Death of a Unicorn Page 21

  ‘She didn’t!’

  I don’t know why I should have reacted with such vehement astonishment to this trivial bit of news. Not only astonishment, but also the amusement always aroused when somebody well known does something totally out of character. There was a long silence. Mrs Clarke, I remembered, was used to studying faces for information.

  ‘If I may say so, Lady Margaret,’ she said, ‘this is all very extraordinary. I am beginning to wonder why you have troubled to pay me this visit.’

  As she spoke I heard vague sounds of struggle in the blackness beside the glare. Craning sideways and shading my eyes I saw that she had heaved herself to her feet and was looking around in a frustrated way as though not sure what to do next. I rose too and, now able to see her properly, realised that she wanted to move, but her walking-frame was in the kitchen and the trolley encumbered with tea things no longer stacked for safe transport.

  ‘Can I help ?’ I said.

  She didn’t hear, so I moved and took her arm.

  ‘Oh, if you would be so good,’ she said. ‘It must be a misunderstanding. Perhaps I didn’t hear you aright. Oh dear, how strange.’

  I steadied her across the room. Her movements were less purposeful than I had expected, nothing like as doubtful as my mother’s but tinged with the same kind of uncertainty. We stopped at the inner wall by a shelf covered with yet more of the collection. Below it was a closed cupboard.

  ‘In there,’ she said.

  I opened the doors and found a double shelf of albums. I ran my finger along the backs until Mrs Clarke stopped me.

  ‘That one, I think,’ she said.

  I heaved it out, then helped her over to the escritoire where I laid it down. She opened it and leafed steadily through the pages. Faces flipped by. Long dresses and short. Tiaras, toques, pill-boxes. Organdie, cotton, furs, silk. And there we were.

  The picture was in fact dominated not by any of us but by a flower-urn from which erupted a structure of white lilies and roses and gypsophila, with white delphiniums rocketing up above. Before it stood the Milletts, my mother severe and slim in the middle and on either side of her two girls, distinguishable only by their dresses and the fact that one was wearing a showy necklace. Something about the lighting had brought out the Millett look more strongly than usual. The pig princesses. My mother’s emphatic scrawl spread across the bottom.

  ‘There,’ said Mrs Clarke. ‘I knew it was there. I knew I wasn’t dreaming. Sometimes when you get old you aren’t quite sure. You brought it to me. You said you realised you had been wrong about Mr Brierley. You said it was because of a picture you had found in a book. A picture of a little statue. You said it showed that he was a terrible man, and you asked me to explain what I had been trying to tell you before. I don’t normally repeat secrets, but I have had a very soft spot for you almost since the day we met. I told you all I had heard about Mr Brierley cheating his mother, as well as our own government, over a plantation in Barbados. What was its name, now?’

  ‘Halper’s Corner,’ I said.

  She didn’t hear. I left the album where it was and helped her back to her chair. She was extremely shaky now. I held her hand and knelt in the glare of the light. I took a deep breath.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said. ‘I’d quite forgotten about the photograph. Of course I remember now. It’s just that my mother gets very muddled, and the other day she was perfectly convinced she’d met you and you’d told her all sorts of things you hadn’t told me. I usually pay no attention because she gets so confused, but she did seem very on the spot that morning, and I really wanted to get it cleared up. Of course you’re right. You haven’t forgotten anything. It’s all my stupid fault.’

  I don’t think she understood. I couldn’t see whether she was looking at me, but she clutched my hand in a rubbery grip and sighed.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘You haven’t done anything wrong.’

  ‘There was something funny about you. It’s troubled me sometimes. I don’t know what. Of course you were very distressed, finding out what sort of man he really was.’

  ‘Of course I was. It was a fearful shock.’

  ‘That must have been it.’

  She seemed to be getting back her confidence, and understanding what I was saying. I imagine that deafness imposes a considerable strain on the will, to force oneself into continuous attention to the fragmentary signals that come from beyond the barrier. Any little tremor or weakening, and communication is lost.

  ‘May I ask you one more thing?’ I said. ‘You’ll think it’s a bit odd of me not to remember, but really I can hardly have known what I was doing during those weeks. It’s something my mother said again. Did you tell me—when I came and brought you the photograph, I mean—did you say anything about Mr Brierley getting some money from the Jews?’

  A long pause, then a shaky whisper.

  ‘No, my dear. Oh, no. That was what you told me.’

  It was a drizzling November dusk by the time I started home, with five hours’ driving before me. There was no avoiding London so I went to the flat in Charles Street and gave myself an omelette while I waited for the last of the rush hour to clear, then drove north. I remember nothing of the journey. I was thinking about Jane.

  An episode that in some ways has shaped my life more than anything I have so far recounted was my return to Cheadle after B’s death. My mother managed to conceal her triumph and behave in a subdued and reasonable way. I believe that if I had turned to her for comfort she would have done her best to give it. Instead I turned, naturally, to Jane, and Jane refused. Not in so many words, but in all her behaviour; by boredom and irritation and distress; by finding errands for herself that took her out of my company; by seeing that there was some third person present; above all by withdrawing into her art, absorbed and unreachable, as she constructed a thing like a metal pterodactyl in one of the old coach-houses. (I found it a few years ago and had it set up as a kind of guardian demon at the entrance to the grotto, but the effect was so depressing that we have allowed it to be almost engulfed with Old Man’s Beard.)

  I have always put Jane’s behaviour down to unwillingness to let herself be involved in my raw misery, a sort of moral squeamishness, disappointing but not really blameworthy. I now saw that there was a different explanation. All the women in the chain of information—Mrs Clarke, Jane, my mother, Aunt Minnie—must have at least suspected that B’s death was the result of their activities. I don’t know about Aunt Minnie, but I’m sure my mother would scarcely have turned a hair. Any outcome which suited her purpose would by that alone have justified all she had done to achieve it. Mrs Clarke was in a different position. She was, in her own cranky way, a moral person. But believing that it was I who had been the intermediary, I who had made the choice and had thus consented, so to speak, to B’s execution, she might well have felt herself absolved. What had so shaken her in our recent interview was the possibility that there was something mistaken about that belief, that in trying to help me she had in fact betrayed me. But Jane, of course, had known. Determined on her own freedom, she had decided to help my mother break up the affair, but had been totally appalled by the result and unable to face me alone, knowing what she knew.

  So, instead of Jane or my mother or any human, I had in the end turned to stone and wood for comfort. I can remember the exact moment. It must have been eight months later because I had given up my job and was living at Cheadle. A December morning after a lonely breakfast—my mother always had hers in bed. A bright, illusory sunlight from the east, no warmth in it at all. Frost still in the shadow of the avenue, mist on the fields beyond. I stood by one of the pillars of the portico, my skin prickling in the barely perceptible warmth. I stroked my fingers down the fluting of the pillar. The stone was icy, but it was what I wanted. I stroked it again with the accepting caress of a bride.

  As you drive up the M1 you see Cheadle on your left, a mile away on its hill. When the road was built various protesting groups
expected me to add my outrage to theirs and were disgusted with me when I said I welcomed it. I was right, both practically and aesthetically. Seen from the house the sweeping line adds interest to a dullish middle distance. Seen from the road the house stands almost clear above the Avenue and looks truly magnificent. It is a splendid advertisement, and almost free. Almost, because I pay for the floodlighting. This is timer-controlled and switches itself off when there is no longer enough traffic on the motorway to justify it, but I get the bonus sometimes of driving home in the dark and seeing my house as even its builders could not have imagined it, theatrically sharp-shadowed, apparently floating against the dark, at first only the portico, but then as one climbs from the Saturn fountain the vista steadily widening to reveal the full proportion of the wings.

  I may at moments have given the impression that I would have preferred to live my life without ever having known Cheadle, let alone owned and run it. This is, of course, far from the case. I may have bouts of depression or frustration such as occur in any marriage, but Simon is right—I am still deeply in love with the place. I am not merely proud of it and proud of what I have done for it. It feeds me, fuels me, gives me real exhilaration and happiness. I am not so sentimental as to believe that the house has feelings, but if it had I am confident that it would think well of me. It would know I had done my best.

  You spoil things by brooding on them, so I seldom allow myself consciously to think along these lines. But the night I came home after seeing Mrs Clarke I was deliberately looking forward to that last half-mile to restore my own energies, self-confidence, balance. In some ways the shock of realising what Jane had done had been less than that of seeing how easily Mrs Clarke’s apparent serenity could now be broken. Sturdily though she seemed to have withstood the passage of time, one tremor was enough to shake the tower. If not my visit, then something else, soon. A heroic old age is no more use than a feeble one. I am a battler (a battle-axe, perhaps) and have told myself I shall be one always. The only benefit is to my own self-respect, but normally I think that a gain worth having. On the motorway I found myself becoming less and less sure.

  I rounded the basin of the fountain and slowed to a speed at which some ancestor might have cantered up the grass beside the gravel. The rain glittered in my headlights, spoiling the effect, so I switched them off. The wipers slished to and fro. The wind gusted and bustled among the tree-tops. Huddled in my warm steel egg I floated gently towards my floating palace. It too seemed serene, untouchable, safe from the storm of years. The wings began to widen before me.

  Then the floodlights switched themselves off, the palace vanished and I was driving blindly into darkness.

  VII

  John Nightingale found me. He was bicycling down the Avenue in the dawn after spending the night with Maxine. It must have been the very early stages of that affair for him to feel the need to conceal his comings and goings. I had-driven into the statue of Ixion and was unconscious at the wheel, having been there about seven hours. I dare say doctors always tell one it was touch and go, unconsciously emphasising the drama of one’s recovery and their own part in it, but it is a fact that Sally came home and was by my bed when I recovered my senses four days later. I remember nothing between the floodlights going out and my waking up and seeing her.

  Nothing external, that is. On the other hand I remember with great vividness—no, that is the wrong word, because there were elements I cannot put a shape to, in particular the people I shall refer to as They or Them—with great vigour, as episodes of crucial importance in my life, certain scenes I saw in my delirium. I am now going to try and recount them. Of course this is an unreal procedure. They came to me in disorganised and recurring fragments, probably more chaotic than I can now know because of the way the still-dreaming mind tries to shape the pictures it makes into coherence. But it is not unreal in the sense of being irrelevant because they were only dreams. One’s memories of the real past are only a special kind of dreaming, in which one makes mental pictures and tries to explain them into a coherent sequence; and in this case the visions of my delirium retained for me on waking a cogency just as great as if someone had told me that he had documents which showed that B, while working on the Control Commission in Hamburg, had made contact with a group of men who . . . and so on. I have experienced my own explanation in a way that I could not have done if somebody had presented me with second-hand facts. This is the way in which I came to know it, and so the natural way in which to present it here, though tidied up and ordered into sequence so as to satisfy the waking mind. I fully accept that it may not be true.

  I was in a shabby, bleak office. A man in uniform sat at a desk with his back to me. I thought it was my father till he half turned and I saw it was B. He rose, fetched a file from a green cabinet, leafed through it, picked out a sheet and began to compare it with one already on his desk. He sat very still, but I loved him so much I could feel his tension, his excitement. He reached for a telephone.

  I was walking through smashed streets. I could smell the sea. One of Them was my guide. I didn’t dare look at him, though he spoke and joked like an ordinary person. He showed me rows of shops, broken and shuttered, a block of offices, an empty factory. From the way he talked about them I knew that they all belonged to him. Then we were in a quiet suburb where a gaunt man was hiding in the porch of a large house. For a moment I was rigid with his nightmare. My guide muttered to someone behind us and suddenly the porch was empty. My guide took a huge key from under the doormat and opened the door. There was the little bronze head on the table in the hall, and the screaming ivory saint in a niche, and the grey dead Christ. My guide switched on a lamp. The lampshade looked like Mrs Darling. My guide opened a safe, took out some engraved certificates and put them in his pocket. He was in a hurry. Suddenly he noticed me watching him and showed me his machine-gun. He said that if I ever told anyone he would come and shoot me till the blood ran down my petticoat.

  I was back in the street of shops. Some were still boarded up but others were lit and busy. Through the door at the back of a butcher’s I saw B talking to the shopkeeper. The man gave B some money, then came into the shop and tried to sell me a Dior dress. Over his shoulder I saw B divide the money into two piles, then, moving his hands like a conjuror, take a lot of notes off one pile and add them to the other, which he slipped into his pocket. He put the first pile into an envelope with stamps on it.

  We were children, playing on the beach. B wore knickerbockers. He put some money in a bottle and tried to float it out to sea, but the wind kept pushing it back. Whenever the policeman came by he had to pretend to be building a sandcastle, so that he could hide the bottle in the sand. I felt sad for him. The bottle wasn’t heavy enough. I went to look for something to weight it down with. Mummy was unpacking a picnic. She’d brought the Cheadle silver. My necklace sparkled among it. I dropped my handkerchief and picked it up with the necklace inside. I didn’t think Mummy had noticed. On the way back to the water I saw B on the far side of the groyne. He was looking at a drawing of a machine-gun, scratched in the sand. They must have been there while we were playing. As I came up he scuffed the drawing out with his foot, but I knew he was afraid.

  A board-game in the nursery at Cheadle. Myself, B, the people I’d met in Barbados, Them on the far side of the table. I didn’t know the rules. The board was a map of a treasure island, but it was like Monopoly because you had to get hotels built. They were impatient and angry because we’d lost the dice, but at last B found them. He was getting ready to throw and we were all very quiet with excitement when there was Nanny Bassett in the doorway and we had to shut the box up and hide it because you weren’t allowed to play that game on a Sunday and she was going to tell Mummy. She stared hard at B, using Mrs Clarke’s eye-glasses.

  Jane was lying on the floor drawing a picture of Wheatstone. She drew a thin line going up from his head and I was just thinking of something silly to put in the speech-balloon when she turned the line into a noose
and a gallows. I was furious. She ran out of the room and I followed her, pig-faced and shrieking. She ran to a tiny door and waited. I knew we weren’t allowed in there but she pushed me through and there was Wheatstone, white as bone, hanging from a clothes-rack, dead but still screaming. Jane stroked his arm and said it was lovely.

  Mrs Clarke’s office, only the make-up table had been moved in and she was Art Editor. Jane had come to show her a portfolio of drawings, but she was wearing my gold dress and pretending to be me. First Mrs Clarke showed her a David Low cartoon of B in a grocer’s shop, standing behind the counter. There were only a few small sugar-bags on the bare shelves. The bags had signs on them. Under the counter was an enormous bag with a $ sign on it. Jane showed Mrs Clarke the picture of Wheatstone hanging, and then she showed her a book with a photograph she’d copied it from. She put a speech-balloon into the drawing. It said, ‘He got it from the Jews.’

  Sir Drummond was chatting with the policeman on the beach. He showed him the Low cartoon. The policeman was very interested, but when Sir Drummond showed him Jane’s drawing of Wheatstone he looked worried and hid the drawings under a rock. He saw me watching him and told me to go straight up to my bedroom and not talk to anyone. When I looked back from the sea-wall I thought I saw someone I didn’t know take something from under the rock and carry it round behind the groyne.

  I was at a glorious party which B was giving to say thank you for my necklace. All my friends were there, loving it, and I was totally happy until I realised I hadn’t seen B yet. I pushed my way among the guests, searching and searching, till I came to the little door I wasn’t allowed through. Still, I opened it and went in. B was playing bridge so I sat in a corner to watch the television. It was closed-circuit and I could see my party still going on. Then I realised that the other three bridge-players were Them, and it was vital they shouldn’t see what B was spending their money on, so I used the remote control to change the programme. It was an old black-and-white film, a long line of men, women and children, naked, skeletal, edging towards a big building with no windows. I recognised the old man I had seen hiding in the porch in the smashed city. B looked up and saw what I was watching, and made one of his small, strong gestures to tell me to turn it off. I prodded and prodded at the control, but nothing happened.