The Unicorn (23 page)

The ‘music’, while simple enough, turned out to be more ambitious than Marian had expected. One or two of the handsome redheads from Riders were to be seen sitting in the group of servants near the piano, and one of these, a big girl called Carrie, had opened the programme by playing with little expression but great correctness a small piece of Mozart. This had been applauded frenetically; and Marian, although she had grave and painful matters on her mind, could not help being rapt into the touchingly absurd and endearing atmosphere of an amateur performance. She smiled and clapped with the rest, catching Hannah’s eye. It was hard to believe that all in this cheerful little family party was not as it seemed.

The next item was a performance by two of the black maids of Gaze upon a sort of stringed instrument which Marian had not seen before, rather resembling a Jew’s harp. The noise was twangy and confused, but not unpleasant. Everyone liked that too. Then another pair of black maids sang songs, one in English and two in their own language. The songs were pretty and sad, the voices thin. After that there was a pianola performance. Marian had not noticed that the grand piano had a pianola attachment Operated by another maid, the pianola played, a little jerkily in places, the Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven.

Marian had not expected this assault upon her feelings. She had expected to be embarrassed and touched, but not to hear any serious music. Marian was not musical and on the whole shunned musical occasions. She did not understand music and it upset her, it had only sad, tragic things to say. These leaping forms, these pursuits and insistences, these elusive desperate repetitions, always seemed to her like one long cry of agony. She could not, in this company, allow herself the luxury of self-pitying tears, which was her highest tribute to the art. She looked about her and let the music gather to her the people with whom she was so deeply concerned.

The gentry were seated in a semicircle stretching across the middle of the room from the fire to the open windows. The circle was curved enough for everyone to be able to see everyone else, and there was a lot of polite exchanging of nods and smiles during the applause. The relations of the inhabitants of Gaze were, in public, remarkably formal. Hannah sat in the middle. She was wearing the mauve silk evening-dress and a collar of blue stones. She looked very young in the soft light. Effingham was on her right, on the side nearest the fire and Jamesie next to him in the bright glow of the logs. Gerald sat on Hannah’s left, and Violet a little behind her. Marian sat near the window. Denis, who didn’t count as gentry, was sitting, one leg crossed over the other, against the wall. Alice had been asked but had pleaded a cold. The maids were scattered, some near the piano, some behind the semicircle. Some very large men, whom Marian had not seen before, were standing at the back near the door.

Marian raised her eyes cautiously. The music, almost unheard now, had drawn her into a solemn meditation wherein she must try, so much more deeply, to understand these people for whom she suddenly felt responsible. Jamesie was looking enchanting, wearing a sort of Teddy boy evening-dress composed of tight black trousers, dark blue corduroy coat, white silk shirt, and purple choker. He had sleeked his curly hair well back and looked older, his long bony face, from which the light of play and mockery had been withdrawn, grave and in repose. His gaze, which had been cast down, lifted quietly to rest upon Gerald. He looked, as if taking a long draught, and looked away again. Marian recalled Denis’s words about Jamesie having changed. He had been broken and remade by Gerald Scottow. With a long internal shuddering sigh she looked now at Gerald. His big face looked brown and southern and he inhabited his evening clothes hugely and yet with ease. His slightly bloodshot brown eyes glowed reddish in the hazy light. He was looking up, his expression quite serene, and yet he was patently not listening to the music. He turned his head slightly and caught Marian’s eye. Something went through the middle of her like a shot and she looked away. Gerald might be untamable, unattainable, taboo; yet he was still for her the centre from which the furies came.

She now turned her gaze upon Effingham. Dear Effingham. Dear, dear Effingham. Dear, dear dear Effingham. What was she saying? Able now for a moment to contemplate him, as he sat there large and round and bland in the hurly-burly of the music, Marian measured how deep was her sense of relief at having Effingham upon the scene. The more dangerous that scene appeared to her, the more she needed Effingham; for he was one of her own kind. She would indeed need him, and for most precise services, she would need him now to drive the car: if she ever carried out her plan. At that moment Effingham looked at her and smiled. Marian smiled back, warmed by a sudden rush of affection for him; and found herself reflecting that it was perhaps something of a pity that the rescue of Hannah was so likely to be equivalent to the definitive withdrawal of Effingham from circulation.

Yet how seriously did she intend her rescue plan? Was it not merely a dream? Hannah was a provoker of dreams, her many shadows fell round about her in the fantasies of others; and the plan of the rescue, which had seemed the product of plainest sense and reason, was already beginning to look a little crazed. The very solidity of Marian’s only possible confederate made her idea now seem flimsy. It was not just that she would never persuade Effingham to help her; his very mode of being, felt as so kin to her own, now made her lose confidence. The whole notion was too mad: it must figure as but one more of those lurid private consolations which those concerned with her plight continued to generate about the unconscious and unconcerned figure of Hannah.

The music came abruptly to an end. There was clapping, and Marian, startled and shivering a little with cold beside the open window, turned her head and saw behind her the stony figure of Violet Evercreech. Violet, who had been clapping, had her hands held up before her in an attitude of prayer. She was looking at Hannah. Marian looked away quickly. The strange guilt which she had always felt before Violet had been a shadow of which she now confusedly apprehended the sub-stance. With what hope of good or malicious intent toward confusion and chaos, out of what love or what hate, had Violet spoken to her today? For Violet too had her fantasies, her own version of an imperfect and frustrated love.

Denis had moved to the piano. There was some expectant whispering, and Marian’s embarrassment returned. She blushed already on Denis’s behalf. She looked down at the floor while in a profounder silence he touched the keys. Then he began to sing. Marian lifted her head. With a relieved surprise, with a strong shock of pleasure which drove all other thoughts from her mind, she realized that Denis had got an exceedingly beautiful tenor voice.

There was a slight nervousness in the first notes, but then with confidence and authority the rich sound took possession of the room. Nothing is more beautifully and acceptably self-assertive than good singing. The sound filled and honeycombed the collected room, making the rapt audience one with itself, a great golden object rising slowly through space. The song ended, and after
a
homage of acute silence there was rapturous applauding. Marian exclaimed aloud, and found that several people were looking at her, evidently enjoying her surprise. She leaned forward to exchange looks with Hannah, smiling and nodding her head.

The song had been simple enough, a local ballad sung to a sad monotonous little tune. There followed two Elizabethan songs full of grieving intervals and grave spondaic cadences. There was in the singing an elusive sense of drama, a mounting atmosphere, as if the audience were sitting forward in their chairs ready to participate in some marvellous transfiguration. Yet Denis himself seemed by now almost invisible, so much had he made sound sovereign over vision.

He began another song. She knew it slightly, had heard it somewhere long ago.

O what if the fowler my blackbird has taken?
The roses of dawn blossom over the sea;
Awaken, my blackbird, awaken, awaken,
And sing to me out of my red fuchsia tree.

O what if the fowler my blackbird has taken?
The sun lifts his head from the lap of the sea -
Awaken, my blackbird, awaken, awaken,
And sing to me out of my red fuchsia tree.

O what if the fowler my blackbird has taken?
The mountains grow white with the birds of the sea,
But down in the garden forsaken, forsaken,
I’ll weep all the day by my red fuchsia tree.

As the last notes died away, in the breathless moment before the crack of the applause, there was a cry of pain. Hannah was sitting with her head thrown right forward in her lap. It looked for a moment as if she had been physically struck. Then she gave a moan, lifted her face and covered it, and there followed the sharp rhythmic wails and gasps of a hysterically sobbing woman. The applause, which had begun uncertainly, faltered to silence and was succeeded by a rising murmur of voices.

Marian stood up. People all round her were getting up and either hurrying forward toward Hannah or else retreating from her with a sort of fearful respect. In the centre the dreadful sobbing continued. As Marian moved she caught a glimpse through the throng of Denis, who was standing by the piano, looking down at his hand on one of the keys. She tried to get to Hannah and had almost reached her when she was thrust aside. The tall figure of Violet Evercreech loomed and swayed over the little group in the centre where Effingham distractedly and Gerald with a kind of sympathetic annoyance were patting and exhorting Hannah from either side. Violet said, ‘Get up.’

Hannah rose, still hiding her face, and let Violet lead her away stumbling toward the door. The hubbub rose as people pushed each other back out of the way. The bowed, weeping figure seemed to inspire fear as well as pity. They shrank from her. The door closed behind the two women. A moment later, from farther, and then farther, away in the house there arose a sort of howl, the scarcely human cry of a soul in agony.

Marian found that there were tears upon her cheeks. She looked around for Effingham and saw that he was standing beside her. He instantly took her hand and led her toward the open window. There was a desperate childish spontaneity in their departure together, as Marian’s last glimpse of the room took in the figure of Denis, seated now by the piano, frowning, his eyes closed, and the alert, interested glance of Jamesie as he observed her flight with Effingham. Gerald was giving instructions to two of the maids. He still wore his air of annoyance. The noise subsided behind them. The musical evening was at an end.

There was no moon, but the stars gave a kind of light. Effingham held on to her hand as they half ran across the terrace and over the drive and on to the soft peaty grass among the fuchsia bushes. At last they stopped in the middle of the blackness and the stillness and turned to face each other.

‘Oh, Effingham -‘ The cold sea breeze chilled her cheeks where the tears were yet coming.

‘Marian,’ said Effingham, and there was a coolness, even a coldness, in his manner which affected her with an increased sense of the violence of the occasion, ‘You were quite right.’

‘Right-?’

‘Your reaction was right, was the right one. The rest of us have been bewitched. We must get her out of this.’

Marian reflected; and I was just about to become bewitched too. She said, ‘Yes. We have thought her sane when she was half mad and serene when she was in torment.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Effingham. ‘She has achieved a kind of peace, a kind of centre for herself - it’s not just an illusion. But it suddenly seems to me that the whole structure is just too dangerous. There are these - awful cracks. And she might lose her nerve.’

‘What would happen then?’

‘I don’t know. I’m just suddenly terrified. We’re all eating her up somehow, all of us. It’s got to stop. I suggest we do exactly what you proposed, the other day - take her off in the car and hope to God she won’t want to come back.’

‘All right,’ said Marian. Her teeth were suddenly chattering with cold and fear. ‘Shall we fix the details now?’

‘No. You must go back to her now. She mustn’t be left with Scottow and Violet tonight. Come to Riders tomorrow afternoon. Of course, I won’t tell Max or Alice.’

‘Nor I anyone. Goodnight, Effingham.’

They stood staring at each other’s darkened faces. Then in a quick movement they drew together, once more like frightened children, and without kissing hugged one another fiercely. Marian thought, soon we shall leave them all behind, soon we shall be off on the road together, Hannah and Effingham and I.

The day had come. They had been over the details a number of times and there seemed to be nothing now which could possibly go wrong. The main uncertain factor had been the weather and that, as Marian rose early from a sleepless bed, seemed likely to be perfect.