The Unicorn

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘Mr Lejour was very determined.’

  ‘Is he outside now? Let him in. No, wait a minute.’

  She turned back to the room, drawing the silk gown closer about her and re-tying the cord. She went to one of the mirrors and looked at herself. She did not touch her face or hair. ‘Let him in.’

  Marian moved toward the door. ‘Wait, Marian, I want you and Denis to stay here while I talk to – him.’

  Marian looked at Denis, but his face was frozen, grim, his face of a mountain man, of a partisan, and he would not look at her. With a sense almost of physical danger at what was to come Marian retired again to the window, getting as far away as she could. Hannah sat down on an upright chair, turning it a little towards the door. Denis opened the door.

  Pip had taken off his coat but he still carried the gun. His boots were thick with mud and a smell of rain and earth and sea, a smell of damp tweed, entered the room with him. For all his rough country clothes, he looked slim, elegant, feline, or with his small sleek head and long neck, like a beautiful snake. He took a step or two, and stood before Hannah, very straight, soldier-like. Denis closed the door softly and sat down against it on the floor.

  Pip and Hannah looked at each other in silence for a long time, he reflectively grave as if before a great picture, she gloomy, almost morose, taking her eyes off him, glancing about, returning.

  ‘You don’t mind my coming?’ It was a cool question, as if he had been with her yesterday.

  ‘Of course I mind. What do you want?’

  To take you away.’

  ‘Why do you say this now? You could have come and said this at any time in these years. You have been here often enough, watching me. Marian, my cigarettes please.’ Her tone was calmly irritable. But when Marian lit the cigarette Hannah’s hand was trembling so much that the operation was almost impossible.

  ‘It is different now. There is no point in your staying now.’

  ‘You are brutal.’

  ‘Not that. I am not going to witness what happens next Everything has changed now. When I go away from here now I shall never come back. But I want to take you with me.’ He spoke softly and rhythmically as if with the authority of a priest.

  ‘Some things may have changed, but my intentions have not changed.’ She answered him with an equal resonance, leaning back in her chair, one arm drawn back, one foot extended. Their still figures were connected by lines of force which made them seem without witnesses, a closed capsule of quiet violence.

  ‘You can’t do it again. It is all spoilt now. Don’t deceive yourself, Hannah. You are tired.’

  She closed her eyes and the truth of it for a moment seemed to weaken her. ‘You say it is spoilt now. What was it before?’

  He was silent for a moment. Then he turned and leaned the gun against the desk. He crossed his arms, looking down on her, and seemed to reflect as if for the first time on her question. ‘Does it matter exactly? You attempted something which was too difficult.’

  ‘Well. Now I am going to attempt something even more difficult –’ The cigarette was singeing her hair. She drew her hand away. The smell of burnt hair drifted through the room.

  ‘No, no. You cannot do the thing that you intended. You simply do not know how. Come out through the gates into the real world.’

  She was silent as if she had been listening to him attentively. Then she said conversationally, ‘With you?’

  ‘With me. I have had my own vigil, Hannah, the counterpart of yours. And I have learnt on the last day what I should have known on the first day. Come.’

  ‘And what would we do,’ she said in the soft voice of someone listening to a story, ‘if we were to go out of the gates together?’

  Pip gazed at her. The mere sound of the hypothesis uttered in her voice seemed to make him glow as with some imminent metamorphosis. He grew not tenser, but looser, like a ballet dancer about to move. ‘We would decide that – when we got outside. We would decide it as people in the world decide things, considering this and that, considering possibilities. You know that you could dismiss me forever as soon as we were away.’ A smile lightened for a moment behind the sad poised mask.

  Hannah sighed a long sigh and looked away from him. ‘I doubt if you really want this. But why do you think you deserve it?’ She spoke as a queen, one who highly disposes of herself.

  ‘I am the only one who has loved you and not used you.’

  ‘What were you doing all these seven years if you were not “using me”?’

  ‘Waiting for you to wake up. You have woken up. You are awake now. Come, move, act, before you fall asleep again.’

  ‘You think Gerald woke me up?’

  Pip unfolded his arms and opened his drooping hands before her in a gesture of prayer. ‘I have a right –’

  ‘You mean if someone’s going to have me it may as well be you. Perhaps it was you that Gerald awakened!’

  She said it brutally, and for that second Marian, watching from the window, stilled and almost without breath, saw her not as a queen but as a great courtesan, saw her, she suddenly thought, as Violet Evercreech saw her: a woman infinitely capable of crimes.

  Pip looked at her, and the dignity of his face dissolved into supplication. Then he moved. Everyone in the room flinched. But he merely stepped forward and fell on one knee. There was still a space between them. ‘Don’t ask what it meant for you, for me, that interval. Fold it away. You loved me once. Call up the remnant of that love. It is your only hope of life.’

  Hannah was silent, in repose, staring at him thoughtfully, as at a beautiful boy brought to judgement She did not seem so much debating as contemplating.

  Marian could not bear it. She said in a clear voice, ‘Go with him. Your clothes are still packed. Tell Denis to go and get the car. You are mistress here.’ She moved up behind Hannah’s chair. Denis had risen and moved forward too.

  Hannah and Pip went on looking at each other as if no one had spoken, and a moment later Marian wondered if she had uttered the words only in her mind. The immobility continued; and then Hannah began to move and fidget. It was like the moment after the host has been lifted, when the silence of adoration is quietly broken. When she spoke it was in the old irritable almost whining tone. ‘No, Pip. I wish you hadn’t come. It’s no use.’

  Pip rose slowly where he was. ‘Why not?’

  ‘I thought it would never matter. I thought I would never see you again. You may not have used me, but I have used you.’

  ‘No, no –’ he said softly, putting her words away with a gesture.

  But she went on, fidgeting with the neck of her gown, turned now a little toward the rainy window. ‘I suffered too much for you. At the beginning. The suffering did not end in me. I thrust it back towards you in resentment. If you do not understand that, you are a dupe of the story after all. Did you expect me not to blame you? Did you expect me to go on loving you? Did you expect me not to curse you?’

  He said quietly after a moment’s silence, ‘Yes, I think I did expect these things.’ to watch me. Go away. Go away, as you said, from Riders and don’t ever come back. Go, go, go!’

  He looked down at her and his face became quiet, as if she had receded from him into the remoteness of art. Tears gathered in his eyes and he blinked to release them. They were large still tears such as men weep in solitude over beautiful things. To weep like that over a human being was a most desolate homage.

  He began to withdraw slowly, collecting himself towards the door. He paused. ‘Shall I send my father to see you?’ The question seemed detached, the beginning of another subject.

  Hannah rose, and anger and resentment inhabited her whole person. ‘No! What have I to do with your father? Let him keep to his choice and leave me to mine. Go.’

  Denis began to open the door. Pip had paused and had turned back as if he might implore her again. Then Gerald entered.

  There was no doubt that he had been waiting and listening outside and that he came now to terminate the i
nterview. Marian felt at that instant how Gerald attracted the hatred of everyone in the room, and although no one moved it was as if they all swirled about him. There was a black hole where he was.

  It was dark in the room now. The rain hissed steadily outside. Gerald was smiling. Hannah moved slowly across to the window and lay against it with her head touching the pane. Gerald held the door wide open and Pip passed through it without haste, and then Gerald was closing the door. It was the defeat of a man by a beast.

  There was silence. Hannah said in a low voice to herself, ‘Oh dear.’ Gerald waited, leaning against the closed door, to give Pip time to leave the house. He was still smiling. Then he opened the door again. ‘You two can get out. Get moving.’

  Denis, who had been standing perfectly still, gave a sudden exclamation and for just a second Marian expected him to strike Gerald. But instead he ran out of the room. Marian moved slowly to follow him. She tried to bring herself to speak to Hannah, to touch her, but she could not, she could not even look at her. All she could see was Gerald’s grinning face. As she neared him he shot out a hand and gripped her arm hard. She hung in his grasp like a terrified punished child. ‘Go to your room, Maid Marian, and stay there. I shall want to talk to you.’ He pivoted her to the door. The last she saw were his teeth, wide, white and metallic. Then she was outside and the door was bolted.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  The light inside the house was sallow and cold. She ran along the upper corridor but could not see where Denis had gone. The tasselled curtains flicked her face as she passed through. She stopped at the stairhead and called him softly. The place was silent, yet with a sense of people brooding behind their doors. In fear of the house she moved to the big landing window. The rain was leaking in through the closed window and lay in pools upon the floor. She looked out at the yellowish rain-lashed garden and saw with a shock a figure standing still beside one of the fish pools. Then she saw that it was Denis. Yet his solitary presence there in the rain and his quick translation from the house to the garden lent him an eerie quality.

  Marian ran down the stairs and out through the back of the house on to the slippery glistening terrace. The rain had abated a little. It enclosed her in a cold, fragrant, drifting, penetrating cloud as she ran towards Denis. He was standing looking down at the black trembling surface of the pool. His hair was flattened to his head in long dark streaks and the water dripped from his nose and chin.

  ‘Denis, Denis, come inside. You’re getting all wet. Come with me, come inside.’

  He let her lead him back into the house and on into the drawing-room. The rain water stood out in drops upon the close tweed of his coat and as Marian tried to brush them off he stood preoccupied and silent, staring over her shoulder. She went to fetch a towel, and when she returned he had laid himself face downward on the couch. Marian looked at him for a while and then began slowly to dry her own face and hair. Isolated from her by his grief, he seemed an almost frightening object. She sat down on the floor beside him.

  Now everything was the same as before. Yet everything was also different and much worse. That earlier time, which had at moments seemed a nightmare, looked now like a period of innocence and unconsciousness and peace. She had imagined that something had been wound to a conclusion and that she had been set free. She had been ready to go. Yet it was merely the turn of the screw, the turn to the ‘next spiral. She was not free to go, she was more deeply involved than ever; and if Hannah chose to suffer, she chose a suffering now for all of them which they could not avoid.

  Marian took hold of Denis’s hand. It was as cold and as limp as a dead fish. His face was still buried in the cushions. How little she knew about this being with whom she felt now so connected. Had she, by coveting him, by seizing him, done him a harm for which he would detest her? She recalled his cry of ‘We are faithless, faithless.’ How much more faithless did they not seem now, recalled to their former places. And as Marian looked at Denis’s humped shoulder and at the streaks of black hair upon his neck she thought: I am not Hannah’s equal, for I am connected with her through him.

  She thought too: he is now connected with her through me, and he may hate me for this. The shadow of Hannah had been upon her at the salmon pool. Denis must now doubly, because of Gerald and because of her, think of Hannah as a woman who might be possessed. His pains, which had been simple and pure before, would be darkened now. But they were all darkened now by what Hannah had done, and because Hannah was no longer innocent she could no longer save them.

  It’s odd, she thought, there is no one to appeal to any more, not even Peter. There is no outside any more. Everything is inside, the sphere is closed upon itself, and we can’t get out Pip had gone, he would wait and watch no longer. Effingham had deserted to the world of ordinary life and reason. She and Denis were ruined servants. The human world was at an end. Now they could only wait for Gerald to come down and whip them to the stables and turn them into swine.

  Marian found herself crying quietly. She thought, I am becoming a bit mad. Gerald had told her to go to her room and wait. Through Hannah Gerald now had them all at his disposal. Gerald towered in her imagination: it was as if he were indeed a black man, a colossal Moor. And Marian apprehended with prophetic terror the quality of the new spiral. She feared and detested Gerald; yet something in her also said quite clearly: do what you will.

  In a sudden fright she knelt up beside Denis, shaking him. ‘Please speak to me. I am having terrible thoughts. Denis, what can we do? What can we do for Hannah, for ourselves?’

  He rolled over slowly. His face, upon which she had expected to see agony, was curiously serene and thoughtful. He leaned his head back, looking wide-eyed at the ceiling, silent for a while. ‘Ah, if she had only not done that. She has changed us all.’ ‘I know.’ It was a relief just to talk, like the consolation of prayer. ‘Denis, I’m so frightened of Gerald.’

  Denis murmured, still regarding the ceiling, ‘He has become like him. He has become him. That is what has happened.’

  ‘You mean-?’

  ‘Gerald is Peter now. He has Peter’s place, he is possessed by Peter, he even looks like Peter. He is no longer what keeps Peter away from her. Nothing keeps him off her now.’

  ‘So it is - like it was at the beginning - it is the beginning -‘

  ‘Only worse. Peter, Gerald, they have learnt a lot in seven years. This is a spiritual not a physical thing.’

  Marian was silent. She was afraid to look at the apparitions which Denis was calling up; she was afraid of Denis, this suddenly cool, savage, preoccupied man. His face was beautiful though, and younger, as if a wind had swept away all the wrinkles of human fret and worry. She could not understand this sudden calm and it did little to quiet her. She said at last, ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘Whether one must not in the end fight evil with evil.’

  ‘No!’ But she said it, she knew even then, not because she abhorred evil, but because she too much feared it.

  Her word had scarcely sounded when a great deafening noise rang thunderously through the house. The house shook with it. Marian leapt terrified to her feet, but not more quickly than Denis, who was already at the door of the room, uttering, in the echoes of the strange sound, a great wail of pain. Then Marian realized what it was. It was the sound of a shotgun being fired upstairs.

  Denis and Marian crossed the ante-room. They could hear behind them the sound of running feet converging from different parts of the house. Denis had been gabbling something to himself as he ran. Now he hurled himself against the door. It was still bolted. Marian had an impression of many people crowding behind her. Denis had begun to kick the door, splintering the wood, when suddenly the bolt was withdrawn and the door was opened slowly from within.

  They fell silent outside. Then Denis entered the room and Marian followed. Hannah was standing by the window looking out at the rain. The shotgun was leaning against her thigh. Her face had the calm angelic look which Denis’s face had wo
rn a few moments since. Gerald was lying on the floor.