Death of a Unicorn

VII

‘You’d better come and meet my mother,’ said B.

It was one of his typical tricks, to spring something on you and watch you jump. I was used to it, but he caught me this time. We had been in Barbados five days and met a number of B’s acquaintances—a much more ramshackle and dubious collection than his friends in England, and not at all the sort of polo-playing Barbadian Mrs Clarke wrote about in her winter excursions to the islands, either. There’d been a numbingly boring American businessman who could only talk about expanding the island’s tourist facilities, an almost wordless lawyer, a voluble half-Indian building contractor, and so on. I hadn’t had any sense that B had enjoyed these meetings—in fact he disliked and despised the people as far as I could make out, but he was strangely patient with them and refused to tell me afterwards the sort of gossip about them which he would have amused me with after similar encounters in England. None of them had even hinted that his mother was on the island.

‘Take off that nail varnish and find something quiet to wear,’ he said.

‘Do you really want me to come? I’ll be perfectly happy . . .’

‘Yes. It’ll be a help.’

‘All right.’

She lived in a new block of flats overlooking the harbour at Bridgetown. The place was obviously expensive—bowls of flowers in the entrance lobby, thick carpet, the chill of air-conditioning, smooth-running lift. But when B opened the door of a top-floor flat with his own key I realised that I was crossing a frontier—between times, or civilisations, or something vaguer. The hallway reeked of spiced cooking. Its walls were white-painted, like those outside, but the furniture consisted of a monstrous black armoire, heavily carved, and beside it a cane chair with one of its legs mended with a splint. In the distance a strange big voice was ranting through shouts and bursts of music. We passed an open door where a small black man, grey and wrinkled, was stirring an old iron cooking-pot on a modern electric cooker. B raised a hand in greeting to him, and the man’s face, wreathed in the spicy steam, split into the traditional water-melon smile. I smiled back, of course, but the scene through the door heightened the sense of having moved into a country much more foreign than the Barbados outside. The worn old face, the smile, the stoop over the pot, the pot itself—older possibly than the man—belonged to an illustration to some book in the Cheadle nursery, one of Daddy’s perhaps, or going back even a generation beyond, a G.A. Henty about adventures in the American Civil War. Or pirate-hunting, a century before, among these very islands. Some images don’t change. The man in the kitchen was the old slave who happened to hold the clue to where the treasure lay.

B opened the door for me at the far end of the hallway. The voice came blasting through, recognisable now as that of an American revivalist preacher. The cries and music came from the congregation. B crossed the room and switched the wireless off. I stood by the door, peering through dimness made duskier still by the dazzle of morning sun between the slats of blinds. There seemed to be nobody in the room, but it was hard to be certain because of the clutter of furniture—screens, little tables, chairs, lampstands, a piano, sideboard, and vague shapes whose purpose I could only guess at because of the way everything drapable seemed to be draped in beautiful old silk shawls the colour of ivory, fringed and embroidered. Though most of the large furniture was as black and heavy as the armoire outside, the shawls seemed to light the dim room with their own vague luminescence, like snowfall in a winter wood at dusk. The room was stifling.

B strolled across to a chaise-longue and stood looking down at the muddle of cushions and shawls on it.

‘Wake up, Mother,’ he said.

‘I am wide awake,’ said a vigorous old voice, ‘and listening to the Word from the lips of the Reverend Patterson. Why did you silence him?’

‘Why don’t you use the air-conditioning? It’s far too hot in here.’

‘Noisy nuisance. Why did you silence him, Amos? Why will you always be deaf to the Word?’

‘I’ve brought a friend to see you.’

The chaise-longue arranged itself. A yellow hand emerged from the cushions and clawed a corner of shawl aside to reveal a large wrinkled face, even more toad-like than B’s, and some wispy yellow-grey hair. Surely if B had known he might find his mother in this kind of state he could have left me waiting in the passage and given her a moment to pull herself together, but being B he enjoyed such confrontations. I was cross enough with him already for making me take my nail varnish off just after I’d spent twenty minutes putting it on.

Mrs Brierley didn’t seem at all put out. Two or three of the cushions became her body as she heaved herself into a sitting position, slapping B’s hand aside when he tried to help her. She patted her hair, tugged her shawl, and then, sitting primly on the edge of the chaise-longue, rotated her head like an owl towards me and rotated it back as I walked round to stand where she could see me better.

‘Miss Millett, my mother,’ said B.

She inspected me. The whites of her eyes were yellow and bloodshot but the dark brown irises seemed unbleared. She was very short, but fat, and smelt pungently of Pears soap. The likeness to B was strong, not just in her general ugliness but also in the feeling of self-willed energy that beamed from her.

‘How do you do?’ I said.

‘You are welcome,’ she answered, not with the snap she’d used in speaking to B but with a slight drawl. She patted the chaise-longue.

‘What is your denomination, Miss Millett?’ she said as I sat down.

‘Church of England, I suppose.’

‘Neither hot nor cold, but better than nothing. Do you attend?’

‘When I’m at home. I haven’t found a church I like in London, I’m afraid.’

‘What do bricks and mortar count for? It is the preacher, the man with the Word on his lips.’

‘I like the singing best.’

‘You have never heard singing.’

‘Oh, I don’t know . . .’

‘A thousand Negro voices under the stars, gathered after labour to praise the great Creator.’

‘That must be terrific.’

‘It surely was. The Lord was there among us.’

‘Let’s have a drink,’ said B.

Mrs Brierley reached down to the floor, picked up a satin-covered shoe and used the heel of it as a mallet to strike the brass gong on the table beside her. The old black man must have been poised at the door, ready, because he came in immediately carrying a silver tray with three glasses on it. He was wearing a clean white jacket now, but the same old linen trousers, shredded at the ends like those of castaways in desert-island cartoons. His feet were bare. He held the tray for Mrs Brierley who sniffed at the glasses in turn.

‘Maketh glad the heart of man,’ said the old man. ‘For thy stomach’s sake.’

Mrs Brierley smiled B’s toad-smile and licked her lips, the way I always thought B was about to. She handed me a beautiful tall thin glass, slightly chipped and only about half full. She then chose a large cheap tumbler for herself, brim full, leaving B another old glass, larger and coarser and fuller than mine. I took an incautious sip, thinking it was going to be sangaree, a weak, cold, winy concoction I’d been drinking in bars. It turned out to be some kind of sweet-sour punch, with twice as much rum in it as I was ready for. B had been watching me, amused.

‘My mother drinks rum under doctor’s orders,’ he said. ‘I drink it because I like it. Thank you, Jeremy.’

‘Were you born on a plantation, Mrs Brierley?’ I asked.

‘Born and reared among fields that bore my name. Born in the old days, reared in the old ways, a Halper of Halper’s Corner.’

‘It sounds marvellous.’

‘It was hell on earth, Miss Millett. The Devil walked those fields in the shape of my father, a wicked, lustful, foul-mouthed, drunken atheist. My mother would stumble into my room at midnight to weep by my cot. When she died, many thought it was murder. The other planters would not speak with my father, or have me to their houses. I grew up alone, reared by the devil to be one of his kind.’

‘How ghastly,’ I said, though actually she made it sound perfectly thrilling, and meant to. ‘Do go on.’

‘When I was seventeen a man of God came to us, sent from England to do mission work among the Negroes. I saw him stand face to face with my father and wrestle there for his soul. My father laughed and swore and turned away, but my heart went out to that young man. I began to toil by his side in the work of the Lord among our poor Negroes, and before the time came when he was called back to England I betrothed myself to him in secret. I promised him I would follow him, but for eight years my father would not let me go: I had no money, no friends but our Negroes. Though I wore silk and lace and walked along the cuts between the cane fields with a servant to carry my parasol over me, I was no more free than an ape in a cage. For eight long years I continued the Lord’s work which that young man had begun, bringing the Word to our people where they laboured in the fields. One day the Lord moved me to speak to an old Negro of my sorrow, and thenceforth he and all our people put a portion of their small wages aside, little by little, to help me. In their poverty and in their wretchedness they sought to prove how nobly the seed we had sown among them brought forth its harvest of good works. At last we had gathered enough to pay for my passage to England. One day as I walked among the fields, with my father watching from the verandah, I went into one of the huts, as was my custom, to read the Word of the Lord, but instead I changed clothes with a child of that house and we put flour upon his face and he walked out under the parasol, going from hut to hut, while I was stolen away by the back and hidden in a cart they had ready with my cases, and taken to the harbour and put aboard the steamer for England. As we crossed the harbour bar I saw my father come raging down to the quay.’

‘What a romantic story! But what about the people who’d helped you?’

She held up her pudgy, crook-fingered hand, palm forward. I realised this was a party piece, which had to be told in its proper order with its proper words, like a church ritual. She talked with a slightly nasal drawl, which didn’t sound American or like anything else I’d heard, and sipped purse-lipped from her glass between sentences. I could imagine black faces, fire-lit, ringing her, as she sat in a space between shanty houses, and the stars overhead, and the punctuating cries of ‘Hallelujah’ and ‘Praise the Lord’.

‘I sailed to England,’ she said, ‘and found my betrothed in Halifax, where I joined myself with him in the work of the Lord. Our son Amos was given to us. Ten years passed, and there was war and the breaking of nations, but we toiled on in the stony field the Lord had made our portion. For five and thirty years we toiled with small reward. Each year at the time of the Lord’s birth I wrote to my father and sent him tracts, begging and warning him to repent of his wicked ways, but he sent no answer. Then there was war again, and our son Amos was called to fight. Within a year there came a letter from a lawyer in Bridgetown saying that my father had died and Halper’s Corner was now mine, subject to heavy mortgages. I spoke with my husband and we made plans to return to the place where we had met and take up the work we had begun there, but because of the war we could not travel, and then within the year the Lord called him to His side and I was left desolate. My son Amos was in Italy. I had none to turn to. But at last the war ended and I gathered my possessions and sailed home to take up my inheritance. All was in ruin. Though the war had given fat years to sugar planters, there had been none to manage Halper’s Corner, and with peace the lean years came. Only one seed still prospered. The Word of the Lord that with my husband’s help I had sown among our people was now a strong green tree. Many remembered me and rejoiced at my return. They told me that my father had died as he had lived, ninety-five years old, raging in sin. They told me too that on my escape his fury had been terrible, so that he might have slain my helpers with his own hands, but foreseeing this they had persuaded the doctor from Holetown to come up, giving other reasons, and this man, though a feeble vessel, constrained my father by his presence. And the other landlords around were happy to thwart my father, so it was not difficult to hide my chief helpers, the boy who had carried my parasol, and the boy who had worn my dress. He stands before you now, my brother and servant Jeremy.’

‘The Lord shall deliver me from every evil work,’ said Jeremy.

I hadn’t realised he was still in the room, but he was, standing by the door and listening eagerly to the story. He smiled again when I caught his eye. There was something familiar about the smile which made me blink inwardly, and see him with different eyes. The likeness was nowhere near as strong as that between B and his mother, but it was there. When Mrs Brierley had called Jeremy her brother, she had meant it. Stepbrother, anyway.

‘How marvellous!’ I said. Did you manage to get the plantation going again? Was it very beautiful?’

She looked at me half-sideways over her glass. Knowing B as well as I did I thought she was pleased. I guessed he had brought me along because it would give her somebody new to tell her story to. Judging by the few words they’d said to each other so far, they didn’t find tête-à-têtes very easy.

‘If Amos had stayed we might have done it, with the Lord’s help,’ she said.

‘We’d have needed that,’ said B. ‘Sugar’s been in the doldrums for five years. The places which had built up a bit of fat during the war have managed to keep going, but Halper’s was run right down and mortgaged twice over.’

‘Now they are giving us the Commonwealth Sugar Agreement,’ said Jeremy. I expected him to add ‘Hallelujah,’ but he didn’t.

B shot him one of his looks. I thought he was about to snap at him to clear out, but perhaps he wasn’t quite prepared to take that line with his step-uncle. Instead he just growled, ‘Too late. Tell Miss Millett what it looked like, Mother.’

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘It is an old house, built by my forebear Cleck Halper in the year of our Lord seventeen hundred and twelve. Built and well built, but my father neglected it. I did not think it beautiful when I was a child, but when I returned and saw it in its ruin my heart went out in grief. The fields around are fields of cane, with cuts between, beautiful in the green and gold of their season. And beyond the road is a little bay with a beach, where my mother used to take me when I was a child and teach me my letters in the sand. That was surely beautiful, according to the beauty of this world.’

She was talking now in a much less here-endeth-the-second-lesson style, but with her drawl more pronounced. I thought perhaps this was part of the story that she didn’t often tell.

‘It sounds lovely,’ I said. ‘Can we go and see it?’

‘Waste of time,’ said B. ‘Miss Millett is going to inherit an old house, Mother. That’s why she’s interested.’

‘Lay not up for yourself treasures upon earth,’ she said.

‘It seems to be more a case of laying up for yourself troubles upon earth,’ I said. ‘Besides, I didn’t do the laying up. It all happened before I was born. Perhaps one day I’ll run away for love, like you did.’

In fact B made very little fuss about driving me out to Halper’s Corner. I felt that he actually wanted to go, but at the same time not to seem to want to. It was difficult to be sure. He’d been more than usually unpredictable these last few days.

The house we were staying in—I never found out who it belonged to, but B said it wasn’t his, and it had a used feeling, half-full bottles in the drinks cabinet, recent copies of Life and Harpers, servants and a gardener—also provided a vast squashy American car, a convertible. We drove up the West Coast Road in the middle of the afternoon. B was in one of his withdrawn moods, so I fantasised about being a film star being taken by my director to look at the location for a lush plantation romance—brutal planter, sullen-seeming daughter, noble young missionary—there’d have to be an alternative lover, of course, spit image of Mark Babington—he would be the one who rode frantic to the quay as the ship sailed for England—finish in misty glow as lovers embrace at Liverpool with Salvation Army Silver Band for background, and skip the grinding years in Halifax—not Hollywood material . . .

Before I’d come to Barbados I’d created it vividly in my mind’s eye, white beaches and palms round the fringe, and a hinterland of steep jungly mountains, brilliant with parakeets and hibiscus. Quite wrong. It turned out to be a landscape rather like one of the duller English counties, rolling, undistinguished hills given over to farming. It obviously wasn’t England, because of the blueness of the sky and the blackness of the people and their crowdedness and poverty, and the height of the sugar cane in the fields; the beaches and hibiscus were there too. So one was abroad, but not very. Mrs Brierley’s flat still felt far more foreign than anything else I’d come across. Up the West Coast Road, where the land was poorer than elsewhere, there were certainly unfarmed patches, but even these had a scrubby, battered look. The sheer number of people on the island meant that there was almost nowhere really wild and lonely. It was all a bit like a town, with fields instead of houses. I had prepared myself to be disappointed well before B turned up a track between cane-fields. The lie of the low hills enclosed a flat triangular area. The sea dropped out of sight behind us and for once I felt here was a place of isolation. A black man on an old bicycle came bumping down the track towards us, pulled aside to let us pass and gaped as we went through. A hundred yards further on, as the track rose to one of the boundary hills, it was barred by rusted iron gates hanging askew between a pair of grand stone gateposts. B stopped and we climbed out.

The gates were padlocked, but a footpath had been beaten through a breach in the stone wall, so we followed it round and up what must once have been the sweep of a carriage drive but was now only a path one man wide and barely kept open, through the tangle of sweet-smelling undergrowth, lush with feeding on its own decay and raucous with insect life. The tops of three vast palms were visible above the bushes, but no sign of a roof or chimney.

I led the way until the path opened into a clearing. As I approached it I could see a tethered goat, but then a black boy leapt across the gap with his left elbow and shoulder angled forward and his right arm flung stiffly back, the hand clutching a battered old ball. A couple of seconds later I heard the snap of the ball on to a bat. I walked on into the clearing and there was the house. It was stone built, three storeys high. A double curve of stone steps rose to the broken front door, and the porch had been extended on either side to make a deep balcony the whole width of the house, the verandah where Mrs Brierley’s father used to sit and watch as she carried the Word of God to his labourers down below. There had been three grand Dutch-style gables at roof level, but the whole south-west corner of the house was in ruins. Once there had been four of the big palms, symmetrically planted at the corners of the building. Three great smooth trunks still rose in place,but the fourth had fallen and lay with half its roots in the air and its trunk slanting up through the wall of the house as if it had poked its head in through the window to see what was happening in the nursery. The falling masonry had smashed through the verandah roof that end, but on the other side it was still intact and the verandah seemed to be used now as an open-air kitchen, with the black iron chimney of the stove lashed to a filigree pillar. In the clearing two more goats grazed, and chickens clucked in dust baths. Beyond the corner of the house an old man was hoeing a vegetable patch. Nearer were the cricket players, two boys and a girl.

The girl saw me as she straightened from picking the ball up. Her hesitation made the bowler turn. He was black as a boot, but the girl was paler, as was the younger boy with the bat. Both of these were quite clearly Halpers. I realised that when Mrs Brierley had described her father as lustful she’d had some evidence to go on. The bowler stared at me for a moment, then turned and shouted to the man with the hoe, who shaded his eyes and gazed before coming slowly towards us.

‘The tree came down in the ’44 hurricane,’ said B.

‘It’s too sad. They must have been planted when the house was built.’

‘I should think so. Hello, you’re Philemon, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, please, Mr Halper. Glad to see your face, Mr Halper.’

‘My name’s Brierley,’ said B in a bored voice, watching the cricket, without seeming to be interested in that either.

‘Do you remember old Mr Halper?’ I asked.

‘Sure I see Miss Mary’s father.’

‘What was he like?’

The old man glanced towards B and pointed. Like that.

‘Die way he live,’ he said. ‘Drunk and cursing. Bring ruin on us all.’

‘Rubbish,’ said B, who couldn’t have seen the gesture. ‘He kept things going his own way till he was getting on ninety. It was my mother running off and leaving him with no one to help did the damage. She should have stuck it out here. Seen enough? Let’s go.’

‘You tell me what going to happen, sir?’ said Philemon. ‘Nobody know what going to happen.’

B gave him a bleak look.

‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ he said, and turned away. Philemon shook his head and hobbled back towards his vegetables.

Because of the narrowness of the track I couldn’t talk to B properly till we were in the car.

‘You didn’t have to be quite so foul to that old man,’ I said. ‘Surely you’ve got some idea. It’s his whole life, after all.’

‘I thought I did but now I don’t,’ said B.

‘You’re hating this, aren’t you?’

‘I decided you’d better see it.’

He didn’t start the car but sat brooding at the even acres of half-grown cane.

‘Apart from the house it doesn’t look all that run down,’ I said.

‘Not bad, I gather.’

‘Oh, I thought you’d sold it.’

‘Not yet. No point. Get nothing for it with the sugar market shot to hell. I’ve been waiting for a turn-up, paying off the mortgages and meanwhile working it up into a state where it will fetch something.’

It didn’t sound at all B’s style, to pay off mortgages before he had to, but I didn’t say so.

‘What’s this sugar agreement Jeremy was talking about?’ I asked. ‘I noticed you shut him up.’

‘Commonwealth Sugar Agreement. Becomes operative next year. Should stabilise the market, and then I can sell and sort things out.’

‘Is it yours or your mother’s?’

‘Mine, effectively. I bought her an annuity in exchange. She got much better terms than she’d have done if she’d simply sold it then, so I don’t want her now getting it into her head that she should have hung on. None of us knew this agreement was coming up. It was only passed last year. Shall we go?’

He sounded relieved, as though this was what he had brought me out here to tell me. For some reason it had been worrying him, and might even explain his recent edginess.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Can we look at the bay, though, first?’

‘What bay?’

‘The one where her mother used to teach her her letters in the sand.’

‘You don’t want to see that. It’s just a bay.’

‘Please. As we’re here. It was important to her, wasn’t it?’

‘You liked the old frump?’

‘I think she’s terrific. After a life like that.’

‘I don’t owe her anything.’

‘I expect other people’s mothers tend to seem OK. A lot of my friends can’t see what’s, wrong with mine. But don’t you have a hankering, darling, to see the house in order again?’

‘Not worth the effort.’

‘That’s not what I meant. Suppose your fairy godmother were to wave her wand and there it was, roof mended, garden spick, all four palm trees standing, and you sitting on the verandah smoking a cigar while a shiny black butler brought you your punch on a silver tray?’

‘No,’ he said, and started the engine.

We drove bumpily down to the main road, headed north, and a quarter of a mile later turned left along a fresh-laid concrete track towards the sea. It wound between dunes, bare sand in some places, and in others spiky plants like yuccas, scrubby bushes and a few palm trees. At the shore-line—a dazzle of white beach between two wooded headlands—it curved back and climbed a low outcrop a hundred yards inland. Up there there were signs of work, obviously connected with the newness of the road. I could see a jeep, and the tip of a crane. Apart from that the bay was, as Mrs Brierley had claimed, beautiful according to the beauty of this world.

‘It’s a long way from the house,’ 1 said,, thinking what a release it must have seemed to mother and child, so far from the brutal troll who ruled the cane-fields.

‘My great-grandfather bought it to dredge so that he could ship his cane straight out,’ said B. ‘That was always the chief problem—too far from the factories. But he was caught by the 1876 slump.’

‘What’s happening up there?’

‘New hotel, mainly.’

‘How dreadful.’

‘Don’t be a snob.’

‘I am a snob. I can’t help it. It’s like the idea of trippers trooping round Cheadle. We do have open days, but the family all hide and pretend they aren’t happening. Don’t you feel that at all?’

‘Why should I? I was born and brought up in Halifax. People who live most of their lives in places like Halifax consider it an excellent idea that hotels should be built by otherwise useless beaches for them to stay at.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘I know. You’re trying to make me say that because my family have kept it as a wild bay for eighty years I should continue to do so. You forget that we originally bought it for commercial exploitation. In any case your whole idea is based on a misconception. I am the man who was born in Halifax. Any feelings I have are appropriate to that man. In fact my feelings towards Halifax are that it was a place to get away from and never go back to. But the man I am could not have been born here. Suppose my mother had not run off and joined my father, she would most likely never have married. But if she had, and had then had a child, that child would not have become me. Even if the father had been my father, that is still true. We are who we are by the accident of a moment. ‘You ought to know that. You are one of a pair of twins because of a momentary readjustment of molecules in a uterus twenty-two years ago.’

He lolled back on the soft bench-seat of the car, his brown face more toad-like than ever because of his impenetrable sun-glasses. His voice too had the reptilian creak which came when he was talking about something important to him. I had learnt more about him today than in all the rest of our friendship. I even knew his age, born ten years before the First World War, ‘not yet fifty’—just. I wondered if he guessed how effective it was, bringing Jane in. I’d often tried to imagine what would have happened if Jane and I had never separated, if we had been born as I. The idea was part of my fairy-tale world in which everything was all right; and now that world contained the image of a curious toad-like boy and his yellow toad-like mother coming to this bay so that she could teach him his letters in the sand. For some reason the mental picture, combined with B’s real face in front of me now, made me see something I hadn’t seen before.

‘You’ve got Negro blood, haven’t you?’ I said.

He didn’t answer for several seconds. I cursed myself for my stupidity. Then he said, ‘Does it matter?’

‘Not to me. Not a scrap, darling, honestly. It’s just interesting.’

‘The true reason why the other planters chose to have nothing to do with my grandfather was that he had married a quadroon. My mother is therefore an octoroon.’

‘How lovely. That’s a word I’ve never come across except in crossword puzzles.’

‘It is a word which has ruined lives.’

‘I suppose so. But it’s nothing compared to the Halper side of you, is it? That must be fantastically strong. If we had a baby I wonder whose face it would have.’

‘Mine, of course. That’s why we’re not going to.’

‘I think we’d get a slightly yellow Millett. You can see this piggy nose in the Long Gallery, snuffling out under wigs and over ruffs for generations. Even old Lely couldn’t do much about it.’

‘The Halpers would win all the same.’

‘Got you!’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Whatever you say you’re secretly proud of your family.’

‘My family is still alive, in me.’

‘It won’t be much longer unless you start doing something about the next generation.’

‘Haven’t you noticed? My grandfather did quite enough to let me off the obligation.’

‘You’re scared of losing to the Milletts. I bet you . . .’

‘Don’t be a fool.’

‘I’m serious, I think. I mean . . . you see, I’ve been wondering why you let me bully you into coming out here. You’ve hated it, haven’t you? I think it might be your way of telling me what you think about me and Cheadle. That it isn’t worth it, I mean. I ought to get loose from it and do something else with my life. Like . . . Do take those beastly specs off. I can’t see what you’re thinking.’

‘I am thinking that if you say anything more about babies I shall boot you out.’

Booting me out was a running joke, though the possibility of it being true always gave me a slight kick, and him too, I think, reminding us of the tricky balance we’d set up and the certainty that we were going to fall off the wire one day—though when it happened it was not going to be anything like this.

‘I’ve thought of a new and thrilling revenge,’ I said. ‘I shall picket your bridge club and proclaim the story of my wrongs on a sandwich board.’

‘The police will move you on.’

‘Policemen eat out of my hand.’

This was part of the game. B enjoyed fending off imaginary attacks on his power-bases, though he was incapable of producing the mildest leap of fantasy in response to my flights. We might have gone on for some time if a car hadn’t drawn up behind us and blared its hooter. B drove forward, found a turning-place and reversed into it. As the other car came by I saw that the driver was the boring property developer, Henry van Something, with whom I’d had to put up all through an endless dinner party a couple of evenings before. He waved to us and drove on.

‘Are you selling it to him?’ I said. ‘I couldn’t stand that.’

‘There’s a syndicate. It’s quite a big deal.’

‘Worse still.’

I woke in the middle of the night and knew without reaching out to feel that B wasn’t there. Normally he willed himself asleep in two minutes and slept all night, turning once as if he was a chop being fried. I lay for a while, listening to the distant whisper of the sea, then got up and went out on to the balcony. He was leaning on the rail in his pyjamas, staring out towards America. There was no moon, but lots of stars above and fireflies in the garden. Apart from them sea and land were pitch black and it was nothing like as warm as you’d expect a tropic night to be. I slid my arm up under his pyjama top and ran my fingers over the knotty muscles below his shoulder-blades. He seemed not to notice.

‘What’s the matter?’ I said. ‘Just money?’

‘No. There’s enough of that. Or there would be. It’s in the wrong place.’

‘Can’t you move it?’

‘I thought I could. Been setting it up for years. But now . . .’

‘Because of Mummy?’

‘Partly.’

‘Can’t you just buy her off?’

‘Why should I?’

‘I had an idea. It came to me in my sleep. Would you mind if I bought her off?’

‘A hundred and twenty thousand pounds?’

‘But would you let me?’

‘Up to you. But I’m not going to lend you the money.’

‘I know. But I could sell my sapphires.’

He grunted.

‘They’re insured for two hundred and fifty thousand,’ I said. ‘I know you don’t get as much as that, and just as sapphires they aren’t worth it. It’s Mary’s stone makes the difference. But I thought if you helped me find someone to buy them we might get enough. We could make it a condition they didn’t tell anyone for a couple of years. I can go on wearing the replica if I have to. Would it help? Would it make any difference?’

He was silent so long I thought he’d stopped listening.

‘You’re certain they’re yours to sell?’ he said.

‘Daddy left them to me outright. They’re not entailed or part of the Trust or anything.’

‘Odd.’

‘I’ve always thought he wanted me to feel I had something of my own which I could do what I liked with. I wasn’t a complete slave to the house.’

‘I suppose it’s a possibility. I told you it was only part of the deal your mother proposed?’

‘You don’t have to explain. Jane told me. That’s nonsense. We may look alike but we’re not swaps. Jane thinks so too.’

‘So do I.’

He said it without thinking, a casual comment on a side-issue to the main business, but it was a fantastic relief to hear. I put my head on his shoulder and leaned against him. Both our bodies were chilly with the night air, but as the warmth came back between us I persuaded myself I could feel him beginning to relax.

‘It might be a possibility,’ he said at last. I’ll have to sort it out. Would your mother stay bought?’

‘Oh, I think so. Provided she didn’t find out where the money really came from. She isn’t a complete crook.’