Death of a Unicorn

I

Maxine was out of the office so I answered the telephone, using my old secretary-voice.

‘Cheadle Enterprises.’

‘Mabs?’ said the man after a slight pause. Nobody apart from my mother and sisters had called me that for twenty years.

‘Who is speaking?’

‘Ronald Smith.’

‘Would you mind telling me . . . Ronnie?’

‘Ah, it is you. Yes, Ronnie.’

‘How nice to hear from you after all these years. What can I do for you?’

Maxine came in and I signalled to her to get ready to interrupt with the urgent-call-on-other-line routine. This was more excusable than it may sound. Ronnie had been something of a public figure in the Sixties as a television journalist specialising in Eastern Bloc politics but with a lucrative sideline in British traitors, most of whom he had known well. Then he had dropped rather suddenly out of sight, after a series of drunk-on-screen episodes.

‘May I come and talk to you, Mabs?’

‘Is it about money?’

‘Am I hoping to touch you, you mean?’

‘I’m afraid so. Most people seem to be.’

‘In my case, no. But I’m told you make a charge for interviews.’

‘Sometimes. If people are trying to use me and my name for their own profit I don’t see why I shouldn’t get a percentage.’

‘Ah. This may be one of those times, then. The thing is, Night and Day is coming up to its fiftieth anniversary and I’ve been commissioned to write the official history to celebrate the event. I leave it to you, with your extensive knowledge of the publishing industry, to decide how much profit there is likely to be in that.’

One should never lift one’s eyes from the treadmill, never. His voice had aged, blurred, but the old hoot was still very marked and the half self-mocking pomposity of phrase. Also, I persuaded myself, the old eager inquisitiveness, the schoolboy’s delight in secret knowledge.

‘A bottle of champagne,’ I said. ‘Special price for you, Ronnie.’

‘Right. You’ll have to drink my share. I’m on the wagon.’

Of course. The world does not stay the same.

‘A bottle of Perrier, then,’ I said. ‘Can you come here? My London visits are always crammed. Mondays are best. We’re open the rest of the week. Not this Monday. Not next, not . . . hell! I suppose I could cancel . . . What about Monday March the 15th? Come to luncheon, one sharp, and I’ll clear the afternoon till three. That ought to be enough. I was only on the paper ten months, remember.’

‘Months of some significance.’

‘I suppose so. It seems ages now. Give me your address and telephone number in case there’s a crisis. One o’clock Monday the 15th. I’ll send you a pass for the gate and a map about parking and finding the garden-room door.’

When I put the telephone down I saw Maxine watching me with a frown on her flat, plain face.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘You never know where you are with long-lost friends. I didn’t need rescuing after all.’

‘You sounded sort of different. Not you.’

‘Did I? Tell Pellegrini luncheon for two in the Satin Room on the 15th. No wine—a cup of some sort. Do a pass for Mr Ronald Smith and tell the gate to expect him. Ring Burroughs and tell them I can’t see that man . . .’

‘It’ll be the third time you’ve put him off.’

‘Sure? What am I doing before luncheon that day? All right, don’t ring Burroughs—it won’t hurt the man to wait ten minutes. Ring Mr Smith and ask him to make it 12.30. Warn him I may be a bit late even so. Oh, and check if he’s got any diet requirements. He must be nearer seventy than sixty . . . Good Lord!’

And I had heard nothing of Tom for twenty years. I seldom looked at Night and Day but I knew Brian Naylor was still in charge—he’d got an OBE two years back, and he popped up on some television or wireless programme most weeks, the professional deflater, that flat voice still setting my teeth on edge. What on earth had made me think I wanted to see Ronnie?

‘Have you decided on a name for this new girl yet, Lady Margaret?’

‘No. Must I?’

‘I can always put it in later.’

‘I suppose I’d better or I shan’t start thinking about her properly. Let’s have a look at the file.’

‘I’ve got them all on the processor now.’

‘I knew I shouldn’t have bought that bloody thing.’

It was what they call a mini-computer, in fact. Its chief function was supposed to be to keep track of the Cheadle accounts, if ever I and the accountants succeeded in agreeing how we wanted them kept. Meanwhile Maxine had taken it over. I went and stood behind her shoulder and watched the names ladder up the screen.

‘Tara Faithfull,’ I said. ‘Nobody’s called Tara Faithfull, even in a romantic novel. Or Prudence Hastie.’

‘I think Tara Faithfull’s lovely. I can sort of see her already.’

‘Long raven hair with highlights like dark fire? Smoky voice? Slender fingers?’

‘Sort of.’

‘Not on your life, Maxine. I’m not that sort of writer. Almost, but not quite. I see this one as an Isobel, I think.’

‘You had an Isobel Grandison in Dark Pinnacles, only three back.’

‘I thought she sounded familiar. What’ve I called the last few hussies, do you remember?’

‘I’ve got them too. Just a sec.’

She poked at the keyboard. The screen blanked. New names appeared. They were accompanied this time by columns of attributes, height, hair-colour and so on. She’d really been playing with her toy while she had it. I seemed to have been alternating talls with shorts. No redheads, I was glad to see.

‘What does “Chuckles” mean, for heaven’s sake?’ I said.

‘Deep soft chuckles, like a man’s.’

‘Three of them?’

‘Yes. Didn’t you know?’

‘Of course not. Dear God! I seem to be that sort of writer after all.’

‘You don’t have to decide about a name if you don’t want to. It’s so easy now. You can call her Ann Brown and when you’ve made up your mind I can just tell the machine to go through and change it. No sweat, honest.’

‘The trouble, my dear Maxine, is that I shall write differently about a girl called Ann Brown from a girl . . . one moment! Do you mean to say that suppose I’d made the current hussy a chuckler and then you pointed out I was getting into a rut I could tell you to give her a silvery gurgle and hey presto, she gurgles?’

‘Oh. Well, not quite like that. I mean you might have made a footman chuckle, or someone. I could tell it to find all the chuckles, though, and then tell it which ones to change.’

‘Really? This opens . . . No, don’t let’s let it open. I invariably get sick of a girl around Chapter Ten. I start happily off with some flaxen-haired romp of a Gibson Girl but by then I’m yearning for a lissom and consumptive brunette. Would your toy do that for me?’

‘You’re joking, aren’t you, Lady Margaret?’

Maxine is perhaps my most dedicated reader, against stiff competition. She sometimes seems to me to know all my books by heart. She came to Cheadle in a coach-party in the hope of meeting me and asking me for a job. When she didn’t she camped, metaphorically, on my doorstep, like some Indian would-be servant, until in an emergency I took her on for a fortnight, thinking that at least I’d be able to pay her less than an agency girl. She’s stayed two years now. Her devotion seems entirely uncritical. No book is better or worse than another, because the question does not arise, any more than it arises with episodes of real life.

‘Joking?’ I said. ‘Please God, yes.’

One’s personality is laid down in layers, like a landscape. Placid lives are like old lake-beds, sedimentary stratifications each scarcely different from the one below. Others, if one dug down, would show evidence of the long-ago upheavals that cause the rumplings of the surface under today’s thin turf. And in most lives there are outcrops, barely changed beyond a little weathering, persisting through all the sediments, still there.

For thirty years, winter and summer, I have risen at six and gone upstairs to write until breakfast. These words are leaping into existence letter by letter at twelve minutes past seven on a yellow September morning in what used to be the housekeeper’s bedroom in the top passage of the West Wing. The house at this hour is almost empty, and seems emptier since all Mark’s clothes went from his cupboard, though Simon and Terry are still here after the summer. Sally is in Sri Lanka. Maxine is in her own room, very likely with John Nightingale, the assistant gardener. I no longer try to keep track of Maxine’s affairs, but am still amazed by her ability to attract presentable young men and later get rid of them with, as far as I can see, no fuss at all. She seems to run her love-life with the same down-to-earth practicality with which she runs my office. This room, by the way, is not my office. It is the place where I write. I do not remember choosing it deliberately for being the same size as my living-room in Dolphin Square and for looking out over a well of the building; it is not in other ways very like, nor can I smell the Thames. But it is now necessary, just as this hour is necessary. Now as then I am too busy at other times of the day. Necessary in another sense too. I cannot imagine this part of me functioning anywhere else. Granite protruding through the strata.

The morning after Ronnie’s telephone call was a peculiarly bad one. Naturally I have bad days, not only when I have influenza coming on, but I have trained myself to slog through them. I imagine that on a real treadmill rhythm is vital, the work is only tolerable if you and your fellow-slaves keep it groaning round at an even pace. I do not like to write rubbish but I would sooner do that than let the treadmill stop. That morning I wrote nothing at all. Superficially I spent it trying to decide whether the new girl was tall or short, plump or skinny, quick-tempered or placid. Usually these things accrete and stick to a few early and almost random decisions, building up to a coherent character, but one has to make the random decisions and then stick to them. I couldn’t.

It was not as though it yet mattered. The important thing was to get the girl on to a boat for South Africa, where she was going to hire a laconic and embittered white hunter and start looking for her brother, missing since ‘the Boer War. There was also the business of the cousin, apparently in love with the girl and doing everything to help her, but in fact using his connections in the Colonial Office to thwart her efforts so that he could inherit. It had all seemed reasonably promising in a run-of-the-treadmill way, quite interesting enough in its own right to publish under my name and not as a Mary Mason, for which I would have had to hot up the affair with the hunter. There was almost no research to do—after thirty years I know the surface details of my period better than most professional scholars. Six months should see it through, one more step on the groaning wheel that helps to keep this house in being.

The wheel stuck. Jammed tight. No give at all.

Interviewers, patronising to varying degrees, tend to ask whether I actually believe in the people I invent. Usually I open my eyes very wide and speak with practised sweetness about how real they seem to me. Occasionally with an interviewer both intelligent and understanding (not at all the same thing) I feel impelled to greater candour. I write much better than average romantic novels, I say, with a big and loyal readership, and that means that readers must be aware that I am not simply exploiting them. They find my characters real because I, while writing, hypnotise myself into a similar belief. There are passages—the hot bits in the Mary Masons, for example—which are written with little enthusiasm. The reason this does not show is that similar parts of books by my competitors are; I’m sure, also inserted without any real gusto in response to a publishing fashion as tiresome (and let us hope as transient) as the hideous beehive hats at the end of my period. When I consider the difficulty of writing about something like Maxine’s actual love-life I am thankful for the set of wooden conventions that have evolved to cope with the problem in books like mine.

But mostly I have to believe. It may be easier for me because I can start by believing in the world I write about. In some ways the twenty years before the First World War have become more real to me than the period in which I find myself living. I am mentally at home there, relaxed and happy. By comparison my life in the last thirty years has been one of almost constant struggle, a long defensive war for a cause that must be doomed in the end but not, thanks to my efforts, in my lifetime. The giants of my childhood—my great-great-uncle, Nanny Bassett, my mother—behaved and thought as though they still inhabited that earlier world, as though Cheadle could be maintained as a fortress loyal to the past while the present raged and ruined outside its walls. Wheatstone, who died less than three years ago, had come to Cheadle as an underfootman on getting his discharge from the Boer War. (He was invaluable to me to the end. My ‘Historical Consultant’. I got his funeral as a tax-allowable expense by hiring black-plumed horses and having it filmed for publicity purposes.) In fact my heroines are seldom born into houses like Cheadle, but I am convinced that my emotional grasp of what Cheadle was like towards the end of its heyday allows me an imaginative entrée into the reality of other possible lives of the period. My heroines are not fantasy versions of myself. You could say that my heroes are more likely to be that.

It happened that this new girl, because of the plot about the cousin and the inheritance, needed to come from a family of some wealth. Still, she was not going to be any possible version of myself. She had to be a horsewoman for a start, which I have never been. Or . . . yes, almost as I’d said yesterday, she could start as consumptive, doomed by the doctors. I’d never had a consumptive as a main character, surely, though I’d killed a few minor characters off with the scourge. Yes, she determines to spend her last few months finding her brother, but then the good sun, the open-air life on the veldt . . . really, it was extremely promising.

In desperation I began to rewrite yesterday morning’s stint, replacing horses with physicians. The wheel would not move. The day-bed was there, the view through the shaded windows to the croquet lawn, the telegraph boy bicycling up the curve of the drive, but no one lay on the stupid bed. No name was on the buff envelope. It was all Maxine’s fault. I would have to get rid of that stupid machine.

Or was it Ronnie’s?

I was not aware of having thought about his call, though I had a vague idea that I might have dreamed of something to do with Night and Day. I seldom remember dreams, unless they are nightmares that wake me in mid-story. Perhaps it would be wiser to put Ronnie off. I did not wish to think in detail about thirty years ago. I could manage two lives, one in the period of my books and one in the here and now. A third might be a disaster. The extreme, unrepeatable happiness of those ten months in 1952 and 1953 was better left down among the sediments. I was too busy in my other lives for that kind of day-dreaming. It was safer for it to stay where it belonged, in the night-dreams. But I had said I would see Ronnie and somehow the way in which I had agreed had seemed to involve a different level of promise from, say, the appointments with the man from Burroughs. I would think less of myself if I cancelled.

Having determined not to day-dream, inevitably I began. I was actually on my feet, standing by the window, running my fingertips vaguely down the bobbly old wallpaper and thinking about the room in Dolphin Square where I began my real writing, when I heard a faint but definite movement from the corridor. I stood still. At first I thought it was the East Wing Ghost. You never see him. He just moves around, muttering in what we think is Old Dutch, and opening and closing doors. There is something comic about him. I mean this literally. Strangers who have chanced on him have never been frightened but have often mentioned a sudden impulse to laugh. What was he doing over here? And comedy was far from what I felt at the sound. Footsteps and a slithering, trailing whisper.

I crossed the room and opened the door slowly.

My mother was shuffling towards me. She had contrived to get one arm into her dressing-gown and then had given up, so that it was trailing along behind her. As usual since her stroke her head was tilted sideways, but her mouth was not hanging open. She held in front of her, as though it was the purpose of her visit, one of the small towels we use for wiping the dribbles from her face. I was appalled to see her. How on earth had she managed the stairs? Was she going to start wandering round the house at odd hours? She might have slipped and broken her neck. Oh, but if only she had!

‘Mummy, darling,’ I said in the calm, amused voice I have trained myself to use, ‘what are you up to? It’s not breakfast for an hour yet.’

She looked at me with her old sharp arrogance, but with no apparent recognition, and came shambling on. I moved to meet her, intending to turn her gently in her tracks and lead her back to bed, but she tugged her arm determinedly free of my grip and pushed on into the room. I dare say I could have had my way with a struggle, though she is still surprisingly strong—the apparent feebleness of her movements is misleading, the result, according to Dr Jackson, of lack of confidence in her own motor control. I followed her in, mysteriously relieved to have a tangible reason for not being able to do my work.

‘I just came up to make sure you were all right, Mabs, darling,’ she said.

It was her old voice, perfectly clear, but slowed. She had not spoken to me but to the room. Now she faltered, apparently perceiving that it was empty. She shuffled to my desk, pushed at the chair, patted my typewriter. Being electric it responded by printing a few meaningless letters. She nodded approvingly, then turned and looked at me.

‘Where is . . . ?’ she began.

Her eyes dulled. Her mouth dragged open.

‘Urrh? . . . Urrh?’ she mumbled.

It was the same question. Where was Mabs? Where was the child she had borne and trained, and fought for, to take Cheadle over and keep it going, and to bear and train and fight for another child to do the same in its turn?

I guessed what had happened. Long ago, when I had first come back to Cheadle to live, and get ready to take up the responsibilities of my inheritance, my mother had deeply resented the two early-morning hours in which I lived a life beyond her grasp. Her attack had not of course been direct, but had consisted of excuses for interruptions, getting up earlier than she ever used to, for instance, and losing some essential article of clothing and then coming up to try and make me help her find it. My first permanent victory over her had been to make her stop, to keep my two hours mine, untouchable:

Over the years her attitude changed, partly because like many strong-willed people she was capable of thinking her defeats into victories, of altering the past so that what had happened became what she had decided would happen; partly also because she began to realise how my books were contributing to Cheadle; also because she read and enjoyed them, though she can hardly have read a book before in her life. (Mark used to say that the real reason for my success in my genre is that I have all the time been unconsciously striving to win her affection and approval. This may be true. I hope there is more to it than that.) Over the years too she must have grown used to the sound of my typewriter, as regular as the birds’ dawn chorus. Her room is not directly below my writing room, but only the opposite side of the corridor on the floor below, and the machine is ‘silent’, not silent. She may never have heard it more than subliminally, but this morning she must have missed it. The erratic connections of her brain had functioned after their fashion—indeed the momentary clarity of her speech showed that something remarkable of that kind must have happened. She had come to see why the noise was not there. What was wrong? Where was Mabs, her Mabs? Once, almost, Mabs had escaped, ceased to be hers. Had it happened again? Was she going to have to track her down, bring her home, all over again?

She stared at me like somebody trying to make out the features of another person in a dim-lit hallway. I moved towards her. My mind was numb with the horror of her visit, but my dutiful body knew what to do—get hold of her, prevent her falling, put the dressing-gown round her shoulders, lead her back to bed. Her face changed as though the movement had brought me into the light. Recognition flooded into her eyes.

‘Darling Janey,’ she said. ‘You’re the one I can trust.’

‘Of course you can, darling,’ I said.

Her mouth drooped open. She let me cover her up and lead her back downstairs.