Death of a Unicorn

VI

I shall never get used to Americans. My mogul turned out to be one of the absurdly over-civilised sort. He had a Dutch-sounding name but ordered in easy Italian a very well-judged meal at a restaurant where he was obviously a valued customer, and so on. But still there was that sense of almost manic competitiveness about him, as though doing these things was a way of scoring points in an immensely elaborate game. I suppose we all do that more or less, but the difference is that in his culture they seem to regard the game as actually winnable, whereas in ours it is more in the nature of a ritual, whose function, if any, we’ve somehow forgotten.

I didn’t mind. In fact, being of a competitive nature myself I took part with gusto and the meeting was going extremely well until, with no reference to anything we’d been talking about, something in my mind clicked. A silly little discrepancy. ‘He got money from the Jews, you know.’ But Mrs Clarke believed that B got his funds from the Kremlin. So how had my mother known? Oh, there were lots of possible explanations, but it would be nice to tidy it up and not leave it to nag away.

I smiled at my American, widening my eyes to acknowledge the elegance of his latest score, whatever it may have been, and returned to the arena with zest. I had to let him win in the end, of course, for business reasons. We were both perfectly aware of that, but he was a magnanimous victor.

After luncheon I telephoned Ronnie for Mrs Clarke’s address, then my agent to report on my luncheon and cancel my appointment with her for that afternoon, then Cheadle to say I would miss supper and be late home. A traffic warden, pad at the ready, was approaching my car when I reached it, marvellous omen. In fact the whole day seemed to be going with a cohesive impetus in my favour, and the thing was to let it take me, to surf the wave of good fortune. I had turned out to be rather good at surfing, thirty years ago.

You do not have much time to meditate on a surf-board, but in the lull of driving down to Haywards Heath it struck me that my behaviour was quite uncharacteristic of the person I am now. My ostensible reason for not checking with Mrs Clarke to see whether she was in was that I didn’t want to have to cope with a very deaf and elderly person on the telephone, or to seem to make too much of my visit. It was better to turn up and pretend to have been in the neighbourhood, then see how the land lay. I was at least partly aware that this was only a pretext to myself and that I was for some reason acting in a manner which would have been quite normal for the girl who worked thirty years before on Night and Day. Certainly I felt quite light-hearted as I drove, though I now wonder why I failed to perceive that the sense of urgency, of the wave rolling onwards, must, though it felt like something happening outside me, really indicate a subconscious compulsion, a foreknowledge of the shore-line I was riding towards on that slowly darkening afternoon.

I started to wonder about Ronnie’s theory. Not whether it was true, but whether it mattered. Certainly it mattered that the money which he paid for the repairs to the Banqueting Hall seemed to have come from the sale of Halper’s Corner, and so morally and legally had belonged to B. No doubt the plantation had had a lot of misery and wickedness in its past, but the filter-beds of the generations had washed it clean. There was no taint now. The same could not be said of B’s other finances. Those horrors had happened well within my lifetime. What did I feel about that? If it had been anyone else, perhaps . . . But he was like a boy who has unearthed pirate gold. As he carries the jar of ducats home he isn’t expected to think of the decks slopping with blood and the screams of the women in the cabins. There has been a break, and the coins belong to no one. So though that money may have paid for my year of happiness, and therefore in a sense helped to shape me into what I am now, the awareness of where it had ultimately come from didn’t seem to tarnish the afterglow.

The house was one of a row lining a wide undulating road, neither town nor country. A dark brick bungalow with an over-imposing roof-line, which made it look as though a two-storey house had been bodily shoved into the ground, leaving only the upper floor visible. I rang the bell and was answered by a screaming klaxon. I remembered Ronnie had said she was very deaf. There was no answer. I rang two or three times and then started to peer through windows. I tried the side-door in a narrow alley. It opened into a kitchen which showed obvious signs of recent use. Encouraged, I went out again and on down the alley, hoping to be able to attract Mrs Clarke’s attention at one of the windows that side.

She was working in her garden. Even in the grey November light it was an attractive place, despite measuring only a few yards in each direction. Raised beds, to eliminate bending. Pincushiony plants nestling among layered boulders and a scree of chippings. A slanting birch, almost bare. Everything extremely tidy. Mrs Clarke, her dumpy body supported by a walking-frame, was picking birch-leaves one by one out of a tussock of heather. She had her back to me so I walked on at an angle until my movement caught the corner of her eye. She straightened and turned slowly, thumping her frame round to do so. Her head went back to the old familiar angle.

‘My dear Lady Margaret,’ she said. ‘It is you, isn’t it? This is a quite unexpected pleasure.’

Ronnie was right. Apart from the hearing-aid and the frame she had scarcely aged. Her white hair was done in smooth, perfect waves, her face fully made up, her pale blue eyes unclouded. She was wearing a tweed jacket and skirt. Only her pink rubber gloves struck an odd note. She pulled one of them off in order to turn up the volume of her hearing-aid.

‘I’m sorry to barge in on you like this,’ I mouthed.

‘Oh, but do come in. I have thought of you so often. You find me in a weeny bit of a mess. I was just tidying up my dear little garden for the winter.’

She thumped herself across the pavement and opened a French window for me.

‘I do trust you will stay for tea,’ she said. ‘I was just thinking how pleasant a cup would be.’

‘Only if you’ll let me help.’

‘I’m tiresomely deaf, you see. I used to depend so much on my ears.’

‘I said . . .’

‘Certainly not, Lady Margaret. I make a point of doing things for myself. It is the only way not to become a helpless old woman.’

She closed the window and thumped herself across the room towards the kitchen, leaving me alone. I felt immensely relieved, almost exhilarated. Anyone my age must wonder at times what kind of old person they will become. The constant company of someone in my mother’s condition gives these speculations a prurient intensity, though Dr Jackson assures me that there is no hereditary element in my mother’s senility. To see Mrs Clarke so obviously unconquered was a moral tonic. The walking-frame and the deafness actually helped. They made the ageing process superficial, consisting of disabilities that could be coped with provided the will remained steadfast. She had recognised me at once—not quite the feat it might seem, because of my not infrequent appearances on television; she seemed to have taught herself to lip-read; she took getting a tea-tray together without help for granted; she did her own garden.

This sense of enduringness was confirmed by the room itself. It was just what one would have found her living in thirty years ago, lime green and ivory, frills and satins, framed photographs on every shelf, no books but neatly piled magazines. The enormous television was of course a modern note, but to balance it there were the well-remembered escritoire and commode.

The largest photograph, on the commode, showed an elderly man, the smooth baldness of his scalp contrasting with a many-wrinkled face, eyes hard and small, white moustache cut like a soldier’s. Father or husband? The soft, society-portrait focus seemed inappropriate to the forbidding sitter. Mr Clarke, I decided, taken in the late Thirties, when The Social Round was still a separate magazine from Night and Day and Mrs Clarke might well have coaxed her husband into sitting for one of her regular photographers. In that case he must have been twenty or thirty years older than she was. He looked something of a pirate, and evidently understood how to make money. An utterly different creature from B, though, just as she was from me.

I nosed along the main shelf, looking at other photographs. These were the type I remembered, her famous collection, taken at parties, race-meetings, Henley, Lord’s, with a central figure often vaguely familiar to me as the parent of a girl or young man I had once known. All the pictures were autographed by their central figure. I had picked one out and was looking at it when Mrs Clarke came back, more silently because she was using the tea-trolley instead of her walking-frame to support herself.

‘My little collection,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you remember. I haven’t room for them all in this tiny house, so many are in albums. Which one have you there?’

‘Um . . . One of those impossible signatures. I dimly remember the face. Actually I was looking at it because that’s Veronica Bracken, isn’t it?’

Names are presumably harder to lip-read than ordinary words. Mrs Clarke had clearly not taken in what I’d said. She pulled a lever at the side of the trolley to lock the wheels so that she could steady herself with one hand and use the other for her eye-glasses to inspect the picture as I held it for her.

‘Dear Lady Trufitt,’ she said. ‘Her Mary must have been a year or two older than you.’

‘But that’s Veronica Bracken,’ I said, pointing.

Unmistakable. Not just a very pretty girl, but still to me somehow an embodiment. The photograph had been taken out of doors in high summer at what looked like a wedding reception, to judge by the men’s morning suits. Lady Trufitt occupied the centre, a tall, plain, weather-beaten woman wearing a pill-box hat and veil which looked as though they had been modified from her hunting gear. Veronica was in the picture by accident, in profile, wearing a simple hat with a wide gauze brim, talking to someone outside the frame—a man, to judge by the tilt of her head. The animation and buoyancy of her beauty flowed at me from the photograph, not simply nostalgia though that was there too, not the pathos of knowing what happened to her later, but existing independently of any history, like a statue unearthed in the desert.

‘Oh, yes, Veronica Bracken,’ said Mrs Clarke. ‘Veronica Seago now. Her husband seems to have done very well in the Air Force. He must be about due for his knighthood, but I am very out of touch these days. Now, my dear—I hope you don’t mind an old woman calling you that, it seems so natural in the circumstances—if you will sit on the sofa and just wait while I organise myself a little—people will try to help when it’s really quite unnecessary—I manage very well .

Indeed she did. By the time I had put the photograph back in its place and sat down she had pushed the trolley a few feet further, locked its wheels again, and with careful but obviously practised movements was working her way round to an upright wooden chair with sturdy arms, which she used to lower herself to sit. If any part of the process hurt her, she gave no sign.

‘There,’ she said placidly. ‘Now if you don’t mind I will just turn this little light on. It makes it so much easier to understand what you are saying if I can see you clearly. I do hope that is not too bright for you.’

A good two hundred watts beamed straight at me. Mrs Clarke became a shadow beside the glare. I took my sunglasses from my handbag and put them on.

‘How sensible,’ she said.

‘I didn’t think I’d need them again this year. Haven’t these last two weeks been foul?’

‘Have they? I always think the weather you remember depends so much on how you have been feeling. And I am a long way south of Cheadle. How is your poor dear mother?’

The extra adjective showed that she was not so out of touch as she claimed. I answered briefly and went on to a noncommittal account of the doings and prospects of my children. Then Jane, and then my other sisters. Under that light it was like an interrogation. Mrs Clarke’s talent for euphemism had not deserted her; she seemed to know a good deal about Selina’s rackety adventures, but merely remarked that it was often a little difficult for younger sisters to settle down.

She continued to demonstrate her competence in coping with age. She needed to support her wrist with her left hand in order to pour from the teapot, but did so without splash or spill. The trolley was neatly laid with china all from one set, a variety of biscuits in a pattern on their plate, a fruit cake. The teaspoons and silver milk jug had been recently polished. The tea was hot.

The simplest course seemed to be to plunge straight in.

‘I have been talking to Ronnie Smith . . .’ I began.

‘Who, my dear?’

I mouthed the name.

‘Oh, Ronald Smith. He came to see me about his history of Night and Day. I must confess I was very doubtful about telling him anything. If I had known in the old days what we have since learned I would have done my best to see that he was locked up. Of course he claims to have had a change of heart, but you cannot ever tell with these people.’

‘I think it’s genuine,’ I said. ‘I saw him this morning. He’s in rather a poor way, I’m sorry to say, but I’m going to try and get him looked after. And he’s had trouble with his publisher about the history, which means it may not get written after all.’

‘An excellent project, though I must confess I would have preferred to see it in other hands. I could have told him a great deal about my dear husband’s doings, but he seemed to me much more interested in that dreadful man Brierley. My dear, I need not tell you how often I have given thanks that the scales fell from your eyes in time.’

‘If they did, but don’t let’s worry about that. There’s something I particularly want to ask you, Mrs Clarke. It’s why I came. I’m afraid it’s still about Amos Brierley. I know at one time you were trying to find out all you could about him. I wonder if you know where he got most of his money from.’

‘From the Communists, of course.’

‘I see. But you didn’t tell anyone?’

‘I did not realise in time. My late husband’s friends had told me that there was something peculiar. Money doesn’t come from nowhere, you know, and people in the City are very clever about that sort of thing. I did know of course about that business in Barbados of which I told you, but that had not then produced any funds. No, it was only after they had him shot . . .’

‘Who had him shot?’

‘The Communists, my dear.’

‘Why on earth?’

‘Because he was trying to cheat them. They gave him money to turn my magazine into a weapon on their side, and he pretended to be doing that, but all he wanted was to make money, and when he appointed Mr Naylor . . . I do not care for Mr Naylor, but he is certainly not a friend of the Communists. You see, he gave himself away. They shot him, of course. They do not know the meaning of pity or forgiveness.’

I was not as disappointed as one might think. The theory might be absurd, but the fact that she had remembered a brief and trivial conversation with me showed that her grasp of the past was remarkably precise. I wouldn’t have known what she was referring to if I had not recently read my old manuscript.

‘So you didn’t tell my mother about the Communists because you didn’t know then?’ I said.

‘I beg your pardon.’

Perhaps, because she had been seeming to follow the conversation with such ease, I had allowed myself to speed up too much. I repeated the question slowly and clearly.

‘I never told your mother anything, Lady Margaret,’ she said.

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you told my mother about Amos Brierley trying to work a currency swindle in Barbados.’

‘No, my dear. I told you. I didn’t tell anyone else.’

‘Yes, I know you did. Well, you hinted at it.’

‘I told you very explicitly.’

‘All right. Perhaps my memory’s not as good as yours. But my mother certainly seems to think you told her.’

‘I never met Lady Millett except the once, at that party when your little book was published. Of course, as you know, she was kind enough to sign my photograph for me.’

‘She didn’t!’

I don’t know why I should have reacted with such vehement astonishment to this trivial bit of news. Not only astonishment, but also the amusement always aroused when somebody well known does something totally out of character. There was a long silence. Mrs Clarke, I remembered, was used to studying faces for information.

‘If I may say so, Lady Margaret,’ she said, ‘this is all very extraordinary. I am beginning to wonder why you have troubled to pay me this visit.’

As she spoke I heard vague sounds of struggle in the blackness beside the glare. Craning sideways and shading my eyes I saw that she had heaved herself to her feet and was looking around in a frustrated way as though not sure what to do next. I rose too and, now able to see her properly, realised that she wanted to move, but her walking-frame was in the kitchen and the trolley encumbered with tea things no longer stacked for safe transport.

‘Can I help ?’ I said.

She didn’t hear, so I moved and took her arm.

‘Oh, if you would be so good,’ she said. ‘It must be a misunderstanding. Perhaps I didn’t hear you aright. Oh dear, how strange.’

I steadied her across the room. Her movements were less purposeful than I had expected, nothing like as doubtful as my mother’s but tinged with the same kind of uncertainty. We stopped at the inner wall by a shelf covered with yet more of the collection. Below it was a closed cupboard.

‘In there,’ she said.

I opened the doors and found a double shelf of albums. I ran my finger along the backs until Mrs Clarke stopped me.

‘That one, I think,’ she said.

I heaved it out, then helped her over to the escritoire where I laid it down. She opened it and leafed steadily through the pages. Faces flipped by. Long dresses and short. Tiaras, toques, pill-boxes. Organdie, cotton, furs, silk. And there we were.

The picture was in fact dominated not by any of us but by a flower-urn from which erupted a structure of white lilies and roses and gypsophila, with white delphiniums rocketing up above. Before it stood the Milletts, my mother severe and slim in the middle and on either side of her two girls, distinguishable only by their dresses and the fact that one was wearing a showy necklace. Something about the lighting had brought out the Millett look more strongly than usual. The pig princesses. My mother’s emphatic scrawl spread across the bottom.

‘There,’ said Mrs Clarke. ‘I knew it was there. I knew I wasn’t dreaming. Sometimes when you get old you aren’t quite sure. You brought it to me. You said you realised you had been wrong about Mr Brierley. You said it was because of a picture you had found in a book. A picture of a little statue. You said it showed that he was a terrible man, and you asked me to explain what I had been trying to tell you before. I don’t normally repeat secrets, but I have had a very soft spot for you almost since the day we met. I told you all I had heard about Mr Brierley cheating his mother, as well as our own government, over a plantation in Barbados. What was its name, now?’

‘Halper’s Corner,’ I said.

She didn’t hear. I left the album where it was and helped her back to her chair. She was extremely shaky now. I held her hand and knelt in the glare of the light. I took a deep breath.

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said. ‘I’d quite forgotten about the photograph. Of course I remember now. It’s just that my mother gets very muddled, and the other day she was perfectly convinced she’d met you and you’d told her all sorts of things you hadn’t told me. I usually pay no attention because she gets so confused, but she did seem very on the spot that morning, and I really wanted to get it cleared up. Of course you’re right. You haven’t forgotten anything. It’s all my stupid fault.’

I don’t think she understood. I couldn’t see whether she was looking at me, but she clutched my hand in a rubbery grip and sighed.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘You haven’t done anything wrong.’

‘There was something funny about you. It’s troubled me sometimes. I don’t know what. Of course you were very distressed, finding out what sort of man he really was.’

‘Of course I was. It was a fearful shock.’

‘That must have been it.’

She seemed to be getting back her confidence, and understanding what I was saying. I imagine that deafness imposes a considerable strain on the will, to force oneself into continuous attention to the fragmentary signals that come from beyond the barrier. Any little tremor or weakening, and communication is lost.

‘May I ask you one more thing?’ I said. ‘You’ll think it’s a bit odd of me not to remember, but really I can hardly have known what I was doing during those weeks. It’s something my mother said again. Did you tell me—when I came and brought you the photograph, I mean—did you say anything about Mr Brierley getting some money from the Jews?’

A long pause, then a shaky whisper.

‘No, my dear. Oh, no. That was what you told me.’

It was a drizzling November dusk by the time I started home, with five hours’ driving before me. There was no avoiding London so I went to the flat in Charles Street and gave myself an omelette while I waited for the last of the rush hour to clear, then drove north. I remember nothing of the journey. I was thinking about Jane.

An episode that in some ways has shaped my life more than anything I have so far recounted was my return to Cheadle after B’s death. My mother managed to conceal her triumph and behave in a subdued and reasonable way. I believe that if I had turned to her for comfort she would have done her best to give it. Instead I turned, naturally, to Jane, and Jane refused. Not in so many words, but in all her behaviour; by boredom and irritation and distress; by finding errands for herself that took her out of my company; by seeing that there was some third person present; above all by withdrawing into her art, absorbed and unreachable, as she constructed a thing like a metal pterodactyl in one of the old coach-houses. (I found it a few years ago and had it set up as a kind of guardian demon at the entrance to the grotto, but the effect was so depressing that we have allowed it to be almost engulfed with Old Man’s Beard.)

I have always put Jane’s behaviour down to unwillingness to let herself be involved in my raw misery, a sort of moral squeamishness, disappointing but not really blameworthy. I now saw that there was a different explanation. All the women in the chain of information—Mrs Clarke, Jane, my mother, Aunt Minnie—must have at least suspected that B’s death was the result of their activities. I don’t know about Aunt Minnie, but I’m sure my mother would scarcely have turned a hair. Any outcome which suited her purpose would by that alone have justified all she had done to achieve it. Mrs Clarke was in a different position. She was, in her own cranky way, a moral person. But believing that it was I who had been the intermediary, I who had made the choice and had thus consented, so to speak, to B’s execution, she might well have felt herself absolved. What had so shaken her in our recent interview was the possibility that there was something mistaken about that belief, that in trying to help me she had in fact betrayed me. But Jane, of course, had known. Determined on her own freedom, she had decided to help my mother break up the affair, but had been totally appalled by the result and unable to face me alone, knowing what she knew.

So, instead of Jane or my mother or any human, I had in the end turned to stone and wood for comfort. I can remember the exact moment. It must have been eight months later because I had given up my job and was living at Cheadle. A December morning after a lonely breakfast—my mother always had hers in bed. A bright, illusory sunlight from the east, no warmth in it at all. Frost still in the shadow of the avenue, mist on the fields beyond. I stood by one of the pillars of the portico, my skin prickling in the barely perceptible warmth. I stroked my fingers down the fluting of the pillar. The stone was icy, but it was what I wanted. I stroked it again with the accepting caress of a bride.

As you drive up the M1 you see Cheadle on your left, a mile away on its hill. When the road was built various protesting groups expected me to add my outrage to theirs and were disgusted with me when I said I welcomed it. I was right, both practically and aesthetically. Seen from the house the sweeping line adds interest to a dullish middle distance. Seen from the road the house stands almost clear above the Avenue and looks truly magnificent. It is a splendid advertisement, and almost free. Almost, because I pay for the floodlighting. This is timer-controlled and switches itself off when there is no longer enough traffic on the motorway to justify it, but I get the bonus sometimes of driving home in the dark and seeing my house as even its builders could not have imagined it, theatrically sharp-shadowed, apparently floating against the dark, at first only the portico, but then as one climbs from the Saturn fountain the vista steadily widening to reveal the full proportion of the wings.

I may at moments have given the impression that I would have preferred to live my life without ever having known Cheadle, let alone owned and run it. This is, of course, far from the case. I may have bouts of depression or frustration such as occur in any marriage, but Simon is right—I am still deeply in love with the place. I am not merely proud of it and proud of what I have done for it. It feeds me, fuels me, gives me real exhilaration and happiness. I am not so sentimental as to believe that the house has feelings, but if it had I am confident that it would think well of me. It would know I had done my best.

You spoil things by brooding on them, so I seldom allow myself consciously to think along these lines. But the night I came home after seeing Mrs Clarke I was deliberately looking forward to that last half-mile to restore my own energies, self-confidence, balance. In some ways the shock of realising what Jane had done had been less than that of seeing how easily Mrs Clarke’s apparent serenity could now be broken. Sturdily though she seemed to have withstood the passage of time, one tremor was enough to shake the tower. If not my visit, then something else, soon. A heroic old age is no more use than a feeble one. I am a battler (a battle-axe, perhaps) and have told myself I shall be one always. The only benefit is to my own self-respect, but normally I think that a gain worth having. On the motorway I found myself becoming less and less sure.

I rounded the basin of the fountain and slowed to a speed at which some ancestor might have cantered up the grass beside the gravel. The rain glittered in my headlights, spoiling the effect, so I switched them off. The wipers slished to and fro. The wind gusted and bustled among the tree-tops. Huddled in my warm steel egg I floated gently towards my floating palace. It too seemed serene, untouchable, safe from the storm of years. The wings began to widen before me.

Then the floodlights switched themselves off, the palace vanished and I was driving blindly into darkness.