Death of a Unicorn

III

It was a real job. I adored it from the very beginning.

This wasn’t only because it was new and interesting, though it was. But I’d had my row with Mummy, worse than I could have imagined, about taking it on, and for the first time ever I’d won. So it seemed like the beginning of freedom.

She hadn’t minded me working for Mrs Darling, because that wasn’t a real job; it certainly didn’t pay enough for me to be able to afford to live anywhere except at Charles Street. If anyone thinks it peculiar that the heir to a vast house and estate in Leicestershire, and another house in Mayfair, should have needed to think about things like that, all I can say is that Cheadle ate almost everything[1], and the rest was taken up with what Mummy thought important, such as bringing my sisters out. I had an allowance from the Trust till I was twenty-five, when I was due to inherit, but the Trustees were completely under Mummy’s thumb. She could stop it whenever she wanted. In fact she threatened to when I said I was going to Night and Day until I explained that Mr Todd was going to pay me as much as my allowance and Mrs Darling put together. I could actually have afforded (just) to rent a tatty little room in Pimlico or somewhere and move out of Charles Street altogether. I could have got away.

Of course Mummy’s argument was that the job was ‘completely impossible’ because of the cartoons of naked models and blondes in bed and so on, but in a funny way she made me feel as though the real reason was that she had magically known all along that this was going to happen, and that was why she’d banned the magazine—like Sleeping Beauty’s parents trying to avert her doom by banishing anything sharp from the palace. My finding the door in the alcove at Fenella’s dance had been like Sleeping Beauty discovering the room at the top of the turret with the old fairy at her spinning-wheel. She gave in all of a sudden. At one moment she was saying that she was going to have me made a ward of court, and the next she was ringing up Mrs Darling and apologising for my letting the old hag down. I started work next morning.

In theory my desk was the one outside Mrs Clarke’s room, but there was nothing for me to do there except answer the telephone when she was out. She had her job totally organised and didn’t need or want any help with it, so in practice I spent most of my time in the middle room with Tom and Ronnie. I read the articles sent in by casual contributors and weeded out the hopeless ones; I read the rough proofs from the printers and learnt how to correct them; I sorted the books that came in for review on to the shelves behind Ronnie’s desk and kept his file of publication dates in order; I scissored and glued for Tom when he and Bruce Fischer were working out which articles and cartoons were going on to which pages of next week’s paper; and on Thursday mornings I lugged the mechanical elephant along to my desk and wrote another Petronella paragraph.

‘It was a lot harder this time,’ I said when I handed Tom my second piece with the magic letters ‘OK. JT’ scrawled across the top. He looked it through and nodded.

‘You’ll be needing to find a variation,’ he said. ‘Always the trouble with these jejune vocabularies. They weary the ear. You want another voice, for contrast.’

‘But I’ve hardly got going with this one,’ I said. ‘There’s a mass of things for her to do. Ascot and a Garden Party and Cowes and the Twelfth . . .’

‘The material’s there, no doubt. That’s never the problem. It’s the means.’

‘But provided there’s something new for her to rattle on about . . .’

‘All matter is illusion. Only the Word—cap doubleyou—gives it reality, by allowing it to persist beyond the transient series of events which composed its apparent existence.’

‘Words have got to be about something, haven’t they, or they don’t mean anything?’

‘In this imperfect world. But I tell you, Mabs, when the trumpets sound for you and you come dripping from the river and shake the final impurities of matter out of your ears, the first sound you will hear will be the fine tenor voice of the Blessed Thomas Duggan celebrating the glory of God in a language infinitely rich in vocabulary and syntax but utterly purged of all gross content of meaning.’

‘I can’t wait.’

‘Meanwhile, look for an answering voice, a different kind of idiocy from that of this little idiot. Something worldly wise, perhaps.’

He tucked the paragraph in an envelope and flipped it into the wire tray. That, I suppose, was the moment at which Uncle Tosh began to come into existence, utterly out of keeping. Of course I cribbed parts of him from Nancy Mitford, and parts from things that Wheatstone had told me about my great-great-uncle. And I didn’t think I’d taken any notice of what Tom had said until the following Thursday when I had to think of something new in a hurry. I’d finished my paragraph but Mr Todd had a crony with him and Ronnie was interviewing a would-be reviewer in the middle room, so I was at my own desk, rejecting manuscripts, when Mrs Clarke came out.

‘Have you finished, my dear?’ she said. ‘May I please see?’

I gave her the page. She read it and sighed.

‘I do wish you liked her,’ I said.

It was true. I really longed for Mrs Clarke to approve. I think it was because she reminded me more and more of Nanny Bassett, who had meant so much to me until Mummy had suddenly fired her while I was away at school. They were both people you couldn’t help liking, whatever they did or said, and Nanny had the most extraordinary opinions about people and things, which nothing could persuade her out of. They both had quiet but extremely strong personalities—Nanny was one of the very few people at Cheadle who regularly stood up to Mummy. And they both, in Nanny’s words, ‘knew how to behave’. This wasn’t the same thing as having good manners, or rather it meant having inner good manners, having standards, however dotty, and sticking to them without fuss. I felt Petronella didn’t conform to Mrs Clarke’s standards. She wasn’t meant to, but that’s not the point.

‘It isn’t that, my dear,’ she said. ‘I have agreed with Mr Todd that what you write is his concern, but I think it my duty to tell you that Mrs Brett-Carling is dying.’

‘She can’t be! I mean Corinna was talking last night . . .’

‘Corinna does not know. Her mother is determined not to spoil her season. She’s an extremely brave woman. But it is a fact.’

‘That’s awful!’

I looked through what I’d written, feeling sick. The dance had been held at the Dorchester, which Petronella had christened ‘The Mourg’, and I’d let her pretend she’d been to a funeral there. I knew Corinna wouldn’t mind—she’d have given anything to be back with her horses in Worcestershire—and I’d worked in a lot of little undertakery details which I thought were funny in a bad-taste way—but not if you knew Corinna’s mother was dying. She’d always looked a bit death’s-doorish, beautiful, glassy-pale, dazed.

‘I must ask you not to say anything to Corinna, or any of your friends,’ said Mrs Clarke. ‘Very few people know.’

‘Of course,’ I said, without thinking about it. ‘Hell! What am I going to do? I went to Minna Tully’s cocktail party, but I didn’t make mental notes. Hell!’

‘Mrs Turner is looking after Minna,’ said Mrs Clarke.

‘There was a crowd of arty-hearties there. I suppose Petronella . . . Do you think I could say anything about Mrs Turner taking fees for bringing people out?’

‘I think it would be most unwise.’

‘You mean after what happened to Veronica Bracken? But that wasn’t Mrs Turner’s fault. She had flu. And Veronica really was incredibly stupid. You know there was a story going round that she put her head in an oven but she didn’t realise it had to be gas.’

‘But it was gas,’ said Mrs Clarke. ‘The concierge found her just in time. That was just after the abortion.’

‘Abortion? But Veronica wouldn’t know how . . .’

‘Mrs Turner would.’

She didn’t snap or raise her voice. She didn’t need to.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t realise.’

‘Of course you didn’t. Tell me, has it ever struck you, when you go to these parties and dances, what it must be like to be one of the fathers?’

‘Not specially.’

‘A man still in his own mind in the prime of life, having to sit and watch the girls swing past in the arms of their partners, all those clear young eyes, those bare shoulders, when his own wife . . . You understand?’

‘But everyone said it was a chap in the Coldstream.’

‘It was a man old enough to be your father, a director of several companies. One of those companies was a tin-mining business. During that year they opened a new seam which turned out to be unexpectedly rich, and the value of the shares went up to seven times what they’d been. Mrs Turner spends her winters in Monte Carlo. She played in the high-stake room that year, which she cannot normally afford to.’

‘Golly! Are you sure?’

‘I know a very great deal about the people I write about, my dear. I need to, so that I do not make mistakes. And I must tell you that you would be doing society a serious disservice if you were to write anything which might make other parents feel that Mrs Turner was a suitable person to help bring their daughters out.’

‘Golly! How do you know all this?’

‘I keep my ears open. I think about it. My husband was a very clever man, so I have friends in the City who tell me where the money is coming from. Nothing can be done without money. You see, my dear, though I know you and your friends probably laugh at it, I happen to believe that what I do is extremely important, so I take it seriously.’

‘I know you do. They only sort of half-laugh, Mrs Clarke. They always turn there first . . . I wonder what’s happened to Veronica. Modelling, I suppose, though I don’t think I’ve seen her picture anywhere. She’s really incredibly pretty.’

‘That type of looks does not always wear. Didn’t I see—was it that Bournemouth paper?—a Flight Lieutenant—the name will come to me—not Suarez, but something foreign-sounding . . .’

She slipped back into her room. For somebody so dignified she had a habit of moving around very unobtrusively. You could easily imagine her picking up snippets of gossip because people didn’t notice she was there. I went and stood in her doorway and watched her unlock the top drawer of her commode and begin to walk her fingers along one of the racks of filing-cards that filled it. My telephone rang. I went back to my desk and answered it in the bright-girl-on-the-make voice I was developing for the purpose.

‘Cynthia Darke’s suite.’

‘Is she now?’ said Tom’s voice. ‘On whom?’

‘I’m terribly sorry. I’m going to have to do it again. It seems I’ve trodden on a sort of social land-mine. Can it wait till the next messenger?’

‘I will hold the roaring presses. Doing anything for lunch, Mabs?’

‘Rewriting Petronella, by the look of it.’

‘You’ve got an hour. I was thinking you ought to see the inside of a Fleet Street wine bar. Purely as part of your training, mind.’

‘Provided we go dutch.’

‘I was willing the thought into your mind. Think you’ll have done by one-thirty?

‘Oh, God, I hope so.’

I put the telephone down. Mrs Clarke was in the doorway, reading a filing-card with the help of her hand-held eyeglasses.

‘Seago, of course,’ she said. ‘Flight Lieutenant Paul Seago. Not foreign at all, only Norfolk.’

The card seemed to have a hypnotic effect on her. She stared at it like a hen on a chalk-line. I thought of Veronica Bracken, the first time I’d noticed her, at Queen Charlotte’s Ball three years ago. I was feeling nervous and ugly. White doesn’t suit me, and Mummy had decided the occasion was important enough to get the real sapphires out of the bank, the first time I’d worn them in public. I lined up in the famous queue next door to a blonde child. She turned to me.

‘Isn’t this super!’ she whispered.

She flexed her bare brown shoulders like a cat in a patch of sun. Her hair shone. Her eyes were very dark brown. She seemed to be floating an inch above the floor . And within a year she’d had an abortion in Paris and put her head in a gas oven and been found just in time by the concierge, according to Mrs Clarke. And now she was going to marry Flight Lieutenant Paul Seago.

‘Have you got a card about me, Mrs Clarke? May I see?’

‘No, my dear. In any case I keep them in code. For safety, you know.’

‘Were you really at my parents’ wedding? I don’t mean that, but do you really remember it? You go to so many.’

‘It was the wedding of the year.’

‘I suppose so. I only remember my father a bit. I don’t feel as if I knew him. It’s so difficult to imagine them falling in love, and marrying, and so on, but here I am.’

Mrs Clarke nodded, more like Nanny Bassett than ever. Certain sequences in the social order of things were as correct and perfect as a proof in Euclid. Without thinking I asked a typical nursery question.

‘Were they really in love, do you think? It could just have been Cheadle.’

‘They made a particularly handsome couple. Your mother looked radiant.’

‘I bet she did. I bet it rained buckets, too.’

‘Why should you say that?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. It was November, anyway. Mummy makes a fuss about the anniversary, and Jane and me were born in August, just in time to spoil the Twelfth.’

Mrs Clarke nodded and went back to her room. I heaved the mechanical elephant into position and tried to think of a way of taking the funeral bits out of my Petronella piece without leaving it as flat as last night’s champagne, but the rain at my parents’ wedding kept getting in the way. Mrs Clarke had as good as told me they hadn’t married for love, but for Cheadle. I don’t know why I should accept her word on something like that, but I did. In any case I’d always known, just as I knew about the rain.

When we were about fourteen we came back for one Christmas holidays on the same train. Mummy had organised that, though Jane went to a cheaper school. (‘It isn’t good for them to live in each other’s pockets the whole time.’) Mummy got extra petrol for being a magistrate, which meant she could fetch us from the station. It was a beast of a day, black and drenching. Jane and I were sitting together in the back. We came round the Saturn fountain and started up the avenue. I expect all children, coming back from three months away, automatically stare for the first real sight of home. I know I used to. All you see from the fountain is the portico, which goes right up the front of the house. The trees of the avenue hide the wings. On a day like that it’s only the pediment and pillars, with blackness behind them.

‘It looks like a great mouth, waiting to swallow us,’ I said.

‘Waiting to swallow you, darling,’ said Jane. ‘It’s a stone ogre. Once a generation it’s given a girl to eat.’

I didn’t think Mummy had been listening, but she called out, ‘Nonsense! In any case, next time it’s going to be a man!’

She accelerated up the avenue as though she couldn’t wait.

I was brooding about this, and I suppose I was thinking about Veronica and my parents’ wedding and other disasters, and at the same time desperately trying to make my mind take an interest in Petronella, when I remembered what Tom had told me about finding what he called ‘another voice’. Almost without noticing what I was doing I invented an uncle for the little idiot, a cynical old brute to balance her innocent gush. A guardian angel to save her from Veronica’s fate. Uncle Tosh. He was running a book on the Season’s Engagement Stakes. I can’t pretend that I felt him, that very first morning, beginning to leap into life on the paper—he was just a way out of the mess I was in. When I showed the piece to Mrs Clarke she wasn’t specially interested, but remarked that if it were true she would win a lot of money off him. On the other hand Tom spotted the possibilities at once.

‘You’ll find he comes in handy,’ he said. ‘What about these odds? You’ll have readers writing in proving the fellow’s certain to lose.’

‘I was hoping you’d know about that.’

‘You’ve come to the wrong door. I’m one of your literary Irishmen. The winged horse is the beast I bestride. Sensitive my nature, daring and sweet my thought, but neither mathematical nor hippophatical my bent. Ronnie’s the fellow. His brother runs a racing stable. Ronnie!’

‘Just a moment,’ said Ronnie without looking up. Tom talked on cheerfully as though telling me an anecdote about some total stranger.

‘You know, when Ronnie came down from Oxford all eager to implement the revolution he tried for a job on the Daily Worker. Not the least interested in his Marxist fervour, they were, but the moment they found out his connections they snapped him up, gave him the petty cash and sent him out to put it on a horse. Doubled their fighting fund in a fortnight. Come and take a glass of lunch, Ronnie, and expound the intricacies of horse-race betting to little Mabs here.’

We got back to the office two hours later. I’d eaten one flavourless chicken sandwich and drunk a bit less than my share of two bottles of Pommery. We’d ordered the second bottle on discovering that Ronnie was a connection of mine through one of those typical third-cousin-once-removed linkages which come up in the course of conversations about something else—in this case my great-great-uncle’s Gimcrack-winner Knobkerrie. He’d had it stuffed when it had to be put down after a training accident, and I think the earliest distinct memory I have of anything is being allowed to stroke its leg, in the billiard room. Tom had been delighted by the discovery and had kept calling cronies over to explain to them that Ronnie and I were related by way of a horse.

There was a note on my desk. ‘I have tickets for Eugene Onegin at Sadler’s Wells tomorrow evening. Please come if you are free. AB.’ A telephone number but no address. I hadn’t seen the writing before but I knew who it was. I wasn’t free, but that didn’t matter. I was going. Ah, I could actually insist on going because I could tell Mummy it was part of my job. Uncle Tosh could take Petronella to the opera. Then I wouldn’t have to explain who Mr Brierley was.

Still, it might be useful to know. I tapped on Mrs Clarke’s door and put my head round. It wasn’t a good moment. She was wearing proper spectacles and typing that week’s Round on a little white portable. (She used all her fingers, like a proper typist, and was very quick. Letters, even formal ones, she hand-wrote in purple ink on pale pink paper.) She looked up at me over the top of her spectacles—Nanny Bassett again, looking up from her darning, knowing we’d been up to some mischief.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘This is terrible cheek, but have you got a card for Mr Brierley?’

‘I have.’

‘Could you tell me what’s on it?’

‘Certainly not. This is not an information parlour, Lady Margaret. I told you certain things this morning because it was necessary that you should know them, and I thought I could trust to your good sense to tell no one else. As for the gentleman you refer to, I know very little about him as yet, but I strongly advise you to have as little as possible to do with him.’

‘I’m dreadfully sorry,’ I said. ‘I know I shouldn’t have asked.’

She nodded icily and went back to her typing.

[1] This is still the case, and always has been. When Bartrand Millett built Cheadle in 1712 he effectively bankrupted all his heirs, in perpetuity. Looking through the account books I can see the same scrimping going on generation after generation. My mother and I are only the last two in a long line of cheeseparers. But I am the first, I think, ever to have put money in, not counting the heirs who did it by marrying money.