Death of a Unicorn

I let myself in at about one in the morning. There was always the faint, faint chance that B had had to cancel his flight or something, and in any case I wanted to sleep in our bed. No luck. His travelling case was gone, and his shaving things, and his light overcoat. The jigsaw had been picked up from the floor and placed in the middle of the table. My heart went small and cold as I looked at it. The mild alleviation of misery that had come from drink and company and the infectious euphoria of what was obviously going to be an enormously successful show slid away. There would be a message inside the box. Business arrangements, the rent for my flat and so on. He might say ‘Thank you’ but not ‘I love you’. He did not think like that.

It was better to get it over. It always is.

The box felt heavier now, its rattle muffled. When I opened it I saw the jigsaw pieces were still there, but all huddled into one end. I noticed one printed with a milk-white hoof. The other end of the box was wedged tight with tissue paper. I picked it out and dropped it wad by wad on the carpet. Didn’t he see I’d much rather not have anything, least of all some expensive gewgaw? He might not love me, but I loved him. I didn’t need paying off, for God’s sake! By the time I came to the central package I’d worked myself into a muddled frenzy. On the surface, rage. Beneath, panic. With a swoop of relief I saw the envelope with his gift in it.

It was an ordinary long white envelope, the sort he used for his business letters. It had my name on it in his writing, and a short sentence heavily inked out. It had been sealed, opened again, and re-sealed with stamp paper. That was the point. If he’d been paying me off he might have bought the jigsaw and put his present in an unglamorous white envelope inside, but it would have been a new envelope. This was incredibly not like B. Messy. Dithering. Wrong. I forced my fingers to pull the envelope open.

It was the sapphires, of course. Somehow I knew they were the real ones, although until that instant I had assumed that he had sold them for me, and I should never see them again. I slid them through my hands until I found Mary’s stone and turned it over. The little double cross was there, just below the point of the setting. I had to squint through my tears to see it. But he’d given me that enormous cheque for them, and I’d immediately paid it back for him to send to Mummy. I stood for ages, running the jewels from hand to hand like a rosary, filled to the brim with doom. At last I came part of the way back to my senses. I’d have to do something with the vile object. I refused to sleep with it under my pillow, not that near.

The obvious place was the wall safe, where he let me keep the replica and my other bits of jewellery. It was hidden behind a row of encyclopaedias in the bookshelf. I knelt and lugged the volumes out. The wheels were already set at the combination and the door opened when I pulled it. It was almost empty, only my own various little boxes. Usually it was stuffed with documents, and a wad of five-pound notes, and a wash-leather bag full of sovereigns. My hands thought for me, automatically taking out the replica case. They were aware that if there was only one case then the real necklace must have it. But it was empty. This did not seem strange in the general daze of strangeness. My hands arranged the necklace into the velvet pits and grooves, put the case back in the safe, closed the door, spun the dials and shoved the volumes on to their shelf. I rose and returned to the table where I stood staring down at the muddle of pieces in the jigsaw box.

He was sending me home. He had given me back the sapphires. He did not need my love.

I went up to my own flat to try and sleep in that bed where I’d never slept before, strange, narrow, cold.

They gunned him down in Rio.[1] It was thirty-six hours before I knew. He had flown off on the Wednesday evening. He was killed late on Friday afternoon, the small hours of Saturday morning our time. I was presumably asleep, or more likely lying awake and wondering whether I would get back to sleep and trying not to start again on the useless chain of thoughts trudging round and round in my head like prisoners in an exercise yard, about going home, and coping with Mummy, and Cheadle, and what was left of my life.