Death of a Unicorn

Of course Mummy’s argument was that the job was ‘completely impossible’ because of the cartoons of naked models and blondes in bed and so on, but in a funny way she made me feel as though the real reason was that she had magically known all along that this was going to happen, and that was why she’d banned the magazine—like Sleeping Beauty’s parents trying to avert her doom by banishing anything sharp from the palace. My finding the door in the alcove at Fenella’s dance had been like Sleeping Beauty discovering the room at the top of the turret with the old fairy at her spinning-wheel. She gave in all of a sudden. At one moment she was saying that she was going to have me made a ward of court, and the next she was ringing up Mrs Darling and apologising for my letting the old hag down. I started work next morning.

In theory my desk was the one outside Mrs Clarke’s room, but there was nothing for me to do there except answer the telephone when she was out. She had her job totally organised and didn’t need or want any help with it, so in practice I spent most of my time in the middle room with Tom and Ronnie. I read the articles sent in by casual contributors and weeded out the hopeless ones; I read the rough proofs from the printers and learnt how to correct them; I sorted the books that came in for review on to the shelves behind Ronnie’s desk and kept his file of publication dates in order; I scissored and glued for Tom when he and Bruce Fischer were working out which articles and cartoons were going on to which pages of next week’s paper; and on Thursday mornings I lugged the mechanical elephant along to my desk and wrote another Petronella paragraph.

‘It was a lot harder this time,’ I said when I handed Tom my second piece with the magic letters ‘OK. JT’ scrawled across the top. He looked it through and nodded.

‘You’ll be needing to find a variation,’ he said. ‘Always the trouble with these jejune vocabularies. They weary the ear. You want another voice, for contrast.’

‘But I’ve hardly got going with this one,’ I said. ‘There’s a mass of things for her to do. Ascot and a Garden Party and Cowes and the Twelfth . . .’

‘The material’s there, no doubt. That’s never the problem. It’s the means.’

‘But provided there’s something new for her to rattle on about . . .’

‘All matter is illusion. Only the Word—cap doubleyou—gives it reality, by allowing it to persist beyond the transient series of events which composed its apparent existence.’

‘Words have got to be about something, haven’t they, or they don’t mean anything?’

‘In this imperfect world. But I tell you, Mabs, when the trumpets sound for you and you come dripping from the river and shake the final impurities of matter out of your ears, the first sound you will hear will be the fine tenor voice of the Blessed Thomas Duggan celebrating the glory of God in a language infinitely rich in vocabulary and syntax but utterly purged of all gross content of meaning.’

‘I can’t wait.’

‘Meanwhile, look for an answering voice, a different kind of idiocy from that of this little idiot. Something worldly wise, perhaps.’

He tucked the paragraph in an envelope and flipped it into the wire tray. That, I suppose, was the moment at which Uncle Tosh began to come into existence, utterly out of keeping. Of course I cribbed parts of him from Nancy Mitford, and parts from things that Wheatstone had told me about my great-great-uncle. And I didn’t think I’d taken any notice of what Tom had said until the following Thursday when I had to think of something new in a hurry. I’d finished my paragraph but Mr Todd had a crony with him and Ronnie was interviewing a would-be reviewer in the middle room, so I was at my own desk, rejecting manuscripts, when Mrs Clarke came out.

‘Have you finished, my dear?’ she said. ‘May I please see?’

I gave her the page. She read it and sighed.

‘I do wish you liked her,’ I said.

It was true. I really longed for Mrs Clarke to approve. I think it was because she reminded me more and more of Nanny Bassett, who had meant so much to me until Mummy had suddenly fired her while I was away at school. They were both people you couldn’t help liking, whatever they did or said, and Nanny had the most extraordinary opinions about people and things, which nothing could persuade her out of. They both had quiet but extremely strong personalities—Nanny was one of the very few people at Cheadle who regularly stood up to Mummy. And they both, in Nanny’s words, ‘knew how to behave’. This wasn’t the same thing as having good manners, or rather it meant having inner good manners, having standards, however dotty, and sticking to them without fuss. I felt Petronella didn’t conform to Mrs Clarke’s standards. She wasn’t meant to, but that’s not the point.

‘It isn’t that, my dear,’ she said. ‘I have agreed with Mr Todd that what you write is his concern, but I think it my duty to tell you that Mrs Brett-Carling is dying.’

‘She can’t be! I mean Corinna was talking last night . . .’