Death of a Unicorn

One week when no letter came—Fiona had had flu, it turned out—I thought of faking one but didn’t, mainly because it wasn’t worth the trouble, but also because I felt it would be a betrayal of Fiona to do so. Besides, I had an instinct that however accurately I did it my mother would somehow know. For the first time in my life I was feeling something that might be called fondness for my mother, beginning from our shared affection for my niece but existing, however vaguely, in its own right. Though she always complained and often wept at Fiona’s continued absence, I found these manifestations more tolerable than I would have six months earlier, because I could sympathise with them. Moreover, my mother maintained the improvement in her grasp of the world which Fiona had produced while she was with us, and I felt it my duty to both of them to try and see that this was at least not let slip. It was still impossible to hold anything like a coherent conversation (would I have welcomed that, I wonder?) but she usually called me by my own name and understood that Wheatstone was dead, and so on. She was more selective about what she watched on television, prodding her remote-control switch and rocketing from channel to channel until something promising showed up. She enjoyed American serials most, not the shoot-outs but the emotional traumas, sometimes displaying a definite understanding of the causes of that week’s row, and even remembering parts of what had happened the previous week. I forced myself to watch with her so that we should have something to talk about—duty or no duty I could not bring myself to chat, as Fiona did, about my own doings.

One evening I was reading proofs while we waited for Dallas to come on. I had turned the sound down so as to be able to concentrate while my mother fidgeted with her control switch. Suddenly she said in a strong, clear voice, ‘Absolutely no dress sense. When I took my girls to dances . . .’

I glanced up and saw it was an advertisement for toffee, which the manufacturers were trying to invest with snob appeal. I’d seen it before. Dancers at an Ivor Novello-ish ball twirled past the camera. In a few seconds the lens would zoom in on an ambassadorial figure, all ribbons and orders, who would push aside a vast offering of caviare and then surreptitiously take a packet of the advertiser’s toffee from his coat-tail pocket. As it is important to respond to my mother’s remarks but there is no need to maintain coherence I said the first thing that came into my head.

‘Do you know, I think Mrs Clarke may still be alive.’

‘Nonsense. I wore one of her own hats at her funeral.’

We had all suffered mildly from my mother’s conviction that the daughter of a previous Cheadle head-gardener could make us more becoming hats in her little shop in Bolsover than anything we could buy in Sloane Street, and at a tenth of the price.

‘Not that one,’ I said. ‘I’m talking about the Mrs Clarke who used to write “The Social Round” in Night and Day. She signed herself Cynthia Darke.’

‘Tiresome woman.’

Really she was alarmingly her old self this evening. Like many people of vehement opinions she had never had more than a few words to express them. Condemnation ran a gamut from ‘unreliable’ through ‘tiresome’ to ‘horrible’.

‘She was extremely kind to me,’ I said.

‘Expected me to sign a photograph,’ said my mother. ‘Of all things!’

‘You were almost the only countess she hadn’t got.’

‘Ridiculous. Useless woman. I admit she told me about that horrible man being up to no good on that island. Minnie was so interested. He got money from the Jews, you know.’

She turned directly towards me and gave me the old witch-smile. It was like a story-book illustration which used to give one nightmares as a child, why one can no longer perceive.

‘Do you mean Amos Brierley?’ I said.