Killing a Unicorn Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Also by Marjorie Eccles

  Copyright Page

  Chapter One

  London. A stifling early September afternoon, the sun beating down. Oxford Street and a million shoppers. Sheer hell.

  Overnight bag and briefcase in one hand, handbag over her shoulder, Fran plunges down into the arguably worse hell of the Underground at Oxford Circus. Everything conspires against her, but what’s new, when you’re in a hurry? Jostling her way through the shuffling crowds, she steps on to the down escalator, where a couple of tourists very nearly cause a major pile-up by stopping dead at the bottom and opening their map. Squashed between them and the crowd behind, Fran feels her shoulder-bag slip and she grabs it just in time. On the teeming platform she’s pushed around between home-going commuters like herself and shoppers weighed down with carrier bags from Selfridges and Harrods. Plus students of every nationality, top-heavy with bedrolls and backpacks, a hazard to anyone who isn’t adroit enough to dodge their gigantic loads as they swing round like ungainly camels … Why am I doing this? she asks herself, finally in the tube train, strap-hanging, in unwanted intimacy with a garlic-scented, hair-oiled individual who eyes her suggestively, but it’s a rhetorical question.

  Clutching the support by the door with one hand, her grip and briefcase wedged between her feet, the other hand firmly on her handbag, she closes her eyes and longs to be able to massage the crease between her brows where the incipient headache has threatened all day. Staring at the VDU hasn’t helped, trying to co-ordinate the designs so clear in her own mind with the recalcitrant graphics on the screen. O‘Sullivan, O’Toole Advertising — O.S.O.T. — in the middle of a prestigious toothpaste account, has been more than the usual madhouse today. If anything could go wrong, it had. Murphy’s Law. That’s not unusual, either. It’s what comes of working for the Irish mob, according to her friend Claire, who is little and neat and deceptively wide-eyed, and sees things very clearly. She’s an exceedingly clever lawyer, and would never dream of working for any outfit as wacky as O.S.O.T., though that’s hardly the point, as far as Fran’s concerned. The point is that there are other factors that make it a good place to work. And however hit and miss it might seem to outsiders, the agency functions well. Saatchi & Saatchi it’s not, but they get results.

  They’d had supper together last night, she and Claire, and afterwards Fran had stayed in the family’s flat, a one-bedroomed pad in Belsize Park, which all the Calverts use as a convenient overnight stopping place on visits to town, or when it’s too late to get home. Claire had pressed her to stay on another night and see the latest new release at the Leicester Square Odeon, but Chip has bagged the flat for tonight, and anyway the mere thought of its stuffy claustrophobia, never mind her brother-in-law’s large presence and a consequent bed for her on the sofa, was enough to negative the idea. No contest there with the house in the woods, waiting for her, the thought of which is like a long, refreshing draught of cold water.

  Home. Even home alone.

  Cool and light, set in a wide, open clearing, the windows facing in all the right directions because Mark designed it that way. An award-winning, modernist arrangement of glass cubes, planned for maximum light, wonderful when she’s working on the intricate hangings she does in what spare time she can muster, but mainly designed for Mark’s working environment. What you can see of it that isn’t windows is creamy slabs of Purbeck stone, smooth as marble. No garden, just a large, grassy space beneath the little waterfall and the pool, the backdrop of trees behind it. Shared only with rabbits, squirrels, the odd badger, and the deer who roam the woods and come down to the pool at night to drink. It’s what Fran thinks of as part of her inner landscape, or if that isn’t too fanciful, the place where, finally, she knows she’s meant to be. Not everyone shares her passion for it, much less for the animals. They’re a menace in the village gardens, and sometimes the deer herds wander even further out of the woods, up along the bluff behind the house towards Membery and, with no trouble at all, gracefully leap the crumbling six-foot wall enclosing Alyssa’s garden, wreaking havoc and bringing out the worst in her. Better to have no roses than no deer, thinks Fran, though Alyssa can hardly be blamed for feeling that way when the garden has become a substantial part of her livelihood. She’s gradually having the old wall replaced by a chain-link fence, ten feet high — a less aesthetically pleasing but more affordable deterrent. As and when she has the money. That’s the story she’s putting about, though it would be more truthful to say when Chip can be persuaded to sanction payment for it.

  It doesn’t do to take Alyssa too literally. Large and flamboyant, in her mid-sixties but still hanging on in there to the vivid, dark good looks she’s passed on to her three sons, exaggeration is as much part of her nature as her flashing eyes, her warm smile and the jewellery she wears with such panache whenever she isn’t working in the garden — and sometimes when she is. Unlike most women of her station, she has no inhibitions about appearing vulgar. But then, she wasn’t born out of the top drawer. Like Fran, she has only married a Calvert.

  The escalator disgorges its passengers into the main-line railway station, Fran makes a run for it across the concourse and by the skin of her teeth manages to catch the commuter train that will bear her home. Miraculously, she finds a seat, collapses into it while she gets her breath back after her sprint and closes her eyes, willing herself to relax. But she can’t shut out the vague incipient unease which, like that hint of a headache, has been with her all day in the office, shadow-dancing at the back of her mind.

  Why does Mark have to be away on this particular night? She doesn’t mind being on her own, as a rule, she’s used to it. Only lately she’s been a bit jittery — imagining she hears sounds outside, when there’s nothing. Hearing someone moving around outside the house during the night, voices, running footsteps, a motorbike revving up and driving away, none of which Mark ever hears, because once his head touches the pillow, he’s dead to the world for the next seven hours. Things like that.

  In fact she normally enjoys the silence of the forest. The product of divorced parents, she was brought up in the hurly-burly of life with three half-siblings, where there was never enough room, never enough privacy. Then at art college, it was much the same in a way, where not only classes were shared but life outside, the not yet cast off adolescent compulsion to go with the crowd. She’d been determined afterwards to have her own bedsit, but it had come as a shock, a fierce disappointment. She’s tried to explain the difference between aloneness and loneliness to Mark … has he understood? She isn’t sure her powers of interpretation are adequate. Or, as always with Mark, if he’s understood only too well.

  Meanwhile, the silence surrounding the house is a precious commodity, to be weighed out and savoured in small amounts, alone or, better still, with Mark.

  ‘Look, Fran, you love him, right?’ Claire had begun her mini lecture last night, over paella and a bottle of Rioja. ‘OK, stupid question! So — isn’t it time for some straight talking between you?’

  ‘I’ve tried that, but he won’t talk, not really talk, discuss things — and that’s so unlike him.’ Mark, relaxed, smiling, sk
ilfully changing the subject.

  ‘Then you do the talking, and refuse to stop. He’ll have to answer sometime. I wouldn’t let Mitch get away with anything like that, and we’re not even married yet. Come on, it’s not like you, Fran!’

  ‘We-ell …’

  ‘Trouble is, you don’t know yourself what you want. Am I right or am I right?’

  Fran looked down into the bottom of her empty glass, and saw the inescapable truth. ‘You’re in the wrong job, Claire, you should be working for Relate. All right, when he gets back, I’ll give it a try.’ For a moment, she’d felt bleak. ‘Another try.’

  ‘Don’t give up, duckie, you owe it to yourself. Get a life.’

  Claire’s talking sense. Only, Fran’s never been very good at confrontations. If confrontation is the right word.

  Hopefully, Mark will be ringing her this evening, though his schedule in Brussels is tight. But she knows really that a brief message on the answerphone is all she can realistically expect. Mark, when working, is totally concentrated - and considering how things have been lately, she can only be glad of it. However, this brings forth aspects of the situation she doesn’t want to consider at this precise moment.

  Then she remembers that Bibi’s coming down later that evening, and hardly knows whether to be pleased or not. It will all depend on what mood she’s in. Bibi with all her candles lit is great to be with: she radiates happiness, seeming to dance as she walks, light as a leaf, with her soft hair curving like silver-gilt feathers round her face, unbelievable eyes, a real, gentian blue, complexion so fair and translucent it dazzles. An infectious laugh, when she’s pleased, or wanting to please. Totally different from that other self she can assume, as for instance when she goes up to work at the country club: then, she wears severe suits, so unlike her preferred ethnic garments, hair drawn back to reveal the clean modelling of a face beautiful without the need for much make-up, with high, rounded cheekbones and a soft mouth that’s belied by a determined chin.

  But — and that ‘but’ makes Fran shiver — it isn’t outside the bounds of possibility that tonight she’ll be in neither persona, but in that faraway, withdrawn mood, where you can never be sure if it’s something you’ve said, or whether any single word you’ve uttered has actually reached her, never mind that she always answers rationally enough. Indeed, if you didn’t know her, you might well think there was nothing wrong, unless you noticed that blank, china-doll stare in those blue eyes, that unnerving, unblinking, inward-looking gaze, as if there was a glass wall between her and the rest of the world. At such times, Fran often wonders whether she’d feel anything if you stuck a pin into her. It’s weird. No, it’s much more than that, it’s frightening, in a way that makes your blood run cold.

  Forty minutes later, Fran steps off the train at Felsborough and crosses the car park to where she’s left her car the previous morning, slips off her London shoes and exchanges them for the old flatties under the driving seat, stows her jacket tidily on the back seat — better and better, Fran! — and sets off for home.

  Gradually, the tense band around her skull eases as she drives up the wooded hill, one of the ridges of the Chilterns set high among rolling chalk uplands. Half-way up, the trees begin to close in and it becomes noticeably cooler as she makes the turn for the forest ride that eventually leads to the house. The silence deepens; she winds down the window further and the car is suddenly full of earthy scents and the croo-crooing of wood pigeons and the scrunch of beech-mast beneath the wheels. The forest is considerable, covering four thousand acres of mostly beech and some oak, interspersed here and there by the occasional stand of mixed conifers, spreading upwards and outwards across the valley. Jutting forward in the midst of this, cleaving the valley like the prow of a huge ocean liner, is the bluff on which Membery Place stands.

  Soon, she drives through the shallow ford that crosses the road immediately before the point where the drive of The Watersplash appears to the right before whipping diagonally back on itself. The ford has been marked on ancient maps from time immemorial as The Watersplash, and the name settled easily on the new house in the course of its erection without anyone consciously having chosen it.

  And there it is, with only a row of slender silver birches to screen it from the forest road, and beyond it the wide green sward of the clearing stretching right up to the front door. It’s compelling, totally unexpected in that place, an in-your-face statement, like a lot of Mark’s work. All right, a shock it might be — and some of its detractors say it’s an outrage, an alien structure in this wood — but its clean geometry of dynamically interlocking glass cubes endows it with a spatial quality that allows it to blend in with its background. Its glass gilded tonight by the evening sun, glimpsed through the birches, it stands at the end of a driveway of ruinously expensive bark chippings that constantly need to be renewed: Mark’s poetic vision of this house hasn’t entirely encompassed the practicalities of living in a wood. For one thing, a house like this — though not as much at the back end of nowhere as one might think, since a road runs along the ridge of the bluff above and behind the house, past the village of Middleton Thorpe (which has a pub, a church and a school — a shop, even) and then on towards Membery Place, before curling back down the other side — such a house couldn’t be built and maintained except at considerable expense and not a little inconvenience. The estimated cost of just laying the services, bringing them down from the road, had almost shipwrecked the enterprise before it was launched. The electricity is unreliable, there are often blips, momentary but enough to cause trouble with all the electronic devices Mark sees as indispensable to life: his PC, fax, video and e-mail, not to mention the microwave, fridge and freezer. Occasionally, however, it fails altogether. The overhead cables are easily brought down by the wind, a falling tree, and once, it’s said, by a gnawing squirrel — though how this was known, or what had happened to the squirrel, has not been recorded. Fried, presumably, says Mark. But at least, the lack of a garden poses no problems of maintenance: a scything of the soft, lush grass twice a year, occasional attempts to keep back the encroaching bracken are all that is needed.

  Fran drives her car into the area at the back of the house, discreetly screened by a thick holly hedge, and parks it in the double garage, carefully not taking up too much room, although Mark won’t be needing his space until next week. She remembers to change her shoes again and leave her flatties in the car. She’s learning — though it has to be said that natural tidiness isn’t in her nature. She heads for the house.

  Its lovely, spicy cedar smell welcomes her as she enters. The muted light filtering through the blinds burnishes the pale wood floor to gold, the white walls to a warm apricot. Interlocking spaces rather than rooms meet her, a suspended staircase and a mezzanine floor. Height and light and, flanking the front windows, the lavish, seemingly never-ending curtains of shimmering ivory watered silk that stretch through two floors to the upstairs ceiling (God knows how many metres — a second mortgage) and are never drawn. There are holland blinds, necessary to shut out the sun when it’s too intrusive. Or for privacy. Fran insists on drawing them in the evening against the blank-black night outside, when Mark would leave them undrawn, secure and unperturbed in his lighted glass cube.

  The decor Mark chose is minimalist, hi-tech, with transparent tables, cool, neutral colours, tubular furniture. Some of Fran’s own brilliant-hued wall hangings provide the only splash of colour. And, on a table, a pile of oranges heaped in the huge black basalt bowl she’d once guiltily splurged a fortune on. She frowns.

  They look gorgeous, a black and orange composition on the smoked glass table, but she doesn’t remember putting them there, she prefers oranges cold from the fridge, juicy and almost lemon sharp. She cannot abide eating their flesh when it’s warm. But there’s no denying the evidence of her own eyes, she must have put them there and forgotten. She pauses, then shrugs. Well, yes, perhaps. She’s found herself, regrettably, doing this sort of thing before. Subconsciousl
y copying that habit of Mark’s, that clever way he has of meticulously arranging groups of objets trouvés. Perhaps hoping to please him. Forgetting his habit of sometimes removing her vases of flowers because they don’t fit in with his overall perception of what the house should look like. Annoyed with herself, ignoring the thought of what construction Claire would put on such a lapse, she puts the fruit back in the fridge. She’s teaching herself to live with perfection, artistic perfection, but it isn’t always easy.

  She sighs. Most women would give their eye teeth for a husband who never leaves his dirty socks under the bed, who wipes the washbasin, and puts the cap back on the toothpaste, without even a conscious effort. Picks her things up, too, as well as his own, and not in any spirit of criticism — he’s relaxed and easy, just never thinks about it, it’s how he’s made. Either that or his training has made him so. She reminds herself that architects need to be meticulous. Mind you, he isn’t above letting her change the vacuum cleaner bag, or iron his shirts or struggle to put the fresh cover on the duvet. Wifely things he never thinks of doing.

  It cuts both ways, though, doesn’t it? He keeps an eye on her car and stops her from forgetting to make out her tax forms. He’s wonderful when she has flu. And he’s more fun to be with than anyone else she’s ever known.

  Kicking off her shoes to protect the floor, she pads around. No red, blinking light flashing from the answering machine, but loads of post. More bills than she wants to see, half a rain forest in junk mail, a folded slip of paper that turns out to be a note from Bibi: ‘Sorry darling, couldn’t make it tonight after all. I’ll ring you and we’ll fix another time.’ Typewritten, but at least she’s signed it in her distinctive violet ink, and with her full name, too: Bianca, in rounded, schoolgirl handwriting, and with the tail of the final ‘a’ curling backwards and round to encircle the whole signature with a great stylish flourish.

  Fran goes into the kitchen, pours herself a glass of iced water and drinks it down in one, not entirely sorry Bibi won’t be here tonight. It might be her ankle that’s bothering her: she broke it a few weeks ago, and though she says it isn’t actually painful now, it’s still irksome. She’s obliged to hobble, even with the aid of a stick. She must have persuaded the boy who works for Alyssa in the gardens to deliver the note on his way home. She isn’t able to drive yet and being dependent on others to get about irritates her. She doesn’t like everyone to know her business — where she’s going and who she’s been with. In her own way, she’s a very independent person. Stubborn and secretive, more like, according to Mark. Mulish, at times. Yet, when she’d rung Fran that afternoon to say she’d be dropping in, she’d sounded … well, almost pleading. She’d insisted it was urgent that they should talk. Perhaps she’s been casting her own horoscope again. Maybe there is malevolence in Saturn, or whatever else it is that makes the planets inauspicious. Bibi’s actions, her life even, are ruled by her belief in this sort of mumbo-jumbo, but you’d be very brave if you tried to laugh her out of it. She’s deadly serious.