The Unicorn

by Iris Murdoch

‘Not even crypto, Effingham. I believe in Good. So do you.’

  ‘That’s different,’ said Effingham. ‘Good is a matter of choosing, acting -‘

  “That is the vulgar doctrine, my dear Effingham. What we can see determines what we choose. Good is the distant source of light, it is the unimaginable object of our desire. Our fallen nature knows only its name and its perfection. That is the idea which is vulgarized by existentialists and linguistic philosophers when they make good into a mere matter of personal choice. It cannot be defined, not because it is a function of our freedom, but because we do not know it.’

  ‘This sounds like a mystery religion.’

  ‘All religions are mystery religions. The only proof of God is the ontological proof, and that is a mystery. Only the spiritual man can give it to himself in secret.’

  I always thought the ontological proof was based on a gross logical fallacy. I realize I’m in no condition to give it to myself -‘

  ‘ “Desire and possession of the true Good are one.”’

  ‘God is because I desire him? I’m damned if I’ll stand for that.’

  Max smiled. He said, ‘I shall take refuge in the Phaedrus. You remember at the end Socrates tells Phaedrus that words can’t be removed from place to place and retain their meaning. Truth is communicated from a particular speaker to a particular listener.’

  ‘I stand rebuked! I recall that passage. But it is a reference to mystery religions, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not necessarily. It can apply to any occasion of learning the truth.’

  ‘Do you think Hannah - desires the true good?’

  Max said after a long silence during which Effingham found himself nodding with sleep, ‘I’m not sure. And I don’t think you can tell me. It may all be to meet some need of my own. I’ve meant all my life to go on a spiritual pilgrimage. And here I am at the end - and I haven’t even set out.’ He spoke with a sudden fierceness, cutting and lighting a cigar with quick precision and moving the ash-tray farther down the table with a loud clack. He added, ‘Perhaps Hannah is my experiment! I’ve always had a great theoretical knowledge of morals, but practically speaking I’ve never done a hand’s turn. That’s why my reference to the Phaedrus was damned dishonest. I don’t know the truth either. I just know about it.’

  ‘Well,’ said Effingham, who was getting very sleepy indeed. ‘You may be right about her. There is something unusual, something spiritual, there. There is that very exceptional quietness -‘

  ‘A mouse that’s trapped by a cat is quiet!’ said Alice sharply behind him. She had entered without their noticing her.

  She came round the table and banged a tray down between the two men. ‘Here’s your tea. I found that vervain stuff that Effie brought from France. I hope it’s all right It’s as old as the hills.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Darling Effie,

  Do come back soon, the office is hell, but hell, without you. When you are here (a funny thing, it occurs to me just this moment and is probably something to do with your being a brilliant administrator) when you are here it seems as if you are doing nothing at all all day (pert words from your junior) and yet as soon as you go the whole place gets uneasy and unhinged as if we suddenly weren’t sure why we came in in the mornings and sat at these desks and shuffled these papers. It seems, without you, absurd; and perhaps one time you’ll come back and find we’ve all gone away and the office is deserted, and the telephones are ringing in empty rooms. What I am referring to, as you will of course realize, is my own psychological state, though you are missed here, and I’m afraid there are a lot of things which men in other departments won’t refer to anyone but you. Your in-tray is a picture. Poor sweetie.

  How is the lonely lady of Gaze Castle? I am getting curiously attached to her. I dreamt about her the other night. Shall I write her a letter beginning, ‘As you and I will realize, my dear, poor Effingham is really terrified of women’? All right, all right, there, there! But I sincerely hope that she is well and that you are chastely enjoying her, and that she is enjoying being enjoyed. And if there is a grain of malice in my respectful interest in your adventure, I am sure you would not wish that little tribute away. I am only sorry I did not realize your peculiarities a little earlier.

  Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning, and that is what I am experiencing just now. I envy you your capacity for innocent romancing. At a great price bought I this freedom in four years of deep analysis, whereas you seem born not exactly free but with the next best thing, a capacity to cheer yourself along by endless little inventions. Now don’t be cross with me! And come back soon or the Rubens exhibition will be over. Cooper-less go I every lunch-time. Can you think of a greater man capable of worse taste? Quand même.

  Don’t be tempted to carry off your princess, Effingham. The fairy tales never tell us, but it has always proved a mistake. I send the usual love, and am but too much as usual your too possessable Elizabeth

  Effingham read Elizabeth’s letter through and pushed it hastily back into the envelope. It jarred on him. Why were clever women always so silly? He had never met a clever woman who wasn’t somehow touchy and nervy and silly. Elizabeth could, on so many subjects, be beautifully serious; but as soon as matters engaged her emotions she would become suddenly arch and smart. How he detested that smart knowing tone.

  A connexion of thought led him to Miss Taylor. He was on the following afternoon to give her the first of the disastrously promised Greek lessons. He would have been glad enough to drop the idea, and he guessed that Miss Taylor would tactfully have forgotten it too; only Alice had insisted. With a perverse desire to obtain for herself as much pain as possible, and with reproachful eyes fixed on Effingham, she had declared that of course this lovely plan must be carried out, it would be so nice for both of them, wouldn’t it. Non-clever women could be very silly too. Perhaps all women were silly. Not Hannah of course, but, he found himself vaguely and spontaneously reflecting deep in his mind, Hannah was not exactly a woman. Well, he didn’t mean that, of course she was. He recalled with exasperation Elizabeth’s remark that he was really terrified of women. Poor Elizabeth had never really recovered her common sense after that analysis.

  He looked out of the window and saw Pip Lejour armed with fishing-tackle, his waders slung over his shoulder, setting off up the hill. It was the dead time of the afternoon. Max, who hated the afternoon, had just retired to rest after quoting to Effingham a poem of Alcman about sleep which Effingham had always imagined referred to the night. He murmured it now, seeing it as the account of a sinister enchanted siesta. The day was hot and still enough to seem a day of the south. The mountain peaks and deep ravines, the trees, the honey bees, the wide-winged birds, asleep: like creatures round the castle of the sleeping beauty. Alice no doubt was asleep too, and in their rooms the beautiful red-haired maids were asleep. Fleetingly he pictured Carrie. The house was silent beside a silent sea. Only Pip, blasphemously out of tune as usual, was wakeful and full of jaunty purpose. Seeing him departing, Effingham had an immediate irritated desire to follow him and interrupt him. He knew from talk at lunch-time that Pip was going to fish for trout above the Devil’s Causeway. He decided to pursue him and ask, at last, those questions which within the house it was so difficult brutally to put into words. It was about time, in any case, for the elusive, fluttering, mocking Pip to be cornered, pinned down, and somehow accounted for.

  Effingham had woken up that morning with a disagreeable sensation which he attributed partly to alcohol and partly to the tone of Max’s conversation the night before. He had been sickened, he was still not quite sure why, by the faintly hinted prospect that Max might open direct relations with Hannah. He appreciated, he enjoyed, the old man’s interest in his story, but his enjoyment depended upon his retaining his own expertise, depended upon its remaining precisely a story. He did not mind, he even relished, the strange notion that Max and H
annah were somehow in communication, so long as they were in communication through him. But he did not want Max to have an independent view of the situation. Perhaps the old man ought not to be encouraged, perhaps he ought not to talk to him at all about Hannah. These conversations were too abstract, they belonged to the world of Max’s book; and Effingham felt, with a sort of chilled apprehension, that he did not want the meaning of Hannah to be drawn into that world. So today Effingham felt a deliberate desire to pull things down to a simpler cruder level; and the idea of chasing and interrogating Pip appealed to him as a piece of detective work.

  Effingham had of course tried to question Pip before, though not quite at first. At first a delicacy concerning Pip’s privileged position had kept him silent. But time had quietly altered their relations. Effingham had come to see Pip as an outsider, as an object belonging to the past, and he had come, as he noted Pip’s voyeur-like attitude to the situation, very slightly to despise him. Then he had questioned him, tactfully, indirectly, coaxingly, cleverly, but vainly. Pip had obviously enjoyed leading him on, hinting at revelations, keeping him on tenterhooks, and telling him nothing. Angry half with himself and half with his tormentor, he realized at last that his own easily divined attitude of superiority to Pip helped to close the latter’s mouth. He ought to have questioned Pip at the start, at the time when he considered Pip a sacred object, and when he himself was more abjectly in need. Yet time, still quietly working upon the relations of the dramatis personae, had now again made, he felt, some difference. He had gained a greater stature, a greater authority, and it seemed to him for the first time that he might positively command Pip to talk.

  Pip was well up the stream and Effingham was thoroughly out of breath by the time he sighted him. He had given his quarry a good start and had set out in Max’s Humber, which he had left below by the sea wall. Then he had climbed up the steep leafy gully beside the stream, which tumbled in a series of narrow deafening waterfalls into dark swirling clefts, and he had passed a number of limestone steps and pillars which he had first taken to be the ruin of some eighteenth-century folly but which he later realized to be the work of nature, and now he had come out on a piece of heathery moor where the stream was spread out between expanses of tussocky grass into wide glossy pools which the clear and vivid sky had turned to a metallic blue. And there was Pip.

  Pip was standing in one of the pools, the stream half-way up his waders, casting his line on to the bright smooth surface. Effingham, who knew nothing about fishing, stood by a while to watch, aware now that Pip was aware of him. The dance of the moving line continued without interruption as it curled and uncurled in an inapprehensible yet definite pattern above the fisherman’s head and deposited the fly with a caressing touch upon the scarcely troubled water.

  When Pip judged that he had kept Effingham waiting long enough, he caught the line with a deft twitch, thrust the end of the rod into his waders, and came slowly back to the shore, shoving his knees sturdily against the smooth yet vigorous stream. ‘Hello, Effie. Bit out of condition, aren’t you? You’re still puffing like an old grampus. Come for a lesson?’

  ‘No, thanks. I still don’t want to. I just wanted to talk to you, Pip.’ Of course he realized now, after seeing the lonely, absorbed, graceful figure in the pool, that it was idiotic to ask favours of a maniac whom one has just disturbed in the enjoyment of his mania.

  ‘Always ready for a talk, Effie. Got any matches? I brought my pipe and tobacco but no matches. You’re a godsend.’

  Pip seemed attentive enough and not out of temper. But that was how he always seemed. It sometimes struck Effingham that the good humour with which Pip always greeted him was a result of some stifled burst of laughter which Effingham’s appearance somehow occasioned.

  Effingham was dignified. He produced the matches and watched Pip’s moist mouth pursed round the pipe and saw Pip’s eyes widen with gaiety, peering up at him as the pipe was attended to. A little breeze, rising now with the approach of evening, carried the smoke away across the pool and stroked Pip’s remnants of hair into a hazy fur round his neat head.

  ‘Caught any fish/’

  ‘Not yet. But I have hopes. I’m using a new fly. See. Alice says you can’t fish these moory streams with a dry fly, but you can.’ Pipe between teeth, Pip held up a tiny bright reddish gold and blue object, tied into a sort of complex bow.

  ‘These things never look like any flies I’ve ever seen,’ said Effingham. ‘Where are its wings?’

  ‘Doesn’t need wings. Trout can’t see the wings, you know. And we’re aiming at a trout’s eye view.’

  ‘What’s it made of?’

  ‘Artificial silk and human hair.’

  Effingham stared at the reddish gold stuff with a sudden irrational shudder. ‘Whose?’

  ‘Carrie’s. The maids always oblige. And Tadg obliges too, only his hair is the tiniest bit too heavy, I find.’

  Tadg not with you?’ Effingham was still unnerved by the hair.

  ‘No. The trout would take him for an otter!’

  ‘You’re after trout? Or anything that comes?’

  ‘For this, nothing else will come at this season. September is the best month for trout. Not that there aren’t plenty of other fish around. Pike, for instance. I saw a biggish one just now. There used to be a monster pike in the lake, the little lake you know that caused the flood. Denis said he saw a pike five feet long there once and I believe him. I wonder where those pike went to. Wonderful fish, but terrifying. The big ones are always female. They often eat their husbands, ha, ha!’

  ‘Ha, ha,’ said Effingham. He felt that that was quite enough about fish. ‘Look, Pip, let’s sit down, shall we, while you have your pipe. There are a lot of things I want you to tell me and which I think I ought to know. I’ve waited long enough. I’m sorry to pursue you out here, but somehow you and I can’t talk at Riders. You understand.’

  ‘Do I?’ said Pip. ‘Well, there’s plenty of space and privacy here.’

  They sat down on a rock. There was in a way, Effingham immediately felt, rather too much space and privacy. The sky, into which an invisible lark was ascending, was too large and too high, and they beneath it were too tiny and too accidental for any really conspiratorial talk. A heron flapped across the pool, its slow wing-beats shadowed in it for a moment, and came down to stand immobile farther off, working the upper course of the stream. A water rat, its nose just above the water, broke the surface with a neat wash and vanished into the bank. A dipper moved like a restless shade from stone to stone. Elizabeth would have said it looked like a painting by Carpaccio.

  ‘Gerald Scottow, what?’ said Effingham.

  Pip looked away across the pool, whistling a little squeakily past the pipe. ‘They’re rising a little for their evening feed, see.’ There were faintly perceptible rings upon the water.

  ‘Come on, Pip,’ said Effingham. T deserve it.’

  ‘I’m not sure what you deserve, Effie,’ said Pip. ‘But you credit me with far too much knowledge. I know nodings. Like yourself.’ He began to touch up the fly.

  ‘Bloody liar, aren’t you,’ said Effingham. He never knew what line to take with Pip: polite, jocular, brusque, insinuating, he had tried them all.

  Pip laughed. He said, ‘I must just try another cast or two. My intuition tells me there are hungry fish over yonder. You stay here and keep damn still.’

  He moved cautiously into the water again, waited till the stream was smooth again about his waders, and began to cast. In the hazier gentler light the pool was glossy but less bright, a greyish-blue in the centre and under the banks the colour of brown ale. At the far end a little white foam outlined a pebbly beach beyond which the distant heron still stood like stone. Pip’s long line curled like a quiet slow-motion stock whip, moving in a leisured arabesque behind his head and seeming to pause before coming forward in the vertical cast. The fly alighted and sailed, tiny, golden, and tempting, near to the recent faint ripples. Then Pip with a sinuous movement,
during which the line was invisible, lifted it cleanly into the air. He cast again and again and again. Effingham watched dreamily and then began to think about Hannah.

  The graceful regular movement of the line was suddenly interrupted and Pip jerked abruptly forward into the deeper water. Effingham focused his eyes. The line was running swiftly out with a hissing sound as the trout raced for the cover of the opposite bank. Pip, legs wide apart near the swift centre of the crown pool, let the line run, checked it, and began cautiously to wind. The trout, feeling the tug, changed direction and began to rush downstream. As Effingham advanced to the water’s edge, Pip came edging backward, stumbling over the stones in the slippery shallows, and began to splash after the trout in the direction of the next pool, letting out the line again and cursing Effingham for being in the way.