Death of a Unicorn

Saturday morning I spent moving my things out of his flat, as far as possible wiping out any traces of my ever having lived there. I found the replica of my necklace, loose, among my nylons. This was as strange as anything in the whole business. I almost felt that somebody quite different must have been in the flat after he’d left, doing things he would never have done. Dithering, panicking, changing his mind. Not having the nerve to say a proper goodbye to me, to my face. He’d been going to take the replica with him, but then, while he’d been packing . . . And before that he’d been going to take the real necklace. It hadn’t been in the box when he gave it me. Only a message.

I went and got the envelope out of the waste-paper basket and for the umpteenth time tried to read the scratched-out sentence. No use. He didn’t mean me to. . . . one person in the world who trusted you? It’s still true. So is the reverse. My doped mind jiggled the words to and fro. You trusted one person in the world. Who?

Me.

B had left me a message because I was the only person in the world he trusted. He had told me so. And then he had changed his mind and left me the sapphires instead. And gone off in a panic.

I gave up thinking about it. There wasn’t any point any longer.

In the middle of Saturday afternoon I spilt the jigsaw pieces out on to my desk upstairs and began. It had to be done. Then I could give it away to a hospital or something. It was a fiend, all muddy shades of green with little flowers, the paler tree, and a fair amount of brown fence. I kept the unicorn pieces to the end. It was a sort of magic, I suppose, as though the unicorn stood for him and when I pieced it together, whole, in its proper place, that would bring him back safe. Though not to me. I’d got about half done when I went to bed on Saturday, after midnight. Pieces of jigsaw floated to and fro under my closed eyelids, but then for some reason I slept solidly till morning. It was noon on Sunday and I had almost finished when the telephone rang.

Jane.

‘Do you . . . Have you . . . Mabs, do you know?’

‘Know what ?’

‘Oh, darling!’

‘For God’s sake!’

‘Oh, it’s my . . . I can’t . . . Didn’t you get the papers?’

‘The newspapers?’

‘Yes, of course. The Sunday Times. Page One.’

I had no idea what she was talking about. It crossed my mind that Mummy might have gone mad and assaulted the architect. Something to do with Cheadle anyway. Something right outside me.

‘They’re downstairs, I suppose. I’ll go and look now. I take it it’s bad.’

‘Yes. Oh, Mabs!’

I rang off and hurried out, too tired and drained for worry. One of the Dolphin Square porters used to come round leaving the papers on tenants’ doormats, but naturally none were ordered for me upstairs and the other people on my floor had already taken theirs in. I took the lift down to B’s. He liked several. They lay folded in a thick wad, but with the Times outermost, its main headline showing. PEACE MOVE IN KOREA. I opened the wad out and saw it at once, two-thirds of the way down the page. BRITON GUNNED DOWN IN RIO. There was a photograph. Photographs always made him look hideous.

The world closed right in. It became a tight little cell holding nothing but me and the paper in my hands. The words joggled about as if I’d been trying to read them in a dream. It must be someone else with the same name and they’d got the wrong photograph. He wasn’t in Rio, he was in . . . ‘That general direction’. Of course he’d got enemies, but not the shooting kind, surely. Only when we’d said goodbye he hadn’t just been worried—he’d been frightened. Coming out of his hotel. Three men in a car. Sub-machine-guns. Stayed with us before, said the hotel manager, Sr Luis . . . No, he hadn’t. Not for a year, anyway. It must be someone else.

A man was asking me a question. I turned away but a hand gripped my elbow. Two men. Some sort of visiting card.

‘I don’t want anything. Can’t you see? Not now.’

He asked again. The question had B’s name in it.

‘He’s dead.’

They had a key. They took me into the flat and went on asking me questions. I stared at them and shook my head. They didn’t seem real. Then one of them asked me my name. I told them, without thinking. They looked at each other.

You get used to it with policemen and people like that. It’s a special sort of look when they find they’re dealing with somebody who might have friends or relations who could get them into trouble with their superiors if they aren’t careful. That look, and saying my own name, made a sort of crack in my cell wall. I was still alone, closed tight in, but I could hear the voices from outside now, and get a whisper back through.

‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled.

‘It must be a shock.’

‘Yes. I’ll try . . .’