The Unicorn (12 page)

‘You mean she hasn’t been outside the garden for five years?’

‘She has not. And it was then he sent the Evercreeches to be here, they were poor relatives, and he sent them to add to the watch. They are not close, but they are her nearest relatives, after her husband, now her father is dead.’

This is an insane story!’ said Marian shrilly. She lowered her voice. ‘I don’t mean I don’t believe you. But it’s all mad. You say “I am forgetting her”. But what
about
her? Why does she put up with it all, why doesn’t she just pack and go away? Surely, Gerald Scottow and the rest of you wouldn’t forcibly restrain her? And surely there are people anyway who know about her? What about this Effingham Cooper? What about young Mr Lejour? What is he doing? What-‘

‘Mr Lejour watches and waits. He comes every summer here. He has done up the house and has brought his old father to live here. He comes and he watches. But there is nothing for him to do. And I don’t know if there is anything he wants to do - now.’

Marian recalled the man with the field-glasses whom she had so abruptly encountered on her first evening at Gaze. ‘He doesn’t - see her, communicate with her?’

‘He is not allowed to see her, and as far as I know he does not communicate with her. He could only make her situation worse, he could only harm her.’

‘But this is all absolutely appalling. What about you? Surely you can help her? Surely you aren’t on their side?’

‘What is - helping her?’

‘But I still don’t understand. Does she
want
to stay here?’

‘Perhaps. You must know that she is a religious person.’

‘What has religion to do with it? Did she - Do you think that she did really push him over?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps she does not know now. But there are - acts which belong to people somehow regardless of their will.’

‘You mean she’d feel responsible anyway? Do
you
think she pushed him over?’

He paused. ‘Yes, perhaps. But is not important to say so. She has claimed the act and one has no right to take it from her.’

‘I just can’t imagine it. Staying so long in one small place. I’m surprised she hasn’t run mad.’

‘There are holy nuns in the convent at Blackport who live forever in smaller places.’

‘But they have faith.’

‘Perhaps Mrs Crean-Smith has faith.’

‘Yes, but she’s wrong. I mean, it can’t be right to give way to that sort of thing. It’s morbid. And it’s bad for him as well as for her. Do the people about here generally know about her?’

‘The local people? Yes, they know. She is a legend in this part of the country. They believe that if she comes outside the garden she will die.’

‘They think she is really under a curse?’

‘Yes. And they think that at the end of seven years something will happen to her.’

‘Why seven years? Just because that’s the time things go on for in fairy tales? But it is the end of seven years now!’

‘Yes. But nothing is going to happen.’

‘Something has happened. I have come.’

He was silent, as if shrugging his shoulders.

‘Why have I come?’ said Marian. Her own place in the story occurred to her for the first time. The ghastly tale had become a reality all about her, it was still going on. And it was a tale in which nothing happened at random. ‘Who decided I should come, and why?’

‘That has puzzled me,’ he said. ‘I think it may be simply -some moment of compassion. Or it may be that you are to be a sort of chaperone.’

‘Who do I chaperone, who with her, I mean?’

‘Oh, anyone. Mr Cooper, for instance. He is one of the few people who is allowed to visit her. He is a harmless man. But there might now be a chaperone to make sure. Or else it might be some torture.’

‘Some torture?’

‘To make her fond of you and then take you away. I don’t know. The nicer maids have all gone. You will be wise not to come too close to her. And another thing. Do not make an enemy of Gerald Scottow.’

A prophetic flash of understanding burnt her with a terrible warmth. That was what she was for; she was for Gerald Scottow: his adversary, his opposite angel. By wrestling with Scottow she would make her way into the story. It was scarcely a coherent thought and it was gone in a moment. She went on at once, ‘But why don’t her friends - you, Mr Lejour, Mr Cooper - persuade her to come away? She can’t be waiting still for him to relent, to forgive her. It sounds to me as if she were really under a spell, I mean a psychological spell, half believing by now that she’s somehow
got
to stay here. Oughtn’t she to be wakened up? I mean it’s all so unhealthy, so unnatural.’

‘What is spiritual is unnatural. The soul under the burden of sin cannot flee. What is enacted here with her is enacted with all of us in one way or another. You cannot come between her and her suffering, it is too complicated, too precious. We must play her game, whatever it is, and believe her beliefs. That is all we can do for her.’

‘Well, it’s not what I’m going to do,’ said Marian. “I’m going to talk to her about freedom.’

‘Do not do so,’ he said urgently. ‘It means nothing to her now. Whatever you believe about her heart and her soul, even if you believe only that she is afraid of the outside world, or spellbound by mere fancies, or by now half mad, do not talk to her of freedom. She has found over these last years a great and deep peace of mind. As I think, she has made her peace with God. Do not try to disturb her calm. I think you could not even if you tried. She is a much stronger person than you have yet seen. But do not try. Her peace is her own and it is her best possession, whatever you believe.’

Marian shook her head violently in the darkness. ‘But she seems sometimes in such pain, in despair -‘

‘True obedience is without illusion. A common soldier will die in silence, but Christ cried out.’

She murmured, ‘Obedience to -?’

But their talk was over. He had risen as he spoke and she rose too. She was stiff and cold now and her clothes clung to her with a damp dew. The small moon, seeming to fly along through torn clouds, showed them the path to the house. They began to walk.

‘When did you come here?’

‘Five years ago.’

‘Were you one of the messengers, the ones Mr Lejour used to send to her at such risk?’

‘Yes. I think we had better go in separately.’

They were on the terrace now. The moonlight revealed the table where she had sat, so long ago, with Hannah. The mass of jewels were still strewn upon it, scattered with sparkling points of cold light. She paused to gather them up.

The stifling fright and sickness came back upon her as she looked up at the dark veiled eyes of the house. She murmured to him, ‘What will end it then?’

‘His death perhaps. Good night’

Effingham Cooper gazed out of the window of his first-class railway carriage. The landscape was just beginning to be familiar. Now each scene told him what was coming next. It was a moment that always affected him with pleasure and fear. There was the round tower, there was the ruined Georgian house with the dentil cornice, there was the big leaning megalith, there at last were the yellowish grey rocks which marked the beginning of the Scarren. Although there was still another twenty minutes to go, he took down his suitcases, put on his coat, and straightened his tie, regarding himself gravely in the carriage mirror. The little train jolted and swayed onward. It was a hot day.

It was nearly six months since he had been there before. But he would find them unchanged. Doubtless they would find him unchanged. He continued to look at himself in the mirror. His youthful appearance always startled people who knew him only by repute. He was still young, of course, in his forties, though sometimes he felt as old as Methuselah. He was certainly young for his achievements, young to be the head of a department. He looked at himself with an amused ironical affection. He was tall, large, with a pink face and a big firm mouth and a big straight nose and big blue-grey eyes. His hair, which was inclined to be chestnut-coloured and wavy, was sleek, tamed by years of bowler hats and hair-oil. He looked like a man; and he certainly passed, in the society which he frequented, as a clever successful enviable one. As he lifted his chin pensively to his image he recalled that Elizabeth, who was the only person who dared to mock him, had once said that his favourite expression was one of ‘slumbrous power’. He smiled ruefully at himself and sat down.

He began to bite his nails. Would something happen this time? What would have passed, when he was in the train once more and going the other way? He wondered this on each occasion, and wondered, as indeed he wondered all the year round, waking at night, or at unnerving moments in meetings or on escalators or railway stations, whether he ought not to
do
something. He was, it sometimes seemed to him, and he evaded the idea with alarm, the person with the most power, the only person who could really act. Ought he not to do something drastic? Was it not his action for which they were all waiting? It was a dreadful thought.

Effingham had known Hannah Crean-Smith for four years. He had known the Lejour family for twenty years. Max Lejour had been Effingham’s tutor at Oxford, and he had met the younger Lejours while he was still a student. Max’s wife had died when Pip was born, and Max when Effingham first knew him was so cantankerously a bachelor, it seemed that he must have invented the two children, so undoubtedly his, without female assistance. Yet the picture of Mrs Lejour, reputedly a beautiful redhead, was always to be seen on his desk. Effingham had proceeded from his first in Mods to his first in Greats and on to a College fellowship. But he was restless, and soon, to Max’s sorrow, left the academic world for the public service. He had done well, he had done very well. It was senseless now to repent of that choice.

Poor little Alice Lejour had fallen in love with her father’s star pupil on a weekend visit from her boarding-school; and to Effingham’s gratification and annoyance she had never entertained any other serious thought on the matter of love. He had patronized her when she was a schoolgirl, teased her when she was a student, and then much later on, in a regrettable moment of weakness, flirted with her: at the time when he was escaping from the clutches of darling Elizabeth. He was glad he had not married Elizabeth. It would be awkward to marry a relentless career woman; Elizabeth was his subordinate in the department. It would be awkward to marry a relentless woman. Elizabeth was far too clever; and in any case his present relations with her were perfect. He was only sorry that. he had hurt Alice, and disappointed Max, who had always tacitly wanted him to marry Alice, and entangled the poor girl yet further in a profitless love: and there they were all growing older.

Max Lejour had been a great power in his life. Uneasily Effingham acknowledged that Max was still a great power in his life. He had been completely dominated by his tutor in a way which his academic success had tended to disguise from all eyes but his own. He had taken Max without question as a great sage; and when he could himself still pass as a youth he had quite simply adored the older man. Later when, as men, they had inhabited the same world, Effingham had sometimes found himself feeling afraid of Max; it was not malice or even criticism that he feared, but simply the inadvertent extinction of his own personality by that proximity. Sometimes for a while he had avoided his former tutor; but always came back. In more recent years, during which he himself had become successful, powerful, famous, he had felt his view of Max shift again: he had permitted himself to jest at his expense, referred to him as a ‘quaint old fellow’, felt altogether his shoulder twitch as for the throwing off of a load. He found Max an abstract being, an out-of-date being, a hollow sage, and wondered loudly to himself what had so fascinated him for half his life. Yet still he came back.