Death of a Unicorn

VII

John Nightingale found me. He was bicycling down the Avenue in the dawn after spending the night with Maxine. It must have been the very early stages of that affair for him to feel the need to conceal his comings and goings. I had-driven into the statue of Ixion and was unconscious at the wheel, having been there about seven hours. I dare say doctors always tell one it was touch and go, unconsciously emphasising the drama of one’s recovery and their own part in it, but it is a fact that Sally came home and was by my bed when I recovered my senses four days later. I remember nothing between the floodlights going out and my waking up and seeing her.

Nothing external, that is. On the other hand I remember with great vividness—no, that is the wrong word, because there were elements I cannot put a shape to, in particular the people I shall refer to as They or Them—with great vigour, as episodes of crucial importance in my life, certain scenes I saw in my delirium. I am now going to try and recount them. Of course this is an unreal procedure. They came to me in disorganised and recurring fragments, probably more chaotic than I can now know because of the way the still-dreaming mind tries to shape the pictures it makes into coherence. But it is not unreal in the sense of being irrelevant because they were only dreams. One’s memories of the real past are only a special kind of dreaming, in which one makes mental pictures and tries to explain them into a coherent sequence; and in this case the visions of my delirium retained for me on waking a cogency just as great as if someone had told me that he had documents which showed that B, while working on the Control Commission in Hamburg, had made contact with a group of men who . . . and so on. I have experienced my own explanation in a way that I could not have done if somebody had presented me with second-hand facts. This is the way in which I came to know it, and so the natural way in which to present it here, though tidied up and ordered into sequence so as to satisfy the waking mind. I fully accept that it may not be true.

I was in a shabby, bleak office. A man in uniform sat at a desk with his back to me. I thought it was my father till he half turned and I saw it was B. He rose, fetched a file from a green cabinet, leafed through it, picked out a sheet and began to compare it with one already on his desk. He sat very still, but I loved him so much I could feel his tension, his excitement. He reached for a telephone.

I was walking through smashed streets. I could smell the sea. One of Them was my guide. I didn’t dare look at him, though he spoke and joked like an ordinary person. He showed me rows of shops, broken and shuttered, a block of offices, an empty factory. From the way he talked about them I knew that they all belonged to him. Then we were in a quiet suburb where a gaunt man was hiding in the porch of a large house. For a moment I was rigid with his nightmare. My guide muttered to someone behind us and suddenly the porch was empty. My guide took a huge key from under the doormat and opened the door. There was the little bronze head on the table in the hall, and the screaming ivory saint in a niche, and the grey dead Christ. My guide switched on a lamp. The lampshade looked like Mrs Darling. My guide opened a safe, took out some engraved certificates and put them in his pocket. He was in a hurry. Suddenly he noticed me watching him and showed me his machine-gun. He said that if I ever told anyone he would come and shoot me till the blood ran down my petticoat.

I was back in the street of shops. Some were still boarded up but others were lit and busy. Through the door at the back of a butcher’s I saw B talking to the shopkeeper. The man gave B some money, then came into the shop and tried to sell me a Dior dress. Over his shoulder I saw B divide the money into two piles, then, moving his hands like a conjuror, take a lot of notes off one pile and add them to the other, which he slipped into his pocket. He put the first pile into an envelope with stamps on it.

We were children, playing on the beach. B wore knickerbockers. He put some money in a bottle and tried to float it out to sea, but the wind kept pushing it back. Whenever the policeman came by he had to pretend to be building a sandcastle, so that he could hide the bottle in the sand. I felt sad for him. The bottle wasn’t heavy enough. I went to look for something to weight it down with. Mummy was unpacking a picnic. She’d brought the Cheadle silver. My necklace sparkled among it. I dropped my handkerchief and picked it up with the necklace inside. I didn’t think Mummy had noticed. On the way back to the water I saw B on the far side of the groyne. He was looking at a drawing of a machine-gun, scratched in the sand. They must have been there while we were playing. As I came up he scuffed the drawing out with his foot, but I knew he was afraid.

A board-game in the nursery at Cheadle. Myself, B, the people I’d met in Barbados, Them on the far side of the table. I didn’t know the rules. The board was a map of a treasure island, but it was like Monopoly because you had to get hotels built. They were impatient and angry because we’d lost the dice, but at last B found them. He was getting ready to throw and we were all very quiet with excitement when there was Nanny Bassett in the doorway and we had to shut the box up and hide it because you weren’t allowed to play that game on a Sunday and she was going to tell Mummy. She stared hard at B, using Mrs Clarke’s eye-glasses.

Jane was lying on the floor drawing a picture of Wheatstone. She drew a thin line going up from his head and I was just thinking of something silly to put in the speech-balloon when she turned the line into a noose and a gallows. I was furious. She ran out of the room and I followed her, pig-faced and shrieking. She ran to a tiny door and waited. I knew we weren’t allowed in there but she pushed me through and there was Wheatstone, white as bone, hanging from a clothes-rack, dead but still screaming. Jane stroked his arm and said it was lovely.

Mrs Clarke’s office, only the make-up table had been moved in and she was Art Editor. Jane had come to show her a portfolio of drawings, but she was wearing my gold dress and pretending to be me. First Mrs Clarke showed her a David Low cartoon of B in a grocer’s shop, standing behind the counter. There were only a few small sugar-bags on the bare shelves. The bags had signs on them. Under the counter was an enormous bag with a $ sign on it. Jane showed Mrs Clarke the picture of Wheatstone hanging, and then she showed her a book with a photograph she’d copied it from. She put a speech-balloon into the drawing. It said, ‘He got it from the Jews.’

Sir Drummond was chatting with the policeman on the beach. He showed him the Low cartoon. The policeman was very interested, but when Sir Drummond showed him Jane’s drawing of Wheatstone he looked worried and hid the drawings under a rock. He saw me watching him and told me to go straight up to my bedroom and not talk to anyone. When I looked back from the sea-wall I thought I saw someone I didn’t know take something from under the rock and carry it round behind the groyne.

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

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

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

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

‘Hello, Mums,’ said the woman.

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

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

‘Take it easy, Mums,’ said the woman.

‘He did cheat them, of course,’ I said. ‘He took more than his share. He needed the money to help buy Night and Day and things like that, but he thought it would be all right provided he paid them back in time. That’s why he had a deadline. It was always difficult with exchange control. You weren’t allowed to send money out of the sterling area. But he thought he could get round that by selling Halper’s Corner. Barbados was in the sterling area too, of course, but he was going to sell it in two parts. There’d be the sale of the plantation to show the Treasury. Plantations were cheap then. It wouldn’t be much. But he could use it as a cover for what he was doing at the bay, selling the land and joining in a deal to build a holiday hotel. All that would be in dollars, which he could use to pay the people in South America. It was quite safe provided nobody told the Treasury there was something funny going on. They’d find out if they started to investigate, but they didn’t usually. That’s why he was so careful about not spending more than our travel allowance in Paris—he didn’t want to draw attention to himself, the way the Dockers did.

‘It was all going along fine until Mummy found out about him and me and threatened to blackmail him. Then, suddenly, it was more of a risk. It wasn’t because of Mummy knowing anything—it was because of Aunt Minnie being her best friend and Sir Drummond being a Director of the Bank of England. He thought it was probably still all right, but he began to get worried. He was such a coward, you see. When we went to Barbados he was screwing himself up to take the risk .

I saw the woman’s eyes leave me and look with a query in them at somebody on the other side of the bed. I couldn’t turn my head that way to see who it was, but I wasn’t in any case interested. I waited impatiently till she was looking at me again.

‘Then I offered to sell the necklace,’ I said. ‘B jumped at it. I don’t suppose it was worth everything he owed them, but a hundred and fifty thousand pounds was a lot then, almost a million now. It would have been an instalment. The point was it was small, so he could smuggle it out, and the sale wasn’t on anyone’s books, so the Treasury wouldn’t know, and I had the replica to wear, so no one need realise it had gone. He could do the whole Halper’s Corner deal in sterling and use the money to buy the necklace by paying for the roof. He did that because if he hadn’t he would have been cheating me. It wasn’t because of Mummy blackmailing him. She didn’t know anything, not then.

‘Mrs Clarke did, though. She’d picked something up on one of her West Indies tours, keeping her ears open, the way she used to. Isn’t it odd she’s the one who’s gone deaf, and Ronnie’s the one who’s gone blind? She tried to warn me, and I told Jane, and Jane went to see her pretending to be me. Jane said I’d found out about the screaming saint coming from a Jewish collection—he never sold it because he knew it could be traced, you see—and that was why I’d turned against him. So Mrs Clarke told Jane about Halper’s Corner, and Jane told Mummy about both things and Mummy told Aunt Minnie, and so on. Of course there wasn’t anything to find out about Halper’s Corner, not any longer, but now it was the screaming saint and what had happened in Hamburg—that was what really mattered. Our people started to investigate. They must have asked questions in Hamburg, and somebody there guessed why they were asking and told the people in South America, and they sent for B.

‘I wish I knew what I said or did when we said goodbye. He was going to take the sapphires, you see, and suddenly he decided not to. He’d written a letter to me, telling me all about them, in case they turned nasty. He was terribly frightened. But he thought if they knew there was someone he trusted in England who knew about them, they wouldn’t risk hurting him. The letter was in the jigsaw. And then, at the last minute, he changed his mind. They were my sapphires, you see. They were valuable because of that, because of the Mary stone. If he was going to persuade them to take the sapphires as an instalment, he had to explain what they were worth, and that would mean telling them about me. And then they might guess who he’d left the letter with, and send someone to get rid of me. I told you, he wasn’t prepared to risk it. He got in a sort of panic and dashed off, hoping he could talk them into giving him more time.

‘Of course they were going to kill him anyway, whether he took the necklace or not.’

I closed my eyes and tried to sink back into the dark. A fearsome, throbbing pain started at the side of my neck. I wondered whether it hurt as much as that, being shot. Slowly the pain slid away and I opened my eyes again.

‘He wasn’t used to it, you see,’ I said. ‘If you’re going to be that sort of creature and live that sort of life, love is too dangerous. You daren’t love anyone, because then there’s a hostage. You’ve got to stay wild, with the whole world your enemy. You mustn’t let yourself be tame for anybody. It was all my fault, letting him love me. There was only one of him in the whole world, ever. Only one in all the world.’

‘Marge even dreams romantic,’ said Terry’s voice. He was the person I couldn’t see on the other side of the bed.

‘It’s all true,’ I said. ‘Ages ago, but all true.’

‘I keep telling her she wants to stop living in the past,’ he said, ‘The only time is now.’

The woman glanced towards him again. Something characteristic about the slant of her face made me see that it was Sally. My heart leapt.

‘It’s better not to live in time at all,’ she said.