The Unicorn (41 page)

‘It belongs to me. I am Hannah’s next of kin and there is no will.’

‘Well, there is a will, actually,’ said Alice, looking down. ‘Hannah made a will in favour of my father.’

Effingham opened his eyes and jerked his head up, spilling his whiskey. Jamesie got up slowly. Alice looked at her shoes and shuffled them in the carpet

Violet said at last in a whisper, ‘Your
father.
I don’t believe you.’

“Yes. She gave me a copy of it when I came over with some books and things last Christmas time. She asked me then not to tell him, and I didn’t till very lately, when I thought I should. There’s another copy with the solicitor in Greytown.’

Violet stared at her. Then her eyes became hazy and vague. ‘What a bitch she was, what a perfect bitch 1’

The words stood up in the room like an epitaph, like a monument, and there was a silence round about them. Then Alice began to say, ‘Of course, we don’t intend to accept -‘

But Jamesie stepped into the centre. He took his sister by the arm. There is no more for us to say to each other. The play is over, the Vampire Play let us call it. The blood is all shed that we used to drink. We shall go away now and you will hear no more’ of us at all and you’ll clean the house of our traces. We leave them all to you, the dead ones. You can have the house, you can conduct the funeral, yes, you can bury them and weep too if you have tears for them. They are yours now, made over to you, part of the property, all yours now that they are dead, my lord of the underworld!’

He pulled at Violet’s arm. Leaning heavily upon him she turned, her eyes still vague, and they went out of the door.

Alice began to say, ‘I’ll go after them, I shouldn’t have upset Violet like that -‘

But Max shook his head. ‘Not now -‘ Carrie closed the door from the outside.

Effingham jumped up. ‘Is that true?’

‘About the will? Yes. She left Father everything. Of course we-‘

‘Oh, shut up!’ said Effingham. He strode to the window. He wanted to yell. The sun was burning the sea, searing it with a long golden scar. The sky was a pale but cloudless blue. The battered garden was entirely still. Of course, he had not thought that Hannah would leave her wealth to him, he had not thought about it at all, he had not expected that she would die. But how grotesque and hideous it was that she had made Max her heir. Why Max, the person who deserved least of her? It was like a senseless insulting joke. Now the invasion that he dreaded had taken place indeed, and it all belonged to
him,
her desk, her dressing-gown, her decanter of whiskey, the pampas grass, Peter’s photo, everything. Effingham found himself suddenly coveting the things, and not only the little things, but the house, the acres of moorland, the stocks and shares. She had made herself into a piece of property and given herself insanely, spitefully away. This was her death, this mean thing. It was a vulgar trick.

Max said, ‘What’s the matter, Effingham?’ His voice was tired and cross.

Effingham thought, she is taken from me entirely. Max will scatter the earth upon her, Max will speak her funeral speech, Max will tell the world what she was.

Effingham said out of his immediate distress, ‘It was an unkind decision, and rather mad, don’t you think?’ He was near to echoing Violet’s epitaph.

Max said slowly, ‘It was a romantic decision, if you like a symbolic decision. Hannah was like the rest of us. She loved what wasn’t there, what was absent. This can be dangerous. Only she did not dare to love what was present too. Perhaps it would have been better if she had. She could not really love the people she saw, she could not afford to, it would have made the limitations of her life too painful. She could not, for them, transform the idea of love into something manageable: it remained something destructive and fearful and she simply avoided it.’

Alice said solemnly, ‘She could have loved
you
in presence too, father. You are the person she was waiting for. I felt this very much at Christmas. Perhaps the will was a sort of hint’

Max just shook his head.

Effingham stared at the old man, the great hollow mask, the crumpled dangling body. He said, ‘So Jamesie was right. You are the owner of her death and she was waiting for you. You
are
her death and she loved you.’

He uttered the words in a sudden angry cry. Then he felt that he must get out of the room, away from that little shut-in silken scene with Max’s hollow stare in the centre of it. He fumbled desperately at the door-handle. The maids, who were talking quietly in the ante-room, fell silent to let him pass. He ran down the stairs. He felt cornered, harassed, menaced. He was being driven out too, like Violet and Jamesie. He was being, in the course of some ruthless rite of purification, simply cleared away. He paused in the hall. Marian and Denis had moved and were sitting side by side on the floor near to the glass doors. Marian had turned her head so that her brow rested on Denis’s shoulder. They both had their eyes closed. They looked unnecessary, absurd, like some sculptured group in an auction sale. He looked at them with a shrinking disgust. They too ought to be cleared away. He moved nearer to the drawing-room door.

The sun shone on to the gleaming terrace raising a gentle steam. There was a profound quietness outside as if nature were exhausted and resting. He had not yet really understood that she was dead. He could think of her as lost, blackened, destroyed, he could think of her as transformed into stocks and shares, he could think of her as diminished into a little idea in the mind of Max, he could not think of her as simply dead. He could not think of
her
as dead, so utterly was she now veiled from him. He had been ready to feel her death as an affront, as an act on her part of unwarrantable self-assertion. Now, with the sudden intense quietness in front of him, he felt the awful mystery of her absence sweep over him like a cloud. He opened the drawing-room door.

The lace curtains were drawn and there was a yellowish light in the room. Effingham had a strange vague memory of childhood, of lying in some sick-room in summer. He saw in the engraved twilight, as in a picture by Blake, the three recumbent forms and the folds of the white sheets reaching to the floor. They seemed already like three funereal monuments. He stood quite still. They slept together now, those three entwined destinies, they lay now helpless and complete before whatever judgement there might be in earth or heaven.

There was a slight movement in the room and Effingham started violently. Then he saw in the brown shadows a little black old woman sitting hunched on a low chair beside one of the white forms. He saw the pale round of her face, oblivious of him, herself a little grotesque image of death. Her presence made the scene suddenly more personal, more dreadfully real. He looked down at the shrouded body nearest to him. It was long and large. If that was Gerald, this must be Peter, and
that
at the far end must be her. He looked at the quiet, quiet, faceless form, but he could not stir his feet to approach nearer. She was her death now, that death which she had so much striven to emulate in life, which she had studied and practised and loved. She had succeeded, and death and she had converged into a single point Who knew if that was victory or defeat? His last vision was of the white veil that hid her now. After all, and at last, she had become utterly private.

He felt no sharp grief only a rather frightened awe. He gazed down at the nearer figure. Perhaps it was here that he belonged, with Peter Crean-Smith. He felt then, like a sudden chill, a sense of ghoulish curiosity which he recognized as such almost before he knew its object What had really happened to Peter when he fell over the cliff? In what way was Peter maimed or disfigured? Effingham breathed hard. There was a smell of sea-water in the room and the carpet at his feet was damp and darkened. He felt a stirring in his hand, a desire to whisk off the sheet and see what lay beneath. But again he could not. Perhaps he feared to see, not some terrible disfigured face, but laid thereupon, like a hideous mask, the likeness of his own features.

Marian thrust the letter from Geoffrey into her pocket unopened. She went to the window wondering what time it was and how long she had slept.

The sky suggested that it was late afternoon. The wind had risen again and a great mountain of purple cloud was growing out of the sea. Max and Effingham and Alice had gone back to Riders that morning, not very long indeed after their arrival. Jamesie and Violet had driven away in the Morris, whether temporarily or for good was not known. Denis had gone to his own room to sleep. He would not let Marian stay with him. She had crept upstairs at last and lain down and dropped her brow into a pool of blackness.

The awakening was terrible. She awoke to the aggressive reddened afternoon and the sound of the wind. She got up and noticed Geoffrey’s letter which a maid must have left there heaven knows how long ago. She washed her face which was stiff with weeping as if it had been coated with enamel. She opened the door of her room and seemed suddenly to apprehend the house as empty. There were distant creakings and murmurings and shudderings but there were no human sounds. It came to her that she might have been left behind, that everyone might have gone away and left her there alone. She stood there for a while paralysed listening.

She forced herself to move at last and went very quietly down the stairs. She feared the house was empty, yet she also feared what might be behind those many many closed doors. She paused in the hall, controlling her urge to rush outside and run and run. She felt the presences in the drawing-room. She turned back, compelling herself to re-enter the heart of the house. She must find Denis.

She both needed him and feared him now. Now that he was separated from her by her action, now that he was separated from her by the special quality of his grief, she realized that she had never for a second known him. He was as wild to her as an unfamiliar animal that has briefly let itself be caressed. She could not see his mind or predict his movements. She feared him yet she needed him: to wait at his feet, to gain from him some sense of what had happened, to receive some hint or vestige of a judgement. He would protect her against the dead.

She knocked very softly on the door of his room. There was no answer and she slowly opened the door upon the twilit curtained room. Her heart beat painfully. It took her a moment to see that there was no one there. The bed was disordered, a number of drawers stood open, there were clothes scattered upon the floor. Marian retired. She ran on into the kitchen. The huge deal table had been cleared and scrubbed, but the place was empty. The big clock ticked in the interior silence. Marian called ‘Denis’, quietly at first, and then with a voice high, cracked with tears and fear. There was no answer.

She kept turning to see what was behind her. Now she retreated step by step toward the window, as if something invisible in the house were cornering her. In desperation she looked out into the garden. There was a figure moving. The figure was too starkly clear in the intense light, detached from its surroundings, the same daylight spectre that she had seen before. It was Denis, standing beside one of the fish pools and staring down into it. Marian exclaimed almost with a new fear at seeing him. Then she ran from the too empty kitchen and out through the labyrinth of damp echoing stone-flagged rooms on to the wet-slippery terrace. She nearly fell and then went on more slowly.

‘Denis!’ She was connected with what had happened only through him. Only he could set her free from the gathered dead.

He looked towards her with a vague wild look. ‘Hello, Marian. Are you feeling better?’

‘I was so frightened when I woke up, I thought you’d gone. Oh, Denis, come inside and talk to me, you must talk to me.’

He focused his eyes upon her now, frowning, a small alien man, his hair fanned up by the wind, hunched and shrivelling inside his overcoat as the wind blew. He looked down again at the dark brown rippling surface of the pool and was silent.

‘Please,’
said Marian. She took a step forward and reached out timidly to touch his sleeve.

He moved back from her. ‘Not that’ He turned his shoulder to her and knelt down beside the pool.

Marian looked at the crouching figure. Then she saw beside him a small neat suitcase, and beyond that a gaping canvas hold-all, out of which there emerged the wide mouth of a plastic bag. The plastic bag contained water and she saw a quick movement of gold in the darkness within. A small fishing net lay by Denis’s hand.