Killing a Unicorn Read Free Page B

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,