The Unicorn (13 page)

With Pip Lejour his relations had been intermittent and uneasy. Pip was Alice’s junior by four years and had come more slowly over Effingham’s horizon. Pip, as a schoolboy, had settled down to making fun of Effingham as soon as Alice’s passion had become evident; and Effingham suspected that, like his sister, the boy was consistent. Yet he was fond enough of Pip and had tried several times to help him with his career. Pip was unfortunately obsessed with the notion that he was a poet; but persuaded by financial need and Effingham he had eventually turned himself into a competent journalist. One thing that seemed clear about him was that he would never actually
do
anything; and it was with interested surprise that Effingham learnt from Alice of Pip’s amorous exploit and its curious consequences. Pip had, after all, altered the face of the world; hardly for the better, but he had at least altered it

Max’s retirement came a year or two later and he removed himself to Riders to finish in seclusion his immense work on Plato. He suggested to Effingham that they should revive their old custom of ‘reading parties’ and that he should come and stay and that they should read Greek together. Effingham was pleased: he enjoyed reading Greek with the old man; he looked forward to the holiday, he looked forward to the scenery, he even looked forward to Alice, who would then be on leave from the horticultural institute where she now worked. He was less pleased, on arriving, to find Pip there as well, mooching on the terrace and surveying the other house through his glasses in a way which made Effingham mink at first that there was something afoot. However, there seemed to be nothing afoot. Pip was respectful, Alice was tactful, Pip went fishing, Alice went hunting for plants, Max was eager to settle down to the
Timaeus.
The sun shone without ceasing upon the noble coast and the gorgeous sea. Nothing, it seemed, could prevent his stay from being delightful: nothing except the disturbing proximity of the imprisoned lady.

Alice had of course told Effingham the outline of the story, and of course it had intrigued him. A sort of interest in it had been part of his pleasure in the idea of coming. But now that he was here it was different. The lady obsessed him, she took away his calm of mind, he even began to dream about her. He took walks in the direction of the other house, though without daring to come very near, and spent long periods staring at it from his window, though without overcoming his distaste for the fascinating notion of using field-glasses. He decided that either he must go away or else something must be done. Yet what could be done? The Lejours never mentioned the lady; and their silence made a frame in which her image grew and grew.

What happened eventually happened without any decision. Effingham, walking late one evening on the cliffs beyond Gaze, missed his way and was overtaken by twilight. When he had been thoroughly lost for some time in the sheep runs between the cliff edge and the bog, and was beginning to be the least bit apprehensive, he fell in with a man who turned out to be Denis Nolan, who set him in the right direction. There was only one tolerable path, so they went on together. As they neared Gaze a great storm came on and it was natural for him to take refuge in the house into which Nolan invited him with an ill enough grace. News of his presence was brought to Hannah, who at once summoned him to see her.

Effingham was of course, as he had hundreds of times since told himself, stripped, prepared, keyed up, attuned, conditioned. No space-man about to step into his rocket was more meticulously fitted to go into orbit than Effingham at that moment was ready to fall in love with Hannah. He fell. It seemed in retrospect, as he tried to recall that meeting which was now so curiously confused in his memory, that he must have fallen literally at her feet and lain there gasping; though in fact doubtless there had been a polite conversation over a glass of whiskey. He left the house an hour later in a dazed condition and walked about nearly all night in the rain.

The rest of his stay at Riders passed in a sort of cloud of altercation and confusion and misunderstanding. He could not conceal his condition. Indeed, with that pride which accompanies falling in love at what passes as an advanced age he was but too anxious to display it to everyone. He had supposed that the clever Elizabeth was the great love of his life. But the odd spiritual tormented yet resigned beauty of Hannah seemed to him now the castle perilous toward which he had now all his days been faring. Regardless of the pain he caused, he gave way to positive raving. For he did cause pain most comprehensibly to Alice, who was disembowelled by agonies of jealousy; comprehensibly too to Pip, whose present feelings about Hannah Effingham did not understand, but who was probably distressed, even angered by Effingham’s outrageous passion; and more obscurely to Max, who seemed distressed not on account of Alice, for he had long ago stopped hoping that Effingham would marry his daughter, but oddly on account of Hannah. Max had not attempted to establish any social relations with the other house; but Effingham reflected later, when he was able to think, that of course the imprisoned lady must somehow have occupied the old man’s imagination too.

Effingham passed two days in torment and then he went to see Hannah again. He went to the front door and knocked. He was admitted. He saw her alone. He declared his love. It was done. Hannah was startled and gently scandalized without being exactly astonished. Yet he knew that he
was
a surprise, and not only to her. She did not know how to deal with him and kept seeming to look round him and past him to see how he could fit into the scene. Meanwhile she surrounded his passion with a haze of vague deprecatory chatter which was both caressing and suffocating. She said she could not take him seriously. She hinted that he was not
persona grata.
She told him laughingly to go away. And she held his hand at the moment of departure with a sudden desperate look of appeal. He called again. And again. Nothing happened. Hannah became less agitated, more friendly, less wild, more polite. As they thus became acquainted with each other he feared at each moment the intervention of some outside force. But it did not happen. For some incomprehensible reason his visits were tolerated.

They never came, however, very near, never too near. When Effingham had stopped being afraid about not seeing her, he began to be afraid about what to do next. He did not understand her situation, he did not understand her state of mind, and there was in her attitude to him a certain determined vagueness. The absent husband began to haunt his dreams. He pictured him lame, blind, full of hate. He would like to have known what really happened that day on the cliff top, he would like to have known what really happened altogether, but it was unthinkable to ask Hannah. He said to Hannah, frequently at first, ‘Let me take you away from here’; but without saying anything clearly, without saying anything at all, she returned him a negative. It was evident too, without words, that he could not become her lover.

Effingham contrived, that summer, to be in a frenzy. He prolonged his leave, he got special leave, he quarrelled with the Lejours, and was always on the point of moving to the fishing-hotel at Blackport, but did not. He was in a frenzy; yet, as he had to admit afterwards to himself, or rather to Elizabeth, in a way he rather enjoyed it. And in a way he was, even then, deeply afraid of the possibility of really having to take Hannah away. He returned at last perforce to his work, regarding the situation as unresolved, and wrote carefully allusive replies to Hannah’s open friendly letters. He assumed her mail was censored.

He returned at Christmas; but already the drama had taken on a certain settled form. Hannah was glad to see him, the Lejours were glad to see him; he had his place. He fell into accepting it. He was to be in love with Hannah, he was to be Hannah’s servant, he was to come running back whenever he could, he was to be tolerated by everybody, he was to be harmless. Harmless indeed, he reflected, was what they, whoever exactly they were, had put him down as being from the start. But how harmless was he really? He had certainly done nothing yet. And he had to continue to admit to Elizabeth, who had some sharp-witted things to say on the subject of Courtly Love, that the situation rather fascinated him as it was. It had undeniably the qualities of a wonderful story. And as he sat in his office dreaming of Hannah he found himself feeling a certain strange guilty pleasure at the idea that she was, somehow, for him, shut up, reserved, sequestered.

He felt later, when he considered the quality of his resignation, that he had caught it positively from Hannah herself. She was, in some mysterious way, it seemed, totally resigned, almost as if she were condemned to death or already dead. The moments of appeal were wordless, ambiguous, superficial, and rare. Some kind of surrender underlay them. What kind of surrender, what kind of resignation, he could never come quite to decide: whether she had given in to Peter, or to Duty, or to God, or to some mad fancy of her own; whether it was a great virtue in her or a remarkable vice. For it was certainly something extreme: something which, he began increasingly to think, he ought not to try to disturb with flimsy ideas of happiness and freedom.

The Lejours were glad to see him, had forgiven him. Max had got over his first curious distress and seemed now to welcome, with a straightforward curiosity, Effingham’s privileged access to the other house. Alice had equally recovered from her first pains, and although retaining a certain stiffness about the whole subject, was, Effingham suspected, glad in a way to see him, if not hers, at least chained to an unattainable other. Alice had never stopped being afraid of Elizabeth. The attachment to Hannah brought Effingham to Riders and kept him single. What exactly Pip thought remained a mystery; there was in his continued haunting of the place something morbid which unnerved Effingham, and at moments he imagined that Pip derived some positive satisfaction from the spectacle of the beautiful imprisoned creature. However that might be, Pip was tolerant of Effingham’s role, although the old dangerous schoolboy mockery could often be seen just vanishing from his mild and non-committal gaze.

The train began to slow down and Effingham’s heart quickened, with the delight and fear of arrival. Surely he was harmless and surely all would be as before; and yet too each year he had the sense of moving a little closer to the centre, whatever the centre might prove to be. He put his hand on the door. A dazzling sunshiny haze hung like a curtain over the little derelict station where a single figure was waiting on the platform. Dear Alice. Poor Alice.

‘There’s a new girl over there called Marian Taylor.’

‘Over where?’

‘Over
there,
Effie. She’s been engaged as a sort of companion for Hannah. She’s quite educated, and used to teach French in a school or something.’

‘How do you know all this? Have you been calling on Hannah? Bless you for that.’

Alice had in the last two years set up a tenuous visiting relationship with her rival which rather pleased Effingham.

‘No. I just couldn’t bring myself to call. I don’t know if she knows I’m here. Denis told me.’

Alice maintained, toward the delinquent Denis, a protective attitude which Effingham found incomprehensible and irritating. He could not think how she could bear to see the little rat after that incident.

‘Oh. Hannah said something vague in a letter about a girl, but I thought it was a maid. I’m glad she’s got some more female company. Since you’re falling down on your job.’

‘It’s not my job. As you know, I only went to see Hannah out of curiosity. I don’t dislike her, one couldn’t, but we just don’t get on. Anyway, it’s a bit improper. But this girl, yes. Pretty and so nice. You must meet her, Effie. I said I’d ask her over.’

Alice is jealous already, thought Effingham, as he listened to her over-urgent tones. She sees every woman as a menace, as after me. The idea of every woman after him was not displeasing. ‘Where did you come across this girl?’

‘She was down on the beach trying to pluck up courage to get in the sea, but she didn’t manage it.’

‘Sensible child! I hope you haven’t been swimming again?’

‘No, I’ve given up swimming since I got to look like a porpoise. That reminds me, I dreamt about you last night. We were swimming together. And not just swimming. Yes. Never mind.’

It was odd, the life one lived in other people’s dreams. He wondered if Hannah dreamt about him. He had never asked her.

‘You
are
a little plumper. But it suits you.’ Poor Alice was now getting really thick-set: a stout, tweedy, doggy middle-aged woman. Perhaps being a professional gardener made one look like that anyway: all that stooping with feet wide apart.

They had just arrived in Alice’s Austin Seven from the station and they were in Effingham’s bedroom. His big suitcase was half unpacked on the bed. He noted with affectionate annoyance the mess of bric-a-brac with which Alice had lovingly adorned his room: shells on the mantelpiece, china cats and dogs, small and useless cushions, embroidered mats, and chipped saucers out of fine tea-sets. Devoid of taste, Alice was an indefatigable hunter of antique shops, from which she would come home laden with small cracked objects which she had got triumphantly cheap. Alice was mean with money. And her domestic activities had the air of a sort of elephantine play. Perhaps that too was something to do with being a gardener. ‘How nice you’ve made my room. And what a lovely little thing of wild flowers. Are they bog flowers?’