The Unicorn

by Iris Murdoch

  Denis ran to Hannah and took the gun away from her. Marian looked down at what was at her feet. There could be no doubting what she saw. She was aware of Hannah sinking slowly to the ground and Denis kneeling beside her. She heard the slight bump as the red-golden head struck the floor. She stepped back so as to see no more. The sphere was shattered now and the open sky looked in. Hannah had brought the day of judgement upon them.

  Part Six

  Chapter Thirty

  Effingham and Alice paused in the darkened hall. There was a disagreeable stifling smell, perhaps of something burning. A weird sound was issuing from the drawing-room, a lilting, singing, whining sound, rising and falling continuously. Effingham had been long enough in that part of the world to know what it was, and he shuddered. Alice took his hand. There seemed to be no one about. Yet they had come at once as soon as they got Marian’s note with the dreadful news.

  They whispered to each other, not daring to speak aloud. Then Marian materialized upon the stairs. ‘Not in there. Come upstairs to my room, will you.’

  They followed her up into the darkness. The rain was still falling heavily and the leaden evening sky could send no light into the house. A lamp was lit in Marian’s room.

  Marian closed the door and then turned to face them with a little moan. Alice put her arms round her. Effingham looked at the two women clinging together with their eyes closed. He felt paralysed, stupefied, filled with blind horror and revulsion. He could still scarcely believe what Marian had said in her letter.

  Alice slowly released her. ‘Who is that keening?’

  ‘Gerald’s mother. She’s been in the house - ever since.’

  ‘Why didn’t you let us know at once?’ said Effingham.

  ‘So much has been happening all day. We’ve had the police here. Jamesie had to go to Blackport to contact them and to telephone New York. And someone’s had to look after Hannah. Denis is with her now. And I couldn’t find a man to take the note. Oh God -‘

  ‘Steady, steady,’ said Alice. “We’d have arrived sooner only we had to take the inland road because of the rain. The lower road is rather silted up. And half your drive is washed away, we could hardly get up it What happened with the police?’

  ‘It was very weird. They were terribly simple men. Violet just told them there had been a ghastly accident, and they wrote it all down as she said.’

  They will treat what we do as our own affair. I don’t suppose you’ll hear anything more from them. We’ve destroyed your note, of course. Did they say there’d be an inquest?’

  They said there was no need for one. The undertaker has been too. He somehow knew and came of his own accord. He says we can’t - bury Gerald anyway until the rain stops. Oh, Alice-‘

  Effingham went over to the window. He looked out into the depths of the rain. Nothing could be seen but grey rain behind rain.

  He said, ‘What happened about New York?’

  ‘Peter’s coming over by jet. He should be here some time tonight or early tomorrow morning. Someone will have to meet him at the airport’

  ‘And Hannah-?’

  ‘She hasn’t spoken a word since then. I’ve sat with her, and Denis has sat with her, and Violet. She just stays quite quiet, looking rather puzzled. She ate some lunch and some tea in an ordinary way, but she won’t speak. We kept her away from the police of course. Violet said Gerald was cleaning his gun when it happened.’

  ‘Do you think she’s -‘ Effingham choked on the words. ‘Do you think she’s - deranged - that her reason has given way?’

  Marian wiped her eyes. ‘I don’t know. She’s in a terribly shocked state, but so she was before and got over it. I don’t think she’s any more - deranged now than she ever was.’

  ‘And how much that is is anyone’s guess,’ said Alice shortly.

  ‘Shall I go and see her?’ said Effingham.

  Since his departure from the house that morning Effingham had been talking almost continuously to Alice. The subject of his talk had been Hannah, or rather, that is, Effingham. He had explained it all to Alice from the very beginning. He understood it now, he saw exactly how it had been. Hannah had been to him the chaste mother-goddess, the Virgin mother. The sin which Hannah was, through her own sinless suffering, redeeming for him had been the sin of his own mother’s betrayal of him with his own father. Hannah was the mother who sequestered, immaculate, chaste, the unmoved mover. Because of his unconscious resentment of his own mother’s sin of sex, he had been, he explained, unable to establish any satisfactory relations with women other than those of Courtly Love. He would identify the woman he loved with his mother and then make her unapproachable and holy.

  Hannah of course fitted this role perfectly. Or had done. Of course it was all impossible now. He had not really loved Hannah, he had loved a dream figure which he had been able to superimpose upon her - as long as she was chaste and untouched. Now he recognized, through the very collapse of his whole structure of emotions, what it was that he had been up to. It was interesting and curious, really. When he searched his heart it seemed as if his love for Hannah had ceased, had been abruptly switched off. Of course, things didn’t really happen as quickly as that, and he could not regard himself as ‘cured’. The difficulty always was to bring to the passions the news which the reason was so much readier to learn. He would have slowly to take in what he had done, to take it in to his whole self. And when he had thoroughly learnt it perhaps he would be free to love properly, to escape from this frustrating pattern. He understood himself at last; but he would need to recite the solution, like a charm, many times over before he should be really free. Alice should help him. She would hear his lesson. And when he had recited it to her enough times he would become hers in wholeness and truth in the present, as he was already hers prophetically, and through their long common past. He felt, with her, home. She was real to him and had been all along. Only let her hear him repeat the exorcism and all would be well.

  Alice had listened to him with a sceptical face, with sudden bursts of tears, but she had held his hand as he talked wildly hour after hour. She had twice suggested that he should talk to her father, but Effingham had refused. He was not yet ready to face Max. He had not yet repeated the charm enough times. Max would not understand. He had to strengthen himself further, he had more fully to convert Alice, before he could face Max. Alice herself had of course been in to see her father to tell him what had happened at the other house, but Max had apparently sent no summons to Effingham. So the hours had passed.

  The arrival of Marian’s note had put an abrupt end to Effingham’s self-analysis, which was by then becoming rather feverish and repetitive. His immediate feeling on learning what had happened was, after the first extreme shock, a sort of violent guilt which was indistinguishable from resentment. How could he be so horribly put in the wrong, just when he was beginning to extricate himself and to talk honesty and sense about his position? His next feeling was one of pity which was indistinguishable from horror. What had she done? What had she done now, and what in the past? For the new crime suddenly cast back upon the old crime a certain lurid light; and Violet Evercreech’s cry rang in his ears again, ‘a murderous adulterous woman’. Then he felt compassion and then he felt fear. He had never, he knew now, understood Hannah, or seen in her the violence which lay behind her apparent resignation. He had seen her as an innocent, as a lamb led to the slaughter. Yet why? He had had his own good reasons for suffering at her hands; she doubtless had had her own good reasons for suffering at Peter’s. If it had been, for him, a psychological masquerade, so had it been for her something which had, in reality, little to do with the spiritual world whose light he had been pleased to see so purely shining all about her. It had been, after all, violence all the way. This new violence was the almost casual expression of a fierceness of character which it now seemed amazing to him that he had not previously seen and shrunk from. The change in Hannah’s situation which had begun to effect his own liberation had let that v
iolence loose. And now, since a man had died, some unimaginably different state of affairs must come to be, just as he was beginning to understand the old one. He looked with sick amazement at Gerald’s clothes, which he still had in his room at Riders. Some transforming mystery had come upon them all. Then it was that he wanted desperately to speak to Max, but the old man refused to see him.

  Effingham felt bound to ask to see Hannah, but he did not feel at all ready for it. He felt frightened, guilty and ashamed. He could not help feeling that what had happened must somehow, though he could not quite see how, be his fault. At Hannah’s greatest moment of need he had abandoned her for Alice. Or rather, he had abandoned her for some more urgent, and it almost now seemed to him abstract, concern with his own destiny. Alice’s love for him had made the place, the vacuum, into which he had been able to step aside to reassemble himself. Yet there had been some inevitability in this, and it was as if Hannah’s own destiny, assembling itself for a violent denouement, had simply thrust him aside. He had been cleared away as useless. He felt his guilt merge with resentment, and with a sheer fear of her, as of something poisonous or radioactive. He shivered and sickened at the thought of what she had done, he felt the shock of it through his whole body as if he were being threatened himself. He did not really want to see her yet.

  ‘I don’t know that there’s any point in your seeing her,’ said Marian. ‘She won’t talk to you and I don’t think she should be troubled any more.’ Her voice trembled tearfully. ‘Anyway, I don’t think Violet and Jamesie will let anyone see her, except me and Denis, before Peter comes. One of them is always in the ante-room. They’re keeping her shut up.’

  ‘So Violet and Jamesie have taken over?’ said Alice.

  ‘Well, someone had to,’ said Marian rather fiercely, as if she were being accused. ‘Denis isn’t concerned with anything except sitting with Hannah and he’ll hardly utter a word. Someone had to deal with the situation, and I just couldn’t by myself. Violet really took charge.’

  “Was Jamesie - very upset?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. He behaved oddly. He was quite hysterical first of all. Then he suddenly stopped that and began to rush round the house looking for things.’

  ‘Looking for things?’

  ‘Yes, for letters and things. He and Violet have practically taken the house to pieces looking for papers and things. One of the maids said they were looking for Hannah’s will.’

  ‘For her will?’ said Effingham. He was chilled by the murky room and by the silence of the house in his back. It was getting dark outside. He shivered.

  ‘Yes. I think Violet thinks Hannah made a will in her favour and she wants to get it to a safe place before Peter comes. And there are a lot of other things, things they want to hide and destroy. Jamesie has burnt a lot of photographs. And they’ve been burning letters and all sorts of things. They couldn’t burn them outside, so they’ve had a sort of perpetual bonfire in the kitchen boiler. You must have smelt it as you came in.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ said Alice drily, ‘that the house would need some sweeping and garnishing before Peter’s arrival.’

  ‘Peter, yes. I can hardly believe he’s coming. This time tomorrow he will be here.’

  They were silent. Alice turned up the oil-lamp a little. The rain continued its dull roar. The sound of keening was distantly heard from below. Effingham thought, poor Gerald. Then he thought, and it might have been me. Who knew if the violence which Hannah’s quiet years had stored up between these walls had yet spent its force? He began desperately to want to leave the house.

  Alice said, ‘You must let us stay, Marian.’

  Marian rose. The lamp lighted half her face. She quieted her mouth with her hand. Now it was dark outside. She said, ‘I’m awfully frightened. I’d be very glad if you would stay. I’ve hardly talked to Denis, but I know he’s afraid that Peter, when he arrives, will just go berserk or something.’

  Effingham said, ‘But our presence here, as outsiders, will only make him madder.’ He was appalled, terrified, at the idea of being found in the house by Peter.

  ‘I’ve thought about this. I’m even more frightened of what will happen if you’re not here. I want to crowd the house with people. It may be just a matter of getting through the first twenty-four hours without something dreadful.’

  Effingham started to protest again, but Alice spoke more loudly. ‘Effie, one of us must go back and tell my father we’re staying. Shall I go?’

  That’s just it,’ said Marian, and her high-pitched nervous voice rang decisively. ‘I want you to go and fetch your father. I want him to be in the house when Peter comes. If he is here, I feel everything will be all right.’

  ‘Fetch Max, bring him here!’ Effingham jumped up. This was another kind of violence. He needed time to decide upon his own view of the story, to regroup his emotions, to sketch out his own salvation. He did not want Max to enter suddenly upon the scene. He did not want Max to contain him in any picture of the destiny of Hannah. The story, after all, was his, he had suffered enough for it.

  ‘Capital idea,’ said Alice, as if it were the most ordinary of suggestions. ‘Ill go and get him, Effie.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Effingham. ‘He may need persuading. And anyway I must get some clothes and things.’ He would not stay behind in the dark house with Hannah imprisoned and Peter approaching.

  Then we’d better go at once,’ said Alice. The roads may soon be impassable.’

  ‘Yes, yes, go. And bring your father back, whatever you do. Here, take this lamp. It’s all right, I have a candle. I won’t come down with you. I’ll go back to Hannah. But, oh, come back soon, soon. I shall be waiting for you, listening for the car. Come back very soon. I am so frightened.’

  She opened the door for them and the lamp in Alice’s hand showed the empty corridor and the red looped velvet hangings. The sound of keening was louder, regular, endless. The smell of burning paper floated up from below.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Marian woke with a start, and terror immediately, with consciousness, invaded her limbs and made them rigid. It was pitch dark in the room, but she knew that someone was standing beside her bed. She tried to move and speak, but it was as if her throat were being held. She gasped and cowered back.

  Then with a sharp sound a match was struck and she saw the face of Jamesie close above her.

  It must be many hours now since Denis had set off in the Land Rover for the airport. ‘Has he come?’

  ‘Ssh. No, no one’s come. It’s only four o’clock.’

  Four o’clock. Why had not Alice and Effingham come back with Max? She should never have let them go away.

  Marian had been asleep on a couch in Hannah’s ante-room. She had remained with Hannah until the latter had showed signs of wanting to go to bed. Hannah had still not spoken, though she had begun, in the later evening, to murmur various things to herself. Marian could not make out what these murmurings were, and she had several times tried in vain to make Hannah speak to her. She had helped Hannah to bed, and seen her instantly fall asleep. The beautiful face, which had all day been wrinkled in a puzzled painful frown, became smooth and young, flooded with innocence and forgetfulness. Perhaps Hannah had now forgotten and would never more remember. Perhaps, it occurred to Marian as she sat watching beside her, she had forgotten Gerald, and had earlier forgotten Peter, forgotten what she had done to Peter. And with that there rose the image of the maimed returning husband, and Marian had shuddered and turned to find a tall figure in the doorway.

  It was Violet Evercreech. She had come to lock the room. She told Marian that she might stay inside or come outside, but locked the room must be until the morning. Marian did not want to be separated from Hannah by a locked door. But she decided she had better be on the outside. She was momently expecting the party from Riders. So she had come out, leaving Hannah sleeping, and had seen Violet turn the key in the lock of Hannah’s sitting-room and depart. After that Marian had fetched
blankets and lain down on the couch in the ante-room. Sleep had come at once.

  ‘Light the candle. Here it is.’ She spoke softly. Hannah’s bedroom was beyond the sitting-room, but she did not want to risk waking her. She feared Hannah’s return to consciousness.