Death of a Unicorn

It happened. I’d told myself as usual that if Jane exploded I wasn’t going to react, but as usual it didn’t work. Pink-cheeked, blotchy, wide-nostrilled, we hissed at each other across Penny’s bare shoulders while other girls, and mothers or chaperones, went in and out and pretended not to be interested. Penny burst into tears. In the end Jane said, ‘Well, it’s your bloody dress, you fix it!’ and threw the pins on the floor. She’d undone the ring and I had to scrabble about for them. It turned out she’d practically finished so I put a couple more pins in, told Penny to keep breathing in and re-did her face for her. She wasn’t grateful. She and Selina always take Jane’s side. It’s only natural.

Jane was born twenty minutes after me. Identical twins. When we were small we were dressed alike and had our hair done alike and were treated almost as though we were a single person who happened to be living in two bodies. Selina came two years later and Penny a year after that. Then there was a gap. I don’t imagine my parents really expected to have another child, but there was always the faint chance a boy would be born until my father was killed on the beach at Dunkirk. At that point it became certain that I was going to inherit Cheadle, and Mummy changed the rules. I became the elder sister and the other three were younger. They wore my old frocks and dresses. Later I did everything a year before Jane was allowed to—put on nail varnish, had my hair permed, went to finishing school, drank gin, came out and so on. Mummy was bringing out Selina and Penny in the same season, despite their being a year apart, to save money. But there’d been no question of that with me and Jane. She’d actually used Jane’s clothing coupons to get me grown-up clothes. It was totally unfair, and I sometimes said so, or tried to, but I knew it wasn’t any good. Besides, I liked being treated, outwardly at least, as a grown-up. So I ate my cake and had it still.

It was different for Jane. Once, my first season, Jane had to come up to London suddenly to see a dentist. Most of the house in Charles Street was still let and we had to share a bed. There is something about touching, about closeness. We lay awake and talked and cried and made promises and blamed Mummy and I suppose it was some use. But still Mummy knew she only had to lift a finger to set us clawing away at the scar-tissue of the wound where she ripped us apart, and from time to time she made it happen on purpose. Not because she enjoyed it, oh no. It was her duty to keep reminding me that I was not like anyone else, especially not like Jane, though nobody outside the family could tell us apart. Jane was not going to inherit Cheadle.

When I’d tidied up Penny I looked at myself in the glass. I was still piggy with the after-effects of rage. The Millett family face is like that. Penny and Selina took after Mummy, but Jane and I had round plump faces and noses so snub that the nostrils face forwards. That makes us sound repellent, but actually we’ve got good complexions, big mouths, long-lashed brown eyes, and can look really fetching when we’re not in a foul temper. I can just remember my great-great-uncle in his wheelchair, glaring at me because I wasn’t a boy. He looked like a rabid little hog. I wasn’t going back with that look still on my face, so I told Penny to tell them to go on up while I finished collecting the pins. Next time I looked it wasn’t too bad, though I was still in a filthy mood. The necklace had fallen skewy and as I was putting it straight I had an impulse to hide it and tell Mummy I’d flushed it down the loo. Although it was only the replica it was still worth several hundred pounds.

I didn’t, of course. Actually I was extremely fond of the necklace, though it meant choosing half my dresses to go with the sapphires and not with my eyes. Daddy left it to me direct, and not as part of the Trust. Mummy was furious because it meant we had to pay death duties on it. She brought this up whenever there was a money crisis. But I hadn’t got much of my own to remember Daddy by, and besides, it was useful for things like keeping the conversation going with dismal partners, showing them the stone that had belonged to Mary Queen of Scots, and so on. But at the same time, in Mummy’s eyes, it was a sort of price label. For sale, with wearer. Condition of sale, that the purchaser undertake to maintain Cheadle Abbey and estates in good order for a period of one generation.