Harrow, because he was a good tennis-player. But even he, one vaguely assumed, was going to grow out of it.

Tom (if I was right about him) was not. This made him seem different from anyone else I’d known. And then there was the danger, the daring, involved in that way of life. Only a fortnight before the supper at Maidenhead a well-known playwright had been sent to prison after being found in the arms of a guardsman under some bushes by the Serpentine. Jack Todd had become almost hysterical with excitement at the news, chain-laughing, thrilled by the man’s downfall, derisive of the hypocrisy of public life, but obviously inquisitive as a small boy and shocked as a great-aunt. Did he know about Tom? Was he in some way getting at him? Tom hadn’t seemed to notice but Ronnie had become very jumpy and tried to shut Jack up. Later he’d told me, ‘Jack’s got it in for old Tom. He needs him. Tom’s the flywheel, keeping the machine running when the engine’s off. But Jack will do all he knows to stop Tom becoming editor when his own time’s up. In fact he’ll hang on to that chair till he keels over.’

Now, how much of this could I tell Mr B? Of course I longed to tell him everything, to show how bright I was, how at home in my new adult world. Only I guessed he wouldn’t be all that impressed, so I stuck to what actually went into the paper. We were talking about ‘By the Way’. This was a series of unconnected paragraphs at the start of each week’s paper, beginning with a phrase like ‘We notice that . . .’ and going on to be ironic or witty or lightly sentimental about whatever Tom claimed to have noticed. He wrote most of them. They looked as easy as pie. You didn’t realise till you’d tried that they were incredibly difficult to get right. I was explaining this when Mr B interrupted.