Of course, parties try to book me as their guide. Within the limits of my own commitments I play fair, taking pot luck, although my own preference is for working-class pensioners, women with the print of time on them, brave poverty-weathered faces. I like the way they think that because they have paid their fee they have a right to their money’s worth. I like their sense of acceptance of transience, which in itself has the quality of endurance, and echoes what I feel about my house. Sometimes these parties include splendid old ladies who used to be in service themselves and reminisce about backstairs life, the appalling long hours, the incredible restrictions on their freedom, the tiny wages, but in no complaining tone, in fact with a scholar-like sense of reconstructing lost ways of life. I prefer such groups to middle-class women who drop quiet hints to each other that in childhood they were at home in surroundings like Cheadle.
When I could walk after my accident I took on a bit more of this work, to show my visitors and prove to myself that I was now up to it. One Wednesday afternoon I had an outing from Dorset. A mixed bag from a market town, no trouble but not very interesting. The tour ends in the kitchens so that visitors have to go out through the shop, which is in the old brewhouse. I had said goodbye to them and was waiting to see that they did all in fact leave when a woman came up to me. I had noticed her during the tour, younger than most of the others, plump but trim, wearing a too-smart pale violet coat and bouffant blonde hair, a style that would have better suited someone twenty years younger. But she carried herself with confidence and did not at all look as though she had sat in a coach all morning, had a picnic luncheon and then trailed for an hour round a huge house. I had noticed too that the other women showed the usual unconscious signs of deference to her, so when she approached me I assumed she was the President of their WI and was about to say thank you on their behalf. Then I saw she was clutching a book.
I had already explained about not signing autographs because of the time it takes and the need to be fair to other parties, so I was irritated that this apparently educated woman had not got the point.
‘You won’t remember me, Lady Margaret,’ she said. ‘I was so hoping it might be you. You see, a million years ago I lined up next to you at Queen Charlotte’s Ball.’
‘You’re not Veronica Bracken!’
‘How clever of you. I haven’t forgotten, of course, but I didn’t dream you’d remember.’
‘You’re Mrs . . . Seago now, isn’t it?’
‘Lady Seago, actually. Paul got his K in the New Year Honours.’
‘Congratulations. He’s still in the Air Force then?’
‘It’s too brilliant of you to know all this. How on earth do you do it with everything else to think about?’
‘Oh, I suppose it’s just one of the things that stick. After all, you were easily the most beautiful girl in our year. Or in any year ever, as far as I’m concerned.’
She looked pleased, and younger now. I could sense rather than see it was the same woman. Handsome, certainly, but of course the unbelievable bloom had gone. Still, an innocence remained that had been part of it.
‘I’ve read all your books,’ she said. ‘I think they’re marvellous. But I’m afraid this is still my favourite.’
She had been carrying it clutched between two hands in such a way that I hadn’t had a clear sight of it, beyond noticing that it was a hardback and well worn. Nowadays my books go straight into paperback. When she lifted her left hand from the cover I saw that she had needed to hold it like that because it was falling to bits. It was Uncle Tosh.
I took it from her and leafed delicately through. It was like a child’s favourite book. The very paper seemed to have been worn soft with perusal. The pages were torn, taped, stained. I understood that I was holding a talisman.
‘It’s been all over the world with me,’ she said. ‘That’s why it’s in such a state. I read it whenever I’m low and it cheers me up. She’s so wonderful, isn’t she? I can’t spell, either.’
I found it difficult to say anything. The rest of her party were milling gently through the brew-house door, but a few were glancing back, inquisitive. It is so easy to give in to cheap emotion. After all, people who dislike the kind of book I write say that my stock-in-trade is to trigger such automatic easy responses, and there’s some truth in the criticism. All I can answer is that at that moment and in those circumstances I felt I was in the presence of one of those simple, pure, totally unconsidered expressions of something essential to human nature, such as you get in certain movements of children, and to which you respond with an emotion that may be easy but cannot be called cheap. If someone else had put that book into my hand I would have been interested, might have been moved, but not in the same way.
‘Tell me about your family,’ I said. ‘Have you got one, I mean?’
‘Oh, yes. Three boys. Two in the Air Force and David at Theological College.’
‘That sounds satisfactory.’
‘Luckily they’ve got Paul’s brains.’
I thought I could imagine the relationship. Four thoroughly male men, and this little woman whom they managed to treat as half way between a pet and a person, but adored on that basis. Good for her.
‘Didn’t you want a daughter?’ I said.
She frowned. It was a most charming expression, suggesting both the difficulty of the question and the difficulty of the process of thought. I could see that if I had been a man it would instantly have aroused my protective warrior instincts, a response almost as automatic as that of insects or birds to particular innate stimuli.
‘Paul longed for one,’ she said. ‘I was never sure. It isn’t easy for girls. I’ve had a lovely life, but then I’ve been terribly lucky. I could so easily . . . But of course you’re different, Lady Margaret.’
She reached out for the book.
‘I’ll sign it for you if you like,’ I said. ‘Nobody’s looking.’
‘Oh . . . I only brought it to show you.’
Obviously she didn’t want me to. I guessed that I seemed less real to her than the girl who had stood beside her at Queen Charlotte’s, and that that girl in turn was less real than the purely imaginary Petronella. The book had properties of personal magic, which might be exorcised by my attaching my name—the counter-magic of a formidable middle-aged woman—to her key to the unicorn’s garden where only youth belongs. She gazed up at me, apparently perfectly content.
‘I mustn’t keep the others waiting,’ she said.
Reading Group Discussion Questions
by Jenny Terpsichore Abeles
In what ways is this story a classic “whodunit”? How does it surprise the reader’s expectations of the mystery genré?
“Death of a Unicorn” is the image of the puzzle B. gives the young Mabs to kill time while he is away. Which character is best correlated with the unicorn and why? How do themes and images associated with unicorn myths connect to themes and images of the novel? When and how does the “puzzle” come to be completed?