Death of a Unicorn Read online

  ‘I sell lampshades.’

  ‘For Mrs Darling in Beauchamp Place?’

  ‘They should have made her into lampshades herself.’

  He raised his eyebrows a millimetre. I thought I was getting used to him. He liked to seem to know everything, my name, the sort of shop someone like me might have a job in, and so on. And he liked to make the smallest possible gestures and still get his meaning across. It was a way of showing how powerful he was, inside. The eyebrow-raising meant that I’d got something wrong, though nobody who’d worked for Mrs Darling for five minutes could possibly have a good word to say for her. But before I could ask I heard a click and squeak from the door, then a distinct thud, then Mark’s voice calling my name.

  ‘Obstinate?’ said the man.

  ‘Pretty.’

  He smiled a different smile, thinning his lips so that I half expected a toad-tongue to flicker across them. He pointed to a place where a bookcase jutted from the inner wall. I slid over and tucked myself out of sight. Just like playing sardines at Cheadle. It struck me that I’d been hiding from Mark—versions of Mark—practically since I could walk, behind nursery curtains, in empty servants’ rooms along the bare top corridors, in cellars and stable lofts, and now at London dances.

  I heard the bolt click and the hinges whimper, and shut my eyes to strain for the voices. Mark’s, angry, my name in a question. Man’s flat murmur. Mark angrier still . . .

  ‘Two down,’ called a man at the table. Automatically I opened my eyes to look. One player was turned towards the door, shuffling a pack, looking smugly amused. His partner was dealing. My man’s partner was leaning back in his chair, trying to frown his way through the misplayed hand. Above their heads, between the two windows, rose a narrow pier-glass, black-blotched with age but still with enough good patches for me to be able to see Mark standing in the doorway. He looked straight into my eyes above the man’s bald scalp. Anger and the contrast with the black and white of his clothes made his large face seem bright scarlet. He spoke to the man, who turned, nodded to my reflection in the glass and turned back to Mark. As far as I could hear he used the same tone as before, only four or five words. Mark’s face changed. He took a half-pace back, as though the man had shoved him in the chest. The man shut the door but didn’t bother to close the bolt.

  ‘Two down, Brierley,’ called the bridge player again.

  ‘One moment,’ he said.

  I discovered I was quivering. A mixture of excitement and fright. Nothing much had happened. At any large dance there must be at least a dozen sticky moments like that when some girl is trying to get away from a man, but I felt as though I’d got sucked into something much more important. Mr Brierley topped up my glass without my asking. The cold patch effect was very strong. I thought he was going to tick me off for getting him caught out lying to Mark.

  ‘You’re a writer,’ he said.

  ‘Not really. Only beginning.’

  ‘You can explain that your friend interrupted me in the middle of offering you a job on my magazine.’

  ‘Did . . . Did I accept?’

  ‘Tomorrow afternoon, three o’clock, 83 Shoe Lane, Night and Day office. Ask for Mr Todd. You must make your own arrangements with Mrs Darling.’

  ‘Jane will stand in for me. Mrs D can’t tell us apart.’

  ‘Stay here as long as you wish. Don’t drink any more.’

  He went back to the table, looked through his hand and when his turn came called without sorting it. It wasn’t even his house—Fenella’s uncle was the one with his back to the door. But here he was, telling another guest what she could and couldn’t do in it. Not just because I was young, either. He would have said the same to anyone, though he wasn’t even somebody’s father, just here because he wanted to be, to play bridge. It was typical.[2]

  [1] Even now, after almost thirty years, not always.

  [2] Really? I wrote that nearly thirty years ago, but even then I was looking back on an earlier self. Did I really perceive in those first few minutes what kind of person B might be? Me, twenty, far too self-absorbed to be perceptive or objective about anyone, myself included? Wasn’t I, as I wrote, already reading back later knowledge? I cannot now tell, though I agree that B’s behaviour had been typical, from his casual kindness to pretty girls, or to men who took his interest for other reasons, to his flabbergasting public rudeness to people who’d done even less than poor Mark to offend him. I saw that sort of thing happen again and again during the ten months I was his mistress.

  II

  ‘Saw little Penny Millett looking sweet,’ I wrote, ‘and big sister Mabs (knew it wasn’t Jane because she was sporting the saphires) looking too too bored, poor darling.’

  I hit the typewriter as hard as I could, furious and disgusted. The machine looked and felt like a spare part for a mechanical elephant. Later I used to think that I should have had it shot and hung it up somewhere as a trophy, so that I could tell people how it changed my life. The dusty, drab-yellow room smelt of nerves and unemptied ashtrays. The hem of my stupid pencil skirt caught my calves when I tucked my legs back under my chair, the way I used to, so I’d hoicked it up round my thighs and the hell with creases. I re-read what I’d written, sick with disappointment. The machine was slower than my fingers and kept typing letters on top of each other. It had only put one ‘p’ in ‘sapphires’, for instance. I rolled the carriage back to type it in and then thought, ‘Why not? I don’t want this job anyway.’ I left the word as it was and instead I exed out ‘sweet’ and wrote ‘delish’. A picture of Veronica Bracken came into my mind, incredibly pretty, incredibly stupid. I pulled the paper out and rewrote the paragraph about Fenella’s dance in pure, illiterate debutese. The words seemed to flow straight out through my fingers without my thinking about them at all.

  I tugged my skirt down and minced along with maddening nine-inch steps to Mr Todd’s office. He was on the telephone and something the person at the other end had said had caused him to explode into a harsh, bellowing laugh. He took the sheet of paper from me and read it, still apparently listening to the telephone.

  ‘The spelling mistakes are intentional,’ I hissed.

  He nodded and went on reading and/or listening. A big man with the look of a horse which guesses it’s on its way to the knackers. Bloodshot brown eyes, skin loose over coarse bones, like a sofa whose stuffing has come adrift, huge quivering hands, cigarette smouldering between yellow fingers. Office a clutter, roll-top desk, shabby leather armchairs, newspapers on floor, originals of cartoons on walls.

  ‘Fine,’ he said, interrupting the quack of the telephone. ‘Get it on paper and bung it in, old boy. No, on spec, I’m afraid. I’ve got a new proprietor and I haven’t broken him in yet. No, don’t talk about it any more or it will die on you. Got a meeting now, but let’s have lunch—where the hell’s my diary? Bugger. You’ll have to ring Miss Walsh and fix a date. It’ll be good to see you.’

  He put the telephone down and shook his head.

  ‘Poor sod,’ he said. ‘Never be any use again.’

  He picked up another telephone.

  ‘Nellie? Fellow called Gerald Astley will ring and say I told him to fix a lunch. Fend him . . . Did I? Oh God, how awful! All right, I’ll see it through this time. Somewhere not too pricey. Oh, he’ll ring all right. Geralds never get the message.’

  He put the telephone down, looked me in the eye and brought out that ghastly laugh. Then he tilted his chair back and re-read what I’d written, dragging at his cigarette. I felt shy and nervous. Although I’d written it to show him what I thought of the job he seemed to be going to offer me, I felt it had come out really funny. I wanted him to like it, after all. Considering how he’d dealt with the man on the telephone he seemed to be taking a surprising amount of time. Perhaps, I realised, what he was really doing was thinking of a way of getting rid of me without offending Mr Brierley. Rather slowly he heaved himself to his feet and stood, still looking down at the paper.

  ‘All r
ight,’ he said. ‘Let’s see how far her ladyship’s jaw drops.’

  He rushed past me with a shambling Groucho stride. I hobbled behind and found him out in the corridor holding a swing door open. There was more corridor beyond, but quite different. The change was almost as sudden as the one when you went through the little door in the corner of the Banqueting Hall at Cheadle and found yourself in Wheatstone’s pantry. Mr Todd’s side of the swing doors had a battered, clubby, male feeling. Here there was a receptionist’s desk, unoccupied except for a bowl of tulips. White telephone. Photograph of Queen Mary, signed. Lime-green carpet. My stupid skirt and high heels belonged this side, in a way they didn’t on the other. Mr Todd knocked at a door with a painted porcelain handle and fingerplate, put his head into the room, said something, then held the door for me.

  The same, only more so. Smell of pot-pourri, pale pink walls, thick cream carpet, silk lampshades, little gilt chairs covered in ivory watered satin, painted escritoire—you couldn’t call it a desk, that would be rude—and commode. Signed photographs on every ledge and shelf. A woman rose from the escritoire and came forward to greet me. I had seen her hundreds of times, at dances and weddings and Henleys and Fourths of Junes and Ascots, but I’d never known who she was. Small and plump but ultra-stately, blue rinse, flat face heavily powdered.

  ‘Lady Margaret,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘How well I remember your parents’ wedding. Such a happy occasion. How is your dear mother?’

  ‘Firing on all cylinders,’ I said. ‘I had a colossal row about coming here at all.’

  I don’t know why I said that. It wasn’t true, because actually I hadn’t risked telling Mummy, though there really would have been a row if I had—I’ll explain about that in a moment. Anyway, the woman looked blank and glanced at Mr Todd in a manner that told me no one had asked her whether she needed a new assistant.

  ‘Something I want to show you,’ said Mr Todd and passed her my paragraph.

  She took the eye-glasses that hung on a silk cord round her neck and held them to her face. Her eyebrows went up almost an inch. She only read a couple of lines before letting the glasses fall and staring at Mr Todd.

  ‘Oh, no,’ she murmured. ‘Quite impossible.’

  ‘Nice and lively, I thought,’ said Mr Todd.

  She turned her stare on me, stony-blue.

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind, Lady Margaret.’

  ‘I did a grown-up version too.’

  ‘I like this,’ said Mr Todd. ‘It’s a fresh note.’

  He didn’t sound at all sure of himself.

  ‘If you don’t mind, Lady Margaret,’ said the woman again.

  It was like being back in the nursery when Nanny and Mummy were setting up for a battle. I went scarlet and hobbled out. Mr Todd closed the door behind me. All my misery and fury came back. I leaned against the receptionist’s desk and tried to will them away, but I was now quite certain I knew what was happening. Until this morning I’d hardly thought about Night and Day. It was just another magazine, slightly more exciting than some of them because Mummy wouldn’t have it in the house. The reason she gave was that some of the cartoons were ‘unsuitable’ (there was usually at least one of an artist saying something to a naked model and another of a blonde saying something to an old gentleman she was in bed with), but really it was because she hated the ‘Social Round’ pages, which were written by somebody called Cynthia Darke. She disliked all that sort of thing, I think because she thought that what they were about was extremely important but private, and it was obscene to have it all written down for dentists’ wives in Wimbledon to read. But though she disapproved of ‘Jennifer’ and the others she had an especial hatred for Cynthia Darke. Presumably the woman I’d just met was Cynthia Darke, which made what she’d said about my parents’ wedding and my dear mother a bit ironic.

  Anyway, when I read the magazine in the hairdresser’s—naturally grabbing it first because it was banned at home—I used to glance at the grisly ‘Social Round’ to see if any of my friends were in it, then look at the cartoons, then read the theatre and book reviews, and then if there wasn’t any other magazine handy try some of the articles and poems. I was so used to it that it had never struck me as at all odd that a magazine that was mainly like Punch or Lilliput should contain a section on what the debby-and-horsey world was up to. Now I was actually in the place and had seen and smelt the difference between the two sides of the swing door I realised that I was dealing with two almost separate kingdoms. Mr Brierley had talked about ‘my magazine’ and I’d heard Mr Todd saying that he’d got a new proprietor. Naturally he wasn’t happy about having some chance-met girl foisted on him so he’d decided to shunt her over the border into the other kingdom. He was only pretending to like what I’d written so that he could put all the blame on Cynthia Darke for turning me down. And equally naturally Cynthia Darke wasn’t going to let it happen like that. Well, if they didn’t want me, I didn’t want them. I pushed through the swing doors and along the corridor to the landing, where I pressed the button for the lift.

  It was an age coming. In any other skirt I could have gone clattering ostentatiously down the stairs. I waited and waited, working myself into a frenzy that Mr Todd would come out and find me there. From down the stairs a tenor voice began to sing one of those Irish ballads about a prisoner turning his last gaze on the green hills of Erin before the English did something unspeakable to him. The voice enjoyed itself, enjoyed the echoing stairwell which made it sound as though it was filtering up from some dungeon deep under Shoe Lane. Another voice interrupted and the singing ended in a laugh. Footsteps tapped on the polished wooden treads. Not wanting to be caught so obviously running away from my defeat (that’s what I felt, though I don’t see how the men could have known) I moved away from the lift and pulled myself together a bit. When they came in sight I realised that they’d only just finished luncheon, though it was nearly four o’clock.

  One was about forty, scruffily shaved, balding, stooped. Thick spectacles. Hairy tweeds. The other was a few years younger and very dapper. Pale brown suit and yellow waistcoat. Small hooky nose, cheeks flushed and pudgy, dark eyes. As they reached the top of the stairs he laid his hand on his friend’s arm to draw attention to me.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ he said.

  I muttered back.

  ‘Are you here for a purpose, other than the enhancement of the scenery? A sufficient purpose in itself, mark you.’

  He swayed, deliberately I thought, to show he was a bit tight and so to be excused.

  ‘I came for an interview,’ I said.

  ‘Shorthand and typing too!’

  ‘No shorthand. Two fingers. And I can spell “accommodation”.’

  ‘Do they know you’re here?’ said the other man. He gave the last word a funny hooting emphasis, as though the problem was that they thought I was somewhere else.

  ‘I’ve been sent to wait in the corridor while Nanny has an argument with the master,’ I said.

  The younger man laughed vaguely. The other man moved aside so that he could peer through the open door of Mr Todd’s room. He frowned.

  ‘I’m Tom Duggan,’ said the younger man. ‘And Ronnie Smith here.’

  ‘I’m Margaret Millett.’

  ‘And your genius is about to burst upon the world through our poor pages?’

  ‘I came to see Mr Todd about giving me a job.’

  ‘Did you, indeed? Come and inspect the conditions of work, Miss Millett.’

  He pushed at the door beside Mr Todd’s and held it for me. A large, cream-coloured room with a long-used look to all its furniture. Three roll-top desks, bookshelves along the side walls and a set of high, broad tables running the full length of the inner wall. Above the tables was a long baize-covered board with a row of pages pinned to it, some blank, some roughly scribbled on, and some with type and cartoons pasted to them.

  ‘Sit you down,’ said Mr Duggan, ‘and explain how Jack got hold of you. Can there be a crack beginni
ng in the great monolith of his uxoriousness?’

  The chairs were the same large, leather-covered sort as in Mr Todd’s office but even more worn and sat into shape. I couldn’t risk getting that low in my skirt so I perched on a creaking arm.

  ‘Somebody called Brierley arranged it,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, God!’ said Mr Smith.

  He’d been fumbling with a packet of Craven A, apparently screwing himself up to offer me one. But now he swung away and retreated to a window where he lit his cigarette and stood staring at the building opposite.

  ‘Somebody called Brierley?’ said Mr Duggan. ‘There is an unlikely innocence to the phrase.’

  He sounded much soberer.

  ‘It’s the thin end of the wedge,’ said Mr Smith, without turning round.

  ‘I don’t really know him,’ I said. ‘I met him at a dance.’

  ‘Oh, God!’ shouted Mr Smith. He glared at me and strode out.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said.

  Mr Duggan studied me.

  ‘Your friend Brierley bought the magazine last week,’ he said. ‘No doubt he has plans for it, but we have not been told. Naturally we are somewhat on edge. Your arrival upon such credentials appears a dubious omen.’

  ‘Don’t worry. The idea seems to have been for me to help with “The Social Round”. Only Mrs Darke, or is she Miss Darke . . .’

  ‘Mrs Dorothy Clarke. Yes?’

  ‘She doesn’t seem too keen. Mr Todd asked me to write a specimen paragraph and I did a silly little bit which he said was all right but when he showed it to her . . .’

  ‘Ronnie!’ shouted Mr Duggan. ‘Ronnie, come and listen!’

  He smiled at me, less sober again, but friendlier.

  ‘A very English phenomenon,’ he said. ‘The radical ego and the conservative id. Long ago at some Bolshevik panchayet Ronnie saw an American delegate smearing treacle over his bacon and eggs. Get Ronnie on to some theme such as the capitalist conspiracy and the world-wide tentacles of the Wall Street octopus and you will hear him utter phrases winged with red lightning and impetuous rage. Ronnie! Come back! Just remember that he’s thinking of the treacle. He does not appreciate any change in the superficial order of things. He is naturally deeply suspicious of a new proprietor whose first act is to attempt to introduce on to the staff a pretty girl he met at a dance.’