Death of a Unicorn

‘I am not going to take her proposal seriously. But she might be in a position to make a nuisance of herself at this particular moment.’

‘Oh.’

People keep saying it’s a small world, when really it’s a lot of small worlds, with less overlap than you’d think. Moving in with B I had changed from one small world to another, though to outsiders they might have seemed almost identical. The fathers of many of my friends might sit on the boards of companies on which B’s allies and enemies also sat, but they were not the same sort of people. My friends’ fathers, whether they said so or not, were waiting for England to return to the kind of place it had been before the war. Mr Churchill belonged to that period and Mr Eden, and now that they were in power my friends’ fathers were impatient for it to happen. The war itself and the struggles afterwards had been only an interruption. But for men like B the Thirties were dead history—deader even than they were for me because of my connection with those times through Cheadle and the people there, such as old Wheatstone. For these men the war and the period since had been the start of things. That was when they had begun, one way and another, to spot their opportunities and make the most of them. They were impatient too, but to go on, not back. They weren’t impressed by Churchill and Eden. Their hope lay in the younger politicians who were going to clear away all the left-over restrictions of wartime—B had a particular bee in his bonnet about currency control—and let those who could get rich.

Of course there were occasional overlaps. These could be embarrassing, and hilarious. There’d been one dinner-and-night-club evening at which Sir Drummond Trenchard-Yates turned up with a marvellously bosomy and brassy blonde, the sort Bruce Fischer kept drawing. Aunt Minnie Trenchard-Yates was really no relation of ours but that’s what we’d always called her because she was Mummy’s closest friend, a tiny, smiling, sweetly tough woman I’d known since I could remember. Sir Drummond had got rather grand, Director of the Bank of England and so on, and he huffed and puffed a bit when he saw me, rather as though bringing his blonde had been like coming to the party wearing a black tie when he should have been in tails. He kept explaining that the blonde was his secretary, and that she was wonderful at putting his spelling right. Later that evening, having apparently decided that I was the other kept woman in the party—the remaining three seemed to be more or less wives—she poured out her heart to me. It was too sad. She seemed really fond of Sir Drummond and was longing for Aunt Minnie to divorce him so that she could marry him and become what she called ‘a real person’. I hadn’t the heart to tell her that Aunt Minnie would never let it get that far.

That sort of thing didn’t happen often, and though the men mightn’t be as awkwardly placed as Sir Drummond, they still behaved as if they all belonged to a sort of huge, vague club, whose basic rule was that the members didn’t tell their wives about each other. But clubs have snags, as well as advantages. Suppose Mummy were to talk to Aunt Minnie about me, and then Aunt Minnie snapped her fingers at Sir Drummond—well, I couldn’t imagine Sir Drummond sitting on one of his boards and putting forward a coherent financial argument against some enterprise of B’s, but I could imagine him going a bit red and pulling his moustache and saying, ‘Don’t care for the feller myself. Heard something the other day . . .’ And that might be enough. It was what Sir Drummond was for, after all, being a sound chap and hearing things.

I’m only using Sir Drummond as an instance. There were a dozen people Mummy could get in touch with, any of whom might have been able to put a spanner in B’s works. The point is that B couldn’t afford it. Though I gathered things had been going rather well these last months he was still always desperately short of money. He had a huge overdraft. He lived like a rich man, spent like a rich man, but if he’d been forced to sell up at certain moments he’d probably have been bankrupt. It was other people’s money, and it all depended on other people’s confidence.

He was reading the letter again.

‘I never really believed you, you know,’ he said. ‘I put her down as a stupid woman.’

‘Oh, she is, in some ways. But she’s brilliant at people. If you’ve got a weak spot she’ll find it. What are you going to do?’

He caressed a little bronze sculpture he’d brought back from his last trip to Germany—more like an egg than a head, though it had a nose and eyebrow-ridges.

‘Nothing for the moment,’ he said. ‘Don’t let’s talk about it any more. I’ve got work to do.’

‘Just one thing. I’m terribly sorry. It’s family still. Jane. I found a rather desperate-sounding note from her when I got downstairs. I think Mummy may be giving her hell. I wondered if you’d mind if she came and lived in my flat for a bit.’