Death of a Unicorn

The card seemed to have a hypnotic effect on her. She stared at it like a hen on a chalk-line. I thought of Veronica Bracken, the first time I’d noticed her, at Queen Charlotte’s Ball three years ago. I was feeling nervous and ugly. White doesn’t suit me, and Mummy had decided the occasion was important enough to get the real sapphires out of the bank, the first time I’d worn them in public. I lined up in the famous queue next door to a blonde child. She turned to me.

‘Isn’t this super!’ she whispered.

She flexed her bare brown shoulders like a cat in a patch of sun. Her hair shone. Her eyes were very dark brown. She seemed to be floating an inch above the floor . And within a year she’d had an abortion in Paris and put her head in a gas oven and been found just in time by the concierge, according to Mrs Clarke. And now she was going to marry Flight Lieutenant Paul Seago.

‘Have you got a card about me, Mrs Clarke? May I see?’

‘No, my dear. In any case I keep them in code. For safety, you know.’

‘Were you really at my parents’ wedding? I don’t mean that, but do you really remember it? You go to so many.’

‘It was the wedding of the year.’

‘I suppose so. I only remember my father a bit. I don’t feel as if I knew him. It’s so difficult to imagine them falling in love, and marrying, and so on, but here I am.’

Mrs Clarke nodded, more like Nanny Bassett than ever. Certain sequences in the social order of things were as correct and perfect as a proof in Euclid. Without thinking I asked a typical nursery question.

‘Were they really in love, do you think? It could just have been Cheadle.’

‘They made a particularly handsome couple. Your mother looked radiant.’

‘I bet she did. I bet it rained buckets, too.’

‘Why should you say that?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. It was November, anyway. Mummy makes a fuss about the anniversary, and Jane and me were born in August, just in time to spoil the Twelfth.’

Mrs Clarke nodded and went back to her room. I heaved the mechanical elephant into position and tried to think of a way of taking the funeral bits out of my Petronella piece without leaving it as flat as last night’s champagne, but the rain at my parents’ wedding kept getting in the way. Mrs Clarke had as good as told me they hadn’t married for love, but for Cheadle. I don’t know why I should accept her word on something like that, but I did. In any case I’d always known, just as I knew about the rain.

When we were about fourteen we came back for one Christmas holidays on the same train. Mummy had organised that, though Jane went to a cheaper school. (‘It isn’t good for them to live in each other’s pockets the whole time.’) Mummy got extra petrol for being a magistrate, which meant she could fetch us from the station. It was a beast of a day, black and drenching. Jane and I were sitting together in the back. We came round the Saturn fountain and started up the avenue. I expect all children, coming back from three months away, automatically stare for the first real sight of home. I know I used to. All you see from the fountain is the portico, which goes right up the front of the house. The trees of the avenue hide the wings. On a day like that it’s only the pediment and pillars, with blackness behind them.

‘It looks like a great mouth, waiting to swallow us,’ I said.

‘Waiting to swallow you, darling,’ said Jane. ‘It’s a stone ogre. Once a generation it’s given a girl to eat.’

I didn’t think Mummy had been listening, but she called out, ‘Nonsense! In any case, next time it’s going to be a man!’

She accelerated up the avenue as though she couldn’t wait.

I was brooding about this, and I suppose I was thinking about Veronica and my parents’ wedding and other disasters, and at the same time desperately trying to make my mind take an interest in Petronella, when I remembered what Tom had told me about finding what he called ‘another voice’. Almost without noticing what I was doing I invented an uncle for the little idiot, a cynical old brute to balance her innocent gush. A guardian angel to save her from Veronica’s fate. Uncle Tosh. He was running a book on the Season’s Engagement Stakes. I can’t pretend that I felt him, that very first morning, beginning to leap into life on the paper—he was just a way out of the mess I was in. When I showed the piece to Mrs Clarke she wasn’t specially interested, but remarked that if it were true she would win a lot of money off him. On the other hand Tom spotted the possibilities at once.

‘You’ll find he comes in handy,’ he said. ‘What about these odds? You’ll have readers writing in proving the fellow’s certain to lose.’

‘I was hoping you’d know about that.’

‘You’ve come to the wrong door. I’m one of your literary Irishmen. The winged horse is the beast I bestride. Sensitive my nature, daring and sweet my thought, but neither mathematical nor hippophatical my bent. Ronnie’s the fellow. His brother runs a racing stable. Ronnie!’