Killing a Unicorn Page 2

  It was Chip, the eldest of the Calvert brothers, who brought Bibi to Membery Place, a couple of years ago. Chip, a prep school nickname for Crispin, which stuck and has been accepted ever since with the good humour that’s typical of him. Chip, of all people, who might have been expected to settle down eventually with some county gel with a loud laugh, a shiny-haired bob and a way with horses. And, hopefully, money. But no, it was Bibi. About as far from that as you could get.

  Fran first met the three Calverts at Henley, where she’d been taken by Connor O‘Sullivan, then her boss at the O’Sullivan, O’Toole agency, now her fellow director. As a stand-in for his wife, who’d decided an invitation to join friends at their villa in Tuscany was a better prospect than the occasional few seconds’ fleeting excitement offered by the passing of two racing boats. Blink, and you missed them. Though Fran had seen at once that for anyone other than enthusiasts, the racing wasn’t by any means the only point of the Regatta.

  Happily sipping her fruity Pimms, she’d gazed across the sea of pretty hats and frocks, blazers and panamas, and immediately noticed the three seriously gorgeous young men in white flannels and striped blazers, Leander pink socks and ties. Who wouldn’t have? After the two college boats they’d been vociferously cheering had sped by, followed by the umpire boat, and were lost, they’d turned away simultaneously from leaning over the rail in the stand. Coolly surveying the crowd, standing shoulder to shoulder, they could only have been brothers, or at any rate closely related, sharing the dark, family attractiveness that had a good deal to do with that particular brand of assurance that comes only from a privileged background. Something else shared, too — an obvious solidarity, three against all comers. One for all and all for one.

  Chip, of course, had been the first to notice Fran, to make a beeline for Connor’s group, and get himself introduced to her, closely followed by Jonathan, himself never averse to a new prospect. But it had been Mark her attention had fixed on: then, and ever thereafter. And for Mark, too, it had been the same. Mark and Fran. Even Chip had acknowledged that before the end of the day, and backed off, showing a sensitivity one wouldn’t have expected from him. Fran had found herself holding on to this memory lately, like a good-luck talisman, or perhaps a lifeline.

  Chip is the eldest of the three brothers, big and glowing with healthy good spirits, laughing brown eyes and a Rugby-trophy broken nose that adds an endearing quirk to his rugged good looks. At that time obsessed with high-performance cars, long-legged girls and having an astonishing capacity for beer. A phase, a rite of passage, they said. The cars, still fast but now sleeker, more conservative and more expensive, are around yet and, Fran suspects but doesn’t really know, maybe the girls, too, though kept in the background, for Chip has become more circumspect as he’s grown older, and the situation between him and Bibi is equivocal. Defying all previous prognostications, he has turned out to be something successful in the City, and his mother’s adviser, having rescued her from disaster after his father died.

  Their father was Conrad Calvert, gentleman of leisure, an ex-army man who’d retained his army rank of Captain to boost a stature he never again attained in civilian life. Who, had he been born into a different class, would have been called a layabout. Unremarkable for anything except the amount he could drink, the staggering extent of both his wine cellar and the debts he left behind when he died. How could a man like that have produced three such sons? All of them self-motivated, successful in the widely differing careers they’ve chosen. Chip, moneywise and self-assured. Jonathan, the youngest by several years, whose passion is his cello, who draws magic from its strings, who buys it an airline ticket and sits next to it on his flights abroad. He has a growing international reputation as a soloist and an increasingly busy life, with little time for personal considerations. Accompanied everywhere by Jilly, pale Jilly, a wisp of a girl who looks after his bookings and trails with him to the four corners of the earth, sitting on the other side of the cello in the aeroplanes, seemingly largely taken for granted by Jonathan.

  And Mark.

  Oh yes, Mark. Bright, narrow eyes in a thin, sardonic face. Full of beguiling charm, which goes without saying, seeing he’s a Calvert. Less obvious than Chip, and effortlessly clever in a way that makes even Jonathan’s dedicated, driven talent seem laboured. Confident and self-contained, but basically, Fran has all too often found herself thinking lately, unknowable. Too erratic and unpredictable for most people to feel sure of him and, despite his flashes of brilliance, too individualistic to settle into a well-paid, successful architectural partnership, which he has consistently refused to do.

  He’s never been a person you could hold on to, even less so recently. There are times when he seems to slip away from her altogether. More than that, the house suddenly seems to be getting on his nerves. She has a sinking feeling that he has caught the architect’s disease and is already growing tired of it: architects don’t need to live with the imperfections of their own creations, they can always move on to the next. This suspicion chills her with a kind of foreboding that isn’t only to do with fears of losing the house itself, though this is certainly part of it. But he veers away from talking about it, just as he skilfully slides away from what is fast becoming her major preoccupation, the need to talk about their having a child.

  Fran’s experience of family life has been happy, if crowded and noisy, and she has never envisaged a life without children of her own. But Mark shrugs it off lately, every time she tries to open a discussion. Plenty of time, he says, aren’t we happy as we are? Yes, of course they are. They have a loving, trusting relationship, they’ve built a satisfying life together, but it isn’t complete. You can be a couple, but without children, you can’t be a family. She tries to be patient, but her patience is growing thin. It isn’t that Mark doesn’t like children, per se, look how good he is with Jasie, who adores him. Which makes his indifference to having children of their own all the more baffling.

  What is it about the Calvert men that makes them so anxious to steer clear of commitments? Understandable where Jonathan and Jilly are concerned: it’s hard to see them as a staid married couple, their sort of life precludes it, and anyway, are they an item, in that way? Neither give away anything of their private life. By nature, Jilly plays her cards close to her chest: Jonathan isn’t one for explaining much, either. When they come to Membery, they don’t share a room, but that might be out of consideration for his mother’s feelings. For all her outward unconventionality, there’s a strong streak of prudery in Alyssa. And perhaps in Jonathan, too.

  But what about Chip and Bibi? No signs of marriage there, either, though it’s just as likely to be Bibi who doesn’t want permanence. Her previous relationship, which has resulted in Jasie, poor little scrap, has presumably not been an unqualified success.

  Poor little scrap, indeed! No way can Jasie be called that. He’s an ordinary, outgoing little boy, a cheerful little soul, mischievous — a fiend at times, like all children — but engaging and with nothing at all in him of his mother’s feyness. Fran can’t help smiling, thinking of him, but her smile is a little forced. She is thirty-seven, and the biological clock is ticking over.

  She orders herself to stop mooning around and go upstairs and change out of her city clothes, but as she turns into the one dim corner of the house, at the bottom of the cantilevered staircase, she takes an involuntary step backwards, stifling a scream. Her heart leaps into her throat. In front of her, right opposite the front door, hovers a ghostly shadow. A white owl, wings outspread. It hangs motionless, and for a moment Fran can’t move either. It stays there while her heart resumes its normal beat, and a rational explanation presents itself: an owl must have flown straight through the open door into the mirror on the end wall, directly opposite the front door, the impact imprinting the dust from its soft feathers into an uncanny impression of itself, its outspread wings, its large head and short neck, even — oh, shoot! — its eye sockets.

  It isn’t an unusual o
ccurrence for birds to fly into the windows, deceived by the wide expanse of glass into thinking they’re flying into open space. In an attempt to prevent it, Fran has at various times painted images of sparrowhawks, kestrels and other raptors: jackdaws and jays, crows and magpies, owls too, and hung them inside different windows, and sometimes the fear of these birds of prey has warned the smaller birds off. But it isn’t an entirely successful deterrent, sometimes the birds fail to see them — or else they aren’t fooled. The larger birds are mostly just momentarily stunned by the impact and fly woozily away, as presumably the owl had done, since there are no other traces of it, but finding the small broken-necked bodies of thrushes, robins and finches distresses Fran, a reminder that the house is the intruder here, pushing itself into the habitat of these wild creatures.

  So far, however, none of the birds has ever flown right into the house.

  She fetches a duster and wipes the mirror clean of the eerie image, repelled by the ashy, almost greasy residue, by the faintly foetid smell, and is surprised to find her hands trembling, to see her own frightened face behind the image, pale and wide-eyed with shock, her soft, difficult to manage brown hair lank as string with the heat.

  It was only an owl, she tells herself. The woods abound with them, their unnerving shrieks echo through the trees at night, it isn’t unknown for one to swoop silently, intent on its prey, straight across the car windscreen when you’re returning home late.

  But it’s still there in her mind as she showers, lathering her hair and turning up the power to concentrate the sharp needles of water on her shoulders, letting the warm water sluice over her head and body, taking away the tensions with it. Her hair still slightly damp, she combs it through, slips into a loose shift, then bundles every sweaty stitch she’s worn that day into the washing machine. Feeling better, she fixes a hefty gin and tonic while she makes herself a salad in the under-used stainless steel, state-of-the-art kitchen, where you could comfortably cook for an army with every gadget known to man, most of them unused, since she rarely has the time, or need, to cook imaginatively.

  But all the while she’s wondering how the imprint of the owl could have been left on the mirror, when the house has been locked up for two days. It wasn’t there before she left, of that she is certain. She couldn’t have failed to see it as she came down the stairs. She’d locked the doors before leaving and Mark had left before her, business in London first, then on to Brussels. And she has come into the house that night by the back door, closing it behind her.

  They said owls were bad luck.

  It’s too hot for supper to have much appeal, but she dutifully eats as much of her salad as she can stomach, which isn’t a lot. In the end, she gives up and scrapes the rest into the bin. But she finishes off the second glass of cold white burgundy she’s poured, watching the early evening news while she drinks it: television, the solitary person’s refuge.

  The thought is outrageous, and suddenly she feels a great need for air and a release from thoughts about herself, and the need to move, the feeling she should, perhaps, go up to Membery and see if Bibi is all right.

  The heat of the day is still held in the clearing, the dying sun is flickering through the trees with the effect of a shuttered camera. Honeysuckle reaches for the light through a thicket of blackthorn, breathing out its warm and heady scent, mingling with the earthy, woodsy smell under the trees. Further into the woods stinkhorn grow, but their pervasive, disgusting odour thankfully doesn’t reach so far. Walking across the grass, feeling it cool against her bare toes, between the straps of her open sandals, she is conscious of unseen eyes watching her from the shadowed depths beyond the trees. She listens to the silence, broken only by the sounds of the forest beginning to settle for the evening, the cool splash of the waterfall into the pool.

  It isn’t much of a waterfall, to tell the truth, little more than a pretty cascade, not a straight fall, but flowing in three stages for about forty feet from a large slab of rock across the watercourse above, which originates in an underground spring, somewhere beyond Membery. But forty feet is enough to turn the glassy water, sliding like mercury over the lip, into a creaming froth at the bottom, before it gradually disperses into the still water beyond, fringed with ferns and foxgloves. At its far end, the pool narrows again and continues through the clearing and the watersplash to the other side of the road. The water is deep just below the fall, though nowhere is it suitable for serious swimming — not without the major upheaval of removing some of the big rocks at the edges, a job Mark refuses to consider paying for.

  Years ago, someone built a rustic bridge over the lip, to make it possible to return along the right-hand side of the stream after taking a stroll along its left. The bridge isn’t used now, it’s rotten and unsafe. There are planks missing, the railings have grown lichens and moss, just lean on them and they’d give way — but anyway the right-hand path is now invisible beneath its overgrowth of nettles, thistles and cow parsley. The one at this side is hardly any better, being used only as a short cut for the comings and goings between Membery and The Watersplash, ending in a scramble down the rocks alongside the waterfall. The rocks are steep, but hold no terrors for the younger members of the family, who have learned to negotiate them from childhood.

  Fran pauses and sits there for a while, as near to the edge of the pool as she can get, on one of the boulders, most of which are green and slippery in wet weather, and even now are embedded in velvety moss. She slips off her sandals and trails her toes in the water, always deliciously cold. She sits for several minutes before she notices the white shape eddying around in the curdling foam at the foot of the waterfall.

  At first she thinks, ridiculously, it’s another owl, another white shadow. Until she realizes it’s larger, much larger, that it has an arm, and a leg, human form.

  Chapter Two

  Membery Place stood behind closed gates, marked Strictly Private, thirty yards further along the road from the gate leading to the gardens, which were open to visitors on Wednesdays to Sundays, inclusive.

  It was too dark tonight to read the sign by the public entrance as they passed, but Jonathan, at least, knew its pronouncements by heart — the opening and closing times, and the entrance fee, two pounds fifty, no concessions. Do not park on the grass verges outside the gates, there is ample parking within the grounds. We regret that we cannot allow dogs (except for guide dogs), no children under five, and wheelchair access is limited, on account of the steep steps. Picnicking within the grounds is strictly forbidden.

  He’d often wondered how they ever raised any visitors at all, but Alyssa’s assertion that her rules didn’t seem to have affected the garden’s success couldn’t be argued with. His mother had worked wonders, at Chip’s suggestion, after their father died, changing and enlarging the gardens from what she’d created to please herself into what would attract others to look around, and spend their money in. A place where they could initially marvel at the immense Kiftsgate rose that cascaded over the great plum tree in the former stable yard, then amble between the long herbaceous borders to the spot where seats were strategically placed to take advantage of the wide view of the valley, the rolling chalk hills and the forest spread below. At this point, where the flat part of the garden ended, the more venturesome might climb down the steeply sloping rocky bluff and then back again, admiring on the way the wonderful collection of rare and unusual rock plants — a subliminal persuasion to buy, on the way out, highly priced propagations of those same plants, raised in the nurseries. After which they could depart, well pleased, fortified by a cup of tea and a home-made scone in the Old Stables.

  The taxi turned in through the gates towards the house. Asymmetrical, with long, horizontal lines, sweeping roofs and gables, tall brick chimneys, narrow bands of mullioned windows and deep bays. A great front door and beside it a tall, narrow window, awkwardly placed over two adjacent, oddly angled gables, and carried up two storeys, similar in a way to that of The Watersplash. But this ho
use had been built long before that, on the cusp of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thought to be very advanced at the time of its erection, designed by a disciple of Voysey, in the Arts and Crafts manner, it had been built for Great-grandfather Calvert, a long dead judge of some notoriety. Its roughcast walls, though evidently in dire need of repainting at closer quarters, in this light stood out like a dazzling plaster carving against the background frieze of dark trees, the summer moon shedding a warm radiance over it.

  The first thing Jonathan noticed as the taxi cruised up to the front door was that, unusually, every light in the house blazed out into the darkness. For a moment he wondered, with wild speculation, if this was a welcome home after his well-received concert in Vienna yesterday. It was the sort of gesture Alyssa used to make, though the habit had fallen off lately. She’d implied, flatteringly, that his successes were becoming so routine it was no longer necessary to mark them out specially. But she was very superstitious, nearly as much as Bibi, and he thought the more likely reason was that she was afraid of tempting fate. He scoffed at the idea, but wasn’t going to argue with her — no success could be that assured. Jilly, too, had surreptitiously crossed her fingers.