The Unicorn (33 page)

The warm sea wind was risen and blew over them now bringing a salty leafy smell of the autumn. It blew over the wide greenish surface of the salmon pool, rippling it a little, and blew on toward the solitary places of the bog. The evening air thickened about them and the heather began to glow.

‘Denis.’

He turned again, giving her his full face, still sad, still pensively elsewhere. Marian edged forward until her knees touched his. Then she took his hand, then his arm, and leaning forward a little awkwardly she kissed him on the lips. She withdrew a moment. His face was calm now, with a dignified serenity which made him very present to her. Then, edging well up to his side, she kissed him again, holding him longer and letting one arm creep round his shoulder. His lips were closed and unresponsive, but he looked at her still with a solemn detachment which was neither hostile nor surprised.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Marian. ‘I didn’t expect this. I see these things can happen suddenly. I didn’t believe it when you said about Gerald and Jamesie.’ She added, ‘I think I’ve wanted to do this for some time, only I couldn’t
see
you properly.’

He still stared at her. Then he closed his eyes and began to rub the back of her hand to and fro against his brow, uttering little grunting sounds.

Marian felt suddenly pierced and transfixed by tenderness for him. Her first movement had had a sort of abstract purity about it. She had seized him because she must, and emotion, refined to some point of extreme necessity, was scarcely something felt. Now came the torrent of feeling. She drew him close against her shoulder and saw above the black cherished head the salmon beginning to rise.

He was helpless and silent in her arms. She shifted them both into a more comfortable position, her knees leaning against his thighs, and then moved herself back a little so that they could converse. This was freedom, the freedom to love and move which she had so terribly lacked. She was deeply shaken by the suddenness and beauty of it. This at last, after what seemed an interval of stifling in some tapestried room, of simply looking at herself in a mirror, was the real other, the real unknown.

‘Denis, look at me. How old are you? I’ve often wondered.’

Thirty-three.’

‘I’m twenty-nine. Denis, you’re not angry with me?’

‘Marian, Marian –’ He looked at her and his face was full of hollows and shadows. His eyes were narrowed to dark slits which showed no flash of blue. He moved slightly back, stroking her hand as if to control and conciliate it. ‘I didn’t expect this either. I don’t know what it is. But I am glad of you, I have been glad of you from the start.’

‘And now we are, as it were, released to each other.’

He smiled. ‘It sounds like a mating of animals.’

‘We are animals.’ She felt this to be true for the first time in her life. She desired Denis.

‘We are a little mad today, Marian, because of what has passed. Let us go back now.’

‘Not yet. You don’t want to, do you?’ He lowered his eyes and she saw that he did not. ‘Dear, dear Denis, perhaps we are a little mad, but it is a mad place and a mad time. And I feel much more real with you than I do with any of the others.’ Or indeed with anyone else at all, she suddenly felt. This encounter was the unclassifiable encounter that liberates. Always before she had been a kind of person meeting a kind of person. But she did not know what Denis was, and this ignorance cast a darkness back upon herself which made her quiver with reality. They were two unique things meeting one another.

An orange glow from the west was spreading over the zenith and the salmon pool had turned to a sheet of gold which the rising fish fretted with darker rings. Marian still stared at Denis and saw his eyes gradually widen for her. He was wearing his usual faded blue open-necked shirt, and he looked shabby and young and hard like a lad following a tinker’s cart. There was a marvellous equality in the way she was able to meet his still rather suspicious gaze. Still sitting as they were, knee to knee, she began to caress his head, drawing her hand down over his cheek and his neck. She undid the top button of his shirt and let her hand slide down inside. He trembled.

His eyes became vaguer, and then without haste he removed his hand and laid his arm across her throat, forcing her back into the heather. He lay full length beside her, his shoulder covering hers. He did not attempt to kiss her, but pressed his closed mouth against her cheek. She felt the hard pressure and the continued trembling.

Marian looked up past the dark head at the high orange sky with its little scarfs of fiery cloud. She felt a great blank joy and with it a sense almost of free playful gaiety.

‘Denis, I do love you. I’ve never felt like this. Don’t tremble so. You’re not frightened, are you? Denis, tell me, how many girls have you had?’

He withdrew his lips from her cheek, but did not otherwise move. ‘How many – how do you mean?’

‘How many girls have you made love to, been to bed with?’

‘None.’

Marian’s gaiety left her, but her joy darkened and deepened. She still looked at the sky. Her desire became deep and quiet and solemn as if something from the bog, something not hostile but very old, were hovering over them, presiding over the rite.

Denis went on, since she was silent. ‘It is not the custom here – to do those things – if one is not married.’

Marian was silent still, not for unsureness of her feelings, but for very sureness. She would let the words find their own way out. She said at last. ‘I said that I loved you. Perhaps I still don’t know what I mean. But I do know that for me this, now, is well, is good. And I have never really felt this before. I feel totally innocent. It is the first time. But it may be that it would not be right for you, not innocent for you –’

The silence between them was serene, almost sleepy, inert as their two bodies.

‘What – are you wanting?’

‘Whatever you want – anything, this. I feel we are like children together.’

He raised himself a little and looked at her. Then he began to fumble awkwardly with the neck of her dress. She helped him.

Later, much later, when his darkness moved above her and she saw stars overhead she heard him murmur very softly, as if to himself, ‘Ah, but we are faithless, faithless.’

‘Marian, I think I must be honest with you. And please forgive me if I cause you pain.’

Marian listened distractedly to Effingham. They were standing at the window of the drawing-room. Hannah would be leaving the house any moment. She knew this not from any definite intelligence, but from a sense of increasing urgency, a sense of climax which pervaded the rooms and the stairs and trembled upon the terrace in the morning sunshine. Several times she had thought she heard the engine of the Land Rover.

Last night she had returned, not very late, with Denis, to find that all was as before. They were both relieved, and determined now to stay inside the house until the end. Denis had gone away to his own room, and she had leaned for long upon her window sill, watching the full moon, a great golden globe, rising over the sea, and she had watched it until it had become a flat silver plate high up in the blue black sky, and the sea was almost dazzling, barred with light.

She had wept tears of a sort of exhausted broken joy. With the return to Gaze she felt again her connexion with the house and with the drama it had contained. But she felt towards it rather as one who is leaving a theatre after some tragic play, worn, torn, yet rejoiced and set free with a new appetite for the difficult world. Heaven knew what she had landed herself in with Denis. But what would be would be. She had never, she realized, really felt before that certain recklessness of love; and that she was now suddenly, unexpectedly, genuinely in love she did not doubt It had been no momentary magic of the salmon pool. Denis was real to her, mysterious, awkward, unfamiliar, infinitely to be learnt, but real

They returned to Hannah, to the hidden Hannah, with a sort of bold shame. They did not speak of her, and Marian did not know or ask exactly what Denis felt. But she herself felt as if her pity had been, as it were, purified by gratitude. It was almost as if Hannah had sent them forth together, had released them from their former bond, had absolved them. In the breaking of the seven-year vigil it was not only she who disappeared into a terrible liberty. Her servants too were amazingly set free.

‘What did you say, Effingham?’

‘I said I must speak frankly to you. Will you forgive me?’

She must talk to Denis soon about what they would do next. Marian could not see that it was necessary in any way that they should stay at Gaze until the arrival of Peter Crean-Smith. They had no moral obligation to Peter; and Marian was, when she thought about it, more than a little afraid of this dark figure. She had had enough tragic drama. Her encounter with Denis, for all its surprisingness and oddness, had so much of the feeling of coming into real life. What would be enacted between herself and Denis she could not foresee: she was prepared for difficulties, she was prepared for pain. But this would be the real business which one human being has with another. She felt obscurely that if they waited until Peter came they might become involved in some further pattern of magical events. If they waited until Peter came they might be unable to leave Gaze. They must flee sooner. But first they had to attend, as kneeling figures at the fringe of some sombre procession, upon the departure of Hannah.

‘Yes, do talk, Effingham. Is it about Hannah?’

‘Well, not exactly. Marian, I hope you won’t think me irresponsible and mad. I’ve known Alice for a very long time-‘

‘Yes, Effingham?’ Was that Denis now? No, it was Jamesie, tripping along the terrace. She glimpsed his face for a moment and it looked strangely, even wildly happy. She had not, it occurred to her, seen Jamesie since yesterday morning, when he had looked so gaunt and tearful. Perhaps the departing Hannah had dispensed to him too some gift of joy.

‘I suppose I had better explain, tell you everything. Yes, it will be a relief to do so. A relief in many ways. Even if yon find me hopelessly – disappointing.’

‘I’m sure I won’t do that, Effingham. What is it?’ When Hannah had gone she would make Denis play the piano and sing. There would be a time for tears then.

‘Ah, I’m sorry. You understand so quickly. But let me say it all in order. It will be a sort of confession.’

‘Yes, Effingham?’ Whatever was he talking about? If only Hannah would go. That was a moment of suffering, a moment of birth, that must be gone through before the new life could be born.

‘My love for Hannah – you might have asked me
then,
the night before last, what I made of it, and whether I was being faithless –’

‘Faithless,’ said Marian. She caught at the word. ‘We are all faithless.’ She said it objectively, with a pain which had its place, which was not confusing.

‘You
are not faithless, Marian dear, sit down and look at me properly. I know I’m causing you pain.’

They moved from the window and sat down in two of the big humpy sagging armchairs beside the fireplace. Charred logs and mounds of feathery ashes strewed the hearth. Marian looked at Effingham. His fair hair was still wispy and tousled from the morning breeze and his big face was pale and shiny with tiredness; and with something else. There was a vague wild look in his eyes which Marian could not place. She began to attend to him.

‘I loved Hannah, Marian. I
love
her. Oh, I could give all kinds of explanations of that love, but they would insult her and be always less than the truth. I loved her and there were a great many things I might have done for her. I certainly suffered for her. And I would have suffered more. You believe that?’

‘Of course –’ Marian was distressed and troubled by the urgent confessional tone.

‘I can’t really explain or justify what happened. I know now that I never at all had the measure of Hannah. Perhaps none of us had. Perhaps none of us tried to have –’