Death of a Unicorn

I have been unable to refrain from adding a few modern footnotes to the older part of the manuscript, for instance where the gulf of time struck me most forcibly. I would not dare do this in my other books, for fear of irritating my readers, but here I have no one to please but myself.

And you. I mean this. I take great pleasure in pleasing you, so if you do read it, read it for pleasure, my dear.

Your loving aunt, M M

PART ONE

1952–1953

I

It began with a yawn.

I knew Mummy could see me, though she was pretending to listen to Lady Fosse, so I made a meal of it. I raised my hand, white-gloved to the elbow, just far enough for the tip of my middle finger to reach my mouth and yawned like a waking cat.

‘Bored already?’ said a man’s voice beside me.

I was standing at the bottom of the stairs in Fenella’s uncle’s house, waiting for Jane and Penny to emerge from the cloak-room. Penny was wearing an off-the-shoulder dress which had been made for me two years ago, when I’d had a lot of puppy-fat. It was supposed to have been altered by one of Mummy’s little women, but as Penny had been taking off her coat it had suddenly become obvious that the alterations hadn’t been drastic enough. Mummy had given Jane the sacred ring of safety-pins she always took to dances and told her to do something, and we would wait for them at the bottom of the stairs. So the rest of our party had to wait too. Other people I knew and half-knew—Dickies and Susans and Cordelias and Lizzies and Pauls and Tommies and Henriettas—trudged past us up the stairs and I exchanged wide-eyed glances with the girls and little smiles with the men. Signals. We be of one blood, thou and I. Our party was a bit of an obstruction, especially after Mummy had trapped Lady Fosse in order to give herself a reason for hanging around there. She was watching me because she knew I was in a bolshie mood. She’d always been good at that, totally unsympathetic but totally aware. Would I ever, I wondered, be able to look at her without a rubbery little knot suddenly tightening in my stomach?[1] As a kind of counter-magic I produced the yawn, and the voice, summoned by my spell, spoke at my elbow. I turned.

It was a frog prince. No, not really. In fact it was obviously somebody’s father, a hideous little man, shorter than I was but broad-shouldered. Glossy brown skin, too smooth to be the remains of a ski-tan. Almost bald. A bit pop-eyed.  A wide mouth like a toad’s.

‘Not as bored as I’m going to be,’ I said.

The pop eyes looked me over. There was something chilly about him, like the cold patch on the landing which you’re supposed to find in haunted houses, though I’ve never felt one at Cheadle. His inspection paused at my necklace and I could see he knew what it was—the real one stayed in the bank practically all the time because of the insurance. He made me feel as though I was one of those jeweller’s trays on which the famous sapphires were displayed for him to inspect.

‘If you had stayed at home,’ he said, ‘you would be doing an old jigsaw with three pieces missing.’

His voice was quiet, almost a whisper, but grainy.

‘In fact I would be at my desk rewriting the third chapter of my novel,’ I said.

He gave a minute nod, recognising what I was in the same way that he’d recognised what the sapphires were—the literary one of the family who’d started to try and live up to her idea of herself and was finding that the knack of writing amusing letters to aunts wasn’t going to be enough.

‘I’ll go and buy a jigsaw tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I suppose you’d like me to do The Hay-Wain.’

The cold patch vanished. He smiled. It was like that trick where the conjuror makes dozens of gaudy umbrellas explode out of a small black box. Charm, interest, excitement, danger flooded out of him. It was difficult to understand that nobody else in the crowd had noticed the shock of change—except, perhaps, Mummy.

‘Mabs!’ she called. ‘Do go and see why those girls are being such a time!’

I shrugged to the man, making the sapphires crawl slightly on my skin. He raised a small brown hand, letting me go. He still looked really amused, as though he understood exactly what was going on, even that Mummy was now punishing me for the yawn. She could just as easily have sent Selina, who wasn’t talking to anyone, and she must have known what would happen if I tried to help Jane fix Penny’s dress.