Death of a Unicorn Read online

  ‘I don’t want him,’ she said. ‘I don’t want that. She can’t make me.’

  Her voice was creaky with tension.

  ‘You can have Cheadle,’ I said.

  ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

  ‘You can be Mabs from now on,’ I gabbled, ‘and I’ll be Jane. Like we’ve done before, only we’ll keep it up for the rest of our lives.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Yes, absolutely. Don’t you see . . .’

  And I was. It was a totally absurd suggestion. Mummy would have known at once, for a start, and there were all sorts of other things which made it impossible, but all the same I did mean it. If I had the choice, I would give up my rights to Cheadle for ever rather than give up B, even though he might choose to turf me out next week.

  ‘Don’t be bloody stupid!’ she snapped. ‘I don’t want anything you’ve got. I don’t want him. I don’t want Cheadle. I want myself. Me!’

  The pig-mask had started to form, but then her glance shifted. She looked over my shoulder for an instant, twitched herself round, swirling her skirt out, and leaned panting with her hands on the edge of the desk, her pony-tail hanging down to hide her face. I turned and saw Brian Naylor standing in the doorway.

  ‘I trust I don’t intrude,’ he said in his flat, oafish voice.

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

  ‘Having a wee bit of a tiff, are we?’

  ‘Mr Todd’s not coming in today.’

  ‘A great loss. A great, great loss to us all.’

  ‘This is my sister Jane. We had an urgent family problem we had to talk about. I’ll find somewhere else.’

  ‘Hello, Jane. Don’t go. The feminine touch is called for. Tell me what you think of the furniture and fittings in this salubrious accommodation.’

  ‘Dreary,’ said Jane, barely looking up.

  ‘Dreary. That is your considered opinion.’

  ‘Yes. Can I go now?’

  ‘Not quite appropriate for the editor of Britain’s foremost humorous weekly?’

  (He was quoting from the slogan of an advertisement we were running as part of a circulation battle with Punch, but his leaden intonation—as with almost everything he said—implied the opposite of what the words seemed to mean.)

  ‘You’d better get Heal’s in,’ Jane muttered. ‘Tell them Swedish.’

  ‘Heal’s. Swedish.’

  ‘Elephant-grey carpet and dead white walls and stainless steel floor-lamps and natural linen curtains and Bernard Buffet prints and Orrifors glass. Can I go now? I’m trying to talk to Mabs.’

  ‘In office hours.’

  ‘Her office hours.’

  He strutted over and put his arm round her. It seemed as long as an orang-utan’s. His right hand, hairy-backed, clamped on to her breast. Bruce Fischer was a model of finesse by comparison. Jane went Millett scarlet and tried to hoick herself free but he gripped her wrist and winked at me.

  Jack Todd wrote his own articles longhand and kept a large bottle of Quink on his desk for the purpose. Probably because I remembered my success with Bruce and the Gloy pot I snatched it up and undid the top. Mr Naylor saw and let go of Jane to grab at it. I snatched it away but he caught my other wrist. Jane swung at him round-arm from behind, hitting him high up on the side of the head. I don’t know whether without that I would have thrown the ink or merely threatened him with it, but his sideways stagger—Jane had muscles like a blacksmith from her sculpting—pulled me half off balance, so that my arm holding the ink-bottle threshed instinctively forwards. The ink shot out in a fountaining arc, starting on the curtains, spraying across the wall and a bookcase and finishing on Mr Naylor’s trousers. He looked down, then at the mess on the wall. He straightened his specs, rubbed his head where Jane had hit him and laughed—an open, cheerful sound.

  ‘If we’d rehearsed that we’d never have brought it off,’ he said. ‘Is that stuff washable?’

  I looked at the label.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘God, what a mess.’

  He laughed again.

  ‘It was your fault,’ I said. ‘Being editor doesn’t give you droit de seigneur.’

  Instantly he lapsed back into his stage face and voice.

  ‘I will try and remember that, Margaret.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘I’ll get someone to clear up.’

  I found Jane in the corridor, said, ‘Hang on a tick,’ and poked my head round the secretaries’ door.

  ‘I’ve spilt Mr Todd’s ink, Nellie.’

  ‘You haven’t! Over his desk?’

  It must have been a regular occurrence, though I didn’t remember it happening. Nellie whipped a drawer open, snatched out a folder of blotch and rushed past me. Just inside jack Todd’s room, though, she stopped dead. Over her shoulder I could see Mr Naylor. Not unnaturally he had taken his trousers off. Nellie, a large, pale girl of about thirty whose salient characteristics were efficiency and devotion to Jack Todd, hesitated a second, flung the blotch at Mr Naylor and rushed back out.

  I don’t imagine she meant to use the blotch as a missile. She was only trying to get it into the room and herself out again as quickly as possible. He wasn’t a specially indecent sight as his shirt-tails covered his pale, hairy legs almost to the knees. The blotch had struck him in the chest and strewn itself at his feet. Ink was pouring in rivulets down the spines of the books beside him. He was laughing again, and I was too.

  ‘How long do you keep this up?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Nothing to be sorry about. Where I come from we tar and feather strangers. I think I’m going to like it here.’

  I yelled to Jane to come and help, and while she blotted the worst bits I telephoned the commissionaire, Sergeant Sawyer, and told him there was a mess to clear up urgently. Then I asked Mr Naylor for his measurements and took Jane with me along to a men’s outfitters in Ludgate Circus where we bought him a cheap pair of grey flannels. On the way we talked quite placidly about what we were going to do. The silly little bout of action seemed to have cleared my mind. I understood something about Jane which I’d never really seen before. She’d often sworn she wasn’t jealous of my luck in being born first and I hadn’t believed her, but it was true. Provided that in the end I did what Mummy wanted Jane didn’t mind how much special treatment I got, or how much fun I had. She didn’t mind my having an affair with B, because it wasn’t going to last for ever. I would come back in the end. But what I’d said about swapping places, stupid though it was, had truly frightened her, because it showed that given the chance I might somehow slip away for ever. Her reward, what had made the whole arrangement tolerable for her, had always been that in the end she was the one who would be free. In their different ways Mummy’s wicked scheme and my own dotty idea, though neither of them could possibly work, had been images—nightmares—hinting that her freedom might not be there, ever, after all.

  We didn’t talk about this, directly. I told her we were going away for a week to Barbados and I’d give her a key of my flat in case she wanted to go and live there for a bit, and I tried to make her see that the best way to think of Mummy was as a sort of blood-curdling old witch who loses all her power as soon as you realise that none of her spells actually work. There was nothing, however she raged or wheedled, she could actually do. I didn’t tell Jane what B had said about Mummy being in a position to make a nuisance of herself just then—that was none of her business.

  [1] And I, at least, still do. Not about the literally virgin bride, of course, but at a deep and primitive level something that has the same ritual meaning, something to do with innocence, and also with being chosen—not by my mother (or now by me) but absolutely. Chosen, like that. I accept that this is probably only a way of rationalising what I have now become, but that makes no difference to the nature of the feeling.

  VII

  ‘You’d better come and meet my mother,’ said B.<
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  It was one of his typical tricks, to spring something on you and watch you jump. I was used to it, but he caught me this time. We had been in Barbados five days and met a number of B’s acquaintances—a much more ramshackle and dubious collection than his friends in England, and not at all the sort of polo-playing Barbadian Mrs Clarke wrote about in her winter excursions to the islands, either. There’d been a numbingly boring American businessman who could only talk about expanding the island’s tourist facilities, an almost wordless lawyer, a voluble half-Indian building contractor, and so on. I hadn’t had any sense that B had enjoyed these meetings—in fact he disliked and despised the people as far as I could make out, but he was strangely patient with them and refused to tell me afterwards the sort of gossip about them which he would have amused me with after similar encounters in England. None of them had even hinted that his mother was on the island.

  ‘Take off that nail varnish and find something quiet to wear,’ he said.

  ‘Do you really want me to come? I’ll be perfectly happy . . .’

  ‘Yes. It’ll be a help.’

  ‘All right.’

  She lived in a new block of flats overlooking the harbour at Bridgetown. The place was obviously expensive—bowls of flowers in the entrance lobby, thick carpet, the chill of air-conditioning, smooth-running lift. But when B opened the door of a top-floor flat with his own key I realised that I was crossing a frontier—between times, or civilisations, or something vaguer. The hallway reeked of spiced cooking. Its walls were white-painted, like those outside, but the furniture consisted of a monstrous black armoire, heavily carved, and beside it a cane chair with one of its legs mended with a splint. In the distance a strange big voice was ranting through shouts and bursts of music. We passed an open door where a small black man, grey and wrinkled, was stirring an old iron cooking-pot on a modern electric cooker. B raised a hand in greeting to him, and the man’s face, wreathed in the spicy steam, split into the traditional water-melon smile. I smiled back, of course, but the scene through the door heightened the sense of having moved into a country much more foreign than the Barbados outside. The worn old face, the smile, the stoop over the pot, the pot itself—older possibly than the man—belonged to an illustration to some book in the Cheadle nursery, one of Daddy’s perhaps, or going back even a generation beyond, a G.A. Henty about adventures in the American Civil War. Or pirate-hunting, a century before, among these very islands. Some images don’t change. The man in the kitchen was the old slave who happened to hold the clue to where the treasure lay.

  B opened the door for me at the far end of the hallway. The voice came blasting through, recognisable now as that of an American revivalist preacher. The cries and music came from the congregation. B crossed the room and switched the wireless off. I stood by the door, peering through dimness made duskier still by the dazzle of morning sun between the slats of blinds. There seemed to be nobody in the room, but it was hard to be certain because of the clutter of furniture—screens, little tables, chairs, lampstands, a piano, sideboard, and vague shapes whose purpose I could only guess at because of the way everything drapable seemed to be draped in beautiful old silk shawls the colour of ivory, fringed and embroidered. Though most of the large furniture was as black and heavy as the armoire outside, the shawls seemed to light the dim room with their own vague luminescence, like snowfall in a winter wood at dusk. The room was stifling.

  B strolled across to a chaise-longue and stood looking down at the muddle of cushions and shawls on it.

  ‘Wake up, Mother,’ he said.

  ‘I am wide awake,’ said a vigorous old voice, ‘and listening to the Word from the lips of the Reverend Patterson. Why did you silence him?’

  ‘Why don’t you use the air-conditioning? It’s far too hot in here.’

  ‘Noisy nuisance. Why did you silence him, Amos? Why will you always be deaf to the Word?’

  ‘I’ve brought a friend to see you.’

  The chaise-longue arranged itself. A yellow hand emerged from the cushions and clawed a corner of shawl aside to reveal a large wrinkled face, even more toad-like than B’s, and some wispy yellow-grey hair. Surely if B had known he might find his mother in this kind of state he could have left me waiting in the passage and given her a moment to pull herself together, but being B he enjoyed such confrontations. I was cross enough with him already for making me take my nail varnish off just after I’d spent twenty minutes putting it on.

  Mrs Brierley didn’t seem at all put out. Two or three of the cushions became her body as she heaved herself into a sitting position, slapping B’s hand aside when he tried to help her. She patted her hair, tugged her shawl, and then, sitting primly on the edge of the chaise-longue, rotated her head like an owl towards me and rotated it back as I walked round to stand where she could see me better.

  ‘Miss Millett, my mother,’ said B.

  She inspected me. The whites of her eyes were yellow and bloodshot but the dark brown irises seemed unbleared. She was very short, but fat, and smelt pungently of Pears soap. The likeness to B was strong, not just in her general ugliness but also in the feeling of self-willed energy that beamed from her.

  ‘How do you do?’ I said.

  ‘You are welcome,’ she answered, not with the snap she’d used in speaking to B but with a slight drawl. She patted the chaise-longue.

  ‘What is your denomination, Miss Millett?’ she said as I sat down.

  ‘Church of England, I suppose.’

  ‘Neither hot nor cold, but better than nothing. Do you attend?’

  ‘When I’m at home. I haven’t found a church I like in London, I’m afraid.’

  ‘What do bricks and mortar count for? It is the preacher, the man with the Word on his lips.’

  ‘I like the singing best.’

  ‘You have never heard singing.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know . . .’

  ‘A thousand Negro voices under the stars, gathered after labour to praise the great Creator.’

  ‘That must be terrific.’

  ‘It surely was. The Lord was there among us.’

  ‘Let’s have a drink,’ said B.

  Mrs Brierley reached down to the floor, picked up a satin-covered shoe and used the heel of it as a mallet to strike the brass gong on the table beside her. The old black man must have been poised at the door, ready, because he came in immediately carrying a silver tray with three glasses on it. He was wearing a clean white jacket now, but the same old linen trousers, shredded at the ends like those of castaways in desert-island cartoons. His feet were bare. He held the tray for Mrs Brierley who sniffed at the glasses in turn.

  ‘Maketh glad the heart of man,’ said the old man. ‘For thy stomach’s sake.’

  Mrs Brierley smiled B’s toad-smile and licked her lips, the way I always thought B was about to. She handed me a beautiful tall thin glass, slightly chipped and only about half full. She then chose a large cheap tumbler for herself, brim full, leaving B another old glass, larger and coarser and fuller than mine. I took an incautious sip, thinking it was going to be sangaree, a weak, cold, winy concoction I’d been drinking in bars. It turned out to be some kind of sweet-sour punch, with twice as much rum in it as I was ready for. B had been watching me, amused.

  ‘My mother drinks rum under doctor’s orders,’ he said. ‘I drink it because I like it. Thank you, Jeremy.’

  ‘Were you born on a plantation, Mrs Brierley?’ I asked.

  ‘Born and reared among fields that bore my name. Born in the old days, reared in the old ways, a Halper of Halper’s Corner.’

  ‘It sounds marvellous.’

  ‘It was hell on earth, Miss Millett. The Devil walked those fields in the shape of my father, a wicked, lustful, foul-mouthed, drunken atheist. My mother would stumble into my room at midnight to weep by my cot. When she died, many thought it was murder. The other planters would not speak with my father, or have me to their houses. I grew up alone, reared by the devil to be one of his kind.’


  ‘How ghastly,’ I said, though actually she made it sound perfectly thrilling, and meant to. ‘Do go on.’

  ‘When I was seventeen a man of God came to us, sent from England to do mission work among the Negroes. I saw him stand face to face with my father and wrestle there for his soul. My father laughed and swore and turned away, but my heart went out to that young man. I began to toil by his side in the work of the Lord among our poor Negroes, and before the time came when he was called back to England I betrothed myself to him in secret. I promised him I would follow him, but for eight years my father would not let me go: I had no money, no friends but our Negroes. Though I wore silk and lace and walked along the cuts between the cane fields with a servant to carry my parasol over me, I was no more free than an ape in a cage. For eight long years I continued the Lord’s work which that young man had begun, bringing the Word to our people where they laboured in the fields. One day the Lord moved me to speak to an old Negro of my sorrow, and thenceforth he and all our people put a portion of their small wages aside, little by little, to help me. In their poverty and in their wretchedness they sought to prove how nobly the seed we had sown among them brought forth its harvest of good works. At last we had gathered enough to pay for my passage to England. One day as I walked among the fields, with my father watching from the verandah, I went into one of the huts, as was my custom, to read the Word of the Lord, but instead I changed clothes with a child of that house and we put flour upon his face and he walked out under the parasol, going from hut to hut, while I was stolen away by the back and hidden in a cart they had ready with my cases, and taken to the harbour and put aboard the steamer for England. As we crossed the harbour bar I saw my father come raging down to the quay.’