The Unicorn

by Iris Murdoch

  He held her in a long hard open-lipped kiss. Time and place fell about her in a dark warm jumble and she seemed almost to lose consciousness. Then, moving her firmly back, he edged her off his knee and on to the chair, and smoothed her face over again with his big hand inside the handkerchief. ‘There now -‘

  Marian got awkwardly to her feet, holding on to the back of her chair. Something seemed to have happened to her knees and she could scarcely stand up. She began to say something.

  Gerald rose. ‘No more now, child. I must go back to Hannah. Some supper will be sent up to you here. Then you can give your face a good cold wash and comb your hair, and come along to Hannah’s room. Hannah will want to see you. We’re all good friends now, eh Marian?’

  She mumbled assent as he faded across the room and left her. She sat down abruptly on the floor. She could not have been more defeated if he had treated her as he had treated Jamesie. Her appalled heart, her appalled body, submitted utterly.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Marian knocked on Hannah’s door. It was some time later. She had not been able to stop weeping, and had had to wash and powder her face several times over.

  She entered the lighted room from the darkness outside. It seemed as if everyone was in the room, and there was a subdued cheerful murmur as if a decorous little party were in progress. The curtains were cosily drawn and the persons grouped about the fireplace were in fact holding glasses. As she advanced the forms before her were jagged and hazy; she looked for Hannah. A moment later she had a vision of Hannah’s face, swept and pale from recent tears, but wearing the peaceful ecstatic look of someone saved from a shipwreck. Then Hannah was embracing her and kissing her. A moment later she too was holding a glass which had been thrust into her hand by Jamesie.

  It was not for a while clear whether anyone was really talking or not or whether the murmur was all inside her head. The golden group about her still seemed sheathed like seraphim from head to foot in serrated wings of light. Everyone seemed to have become very tall and elongated. She rubbed her aching eyes. Jamesie was indeed now saying something to her and giving her a cigarette and lighting her cigarette. She sipped the strong clean familiar whiskey.

  She took in the little gathering. Hannah was standing close to Violet Evercreech and every now and then their hands entwined. Violet looked beautiful, serene and shadowed over, as if a slightly mauve light were touching her face and hair. At one point she reached out a hand, smiling, to Marian and the tips of their fingers touched in a strange salute. Marian found that she was smiling too and felt dawning upon her face the same rapt serenity which glorified the others.

  Jamesie was darting round the outside of the group, filling glasses and lighting cigarettes, but always returning to the proximity of Gerald. Jamesie was exalted, drunken with some sort of exhilaration, his face beaming and twinkling as if about to dissolve into a peal of purest gaiety. He kept looking at Marian and opening his mouth as if about to call to her and then closing it again in a sort of friendly nip. He touched her arm every time he passed her by; and then he would go and brush against Gerald, returning always to stand very close to him, hunching himself a little as if in conscious collected homage to Gerald’s greater bulk.

  Gerald himself beamed over the scene like a benevolent giant. He kept glancing at Hannah with a pleased look as if asking for her approbation, which she constantly gave him in quick little pleading darts of attention which seemed to express a sort of timid exhausted gratitude. What is she grateful for? thought Marian. Because he’s let me stay? Hannah and Gerald seemed like the mother and father of a united family. Gerald even spread out his arms now and then as if embracing them all, holding them all together. He looked about upon them, and when his gaze met Marian’s, it expressed a sort of bracing unsentimental pride, the sort of look a father might give his daughter when he sees her being a brave good girl. Marian said to herself, I have been accepted into the family, that is what has happened, I have become part of the pattern. That is what we are celebrating tonight. She felt a strange relief. Nothing dreadful had happened. Everything would be as usual. She drank some more neat whiskey.

  The sense of them as a family brought with it an uneasy feeling of something missing. Something or someone was not there. She began to move her head about searching for it as if it were always just outside her field of vision like a ghost or doppelganger. Then she realized what was missing - it was Denis. She looked round again. But no, Denis was not missing, he had been there all the time, standing in the shadow, behind the little group, near to the picture of Peter Crean-Smith. He held a glass too and had evidently been receiving the hospitable attentions of Jamesie. Not for a moment seeing him clearly Marian gave him a little smile. He too belonged here. Then she saw his face.

  The faces of the others were gilded. Denis’s was black. He stood stiffly holding his glass and his features looked like blackened iron. The knobs of his cheekbones and of his brow stood out in the shadowed lamplight as if some terrible pressure was being put upon him. His eyes were black and his mouth a black line. His shirt was hanging open, his hair tousled, and as he held his glass as if it were the top of a rifle he looked strangely like some small tough partisan, irregular and lonely and full to the brim with relentless judgements and grim purposes. He did not return Marian’s smile and she could not even make out the direction of the fierce darkened eyes.

  The shock of the encounter sobered her; while at the same time she realized that she must have become half tipsy with drinking so much whiskey on an empty stomach, as through excitement she had eaten nothing all day. She swayed slightly and took hold of the mantelpiece. What had she been thinking, what had she been doing, since she entered this room? And what before? The previous scene seemed like a dream. And yet it had happened and had somehow caused this one. She had been taken to some place of ultimate surrender, and she had given in without a movement, without a moan. Gerald could have had anything he wished of her in that dark room. He must have known it, even as he patted her like a child and led her back chastened into the bright approval of the family. And Marian recalled her words to Denis when she had said that she alone of them was not involved in guilt. Well, she was involved now.

  Something sudden was happening. Marian shook her head confusedly and made an effort to pull herself together. She somehow got rid of her glass and the scene took shape again. Everyone had turned towards the door, where one of the black maids was standing and saying something unintelligible to Hannah, and Hannah was saying, ‘Yes, yes, of course. Bring her in at once.’

  There was a little flurry in the room and a little buzz of talk and then the door opened to admit Alice Lejour.

  Alice advanced into the circle of light. Her appearance was dishevelled and she wore a frightened, strained, aggressive look. She went up to Hannah. ‘Is Effingham here, here in this house?’

  ‘No, my dear.’

  ‘Well, then he’s lost!’ She spoke it as a desolate cry.

  ‘Lost?’

  ‘He was angry and I let him get out of the car and he started walking inland and it’s after midnight now and he must have got lost in the bog.’

  Part Four

  Chapter Twenty

  It took Effingham some time to realize that he was indeed lost, hopelessly and completely lost. He had had, as the Austin Seven drove away from Gaze, some furious exchanges with Alice; and then, unable to contain himself for the anger, misery, disappointment and remorse that was in him, he told her to stop, got out abruptly and walked away up the hill. She had waited on the road, and he had seen from far above, as he went inland over the skyline, the little red car still waiting. But she had not followed him or called after him.

  Effingham was angry with her not so much for having occasioned the disaster as for having offered him such a quick safe means of retreat. He ought to have stayed, he was telling himself even as he closed the door of the Austin, he ought to have stayed and done something, he ought to have confronted Scottow, to have protected H
annah, to have explained at least. Or he might even have commandeered the Austin and pushed Hannah into it. But no, he could never have done that. Yet he might at least have stayed and had something to say for himself. As it was he had simply shown them all a clean pair of heels and left the two women at Scottow’s mercy. And yet what else could he really have done? It was, first of all, to resolve this debate, whose thunderous beginnings were in his ears even as the car shot out through the castle gateway, that he had had to get away from Alice and be by himself.

  One thing which had been established in their short angry conversation was how it was that Alice knew. Effingham had been betrayed by his own vanity. He had for several years now vaguely taken it for granted that the maid Carrie was a bit in love with him and would do anything that he wished. The idea that he might, in some earlier and more brutish age, have taken Carrie into his bed as a matter of course occurred to him as a piece of agreeable fantasy; and he assumed without reflection that even now she would have no objection. When he had made his preparations for the coup he had written a letter of explanation to Alice. He had given this letter, together with a large tip, to Carrie to be delivered to Alice at dinner-time; by which hour Effingham would be far away. He had not of course hinted to Carrie that he was leaving. But his manner must have been sufficiently conspiratorial; and although he had planned to remove very few of his things, one of the maids might have seen him packing. In any case, Carrie’s suspicions were aroused and she had taken the letter to Alice the moment Effingham was out of the house. Alice had set off, as she said to him, very upset indeed, and with no end in view except to find out what was happening; and when she had seen the Humber coming down the drive full tilt with someone in the back she had been just violently determined not to let it through the gates. She was sorry, she mightn’t have done it if she’d reflected, she mightn’t have done anything if she’d reflected, only Effingham had not given her much time to reflect.

  Effingham had strode blindly on, groaning to himself. It now all seemed a piece of perfectly horrible loutish idiocy, this that he had done. Why ever had he let that clever long-nosed girl persuade him? The whole plan, he could see now, was hopelessly ill-conceived. Hannah would never have consented to be taken away in a hurly-burly like that. It was the proximity of the airport which had confused them both. He seemed to make it out now that it was when Marian mentioned the airport that she had set the fatal seed in his mind. They were both stupidly, frivolously, romantically intoxicated with the idea of taking Hannah on to a plane, it was such a perfect image of escape. He had been influenced too, in a quite irrational way, by the scene at the music. That, for no good reason, had seemed to settle it, that cry of a soul in pain. And of course he had been moved sheerly by Marian, because she seemed so decent, because she argued so well, because he respected her, because he liked her.

  And now look where he was. He had put Hannah in peril, laying her open to retribution from people who had power over her, he had almost certainly helped Marian to get herself the sack, he had wounded Alice perhaps irrevocably, and worst of all he would himself be under sentence. He might never be allowed to go to Gaze again. This was a thought so agonizing that he almost had to bend down over the pain. If they banished him he really would do something desperate. Yet what on earth could he do? Had he not now forfeited the only thing which he could do for Hannah? Even if the opening part of today’s plan had succeeded what could have come of it? He recalled Hannah’s cry of ‘Don’t Effie!’ as they rushed towards the gates. It would have been no different later. They would have driven to the hotel, Hannah would have been tearful, perhaps frightened, and would have begged them to take her back quickly, and they would have had to do so. She could not now confront the outside world like that, and it was unfair as well as foolish to expect her to do so. But if, from within the gates, there was nothing he could thus do for her, what from outside the gates could he hope to achieve.

  He stumbled on, and the accusing remorseful thoughts buzzed in his mind, making him blind and deaf. What should he do now, go back to Gaze and camp woefully outside? It was too soon, they would spurn him from the door, and rightly. He had better let things settle down. Yet what reception would await him at Riders when he went back? How would Alice treat him? What would Max say to him about this piece of irresponsible lunacy, Max with his curious view of Hannah’s spiritual adventure, Max with his deferred attachment to Hannah?

  The thought of returning to Riders brought back to him some vague sense of time and place and he began to slow down. He had been walking fast, gesticulating and talking aloud, and the raging to and fro of his thoughts had provided an impression of continual din. He now, as he checked them a little, began to apprehend what was outside him, and became gradually aware that he was surrounded by a vast silence. He came to a standstill.

  Silent within himself now he looked about. The big sky was crossed with lines of fluffy reds and golds, weighted and blurred with the approach of twilight. The land on every side, already darkened to a purplish brown, was entirely flat and empty. Effingham reassembled his wits. Where was he exactly? He had mounted the hill near to the stream and had started following the path that led to the salmon pool. But there was no sign of the stream now, he must have somehow turned away from it. There was no sign indeed of anything now which could serve as a landmark.

  Fortunately he had only to retrace his steps. He turned about. After all, the sky would guide him. He had been walking east. Now he would walk west toward the sunset. He looked at the sunset. The sky was certainly brighter and redder in one quarter and darker and bluer in another, but the bright quarter was unnervingly large and did not clearly determine a direction. Also it occurred to him that the coastline played odd tricks with east and west in this part of the world. Still his way must lie roughly toward the brighter part of the sky, and he could simply walk back along the path he had been on.

  He began to walk. After a few steps he began to wonder if what he was on was indeed a path at all. There was a scattering of stones under foot; but the stones, he now noticed, were intermittent, and round and about among the humps of wiry brownish-green grass he saw other similar lines of dotted stones which might equally well be or not be paths, be or not be the way he had come. He quickened his pace. His direction was surely right, and there was nothing to be done except to get along quickly. There was plenty of light left. He would soon see something he recognized.

  He strode on, scanning the flat low uniform horizon. The uncertain light troubled his too intently peering gaze and the land seemed to jerk occasionally in an odd way. He had to stop now and then to rub his eyes. He walked on steadily but fast. He should in a little while be able to see the big dolmen which stood on the road above the village, and he kept looking for it and thinking that he saw it, only to see when he had blinked that the land was as flat and empty as ever on every side.

  At last he did begin to see something. There was on the horizon, considerably to the right, something vertical. It must be the dolmen. How far off the straight course he must have wandered. He changed direction and hurried on, falling over moist tussocks of grass, occasionally seeming to lose sight of the vertical object and then finding it again. The light was going fast. After a bit of blind going, when he seemed to be stumbling all the time, he lifted his head to find the object near him, and saw that it was not the dolmen at all, but a tree.

  He approached the tree more slowly. It was not a tree that he knew. Trees were individuals in that part of the world. He must be well away from anywhere where he had ever been before ; and now, after leaving his previous course to pursue the tree he was not at all sure where his previous course had lain or how to get back to it. The sky was still a little light, with the hazy fuzzy blue of the darker twilight, and a narrow reddish rim outlined three quarters of the horizon. The land all round was a mottled purplish black. Effingham came up to the tree and stopped to listen to the silence.

  Since he had realized that the tree was not the dolmen
he had known that he was lost; not seriously or badly lost of course, but annoyingly lost. It would probably take him some time now to walk back. Of course, his sense of direction was not entirely gone, and anyway if he headed firmly for the centre of the red arc of the horizon he would be certain to hit the road, or to come to the Scarren and then to the road. He did not fancy the idea of descending the Scarren in the dark, but it would be all right if he went slowly. There would be starlight and perhaps a moon later. So he was resigned to being, for a while at any rate, benighted.

  He hesitated. He felt suddenly a curious reluctance to leave the tree, which was at least a thing upright like himself. He reached out and touched it. Effingham was a town-dweller. He had always found the countryside at night rather alien and unnerving: the darkness, the emptiness, the absence of human activity, the presence perhaps of other activity. He shook himself. He had better move on before the faint red arc, his only guide now, should have quite faded away. If he walked briskly he would soon reach the road; he might even now be just a few hundred yards away from it. Cheered by this idea he set off quickly and walked for about five minutes. The red arc faded. Effingham walked.