Death of a Unicorn

Maxine is perhaps my most dedicated reader, against stiff competition. She sometimes seems to me to know all my books by heart. She came to Cheadle in a coach-party in the hope of meeting me and asking me for a job. When she didn’t she camped, metaphorically, on my doorstep, like some Indian would-be servant, until in an emergency I took her on for a fortnight, thinking that at least I’d be able to pay her less than an agency girl. She’s stayed two years now. Her devotion seems entirely uncritical. No book is better or worse than another, because the question does not arise, any more than it arises with episodes of real life.

‘Joking?’ I said. ‘Please God, yes.’

One’s personality is laid down in layers, like a landscape. Placid lives are like old lake-beds, sedimentary stratifications each scarcely different from the one below. Others, if one dug down, would show evidence of the long-ago upheavals that cause the rumplings of the surface under today’s thin turf. And in most lives there are outcrops, barely changed beyond a little weathering, persisting through all the sediments, still there.

For thirty years, winter and summer, I have risen at six and gone upstairs to write until breakfast. These words are leaping into existence letter by letter at twelve minutes past seven on a yellow September morning in what used to be the housekeeper’s bedroom in the top passage of the West Wing. The house at this hour is almost empty, and seems emptier since all Mark’s clothes went from his cupboard, though Simon and Terry are still here after the summer. Sally is in Sri Lanka. Maxine is in her own room, very likely with John Nightingale, the assistant gardener. I no longer try to keep track of Maxine’s affairs, but am still amazed by her ability to attract presentable young men and later get rid of them with, as far as I can see, no fuss at all. She seems to run her love-life with the same down-to-earth practicality with which she runs my office. This room, by the way, is not my office. It is the place where I write. I do not remember choosing it deliberately for being the same size as my living-room in Dolphin Square and for looking out over a well of the building; it is not in other ways very like, nor can I smell the Thames. But it is now necessary, just as this hour is necessary. Now as then I am too busy at other times of the day. Necessary in another sense too. I cannot imagine this part of me functioning anywhere else. Granite protruding through the strata.

The morning after Ronnie’s telephone call was a peculiarly bad one. Naturally I have bad days, not only when I have influenza coming on, but I have trained myself to slog through them. I imagine that on a real treadmill rhythm is vital, the work is only tolerable if you and your fellow-slaves keep it groaning round at an even pace. I do not like to write rubbish but I would sooner do that than let the treadmill stop. That morning I wrote nothing at all. Superficially I spent it trying to decide whether the new girl was tall or short, plump or skinny, quick-tempered or placid. Usually these things accrete and stick to a few early and almost random decisions, building up to a coherent character, but one has to make the random decisions and then stick to them. I couldn’t.

It was not as though it yet mattered. The important thing was to get the girl on to a boat for South Africa, where she was going to hire a laconic and embittered white hunter and start looking for her brother, missing since ‘the Boer War. There was also the business of the cousin, apparently in love with the girl and doing everything to help her, but in fact using his connections in the Colonial Office to thwart her efforts so that he could inherit. It had all seemed reasonably promising in a run-of-the-treadmill way, quite interesting enough in its own right to publish under my name and not as a Mary Mason, for which I would have had to hot up the affair with the hunter. There was almost no research to do—after thirty years I know the surface details of my period better than most professional scholars. Six months should see it through, one more step on the groaning wheel that helps to keep this house in being.

The wheel stuck. Jammed tight. No give at all.