Death of a Unicorn

III

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.

‘You want real coal?’ said Terry, who had been gazing at her with his usual open interest almost throughout that first supper. Fiona took the question seriously—it is hard to tell with Terry.

‘It would still be kind of sham. I guess if I was taking it up for a real fire which was going to get lit for someone to dress in front of, that would be OK.’

‘But the whole place is sham, in that sense,’ I said. ‘Apart from the few rooms we live in it doesn’t exist for any purpose except to be looked at. In one sense it never did. Nobody built the portico, for instance, to keep the rain off a visitor ringing the front doorbell. Sometimes I think of myself as the stage manager of a very, very slow play. Each act takes about a century. Cheadle itself is the star. We are now well into the last act, the old age of the hero. There’s nothing I can do to alter the plot, but I am doing my best to see that the performance isn’t a shambles.’

‘See what I mean about Mums and the high romantic line?’ said Simon. ‘You’ve read some of her books, I take it.’

‘Cheadle’s much more important than my books,’ I said. ‘But it’s an example of an art-form, just as they are. It’s not any more real, in the sense Fiona was talking about.’

‘I guess I read quite a few,’ said Fiona.

‘You don’t have to like them,’ I said quickly. I always say that. It has the advantage of being true. If I were a better writer—or at least someone who thought of herself as a “great” writer, I expect I should find it hard to sympathise with readers who didn’t respond to my work. As it is, to assume that every intelligent person must enjoy what I write seems to me as vulgar an attitude as to assume that guests have something wrong with them if they don’t enjoy zabaglione.

‘I liked some of them all right,’ said Fiona. ‘Times when I want to give up and forget, they’re great for that. Other times, though, I guess I get impatient. All those girls. Why’s it always got to be some man who sorts our their problems for them?’

‘Hear, hear,’ said Simon.

‘Why indeed?’ I said. ‘I suppose the only answer is that it’s a convention of the art-form. I’ve tried to get away from it occasionally. There was a girl I made chuck over both men and go and be a nurse in Ethiopia.’

‘I remember cheering,’ said Simon.

‘At least I didn’t have her pegged out and eaten by ants,’ I said. ‘But my publishers were full of doom and gloom. I didn’t mind, but the next book sold much worse, and that did matter.’

‘Mums always talks about sales figures when she’s near the romantic bone,’ said Simon. ‘Or roof repairs. It means she feels she’s let you get too close to her secret garden.’

‘Where would we be without sales figures?’ I said. ‘Secret gardens don’t pay plumbers.’

‘But they do,’ said Simon. ‘Your books don’t sell because you’ve put exactly the right number of dots on the heroine’s veil for 1911. They sell because somehow or other underneath all that there’s this utterly romantic place which you’re the only person’s got the key to.’

‘Oh, really!’ I said. ‘We’re not here to try and analyse my sources of inspiration. My sources of inspiration are the account books for Cheadle.’

‘See what I mean, Fiona?’ said Simon.

‘I guess account books can be pretty romantic,’ said Fiona. ‘They must go back years and years, uh?’

‘Lord, yes,’ said Simon. ‘If you want to know what a hundredweight of horse-shoe cleats cost in 1796, it’s all there.’

‘Can’t I help with the accounts, Aunt Mabs?’ said Fiona. ‘I get pretty good grades in math and I’m aiming to major in economics.’

‘I suppose you might,’ I said. ‘I hadn’t thought . . . You see, the accounts are done by an outside firm called Burroughs and I’ve been having endless discussions with one of their men about getting it all on to Maxine’s new computer. That’s what I bought it for, after all. The trouble is it involves somebody sitting down and actually doing it. If I let Burroughs it will cost the earth and then they’ll get it all wrong. There’s no one here I can trust and spare. It’s worse than that because my own mind goes blank. I’m frightened of ending up with a system I don’t understand, which’ll mean I’m in somebody else’s hands. I’m not having that. Simon and Terry could do it, but they won’t . . .’

‘Dead boring,’ said Simon. ‘Nothing to it. Endless, endless entries. Stock control. Oh, God!’

‘We could write you a basic programme, Marge,’ said Terry. ‘But after that . . .’

‘The man from Burroughs keeps talking about basic programmes. They have this one they sell to farms which he thinks will work with a bit of adapting. I simply can’t believe it’s not going to turn out more trouble than it’s worth.’

‘Listen, Aunt Mabs,’ said Fiona. ‘Why don’t Simon and Terry and me put our heads together? They write the programme, I do the entries. That kind of thing really turns me on, getting it all cleaned up and running. We did a lot of work with computers, tenth grade.’

Even Simon seemed interested, probably not in the task itself—he takes a very blase attitude to the workaday uses of computers—but in making me see that Fiona was going to be an asset to Cheadle. I did not believe I had shown any hint of the bond I felt between myself and the child, had felt from the moment Simon had brought her into the office that morning. I knew it was vital to keep all that side hidden, to pretend even to myself that Fiona was only in England for a vacation job, in exchange for Jane’s hospitality to Simon a couple of years earlier, but I couldn’t keep my eyes off her as the three of them started on micro-chat. Simon, sulkily, had helped me to choose Maxine’s machine but had made it obvious that he wasn’t going to let it become a means of sucking him into the digestive processes of the Cheadle-ogre. I wondered if he knew what he had paid for his escape. I’m not talking about his homosexuality, though I’m aware of what they say about too-dominant mothers. No, it was what I felt to be a kind of spiritual numbness, not merely to me, but to the world in general. You can imagine a small boy, growing up in the innards of the ogre and in his childishness treating it as no more than the place where he happened to live, but then, around the age of seven, beginning to realise from things that his father had said, and his grandmother, what his relationship with it was supposed to be and deciding with that mysterious inward astuteness children possess that somehow he was going to withdraw from a bargain he had never made. He would begin, wouldn’t he, by building a fence between himself and the priestess of the ogre, me. He would make the facets of himself that turned towards me numb, numb to my demands or offers, to my anger, to my love.

Now, though, as he explained the technicalities of Maxine’s toy—all Ks and bits and other barbarisms—he did not seem numb. Or perhaps he was merely reflecting the energy of Fiona’s interest and enthusiasm. She leaned across the table, eating without noticing, her eyes brilliant, making piggy grunts of comprehension or wrinkling her snout at something she didn’t follow (another Millett trait, frowning with the nose, Mark used to say). Hauling my stare away from her for about the tenth time I saw Terry watching me. He nodded.

On the strength of that I decided to give it a try. Burroughs were not going to like it, not at all. I would have to get them in to explain the accounting system in detail to the children, and the output from the computer they would need for purposes of tax and audit. I would see how things stood after a month. There’d still be time to go back to the adapted farm-account system. Burroughs would try to make all possible difficulties in their chilly, bureaucratic style. Never mind. For the first time in ages I felt the old tingle of anticipation at the prospect of a fight, of imposing my will on some body of reluctant, hierarchical, narrow-minded males. I was going to enjoy that. Why, all of a sudden, now? Because I would be doing it—though she wouldn’t know—to satisfy Fiona. How extraordinary.

‘When can I visit Gran?’ she asked at breakfast.

‘You don’t have to, my dear. She’ll never know. She hasn’t much idea what’s happening or who anyone is, except me.’

‘But I want to. And, too, I’ll have to tell Mom I did.’

‘Oh, all right. Let me finish my toast and I’ll go and see if she’s still presentable. I cleaned her up before breakfast, so she shouldn’t be too bad.’

‘Don’t you have a nurse for her?’

‘Only part-time. She’s like a baby, you see, wanting its mother and no one else. She throws a tantrum if it’s anyone but me for some things.’

‘Wow, Aunt Mabs, you keep busy!’

‘I’ve already done my two hours’ writing this morning.’

I was ridiculously gratified when she looked impressed. Simon and Terry never get up till ten so I had her to myself and would have preferred not to introduce a third person, let alone my mother, but I was ashamed to make excuses. Obviously the visit would have to be paid. I was going to be busy all day, and by evening my mother would be tired and her company yet more painful.

She was sitting up in bed watching the breakfast television (a real boon to me, in the few months since it started). She ignored my presence as I straightened her coverlet and wiped the spittle from her cheek.

‘You’ve got a visitor, darling,’ I said.

She paid no attention but continued to stare at the screen, making impatient little movements if I got in her line of sight. I was glad to have her so preoccupied, and not whining or snivelling.

Fiona tapped at the door, came in and walked straight across to the bed.

‘Hi, Gran,’ she said, and without any sign of distaste kissed my mother on the mouth, then took her hand and held it.

‘I’m Fiona,’ she said. ‘I’m Jane’s daughter.’

She had slowed her twitter but otherwise might have been talking to any normal person. My mother had begun to make a waving gesture at not being able to see the screen, but slowly turned her head and stared.

‘My dear,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, my dear.’

Tears welled in her rheumy eyes and I thought she was about to begin one of her bouts of silent weeping, but it didn’t happen.

‘Mom sends her love,’ said Fiona.

‘Jane?’ said my mother. She can only have been trying to puzzle out who this girl with the Millett face could be, but Fiona took the question straight.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Jane’s fine. She’s learnt to fly. Happy as a squirrel all day long.’

She’d speeded up. My mother flicked her hand angrily towards the TV, a much more commanding gesture than her usual feeble fidgetings. I turned the sound down.

‘What did you say, dear?’ she said. ‘I’m getting a little deaf.’

‘Jane’s very happy. She’s learnt to fly. In an aeroplane.’

‘How lovely. And your name is . . .’

‘Fiona.’

‘Fiona. That’s Scottish. My daughter Jane married a Scot. He took her away. They always do.’

‘Well, I’m Jane’s daughter. And I’ve come back to see you, Gran.’

‘Not Gran. That’s ponsy, darling. I don’t want to hear it again.’

Fiona glanced at me.

‘Granny,’ I mouthed.

‘Right, Granny. I’ll remember.’

‘And you’ve come to stay for a long time? How lovely.’

Full of curiosity, astonishment, admiration and absurd wriggling little jealousies I watched and listened to the almost meaningless repetitions and retracings, a slurry of rotted-down memory from which now and then some new phrase would emerge to show that my mother had partially grasped something Fiona had said, perhaps several sentences ago. Fiona coped with this mode of conversation with perfect composure and sympathy, which was no doubt why she was able to elicit more intelligent responses than I would have been able to—or, I have to admit, would have wished to. In the end, though my mother showed little sign of tiring, I had to butt in.

‘I’ve an appointment at nine,’ I said, ‘and I’ll have to settle her down before that. So I’m afraid . . .’

The vague animation on my mother’s face faded at the sound of my voice.

‘I’ll give you a hand, Aunt Mabs.’

‘Oh, you don’t want to. It’s medicines and ointments for bedsores and other little unpleasantnesses.’

‘You just show me how.’

‘Well, if you’re sure . . .’

So I heaved the old carcase around, and emptied the bag and so on, while Fiona watched. My mother hardly grumbled at all and seemed perfectly happy when we left her propped up and staring at an advertisement for cheap jeans.

Fiona took to visiting my mother daily. It was not a formality. I would have sympathised (could have understood better than I did) if these visits after the first few days had consisted of a quick peck on the cheek, a few ritual phrases about health and weather, and then leaving with the catharsis of duty done. But Fiona would stay for an hour on end because she wanted to. They conversed, not usually as coherently as on that first morning, but even on bad days with something being exchanged to and fro. For all her energy the child had a patience I found unbelievable. I had to assume that it came from the Lowland Scots ancestry of my brother-in-law.

‘It’s just like digging out our fort, Aunt Mabs. That’s slow work, slow. You spend a morning and an afternoon on your knees, brushing away a half millimetre of dirt at a time, and if you strike lucky you find a chip of charred timber. I’ve been meaning to ask—what’s “ponsy”, Aunt Mabs?’

She didn’t seem to find the explanation silly or unacceptably snobbish, merely a detail of the behaviour of our tribe and interesting for that reason.

‘You got to listen hard,’ she went on. ‘Sure she gets things wrong and she doesn’t know what she’s saying part of the time, but you’ve got to take it all on board and run it through a kind of sieve, the way we did at the fort, and then you pick through what’s left and sometimes there’s a wee bit that isn’t a pebble and isn’t a clod and you turn it over and over and suddenly you see it might have been part of the handle of a jug. And then you find a few more bits and you begin to guess what kind of a jug, and then it gets easier because you know what you’re looking for now. I’ve been taking up some of the old account books and reading through and asking her about things. Gee, they’re fascinating. Mostly she doesn’t remember but suddenly she’ll come out with something about Mr Wheatstone trying to give notice or having the Americans in the Park—that must have been in the Hitler war, I guess—and I’ve got another piece of my jug.’

‘I think you’re a wonder. I’d never have the patience.’

‘Mom warned me you and Granny didn’t hit it off, uh?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘It’s because you’re so like her—much more than Mom is.’

‘Be careful what you say, darling. It may be true, but you’re on dangerous ground.’

‘Right.’

I was confused in my own reactions to this growing relationship. Of course it was a great practical convenience. My mother became far easier to cope with. She was happier, whined and wept hardly at all, slept all night, seemed less feeble, made fewer demands on my time and emotions. I had to insist on doing my share of the nursing or Fiona would have taken it all on herself. And Fiona clearly got satisfaction from the relationship, so I was glad for her.

But there was no denying that I was also jealous. At a surface level I was simply jealous of Fiona’s openly expressed fondness for my mother. I do not mean that I too wanted to be kissed at each meeting, or would have permitted it. With me she was open, friendly, interested, as she would have been with almost anyone; but for my mother she seemed to feel something particular, and I’m afraid I minded. Browning has long been my favourite poet, and the husband in My Last Duchess seemed to me, in these moods, marginally less of a monster.

At a different level I was also jealous of Fiona, of her ability to love my mother. For thirty years I have more than fulfilled my duty as a daughter. After my mother’s stroke Mark tried to persuade me to put her in a home; from this disagreement, and from the extra demands on me which resulted from keeping her at Cheadle, I date the decline of our marriage, though given Mark’s character and mine he was probably destined to turn to a Julia-figure around now—but there’s no point, in talking about what might have happened. I can fairly claim that in the world’s eyes I have been an admirable daughter—but all without love, and what is the good of that? Irrational feelings of guilt I know are the lot of many women my age; I am lucky to have so much to take my mind off them. But to my disgust I became aware of a growing impatience with Fiona’s ability to think of my mother as a worthwhile person and not, as she was in my eyes, an embarrassing and useless wreck, a monument to all my defeats in our long war, crumbling but still erect where it had always stood, in the heartland of my life. Once recognised I could control the impatience, but not get rid of it.

One evening about a fortnight after her arrival we gathered before supper. It had been a heavy but satisfactory day for me, a flood of summer visitors safely handled, a further step in the negotiations with the film company about The Gamekeeper’s Daughter, a meeting—myself, Fiona, Simon and two men from Burroughs—at which the accountants had finally seemed to realise that we were going to computerise the accounts to suit our own needs and that if they didn’t co-operate I would take the business elsewhere; and before all that, before anyone else was awake, a fulfilling couple of hours in which what had promised to be a no more than a linking scene between plot and sub-plot had, in that mysterious manner I suppose all writers are used to, become an episode of real interest with a life of its own, and with the prospect of sending unexpected currents of that life through scenes yet to come. I was tired but cheerful. An extra source of satisfaction had been the way in which Simon had coped with the accountants. Their computer man, though only a few years older than him, had started to patronise him as an amateur and Simon, for the first time ever in my presence, had, so to speak, made his true weight known. It gave me hope that he might indeed be able, as he had said, to get by on his own.

‘It’s been a good day,’ I said. ‘I thought we’d have some champagne.’

‘Any excuse, Fiona,’ said Simon. ‘It’s her Achilles heel. Good days we celebrate, and bad days we need cheering up.’

‘It happens about once a month,’ I said. ‘Even with Ronnie’s gadget. I think I’ve been fantastically abstemious.’

‘Is there another glass?’ said Fiona. ‘So I can take some to Granny?’

‘I’ve only put one bottle to chill.’

‘Just a mouthful, Aunt Mabs.’

‘Oh, all right.’

When she came back she said, ‘There’s something I wanted to ask you, Aunt Mabs. I don’t get it. I was reading one of the old account books, 1952, all about repairing the roof on the Banqueting Hall. Gee, they did things cheap those days.’

‘I was paid four pounds a week for my first job,’ I said.

‘On a joke mag,’ explained Simon.

‘No, I got ten pounds for that. This was selling lampshades for a frightful old harridan in Beauchamp Place. I haven’t thought of her for years, thank heavens. What about the roof ?’

‘Where did the money come from?’

The question ambushed me.

‘How much?’ said Terry.

‘Round a hundred and forty thousand pounds,’ said Fiona. ‘All it says in the book is “Cheque”.’

‘Christ!’ said Simon. ‘That wasn’t cheap! That was money those days! We must have sold some Canalettos.’

‘It would say in the books,’ said Fiona. ‘It doesn’t.’

‘Are you OK, Mums?’ said Simon.

‘Nose trick,’ I said. ‘Always worse with champagne. No, for God’s sake don’t slap me—I can’t stand that. I’ll be all right.’

I prolonged my recovery while Fiona prattled on about her search through the account books. I had in fact no idea what transactions had taken place between B and my mother. I had got the necklace out of the bank and given it, to him. A few days later he had presented me with a cheque for a hundred and forty-eight thousand pounds, signed by a man I had never heard of. I had paid this into my account—oh, blessed days before the Tax Inspectors thought my statements worth inspecting—and written B a cheque for the same amount. He had said nothing at all and I’d had no wish to talk or think about it. I had bought my freedom, or so I believed. Until I found the necklace in the jigsaw box I assumed that he had paid the money to my mother. Afterwards I deliberately refused to brood on any of the events surrounding his death. I wrote down what I knew and put it in a drawer. Since nothing could bring him back, nothing that had happened to take him away mattered any more. I put it out of my life. My mother never mentioned it either. It was evident that he had kept the necklace, perhaps always intending to give it back to me when the affair was over. It had, so I thought, cost him nothing, and he may merely have wished to gratify me by letting me believe I had made the sacrifice for him, and gratified himself by the knowledge that I had thought it worth it. He had presumably decided that my mother was not after all in a position to do him any damage, and it was certainly unlike him to allow himself to be blackmailed.

‘Honestly I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Mummy ran everything. I didn’t inherit till I was twenty-five and I’d married Mark before that, and there was his career, and then Sally. I didn’t really start taking an interest till you came along, Simon. I imagine we must have sold something. It wouldn’t be Canalettos, because they’re all still there and, besides, the art market didn’t start exploding for another ten years or so. You’d have had to sell a couple of dozen to get anywhere near that.’

‘Besides, that kind of thing would be in the books, uh?’ said Fiona.

‘Do you really want to know?’ I said.

“Oh, I guess not. Only curiosity. I’m only looking through them to try to spot the odd-ball items that might crop up again and tie a knot in our programme, but I keep getting fascinated. I asked Granny and she just said, “That horrible man”.’

‘The architect I should think,’ said Simon. ‘She was always fratching with architects.’

‘But you should have seen the way she smiled, Aunt Mabs. I guess she won the argument.’

A few days before Fiona left I chose a suitably vile morning and walked with her down the avenue between the statues of the Enemies of Zeus. I noticed some fiend of a visitor had climbed up and put a fruit-flavoured yoghurt pot into the upstretched hand of Tantalus. We rounded the fountain and stood looking up at the house while the wind thumped my umbrella. The sky was all fast-moving, sagging clouds and the squalls came and went unpredictably. The leaves of the limes had barely begun to yellow but even so the wind was stripping the first few away. The spray from the fountain whipped to and fro. At the far end of the avenue the portico stood unmoved.

‘Take a good look,’ I said. ‘Pity it isn’t November.’

Fiona stared earnestly. I had kept my inward vow and not once hinted at my intentions, but we had by then reached such a level of rapport that I was sure she knew.

‘Looks kind of like it was waiting to eat someone,’ she said.

‘We used to call it the stone ogre look. Your mother and I, I mean. I can’t see it any more. It just looks grim and enduring now. Remember to tell her I showed you, won’t you, darling?’

‘Right.’