The Unicorn (25 page)

She went straight to her room. The house was very silent as she came in with Jamesie, and after they crossed the threshold his chatter at once subsided and he faded away into the shadow of the stairs.

She entered the room and shut the door. It was still and bright in the room, the sun making great squares on the floor. Her clock was ticking. She had been sorry to leave her clock behind. Well, she had not left her clock behind. She looked at the room in a kind of amazement. Here it was, inhabited, fresh, not yet fallen into the staleness of absence. A jersey and some underclothes lay tossed upon one of the chairs. Yet she had intended never to return.

There was something new lying on the table, a picture post-card. She picked it up and stared at it. It represented the Velasquez picture of the Surrender of Breda. She turned it over. It was from Geoffrey in Madrid. He announced that everyone else had cried off the expedition, so he and Freda Darsey had had to go by themselves. He said he thought the Titians were really … Marian threw the card into the wastepaper basket.

She slowly took off her coat. She had so naturally and immediately been thinking about herself. But what about Hannah? They
must
know that it was not Hannah’s idea, that it had all been planned by herself and Effingham. She must explain, they must forgive. Yet why ‘forgive’? Already her mind was back in the cage. And even if they regarded Hannah as blameless, would they let
her
now stay at Gaze, since she had proved so dangerous? Would they not send her instantly away, and forbid Effingham the house forever after; so that Hannah would be punished indeed, losing her two best friends. She groaned, and the accusing image of Denis came before her. He had warned her not to meddle; why had she not listened?

She got up and walked about the room, walking fast and then stopping suddenly to think and walking again. It all now seemed a terrible mistake. She ought to have respected Hannah’s condition. And was there not a sort of fate about it all. They
could not
have passed those gates. Yet this was mad. She paused at the window and looked across at Riders. The windows were twinkling orange in the western sun. Over there Alice and Effingham were having God knows what to say to each other. Marian felt a resentful lack of interest in whatever it might be. How had Alice known anyway? Effingham must have committed some blunder; and somehow on reflection it seemed inevitable that he would. He had lacked faith. Perhaps she had lacked faith herself. All the same, poor Effingham.

She looked at her watch. It was the time when she was usually with Hannah. Would she ever sit with her again doing the good ordinary things? The narrow quiet life of Gaze, the prison life, suddenly seemed to her the best life of all. It was large enough for love. So it was large enough.

As time passed and she moved restlessly, sometimes talking to herself aloud, she became quietly aware that she was waiting for something, she was waiting for something with a deep tense excited expectation. It did not take her long to realize that what she was waiting for was Gerald Scottow’s visit.

It was nearly an hour before he came. Marian was sitting by the window, and it was getting redder and goldener now outside and darkening in the room, when he softly entered after a little knock. She rose at once.

He closed the door and moved
at
once
to
her
bed and sat
down upon it. ‘Come here.’

Marian came to him.

‘Sit down.’

She sat upon an upright chair beside the bed.

‘Give me your hand.’

She gave it to him.

‘Maid Marian, wasn’t that a foolish thing to do?’

‘Look,’ said Marian, her words all fighting to rush out together, ‘it wasn’t Hannah’s fault at all, she didn’t even know anything about it, we were kidnapping her, well not really that, we were just going to take her a little way, to show her the outside as it were, and then bring her back if she wanted to. We wouldn’t have taken her away if she didn’t want. And she knew nothing about it, nothing whatever, she tried to jump out of the car when she realized. It was all my fault really. Effingham didn’t really approve, I just argued him into it. It was all my fault. Please don’t send me away, please.’

Gerald, who was still holding her hand, turned it over and tapped the palm with one finger. His big brooding face hung over her in the twilight. He did not smile, but his eyes seemed to glow and lengthen. He said, ‘I’m touched by your anxiety to spare Effingham.’

‘Please don’t send me away,’ said Marian, ‘and please don’t send Effingham away. You must understand -‘

‘I understand all right. And of course I know that you planned this without Hannah. I think it is you, Maid Marian, who do not understand. You are very young and you know very little about life and suffering, and since people here have been very ready to become attached to you, your little head has been turned, eh? You have imagined that you know our ills and you have imagined that you have the power to cure them. But neither is the case. Eh?”

‘I was thinking only of Hannah - ‘ Marian began miserably. She could feel herself being sapped and broken as if the rigid parts of her mind and body were giving way one by one.

‘But indeed - we are all thinking only of Hannah. But it is not so easy as you seem to imagine to think about Hannah. What can you do for her, do you think, for
her
with her years and years of this solitude within her, by simply, as you say, “showing her the outside”? Do you think this would mean anything? Do you think there really
is,
for Hannah, an inside and an outside any more? You thought, didn’t you, for I can see into your little mind, that if you could pass the gateposts something would snap, something would be broken. That shows you don’t begin to see what’s in front of you. In a way of course Hannah would be upset. It would make a nasty trivial little incident to be got over, a little wound. But in an-other way, you know, she would hardly notice, she would hardly even notice.’

‘You confuse me, you confuse me,’ said Marian, near to tears. She was clinging on to his hand now. She felt she was being entangled in some dreadful coil of thoughts. If only she could find the words to bring it all back to simplicity and truth. ‘You can’t think it right to shut her up, she can’t want it really, she oughtn’t to want it, it can’t be right -‘

‘Sssh, Marian, there. There are things which are appalling to young people because young people think life should be happy and free. But life is never really happy and free in any beautiful sense. Happiness is a weak and paltry thing and perhaps “freedom” has no meaning. There are great patterns in which we are all involved, and destinies which belong to us and which we love even in the moment when they destroy us. Do you think that I myself am separated in any way from what goes on here, that I am free? I am part of it too. It does not belong to me, I belong to it. And that is the only way it can be here, because of the way the lives of several people are working themselves out, because of the pattern that is what has authority here, and absolute authority. And that is what anyone must submit to, if they are to stay here, and what you must submit to, my Marian, if you are to stay here.’

Marian’s tears were flowing, ‘You know I want to stay here -‘

‘Then I must have an undertaking from you. No more games of this kind. Will you promise? Think carefully before you answer.’

‘I promise, I promise -‘

‘Well, there’s a good girl. Come here and be more comfy, eh? And let’s mop up those tears.’ He drew her gently on to his knee.

Marian leaned against his shoulder sobbing and let him dab her face with a big white handkerchief.

‘There now. No more tears, my child. Everyone loves you here. I love you. Come put your arm round my neck, that’s better. Come, Maid Marian, no grief, this is a good moment. Lift your face now and let me see you. Let me see your pretty face, there now, let me kiss you.’ He was murmuring to her, moving his hand back over her face and tilting her head. It was almost dark in the room now. Marian leaned helplessly back against his arm, closing her eyes and seeking for his mouth.

He held her in a long hard open-lipped kiss. Time and place fell about her in a dark warm jumble and she seemed almost to lose consciousness. Then, moving her firmly back, he edged her off his knee and on to the chair, and smoothed her face over again with his big hand inside the handkerchief. ‘There now -‘

Marian got awkwardly to her feet, holding on to the back of her chair. Something seemed to have happened to her knees and she could scarcely stand up. She began to say something.

Gerald rose. ‘No more now, child. I must go back to Hannah. Some supper will be sent up to you here. Then you can give your face a good cold wash and comb your hair, and come along to Hannah’s room. Hannah will want to see you. We’re all good friends now, eh Marian?’

She mumbled assent as he faded across the room and left her. She sat down abruptly on the floor. She could not have been more defeated if he had treated her as he had treated Jamesie. Her appalled heart, her appalled body, submitted utterly.

Marian knocked on Hannah’s door. It was some time later. She had not been able to stop weeping, and had had to wash and powder her face several times over.

She entered the lighted room from the darkness outside. It seemed as if everyone was in the room, and there was a subdued cheerful murmur as if a decorous little party were in progress. The curtains were cosily drawn and the persons grouped about the fireplace were in fact holding glasses. As she advanced the forms before her were jagged and hazy; she looked for Hannah. A moment later she had a vision of Hannah’s face, swept and pale from recent tears, but wearing the peaceful ecstatic look of someone saved from a shipwreck. Then Hannah was embracing her and kissing her. A moment later she too was holding a glass which had been thrust into her hand by Jamesie.

It was not for a while clear whether anyone was really talking or not or whether the murmur was all inside her head. The golden group about her still seemed sheathed like seraphim from head to foot in serrated wings of light. Everyone seemed to have become very tall and elongated. She rubbed her aching eyes. Jamesie was indeed now saying something to her and giving her a cigarette and lighting her cigarette. She sipped the strong clean familiar whiskey.

She took in the little gathering. Hannah was standing close to Violet Evercreech and every now and then their hands entwined. Violet looked beautiful, serene and shadowed over, as if a slightly mauve light were touching her face and hair. At one point she reached out a hand, smiling, to Marian and the tips of their fingers touched in a strange salute. Marian found that she was smiling too and felt dawning upon her face the same rapt serenity which glorified the others.

Jamesie was darting round the outside of the group, filling glasses and lighting cigarettes, but always returning to the proximity of Gerald. Jamesie was exalted, drunken with some sort of exhilaration, his face beaming and twinkling as if about to dissolve into a peal of purest gaiety. He kept looking at Marian and opening his mouth as if about to call to her and then closing it again in a sort of friendly nip. He touched her arm every time he passed her by; and then he would go and brush against Gerald, returning always to stand very close to him, hunching himself a little as if in conscious collected homage to Gerald’s greater bulk.

Gerald himself beamed over the scene like a benevolent giant. He kept glancing at Hannah with a pleased look as if asking for her approbation, which she constantly gave him in quick little pleading darts of attention which seemed to express a sort of timid exhausted gratitude. What is she grateful for? thought Marian. Because he’s let me stay? Hannah and Gerald seemed like the mother and father of a united family. Gerald even spread out his arms now and then as if embracing them all, holding them all together. He looked about upon them, and when his gaze met Marian’s, it expressed a sort of bracing unsentimental pride, the sort of look a father might give his daughter when he sees her being a brave good girl. Marian said to herself, I have been accepted into the family, that is what has happened, I have become part of the pattern. That is what we are celebrating tonight. She felt a strange relief. Nothing dreadful had happened. Everything would be as usual. She drank some more neat whiskey.