Death of a Unicorn

The largest photograph, on the commode, showed an elderly man, the smooth baldness of his scalp contrasting with a many-wrinkled face, eyes hard and small, white moustache cut like a soldier’s. Father or husband? The soft, society-portrait focus seemed inappropriate to the forbidding sitter. Mr Clarke, I decided, taken in the late Thirties, when The Social Round was still a separate magazine from Night and Day and Mrs Clarke might well have coaxed her husband into sitting for one of her regular photographers. In that case he must have been twenty or thirty years older than she was. He looked something of a pirate, and evidently understood how to make money. An utterly different creature from B, though, just as she was from me.

I nosed along the main shelf, looking at other photographs. These were the type I remembered, her famous collection, taken at parties, race-meetings, Henley, Lord’s, with a central figure often vaguely familiar to me as the parent of a girl or young man I had once known. All the pictures were autographed by their central figure. I had picked one out and was looking at it when Mrs Clarke came back, more silently because she was using the tea-trolley instead of her walking-frame to support herself.

‘My little collection,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you remember. I haven’t room for them all in this tiny house, so many are in albums. Which one have you there?’

‘Um . . . One of those impossible signatures. I dimly remember the face. Actually I was looking at it because that’s Veronica Bracken, isn’t it?’

Names are presumably harder to lip-read than ordinary words. Mrs Clarke had clearly not taken in what I’d said. She pulled a lever at the side of the trolley to lock the wheels so that she could steady herself with one hand and use the other for her eye-glasses to inspect the picture as I held it for her.

‘Dear Lady Trufitt,’ she said. ‘Her Mary must have been a year or two older than you.’

‘But that’s Veronica Bracken,’ I said, pointing.

Unmistakable. Not just a very pretty girl, but still to me somehow an embodiment. The photograph had been taken out of doors in high summer at what looked like a wedding reception, to judge by the men’s morning suits. Lady Trufitt occupied the centre, a tall, plain, weather-beaten woman wearing a pill-box hat and veil which looked as though they had been modified from her hunting gear. Veronica was in the picture by accident, in profile, wearing a simple hat with a wide gauze brim, talking to someone outside the frame—a man, to judge by the tilt of her head. The animation and buoyancy of her beauty flowed at me from the photograph, not simply nostalgia though that was there too, not the pathos of knowing what happened to her later, but existing independently of any history, like a statue unearthed in the desert.

‘Oh, yes, Veronica Bracken,’ said Mrs Clarke. ‘Veronica Seago now. Her husband seems to have done very well in the Air Force. He must be about due for his knighthood, but I am very out of touch these days. Now, my dear—I hope you don’t mind an old woman calling you that, it seems so natural in the circumstances—if you will sit on the sofa and just wait while I organise myself a little—people will try to help when it’s really quite unnecessary—I manage very well .

Indeed she did. By the time I had put the photograph back in its place and sat down she had pushed the trolley a few feet further, locked its wheels again, and with careful but obviously practised movements was working her way round to an upright wooden chair with sturdy arms, which she used to lower herself to sit. If any part of the process hurt her, she gave no sign.

‘There,’ she said placidly. ‘Now if you don’t mind I will just turn this little light on. It makes it so much easier to understand what you are saying if I can see you clearly. I do hope that is not too bright for you.’

A good two hundred watts beamed straight at me. Mrs Clarke became a shadow beside the glare. I took my sunglasses from my handbag and put them on.

‘How sensible,’ she said.

‘I didn’t think I’d need them again this year. Haven’t these last two weeks been foul?’

‘Have they? I always think the weather you remember depends so much on how you have been feeling. And I am a long way south of Cheadle. How is your poor dear mother?’

The extra adjective showed that she was not so out of touch as she claimed. I answered briefly and went on to a noncommittal account of the doings and prospects of my children. Then Jane, and then my other sisters. Under that light it was like an interrogation. Mrs Clarke’s talent for euphemism had not deserted her; she seemed to know a good deal about Selina’s rackety adventures, but merely remarked that it was often a little difficult for younger sisters to settle down.