The Unicorn (36 page)

‘Hannah, you are talking wildly.’ Marian did not wish to be rushed along so fast, not so fast, and not in this direction at all. Yet Hannah was not speaking in an excited tone. She was regarding the fire and twisting her hands as if delivering some sober much-debated judgement

‘It was your belief in the significance of my suffering that kept me going. Ah, how much I needed you all! I have battened upon you like a secret vampire, I have even battened on Max Lejour.’ She sighed. ‘I needed my audience, I lived in your gaze like a false God. But it is the punishment of a false God to become unreal. I have become unreal. You have made me unreal by thinking about me so much. You made me into an object of contemplation. Just like this landscape. I have made it unreal by endlessly looking at it instead of entering it.’ She rose as she spoke and wandered to the window.

Marian saw her, a dark figure now against the grey rain. Gerald had entered the landscape and made it real. But what would happen to it now? What
was
there, in that strange desolate landscape? Marian had risen too. She said rather harshly, ‘But you
have
suffered –’

Hannah turned, and her face, touched by the distant lamp, seemed to glimmer and tremble against the dark grey window. ‘You all attributed your own feelings to me. But I had no feelings, I was empty. I lived by your belief in my suffering. But I had no real suffering. The suffering is only beginning – now.’

And Gerald is its instrument, thought Marian. She was already, as if affected by some strange drug, beginning to see new patterns, new colours. She shook herself. The idea that Hannah was mad shot across her mind like a meteor and disappeared. It was herself she must keep a hold on. In desperation, but quietly, she said, ‘Hannah, you are the most sublime egoist that I have ever met’

‘Am I not after telling you just that?’ The voice was very like Denis’s. And with the deliberate aping of the local brogue Hannah laughed briefly, and Marian laughed too.

She moved to join Hannah at the window and together they looked out at the legendary landscape. As she watched the rain falling on the wrecked garden and on the dull grass slope and on the gleaming streaming black cliffs and on the sullen iron-grey sea, Marian felt a shock of despair, a shock of mortality, as if Death were passing close before her face and, not yet ready to take her, had blown a chill breath into her mouth. The rain fell into the dark fish pools with a jumpy jerky rhythm. Would she have to stay here with Hannah perhaps forever? The real suffering was only beginning now.

As Marian looked down the lines of the rain confused her eyes, so that she could not at first make out whether something which seemed to be happening below were not just some trick of the grey uncertain light. There was a movement, an unrolling of dark shapes. Then she saw that two figures dressed in black oilskins had emerged on to the terrace and were standing there together, looking ahead as if waiting for something. She recognized them from their stance and from the particular way that in standing they seemed to belong together, like a sculptured group, as Gerald and Jamesie. Hannah too stiffened, watching them. The two women looked down in silence.

A minute or two later, materializing out of the blanket of rain, a grey darkness gathering out of the sheeted greyness, another figure appeared, slowly approaching. Hannah gave a soft exclamation, a little gasp or cry. Marian stared at the unfamiliar figure. It was also wrapped up in a mackintosh with a cape over the head. Then with a gasp too, and as she turned in a terror of surprise to Hannah, Marian recognized it. It was Pip Lejour, and he was carrying a shotgun.

Denis leaned against the door. ‘Will you see him? Shall I let him in?’

Hannah was still standing by the window. She had not moved when the figure of Pip entered the house. She was still looking out at the rain. She spoke over her shoulder. ‘So Gerald – didn’t mind.’

‘Mr Lejour was very determined.’

‘Is he outside now? Let him in. No, wait a minute.’

She turned back to the room, drawing the silk gown closer about her and re-tying the cord. She went to one of the mirrors and looked at herself. She did not touch her face or hair. ‘Let him in.’

Marian moved toward the door. ‘Wait, Marian, I want you and Denis to stay here while I talk to – him.’

Marian looked at Denis, but his face was frozen, grim, his face of a mountain man, of a partisan, and he would not look at her. With a sense almost of physical danger at what was to come Marian retired again to the window, getting as far away as she could. Hannah sat down on an upright chair, turning it a little towards the door. Denis opened the door.

Pip had taken off his coat but he still carried the gun. His boots were thick with mud and a smell of rain and earth and sea, a smell of damp tweed, entered the room with him. For all his rough country clothes, he looked slim, elegant, feline, or with his small sleek head and long neck, like a beautiful snake. He took a step or two, and stood before Hannah, very straight, soldier-like. Denis closed the door softly and sat down against it on the floor.

Pip and Hannah looked at each other in silence for a long time, he reflectively grave as if before a great picture, she gloomy, almost morose, taking her eyes off him, glancing about, returning.

‘You don’t mind my coming?’ It was a cool question, as if he had been with her yesterday.

‘Of course I mind. What do you want?’

To take you away.’

‘Why do you say this now? You could have come and said this at any time in these years. You have been here often enough, watching me. Marian, my cigarettes please.’ Her tone was calmly irritable. But when Marian lit the cigarette Hannah’s hand was trembling so much that the operation was almost impossible.

‘It is different now. There is no point in your staying now.’

‘You are brutal.’

‘Not that. I am not going to witness what happens next Everything has changed now. When I go away from here now I shall never come back. But I want to take you with me.’ He spoke softly and rhythmically as if with the authority of a priest.

‘Some things may have changed, but my intentions have not changed.’ She answered him with an equal resonance, leaning back in her chair, one arm drawn back, one foot extended. Their still figures were connected by lines of force which made them seem without witnesses, a closed capsule of quiet violence.

‘You can’t do it again. It is all spoilt now. Don’t deceive yourself, Hannah. You are
tired.’

She closed her eyes and the truth of it for a moment seemed to weaken her. ‘You say it is spoilt
now.
What was it before?’

He was silent for a moment. Then he turned and leaned the gun against the desk. He crossed his arms, looking down on her, and seemed to reflect as if for the first time on her question. ‘Does it matter exactly? You attempted something which was too difficult.’

‘Well. Now I am going to attempt something even more difficult –’ The cigarette was singeing her hair. She drew her hand away. The smell of burnt hair drifted through the room.

‘No, no. You
cannot
do the thing that you intended. You simply do not know how. Come out through the gates into the real world.’

She was silent as if she had been listening to him attentively. Then she said conversationally, ‘With you?’

‘With me. I have had my own vigil, Hannah, the counterpart of yours. And I have learnt on the last day what I should have known on the first day. Come.’

‘And what would we do,’ she said in the soft voice of someone listening to a story, ‘if we were to go out of the gates together?’

Pip gazed at her. The mere sound of the hypothesis uttered in her voice seemed to make him glow as with some imminent metamorphosis. He grew not tenser, but looser, like a ballet dancer about to move. ‘We would decide that – when we got outside. We would decide it as people in the world decide things, considering this and that, considering possibilities. You know that you could dismiss me forever as soon as we were away.’ A smile lightened for a moment behind the sad poised mask.

Hannah sighed a long sigh and looked away from him. ‘I doubt if you really want this. But why do you think you deserve it?’ She spoke as a queen, one who highly disposes of herself.

‘I am the only one who has loved you and not used you.’

‘What were you doing all these seven years if you were not “using me”?’

‘Waiting for you to wake up. You
have
woken up. You are awake now. Come, move, act, before you fall asleep again.’

‘You think Gerald woke me up?’

Pip unfolded his arms and opened his drooping hands before her in a gesture of prayer. ‘I have a right –’

‘You mean if someone’s going to have me it may as well be you. Perhaps it was you that Gerald awakened!’

She said it brutally, and for that second Marian, watching from the window, stilled and almost without breath, saw her not as a queen but as a great courtesan, saw her, she suddenly thought, as Violet Evercreech saw her: a woman infinitely capable of crimes.

Pip looked at her, and the dignity of his face dissolved into supplication. Then he moved. Everyone in the room flinched. But he merely stepped forward and fell on one knee. There was still a space between them. ‘Don’t ask what it meant for you, for me, that interval. Fold it away. You loved me once. Call up the remnant of that love. It is your only hope of life.’

Hannah was silent, in repose, staring at him thoughtfully, as at a beautiful boy brought to judgement She did not seem so much debating as contemplating.

Marian could not bear it. She said in a clear voice, ‘Go with him. Your clothes are still packed. Tell Denis to go and get the car. You are mistress here.’ She moved up behind Hannah’s chair. Denis had risen and moved forward too.

Hannah and Pip went on looking at each other as if no one had spoken, and a moment later Marian wondered if she had uttered the words only in her mind. The immobility continued; and then Hannah began to move and fidget. It was like the moment after the host has been lifted, when the silence of adoration is quietly broken. When she spoke it was in the old irritable almost whining tone. ‘No, Pip. I wish you hadn’t come. It’s no use.’

Pip rose slowly where he was. ‘Why not?’

‘I thought it would never matter. I thought I would never see you again. You may not have used me, but I have used you.’

‘No, no –’ he said softly, putting her words away with a gesture.

But she went on, fidgeting with the neck of her gown, turned now a little toward the rainy window. ‘I suffered too much for you. At the beginning. The suffering did not end in me. I thrust it back towards you in resentment. If you do not understand that, you are a dupe of the story after all. Did you expect me not to blame you? Did you expect me to go on loving you? Did you expect me not to curse you?’

He said quietly after a moment’s silence, ‘Yes, I think I did expect these things.’ to watch me. Go away. Go away, as you said, from Riders and don’t ever come back. Go, go, go!’

He looked down at her and his face became quiet, as if she had receded from him into the remoteness of art. Tears gathered in his eyes and he blinked to release them. They were large still tears such as men weep in solitude over beautiful things. To weep like that over a human being was a most desolate homage.

He began to withdraw slowly, collecting himself towards the door. He paused. ‘Shall I send my father to see you?’ The question seemed detached, the beginning of another subject.

Hannah rose, and anger and resentment inhabited her whole person. ‘No! What have I to do with your father? Let him keep to his choice and leave me to mine. Go.’

Denis began to open the door. Pip had paused and had turned back as if he might implore her again. Then Gerald entered.