The Unicorn

by Iris Murdoch

  The awakening was terrible. She awoke to the aggressive reddened afternoon and the sound of the wind. She got up and noticed Geoffrey’s letter which a maid must have left there heaven knows how long ago. She washed her face which was stiff with weeping as if it had been coated with enamel. She opened the door of her room and seemed suddenly to apprehend the house as empty. There were distant creakings and murmurings and shudderings but there were no human sounds. It came to her that she might have been left behind, that everyone might have gone away and left her there alone. She stood there for a while paralysed listening.

  She forced herself to move at last and went very quietly down the stairs. She feared the house was empty, yet she also feared what might be behind those many many closed doors. She paused in the hall, controlling her urge to rush outside and run and run. She felt the presences in the drawing-room. She turned back, compelling herself to re-enter the heart of the house. She must find Denis.

  She both needed him and feared him now. Now that he was separated from her by her action, now that he was separated from her by the special quality of his grief, she realized that she had never for a second known him. He was as wild to her as an unfamiliar animal that has briefly let itself be caressed. She could not see his mind or predict his movements. She feared him yet she needed him: to wait at his feet, to gain from him some sense of what had happened, to receive some hint or vestige of a judgement. He would protect her against the dead.

  She knocked very softly on the door of his room. There was no answer and she slowly opened the door upon the twilit curtained room. Her heart beat painfully. It took her a moment to see that there was no one there. The bed was disordered, a number of drawers stood open, there were clothes scattered upon the floor. Marian retired. She ran on into the kitchen. The huge deal table had been cleared and scrubbed, but the place was empty. The big clock ticked in the interior silence. Marian called ‘Denis’, quietly at first, and then with a voice high, cracked with tears and fear. There was no answer.

  She kept turning to see what was behind her. Now she retreated step by step toward the window, as if something invisible in the house were cornering her. In desperation she looked out into the garden. There was a figure moving. The figure was too starkly clear in the intense light, detached from its surroundings, the same daylight spectre that she had seen before. It was Denis, standing beside one of the fish pools and staring down into it. Marian exclaimed almost with a new fear at seeing him. Then she ran from the too empty kitchen and out through the labyrinth of damp echoing stone-flagged rooms on to the wet-slippery terrace. She nearly fell and then went on more slowly.

  ‘Denis!’ She was connected with what had happened only through him. Only he could set her free from the gathered dead.

  He looked towards her with a vague wild look. ‘Hello, Marian. Are you feeling better?’

  ‘I was so frightened when I woke up, I thought you’d gone. Oh, Denis, come inside and talk to me, you must talk to me.’

  He focused his eyes upon her now, frowning, a small alien man, his hair fanned up by the wind, hunched and shrivelling inside his overcoat as the wind blew. He looked down again at the dark brown rippling surface of the pool and was silent.

  ‘Please,’ said Marian. She took a step forward and reached out timidly to touch his sleeve.

  He moved back from her. ‘Not that’ He turned his shoulder to her and knelt down beside the pool.

  Marian looked at the crouching figure. Then she saw beside him a small neat suitcase, and beyond that a gaping canvas hold-all, out of which there emerged the wide mouth of a plastic bag. The plastic bag contained water and she saw a quick movement of gold in the darkness within. A small fishing net lay by Denis’s hand.

  ‘You’re catching the fish - Oh, Denis -‘ Marian felt her tears again. She could not bear any more crying. She knelt down beside him. ‘Why are you catching the fish?’

  Denis spoke in a quiet way and his accent made his speech sound almost jaunty. ‘I thought I might just take some old friends away with me.’

  ‘You’re-going?’

  ‘Yes’

  ‘When, where-?’

  ‘Now. I don’t know where. Why should I stay here? Don’t you grieve now -‘

  ‘Denis,’ said Marian. She was trying hard to be calm. ‘You can’t go away and leave me here. Stay a little and we’ll go together. Or if you won’t stay, then let me pack some things and come with you.’

  He looked at her gently now as they knelt close together, and she saw above him the purple clouds parting for the evening sun. ‘No. What have we to do with each other, Marian? We are strangers really to each other. We have been able to converse, we have seemed to understand each other, here. But even here the spell is broken and the magic is all blown away. I ought not to have let you persuade me of things. Only evil, and more evil than you know, has come of those things. We did not really love each other. We could not. You know that now, don’t you?’

  Marian looked at him and then looked down into the water. It was true. She had wanted to possess this sprite. But they had had no real knowledge of each other. And she had brought him an illness of the spirit almost innocently, carrying it like a germ to a remote island. She began to weep again but very quietly. She said through tears, ‘Are you taking Strawberry Nose away?’

  Denis paused before answering and she knew that he took her words as an acceptance of his. ‘Yes. I can’t catch him yet though. He’s very quick. See, there he goes.’

  Denis picked up the net again. The brilliant red fish glided from the shade of the lilies, darted through a cloud of dark weed, and was gone. Denis trailed the net cautiously in the water. The fish reappeared near the end of the pool, circled and approached the net. Denis made a rapid gesture and the next moment the net was lifted high, full of wet, flashing, struggling fish. Strawberry Nose fell with a plop into the plastic bag.

  ‘What will you do with them? You said you didn’t know where you were going.’

  ‘Well, I’ll likely go first across the bog. I know where there are some gipsies would lend me a horse. Then I’ll go to a big house far beyond where I worked a short while once. They’ve a little pond there would take the fish. And then maybe I’d stay at that house or maybe go on. But the fish would be well and I could visit them or take them to where I am. You see,’ he said apologetically, in case Marian was worrying about the fish, ‘the cranes would get them surely if they stayed here. The nets will blow off in the winter, no one will put them back and the cranes will come.’

  Marian gazed through her tears at the blurred golden movements of the fish that remained in the pond. ‘But, Denis, you can’t just leave me behind. You must talk to me. You must tell me that you don’t blame me. You must tell me that it was somehow for the best.’

  ‘It was not for the best But of course I don’t blame you.’

  ‘You see,’ said Marian, speaking quickly, ‘I thought it was better. I wasn’t to know that Peter would be drowned. I had to let her be free. I had to let her be herself at the end. It would have been like destroying her entirely to keep her shut up till Peter came. It was so terrible keeping her a prisoner -‘ She knew as she spoke that she would say these things to herself many many times again, perhaps to the end of her life, but she would never more be able to say them aloud to another person. She turned desperately to Denis as they knelt together like penitents on the hard stone. ‘Denis, you mustn’t leave me like this. You must help me, you must cure me. It’s not really what I ought to have done. I ought to have had hope. I killed her-‘

  Denis shook his head. ‘We all killed her. I most of all.’

  ‘No, no. You least of all.’

  ‘I ought never to have left her for a moment.’

  Marian groaned. The words accused her. ‘You weren’t to know-‘

  ‘Oh, I could have known, I could have feared, I did fear. But I did not only love I also hated. And hatred can corrupt the love that makes it be. That was why I was not there when I shoul
d have been.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Who did you hate? And why did that make you be away?’

  ‘Peter.’

  As Marian stared at him he gave her the full gaze of his blue eyes, solemn, sad, and a little ruthless, a little crazy. ‘I don’t see -‘ said Marian.

  ‘What do you think really happened, down there by the sea, at the foot of the Devil’s Causeway?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose the water -‘ She stopped. She felt her face violently burning. ‘You didn’t -?’

  ‘Yes. The wall was broken down, I saw that as I went out along the road. I drove the car straight into the sea. I jumped out as it went in. He is not an agile man and I thought the car would sink before he got out. And he was not expecting it. But he did begin to get out. And I had to go back into the sea and push him back in the car. Then the pressure of the water kept the door shut, and the car sank.’

  Marian had covered her face as he began to speak. She uncovered it a little now and looked up at the house. The blank windows took the rich sunlight and the house seemed ablaze. No one was near to hear what she had just heard.

  Denis rose. He held out his arm and she pressed upon it to rise too. His arm was hard and rigid as iron. She saw the car plunging into the sea, the terrified man trying to get out. ‘You hated so much - because of -?’

  ‘Because of what I saw at that other time. And what I feared for her now. So you see, Marian, this is your cure.’

  ‘Why is it my cure?’ She turned to touch him, touching his arm again. She did not want to seem to shrink from him after what he had told her. But she looked on him with a strange awe.

  ‘I should have loved only and not hated at all. I should have stayed by her and suffered with her, beside her, becoming her. There was really no other way, and I knew that before. But I let myself be driven mad by jealousy, by her actions, and I was faithless to her and so became mad. I am the most guilty. The guilt passes to me. That is why I must go away by myself.’

  ‘But does that leave me - free?’

  He regarded her sadly without replying and picked up the suitcase and then more carefully the bag containing the fish.

  Marian stared at him. Then she said softly, ‘Yes, you are becoming Hannah, now.’ She came close to him and after a moment’s hesitation kissed the rough shoulder of his coat.

  ‘Good-bye.’ He touched her cheek with his hand and turned away.

  With a most heavy sense of what must be, Marian watched him tramp along the garden and out of the gate. The gate clanged loudly after him. The sun was becoming yet more golden and turning the hillside beyond to a brilliant saffron.

  She was shocked and appalled at what he had said and yet she felt a sort of deep release which may have been no more than a sort of resignation. All her life she would, with differences, be re-enacting that story. And with Denis’s words she had an eerie sense of it all beginning again, the whole tangled business: the violence, the prison house, the guilt. It all still existed. Yet Denis was taking it away with him. He had wound it all inside himself and was taking it away. Perhaps he was bringing it, for her, for the others, to an end.

  She moved slowly away from the edge of the pool. She noticed that one of the wire nets had not been replaced and she pushed it back into position with her foot Later on no doubt, but not yet, the herons would come to eat the fish. She walked slowly back to the terrace.

  On the golden yellow hillside a little figure had appeared, climbing up the path toward the bog. Marian watched it recede. It was the last flicker, the last pinprick, that showed the light through from that other world which she had so briefly and so uncomprehendingly inhabited. And as she watched the climbing figure, and thought, with a last effort of the imagination to reach so far away, of Denis there alone, going onward, with his fish in his hand and his clear knowledge of what he had done, she remembered the story about his having fairy blood; and she did not know whether the world in which she had been living Was a world of good or of evil, a world of significant suffering or a devil’s shadow-play, a mere nightmare of violence.

  ‘Oh, Marian, there you are! ‘

  She turned to find Alice standing beside her, with the dog Tadg held closely on a lead.

  ‘I thought everyone had vanished into thin air. Where’s Denis?’

  Marian looked at Alice, dear, solid, real, ordinary Alice. Good Alice. Then she threw her arms round her neck.

  ‘My dear,’ said Alice, trying to manage Marian’s embrace and Tadg’s lead, ‘are you all right? You really should have come over to Riders. I think I must take you back now, I shall insist.’

  ‘You’re very good,’ said Marian, letting her go. ‘But no, I must start packing my things up. I think I must see it through here.’

  ‘Where’s Denis?’

  ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Yes. Gone to the bog, gone to the gipsies, gone.’

  Alice’s face became blank and stiff. Her voice trembled a little as she said, ‘I see. I thought he would go, of course. But I wanted to give him Tadg to go with him. It seemed right.’

  ‘Quick, then,’ said Marian. ‘He’s not quite out of sight. He’s up there on the hillside, see, see. Would Tadg go after him, do you think, if we released him?’

  They ran across the sunny garden to the gate, their long shadows flying before them. The figure on the hillside was clearly visible.

  Alice undid the lead. ‘Denis, Denis, Denis!’ she whispered intensely to the attentive dog, pointing her finger. Tadg hesitated: looked at her, looked about, sniffed the ground, and then set off slowly. He ambled, sniffing and looking back. Then he began to run and disappeared into a dip in the ground. A little later, much farther up the hill, they saw the golden dog streaking upward in pursuit of the man until both were lost to view in the saffron yellow haze near the skyline.

  Alice and Marian began to walk slowly back toward the house. Marian thrust her hands into her pockets looking for a handkerchief and encountered Geoffrey’s letter. She pulled it out and opened it.

  Alice was saying, The upper road is more or less clear now. It’s a good half-hour to Riders all the same. I’d have come back sooner only I had a chance to arrange a cottage for old Mrs Scottow. You know hers was destroyed in the flood. I’ve brought Carrie with me. I told her to make us some tea. And I’ve brought a cherry cake. No bad news in your letter, I hope?’

  ‘No, no,’ said Marian, ‘good news. A friend of mine is engaged to be married. He’s going to marry a girl I was at school with. They’ve just been in Spain together -‘

  ‘Good show.’ Alice’s face was wet with tears.

  In silence Marian handed her her handkerchief. Yes, she would go back to all that now, to the real world. She would dance at Geoffrey’s wedding.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Effingham pulled his overcoat more closely about him and entered the waiting-room. There was still a while to wait before the train. A little fire was burning in the dark room. The afternoon was grey and overcast and there was a streak of winter in the air.

  Effingham had left Riders two days ago. After the funeral he had not felt able to return to the house, and he had gone away to be by himself at the little fishing-hotel at Blackport. It had been a curious and not unpleasant interval with a sense of holiday about it. He had strolled on the quay watching the fishing-boats and had sat for long hours dreaming in the bar. He had eaten well and felt generally better. Today his taxi had brought him back along the road. The small railway line from Blackport only served the aerodrome, so he had returned to the more northerly station, passing on the road between Gaze and Riders. He had taken in the grey yet clear rainy light what he now felt to be a last look at the two houses. They had glowered upon him like Scylla and Charybdis, but they had let him go through.