Death of a Unicorn

Instantly she hid in the thickets of amnesia, letting her mouth sag open and her eyes blear, bringing senility deliberately on, though I could still sense a sharpness somewhere inside, watching me. Her fingers fumbled with the TV control and there were the towers of Dallas, cross-cut with the performers. I rose and turned the sound up, then went back to my chair. I found I was quivering, a faint, repulsive inward tremor. It happened that a few days before, looking for a container in which to pack some silver to send for repair, I had turned out a battered little cheap suitcase containing a jumble of Sally’s possessions dating from when she was about nine, blurred snaps taken with her first camera, crayons, scribbled exercise books, a broken mascot and so on. The pang of nostalgia over these trivial things had been most unpleasant, a blurred physical ache filling my throat and upper chest. I imagine almost all parents know the feeling. Now, I realised, I was going to have to go back to my own life with B and experience those sensations deliberately, over weeks or months, and perhaps with more painful intensity. It was necessary to know what had actually happened about the money for the roof and the whole nexus of events surrounding it. Not for my own sake, but for Fiona’s.

No secrets. I must hold nothing back. Whatever had happened thirty years ago might be irrelevant, but it might not.

Shortly before Wheatstone died he told me a secret that had been held back. The cause of the trouble in the Banqueting Hall roof had not been an accident or oversight, but a deliberate skimping on the part of the builders to save the price of new lead by re-using the old. My great-great-uncle’s overseer had been too friendly with the builders’ foreman and had allowed himself to be hoodwinked. If this had been realised in time the rafters and the elaborate plasterwork would have been saved, and the repairs of 1952 would have cost less than a twentieth of what they in the end did. Wheatstone had known something was wrong. He didn’t say as much to me, but I deduce it from the manner in which he insisted on telling me the story and the importance he gave it. Owing to some unexplained feud with the overseer he had decided that it was ‘not his place’ to attempt to warn my great-great-uncle. What this means, I have come to believe, is that in 1924 it had seemed necessary to Wheatstone that his enemy’s failure in duty should work itself out and be publicly demonstrated by the processes of decay. For the wrong to be then and there detected and put right, with no other damage done, would have been unsatisfying. Later, of course, his own failure must have troubled him, though still perversely mitigated by the general condemnation of his dead enemy. Telling me was a half-hearted attempt at confession.

I was not having any of that. No hidden rots handed on unbudgeted for. It seemed to me that B, despite not having sold the necklace, had paid my mother for the roof repairs, and then my mother had not, in his words, ‘stayed bought’. She had learnt something from Mrs Clarke (how? when?) and had passed it on to Minnie Trenchard-Yates.

And Minnie was dead. So was Sir Drummond, of a heart-attack in a Kensington brothel. It had been hushed up but I knew about it because, indirectly, it had been important to Mark’s career: two members of the government had been in the house at the same time and had resigned soon after ‘for personal reasons’, one of those minor tremors that foreshadowed the end of the Macmillan era. Mark had got his first ministerial job in the subsequent reshuffle. It had been the period of the first ‘sick jokes’. I remember wondering whether Bruce Fischer had begun to play necrophilic variations on his single theme.