Death of a Unicorn

I was walking through smashed streets. I could smell the sea. One of Them was my guide. I didn’t dare look at him, though he spoke and joked like an ordinary person. He showed me rows of shops, broken and shuttered, a block of offices, an empty factory. From the way he talked about them I knew that they all belonged to him. Then we were in a quiet suburb where a gaunt man was hiding in the porch of a large house. For a moment I was rigid with his nightmare. My guide muttered to someone behind us and suddenly the porch was empty. My guide took a huge key from under the doormat and opened the door. There was the little bronze head on the table in the hall, and the screaming ivory saint in a niche, and the grey dead Christ. My guide switched on a lamp. The lampshade looked like Mrs Darling. My guide opened a safe, took out some engraved certificates and put them in his pocket. He was in a hurry. Suddenly he noticed me watching him and showed me his machine-gun. He said that if I ever told anyone he would come and shoot me till the blood ran down my petticoat.

I was back in the street of shops. Some were still boarded up but others were lit and busy. Through the door at the back of a butcher’s I saw B talking to the shopkeeper. The man gave B some money, then came into the shop and tried to sell me a Dior dress. Over his shoulder I saw B divide the money into two piles, then, moving his hands like a conjuror, take a lot of notes off one pile and add them to the other, which he slipped into his pocket. He put the first pile into an envelope with stamps on it.

We were children, playing on the beach. B wore knickerbockers. He put some money in a bottle and tried to float it out to sea, but the wind kept pushing it back. Whenever the policeman came by he had to pretend to be building a sandcastle, so that he could hide the bottle in the sand. I felt sad for him. The bottle wasn’t heavy enough. I went to look for something to weight it down with. Mummy was unpacking a picnic. She’d brought the Cheadle silver. My necklace sparkled among it. I dropped my handkerchief and picked it up with the necklace inside. I didn’t think Mummy had noticed. On the way back to the water I saw B on the far side of the groyne. He was looking at a drawing of a machine-gun, scratched in the sand. They must have been there while we were playing. As I came up he scuffed the drawing out with his foot, but I knew he was afraid.

A board-game in the nursery at Cheadle. Myself, B, the people I’d met in Barbados, Them on the far side of the table. I didn’t know the rules. The board was a map of a treasure island, but it was like Monopoly because you had to get hotels built. They were impatient and angry because we’d lost the dice, but at last B found them. He was getting ready to throw and we were all very quiet with excitement when there was Nanny Bassett in the doorway and we had to shut the box up and hide it because you weren’t allowed to play that game on a Sunday and she was going to tell Mummy. She stared hard at B, using Mrs Clarke’s eye-glasses.

Jane was lying on the floor drawing a picture of Wheatstone. She drew a thin line going up from his head and I was just thinking of something silly to put in the speech-balloon when she turned the line into a noose and a gallows. I was furious. She ran out of the room and I followed her, pig-faced and shrieking. She ran to a tiny door and waited. I knew we weren’t allowed in there but she pushed me through and there was Wheatstone, white as bone, hanging from a clothes-rack, dead but still screaming. Jane stroked his arm and said it was lovely.

Mrs Clarke’s office, only the make-up table had been moved in and she was Art Editor. Jane had come to show her a portfolio of drawings, but she was wearing my gold dress and pretending to be me. First Mrs Clarke showed her a David Low cartoon of B in a grocer’s shop, standing behind the counter. There were only a few small sugar-bags on the bare shelves. The bags had signs on them. Under the counter was an enormous bag with a $ sign on it. Jane showed Mrs Clarke the picture of Wheatstone hanging, and then she showed her a book with a photograph she’d copied it from. She put a speech-balloon into the drawing. It said, ‘He got it from the Jews.’

Sir Drummond was chatting with the policeman on the beach. He showed him the Low cartoon. The policeman was very interested, but when Sir Drummond showed him Jane’s drawing of Wheatstone he looked worried and hid the drawings under a rock. He saw me watching him and told me to go straight up to my bedroom and not talk to anyone. When I looked back from the sea-wall I thought I saw someone I didn’t know take something from under the rock and carry it round behind the groyne.