by Iris Murdoch
In her immediately succeeding novels (The Italian Girl is said to be an earlier piece of writing) Iris picked up some of the unfinished business of The Unicom – the imagination of a Catholic’s thoughts about redemption with Barney Drumm in The Red and the Green, the relation of the icon of the Trinity to the world in The Time of the Angels, the vision of love at the point of death in The Nice and the Good. Barney Drumm seems to me the most successful of these: the other two seem merely bleaker than their equivalents in The Unicorn. But The Unicorn seems to handle most richly that tangle of feelings which P. D. James records from Iris in her Time to be in Earnest: ‘Oh I’m a Christian. I don’t think I believe in God and I don’t believe Jesus Christ was divine, but I am a Christian. I nearly became a Buddhist, but then I said to myself, “Don’t be foolish, Iris. You’re a member of the Church of England.’” P. D. James wonders if she remembered this accurately: but it sounds entirely characteristic.
[I have to thank Professor Norman Vance for tracking down Charles Dalmon for me, and Professor A. M. Allchin for pointing out the relevance of The Bell to icons]
Stephen Medcalf
October, 2000
THE UNICORN
Part One
Chapter One
“How far away is it?”
‘Fifteen miles.’
‘Is there a bus?’
“There is not.’
‘Is there a taxi or a car I can hire in the village?’
‘There is not’
‘Then how am I to get there?’
‘You might hire a horse hereabouts,’ someone suggested after a silence.
‘I can’t ride a horse,’ she said in exasperation, ‘and in any case there’s my luggage.’
They stared at her with quiet dreamy curiosity. She had been told that the local people were ‘friendly’, but these big slow men, while not exactly hostile, entirely lacked the responsiveness of civilization. They had looked at her a little strangely when she told them where she was going. Perhaps that was it.
She saw now that it was foolish and even discourteous not to have announced her exact time of arrival. It had seemed more exciting, more romantic and somehow less alarming to come at her own pace. But now that the bedraggled little train which had brought her from Greytown Junction had coughed away among the rocks, leaving her in this silence a spectacle for these men, she felt helpless and almost frightened. She had not expected this solitude. She had not expected this appalling landscape.
‘There’s Mr Scottow’s car now,’ said one of the men, pointing.
She stared through the afternoon haze at the empty hillside, at the receding shelves of yellowish grey rock, bare and monumental. Smooth segments of wall here and there suggested the twists and turns of a steeply descending road. By the time she saw the Land Rover approaching, the men had withdrawn from her in a little group, and by the time the vehicle had entered the station yard they had disappeared altogether.
‘Are you Marian Taylor?’
With a relieved sense of regaining her identity she took the hand and reassuring grip of the tall man who stepped out of the car.
‘Yes. I’m so sorry. However did you know I was here?”
‘As you didn’t say when you were coming I asked the station-master at Greytown to look out for you and to send a message with the post van when he saw you waiting for our train. The van gets to Gaze a good half-hour before the train is due. And I thought you shouldn’t prove hard to identify!’ He gave a smile with this which made the remark complimentary.
Marian felt both rebuked and looked after. She liked the man. ‘Are you Mr Scottow?’
‘Yes. I should have said. I’m Gerald Scottow. Are these all your bags?’ He spoke with a pleasant English voice.
She followed him towards the car, smiling and dignified, hoping that she was making a good impression. That had been a very foolish moment of fright just now.
‘In we go,’ said Gerald Scottow.
As he pushed her bags into the back of the Land Rover she saw in the shadowy interior what she took at first to be a large dog, but then recognized as a very pretty boy of about fifteen. The boy did not get out, but bowed to her from behind the luggage.
“This is Jamesie Evercreech,’ said Scottow, as he settled Marian in the front.
The name meant nothing to her, but as she greeted him she wondered if he were perhaps her prospective pupil.
T hope you had a decent tea at Greytown? Dinner will be late tonight. It’s awfully good of you to join us in this Godforsaken spot.’ Scottow started up the engine and the car set off back toward the twisting rising road.
‘Not at all. I’m most thrilled to come to this part of the world.’
‘Your first visit, I suppose? The coast-line is all right. Beautiful perhaps. But the land is dreadful. I doubt if there’s a single tree between here and Greytown.’
As Marian, who had also noticed this, was trying to think of a way of turning it into a merit, the Land Rover took an abrupt turning and the sea came into view. She exclaimed.
The sea was a luminous emerald green streaked with lines of dark purple. Small humpy islands of a duller paler green, bisected by shadows, rose out of it through rings of white foam. As the car kept turning and mounting, the scene appeared and reappeared, framed between fissured towers of grey rock which, now that she was close to it, Marian saw to be covered with yellow stonecrop and saxifrage and pink tufted moss.
‘Yes,’ said Scottow. ‘Beautiful certainly. I’m afraid I’ve got too used to it, and we have so few visitors to see it with new eyes. You’ll see the famous cliffs in a minute.’
‘Do many people live about here?’
‘It’s an empty land. As you can see, there’s scarcely any earth. And inland where there is earth it’s mostly bog. The nearest settlement is at Blackport, and that’s a miserable fishing-village.’
‘Isn’t there a village at Gaze?’ Marian asked, her heart sinking a little.
‘Not now. Or scarcely. There used to be some fishermen’s cottages and a sort of inn. There was a bit of moor up above and a lake, and a few people would come for the shooting and that, though it was never fashionable. But the place was killed by a big storm some years ago. The fishing-boats were all lost and the lake came flooding down the valley. It was quite a famous disaster, you might have read about it. And now the moor is just another piece of bog, and even the salmon have gone away.’
Marian thought to herself, with a sudden foreboding, that perhaps Geoffrey had been right after all. They had looked at the map together and he had shaken his head over it. Yet Gaze had been marked in quite large letters and Marian had been sure it must be a real civilized place with shops and a public house.
Elation and despair had so fiercely ebbed and flowed in her during the last month; she realized now how naive it had been to envisage her journey’s end as the beginning of some sort of happiness. Her love for Geoffrey had not been her first love, but it had had the violence of a first occasion together with a depth and a detail which come from commerce with the judgement. She was no longer, after all, so young. She was very nearly thirty; and her sense of her life hitherto as a series of makeshift stage-setting preliminaries had made her the more rapaciously welcoming to what seemed at last an event. Totally disappointed, she had faced her loss with fierce rationality. When it had become clear that Geoffrey did not and could not love her she had decided that she must go. She had been settled, perhaps too settled, in her job as a schoolmistress. Now it was suddenly plain that the same town, the same country even, must not contain herself and him. She admired in herself this ruthlessness. But she admired even more what came later: how, after she had ceased wanting to blot him entirely from her mind, to make him not to be, they had found that they could after all talk good sense and kindness to each other. She was, then, consciously generous. She let him console her a little for the loss of him; and had the painful gratification of finding him almost ready to fall in love with her at about the moment wh
en she, amazingly, disgracefully, was beginning to recover.
She had noticed it quite by chance, the curious little advertisement Geoffrey had told her teasingly that she was simply impressed by a grand name and a vision of ‘high life’. She was attracted indeed by the name, Gaze Castle, and by the remote and reputedly beautiful region. A Mrs Crean-Smith was advertising for a governess with a knowledge of French and Italian. A high salary was mentioned; suspiciously high, Geoffrey said, even considering it was a lonely place. He had been against the plan; partly, Marian felt, with a rueful tenderness for him, out of a kind of jealousy, a kind of envy, at seeing her so soon whole again and ready for adventure.
Marian had written, naming her qualifications, and had received a friendly letter from a Gerald Scottow. Correspondence followed, and she was offered the job, but without having found out, or quite liking to enquire, the age and number of her prospective pupils. Nor could she quite make out from Mr Scottow’s manner whether he was a friend or a relative or a servant of the Mrs Crean-Smith on whose behalf he wrote.
Marian turned her head now in a cautious manner and surveyed Gerald Scottow. This was easy to do, since he sat between her and the great view of the sea. She would have liked to turn round too and look at the boy whose silent presence behind her she most uneasily felt, but she was too shy to do that. Scottow certainly seemed to be, in a terminology which Geoffrey would have been quick to taunt her with adopting, one of ‘the gentry’. His accent and his manner proclaimed him no subordinate, and Marian conjectured that he might be a relative or a family friend. Yet, if he lived here, what did he dot He was a big handsome man with a smooth fresh-complexioned powerful face and something of the mien of a soldier. He had a great deal of crinkly brown hair which grew in little flat circular curls a long way down his reddish weather-beaten neck. His brown eyes were rather consciously fine. He seemed in his early forties and was perhaps just thickening out of some early beauty. He now made a stouter, squarer impression, filled out yet muscular and not without grace. Marian transferred her gaze to his big hirsute hands upon the steering-wheel. She shivered for a moment. It occurred to her to wonder if there was a Mrs Scottow.
There are the cliffs.’
Marian had read about the great cliffs of black sandstone. In the hazy light they seemed brownish now, receding in a series of huge buttresses as far as eye could see. striated, perpendicular, immensely lofty, descending sheer into a boiling white surge. It was the sea here which seemed black, mingling with the foam like ink with cream.
‘They are wonderful,’ said Marian. She found the vast dark coastline repellent and frightening. She had never seen a land so out of sympathy with man.
‘They are said to be sublime,’ said Scottow. ‘Again I am no judge. I am too used to them.’
‘Are there good places to swim?’ said Marian. ‘I mean, can one get down to the sea?’
‘One can get down to the sea. But no one swims here.’
‘Why not?’
‘No one swims in this sea. It’s far too cold. And it is a sea that kills people.’
Marian, who was a strong swimmer, privately decided to swim all the same.
The descending sun was making a brilliance now upon the water and her eyes were dazzled. She looked inland, still unnervingly conscious of the silent boy behind her. The bare limestone desert receded, rising in clearly marked shelves to form low humpy plateaus which lay one behind the other like huge fossilized monsters. A few miserable reddish shrubs and little east-bent hazel trees clung to the rock, which the sun had turned to a pale gritty yellow.
‘It’s remarkable scenery, isn’t it?’ said Scottow. ‘Not everyone’s cup of tea, of course. But you should see those rocks in May and June. They’re absolutely covered with gentians. Even now there’s far more vegetation than appears at first sight. Weird little flowers you’ll find if you look, and carnivorous plants. And there are most curious caves and underground rivers. Are you interested in geology and in flowers and things? I see you’ve brought your field-glasses with you.’
‘I’m no geologist, I’m afraid. I thought I might do some bird-watching, though I don’t really know much about birds either.’
‘I know nothing about birds except the kind you shoot, but you can certainly see some rare ones around here. Ravens and golden eagles and such. I hope you’re fond of walking?’
‘Yes, very. I imagine one could soon get lost up there.”
There aren’t many landmarks, on the Scarren. There’s hardly anything upright except megaliths and dolmens. It’s a very ancient land.’
The road had turned inland and was winding between shallow shelves of rock. The uncertain tarmac was beginning to degenerate into a bumpy gravelly track. Scottow slowed down. There was something dark ahead which turned out to be a little group of donkeys. Among them were two baby donkeys scarcely bigger than fox terriers. The car nosed its way up to them and they shifted lazily upon their dainty feet. A weird cry followed after.
Marian took the occasion of the donkeys to turn and look at the boy behind her. He gave her a smile of singular sweetness, but she could not make out his face.
‘They’re nice little beasts,’ said Scottow, ‘but I wish they’d keep off the roads. Fortunately there’s little traffic. Though that means too that people drive like the devil. There’s a saying about here that you’ll meet only one car in a day, but that car will kill you.’
A turn in the road suddenly revealed in the distance a big handsome house. Its appearance was startling in the midst of the naked scene and had, in the sunny mist, something of the air of a mirage. It stood high up on the seaward side, on a promontory of the cliffs, a long grey three-storey eighteenth-century house. Marian had seen several such houses already on her journey, but always with their roofs off. ‘Is that Gaze Castle?’
‘I’m afraid not. That’s a house called Riders. Our nearest neighbour. Gaze isn’t half so grand. I hope you won’t be disappointed. All the gentlemen’s residences around here tend to be called castles.’
‘Who lives at Riders?’ From the account of the available civilization it seemed that this would be a matter of some importance.
‘A curious recluse, an elderly scholar called Max Lejour.’
‘Does he live there alone?’
‘He lives alone all the winter, except for the servants, of course. The winter here is terrible and not everyone can stand it. In the summer he has visitors. His son and daughter are with him at present. And there’s a man called Effingham Cooper who always comes.’
There was a weird high-pitched noise behind her. Marian realized that the boy had laughed. She realized at the same moment that he must be older than she had guessed. That was not a fifteen-year-old laugh. She turned quickly to look at him and saw his face more clearly now. He was a pallid rather spoilt-looking cherub of about nineteen with a long head and a pointed chin. Lank longish silky fair curls hung about his brow and half obscured his long light blue intelligent eyes, giving him the dog-like appearance. He tossed his hair back, widened his eyes, and gave Marian an impish look which made her a mock-partner in his private joke.
Scottow went on, That lot, together with our little gang, account for the gentry for about thirty miles around. Eh, Jamesie?’ There was a slight sharpness. Perhaps Scottow had been irritated by the laugh.
Marian longed to enquire who ‘our little gang’ consisted of. Well, she would know, for better or worse, soon enough.
‘I’m afraid you’ve come to an awful hole, Miss Taylor. The peasants are mostly loonies, and the others are something worse.’ The boy spoke in a pleasant light voice with a touch of the local accent.
‘Don’t ever believe a word he says!’ said Scottow. ‘Jamesie is our little sunshine, but he’s a dreadful romancer.’
Marian laughed uneasily. She could not place Jamesie. She could not even yet really place Scottow.
