The Unicorn by Iris Murdoch
A car had appeared in the distance near to the gates and was approaching slowly over the devastated gravel. It was not the Land Rover. It was not the Humber either. It was a completely strange car. Marian gazed at it with fear and confusion. Was this some quite new person coming, some quite strange person coming to Gaze from the outside world, some doctor or some inspector, someone who would assess, clear up, explain and punish? The car approached the house and stopped. Then the door opened and Denis got out. He was alone.
Marian turned about and shot out of her room. Her flying heels made an echoing din along the corridor and down the stairs. The house she ran through echoed as if it had already been emptied of its people and its things. There was no one about and no one on the terrace when she got there just as Denis was mounting the steps. She saw his face, strained and exhausted, strangely blank. When he saw her the features seemed to droop with a sudden relief and he opened his arms to her. He looked familiar now, renewed, restored. But she closed her eye against his shoulder with a groan. It was clear that he did not yet know.
She became aware that his clothes were dripping wet and stiff with mud and sand. She held him off a little, gripping him hard and careless who saw them from the windows behind. ‘Where’s Peter?’
Denis held her two forearms firmly as if to prevent her from falling. They stood there like two wrestlers.
‘Peter. You haven’t heard?’
‘No-‘
‘Peter is drowned.’
Marian leaned back against the balustrade, drawing him to her. Behind his head the sky had become a soft bright fawn colour. It had stopped raining.
She could hardly speak. ‘Drowned. How?’
‘I should not have come back by the coast road. There was a great flood coming down at the Devil’s Causeway. The car got out of control and went into the sea. I got out quick enough but Peter did not.’ He went on holding her and staring into her eyes as if her attention could rescue him from the appalling memory. He added, They are bringing him now.’
Another car had appeared distantly on the drive.
He said, ‘Let us go in now and tell Hannah.’
Marian’s grip restrained his movement. Her mouth opened mumbling but she could find no words. Then she threw her head back and uttered a long harsh cry. After that she said, still staring at him, in a very low voice. ‘It is too late. Hannah is dead.’
He closed his eyes for a moment. Then he removed her clasp from his arm and turned his back to her. As she began to whimper and to paw at his shoulder she saw beyond him the second car coming slowly nearer, bringing Peter Crean-Smith home at last
Part Seven
Chapter Thirty-three
Effingham, driving the Humber through the rain from the night on into the morning, learnt the news about Hannah and Peter at one of the inland villages. Max and Alice were with him. They had taken an inland route which was very roundabout and had been lost twice and once stopped by flood water. Carrie and two of the maids and a man-servant were following them in the Austin Seven, but they had lost touch with them far back while it was still dark. They had paused at an inn for some breakfast and been told the news.
The Humber came crawling up the drive at Gaze, bumping across the deep rain-channels, just as they were carrying Peter Crean-Smith into the house. Effingham left Alice to help Max. He ran on to the terrace and stood watching. He felt stupid, curious, excluded. The emotional current of the scene did not pass through him. He followed the procession into the house. Marian was in the hall. She was pointing to the drawing-room door, her handkerchief pressed tightly against her mouth. Denis was lying on the stairs, his face hidden. He looked like something that had fallen from a great height No one paid any attention to Effingham. He was suddenly a stranger. He wanted, like a stranger, to find someone to whom he could say, ‘Oh, I am sorry, I am so sorry.’
Alice and Max were coming slowly through the door and he could see beyond them that the Austin Seven had arrived. Marian pushed past him and sat down on the bottom step. She laid her head against the banisters and began to weep in a series of low cries, ‘Oh, oh, oh -‘ Effingham stared. It did not seem to him that he could establish any communication with Marian and Denis, and the spectacle of their grief sickened him. The others were gathered behind him. Quickly he stepped over Denis’s legs and ran up the stairs and along the corridor to Hannah’s room.
He rushed in and paused in appalled confusion. The sun was shining now and the room was bright, almost welcoming as if it did not know what had passed. A clock was ticking jauntily. A last remnant of fire glowed in the grate. There was a dark stain on the carpet near the door, and the drawers of the desk were open and papers were strewn about everywhere upon the floor. But otherwise everything was the same. The pampas grass and dried honesty were stiff and immobile in their vase. Peter’s photograph gazed across the room at exactly the same angle. There was the familiar smell of turf and whiskey. Surely in a moment Hannah would emerge from the inner room. Then as he stood there alone he heard the heavy dragging tread of Max and Alice’s shuffle as they came along the corridor after him; and for one violent moment he was tempted to hurl himself against the door to prevent the old man from entering.
Effingham stood stiffly, staring into a corner. Something was lying there. It was Hannah’s old yellow silk dressing-gown, lying there in a heap. Max moved slowly past him and sat down in Hannah’s chair. Effingham gave a moan and descended abruptly on to a stool. He felt almost delirious with tiredness.
‘Open the windows, would you,’ said Max. He spoke with his usual authority but very wearily, letting his big head, yellow and hollowed like some Chinese object, fall heavily back against the cushions. He looked like death itself usurping Hannah’s place.
Carrie, who had followed them up, ran to the window. The room seemed to be full of people.
‘Brace up, Effie. Drink this.’ Alice was pouring whiskey out of Hannah’s decanter. She thrust it into Effingham’s hand and he sipped it. It tasted of Hannah. His eyes were closing.
Fresh cool rainy air blew through the room, carrying away the close quiet smells, lifting the litter of papers along the floor and stirring the honesty and the pampas grass. Two of the maids were gathering up the papers and stuffing them back into the drawers. Alice had picked up Hannah’s dressing-gown and hung it on a hook.
‘What is this? What are you all doing here, this great crowd of you? Why are you walking about and giving orders in this house?’ Violet Evercreech stood in the doorway, leaning upon a stick. Her voice was high and piercing with anger. Jamesie stood just behind her.
Alice answered, ‘Forgive us, Violet. We came to see if we could help. We only heard the news on the way.’ She pushed a chair forward for Violet.
‘And coming into this room, and drinking. Have you no shame? No, you cannot help. I can bury my own dead.’
She ignored the chair. Jamesie swung it to the side and sat down on it himself. He rested his elbows on his knees and covered his face. The maids retired into the ante-room.
No one spoke. Violet crashed her stick upon the floor. ‘You can go. I don’t need you to open windows in my house.’
Max turned his head slightly to Alice, who was leaning back against the mantelpiece, her feet wide apart. Alice said, ‘Don’t turn us out, Violet. We have a sort of right to be here.’
Violet looked venomously at each of them. ‘Oh yes! You’ve lived like vampires on the sorrows of this house and now you are even come to gape at the dead.’
‘Violet, don’t be angry. My father is tired. We’ll -‘
“You’ll go now, the whole gaping crowd of you. I am in charge here.’
‘Anyway,’ said Alice, her voice sharpening a little, ‘it’s a matter to be decided, I suppose, who all this does belong to now.’
‘It belongs to me. I am Hannah’s next of kin and there is no will.’
‘Well, there is a will, actually,’ said Alice, looking down. ‘Hannah made a will in favour of my father.’
Effingham opened his eyes and jerked his head up, spilling his whiskey. Jamesie got up slowly. Alice looked at her shoes and shuffled them in the carpet
Violet said at last in a whisper, ‘Your father. I don’t believe you.’
“Yes. She gave me a copy of it when I came over with some books and things last Christmas time. She asked me then not to tell him, and I didn’t till very lately, when I thought I should. There’s another copy with the solicitor in Greytown.’
Violet stared at her. Then her eyes became hazy and vague. ‘What a bitch she was, what a perfect bitch 1’
The words stood up in the room like an epitaph, like a monument, and there was a silence round about them. Then Alice began to say, ‘Of course, we don’t intend to accept -‘
But Jamesie stepped into the centre. He took his sister by the arm. There is no more for us to say to each other. The play is over, the Vampire Play let us call it. The blood is all shed that we used to drink. We shall go away now and you will hear no more’ of us at all and you’ll clean the house of our traces. We leave them all to you, the dead ones. You can have the house, you can conduct the funeral, yes, you can bury them and weep too if you have tears for them. They are yours now, made over to you, part of the property, all yours now that they are dead, my lord of the underworld!’
He pulled at Violet’s arm. Leaning heavily upon him she turned, her eyes still vague, and they went out of the door.
Alice began to say, ‘I’ll go after them, I shouldn’t have upset Violet like that -‘
But Max shook his head. ‘Not now -‘ Carrie closed the door from the outside.
Effingham jumped up. ‘Is that true?’
‘About the will? Yes. She left Father everything. Of course we-‘
‘Oh, shut up!’ said Effingham. He strode to the window. He wanted to yell. The sun was burning the sea, searing it with a long golden scar. The sky was a pale but cloudless blue. The battered garden was entirely still. Of course, he had not thought that Hannah would leave her wealth to him, he had not thought about it at all, he had not expected that she would die. But how grotesque and hideous it was that she had made Max her heir. Why Max, the person who deserved least of her? It was like a senseless insulting joke. Now the invasion that he dreaded had taken place indeed, and it all belonged to him, her desk, her dressing-gown, her decanter of whiskey, the pampas grass, Peter’s photo, everything. Effingham found himself suddenly coveting the things, and not only the little things, but the house, the acres of moorland, the stocks and shares. She had made herself into a piece of property and given herself insanely, spitefully away. This was her death, this mean thing. It was a vulgar trick.
Max said, ‘What’s the matter, Effingham?’ His voice was tired and cross.
Effingham thought, she is taken from me entirely. Max will scatter the earth upon her, Max will speak her funeral speech, Max will tell the world what she was.
Effingham said out of his immediate distress, ‘It was an unkind decision, and rather mad, don’t you think?’ He was near to echoing Violet’s epitaph.
Max said slowly, ‘It was a romantic decision, if you like a symbolic decision. Hannah was like the rest of us. She loved what wasn’t there, what was absent. This can be dangerous. Only she did not dare to love what was present too. Perhaps it would have been better if she had. She could not really love the people she saw, she could not afford to, it would have made the limitations of her life too painful. She could not, for them, transform the idea of love into something manageable: it remained something destructive and fearful and she simply avoided it.’
Alice said solemnly, ‘She could have loved you in presence too, father. You are the person she was waiting for. I felt this very much at Christmas. Perhaps the will was a sort of hint’
Max just shook his head.
Effingham stared at the old man, the great hollow mask, the crumpled dangling body. He said, ‘So Jamesie was right. You are the owner of her death and she was waiting for you. You are her death and she loved you.’
He uttered the words in a sudden angry cry. Then he felt that he must get out of the room, away from that little shut-in silken scene with Max’s hollow stare in the centre of it. He fumbled desperately at the door-handle. The maids, who were talking quietly in the ante-room, fell silent to let him pass. He ran down the stairs. He felt cornered, harassed, menaced. He was being driven out too, like Violet and Jamesie. He was being, in the course of some ruthless rite of purification, simply cleared away. He paused in the hall. Marian and Denis had moved and were sitting side by side on the floor near to the glass doors. Marian had turned her head so that her brow rested on Denis’s shoulder. They both had their eyes closed. They looked unnecessary, absurd, like some sculptured group in an auction sale. He looked at them with a shrinking disgust. They too ought to be cleared away. He moved nearer to the drawing-room door.
The sun shone on to the gleaming terrace raising a gentle steam. There was a profound quietness outside as if nature were exhausted and resting. He had not yet really understood that she was dead. He could think of her as lost, blackened, destroyed, he could think of her as transformed into stocks and shares, he could think of her as diminished into a little idea in the mind of Max, he could not think of her as simply dead. He could not think of her as dead, so utterly was she now veiled from him. He had been ready to feel her death as an affront, as an act on her part of unwarrantable self-assertion. Now, with the sudden intense quietness in front of him, he felt the awful mystery of her absence sweep over him like a cloud. He opened the drawing-room door.
The lace curtains were drawn and there was a yellowish light in the room. Effingham had a strange vague memory of childhood, of lying in some sick-room in summer. He saw in the engraved twilight, as in a picture by Blake, the three recumbent forms and the folds of the white sheets reaching to the floor. They seemed already like three funereal monuments. He stood quite still. They slept together now, those three entwined destinies, they lay now helpless and complete before whatever judgement there might be in earth or heaven.
There was a slight movement in the room and Effingham started violently. Then he saw in the brown shadows a little black old woman sitting hunched on a low chair beside one of the white forms. He saw the pale round of her face, oblivious of him, herself a little grotesque image of death. Her presence made the scene suddenly more personal, more dreadfully real. He looked down at the shrouded body nearest to him. It was long and large. If that was Gerald, this must be Peter, and that at the far end must be her. He looked at the quiet, quiet, faceless form, but he could not stir his feet to approach nearer. She was her death now, that death which she had so much striven to emulate in life, which she had studied and practised and loved. She had succeeded, and death and she had converged into a single point Who knew if that was victory or defeat? His last vision was of the white veil that hid her now. After all, and at last, she had become utterly private.
He felt no sharp grief only a rather frightened awe. He gazed down at the nearer figure. Perhaps it was here that he belonged, with Peter Crean-Smith. He felt then, like a sudden chill, a sense of ghoulish curiosity which he recognized as such almost before he knew its object What had really happened to Peter when he fell over the cliff? In what way was Peter maimed or disfigured? Effingham breathed hard. There was a smell of sea-water in the room and the carpet at his feet was damp and darkened. He felt a stirring in his hand, a desire to whisk off the sheet and see what lay beneath. But again he could not. Perhaps he feared to see, not some terrible disfigured face, but laid thereupon, like a hideous mask, the likeness of his own features.
Chapter Thirty-four
Marian thrust the letter from Geoffrey into her pocket unopened. She went to the window wondering what time it was and how long she had slept.
The sky suggested that it was late afternoon. The wind had risen again and a great mountain of purple cloud was growing out of the sea. Max and Effingham and Alice had gone back to Riders that morni