Death of a Unicorn Page 13

  I didn’t actually try to find anyone to go to the theatre with. The last thing I felt like was watching a new musical, but I went because I’d told him I would. My taxi had one of those journeys you sometimes get, slishing through the April drizzle with all the lights green and magical gaps opening in the traffic to let you through, so I reached the theatre far too early. It was the Players, friendly and shabby. B preferred that sort of event to big Shaftesbury Avenue first nights. He liked to feel he might be in at the start of something interesting. At least it meant I didn’t feel quite so conspicuous unescorted and with an empty seat beside me.

  I was pretending to read the programme and wondering whether I would see him again when the rest of my row filled up with a dozen people arriving together. A large man settled beside me.

  ‘Hello, Mabs,’ he said. ‘Alone?’

  It was Mark Babington.

  He sounded cheerful, relaxed, friendly. He told me that he’d put one per cent of the backing into the play and had brought some friends along to see that it got off to a good start. Afterwards he insisted on my joining the celebration party.

  ——

  I let myself in at about one in the morning. There was always the faint, faint chance that B had had to cancel his flight or something, and in any case I wanted to sleep in our bed. No luck. His travelling case was gone, and his shaving things, and his light overcoat. The jigsaw had been picked up from the floor and placed in the middle of the table. My heart went small and cold as I looked at it. The mild alleviation of misery that had come from drink and company and the infectious euphoria of what was obviously going to be an enormously successful show slid away. There would be a message inside the box. Business arrangements, the rent for my flat and so on. He might say ‘Thank you’ but not ‘I love you’. He did not think like that.

  It was better to get it over. It always is.

  The box felt heavier now, its rattle muffled. When I opened it I saw the jigsaw pieces were still there, but all huddled into one end. I noticed one printed with a milk-white hoof. The other end of the box was wedged tight with tissue paper. I picked it out and dropped it wad by wad on the carpet. Didn’t he see I’d much rather not have anything, least of all some expensive gewgaw? He might not love me, but I loved him. I didn’t need paying off, for God’s sake! By the time I came to the central package I’d worked myself into a muddled frenzy. On the surface, rage. Beneath, panic. With a swoop of relief I saw the envelope with his gift in it.

  It was an ordinary long white envelope, the sort he used for his business letters. It had my name on it in his writing, and a short sentence heavily inked out. It had been sealed, opened again, and re-sealed with stamp paper. That was the point. If he’d been paying me off he might have bought the jigsaw and put his present in an unglamorous white envelope inside, but it would have been a new envelope. This was incredibly not like B. Messy. Dithering. Wrong. I forced my fingers to pull the envelope open.

  It was the sapphires, of course. Somehow I knew they were the real ones, although until that instant I had assumed that he had sold them for me, and I should never see them again. I slid them through my hands until I found Mary’s stone and turned it over. The little double cross was there, just below the point of the setting. I had to squint through my tears to see it. But he’d given me that enormous cheque for them, and I’d immediately paid it back for him to send to Mummy. I stood for ages, running the jewels from hand to hand like a rosary, filled to the brim with doom. At last I came part of the way back to my senses. I’d have to do something with the vile object. I refused to sleep with it under my pillow, not that near.

  The obvious place was the wall safe, where he let me keep the replica and my other bits of jewellery. It was hidden behind a row of encyclopaedias in the bookshelf. I knelt and lugged the volumes out. The wheels were already set at the combination and the door opened when I pulled it. It was almost empty, only my own various little boxes. Usually it was stuffed with documents, and a wad of five-pound notes, and a wash-leather bag full of sovereigns. My hands thought for me, automatically taking out the replica case. They were aware that if there was only one case then the real necklace must have it. But it was empty. This did not seem strange in the general daze of strangeness. My hands arranged the necklace into the velvet pits and grooves, put the case back in the safe, closed the door, spun the dials and shoved the volumes on to their shelf. I rose and returned to the table where I stood staring down at the muddle of pieces in the jigsaw box.

  He was sending me home. He had given me back the sapphires. He did not need my love.

  I went up to my own flat to try and sleep in that bed where I’d never slept before, strange, narrow, cold.

  They gunned him down in Rio.[1] It was thirty-six hours before I knew. He had flown off on the Wednesday evening. He was killed late on Friday afternoon, the small hours of Saturday morning our time. I was presumably asleep, or more likely lying awake and wondering whether I would get back to sleep and trying not to start again on the useless chain of thoughts trudging round and round in my head like prisoners in an exercise yard, about going home, and coping with Mummy, and Cheadle, and what was left of my life.

  Saturday morning I spent moving my things out of his flat, as far as possible wiping out any traces of my ever having lived there. I found the replica of my necklace, loose, among my nylons. This was as strange as anything in the whole business. I almost felt that somebody quite different must have been in the flat after he’d left, doing things he would never have done. Dithering, panicking, changing his mind. Not having the nerve to say a proper goodbye to me, to my face. He’d been going to take the replica with him, but then, while he’d been packing . . . And before that he’d been going to take the real necklace. It hadn’t been in the box when he gave it me. Only a message.

  I went and got the envelope out of the waste-paper basket and for the umpteenth time tried to read the scratched-out sentence. No use. He didn’t mean me to. . . . one person in the world who trusted you? It’s still true. So is the reverse. My doped mind jiggled the words to and fro. You trusted one person in the world. Who?

  Me.

  B had left me a message because I was the only person in the world he trusted. He had told me so. And then he had changed his mind and left me the sapphires instead. And gone off in a panic.

  I gave up thinking about it. There wasn’t any point any longer.

  In the middle of Saturday afternoon I spilt the jigsaw pieces out on to my desk upstairs and began. It had to be done. Then I could give it away to a hospital or something. It was a fiend, all muddy shades of green with little flowers, the paler tree, and a fair amount of brown fence. I kept the unicorn pieces to the end. It was a sort of magic, I suppose, as though the unicorn stood for him and when I pieced it together, whole, in its proper place, that would bring him back safe. Though not to me. I’d got about half done when I went to bed on Saturday, after midnight. Pieces of jigsaw floated to and fro under my closed eyelids, but then for some reason I slept solidly till morning. It was noon on Sunday and I had almost finished when the telephone rang.

  Jane.

  ‘Do you . . . Have you . . . Mabs, do you know?’

  ‘Know what ?’

  ‘Oh, darling!’

  ‘For God’s sake!’

  ‘Oh, it’s my . . . I can’t . . . Didn’t you get the papers?’

  ‘The newspapers?’

  ‘Yes, of course. The Sunday Times. Page One.’

  I had no idea what she was talking about. It crossed my mind that Mummy might have gone mad and assaulted the architect. Something to do with Cheadle anyway. Something right outside me.

  ‘They’re downstairs, I suppose. I’ll go and look now. I take it it’s bad.’

  ‘Yes. Oh, Mabs!’

  I rang off and hurried out, too tired and drained for worry. One of the Dolphin Square porters used to come round leaving the papers on tenants’ doormats, but naturally none were ordered for me upstairs and the other
people on my floor had already taken theirs in. I took the lift down to B’s. He liked several. They lay folded in a thick wad, but with the Times outermost, its main headline showing. PEACE MOVE IN KOREA. I opened the wad out and saw it at once, two-thirds of the way down the page. BRITON GUNNED DOWN IN RIO. There was a photograph. Photographs always made him look hideous.

  The world closed right in. It became a tight little cell holding nothing but me and the paper in my hands. The words joggled about as if I’d been trying to read them in a dream. It must be someone else with the same name and they’d got the wrong photograph. He wasn’t in Rio, he was in . . . ‘That general direction’. Of course he’d got enemies, but not the shooting kind, surely. Only when we’d said goodbye he hadn’t just been worried—he’d been frightened. Coming out of his hotel. Three men in a car. Sub-machine-guns. Stayed with us before, said the hotel manager, Sr Luis . . . No, he hadn’t. Not for a year, anyway. It must be someone else.

  A man was asking me a question. I turned away but a hand gripped my elbow. Two men. Some sort of visiting card.

  ‘I don’t want anything. Can’t you see? Not now.’

  He asked again. The question had B’s name in it.

  ‘He’s dead.’

  They had a key. They took me into the flat and went on asking me questions. I stared at them and shook my head. They didn’t seem real. Then one of them asked me my name. I told them, without thinking. They looked at each other.

  You get used to it with policemen and people like that. It’s a special sort of look when they find they’re dealing with somebody who might have friends or relations who could get them into trouble with their superiors if they aren’t careful. That look, and saying my own name, made a sort of crack in my cell wall. I was still alone, closed tight in, but I could hear the voices from outside now, and get a whisper back through.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled.

  ‘It must be a shock.’

  ‘Yes. I’ll try . . .’

  They let me make a pot of tea and then I sat down in the chair where I used to wait for B to come home. I could understand what they were saying now. I told them the answers but not anything else. They didn’t ask about the sapphires. While we were talking there was a ring at the door and one of them answered it. He came back as if nothing had happened and they went on with their questions. There was something about them not like ordinary policemen. They were quite old, solemn and fatherly. What they wanted to know about was B’s foreign trips. I told them he usually went to Germany and sometimes to Barbados. Once to New York. They were interested in the ivory statue and the other things like that but I could only tell them he’d brought them back from Germany. When they’d finished the senior one said, ‘Our caller was a journalist, Lady Margaret. For your own sake you’d better not talk to journalists. We’d prefer you not to in any case. My colleague will see that the coast is clear and then I think you’d better go up to your own flat and not come down here again.’

  ‘It’s bound to come out. We’ve been about together a lot.’

  ‘We’ll do our best to see that you don’t have any problems. Since you have been so frank with us I will tell you that this is not a normal criminal investigation.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He shook his head.

  I never finished the jigsaw. I rang Jane at Cheadle to tell her I was coming home. She was different now. She sounded cold and angry. She said she mightn’t be there, although it was the art-school vac. I had to beg her. My cell was closing in again.

  I packed a few clothes, took the jigsaw to bits and put it back in its box. I left my case at the porter’s lodge while I walked down to the river with the box under my arm. A bright spring afternoon, the tide just past full, the dirty water sweeping seaward below the Embankment wall. I put the box on the wall, opened the lid and took out a handful of pieces, but before I could throw them someone gripped my wrist and forced it back over the open box.

  It was a man, not one of the pair I’d talked to in B’s flat but another of the same sort, only younger. He let me spill the pieces back in the box and took it from me.

  ‘It was a goodbye present,’ I said. ‘It isn’t anything else.’

  He poked among the pieces, took some out one by one, held them up to the light and looked at them closely, back and front.

  ‘It’s the only thing I can do, you see,’ I said. ‘I haven’t got anything else. Nothing that means anything.’

  He closed the box, turned it over, looked carefully at the underneath.

  ‘Please,’ I said.

  He handed it back to me and watched while I opened it again. I took the pieces and threw them in handfuls on to the river. They seemed to vanish as they touched the surface. The water was their colour, dark green or cardboard. The few white bits of unicorn might have been flecks of foam.

  [1] This tawdry phrase is still my only means of thinking of the event. If I had been there at his side perhaps I could think of it (if I could think of it at all) in terms of the sudden clatter, the bewilderment, my own throat numb with screaming, the smashed body bleeding on to my dress. As it is, my contact is through a newspaper headline. I would rather have that than nothing at all.

  PART TWO

  1982–1983

  I

  Maxine was out of the office so I answered the telephone, using my old secretary-voice.

  ‘Cheadle Enterprises.’

  ‘Mabs?’ said the man after a slight pause. Nobody apart from my mother and sisters had called me that for twenty years.

  ‘Who is speaking?’

  ‘Ronald Smith.’

  ‘Would you mind telling me . . . Ronnie?’

  ‘Ah, it is you. Yes, Ronnie.’

  ‘How nice to hear from you after all these years. What can I do for you?’

  Maxine came in and I signalled to her to get ready to interrupt with the urgent-call-on-other-line routine. This was more excusable than it may sound. Ronnie had been something of a public figure in the Sixties as a television journalist specialising in Eastern Bloc politics but with a lucrative sideline in British traitors, most of whom he had known well. Then he had dropped rather suddenly out of sight, after a series of drunk-on-screen episodes.

  ‘May I come and talk to you, Mabs?’

  ‘Is it about money?’

  ‘Am I hoping to touch you, you mean?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. Most people seem to be.’

  ‘In my case, no. But I’m told you make a charge for interviews.’

  ‘Sometimes. If people are trying to use me and my name for their own profit I don’t see why I shouldn’t get a percentage.’

  ‘Ah. This may be one of those times, then. The thing is, Night and Day is coming up to its fiftieth anniversary and I’ve been commissioned to write the official history to celebrate the event. I leave it to you, with your extensive knowledge of the publishing industry, to decide how much profit there is likely to be in that.’

  One should never lift one’s eyes from the treadmill, never. His voice had aged, blurred, but the old hoot was still very marked and the half self-mocking pomposity of phrase. Also, I persuaded myself, the old eager inquisitiveness, the schoolboy’s delight in secret knowledge.

  ‘A bottle of champagne,’ I said. ‘Special price for you, Ronnie.’

  ‘Right. You’ll have to drink my share. I’m on the wagon.’

  Of course. The world does not stay the same.

  ‘A bottle of Perrier, then,’ I said. ‘Can you come here? My London visits are always crammed. Mondays are best. We’re open the rest of the week. Not this Monday. Not next, not . . . hell! I suppose I could cancel . . . What about Monday March the 15th? Come to luncheon, one sharp, and I’ll clear the afternoon till three. That ought to be enough. I was only on the paper ten months, remember.’

  ‘Months of some significance.’

  ‘I suppose so. It seems ages now. Give me your address and telephone number in case there’s a crisis. One o’clock Monday the 15th
. I’ll send you a pass for the gate and a map about parking and finding the garden-room door.’

  When I put the telephone down I saw Maxine watching me with a frown on her flat, plain face.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘You never know where you are with long-lost friends. I didn’t need rescuing after all.’

  ‘You sounded sort of different. Not you.’

  ‘Did I? Tell Pellegrini luncheon for two in the Satin Room on the 15th. No wine—a cup of some sort. Do a pass for Mr Ronald Smith and tell the gate to expect him. Ring Burroughs and tell them I can’t see that man . . .’

  ‘It’ll be the third time you’ve put him off.’

  ‘Sure? What am I doing before luncheon that day? All right, don’t ring Burroughs—it won’t hurt the man to wait ten minutes. Ring Mr Smith and ask him to make it 12.30. Warn him I may be a bit late even so. Oh, and check if he’s got any diet requirements. He must be nearer seventy than sixty . . . Good Lord!’

  And I had heard nothing of Tom for twenty years. I seldom looked at Night and Day but I knew Brian Naylor was still in charge—he’d got an OBE two years back, and he popped up on some television or wireless programme most weeks, the professional deflater, that flat voice still setting my teeth on edge. What on earth had made me think I wanted to see Ronnie?

  ‘Have you decided on a name for this new girl yet, Lady Margaret?’

  ‘No. Must I?’

  ‘I can always put it in later.’

  ‘I suppose I’d better or I shan’t start thinking about her properly. Let’s have a look at the file.’

  ‘I’ve got them all on the processor now.’

  ‘I knew I shouldn’t have bought that bloody thing.’

  It was what they call a mini-computer, in fact. Its chief function was supposed to be to keep track of the Cheadle accounts, if ever I and the accountants succeeded in agreeing how we wanted them kept. Meanwhile Maxine had taken it over. I went and stood behind her shoulder and watched the names ladder up the screen.