The Unicorn by Iris Murdoch
‘More?’
‘Yes. You suffer, yes. But I’m a story for you. We remain on romantic terms.’
Effingham stared at the freckled hand which still so sensitively and authoritatively caressed his. He had a sense of being deeply wounded, deeply accused. At the same time he said to himself, Ah if she knew how little I suffer! He said, ‘Perhaps I ought to have tried to do what I could do, and that is rescue you, help you in a quite straightforward way, or else have let you be. But I love you, and you know it’s not just a story.’
‘I am to blame. I couldn’t help wanting you to help me in a quite un-straightforward way - and at the same time I gave you no lead. I let you have your dreams. And of course I’m still romantic too. You are my romantic vice.’
‘Well, don’t reform me out of existence. Is it too late to teach me to help you in the un-straightforward way? I think after all I might try. I love you enough to try.’
‘Now I’ve just frightened you.’
‘No you haven’t. Hannah, do talk to me more frankly. Tell me about the past. Tell me what you really feel about this strange business. Let me see what you’re doing. Then perhaps I can be with you, as it were, on the inside -‘
‘Ah, but nobody can be with me on the inside. Nobody can see. That would be another illusion and a far more dangerous one. Now we are really tempting each other. Sorry.’ She spoke with a sudden alarm.
‘I’ve frightened you’ he said. ‘You know it’s only old Effie, harmless old Effie. I’m quite easy to control really. I only wish I could see more of your mind. I mean - do you see - all this - as coming to an end - and how?’
‘You know, it’s odd, but I’ve almost stopped thinking in terms of time.’
He looked into her big golden eyes. She was marvellously strange to him, a fey almost demonic creature sometimes. It was for this weird unconnectedness in her, this cut-looseness from ordinary being that surely he loved her most. Thoughts of taking her away suddenly seemed unbearably crude.
‘Is it like - forgive me for being so simple - a sort of trial that you must undergo with absolute patience? Do you feel -?’
She smiled as if he had been simple indeed, uncurled her legs stiffly and rose to her feet. ‘Oh, I don’t feel much any more, except about very immediate matters - what’s for dinner and Denis’s fish and so on. I have felt frightened, guilty, many things - but not now.’
‘Then why don’t you clear out?’ said Effingham. ‘Why don’t you quietly get up and go? Not necessarily with me, but just go.’
She had moved to the window and stood there in the dusty sunshine. She looked back with a kind of surprise. ‘But why indeed? I belong here, it all belongs here. To go somewhere else would have too much significance now, it would make me be something.’
Effingham got up too. ‘I’m a dull pupil,’ he said. ‘But I think I’ve understood a little. You want me to stop being restless and romantic. You want me to be - resigned, with you - somehow, dead, with you. I can try. I’m not a fool. I know there have been consolations -‘
‘In the dreams? Yes. I hadn’t expected this sort of talk, Effie. But perhaps it’s as well. Perhaps it’s time for us to care for each other differently. Not so pleasantly, but better. With less imagination. If we can.’
‘Oh God,’ said Effingham. He felt confused and stunned, as if the process of becoming dead had started already.
‘Why, there’s Alice,’ said Hannah.
Effingham joined her at the window. Alice, with Tadg pulling hard upon his lead, was crossing the terrace with Denis hurrying after her. Gerald Scottow and Jamesie were striding up the drive loaded with game. Violet Evercreech, with a big basket, and with a black maid in attendance, was disappearing in the direction of the kitchen garden. Beyond was the view of Riders, the black cliffs, the green islands, the windy sea, with near fishing-boats and a steamer at the horizon. From a great height a silver aeroplane was coming down toward the airport. Effingham saw it all with a sort of shock. There was life, indifferent life, beautiful free life going forward. But to what, in here, had he just pledged himself?
Chapter Twelve
‘And how was she?’ Max pushed the chess board aside. It was late that night. Max and Effingham had been sitting for some time now in Max’s study, drinking brandy and playing chess. Effingham, who had drunk a lot with Hannah, after Hannah, and at dinner, was feeling rather the worse for wear. He rather dreaded anyway this interrogation by Max, which occurred at the beginning of every visit. He had a sense of being put through it, and a sense, usually, of being somehow found inadequate. It recalled tutorials, it recalled his first painful-pleasant apprehension of Max as someone to whom only the best, most accurate, most thoughtful, most truthful replies could be offered. Max had been his first real glimpse of a standard. Effingham had never entirely recovered from the shock.
Max worked at a big mahogany dining-table upon which he had cleared a space for the chessboard, thrusting aside books and papers into high precarious piles which at intervals through the evening murmurously subsided or slid to the floor. At the far end of the room, beyond the expanse of the table, the dying turf fire glowed drowsily, and a single tall oil-lamp purred a pearly-yellow between the two men, showing them to each other. Layers of cigar smoke drifted up steadily past the lamp into the darkness above where the books rose in towers. A distant pale smudge was the ever-present photograph of Mrs Lejour.
Trying to be alert, Effingham picked his words carefully. ‘It’s hard to say. She seemed as usual. She was quite serene, she said nothing special had happened. Yet we had a weird little conversation.’
‘Weird? How? Brandy?’ Max’s big head loomed at Effingham as he leaned forward with the bottle. Max’s smoothly polished bald dome was divided from his very wrinkled face and neck by a neatly clipped circlet of silver-grey hair, which made him appear to be wearing some sort of exotic cap. He had with this, at first sight, an oriental air, as of one whose forebears drew back heavy curtains or mumbled interminable chants in the shops or temples of the East. Yet his carefully shaven face, the indoor colour of pale parchment, wore well enough the gentle abstracted mask of the scholar, and only those who knew him very well ever thought they could see anything else looking through. His big nose had thickened and coarsened with age, sprouting vigorous little tufts of black hair, and his mouth had spread and moistened, but the blue eyes were still almost cold with clarity. His hands, which had inspired Effingham as an undergraduate with irrational fears, were big too, hairy, with broad flat paw-like fingers. He was a large broad man, but round-shouldered and cramped with arthritis and stooping over books. He rarely left the house now.
‘She made some sort of appeal to me. I think.’
‘You think? You’re not sure?’
‘Yes, I am sure. But I don’t know quite what the appeal was, and perhaps “command” is a better word than “appeal”. I got rather emotional and said I wanted to take her away. I didn’t mean to say that, it just came out. She said no in an evasive sort of way. Then she accused me of being just romantic about her and said I ought somehow to have entered more into her own experience of the situation. Then she said of course I couldn’t really enter in and it was dangerous to think that too. Then I said it wasn’t too late and I would try to enter in. Then I said what the hell was her experience of the situation anyway. Then she made some remark about not feeling guilt any more and not feeling anything any more. Then I said I’d do my best to be less romantic and more resigned. And then there was a diversion and we talked of other things.’
‘Mmm. I’ve thought all that too.’
Effingham, who had offered his remarks as a half-flippant farrago, looked up quickly, not sure how to take this reply, and whether it was intended as a sort of rebuke; but Max seemed deep in thought, his gaze resting on the distant photograph of his wife.
‘At times you know,’ Max went on, and his voice became hoarse and rhythmical, ‘at times especially in the winter, it has all seemed to me so delicate that any
‘And was it?’
‘I don’t know. Of course, the situation has fascinated me as it has fascinated us all. But in a way too I think I was afraid of her.’
‘Afraid of her needing you?’
‘Afraid of her disturbing my work.’
‘Well, you have stuck to your work,’ said Effingham. He felt suddenly uneasy. The quietness of the room menaced him with some possibility of judgement. He went on, ‘You have stuck to your work. The book is nearly finished.’
‘Yes. More nearly than I’ve let Alice know. She thinks I’ll go out like a light when the book is finished.’
‘You won’t,’ said Effingham. Then the vision came, incomprehensibly painful. ‘Ah - when the book is finished - you will go to see her -‘
Max did not reply. He said after a little silence, ‘I wish I understood more.’
‘So do I,’ said Effingham. He swept his hand upward through the clouds of cigar smoke. He felt stifled, threatened, upset. He wanted somehow to lighten the tone of the conversation and to disturb Max’s oppressive reverie. ‘I’d like to know a bit more about Gerald Scottow, for instance.’ This was a topic on which he was now firmly resolved to question Pip.
‘I am more real in the winter,’ Max went on softly. ‘I can think then. And of course I’ve thought about her. And sometimes it has seemed obvious that the right reaction is the simple one. Alice’s for instance.’
‘What is Alice’s?’ said Effingham grumpily. He was sorry now that he had reported Hannah’s words to the old man.
‘Alice is simply appalled and thinks that something ought to be done. If she doesn’t say so to you, doubtless she has her reasons.’
‘Humph,’ said Effingham. He knew it was some time now since Max had given up wanting him to marry Alice. He wondered vaguely if Alice ever discussed him. He said, ‘It is appalling of course. Visiting that place today was like visiting a police state. It makes one notice the free society when one gets back to it.’
The free society? That rag freedom! Freedom may be a value in politics, but it’s not a value in morals. Truth, yes. But not freedom. That’s a flimsy idea, like happiness. In morals, we are all prisoners, but the name of our cure is not freedom.’
All prisoners, thought Effingham. Speak for yourself, old man. You are a prisoner, of books, age and ill-health. It then occurred to him that in some curious way Max might derive consolation from the spectacle, over there in the other house, of another captivity, a distorted mirror image of his own.
‘I do wonder in a way,’ said Effingham, ‘why I don’t react more simply. I suppose it’s partly a sort of reverence for her way of taking the thing. And partly because, honestly, I find it all somehow beautiful. But that’s idiotic romanticism. She was quite right about that.’
‘It needn’t be,’ said Max. “Plato tells us that of all the things which belong to the spiritual world beauty is the one which is most easily seen here below. We can see wisdom only darkly. But we can see beauty quite plainly, whoever we are, and we don’t need to be trained to love it. And because beauty is a spiritual thing it commands worship rather than arousing desire. That is the meaning of Courtly Love. Hannah is beautiful and her story is as you say “somehow beautiful”. But of course unless there are other virtues, other values, such worship can become corrupt.’
Max’s oblivion of everything to do with Freud was one of the things which made Effingham love him. He said, ‘I don’t know if I have those other virtues. I suppose I’d better try and grow them! I feel if I could only get the situation into focus, give myself some theory of what she’s doing, I could at least participate in some way, be resigned or whatever it is with her, stop - enjoying it. When you said just now you’d thought all that too did you mean you’d thought that I ought to stop enjoying it?’
“That among many things. In a way we can’t help using her as a scapegoat. In a way that’s what she’s for and to recognize it is to do her honour. She is our image of the significance of suffering. But we must also see her as real. And that will make us suffer too.’
‘I’m not sure that I understand,’ said Effingham. ‘I know one mustn’t think of her as a legendary creature, a beautiful unicorn -‘
‘The unicorn is also the image of Christ. But we have to do too with an ordinary guilty person.’
‘Do you really see her as expiating a crime?’
‘I’m not a Christian. By saying she’s guilty I just mean she’s like us. And if she feels no guilt, so much the better for her. Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves. We must just not forget that there was a crime. Exactly whose probably doesn’t matter by now.’
‘I should have thought it did,’ said Effingham. Though I’m not prepared to regard her as particularly guilty even if she did push that bloody man over the cliff. I wish I’d pushed him myself. I hate to think sometimes that she might be - suffering all this - somehow for him.’
‘Why not?’ said Max. ‘He is in a privileged relationship to her.’
‘Because he’s her husband, yes!’
‘I didn’t mean that. Because he’s her executioner.’
‘Privileged? You mean he’s the person she has the power to forgive?’
‘Forgive is too weak a word. Recall the idea of Ate which was so real to the Greeks. Ate is the name of the almost automatic transfer of suffering from one being to another. Power is a form of Ate. The victims of power, and any power has its victims, are themselves infected. They have then to pass it on, to use power on others. This is evil, and the crude image of the all-powerful God is a sacrilege. Good is not exactly powerless. For to be powerless, to be a complete victim, may be another source of power. But Good is non-powerful. And it is in the good that Ate is finally quenched, when it encounters a pure being who only suffers and does not attempt to pass the suffering on.’
Do you think Hannah is such a being?’
Max was silent for a few moments. Then he said, stubbing out his cigar, ‘I don’t know.’ After a while he said, T may be suffering from my own form of what you call romanticism. The truth about her may be quite other. She may be just a sort of enchantress, a Circe, a spiritual Penelope keeping her suitors spellbound and enslaved.’
‘I don’t care for the Penelope image. I don’t want Peter Crean-Smith to come back and put an arrow through me. You said the pure being doesn’t pass the suffering on. But you also said that one ought to suffer with her.’
‘Yes, but she would not be the cause of the suffering. Suffering is only justified if it purifies, and this kind could.’
‘You mean the compassionate kind. Yes. If we have to put in such a lot of work perhaps it won’t matter in the end whether she’s a wicked enchantress or not, provided she’s made saints of us! But I’m not really up to this spiritual adventure story. I just wish I could understand her. She has a weird unusual sort of calm. She spoke today about not feeling anything any more. But that can’t be right. Women are made for feeling, for love. She must feel, she must love. She loves me, in a way. I only wished she loved me properly, with ordinary love.’
‘She can’t afford ordinary love,’ said Max. ‘I think that must be what, in these last years, she has understood. If she were to give way to ordinary love in that situation she would be lost. The only being she can afford to love now is God.’
‘God,’ said Effingham. ‘God!’ He added, asking a question which seemed to have been on the tip of his tongue all his life, ‘Do you believe in God, Max?’
Max paused again, and replied in the same tone, ‘I don’t know, Effingham.’ The oil-lamp murmured in the silent shadowy room, sending up the cigar smoke in a quiet spiral. He added, ‘Of course, in the ordinary sense of believing in God I certainly don’t. I don’t believe in that old tyrant, that old monster. Yet -‘
‘I suspect you of being a crypto-Platonist.’