Death of a Unicorn

I started to wonder about Ronnie’s theory. Not whether it was true, but whether it mattered. Certainly it mattered that the money which he paid for the repairs to the Banqueting Hall seemed to have come from the sale of Halper’s Corner, and so morally and legally had belonged to B. No doubt the plantation had had a lot of misery and wickedness in its past, but the filter-beds of the generations had washed it clean. There was no taint now. The same could not be said of B’s other finances. Those horrors had happened well within my lifetime. What did I feel about that? If it had been anyone else, perhaps . . . But he was like a boy who has unearthed pirate gold. As he carries the jar of ducats home he isn’t expected to think of the decks slopping with blood and the screams of the women in the cabins. There has been a break, and the coins belong to no one. So though that money may have paid for my year of happiness, and therefore in a sense helped to shape me into what I am now, the awareness of where it had ultimately come from didn’t seem to tarnish the afterglow.

The house was one of a row lining a wide undulating road, neither town nor country. A dark brick bungalow with an over-imposing roof-line, which made it look as though a two-storey house had been bodily shoved into the ground, leaving only the upper floor visible. I rang the bell and was answered by a screaming klaxon. I remembered Ronnie had said she was very deaf. There was no answer. I rang two or three times and then started to peer through windows. I tried the side-door in a narrow alley. It opened into a kitchen which showed obvious signs of recent use. Encouraged, I went out again and on down the alley, hoping to be able to attract Mrs Clarke’s attention at one of the windows that side.

She was working in her garden. Even in the grey November light it was an attractive place, despite measuring only a few yards in each direction. Raised beds, to eliminate bending. Pincushiony plants nestling among layered boulders and a scree of chippings. A slanting birch, almost bare. Everything extremely tidy. Mrs Clarke, her dumpy body supported by a walking-frame, was picking birch-leaves one by one out of a tussock of heather. She had her back to me so I walked on at an angle until my movement caught the corner of her eye. She straightened and turned slowly, thumping her frame round to do so. Her head went back to the old familiar angle.

‘My dear Lady Margaret,’ she said. ‘It is you, isn’t it? This is a quite unexpected pleasure.’

Ronnie was right. Apart from the hearing-aid and the frame she had scarcely aged. Her white hair was done in smooth, perfect waves, her face fully made up, her pale blue eyes unclouded. She was wearing a tweed jacket and skirt. Only her pink rubber gloves struck an odd note. She pulled one of them off in order to turn up the volume of her hearing-aid.

‘I’m sorry to barge in on you like this,’ I mouthed.

‘Oh, but do come in. I have thought of you so often. You find me in a weeny bit of a mess. I was just tidying up my dear little garden for the winter.’

She thumped herself across the pavement and opened a French window for me.

‘I do trust you will stay for tea,’ she said. ‘I was just thinking how pleasant a cup would be.’

‘Only if you’ll let me help.’

‘I’m tiresomely deaf, you see. I used to depend so much on my ears.’

‘I said . . .’

‘Certainly not, Lady Margaret. I make a point of doing things for myself. It is the only way not to become a helpless old woman.’

She closed the window and thumped herself across the room towards the kitchen, leaving me alone. I felt immensely relieved, almost exhilarated. Anyone my age must wonder at times what kind of old person they will become. The constant company of someone in my mother’s condition gives these speculations a prurient intensity, though Dr Jackson assures me that there is no hereditary element in my mother’s senility. To see Mrs Clarke so obviously unconquered was a moral tonic. The walking-frame and the deafness actually helped. They made the ageing process superficial, consisting of disabilities that could be coped with provided the will remained steadfast. She had recognised me at once—not quite the feat it might seem, because of my not infrequent appearances on television; she seemed to have taught herself to lip-read; she took getting a tea-tray together without help for granted; she did her own garden.

This sense of enduringness was confirmed by the room itself. It was just what one would have found her living in thirty years ago, lime green and ivory, frills and satins, framed photographs on every shelf, no books but neatly piled magazines. The enormous television was of course a modern note, but to balance it there were the well-remembered escritoire and commode.