The Unicorn (16 page)

‘Effie, you’re looking tired. Are you -?’

‘Stop it, Hannah -‘ He fell down beside the sofa and pawed at the stuff of her dress. She was wearing a short dress of dark green linen. He pawed at her knees. ‘Stop it -‘

‘Stop what? What’s the matter, Effingham? Here I am. Here you are. Everything is the same -‘

That’s just it. Here I am. Here you are. And everything is the same. But it oughtn’t to be the same.’

‘Why not? And do bring me some whiskey, I’m dying for it, and if you’re going to be so wild I shall need it!’

He got up awkwardly, straightening his tie, and handed her the glass of whiskey. She had tucked her feet under her now, girlishly, compact and removed, her broad severe face lifted to his. She patted the cushion to invite him to sit. It was suddenly like being at a party. Effingham still grasped at his moment of frenzy: there was surely a truth in it.

‘Hannah, we can’t go on like this. It’s all mad somehow. Well, isn’t it?’

Her face was very still now, not frozen, but still like a hovering bird. ‘You mean you’d rather not go on coming?’

‘No, I
don’t
mean that,’ said Effingham. ‘I mean we must do something, you and I, do something, even if it’s only going to bed together.’

‘Sssh. If you did feel - and why shouldn’t you feel - that all the sense has gone out of this strange incomplete love of ours -well, you know I would be sorry. But you know too that it would be better then to stop coming to see me. I could bear that, Effingham. And it might be a great relief to you. I know you worry about me. I wish I could stop you.’

‘It’s
not
that,’ said Effingham desperately. He clasped her hand between his own in a wild prayer. ‘I love you, Hannah. And I want you, and that’s no joke either. But that’s not the point. I feel we must do something, anything, to break this spell. For it
is
a spell, a spell on all of us, we’re all walking round and round in our sleep. And it’s a bad unhealthy spell. By this endless quietness we’re just killing something -‘

‘Perhaps we are.’ She released her hand and captured his, lightly stroking him across the knuckles. ‘Perhaps we’re killing something that has no right to live anyhow. Never mind. I know it’s harder on everyone else than it is on me. Another person’s illness is often harder to bear than one’s own. The other is all imagined suffering; with one’s own, one knows its ways and its limits. Are you sure, Effie, that you aren’t just, simply, wanting to go away and stay away? I can imagine how a sort of repulsion might suddenly come over you. You must be truthful with me here. Come, Effingham, the truth.’

He could hardly bear her calm commanding tone. He wanted to see her tears, to hear her cries. He needed her frenzied need of him. He began to stammer and then stopped himself. He must be cool here, as with an enemy.

‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I’m not wanting to go away, you know that. I’m wanting to do something sensible and natural at last. I’m wanting to take you away from here, to take you back into ordinary life. Hannah, let me take you away.’ He had not, when he arrived, intended to say this. Had she somehow made him say it?

‘Don’t talk too loudly, Effie. I’m sorry to have put this burden upon you. I know it’s a burden and I know it all seems to you, sometimes anyway, unnatural, unhealthy. You were something - quite unexpected, something I hadn’t allowed for - and I’ve often felt that I ought to have sent you away then, at the very start. If it were
now
I think I would send you away, I would not let such a story begin at all.’

‘Good Lord, you’re not going to banish me now!’ cried Effingham.

‘No. Sssh. You have such a loud voice. Of course not, if you really want to go on. But it
is
difficult, Effingham, it’s very difficult. I’m to blame in a way for not, from the very start, putting it in front of you as something almost impossible.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Effingham, miserably. ‘I’ve just offered to take you away. Would you come? I mean, will you come?’

‘No, of course not. And you would regret your offer the next moment, you are regretting it already. We just haven’t got that sort of life to live, that sort of love to live. We have run out of life, at least I have. I’m doing something quite different - and perhaps I ought to have made you do it too, or else have made you leave me altogether.’

‘I don’t know what you’re doing,’ said Effingham, ‘but I’m jolly certain I can’t do it, and I’m not sure if you ought to do it.’

She laughed. ‘Give yourself a drink, dear. You know I hate drinking alone. When I say make you do it too, of course it wouldn’t be the
same
thing, it couldn’t be. But I ought to have made you, in a way, suffer more.’

‘More?’

‘Yes. You suffer, yes. But I’m a story for you. We remain on romantic terms.’

Effingham stared at the freckled hand which still so sensitively and authoritatively caressed his. He had a sense of being deeply wounded, deeply accused. At the same time he said to himself, Ah if she knew how
little
I suffer! He said, ‘Perhaps I ought to have tried to do what I
could
do, and that is rescue you, help you in a quite straightforward way, or else have let you be. But I love you, and you know it’s not just a story.’

‘I am to blame. I couldn’t help wanting you to help me in a quite un-straightforward way - and at the same time I gave you no lead. I let you have your dreams. And of course I’m still romantic too. You are my romantic vice.’

‘Well, don’t reform me out of existence. Is it too late to teach me to help you in the un-straightforward way? I think after all I might try. I love you enough to try.’

‘Now I’ve just frightened you.’

‘No you haven’t. Hannah, do talk to me more frankly. Tell me about the past. Tell me what you really feel about this strange business. Let me
see
what you’re doing. Then perhaps I can be with you, as it were, on the inside -‘

‘Ah, but nobody can be with me on the inside. Nobody can
see.
That would be another illusion and a far more dangerous one. Now we are
really
tempting each other. Sorry.’ She spoke with a sudden alarm.

‘I’ve frightened
you’
he said. ‘You know it’s only old Effie, harmless old Effie. I’m quite easy to control really. I only wish I could see more of your mind. I mean - do you see - all this - as coming to an end - and how?’

‘You know, it’s odd, but I’ve almost stopped thinking in terms of time.’

He looked into her big golden eyes. She was marvellously strange to him, a fey almost demonic creature sometimes. It was for this weird unconnectedness in her, this cut-looseness from ordinary being that surely he loved her most. Thoughts of taking her away suddenly seemed unbearably crude.

‘Is it like - forgive me for being so simple - a sort of trial that you must undergo with absolute patience? Do you feel -?’

She smiled as if he had been simple indeed, uncurled her legs stiffly and rose to her feet. ‘Oh, I don’t
feel
much any more, except about very immediate matters - what’s for dinner and Denis’s fish and so on. I
have
felt frightened, guilty, many things - but not now.’

‘Then why don’t you clear out?’ said Effingham. ‘Why don’t you quietly get up and go? Not necessarily with me, but just go.’

She had moved to the window and stood there in the dusty sunshine. She looked back with a kind of surprise. ‘But why indeed? I belong here, it all belongs here. To go somewhere else would have too much significance now, it would make me be something.’

Effingham got up too. ‘I’m a dull pupil,’ he said. ‘But I think I’ve understood a little. You want me to stop being restless and romantic. You want me to be - resigned, with you - somehow, dead, with you. I can try. I’m not a fool. I know there have been consolations -‘

‘In the dreams? Yes. I hadn’t expected this sort of talk, Effie. But perhaps it’s as well. Perhaps it’s time for us to care for each other differently. Not so pleasantly, but better. With less imagination. If we can.’

‘Oh God,’ said Effingham. He felt confused and stunned, as if the process of becoming dead had started already.

‘Why, there’s Alice,’ said Hannah.

Effingham joined her at the window. Alice, with Tadg pulling hard upon his lead, was crossing the terrace with Denis hurrying after her. Gerald Scottow and Jamesie were striding up the drive loaded with game. Violet Evercreech, with a big basket, and with a black maid in attendance, was disappearing in the direction of the kitchen garden. Beyond was the view of Riders, the black cliffs, the green islands, the windy sea, with near fishing-boats and a steamer at the horizon. From a great height a silver aeroplane was coming down toward the airport. Effingham saw it all with a sort of shock. There was life, indifferent life, beautiful free life going forward. But to what, in here, had he just pledged himself?

‘And how was she?’ Max pushed the chess board aside. It was late that night. Max and Effingham had been sitting for some time now in Max’s study, drinking brandy and playing chess. Effingham, who had drunk a lot with Hannah, after Hannah, and at dinner, was feeling rather the worse for wear. He rather dreaded anyway this interrogation by Max, which occurred at the beginning of every visit. He had a sense of being put through it, and a sense, usually, of being somehow found inadequate. It recalled tutorials, it recalled his first painful-pleasant apprehension of Max as someone to whom only the best, most accurate, most thoughtful, most truthful replies could be offered. Max had been his first real glimpse of a standard. Effingham had never entirely recovered from the shock.

Max worked at a big mahogany dining-table upon which he had cleared a space for the chessboard, thrusting aside books and papers into high precarious piles which at intervals through the evening murmurously subsided or slid to the floor. At the far end of the room, beyond the expanse of the table, the dying turf fire glowed drowsily, and a single tall oil-lamp purred a pearly-yellow between the two men, showing them to each other. Layers of cigar smoke drifted up steadily past the lamp into the darkness above where the books rose in towers. A distant pale smudge was the ever-present photograph of Mrs Lejour.

Trying to be alert, Effingham picked his words carefully. ‘It’s hard to say. She seemed as usual. She was quite serene, she said nothing special had happened. Yet we had a weird little conversation.’

‘Weird? How? Brandy?’ Max’s big head loomed at Effingham as he leaned forward with the bottle. Max’s smoothly polished bald dome was divided from his very wrinkled face and neck by a neatly clipped circlet of silver-grey hair, which made him appear to be wearing some sort of exotic cap. He had with this, at first sight, an oriental air, as of one whose forebears drew back heavy curtains or mumbled interminable chants in the shops or temples of the East. Yet his carefully shaven face, the indoor colour of pale parchment, wore well enough the gentle abstracted mask of the scholar, and only those who knew him very well ever thought they could see anything else looking through. His big nose had thickened and coarsened with age, sprouting vigorous little tufts of black hair, and his mouth had spread and moistened, but the blue eyes were still almost cold with clarity. His hands, which had inspired Effingham as an undergraduate with irrational fears, were big too, hairy, with broad flat paw-like fingers. He was a large broad man, but round-shouldered and cramped with arthritis and stooping over books. He rarely left the house now.

‘She made some sort of appeal to me. I think.’

‘You think? You’re not sure?’

‘Yes, I am sure. But I don’t know quite what the appeal was, and perhaps “command” is a better word than “appeal”. I got rather emotional and said I wanted to take her away. I didn’t mean to say that, it just came out. She said no in an evasive sort of way. Then she accused me of being just romantic about her and said I ought somehow to have entered more into her own experience of the situation. Then she said of course I couldn’t really enter in and it was dangerous to think that too. Then I said it wasn’t too late and I would try to enter in. Then I said what the hell was her experience of the situation anyway. Then she made some remark about not feeling guilt any more and not feeling anything any more. Then I said I’d do my best to be less romantic and more resigned. And then there was a diversion and we talked of other things.’