Death of a Unicorn

I was at a glorious party which B was giving to say thank you for my necklace. All my friends were there, loving it, and I was totally happy until I realised I hadn’t seen B yet. I pushed my way among the guests, searching and searching, till I came to the little door I wasn’t allowed through. Still, I opened it and went in. B was playing bridge so I sat in a corner to watch the television. It was closed-circuit and I could see my party still going on. Then I realised that the other three bridge-players were Them, and it was vital they shouldn’t see what B was spending their money on, so I used the remote control to change the programme. It was an old black-and-white film, a long line of men, women and children, naked, skeletal, edging towards a big building with no windows. I recognised the old man I had seen hiding in the porch in the smashed city. B looked up and saw what I was watching, and made one of his small, strong gestures to tell me to turn it off. I prodded and prodded at the control, but nothing happened.

B and I were sitting under an awning in a foreign street. I was parched with thirst. B had ordered champagne. He was doodling cartoons of Them on a paper napkin, glancing sideways over my shoulder as he did so, so that I knew They must be there, sitting at another table behind me. At last the waiter came with our drinks, and slid the bill under B’s glass. B glanced at it, and his hand started shaking so much that he couldn’t pour from the bottle. It was only orange squash anyway. B looked at me. He said, ‘You’re the only person I can trust.’ He folded the napkin he’d been drawing on and slipped it into my handbag. The chairs scraped at Their table. I thought I was going to faint and put out my hand to touch his arm. He’d been getting up to go, but it was as if my touch had given him an electric shock. He sat down and told me to shut my eyes. Through the fog of my eyelids I saw him pick up my handbag, take the napkin out and put something else in. He stood up and walked away. I needed my handkerchief to blow my nose and stop myself crying, but when I opened my handbag all there was in it was a pair of my old school knickers. There was something wrapped in them. My necklace. If I ran after him and gave it to him then everything would be all right, but the catch had got hooked into the felted grey wool of the knickers. I wrestled to get it free. My name-tape was on the knickers. Huge red letters. M. MILLETT. If They saw that . . . The cloth seemed to smother me, billowing like a blanket. Far down the street They stood and waited in the glaring sun. B had vanished. He was in the hotel. I heaved and fought with the grey cloth. Light glinted from the hotel front as the revolving door began to turn.

I was in a strange, soft bed in a medicine-smelling room. The air was full of fog. All my body ached. Something was fastened to my head to stop my neck moving. My right eye was gummed shut. In a clear patch in the fog I could see a young woman with a brown face under a sort of cowl. She was leaning over me and holding my hands to stop me tearing at my blanket, but she saw me looking at her and smiled.

‘He couldn’t do it, you see,’ I said. ‘Not with me. Anything else. He’d gamble with anything. Except me.’

‘Hello, Mums,’ said the woman.

‘Are you awake now?’ She had a slightly chi-chi accent to go with her brown skin. I thought she was some kind of nurse, but she had one of those faces you feel you know in dreams. She was there so that I could tell her what I had seen. It was all lucid in my mind, like a book just after you have written it, all the connections and mechanisms linked and sliding in their grooves. I had to get it out before I lost it. I began to gabble. The woman made shushing noises but she couldn’t stop me.

‘It began in Hamburg,’ I said. ‘He was on the Control Commission after the war, getting Jewish property back to its owners. He came across some property, quite a lot of it, which had been very cunningly stolen. I think it must have been a whole group of Nazi officials, covering up for each other. He was in their shoes now, and he saw that if he went on covering up he could have some of the loot. They’d gone to South America, but they’d left a contact behind so he was able to get in touch with them. The property wasn’t worth much then, with everything smashed after the war, but they could afford to wait because they’d taken trouble to see that all the real owners were dead. He was going to sell it for them when it became valuable again, and take a commission. That was his side of the bargain. Their side was that if he cheated them they would send someone to kill him.’

‘Take it easy, Mums,’ said the woman.