Death of a Unicorn

Pellegrini is an inconceivable nuisance in many ways, a quarreller, liar and cheat with no apparent sense of shame. It is as though all his capacity for honour has been absorbed by his cooking. He would not dream of producing even the simplest snack for some unimportant visitor without making it look and taste and smell as good as it was possible with those ingredients. My mother notices at once and complains when her meals have been prepared by someone else. I couldn’t remember Ronnie’s attitude to food. Most of my meals with him and Tom had consisted of burgundy or champagne, with a few dry and savourless sandwiches. As I put the food on to his plate it struck me that I had been babbling away about my private concerns to a man whom I really hardly knew at all. Even in the old days I had seen only one aspect of his complex existence. Tom and I had talked, and he had responded, as though his membership of the Communist Party had been an aberration of youth, retained as little more than a convenient stance from which to view the British political scene as an outsider. I only learnt from his later television appearances that his involvement at the very time I knew him had been a good deal stronger and more intricate. I had also gathered that he had been married but was separated from his wife and living with someone else. I had never met her. He had once, I remembered, asked my advice about a birthday present for his daughter, then around seventeen.

The sense of ancient intimacy renewed was an illusion. The intimacy had never been there. What had been there was a girl who was prepared to take the world on trust, and she no longer existed.

Ronnie ate with slow relish. It was I who had to suggest that we had better start talking about the purpose of the visit. He sighed. I could sense a mental squaring of shoulders.

‘I have to tell you that I am here, not exactly on false pretences,’ he said, ‘but at least on a somewhat different basis from that which seemed to be the case when I telephoned you.’

‘Yes?’

‘I have learned in the interim that you were, shall we say, somewhat better acquainted with Amos Brierley than I, at least, at the time realised.’

‘I see.’

‘What is your attitude to this? I should point out that I need not have told you that I knew.’

‘In that case I will point out that you could quite well have told me beforehand that you were going to want to talk about this.’

‘I could have. I thought you might refuse to see me.’

‘I certainly should have.’

‘Well?’

‘Oh dear . . . Just tell me one thing before I answer. When did you decide to bring the champagne? Before or after you learnt about me and Mr B, I mean?’

‘Before, Mabs.’

‘All right. In that case my attitude is that I’ll tell you anything I can about my time on Night and Day. I always kept that absolutely separate from the other thing. He would have been furious if I’d done anything else. We never talked about it at all. I don’t see that you need to know a single thing about my life outside the office. Put it like this: I’m prepared to walk round my private garden with you. I’m not prepared to let you bring a spade and start digging for bones.’

‘I’m afraid there’s . . .’

‘And if you are intending to mention the relationship, or even to hint at it, in your book, I completely withdraw my co-operation. I won’t even talk about Night and Day.’

The problem is this, Mabs. Brierley is of crucial importance to the book. He introduced Naylor, who, whatever we may think of him, has been a very successful editor. Without some such change the paper was doomed. I may as well tell you that the line I had expected to take when I first spoke to you was that you were, so to speak, the first swallow, a sign of Brierley’s flair that he was able to spot someone who was going to turn out a hugely successful writer at such an early stage. This was then going to be evidence that his choice of the not immediately obvious Naylor was more than a fluke.’

‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t still take that line. I met him at a dance for about five minutes. To extricate me from a ludicrous little social embarrassment he told me to tell the other person concerned that we had been discussing the possibility of my working at Night and Day. I didn’t see him again until Jack Todd had taken me on and let me start writing my Petronella pieces. And I’m almost certain it wasn’t because Mr B had told him to.’

‘Your arrival appeared to us at the time to be a mechanism for beginning to prise Dorothy out. When he met you at the dance Brierley could well have been on the look-out for a girl of unimpeachable social authority and with some pretensions to be a writer.’

‘Oh. I suppose so. I hadn’t thought of that. You were extraordinarily nice to me in the circumstances.’

‘You were a fetching child, Mabs. I wish I could see you more clearly. My impression is that it’s still there.’