The Unicorn

by Iris Murdoch

  A bang on the bedroom door interrupted her reverie and she jerked quickly away from the mirror. Whenever anyone knocked on her door she was divided between the hope that perhaps it was Gerald Scottow and the fear that it might be, even now, the arrival of her order of banishment. She opened the door to one of the maids from whom, after several repetitions of a gabbled message, she understood that she was being summoned to see Miss Evercreech.

  ‘Come in, my child.’

  Marian entered nervously. Ever since the unnerving promise of the ‘little talk’ she had been trying, with an uneasy conscience and no very clear mind, to avoid Violet Evercreech. She had never been near her room before, and was even now not sure where it lay in the house, so quickly had she been conducted and so agitated had she been on the way.

  It was a corner room, high up on the north side of the house, facing towards the Scarren; and while most rooms at Gaze contained their share of junky relics, this room looked soberly modern. Marian took in white painted bookshelves, a white furry bedspread, wild flowers in a black vase. Violet Evercreech was sitting in a chintz armchair, dressed in a purple dressing-gown, with a bottle of sherry and two glasses on a small table beside her. Her evening-dress was laid out upon the bed, a gawky spreadeagled form.

  ‘I thought we might take a little glass together before dinner,’ said Miss Evercreech. She spoke as if this were something customary ,’ yet there was about the occasion, about the room, a strained sense of the impromptu.

  Marian murmured her thanks and sat down in a chair which had been drawn close to Miss Evercreech’s own. She noticed, half with pity and half with a shiver, that the glasses were thick with dust.

  ‘What a pretty dress. Where did you get it?’

  ‘Mrs Crean-Smith gave it to me.’ Marian looked down, blushing with an immediate mixture of guilt and resentment.

  Miss Evercreech said slowly, after a pause during which she savoured Marian’s blushes, ‘Well, and why not?’

  ‘No reason why not, Miss Evercreech.’ Her voice sounded sharp and grating, and she felt, already, almost ready to weep with annoyance. Miss Evercreech had a quality of sheer attention which made her writhe.

  ‘Please call me Violet.’ The glasses were smartly polished on the purple silk sleeve, and the sherry tinkled in.

  ‘Yes. All right. Thank you.’

  ‘Well, say it then. “Yes, Violet.” ‘

  ‘Yes, Violet.’

  That’s better.’ Violet Evercreech, still seated, turned to look at Marian, and sat thus for some time, staring at her. Marian did not know where to look. She felt her profile being outlined as if a burning finger were being drawn down it from her brow. Her nose began to twitch. In desperation she turned tier face to Violet’s, and saw at uncomfortably close quarters the pale powdery skin, the dry colourless hair, and the long moist eyes which were fixed upon her with a hungry intensity.

  ‘My dear child,’ said Violet Evercreech, ‘give me your hand.’

  Embarrassed and alarmed, quickly averting her gaze, Marian extended her left hand as far as the arm of the chair, gripping her glass firmly with her right Violet took the proffered hand in both of hers, gave it a slow hard pressure and retained it.

  ‘In a way I can only talk nonsense to you,’ Violet went on, ‘and if I talk about myself I can only talk in riddles. I didn’t ask you here to talk about myself, but one has needs, old needs.’

  Marian, her hand and arm stiff as a puppet’s, said, ‘I’m sorry - ‘ And then, to fill a silence which might soon become significant in some intolerable sense, said hastily, ‘You’re a second cousin of Hannah’s, aren’t you - ?’

  ‘Yes. Do you know it is many years since I touched another human being in this way.’

  ‘Really -‘ said Marian. She looked down at where the purple silk parted to reveal a knee clad in a pearly brown cotton stocking. Some emotion from the past choked her utterance. She wriggled her hand in what might have been a caress or a defiance.

  ‘You love Hannah, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes - yes, of course,’ said Marian. She wondered if she were going to receive some warning, some crushing reprimand.

  ‘So do I. Extremely.’ Marian’s hand was crushed again and released. Marian retrieved it and took it to safety on the other side of her knee.

  Violet went on, ‘It is good to have you here in this room. So unexpectedly good, it took me by surprise. It is good to be reminded that love was once a simple natural thing. Perhaps you will come here again, and perhaps I will hold your hand like that again. Or perhaps not. You may have to pay for having seen a moment of weakness. But no, no. It was not for this I summoned you.’ She pushed her chair back a little. ‘I wanted to tell you something else, to tell you that you have made a conquest.’

  ‘A conquest?’ Marian’s thoughts flew to Gerald.

  ‘Yes. My little brother. You have captured Jamesie’s heart’

  ‘Oh - Jamesie - ‘

  ‘You are disappointed, because you have other interests in this house. Yes, yes, I have been watching you! But I wanted to ask you to be kind to Jamesie.’

  ‘Kind to him - why, I adore Jamesie,’ said Marian with a confused overflow of emotion. She almost stretched out her hand again.

  ‘I’m glad. I know he must seem a child to you. But a deep devotion, any deep devotion, is a precious thing, and woe to him who spurns it. Jamesie would do anything for you, anything.’

  ‘I’m very touched indeed - and surprised. I didn’t realize he felt - ‘

  ‘He is a secretive boy. Everyone in this house is secretive. Even you are becoming secretive.’

  ‘Me? Oh, no - ‘ said Marian hastily. ‘But Jamesie - I hope he’s not upset - he’ll get over it - he’s very young.’

  ‘He’s very young and he needs looking after. I think an affair with an older woman is often just what a young fellow needs, don’t you? I mean, with an older woman who doesn’t love him - but who just - adores him.’

  Marian withdrew herself into her chair and put her glass down. ‘Well, really, I don’t think I - if you mean - I’m sorry, but -‘

  ‘Never mind, never mind. Perhaps it was for myself after all that I summoned you - even if I never refer to this occasion again, even if I never see you alone again.’ She rose, as if the interview were at an end, and Marian rose too. They stood looking at each other.

  Violet was taller. She moved first; but Marian knew afterwards that she had moved too, impelled by some immediate irresistible magnetism towards the purple dressing-gown. Her head was upon Violet’s shoulder. She felt Violet kissing her hair and her brow. Next moment she was thrust fiercely away and found herself outside the door.

  Marian fled down the stairs, scarcely touching the floor, and ran along a corridor to a big window where she could see the familiar reassuring view of the sunless garden and the green lift of the cliffs beyond. She leaned her head against the glass and found herself panting and trembling. She sat down on a chair beside the window. She had never been approached in this way by a woman before and the experience had been both weird and exciting. She had found Violet touching and repulsive; yet her whole body was roused and if Gerald Scottow had appeared in the corridor at that moment she would have fallen at his knees. She hoped there would be no sequel; yet she had not wholly, not altogether, disliked it, the drama, the sheer unexpectedness. She rearranged her dress. How curious too about Jamesie.

  With Jamesie she recalled the whole range of her preoccupations. ‘He would do anything for you.’ If he would do anything for her he would drive the car which was to take Hannah away. Marian jumped up. A rapacious desire for action, for sensation, had been put into her by Violet. She felt so strong, so physically alive, she felt she could persuade anybody of anything. She would hunt for Jamesie now, now this minute; and the possibility that she might well, on seeing him, hurl her arms round his neck did not deter her in the least.

  She turned along a dark intersecting corridor. These rooms faced the garden, and she was fairly
sure one of them was his. She knocked on a door and opened it on a totally empty room. The next room looked like a maid’s room. The next, the corner room, must surely be Jamesie’s. She knocked again, softly, and then cautiously opened the door. The corridor, as she glanced back, was empty.

  Clothes which she recognized as his lay in heaps upon the floor, and the room had the slightly menacing personal silence of a very inhabited place. Marian looked about her and saw another door, leading perhaps to a bedroom or inner sanctum. Stepping over the clothes, breathless with nervousness yet bold, she knocked on the further door and opened it. The inner room was dark and smelt of chemicals. There was no one there.

  Marian stood still a moment, finding her breath. She made out an unmade disordered bed and a heap of detective novels on the floor. On a table there were trays and bottles, presumably something to do with photography. There was a curious patterned wallpaper on the walls. Marian moved instinctively to the window and pulled back the curtains. She looked, she stared, she looked closer. As the room lightened she could see that what the walls were covered with was photographs, a mass of photographs, large and small, fitted neatly edge to edge covering three sides of the room. She peered at them curiously. It took her some moments to realize that the photographs represented, every single one of them, Gerald Scottow: Gerald grave, Gerald smiling, Gerald mounted, Gerald on foot, Gerald clothed, Gerald unclothed, Gerald in some very strange postures indeed. …

  With shocked amazement and appalled fascination Marian looked at the pictures. At that moment the sun came out, the garden was lighted up behind her, and a ray of sunlight fell on her shoulder. She started guiltily, as if suddenly revealed and discovered, turned round toward the light, and found herself looking down at the terrace and straight into the raised horrified face of Denis Nolan, who was looking up at her. His face for a moment expressed horror and a sort of anger and disgust. Then he made a violent gesture with his hand and turned away into the garden.

  ‘Wait, Denis, wait!’ Marian caught up with him just as he was reaching the gate in the wall. Her dress kept dragging and catching among the brambles and ash saplings. He turned.

  Denis was dressed, for the evening’s music, in a dark blue suit and wore a collar and tie. The unusual clothes made him look awkwardly thick and burly, big in the shoulder. He turned an uneasy face toward Marian, his blue eyes screwed up angrily. For the first time she felt a little frightened of him.

  ‘Denis, please - ‘

  ‘What is it?’

  What was it indeed? ‘You looked so strange, when I saw you just now from the window, from Jamesie’s room - ‘

  ‘It is nothing to me whose room you are in.’

  ‘No - I didn’t mean that. Jamesie wasn’t there of course. I went to look for him, but he wasn’t there. I’d never been there before.’

  ‘That is nothing to me.’

  ‘Denis, don’t be angry. I don’t understand. Why did you look so terribly savage when you saw me and make that gesture? I thought you were calling to me.’

  ‘I was not calling to you. I think you are meddling too much and thinking too much. If you get yourself sent away now, it will nearly break her heart.’

  ‘Well, I can’t stay here forever,’ said Marian. She said it in exasperation, meaning: I cannot serve her in that way, that is a palliative not a cure.

  Denis looked at her for another moment, his blue-black locks all jagged in the breeze. Then he turned away through the door, banging it in her face.

  Marian tried to pull the door open to follow him, but it had jammed itself once more and she could not get the trick of opening it. It took her several moments of pulling before with apparent ease it came open. She ran after him. He was walking up the slope of short grass toward the top of the cliff, the blue afternoon sky beyond him full of light.

  ‘Denis, Denis - ‘

  ‘What is it now?’ He stopped again, looking at her sadly rather than angrily.

  ‘You know I didn’t mean it in that way. I’m just as troubled about her as you are. Denis, why do you think I’m meddling too much?’ The breeze, stronger here, rippled and rustled the cinnamon coloured dress. The emerald and amethyst sea was in sight.

  ‘Leave alone Jamesie and Scottow.’

  ‘Jamesie and Scottow - Do you know, Jamesie’s room is full of the most extraordinary pictures of Gerald. I - ‘ The significance of what she had seen came to Marian with a rush. ‘Denis, those two, are they - ?’

  ‘Yes. And you’d better leave them alone. They are jealous and spiteful, the pair of them. I’ve seen you looking at Scottow. And I’ve seen Jamesie looking at you. And there is enough trouble and violence here already.’

  ‘Oh God - ‘ said Marian. A variety of confused aches and pains drummed in her heart. Gerald lost, Jamesie useless. She said, ‘Have they - always been like that, I mean, ages? I had no idea Gerald was so inclined. He doesn’t look like it.’

  ‘Those ones often don’t. Nearly three years. You didn’t know about what Jamesie did, or rather tried to do?’

  ‘No, what? Please tell me, Denis. You’d better tell me. It’ll stop me from meddling.’

  They had reached the top of the cliff now and the house was almost hidden by the humped green slope behind them. The black cliffs were lonely, majestic, old.

  ‘He tried to take her away.’

  ‘Jamesie - tried to take Hannah away?’

  ‘Yes. She had no part in it, she did not know of it, but he planned to kidnap her. When he first came, with his sister -that was five years ago, he was a boy really - he was with her a lot, with Mrs Crean-Smith, he was very close to her and she doted on him and called him her little page. Then he began to be a man. Ah, but he was quite different from what he is now. And he made up this scheme to take her away, to put her into the car and drive her away. He might have done it only he was found packing her up a bag. He didn’t want to take her away suddenly without any clothes to change. And Scottow found him packing the bag and made him confess.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘Scottow gave him a tremendous whipping.”

  ‘Good heavens, poor Jamesie. But -‘

  ‘And after that he was Scottow’s slave.’

  ‘You mean - he abandoned Hannah - he went over to Gerald?’

  ‘After Scottow had laid hands on him like that, Jamesie worshipped Scottow and Scottow took Jamesie. That’s how it was.’

  ‘But surely things like that can’t happen so suddenly.’

  ‘We shall be late for dinner. Remember the music.’

  ‘How very strange.’ They began to walk back. ‘Everyone here seems to have some weird secret or other.’ She looked quickly at Denis. She had not meant to hint at his.

  He took her up sombrely. ‘Everyone here is involved in guilt.’

  ‘Except me,’ said Marian half to herself after a moment. ‘Except me, except me, except me.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  The drawing-room, whenever it was periodically resurrected, managed to look a fine enough room, especially now with the lamps lighted, a big log-fire burning, and the tall windows opened to the fragrant air of the terrace which came in with a crisp smell of sea and tamarisk. The soft light made the furniture glowing and hazy, and the various odd old pieces seemed to join hands as if remembering some great days of fifty years ago. The room encircled the people in it with a sort of tottering pride. Outside there was a big night of stars.