Death of a Unicorn

I was worried about both of them, for opposite reasons. Ronnie ran the review pages and wrote the parliamentary sketch. He knew a fantastic amount about what was going on. He could always tell you which ministers Mr Churchill was prepared to listen to and which made him pretend to go gaga the moment they opened their mouths and things like that, but somehow when he wrote it down it came out drab. Tom was the other way round. He was brilliant at noticing the surface of life, what people were wearing and eating and so on, and he had a lovely easy way of writing, but he wasn’t remotely interested in what was going on beneath the surface or why things happened. If he wanted to know whether the Viet Minh were on our side or theirs, for instance, he would have to ask Ronnie. I was specially worried about Tom because somehow I sensed that Mr B wouldn’t be interested in what he did.

I liked Tom most of all. I had decided, tentatively, that he was ‘queer’. Powdering one’s nose before a dance of course one gossiped about the men who’d been in the dinner party and who were therefore going to provide most of one’s partners for the rest of the evening. All of them would have been to one of the big public schools, and as most of the girls had brothers, quite a bit of information got around. On the whole one welcomed the queers. They tended to like dancing and do it well. They noticed what one wore. They talked more amusingly. They weren’t possessive. Above all they didn’t behave as though they were going out to bat for the Men’s First XI in the great game of sex, all arrogance and nerves, in varying proportions but just as tiresome whatever the mixture. I’d known one of these queers since childhood as he lived only three miles from Cheadle and got asked about a lot, despite having been sacked from Harrow, because he was a good tennis-player. But even he, one vaguely assumed, was going to grow out of it.

Tom (if I was right about him) was not. This made him seem different from anyone else I’d known. And then there was the danger, the daring, involved in that way of life. Only a fortnight before the supper at Maidenhead a well-known playwright had been sent to prison after being found in the arms of a guardsman under some bushes by the Serpentine. Jack Todd had become almost hysterical with excitement at the news, chain-laughing, thrilled by the man’s downfall, derisive of the hypocrisy of public life, but obviously inquisitive as a small boy and shocked as a great-aunt. Did he know about Tom? Was he in some way getting at him? Tom hadn’t seemed to notice but Ronnie had become very jumpy and tried to shut Jack up. Later he’d told me, ‘Jack’s got it in for old Tom. He needs him. Tom’s the flywheel, keeping the machine running when the engine’s off. But Jack will do all he knows to stop Tom becoming editor when his own time’s up. In fact he’ll hang on to that chair till he keels over.’

Now, how much of this could I tell Mr B? Of course I longed to tell him everything, to show how bright I was, how at home in my new adult world. Only I guessed he wouldn’t be all that impressed, so I stuck to what actually went into the paper. We were talking about ‘By the Way’. This was a series of unconnected paragraphs at the start of each week’s paper, beginning with a phrase like ‘We notice that . . .’ and going on to be ironic or witty or lightly sentimental about whatever Tom claimed to have noticed. He wrote most of them. They looked as easy as pie. You didn’t realise till you’d tried that they were incredibly difficult to get right. I was explaining this when Mr B interrupted.

‘That’s all over,’ he said.

I looked up.

‘No time for that sort of thing. Not any more,’ he said.

‘He does them incredibly quickly.’

Mr B gave me his toad look, pulled the mustard pot towards himself, took the spoon and began to smear parallel yellow lines on the table-cloth. I watched, shocked. There was something sacred about clean white linen, about the columns of folded table-cloths in Mrs Hamm’s cupboards at Cheadle, some of them stitched with my great-grandmother’s initials, as part of her trousseau, and therefore new in 1876, but still perfectly good thanks to the systematic rotation of the columns. Probably they’d all had mustard spilt on them over the years, but Mr B’s deliberate smearing was different. Each time he drew a line he reduced the space between it and the one before.

‘Our relationship with time is changing,’ he said. ‘We think of time as a constant, but it’s not. It is an accelerating process. In the Middle Ages . . .’

He drew a line on the table, a foot back from where he’d started.

‘. . . it might be a century between one serious change in society and the next. It made sense to plant oak trees.’

He began to move the spoon slowly across the rows, an inch above the cloth.