Death of a Unicorn

You spoil things by brooding on them, so I seldom allow myself consciously to think along these lines. But the night I came home after seeing Mrs Clarke I was deliberately looking forward to that last half-mile to restore my own energies, self-confidence, balance. In some ways the shock of realising what Jane had done had been less than that of seeing how easily Mrs Clarke’s apparent serenity could now be broken. Sturdily though she seemed to have withstood the passage of time, one tremor was enough to shake the tower. If not my visit, then something else, soon. A heroic old age is no more use than a feeble one. I am a battler (a battle-axe, perhaps) and have told myself I shall be one always. The only benefit is to my own self-respect, but normally I think that a gain worth having. On the motorway I found myself becoming less and less sure.

I rounded the basin of the fountain and slowed to a speed at which some ancestor might have cantered up the grass beside the gravel. The rain glittered in my headlights, spoiling the effect, so I switched them off. The wipers slished to and fro. The wind gusted and bustled among the tree-tops. Huddled in my warm steel egg I floated gently towards my floating palace. It too seemed serene, untouchable, safe from the storm of years. The wings began to widen before me.

Then the floodlights switched themselves off, the palace vanished and I was driving blindly into darkness.

VII

John Nightingale found me. He was bicycling down the Avenue in the dawn after spending the night with Maxine. It must have been the very early stages of that affair for him to feel the need to conceal his comings and goings. I had-driven into the statue of Ixion and was unconscious at the wheel, having been there about seven hours. I dare say doctors always tell one it was touch and go, unconsciously emphasising the drama of one’s recovery and their own part in it, but it is a fact that Sally came home and was by my bed when I recovered my senses four days later. I remember nothing between the floodlights going out and my waking up and seeing her.

Nothing external, that is. On the other hand I remember with great vividness—no, that is the wrong word, because there were elements I cannot put a shape to, in particular the people I shall refer to as They or Them—with great vigour, as episodes of crucial importance in my life, certain scenes I saw in my delirium. I am now going to try and recount them. Of course this is an unreal procedure. They came to me in disorganised and recurring fragments, probably more chaotic than I can now know because of the way the still-dreaming mind tries to shape the pictures it makes into coherence. But it is not unreal in the sense of being irrelevant because they were only dreams. One’s memories of the real past are only a special kind of dreaming, in which one makes mental pictures and tries to explain them into a coherent sequence; and in this case the visions of my delirium retained for me on waking a cogency just as great as if someone had told me that he had documents which showed that B, while working on the Control Commission in Hamburg, had made contact with a group of men who . . . and so on. I have experienced my own explanation in a way that I could not have done if somebody had presented me with second-hand facts. This is the way in which I came to know it, and so the natural way in which to present it here, though tidied up and ordered into sequence so as to satisfy the waking mind. I fully accept that it may not be true.

I was in a shabby, bleak office. A man in uniform sat at a desk with his back to me. I thought it was my father till he half turned and I saw it was B. He rose, fetched a file from a green cabinet, leafed through it, picked out a sheet and began to compare it with one already on his desk. He sat very still, but I loved him so much I could feel his tension, his excitement. He reached for a telephone.