I'm a great admirer of Rumer Godden, but I've read only a handful of what wikipedia tells me are her 60 books. Only about 25 of this are novels, some of them are non-fiction and a large proportion were written for children. This was only her second novel, published in 1937, and it contains an element that I haven't encountered in any of the others I've read - a sort of breath of the supernatural.
Godden was born in England but raised in India where her father worked for a shipping company, and she continued to live there for many years as an adult. Unsurprisingly a number of her novels are set there, including this one. The Lady and the Unicorn takes place in Calcutta, where the Lemarchant family live in one wing of a an ancient crumbling mansion. They are what was known at the time as Eurasians - today I think we'd say Anglo-Indians. Descended from unions between Indians and white settlers, they are looked down on as half-castes by both the pure bred Indians and by the whites. The family consists of Father, who seems to spend most of his time lying on the sofa, and Auntie, who holds the family together, shopping, cooking, washing, and generally trying to control the children. There are three of them, all girls. The oldest is Belle, aged about eighteen. Glamorous and confident, Belle is determined to have a better life, and in pursuit of that is prepared to become the mistress of a much older man who treats her badly. However her determination is undimmed, and the last we see of her she has found a new protector who has promised to take her to America and get her into the movies. We're led to believe that it's not impossible that this may succeed, as indeed it is - think Merle Oberon or indeed Cliff Richard, both Anglo Indians by birth.
The second daughter, a year younger, is Rosa, whose story this really is. She's not as flashy as her older sister but has a quiet beauty - pale skin, black hair and dark eyes. She's shy and retiring, has an innocent but close relationship with Robert DeSouza, a handsome boy whose family live in the same building. Then there's the youngest girl, Blanche, who is thirteen and the only family member to have dark skin, of which some family members are ashamed. Rosa herself is ashamed of Belle's flaunting of her sexuality and anxious about her ambitions and the way she seems to let nothing stand in the way of her achieving them. Belle thinks Rosa could do better for herself and persuades her to borrow a dress and go to a party. Here she meets Stephen Bright, a young Englishman newly arrived in Calcutta. It's been described to him as a 'B party'
What's a B Party?
A and B. B girls.
Oh I see. What happens?
Usual thing. They behave well and we behave very badly, and then they behave worse.
Stephen falls head over heels for Rosa - he's fascinated by her beauty and also by the ancient house where she lives - together they explore the garden and find a crumbling old sundial, obviously imported from England, and learn something about the family who once owned the house, seemingly Rosa's ancestors. Rosa actually sometimes seems to glimpse these long gone people - a weeping girl, a little dog, a grand carriage of party goers, though Stephen can't see them. He raises with her the question of her identity:
You insist on being inferior Britons.
That's not fair....We're as much British subjects as you are.
It's all so false. You're no more like a British girl than a poinsettia is like a daisy. You talk of going home to England, when the only home you have is here in India. It's such a sham. Why can't you be more content, more dignified?
This really highlights what Godden was aiming at in this story - to show the great unfairness she perceived in the treatment of these families, living in between two civilisations but shut out of both. Although Stephen adores Rosa and starts by promising her marriage, in the end their cultural differences get in the way and she is left devastated. Whatever Bella's future may be, it's clear that Rosa is going to live out her life in the same kind of environment as she was brought up in.
This is quite a dark novel, apparently suggested to Godden by an Anglo Indian family who lived nearby when she was growing up - the Godden children were forbidden to play with them for fear of contracting their 'chi-chi' accents. It's tremendously evocative of India in general -
Through the door in the front gate the people could be seen passing by on the pavement; a man carrying bassinets on a pole, and two Sikh women who hold their veils across their noses, and one of them had a birdcage with a cover of magenta gauze with tassels; a chinaman in grey cotton selling embroidered linen, a widow in dirty white on her way to the street tap, and three coolies carrying baskets of marigold garlands on their heads.
and Calcutta in particular - I was there about ten years ago and was fascinated by the many crumbling mansions and by the Park Street Cemetery, which Rosa and Stephen visit, marvelling at the 19th century tombs of long dead, mostly painfully young English colonists. My Virago edition has an interesting introduction to Godden and to the novel. Well worth reading.