The Unicorn

by Iris Murdoch

  A prophetic flash of understanding burnt her with a terrible warmth. That was what she was for; she was for Gerald Scottow: his adversary, his opposite angel. By wrestling with Scottow she would make her way into the story. It was scarcely a coherent thought and it was gone in a moment. She went on at once, ‘But why don’t her friends - you, Mr Lejour, Mr Cooper - persuade her to come away? She can’t be waiting still for him to relent, to forgive her. It sounds to me as if she were really under a spell, I mean a psychological spell, half believing by now that she’s somehow got to stay here. Oughtn’t she to be wakened up? I mean it’s all so unhealthy, so unnatural.’

  ‘What is spiritual is unnatural. The soul under the burden of sin cannot flee. What is enacted here with her is enacted with all of us in one way or another. You cannot come between her and her suffering, it is too complicated, too precious. We must play her game, whatever it is, and believe her beliefs. That is all we can do for her.’

  ‘Well, it’s not what I’m going to do,’ said Marian. “I’m going to talk to her about freedom.’

  ‘Do not do so,’ he said urgently. ‘It means nothing to her now. Whatever you believe about her heart and her soul, even if you believe only that she is afraid of the outside world, or spellbound by mere fancies, or by now half mad, do not talk to her of freedom. She has found over these last years a great and deep peace of mind. As I think, she has made her peace with God. Do not try to disturb her calm. I think you could not even if you tried. She is a much stronger person than you have yet seen. But do not try. Her peace is her own and it is her best possession, whatever you believe.’

  Marian shook her head violently in the darkness. ‘But she seems sometimes in such pain, in despair -‘

  ‘True obedience is without illusion. A common soldier will die in silence, but Christ cried out.’

  She murmured, ‘Obedience to -?’

  But their talk was over. He had risen as he spoke and she rose too. She was stiff and cold now and her clothes clung to her with a damp dew. The small moon, seeming to fly along through torn clouds, showed them the path to the house. They began to walk.

  ‘When did you come here?’

  ‘Five years ago.’

  ‘Were you one of the messengers, the ones Mr Lejour used to send to her at such risk?’

  ‘Yes. I think we had better go in separately.’

  They were on the terrace now. The moonlight revealed the table where she had sat, so long ago, with Hannah. The mass of jewels were still strewn upon it, scattered with sparkling points of cold light. She paused to gather them up.

  The stifling fright and sickness came back upon her as she looked up at the dark veiled eyes of the house. She murmured to him, ‘What will end it then?’

  ‘His death perhaps. Good night’

  Part Two

  Chapter Eight

  Effingham Cooper gazed out of the window of his first-class railway carriage. The landscape was just beginning to be familiar. Now each scene told him what was coming next. It was a moment that always affected him with pleasure and fear. There was the round tower, there was the ruined Georgian house with the dentil cornice, there was the big leaning megalith, there at last were the yellowish grey rocks which marked the beginning of the Scarren. Although there was still another twenty minutes to go, he took down his suitcases, put on his coat, and straightened his tie, regarding himself gravely in the carriage mirror. The little train jolted and swayed onward. It was a hot day.

  It was nearly six months since he had been there before. But he would find them unchanged. Doubtless they would find him unchanged. He continued to look at himself in the mirror. His youthful appearance always startled people who knew him only by repute. He was still young, of course, in his forties, though sometimes he felt as old as Methuselah. He was certainly young for his achievements, young to be the head of a department. He looked at himself with an amused ironical affection. He was tall, large, with a pink face and a big firm mouth and a big straight nose and big blue-grey eyes. His hair, which was inclined to be chestnut-coloured and wavy, was sleek, tamed by years of bowler hats and hair-oil. He looked like a man; and he certainly passed, in the society which he frequented, as a clever successful enviable one. As he lifted his chin pensively to his image he recalled that Elizabeth, who was the only person who dared to mock him, had once said that his favourite expression was one of ‘slumbrous power’. He smiled ruefully at himself and sat down.

  He began to bite his nails. Would something happen this time? What would have passed, when he was in the train once more and going the other way? He wondered this on each occasion, and wondered, as indeed he wondered all the year round, waking at night, or at unnerving moments in meetings or on escalators or railway stations, whether he ought not to do something. He was, it sometimes seemed to him, and he evaded the idea with alarm, the person with the most power, the only person who could really act. Ought he not to do something drastic? Was it not his action for which they were all waiting? It was a dreadful thought.

  Effingham had known Hannah Crean-Smith for four years. He had known the Lejour family for twenty years. Max Lejour had been Effingham’s tutor at Oxford, and he had met the younger Lejours while he was still a student. Max’s wife had died when Pip was born, and Max when Effingham first knew him was so cantankerously a bachelor, it seemed that he must have invented the two children, so undoubtedly his, without female assistance. Yet the picture of Mrs Lejour, reputedly a beautiful redhead, was always to be seen on his desk. Effingham had proceeded from his first in Mods to his first in Greats and on to a College fellowship. But he was restless, and soon, to Max’s sorrow, left the academic world for the public service. He had done well, he had done very well. It was senseless now to repent of that choice.

  Poor little Alice Lejour had fallen in love with her father’s star pupil on a weekend visit from her boarding-school; and to Effingham’s gratification and annoyance she had never entertained any other serious thought on the matter of love. He had patronized her when she was a schoolgirl, teased her when she was a student, and then much later on, in a regrettable moment of weakness, flirted with her: at the time when he was escaping from the clutches of darling Elizabeth. He was glad he had not married Elizabeth. It would be awkward to marry a relentless career woman; Elizabeth was his subordinate in the department. It would be awkward to marry a relentless woman. Elizabeth was far too clever; and in any case his present relations with her were perfect. He was only sorry that. he had hurt Alice, and disappointed Max, who had always tacitly wanted him to marry Alice, and entangled the poor girl yet further in a profitless love: and there they were all growing older.

  Max Lejour had been a great power in his life. Uneasily Effingham acknowledged that Max was still a great power in his life. He had been completely dominated by his tutor in a way which his academic success had tended to disguise from all eyes but his own. He had taken Max without question as a great sage; and when he could himself still pass as a youth he had quite simply adored the older man. Later when, as men, they had inhabited the same world, Effingham had sometimes found himself feeling afraid of Max; it was not malice or even criticism that he feared, but simply the inadvertent extinction of his own personality by that proximity. Sometimes for a while he had avoided his former tutor; but always came back. In more recent years, during which he himself had become successful, powerful, famous, he had felt his view of Max shift again: he had permitted himself to jest at his expense, referred to him as a ‘quaint old fellow’, felt altogether his shoulder twitch as for the throwing off of a load. He found Max an abstract being, an out-of-date being, a hollow sage, and wondered loudly to himself what had so fascinated him for half his life. Yet still he came back.

  With Pip Lejour his relations had been intermittent and uneasy. Pip was Alice’s junior by four years and had come more slowly over Effingham’s horizon. Pip, as a schoolboy, had settled down to making fun of Effingham as soon as Alice’s passion had become evident; and Effingham susp
ected that, like his sister, the boy was consistent. Yet he was fond enough of Pip and had tried several times to help him with his career. Pip was unfortunately obsessed with the notion that he was a poet; but persuaded by financial need and Effingham he had eventually turned himself into a competent journalist. One thing that seemed clear about him was that he would never actually do anything; and it was with interested surprise that Effingham learnt from Alice of Pip’s amorous exploit and its curious consequences. Pip had, after all, altered the face of the world; hardly for the better, but he had at least altered it

  Max’s retirement came a year or two later and he removed himself to Riders to finish in seclusion his immense work on Plato. He suggested to Effingham that they should revive their old custom of ‘reading parties’ and that he should come and stay and that they should read Greek together. Effingham was pleased: he enjoyed reading Greek with the old man; he looked forward to the holiday, he looked forward to the scenery, he even looked forward to Alice, who would then be on leave from the horticultural institute where she now worked. He was less pleased, on arriving, to find Pip there as well, mooching on the terrace and surveying the other house through his glasses in a way which made Effingham mink at first that there was something afoot. However, there seemed to be nothing afoot. Pip was respectful, Alice was tactful, Pip went fishing, Alice went hunting for plants, Max was eager to settle down to the Timaeus. The sun shone without ceasing upon the noble coast and the gorgeous sea. Nothing, it seemed, could prevent his stay from being delightful: nothing except the disturbing proximity of the imprisoned lady.

  Alice had of course told Effingham the outline of the story, and of course it had intrigued him. A sort of interest in it had been part of his pleasure in the idea of coming. But now that he was here it was different. The lady obsessed him, she took away his calm of mind, he even began to dream about her. He took walks in the direction of the other house, though without daring to come very near, and spent long periods staring at it from his window, though without overcoming his distaste for the fascinating notion of using field-glasses. He decided that either he must go away or else something must be done. Yet what could be done? The Lejours never mentioned the lady; and their silence made a frame in which her image grew and grew.

  What happened eventually happened without any decision. Effingham, walking late one evening on the cliffs beyond Gaze, missed his way and was overtaken by twilight. When he had been thoroughly lost for some time in the sheep runs between the cliff edge and the bog, and was beginning to be the least bit apprehensive, he fell in with a man who turned out to be Denis Nolan, who set him in the right direction. There was only one tolerable path, so they went on together. As they neared Gaze a great storm came on and it was natural for him to take refuge in the house into which Nolan invited him with an ill enough grace. News of his presence was brought to Hannah, who at once summoned him to see her.

  Effingham was of course, as he had hundreds of times since told himself, stripped, prepared, keyed up, attuned, conditioned. No space-man about to step into his rocket was more meticulously fitted to go into orbit than Effingham at that moment was ready to fall in love with Hannah. He fell. It seemed in retrospect, as he tried to recall that meeting which was now so curiously confused in his memory, that he must have fallen literally at her feet and lain there gasping; though in fact doubtless there had been a polite conversation over a glass of whiskey. He left the house an hour later in a dazed condition and walked about nearly all night in the rain.

  The rest of his stay at Riders passed in a sort of cloud of altercation and confusion and misunderstanding. He could not conceal his condition. Indeed, with that pride which accompanies falling in love at what passes as an advanced age he was but too anxious to display it to everyone. He had supposed that the clever Elizabeth was the great love of his life. But the odd spiritual tormented yet resigned beauty of Hannah seemed to him now the castle perilous toward which he had now all his days been faring. Regardless of the pain he caused, he gave way to positive raving. For he did cause pain most comprehensibly to Alice, who was disembowelled by agonies of jealousy; comprehensibly too to Pip, whose present feelings about Hannah Effingham did not understand, but who was probably distressed, even angered by Effingham’s outrageous passion; and more obscurely to Max, who seemed distressed not on account of Alice, for he had long ago stopped hoping that Effingham would marry his daughter, but oddly on account of Hannah. Max had not attempted to establish any social relations with the other house; but Effingham reflected later, when he was able to think, that of course the imprisoned lady must somehow have occupied the old man’s imagination too.

  Effingham passed two days in torment and then he went to see Hannah again. He went to the front door and knocked. He was admitted. He saw her alone. He declared his love. It was done. Hannah was startled and gently scandalized without being exactly astonished. Yet he knew that he was a surprise, and not only to her. She did not know how to deal with him and kept seeming to look round him and past him to see how he could fit into the scene. Meanwhile she surrounded his passion with a haze of vague deprecatory chatter which was both caressing and suffocating. She said she could not take him seriously. She hinted that he was not persona grata. She told him laughingly to go away. And she held his hand at the moment of departure with a sudden desperate look of appeal. He called again. And again. Nothing happened. Hannah became less agitated, more friendly, less wild, more polite. As they thus became acquainted with each other he feared at each moment the intervention of some outside force. But it did not happen. For some incomprehensible reason his visits were tolerated.

  They never came, however, very near, never too near. When Effingham had stopped being afraid about not seeing her, he began to be afraid about what to do next. He did not understand her situation, he did not understand her state of mind, and there was in her attitude to him a certain determined vagueness. The absent husband began to haunt his dreams. He pictured him lame, blind, full of hate. He would like to have known what really happened that day on the cliff top, he would like to have known what really happened altogether, but it was unthinkable to ask Hannah. He said to Hannah, frequently at first, ‘Let me take you away from here’; but without saying anything clearly, without saying anything at all, she returned him a negative. It was evident too, without words, that he could not become her lover.

  Effingham contrived, that summer, to be in a frenzy. He prolonged his leave, he got special leave, he quarrelled with the Lejours, and was always on the point of moving to the fishing-hotel at Blackport, but did not. He was in a frenzy; yet, as he had to admit afterwards to himself, or rather to Elizabeth, in a way he rather enjoyed it. And in a way he was, even then, deeply afraid of the possibility of really having to take Hannah away. He returned at last perforce to his work, regarding the situation as unresolved, and wrote carefully allusive replies to Hannah’s open friendly letters. He assumed her mail was censored.

  He returned at Christmas; but already the drama had taken on a certain settled form. Hannah was glad to see him, the Lejours were glad to see him; he had his place. He fell into accepting it. He was to be in love with Hannah, he was to be Hannah’s servant, he was to come running back whenever he could, he was to be tolerated by everybody, he was to be harmless. Harmless indeed, he reflected, was what they, whoever exactly they were, had put him down as being from the start. But how harmless was he really? He had certainly done nothing yet. And he had to continue to admit to Elizabeth, who had some sharp-witted things to say on the subject of Courtly Love, that the situation rather fascinated him as it was. It had undeniably the qualities of a wonderful story. And as he sat in his office dreaming of Hannah he found himself feeling a certain strange guilty pleasure at the idea that she was, somehow, for him, shut up, reserved, sequestered.

  He felt later, when he considered the quality of his resignation, that he had caught it positively from Hannah herself. She was, in some mysterious way, it seemed, totally resigned, almost as
if she were condemned to death or already dead. The moments of appeal were wordless, ambiguous, superficial, and rare. Some kind of surrender underlay them. What kind of surrender, what kind of resignation, he could never come quite to decide: whether she had given in to Peter, or to Duty, or to God, or to some mad fancy of her own; whether it was a great virtue in her or a remarkable vice. For it was certainly something extreme: something which, he began increasingly to think, he ought not to try to disturb with flimsy ideas of happiness and freedom.

  The Lejours were glad to see him, had forgiven him. Max had got over his first curious distress and seemed now to welcome, with a straightforward curiosity, Effingham’s privileged access to the other house. Alice had equally recovered from her first pains, and although retaining a certain stiffness about the whole subject, was, Effingham suspected, glad in a way to see him, if not hers, at least chained to an unattainable other. Alice had never stopped being afraid of Elizabeth. The attachment to Hannah brought Effingham to Riders and kept him single. What exactly Pip thought remained a mystery; there was in his continued haunting of the place something morbid which unnerved Effingham, and at moments he imagined that Pip derived some positive satisfaction from the spectacle of the beautiful imprisoned creature. However that might be, Pip was tolerant of Effingham’s role, although the old dangerous schoolboy mockery could often be seen just vanishing from his mild and non-committal gaze.