The Unicorn (32 page)

‘Alice!’ She did not heed him. Perhaps she had not heard. She went on steadily from rock to rock, sure-footed and without haste, towards the sea. Effingham stumbled after her. His feet splayed and slithered upon the golden weed which heaved and popped and breathed under him like a sea animal. When he had caught up on her a little she stopped abruptly upon the brink of a brown pool and turned to face him. The acknowledgement of his presence forced him to stop too and they regarded each other.

She looked at him, not with any expression of intensity, but moodily, morosely, almost crossly. There were tears or sea spray upon her face. The breaking waves were near now and he could see behind her the hypnotic movement of their nearing lines. ‘Alice -‘ He said it with an imploring confidence. He wanted to clasp her, to reward her, to make certain of her protection. She was turning away from him again; and as he was slipping upon the next rock and saving himself with outstretched arms, she put her hands in her pockets, took another step, and hurled herself full length into the pool.

The shock of her sudden movement made Effingham stumble to his knees. By the time he had got himself up and reached the edge, all was strangely quiet again, the surface rippling a little and Alice lying immersed in the pool, her head resting against a gently sloping rock at the far end. The scene, wrapped about by the loudly roaring waves, had a weird stillness, as if Alice had lain there already a long time, a fish-like sea goddess, brooding since antiquity in some watery hole.

She lay there so still, reposing in the brown weedy pool, her head and shoulders raised against the rock, her hair darkened by the water and quietly dripping, that Effingham thought for a moment that she might have struck the rock and become unconscious. But her eyes were open. He stared at them, remembering Hannah’s eyes. He looked down, paralysed and fascinated, as at something suddenly metamorphosed. He could not speak to her now, she had made herself too much other. Yet he noted how grotesquely her hands were still in her pockets, the soaked collar of her tweed coat turned up about her neck, her clothed body disappearing between the reddish stems of flowery seaweed. Shells glittered like small jewels on the floor of the pool, and he remembered the woman of shells that he had seen laid out upon Alice’s bed.

The strong sun cast his shadow upon the pool. He must find his way to Alice. The sides of the pool were too steep and high for him to be able to reach down and touch her. He stood on one leg and took off one shoe. The action seemed grotesque. A seagull passed his head with a shriek and flashed out to sea. He pulled off his sock, removed the other shoe and sock, and then took off his watch and put it in one of the shoes. He took off his jacket and began to loosen his tie. He paused. Something in the ritual of the actions touched him and he felt a sensation which he identified almost at once as sexual desire. Well, was he not going to bed? Without undressing further he began to slither down the side of the pool.

The water was warm and thick with weed. Effingham sank into the brown gluey liquid, on his side now, his head descending close to Alice’s. He felt his clothes resist and then drink. Now he was soaked and heavy. His face was close to hers now, their brows almost touching, as he edged his shoulder to the sloping rock. He seemed to intercept Alice’s vague gaze. She showed no intensity, looking at him quietly with a sort of casual dignity, her hands still in her pockets. He did not try to raise her yet. He leaned towards her and kissed her on the lips. She was calmly ready for the kiss. As he touched the new Alice he was obscurely aware that something was broken, someone had gone: but he could not at the moment remember what or who.

‘How much farther is it to the salmon pool?’

‘Another mile maybe. Shall we go on?’

‘Yes, please, Denis. Anything to stay out of the house.’

Hannah was still there; but her trunks were packed and Marian had hourly expected to see her departure take place, like the carrying out of a coffin. It seemed probable now that she would leave on the morrow. The sensation was indeed very like that of having a dead person in the house.

It was only the evening of the day which had dawned so violently, but everyone at Gaze seemed to have been changed as by some vast tract of experience. Marian had waited about, slept a little, waited about, hoped to be summoned, feared to be summoned, decided to go to Riders, decided not to go to Riders, tried the door of Hannah’s old room and found it locked, sat for an hour on the stairs, retired to the drawing-room with Denis, and at last, in a sick frenzy to get out of the deadly atmosphere, set out with him for a walk.

She had wept earlier in the day but felt, for the moment, a sort of mad calm. She was almost surprised at the completeness with which she despaired for Hannah. And yet, was it despair? She had wanted Hannah to leave the house and Hannah was leaving the house. The due time had passed and the princess was going to be rescued. Did it matter so much how and by whom? She had felt it, in the night, to be appalling that Gerald, who had watched over her for so long, should so suddenly and easily, in her moment of need, have taken her. While her other friends, who had protested so much, had simply not known what to do for her. But Gerald’s long vigil was perhaps the very thing that had mattered, and that had made him, at the crucial moment, more real to her than the others. Gerald had had no theory about Hannah. Gerald had not been paralysed by an allegory. It was right after all that he should be the wondrous necessary man.

However that might be, everything would be different for her now, and her end was in darkness. She moved from one mystery into another. As the huge endless day went on, Marian felt less of the horror and more of a sick sadness of a more selfish kind, her own sense of a total deprivation of Hannah; and it was a part of this pain that she said to herself: I did not love her enough, I did not
see
her enough. Hannah would need her, would ask for her, no more, and there was some justice in this. Still later in the day, as a grotesque and unnerving consolation, came a weird feeling which Marian identified, though not at once, as a re-awakening of her sense of freedom. It was exhilarating though not altogether pleasant. She felt light-headed, giddy with exhaustion and freedom, not exalted, not guilty, almost at moments foot-loose and ordinary. Hannah’s great act of destruction had indeed transformed the world.

Marian supposed that she had better start packing her cases too. Yet the sense of a strange interval, almost of a holiday, was too strong. Everyone sat about drinking tea. The maids abandoned work and invaded all parts of the house, chattering in their own language. No ordinary meals were served. Marian wondered vaguely what would happen when Hannah was gone and they were all left behind. Perhaps they would stay on in the house like a pack of witless abandoned servants, quarrelling among themselves. They would stay there till Peter Crean-Smith arrived, and he would whip them into the stables and change them into swine.

‘Go on telling me about the salmon, what they do.’ Marian asked this as much to distract Denis as to distract herself. He had been in tears, she thought, in the morning, and was in some deep mood of desperation now. He had been touchingly anxious to stay near her all day.

‘Well, when they are about two or three years old they leave the pools and go down the rivers to the sea. And they live in the sea for maybe three or four years – people don’t really know, I think, and particular ones may stay for longer in the sea. And they eat and eat and become big powerful fish. Then one spring they come back up the rivers to spawn, and come back to their own birthplaces.’

‘Up a river like this one? How can they? You’d think they’d be dashed to pieces on the stones.’

‘Some of them are. But they have great strength and cunning. Both are needed to move upward against such a power coming down. It is nature against nature. I have seen one trying to leap up that waterfall there and banging himself on the rocks and falling back, and then at last he leapt sideways on to those stones at the edge, and wriggled along on the land and got himself into the water above the fall. They are brave fish.’

‘Brave fish. Yes. I remember Hannah saying that once. She said their going up the rivers was like souls trying to approach God.’

‘They are certainly possessed by a strange desire.’

‘But to suffer so much –’

‘Suffering is no scandal. It is natural. Nature appoints it. All creation suffers. It suffers from having been created, if from nothing else. It suffers from being divided from God.’

‘Yours is a melancholy sort of religion, Denis. I’m afraid I don’t believe in God.’

‘Ah, you do. But you do not know His name. And I who know His name am only the better of you by one little word. Here is the salmon pool.’

They paused. By a trick of the land, the sound of the waterfalls was, as they came over the brow, quite cut off. The sky ahead was greenish with the evening and gave a green tinge to the big expanse of unrippled water. Hooded crows rose from the heather and took to slow flight casting a fugitive reflection. Ahead at the flat horizon was the dark line of the bog, and a little to the left, far off against a pinker evening, the lop-sided figure of the distant dolmen. Otherwise there was just water and sky and heather and silence.

Marian breathed deeply. She was tired with the hard ascent But the place had some power too which took her breath away. She felt a sudden embarrassment with Denis, as if they had entered a church and must now talk in a different key.

Denis seemed to notice nothing and was picking his way along the heathery verge. He was saying, ‘There’s a place here, where you can usually see them. Don’t come too near the edge though. Here, if you crawl out and lie on this stone. Make no sudden movements, that’s right. Now look into the shadowed places. Wait. Now do you see them, the big fellows?’

Marian lay down cautiously on the stone which projected a little way into the pool. There were dark ledges beneath it and the water seemed deep and very brown now that one was close above it. She looked down for a while but could see nothing except the speckling of the light in the dappled water. Then the speckles seemed to assemble into scales. A great form passed by like a shadow. Then another. The deep brown world was filled with slow majestic silent forms.

‘Do you see them now, Marian? Those are the big fellows. Thirty and forty pounds, some of them. Please God they’ll be left alone.’

Marian suddenly could not endure it. She pulled herself back off the stone into the dry crackling heather. Denis was sitting near, his arms about his knees, his eyes still straining after the fish. Marian felt that she was going to weep. To prevent herself she turned directly to look at Denis. He turned his head slowly in a moment to look at her and she saw against the green eastern sky his bony face of polished bronze, his jagged blue-black hair, his long eyes of sapphire blue, his sad lost face, his face of a man from altogether somewhere else. She said, ‘Whatever could we have done for Hannah? Forgive me for having been a coward.’

He frowned with distress, quickly looking away again. ‘There is nothing. Since she – gave herself – away.’

‘I feel this too, but it’s quite irrational. Still I suppose there’s nothing to be done now. We must just be glad she will be gone – when he comes back. You said yourself that she must not be there when he comes. Well, she will not be there.’ Marian thought with a sort of shock, shall I be there? She pictured Peter approaching and approaching.

‘Yes, but not like that. Ah, she should have kept herself away from him, she should have kept herself!’ The little cry shook with jealousy. Yet it seemed also the primitive word of some untouched puritan.

‘I suppose somehow or other he deserved her. And somehow or other we did not.’

Denis shook his head. ‘She has destroyed herself.’

‘Or set herself free. Time will show.’

Well, she is gone, thought Marian. And whether she will be free or destroyed I shall probably never know; and that is as it should be. No one should be a prisoner of other people’s thoughts, no one’s destiny should be an object of fascination to others, no one’s destiny should be open to inspection; and for a moment with her pity, she felt almost a resentment against Hannah for having so totally fascinated her. Then she thought again, I did not love her enough. Then she thought, she is gone into privacy, she is gone, and now we can all see each other again. She lifted her head and felt the giddy sense of her returning freedom. She stared at Denis. And a second later, quite suddenly, she knew that she was going to do what Alice Lejour had done.