Death of a Unicorn

In the evening I would go back to my own flat and change out of my office clothes. Then I would go down to B’s, shower, do my face and hair, put on a frock and read till he came home. I kept most of my clothes down there because he liked to watch me dressing and undressing. And he liked me to be well dressed when we went out, so he’d opened accounts for me at Victor Stiebel and Harrods and a few other places. I wasn’t extravagant with them. I walked a sort of tightrope in my own mind. For instance we’d slipped over to Paris so that Petronella could do the Autumn Collections and I’d fallen for a little Dior suit, dark grey silk with black lapels and cuffs. I longed for it, and I felt B guessed there was something I wanted, but I couldn’t ask. It wasn’t a question of his paying for it, even—I could actually have afforded it out of my own money, but I would have needed his help to work some kind of currency fiddle to buy it, and he was obsessive about that. He grumbled all the time about the £25 limit but he stayed inside it with a sort of obsessive stinginess which was quite out of character. At home he was generous without being lavish. He paid the rent of my flat and settled my accounts because doing so allowed us to live in the way he wanted, but the bargain between us didn’t lie in that, any more than it lay in my being young and reasonably intelligent and pretty in my piggy way. For me it lay in feeling happy and alive in his company. For him I suppose it lay in knowing that I didn’t think of him as an ugly little man.

Not that it was all perfect, all the time. He could be desperately moody, and once or twice a total beast. I suppose I’d better put one of these times down, because I want him all, and that’s part of him too.

We were due to go to the theatre. We had met by accident earlier in the day, because I’d gone to Sotheby’s to get material for a Petronella piece about a sale of Old Masters, and B had been there. I’d caught his eye across the room and smiled at him. He hadn’t smiled back, but he wouldn’t. So I was waiting for him in his flat that evening, already dressed for the theatre and eager to chat about the sale. I thought he’d be amused about my going to something like that on my own because I never used to until he started to try and educate me. When Jane and I were born the ovum seems to have split with all the aesthetic genes in her half. I expect that’s scientific nonsense, but it’s how it worked out. I got the words and she got the pictures. Of course I knew some names and could do a bit of simple chat, but I could never actually see that a Rembrandt self-portrait had anything more to it than a good coloured photograph. I’d gone to that particular sale because there’d been a couple of Canalettos in it. We’ve got six at Cheadle so I wanted to know what they fetched. ‘Selling the Canalettos’ is family shorthand for taking desperate measures in a financial crisis.

When B came in I gave him his drink and asked whether he’d bid for anything. He went and stared out of the window, emptied his glass and poured himself another without saying a word. By then I knew that something was wrong, but I wasn’t prepared for it when he swung round and asked in his harshest voice why I hadn’t been at the office. I explained about the Petronella piece and was trying to say I thought we’d agreed not to talk about my job, but he went off on another tack, saying that it was pointless for me to write about pictures because I was too stupid to understand anything about them. The only pictures in the flat were a couple of sea-scapes, fishing-boats in rough seas, which I actually liked because they reminded me of a painting in one of the West Wing rooms at Cheadle where I used to hide under the bed to read. I made the mistake of saying so. B said they were rubbish and he was going to get rid of them next day. Then, deliberately I thought, he set about reducing me to tears. I thought he’d decided to ‘boot me out’ but after all that he insisted on going to the play, which turned out dire. He never referred to the incident again. It might almost have been some kind of brainstorm, except that he did get rid of the sea-scapes and next time he came back from Germany replaced them with a horrid little picture of the head of Christ, grey with death, and Mary’s head huddled against it, clumsy and grey with grief. Naturally I didn’t risk saying anything about it, or any of the other pictures and knick-knacks he began to import.