Death of a Unicorn

‘You want real coal?’ said Terry, who had been gazing at her with his usual open interest almost throughout that first supper. Fiona took the question seriously—it is hard to tell with Terry.

‘It would still be kind of sham. I guess if I was taking it up for a real fire which was going to get lit for someone to dress in front of, that would be OK.’

‘But the whole place is sham, in that sense,’ I said. ‘Apart from the few rooms we live in it doesn’t exist for any purpose except to be looked at. In one sense it never did. Nobody built the portico, for instance, to keep the rain off a visitor ringing the front doorbell. Sometimes I think of myself as the stage manager of a very, very slow play. Each act takes about a century. Cheadle itself is the star. We are now well into the last act, the old age of the hero. There’s nothing I can do to alter the plot, but I am doing my best to see that the performance isn’t a shambles.’

‘See what I mean about Mums and the high romantic line?’ said Simon. ‘You’ve read some of her books, I take it.’

‘Cheadle’s much more important than my books,’ I said. ‘But it’s an example of an art-form, just as they are. It’s not any more real, in the sense Fiona was talking about.’

‘I guess I read quite a few,’ said Fiona.

‘You don’t have to like them,’ I said quickly. I always say that. It has the advantage of being true. If I were a better writer—or at least someone who thought of herself as a “great” writer, I expect I should find it hard to sympathise with readers who didn’t respond to my work. As it is, to assume that every intelligent person must enjoy what I write seems to me as vulgar an attitude as to assume that guests have something wrong with them if they don’t enjoy zabaglione.

‘I liked some of them all right,’ said Fiona. ‘Times when I want to give up and forget, they’re great for that. Other times, though, I guess I get impatient. All those girls. Why’s it always got to be some man who sorts our their problems for them?’

‘Hear, hear,’ said Simon.

‘Why indeed?’ I said. ‘I suppose the only answer is that it’s a convention of the art-form. I’ve tried to get away from it occasionally. There was a girl I made chuck over both men and go and be a nurse in Ethiopia.’

‘I remember cheering,’ said Simon.

‘At least I didn’t have her pegged out and eaten by ants,’ I said. ‘But my publishers were full of doom and gloom. I didn’t mind, but the next book sold much worse, and that did matter.’

‘Mums always talks about sales figures when she’s near the romantic bone,’ said Simon. ‘Or roof repairs. It means she feels she’s let you get too close to her secret garden.’

‘Where would we be without sales figures?’ I said. ‘Secret gardens don’t pay plumbers.’

‘But they do,’ said Simon. ‘Your books don’t sell because you’ve put exactly the right number of dots on the heroine’s veil for 1911. They sell because somehow or other underneath all that there’s this utterly romantic place which you’re the only person’s got the key to.’

‘Oh, really!’ I said. ‘We’re not here to try and analyse my sources of inspiration. My sources of inspiration are the account books for Cheadle.’

‘See what I mean, Fiona?’ said Simon.

‘I guess account books can be pretty romantic,’ said Fiona. ‘They must go back years and years, uh?’

‘Lord, yes,’ said Simon. ‘If you want to know what a hundredweight of horse-shoe cleats cost in 1796, it’s all there.’

‘Can’t I help with the accounts, Aunt Mabs?’ said Fiona. ‘I get pretty good grades in math and I’m aiming to major in economics.’

‘I suppose you might,’ I said. ‘I hadn’t thought . . . You see, the accounts are done by an outside firm called Burroughs and I’ve been having endless discussions with one of their men about getting it all on to Maxine’s new computer. That’s what I bought it for, after all. The trouble is it involves somebody sitting down and actually doing it. If I let Burroughs it will cost the earth and then they’ll get it all wrong. There’s no one here I can trust and spare. It’s worse than that because my own mind goes blank. I’m frightened of ending up with a system I don’t understand, which’ll mean I’m in somebody else’s hands. I’m not having that. Simon and Terry could do it, but they won’t . . .’

‘Dead boring,’ said Simon. ‘Nothing to it. Endless, endless entries. Stock control. Oh, God!’

‘We could write you a basic programme, Marge,’ said Terry. ‘But after that . . .’

‘The man from Burroughs keeps talking about basic programmes. They have this one they sell to farms which he thinks will work with a bit of adapting. I simply can’t believe it’s not going to turn out more trouble than it’s worth.’

‘Listen, Aunt Mabs,’ said Fiona. ‘Why don’t Simon and Terry and me put our heads together? They write the programme, I do the entries. That kind of thing really turns me on, getting it all cleaned up and running. We did a lot of work with computers, tenth grade.’