Death of a Unicorn

She had been carrying it clutched between two hands in such a way that I hadn’t had a clear sight of it, beyond noticing that it was a hardback and well worn. Nowadays my books go straight into paperback. When she lifted her left hand from the cover I saw that she had needed to hold it like that because it was falling to bits. It was Uncle Tosh.

I took it from her and leafed delicately through. It was like a child’s favourite book. The very paper seemed to have been worn soft with perusal. The pages were torn, taped, stained. I understood that I was holding a talisman.

‘It’s been all over the world with me,’ she said. ‘That’s why it’s in such a state. I read it whenever I’m low and it cheers me up. She’s so wonderful, isn’t she? I can’t spell, either.’

I found it difficult to say anything. The rest of her party were milling gently through the brew-house door, but a few were glancing back, inquisitive. It is so easy to give in to cheap emotion. After all, people who dislike the kind of book I write say that my stock-in-trade is to trigger such automatic easy responses, and there’s some truth in the criticism. All I can answer is that at that moment and in those circumstances I felt I was in the presence of one of those simple, pure, totally unconsidered expressions of something essential to human nature, such as you get in certain movements of children, and to which you respond with an emotion that may be easy but cannot be called cheap. If someone else had put that book into my hand I would have been interested, might have been moved, but not in the same way.

‘Tell me about your family,’ I said. ‘Have you got one, I mean?’

‘Oh, yes. Three boys. Two in the Air Force and David at Theological College.’

‘That sounds satisfactory.’

‘Luckily they’ve got Paul’s brains.’

I thought I could imagine the relationship. Four thoroughly male men, and this little woman whom they managed to treat as half way between a pet and a person, but adored on that basis. Good for her.

‘Didn’t you want a daughter?’ I said.

She frowned. It was a most charming expression, suggesting both the difficulty of the question and the difficulty of the process of thought. I could see that if I had been a man it would instantly have aroused my protective warrior instincts, a response almost as automatic as that of insects or birds to particular innate stimuli.

‘Paul longed for one,’ she said. ‘I was never sure. It isn’t easy for girls. I’ve had a lovely life, but then I’ve been terribly lucky. I could so easily . . . But of course you’re different, Lady Margaret.’

She reached out for the book.

‘I’ll sign it for you if you like,’ I said. ‘Nobody’s looking.’

‘Oh . . . I only brought it to show you.’

Obviously she didn’t want me to. I guessed that I seemed less real to her than the girl who had stood beside her at Queen Charlotte’s, and that that girl in turn was less real than the purely imaginary Petronella. The book had properties of personal magic, which might be exorcised by my attaching my name—the counter-magic of a formidable middle-aged woman—to her key to the unicorn’s garden where only youth belongs. She gazed up at me, apparently perfectly content.

‘I mustn’t keep the others waiting,’ she said.

Reading Group Discussion Questions

by Jenny Terpsichore Abeles

In what ways is this story a classic “whodunit”? How does it surprise the reader’s expectations of the mystery genré?

“Death of a Unicorn” is the image of the puzzle B. gives the young Mabs to kill time while he is away. Which character is best correlated with the unicorn and why? How do themes and images associated with unicorn myths connect to themes and images of the novel? When and how does the “puzzle” come to be completed?

The narrator of this novel is herself a writer, a young and dazzling journalist in the first half of the book, and a successful, middle-aged romance writer in the second half, the older voice often interrupting the younger one in the form of footnotes. How does her writerly voice change over the course of her career? Her self-image and self-representation? What features or traits bridge the two periods of her life?

Explain your reactions to the central romance—referred to at one point as “the bargain”—in this book between Mabs and B. How do their roles, lifestyle, and feelings for each other surprise or confirm your notions of romance and relationships? Inasmuch as this is a love story, what kind of love story is it?

Mabs is a twin. How does she feel about her twinned status? Where else in the novel does the doppelganger or replication motif emerge, and how do these iterations reflect upon Mabs’ situation and identity?

About midway through the novel (82), B tells Mabs, “We are who we are by the accident of a moment.” To what extent does this prove true, in the book and experience more generally?