Death of a Unicorn

He too was watching me. Clearly this was something they had discussed, more than once perhaps. My sister Jane is married to Angus Duncan, a Canadian insurance executive, and has three children, the eldest two years younger than Simon. Jane has always tended to find excuses not to visit us so I haven’t seen a great deal of them, but Simon knew them better, having stayed six months in Canada when he left school. The possibility of transferring Cheadle to my nephew or one of my nieces had occurred to me often since Sally left, but it had always been something I had refused to think about, I suppose because it would mean accepting decisively that she would never come home. I yearn for my daughter with a passion that disgusts me when I allow it to happen. Last October I drove back from the annual jamboree of the Romantic Novelists’ Association in Cheltenham, and because of something one of my colleagues had told me I made a detour to see the monuments in Crome d’Abitot church, but took a wrong turning and found myself winding down the drive to the house itself. There had been a board up at the gate—Something-ishi Foundation—but I was through before it registered. It was a heavy, hazy morning. The house, as large as Cheadle but much plainer, lay looking out over flat and almost treeless parkland below the ridge I had descended. On the grass a number of cattle were tethered. Near the spot where I began to turn my car a thin young man in a long coat and a sort of skull-cap was inspecting from a distance of a few feet a large fly-infested sore below the eye-socket of one of these animals. He carried a briefcase and looked Western enough in a mildly eccentric way until I realised that beneath the skull-cap his head was close-shaven and that the coat was in fact a robe. His thinness and stoop suggested undernourishment, and he seemed to study the sore with a resignation indistinguishable from despair. Very likely I am doing him and his organisation a complete injustice and his bag was stuffed with fly-repellants and antibiotics which he was about to administer, but in the few seconds it took to get the car round I was gripped with a fit of the horrors. His hopelessness, and the hopeless patience of the animal, spread and filled the valley, drowning the splendid house like one of those villages lost under new-built reservoirs. I think anyone might have felt it, but to me with my preoccupation with Cheadle and my longing for my daughter apparently dead to me in her Sri Lankan ashram the scene was a particular hell.

Sally was born before Simon. I had always intended that she should inherit, though my mother and Mark tried to insist on Simon’s right as first-born male. Sally, almost as soon as she was aware of the possibility, rejected it, continued to do so more and more firmly as she grew up, and on her eighteenth birthday gave me a document prepared by solicitors formally renouncing any claim. She writes long and friendly letters from her sanctuary, never with any hint of return. Suppose, I asked myself as I drove home from Crome d’Abitot, I offered her Cheadle; and suppose the money were available from rich converts to maintain it in however threadbare a fashion as an -ishi establishment; would I pay that price to have her back? It would be a life of a sort for the house, wouldn’t it, arguably more genuine than that provided by the sightseers who now flood through it, so transient as to seem less material than its own old ghosts?

I sighed and looked at Simon.

‘Have you thought what you would live on?’ I asked. ‘Every penny goes with the house. It has to.’

‘We’d get by, Mums. That doesn’t matter. Why don’t you write to Aunt Jane? Don’t let her push Gavin at you—he’s an oaf. Fiona’s the one to go for.’

‘She can’t be more than sixteen.’

‘Eighteen more like. In fact, don’t write to Aunt Jane. Write to Fiona direct. Invite her over. Offer her a job for the summer.’

‘I’ll think about it.’

I was in the kitchen making my hot Bovril before going to bed, when I realised Terry was in the doorway, watching me.

‘Must be feeling kind of down about Sir Mark, Marge,’ he said.

‘A bit.’

‘Would you like me to come along to your room tonight?’

I am still able to blush. On the other hand I didn’t spill my Bovril. Nothing is surprising, coming from Terry.

‘No, thank you. It’s very kind of you . . .’

‘Come off it. I wouldn’t be suggesting it if I didn’t fancy you.’

I wondered whether he had cleared the idea with Simon. Quite likely. He would have told me if I’d asked, too.

‘I belong to a different time, Terry.’

‘You belong now, Marge. You have to. There’s no place else to belong.’

I shook my head.

III