Death of a Unicorn

Fiona was one of us. It was obvious the moment she came into the office. Jane had sent the occasional Christmas photograph but I hadn’t seen my niece in the flesh for six years, and though family traits had then been apparent, these had been half-formed and tending to come and go, as they do with children, almost from day to day. I didn’t remember the sense of kinship striking me with such force. Perhaps because she had grown away from the mould in some respects the remaining points of likeness stood out. Jane and I at Fiona’s age had been tallish, big-boned, a bit gangling but not lumpy—promising in fact to become reasonably good lookers quite soon. The same could not be said of Fiona. She was not merely a chunky young woman. She was a chunk. Three or four inches shorter than I am but broad across the shoulders with a naturally high colour and tight-curling dark red hair. ‘Young woman’ is right. Any stages such as Jane and I had had still to go through before hardening into our final cast Fiona had already behind her.

But she was one of us all the same. It wasn’t merely the forward-facing nostrils, broad-set eyes and wide mouth. Recognition leaped between us, in a way it never does between me and Simon, though he has those features too. Of course in her case she would already have been used to my looks in Jane. The same thought must have struck her.

‘I can’t help wanting to say “Hi, Mom”,’ she said. ‘Only she does her hair different, uh.’

She had a little light voice, the modem girl’s twitter, equivalent to the modem young man’s mumble. The Canadian accent was quite marked.

‘I do hope you’ll feel at home here,’ I said.

She laughed.

‘Be like feeling at home in the Grand Canyon,’ she said. ‘I’d reckoned it might look smaller now I’ve grown up, but it’s still big, big.’

‘We came in by the portico,’ said Simon. ‘I thought Fiona ought to make a grand entrance.’

It being Monday that was possible, but I thought unwise. One didn’t want to frighten the child.

‘We live upstairs really,’ I said. ‘In ordinary little rooms. That’s home. The rest of it . . . well, sometimes it seems more like a factory. This is the office. Places like the Banqueting Hall and the Long Gallery are what you might call plant. Sightseers are the raw material. We suck them in through the portico and extrude them through the brew-house.’

‘Mums has a passionately romantic attitude towards Cheadle,’ said Simon. ‘You mustn’t let her con you with the way she talks about it.’

‘Mom warned me,’ said Fiona.

‘How is she?’ I said.

‘Fine. She got her pilot’s licence. She’s into a new form of art with a bunch of crazy kids who do abstract sky-writing.’

‘I’ll write and tell her you arrived intact,’ I said.

‘Right. I better warn you she and me had a fight about me coming here in the first place. Mom reckons you might be trying to take me over, uh?’

I was looking directly at her and saw, at the memory of the argument, a slight flaring of the nostrils, a patchiness in the pink of the cheeks. At the same time I experienced, not all that far down inside me, a quite irrational spurt of rage with my sister that she should attempt to thwart me. I looked quickly away.

‘I’ll mind my step,’ I said.

It turned out to be less of a case of my taking over Fiona than of Fiona taking over Cheadle, and me with it. I cannot remember anyone in my generation, male or female, who had even the beginnings of her kind of assurance. Some, myself included, had been self-confident by our own standards, but these were not the same. Fiona’s style seemed devoid of either brashness or naivety, without any pose of cynicism. Some of her views and arguments might be naive, but the mode in which she thought and felt was wholly mature, as far as I could see. Theoretically she was with us three and a half months, and my idea had been that she should spend ten weeks doing a series of jobs at Cheadle, ostensibly for the sake of variety but really so that she should learn as much as possible about the place and its workings. She would then have accumulated enough money to pay for a month in Europe. Some time in the following year, supposing I had made up my mind that she was the right person, I would find a way of suggesting that she should come to Cheadle on a permanent basis, and eventually inherit.

Fiona’s timetable was far less leisurely. I dare say that whatever project she had joined for the vacation (she had in fact given up going with friends to continue the excavation of an old French fort in northern Quebec) she would have thrown herself into with the same energy, inquisitive, coherent, unabashed, assertive. She had no hesitation in telling me what she wanted to do with her time, and this did not include either touring round Europe or dressing up in housemaid’s uniform in order to stagger past each group of tourists on the back stairs with loaded coal-scuttles for two of the bedrooms. (The coal is of course blackened polystyrene and weighs nothing.)

‘I’m not that keen on pretending,’ she said.