The Unicorn

by Iris Murdoch

  Hannah was still there; but her trunks were packed and Marian had hourly expected to see her departure take place, like the carrying out of a coffin. It seemed probable now that she would leave on the morrow. The sensation was indeed very like that of having a dead person in the house.

  It was only the evening of the day which had dawned so violently, but everyone at Gaze seemed to have been changed as by some vast tract of experience. Marian had waited about, slept a little, waited about, hoped to be summoned, feared to be summoned, decided to go to Riders, decided not to go to Riders, tried the door of Hannah’s old room and found it locked, sat for an hour on the stairs, retired to the drawing-room with Denis, and at last, in a sick frenzy to get out of the deadly atmosphere, set out with him for a walk.

  She had wept earlier in the day but felt, for the moment, a sort of mad calm. She was almost surprised at the completeness with which she despaired for Hannah. And yet, was it despair? She had wanted Hannah to leave the house and Hannah was leaving the house. The due time had passed and the princess was going to be rescued. Did it matter so much how and by whom? She had felt it, in the night, to be appalling that Gerald, who had watched over her for so long, should so suddenly and easily, in her moment of need, have taken her. While her other friends, who had protested so much, had simply not known what to do for her. But Gerald’s long vigil was perhaps the very thing that had mattered, and that had made him, at the crucial moment, more real to her than the others. Gerald had had no theory about Hannah. Gerald had not been paralysed by an allegory. It was right after all that he should be the wondrous necessary man.

  However that might be, everything would be different for her now, and her end was in darkness. She moved from one mystery into another. As the huge endless day went on, Marian felt less of the horror and more of a sick sadness of a more selfish kind, her own sense of a total deprivation of Hannah; and it was a part of this pain that she said to herself: I did not love her enough, I did not see her enough. Hannah would need her, would ask for her, no more, and there was some justice in this. Still later in the day, as a grotesque and unnerving consolation, came a weird feeling which Marian identified, though not at once, as a re-awakening of her sense of freedom. It was exhilarating though not altogether pleasant. She felt light-headed, giddy with exhaustion and freedom, not exalted, not guilty, almost at moments foot-loose and ordinary. Hannah’s great act of destruction had indeed transformed the world.

  Marian supposed that she had better start packing her cases too. Yet the sense of a strange interval, almost of a holiday, was too strong. Everyone sat about drinking tea. The maids abandoned work and invaded all parts of the house, chattering in their own language. No ordinary meals were served. Marian wondered vaguely what would happen when Hannah was gone and they were all left behind. Perhaps they would stay on in the house like a pack of witless abandoned servants, quarrelling among themselves. They would stay there till Peter Crean-Smith arrived, and he would whip them into the stables and change them into swine.

  ‘Go on telling me about the salmon, what they do.’ Marian asked this as much to distract Denis as to distract herself. He had been in tears, she thought, in the morning, and was in some deep mood of desperation now. He had been touchingly anxious to stay near her all day.

  ‘Well, when they are about two or three years old they leave the pools and go down the rivers to the sea. And they live in the sea for maybe three or four years – people don’t really know, I think, and particular ones may stay for longer in the sea. And they eat and eat and become big powerful fish. Then one spring they come back up the rivers to spawn, and come back to their own birthplaces.’

  ‘Up a river like this one? How can they? You’d think they’d be dashed to pieces on the stones.’

  ‘Some of them are. But they have great strength and cunning. Both are needed to move upward against such a power coming down. It is nature against nature. I have seen one trying to leap up that waterfall there and banging himself on the rocks and falling back, and then at last he leapt sideways on to those stones at the edge, and wriggled along on the land and got himself into the water above the fall. They are brave fish.’

  ‘Brave fish. Yes. I remember Hannah saying that once. She said their going up the rivers was like souls trying to approach God.’

  ‘They are certainly possessed by a strange desire.’

  ‘But to suffer so much –’

  ‘Suffering is no scandal. It is natural. Nature appoints it. All creation suffers. It suffers from having been created, if from nothing else. It suffers from being divided from God.’

  ‘Yours is a melancholy sort of religion, Denis. I’m afraid I don’t believe in God.’

  ‘Ah, you do. But you do not know His name. And I who know His name am only the better of you by one little word. Here is the salmon pool.’

  They paused. By a trick of the land, the sound of the waterfalls was, as they came over the brow, quite cut off. The sky ahead was greenish with the evening and gave a green tinge to the big expanse of unrippled water. Hooded crows rose from the heather and took to slow flight casting a fugitive reflection. Ahead at the flat horizon was the dark line of the bog, and a little to the left, far off against a pinker evening, the lop-sided figure of the distant dolmen. Otherwise there was just water and sky and heather and silence.

  Marian breathed deeply. She was tired with the hard ascent But the place had some power too which took her breath away. She felt a sudden embarrassment with Denis, as if they had entered a church and must now talk in a different key.

  Denis seemed to notice nothing and was picking his way along the heathery verge. He was saying, ‘There’s a place here, where you can usually see them. Don’t come too near the edge though. Here, if you crawl out and lie on this stone. Make no sudden movements, that’s right. Now look into the shadowed places. Wait. Now do you see them, the big fellows?’

  Marian lay down cautiously on the stone which projected a little way into the pool. There were dark ledges beneath it and the water seemed deep and very brown now that one was close above it. She looked down for a while but could see nothing except the speckling of the light in the dappled water. Then the speckles seemed to assemble into scales. A great form passed by like a shadow. Then another. The deep brown world was filled with slow majestic silent forms.

  ‘Do you see them now, Marian? Those are the big fellows. Thirty and forty pounds, some of them. Please God they’ll be left alone.’

  Marian suddenly could not endure it. She pulled herself back off the stone into the dry crackling heather. Denis was sitting near, his arms about his knees, his eyes still straining after the fish. Marian felt that she was going to weep. To prevent herself she turned directly to look at Denis. He turned his head slowly in a moment to look at her and she saw against the green eastern sky his bony face of polished bronze, his jagged blue-black hair, his long eyes of sapphire blue, his sad lost face, his face of a man from altogether somewhere else. She said, ‘Whatever could we have done for Hannah? Forgive me for having been a coward.’

  He frowned with distress, quickly looking away again. ‘There is nothing. Since she – gave herself – away.’

  ‘I feel this too, but it’s quite irrational. Still I suppose there’s nothing to be done now. We must just be glad she will be gone – when he comes back. You said yourself that she must not be there when he comes. Well, she will not be there.’ Marian thought with a sort of shock, shall I be there? She pictured Peter approaching and approaching.

  ‘Yes, but not like that. Ah, she should have kept herself away from him, she should have kept herself!’ The little cry shook with jealousy. Yet it seemed also the primitive word of some untouched puritan.

  ‘I suppose somehow or other he deserved her. And somehow or other we did not.’

  Denis shook his head. ‘She has destroyed herself.’

  ‘Or set herself free. Time will show.’

  Well, she is gone, thought Marian. And whether she will be free or de
stroyed I shall probably never know; and that is as it should be. No one should be a prisoner of other people’s thoughts, no one’s destiny should be an object of fascination to others, no one’s destiny should be open to inspection; and for a moment with her pity, she felt almost a resentment against Hannah for having so totally fascinated her. Then she thought again, I did not love her enough. Then she thought, she is gone into privacy, she is gone, and now we can all see each other again. She lifted her head and felt the giddy sense of her returning freedom. She stared at Denis. And a second later, quite suddenly, she knew that she was going to do what Alice Lejour had done.

  The warm sea wind was risen and blew over them now bringing a salty leafy smell of the autumn. It blew over the wide greenish surface of the salmon pool, rippling it a little, and blew on toward the solitary places of the bog. The evening air thickened about them and the heather began to glow.

  ‘Denis.’

  He turned again, giving her his full face, still sad, still pensively elsewhere. Marian edged forward until her knees touched his. Then she took his hand, then his arm, and leaning forward a little awkwardly she kissed him on the lips. She withdrew a moment. His face was calm now, with a dignified serenity which made him very present to her. Then, edging well up to his side, she kissed him again, holding him longer and letting one arm creep round his shoulder. His lips were closed and unresponsive, but he looked at her still with a solemn detachment which was neither hostile nor surprised.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Marian. ‘I didn’t expect this. I see these things can happen suddenly. I didn’t believe it when you said about Gerald and Jamesie.’ She added, ‘I think I’ve wanted to do this for some time, only I couldn’t see you properly.’

  He still stared at her. Then he closed his eyes and began to rub the back of her hand to and fro against his brow, uttering little grunting sounds.

  Marian felt suddenly pierced and transfixed by tenderness for him. Her first movement had had a sort of abstract purity about it. She had seized him because she must, and emotion, refined to some point of extreme necessity, was scarcely something felt. Now came the torrent of feeling. She drew him close against her shoulder and saw above the black cherished head the salmon beginning to rise.

  He was helpless and silent in her arms. She shifted them both into a more comfortable position, her knees leaning against his thighs, and then moved herself back a little so that they could converse. This was freedom, the freedom to love and move which she had so terribly lacked. She was deeply shaken by the suddenness and beauty of it. This at last, after what seemed an interval of stifling in some tapestried room, of simply looking at herself in a mirror, was the real other, the real unknown.

  ‘Denis, look at me. How old are you? I’ve often wondered.’

  Thirty-three.’

  ‘I’m twenty-nine. Denis, you’re not angry with me?’

  ‘Marian, Marian –’ He looked at her and his face was full of hollows and shadows. His eyes were narrowed to dark slits which showed no flash of blue. He moved slightly back, stroking her hand as if to control and conciliate it. ‘I didn’t expect this either. I don’t know what it is. But I am glad of you, I have been glad of you from the start.’

  ‘And now we are, as it were, released to each other.’

  He smiled. ‘It sounds like a mating of animals.’

  ‘We are animals.’ She felt this to be true for the first time in her life. She desired Denis.

  ‘We are a little mad today, Marian, because of what has passed. Let us go back now.’

  ‘Not yet. You don’t want to, do you?’ He lowered his eyes and she saw that he did not. ‘Dear, dear Denis, perhaps we are a little mad, but it is a mad place and a mad time. And I feel much more real with you than I do with any of the others.’ Or indeed with anyone else at all, she suddenly felt. This encounter was the unclassifiable encounter that liberates. Always before she had been a kind of person meeting a kind of person. But she did not know what Denis was, and this ignorance cast a darkness back upon herself which made her quiver with reality. They were two unique things meeting one another.

  An orange glow from the west was spreading over the zenith and the salmon pool had turned to a sheet of gold which the rising fish fretted with darker rings. Marian still stared at Denis and saw his eyes gradually widen for her. He was wearing his usual faded blue open-necked shirt, and he looked shabby and young and hard like a lad following a tinker’s cart. There was a marvellous equality in the way she was able to meet his still rather suspicious gaze. Still sitting as they were, knee to knee, she began to caress his head, drawing her hand down over his cheek and his neck. She undid the top button of his shirt and let her hand slide down inside. He trembled.

  His eyes became vaguer, and then without haste he removed his hand and laid his arm across her throat, forcing her back into the heather. He lay full length beside her, his shoulder covering hers. He did not attempt to kiss her, but pressed his closed mouth against her cheek. She felt the hard pressure and the continued trembling.

  Marian looked up past the dark head at the high orange sky with its little scarfs of fiery cloud. She felt a great blank joy and with it a sense almost of free playful gaiety.

  ‘Denis, I do love you. I’ve never felt like this. Don’t tremble so. You’re not frightened, are you? Denis, tell me, how many girls have you had?’

  He withdrew his lips from her cheek, but did not otherwise move. ‘How many – how do you mean?’

  ‘How many girls have you made love to, been to bed with?’

  ‘None.’

  Marian’s gaiety left her, but her joy darkened and deepened. She still looked at the sky. Her desire became deep and quiet and solemn as if something from the bog, something not hostile but very old, were hovering over them, presiding over the rite.

  Denis went on, since she was silent. ‘It is not the custom here – to do those things – if one is not married.’

  Marian was silent still, not for unsureness of her feelings, but for very sureness. She would let the words find their own way out. She said at last. ‘I said that I loved you. Perhaps I still don’t know what I mean. But I do know that for me this, now, is well, is good. And I have never really felt this before. I feel totally innocent. It is the first time. But it may be that it would not be right for you, not innocent for you –’

  The silence between them was serene, almost sleepy, inert as their two bodies.

  ‘What – are you wanting?’

  ‘Whatever you want – anything, this. I feel we are like children together.’

  He raised himself a little and looked at her. Then he began to fumble awkwardly with the neck of her dress. She helped him.

  Later, much later, when his darkness moved above her and she saw stars overhead she heard him murmur very softly, as if to himself, ‘Ah, but we are faithless, faithless.’

  Chapter Twenty-six

  ‘Marian, I think I must be honest with you. And please forgive me if I cause you pain.’

  Marian listened distractedly to Effingham. They were standing at the window of the drawing-room. Hannah would be leaving the house any moment. She knew this not from any definite intelligence, but from a sense of increasing urgency, a sense of climax which pervaded the rooms and the stairs and trembled upon the terrace in the morning sunshine. Several times she had thought she heard the engine of the Land Rover.

  Last night she had returned, not very late, with Denis, to find that all was as before. They were both relieved, and determined now to stay inside the house until the end. Denis had gone away to his own room, and she had leaned for long upon her window sill, watching the full moon, a great golden globe, rising over the sea, and she had watched it until it had become a flat silver plate high up in the blue black sky, and the sea was almost dazzling, barred with light.

  She had wept tears of a sort of exhausted broken joy. With the return to Gaze she felt again her connexion with the house and with the drama it had contained. But she felt towards
it rather as one who is leaving a theatre after some tragic play, worn, torn, yet rejoiced and set free with a new appetite for the difficult world. Heaven knew what she had landed herself in with Denis. But what would be would be. She had never, she realized, really felt before that certain recklessness of love; and that she was now suddenly, unexpectedly, genuinely in love she did not doubt It had been no momentary magic of the salmon pool. Denis was real to her, mysterious, awkward, unfamiliar, infinitely to be learnt, but real