The Unicorn by Iris Murdoch
‘I’m going home to lunch.’ Alice set herself in motion and tramped across the floor. After a moment’s hesitation, during which he tried to look at Marian but didn’t quite manage it, Effingham went with her.
Denis turned to Marian. ‘We will go and see her now.’ He marched toward the door. Jerked into motion, Marian followed. Gerald and Jamesie stood back on either side to let them go by. As she passed Gerald, Marian flinched and dropped her eyes.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Marian crossed the ante-chamber and knocked on the door of Hannah’s room. Denis had sent her on alone. ‘Come in.’
She entered. The room was dark, shut in by the rain which was falling outside. A lamp was lit on the writing-table. The turf fire flickered. Hannah was standing by the fireplace wearing her old yellow silk dressing-gown.
Marian came half-way down the room. She felt she was confronted by a stranger. She felt positively afraid.
Hannah had been fumbling in her pocket for a cigarette when Marian appeared. She went on doing so, after giving the girl a quick sideways glance. She looked sallow, older. And as Marian now came near she saw the familiar beautiful features marked all over as if something hard had been pressed down upon them. The face was broken up with little twists and frowns. The rounded radiant look was absent. It seemed another person.
‘Marian.’ It was more like a statement than a greeting. Hannah found the cigarette, lit it, and then as an after-thought offered one to Marian. The familiar smell of whiskey crept like incense through the room and pervaded the plump figure in the dressing-gown.
Marian did not know what to say. Hideous pity filled her and a sudden rising sense of guilt. She felt like a member of a personal bodyguard confronted with the mutilated corpse of her master. She sought for words. Could she say: I’m so glad you’re staying after all? What could she say? There was nothing to say. She bowed her head and felt a burning flush rising through her cheeks. The next moment with an almost cold sense that there was nothing else to be done she fell on her knees at Hannah’s feet
It was the right thing to do. Hannah pulled her up with an incoherent exclamation, and they embraced, holding each other in silence. Marian felt the unhoped-for tears overbrim-ming her eyes and darkening Hannah’s silken shoulder. And with the tears, half with despair, she felt ebb away the hard free person that she had momentarily been. And yet it was true too that nothing could be the same again. Pity for herself, for Hannah, possessed her till she shook.
‘There now, there now, have some whiskey.’ Hannah was comforting her. She too had shed tears, but was dry-eyed now.
The familiar sound of the liquid entering the glass rang like an angelus and they paused, more calm, and then looked at each other. ‘So you didn’t go away, Marian.’
‘Of course not! I didn’t dream of it!’ But that was not true. She felt, as she looked into the golden eyes, suddenly Hannah’s equal, her adversary, an inhabitant of the same world. It was a sickening yet pleasant feeling. It was now possible to lie to Hannah.
Hannah turned away shaking her head and looked out at the rain. ‘It’s strange. I thought I might – come round – come back – and find everyone had gone away. Like in a fairy tale. Has anyone gone?’
‘No.’
She sighed, and Marian said sharply, ‘You’re not sorry, are you, that we haven’t gone?’
‘Ah, of course not!’ Hannah turned, smiling. It was like the old smile, but not quite. ‘How could I be? Yet, you know, it will be difficult, for a while. Don’t feel you have to stay.’
Marian said at once, ‘Of course I shall stay, Hannah.’
They stared at each other. The golden eyes held their own. Marian looked down into the whiskey which, touched with the lamplight, was almost the same colour. The day seemed to be getting darker. What had happened to Hannah? It was not exactly that she was ‘broken’, but she seemed different, as if by some great loop or shift she had joined some other phase of her being. Many years seemed to have passed in two days.
Marian, feeling her way, and testing out her new sensation of being Hannah’s equal, said cautiously, ‘How will it be –difficult – exactly, Hannah?’
That would take a long time to say. And anyway you know. After all that – here we still are.’
‘But we love you, Hannah.’ It had such a false ring that Marian could not lift her head to help the words. She had never really loved Hannah.
‘We’ll see, shall we? Sit down. I feel so tired. I want to talk at random. Oh, how it rains! The winter is starting. Say something to me, Marian.’
They sat down on the sofa, facing the fire, the lamp behind them. The flames lit Hannah’s tired face, with that strange dislocation of the features, as in someone who has had a stroke.
‘I don’t understand what has happened,’ said Marian. ‘Why did – your husband – change his mind?’
Hannah shuddered, perhaps at the word. ‘I think he didn’t I think he didn’t send the cable at all. That it was a fake. But I shall never know.’
‘A fake?’ Marion was chilled. Yet more dark galleries opened out behind the scene. ‘But who – why –?’
‘I don’t know.’ She smiled into the fire, the sort of smile that might become a hysterical laugh. She closed her lips on it, and the light of the smile gave to her features a slightly crazy lift ‘I don’t know who sent the cable or why, though I could make one or two different guesses.’
I couldn’t, thought Marian. Who could have played such a stupid aimless trick? Or was it a stupid aimless trick? She felt fright, as at a glimpse of madness, and to cover it up said quickly, in a tone that sounded ridiculously chatty, ‘Well, it certainly turned things upside down for a while, didn’t it.’
‘It made me temporarily mad.’ She spoke in a high voice as if near to tears. And then, to reassure Marian, turned and smiled at her.
God, poor Hannah. Marian thought desperately of what to say. She felt a nervous itching desire to speak of Gerald. She said, ‘We are all mad sometimes, but it passes.’
‘The consequences do not pass.’
‘What are the consequences?’ Marian was breathless, gripping her glass and looking into the fire. Although their conversation was slow in tempo, almost as in the days when they fell asleep over the Princesse de Clèves, she felt she was fencing with Hannah, or rather building up with her, very delicately, some sort of precarious edifice; something dangerous yet essential, something within which, however crazy, they would have to take shelter in the future.
‘Oh, well they remain to be seen.’ Hannah rubbed her eyes. She wriggled her shoulders and shuffled her bare feet in the thick rug. She seemed to be choosing more words. ‘I’ve always had, of course, a very special bond with Gerald, a mysterious bond –’ She paused again, and seemed to be seeking some greater elaboration, but then ended, ‘because of the way things are, you know.’
Marian felt now that she was being made the recipient of a very precious and very important confession. Certain things had got to be said between them before they could look each other again in the face and go on to build some how-much-altered relationship. This seemed to matter to Hannah. Marian could feel her almost trembling with eagerness to be most delicately interrogated. Marian again felt shame. She was not worthy of this role. Only a humble person could have played it properly. She wished that she had persuaded Denis to go in first. But Hannah would not have talked to Denis. This reminded her too that she was on the brink of a large deception: would she tell Hannah about Denis? How could she, and yet how could she not? How quickly they had all consoled themselves! She was blushing. She felt the silence demanding her speech and, with an effort at precision, said not looking up, ‘But your relation with Gerald is different now?’
‘Yes. Different, quite different.’
What does it mean? Marian wondered. A pain which was certainly jealousy goaded her on. She must find out more before this delicate moment of their being open to each other should be quite past. She was cold, and yet it
This was the point toward which Hannah had been drawing her. And Marian saw something which was almost cunning in the golden firelit eyes: cunning, or caution, or perhaps the look with which someone offers a secret hint in a precarious situation. There was a sort of imploring: as Hannah answered, There just wasn’t sufficient reason for going away.’
With a sudden sense of Hannah’s courage, of her sheer indestructibility, Marian took the look to her heart, but without understanding it. Then she thought, My God, Gerald wouldn’t take her! And she recalled the transfiguration of Jamesie, Jamesie’s triumph, and the figures of Gerald and Jamesie dominating the scene below. Gerald had, with one quick twist, as of one manipulating a whirling rope, bound her, enslaved her, a thousand times more: and then proposed that the situation should continue. Gerald must surely have known almost at once that the telegram was a fake. He must have telephoned New York. He might even have sent the telegram himself. Or Jamesie might have sent it. Or, with a different view, Violet Or Peter might really have sent it, but only to torment and confuse. As Marian opened out the long fretted sheet of possibilities she apprehended Hannah as hopelessly, catastrophic-ally, beset by enemies, caught Her own guilt struck her and she hid her face and lowered her head to her knees.
‘Come, come. Look at me.’ The command was sharp.
Marian straightened up. She had to face her now, she had to try to understand what was required of her. Some apex or crisis in the conversation had passed, and Hannah looked now no longer cunning or begging but very determined, as if she were now going to explain to Marian some important and difficult scheme of work. The change in her face now seemed to Marian to be this: the spiritual veil or haze, the strange light, had been taken away, to reveal the irregularities of the features beneath. But she was still beautiful.
‘None of that!’ said Hannah softly. Then she went on in a more ordinary voice, as if she were talking of quite ordinary things. ‘I must live here and go on with this business of mine, whatever it is, and be prepared to do so alone if necessary. For what has happened will have results. I have a feeling that if it means anything at all I must live it all through from the beginning, since everything up to now has been a false start. Now is the start.’
Marian felt immediately; this is intolerable, she cannot do this, although she did not clearly know what this was. The seven years could not be thus folded into nothing. Were they at the beginning of another seven years? Marian felt as if the prison doors were closing on herself. ‘No, no, no!’
‘Indeed, perhaps better alone. I may decide to send you all away, even if you don’t go of your own accord. Ah, Marian, it is possible to go on and on and to suffer, to pray and to meditate, to impose on oneself a discipline of the greatest austerity, and for all this to be nothing, to be a dream.’
‘Oh, Hannah, stop it!’ said Marian. It was a bitter cry. The enchantment was beginning again, the first words of the spell were being hoarsely murmured; and it was the more terrifying since Marian realized obscurely but at once that this was a far far stranger and more dangerous spell than the old one. This was a spell which had absorbed the old one; it was a higher, more majestic, more terrible spell. She almost wanted, like someone in the presence of a moving, whispering enchanter, to freeze Hannah to stone before her own wits should be stolen away.
‘A dream. Do you know what part I have been playing? That of God. And do you know what I have been really? Nothing, a legend. A hand stretched out from the real world went through me as through paper.’ Her voice became deeper, resonant, like a chant, with touches of the dovelike purr of the local accent. Her eloquent voice was suddenly almost like Denis’s voice.
Marian shivered. She wanted to break the mood which was being imposed. She did not want to hear these confidences, to know these plans. She said, with an attempt at briskness, ‘Playing God? Surely not. God is a tyrant.’
The false God is a tyrant. Or rather he is a tyrannical dream, and that is what I was. I have lived on my audience, on my worshippers. I have lived by their thoughts, by your thoughts – just as you have lived by what you thought were mine. And we have deceived each other.’
‘Hannah, you are talking wildly.’ Marian did not wish to be rushed along so fast, not so fast, and not in this direction at all. Yet Hannah was not speaking in an excited tone. She was regarding the fire and twisting her hands as if delivering some sober much-debated judgement
‘It was your belief in the significance of my suffering that kept me going. Ah, how much I needed you all! I have battened upon you like a secret vampire, I have even battened on Max Lejour.’ She sighed. ‘I needed my audience, I lived in your gaze like a false God. But it is the punishment of a false God to become unreal. I have become unreal. You have made me unreal by thinking about me so much. You made me into an object of contemplation. Just like this landscape. I have made it unreal by endlessly looking at it instead of entering it.’ She rose as she spoke and wandered to the window.
Marian saw her, a dark figure now against the grey rain. Gerald had entered the landscape and made it real. But what would happen to it now? What was there, in that strange desolate landscape? Marian had risen too. She said rather harshly, ‘But you have suffered –’
Hannah turned, and her face, touched by the distant lamp, seemed to glimmer and tremble against the dark grey window. ‘You all attributed your own feelings to me. But I had no feelings, I was empty. I lived by your belief in my suffering. But I had no real suffering. The suffering is only beginning – now.’
And Gerald is its instrument, thought Marian. She was already, as if affected by some strange drug, beginning to see new patterns, new colours. She shook herself. The idea that Hannah was mad shot across her mind like a meteor and disappeared. It was herself she must keep a hold on. In desperation, but quietly, she said, ‘Hannah, you are the most sublime egoist that I have ever met’
‘Am I not after telling you just that?’ The voice was very like Denis’s. And with the deliberate aping of the local brogue Hannah laughed briefly, and Marian laughed too.
She moved to join Hannah at the window and together they looked out at the legendary landscape. As she watched the rain falling on the wrecked garden and on the dull grass slope and on the gleaming streaming black cliffs and on the sullen iron-grey sea, Marian felt a shock of despair, a shock of mortality, as if Death were passing close before her face and, not yet ready to take her, had blown a chill breath into her mouth. The rain fell into the dark fish pools with a jumpy jerky rhythm. Would she have to stay here with Hannah perhaps forever? The real suffering was only beginning now.
As Marian looked down the lines of the rain confused her eyes, so that she could not at first make out whether something which seemed to be happening below were not just some trick of the grey uncertain light. There was a movement, an unrolling of dark shapes. Then she saw that two figures dressed in black oilskins had emerged on to the terrace and were standing there together, looking ahead as if waiting for something. She recognized them from their stance and from the particular way that in standing they seemed to belong together, like a sculptured group, as Gerald and Jamesie. Hannah too stiffened, watching them. The two women looked down in silence.
A minute or two later, materializing out of the blanket of rain, a grey darkness gathering out of the sheeted greyness, another figure appeared, slowly approaching. Hannah gave a soft exclamation, a little gasp or cry. Marian stared at the unfamiliar figure. It was also wrapped up in a mackintosh with a cape over the head. Then with a gasp too, and as she turned in a terror of surprise to Hannah, Marian recognized it. It was Pip Lejour, and he was carrying a shotgun.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Denis leaned against the door. ‘Will you see him? Shall I let him in?’
&n