Free Killing a Unicorn by Marjorie Eccles Page B

she’s the bee’s knees.
    Oh, but they’re a handsome couple! Tall and dark, making heads of both sexes turn, she with her youth and vitality, and he with his mature, devil-may-care charm.
    No wonder they’re smiling. She is, in fact, blazing with happiness, and he’s happy because she is. They are on their way to meet her soldier boy, returned to be demobilized after finishing his tour of duty in Cyprus, and whom she is to marry in six weeks’ time and live with happily ever after.
    It’s not her soldier boy whom they meet when they get to the hotel, however, but his adjutant, Captain Conrad Calvert, who tells them that Lieutenant Crabtree, waiting to board the tender at Limassol which would ferry him across to the troopship bound for home, has been killed in a stupid accident with a runaway trolley on the dockside. It is, in fact, Captain Calvert whom she marries — but
later, several years later. And as for living happily ever after …
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    Her eyes flew open, and she found herself bathed in sweat, her heart thumping with some unremembered dread. The night had been hot and sticky and the moonlight was lying across her face because she’d failed to draw the curtains before she went to sleep last night — Lord, no, this morning! After two it had been, what with Chip’s late arrival. That’s why she’d been dreaming, the moonlight on your face does that. She used to leave the curtains open deliberately, before she was married, so that she could dream of Stephen Crabtree, but it never worked. She had to wait many years to dream of him, until the disappointment of her life with Conrad really came home to her.
    In the moon’s radiance the room looked haunted, the gauzy curtains stirring at the open window were transformed into grey wraiths, here and there were dull, wicked gleams of silver and cut-glass. The dressing-table mirror reflected the room in a long, unfamiliar perspective, making it look even larger than it was, and its shadowed corners deeper, as though they held secrets and impressions of all the people, long dead, who had occupied this room, this very bed.
    The lovely dream, and whatever dread had come to break it, had dispersed and separated into the shadows like curdled cream. But darkness lay on the edge of her consciousness, clamouring to be recognized. She kept it there, she wasn’t ready for it, whatever it was, not yet.
    Instead, she tried to hold on to the cheerful image of her father that the dream had left her with, he was there in the room with her, large as life, exactly as in that old photo she still kept, the one the street photographer took of them walking towards him arm-in-arm, so confidently smiling, on that bright, doom-filled June day.
    A silly dream, with no sense to it, as dreams often are. To begin with, her father had never owned a loud suit like
that, hardly ever wore a hat, and certainly not those vulgar co-respondent shoes, which must in any case have been out of fashion for donkey’s years by then. But — a strangled laugh escaped her — he might have wanted to wear them, or he might even have done so in his youth. Like the Duke of Windsor, he was always a natty dresser. Though never quite the gentleman.
    He’d always had aspirations towards her becoming a lady, however, which was why he had — well, yes — bought Conrad for her. No getting away from it, that’s what it was, another of his transactions, an exchange, buying and selling like any other commodity — his name, and an introduction to the county set, for her father’s money. Conrad hadn’t taken much persuading — and to be fair, her father had had no idea what Conrad was like then, any more than she had. They’d both been taken in by his good looks and easy manners, and what they’d seen as thoughtfulness in delivering personally that terrible news about Stephen Crabtree. She later came to realize that was