Death of a Unicorn

The gates were padlocked, but a footpath had been beaten through a breach in the stone wall, so we followed it round and up what must once have been the sweep of a carriage drive but was now only a path one man wide and barely kept open, through the tangle of sweet-smelling undergrowth, lush with feeding on its own decay and raucous with insect life. The tops of three vast palms were visible above the bushes, but no sign of a roof or chimney.

I led the way until the path opened into a clearing. As I approached it I could see a tethered goat, but then a black boy leapt across the gap with his left elbow and shoulder angled forward and his right arm flung stiffly back, the hand clutching a battered old ball. A couple of seconds later I heard the snap of the ball on to a bat. I walked on into the clearing and there was the house. It was stone built, three storeys high. A double curve of stone steps rose to the broken front door, and the porch had been extended on either side to make a deep balcony the whole width of the house, the verandah where Mrs Brierley’s father used to sit and watch as she carried the Word of God to his labourers down below. There had been three grand Dutch-style gables at roof level, but the whole south-west corner of the house was in ruins. Once there had been four of the big palms, symmetrically planted at the corners of the building. Three great smooth trunks still rose in place,but the fourth had fallen and lay with half its roots in the air and its trunk slanting up through the wall of the house as if it had poked its head in through the window to see what was happening in the nursery. The falling masonry had smashed through the verandah roof that end, but on the other side it was still intact and the verandah seemed to be used now as an open-air kitchen, with the black iron chimney of the stove lashed to a filigree pillar. In the clearing two more goats grazed, and chickens clucked in dust baths. Beyond the corner of the house an old man was hoeing a vegetable patch. Nearer were the cricket players, two boys and a girl.

The girl saw me as she straightened from picking the ball up. Her hesitation made the bowler turn. He was black as a boot, but the girl was paler, as was the younger boy with the bat. Both of these were quite clearly Halpers. I realised that when Mrs Brierley had described her father as lustful she’d had some evidence to go on. The bowler stared at me for a moment, then turned and shouted to the man with the hoe, who shaded his eyes and gazed before coming slowly towards us.

‘The tree came down in the ’44 hurricane,’ said B.

‘It’s too sad. They must have been planted when the house was built.’

‘I should think so. Hello, you’re Philemon, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, please, Mr Halper. Glad to see your face, Mr Halper.’

‘My name’s Brierley,’ said B in a bored voice, watching the cricket, without seeming to be interested in that either.

‘Do you remember old Mr Halper?’ I asked.

‘Sure I see Miss Mary’s father.’

‘What was he like?’

The old man glanced towards B and pointed. Like that.

‘Die way he live,’ he said. ‘Drunk and cursing. Bring ruin on us all.’

‘Rubbish,’ said B, who couldn’t have seen the gesture. ‘He kept things going his own way till he was getting on ninety. It was my mother running off and leaving him with no one to help did the damage. She should have stuck it out here. Seen enough? Let’s go.’

‘You tell me what going to happen, sir?’ said Philemon. ‘Nobody know what going to happen.’

B gave him a bleak look.

‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ he said, and turned away. Philemon shook his head and hobbled back towards his vegetables.

Because of the narrowness of the track I couldn’t talk to B properly till we were in the car.

‘You didn’t have to be quite so foul to that old man,’ I said. ‘Surely you’ve got some idea. It’s his whole life, after all.’

‘I thought I did but now I don’t,’ said B.

‘You’re hating this, aren’t you?’

‘I decided you’d better see it.’

He didn’t start the car but sat brooding at the even acres of half-grown cane.

‘Apart from the house it doesn’t look all that run down,’ I said.

‘Not bad, I gather.’

‘Oh, I thought you’d sold it.’

‘Not yet. No point. Get nothing for it with the sugar market shot to hell. I’ve been waiting for a turn-up, paying off the mortgages and meanwhile working it up into a state where it will fetch something.’

It didn’t sound at all B’s style, to pay off mortgages before he had to, but I didn’t say so.

‘What’s this sugar agreement Jeremy was talking about?’ I asked. ‘I noticed you shut him up.’

‘Commonwealth Sugar Agreement. Becomes operative next year. Should stabilise the market, and then I can sell and sort things out.’

‘Is it yours or your mother’s?’

‘Mine, effectively. I bought her an annuity in exchange. She got much better terms than she’d have done if she’d simply sold it then, so I don’t want her now getting it into her head that she should have hung on. None of us knew this agreement was coming up. It was only passed last year. Shall we go?’