The Unicorn (4 page)

‘I’m no geologist, I’m afraid. I thought I might do some bird-watching, though I don’t really know much about birds either.’

‘I know nothing about birds except the kind you shoot, but you can certainly see some rare ones around here. Ravens and golden eagles and such. I hope you’re fond of walking?’

‘Yes, very. I imagine one could soon get lost up there.”

There aren’t many landmarks, on the Scarren. There’s hardly anything upright except megaliths and dolmens. It’s a very ancient land.’

The road had turned inland and was winding between shallow shelves of rock. The uncertain tarmac was beginning to degenerate into a bumpy gravelly track. Scottow slowed down. There was something dark ahead which turned out to be a little group of donkeys. Among them were two baby donkeys scarcely bigger than fox terriers. The car nosed its way up to them and they shifted lazily upon their dainty feet. A weird cry followed after.

Marian took the occasion of the donkeys to turn and look at the boy behind her. He gave her a smile of singular sweetness, but she could not make out his face.

‘They’re nice little beasts,’ said Scottow, ‘but I wish they’d keep off the roads. Fortunately there’s little traffic. Though that means too that people drive like the devil. There’s a saying about here that you’ll meet only one car in a day, but that car will kill you.’

A turn in the road suddenly revealed in the distance a big handsome house. Its appearance was startling in the midst of the naked scene and had, in the sunny mist, something of the air of a mirage. It stood high up on the seaward side, on a promontory of the cliffs, a long grey three-storey eighteenth-century house. Marian had seen several such houses already on her journey, but always with their roofs off. ‘Is that Gaze Castle?’

‘I’m afraid not. That’s a house called Riders. Our nearest neighbour. Gaze isn’t half so grand. I hope you won’t be disappointed. All the gentlemen’s residences around here tend to be called castles.’

‘Who lives at Riders?’ From the account of the available civilization it seemed that this would be a matter of some importance.

‘A curious recluse, an elderly scholar called Max Lejour.’

‘Does he live there alone?’

‘He lives alone all the winter, except for the servants, of course. The winter here is terrible and not everyone can stand it. In the summer he has visitors. His son and daughter are with him at present. And there’s a man called Effingham Cooper who always comes.’

There was a weird high-pitched noise behind her. Marian realized that the boy had laughed. She realized at the same moment that he must be older than she had guessed. That was not a fifteen-year-old laugh. She turned quickly to look at him and saw his face more clearly now. He was a pallid rather spoilt-looking cherub of about nineteen with a long head and a pointed chin. Lank longish silky fair curls hung about his brow and half obscured his long light blue intelligent eyes, giving him the dog-like appearance. He tossed his hair back, widened his eyes, and gave Marian an impish look which made her a mock-partner in his private joke.

Scottow went on, That lot, together with our little gang, account for the gentry for about thirty miles around. Eh, Jamesie?’ There was a slight sharpness. Perhaps Scottow had been irritated by the laugh.

Marian longed to enquire who ‘our little gang’ consisted of. Well, she would know, for better or worse, soon enough.

‘I’m afraid you’ve come to an awful hole, Miss Taylor. The peasants are mostly loonies, and the others are something worse.’ The boy spoke in a pleasant light voice with a touch of the local accent.

‘Don’t ever believe a word he says!’ said Scottow. ‘Jamesie is our little sunshine, but he’s a dreadful romancer.’

Marian laughed uneasily. She could not place Jamesie. She could not even yet really place Scottow.

Scottow, as if guessing her thought, went on, ‘Jamesie kindly tolerates my driving the car.’

‘Oh, is it his car?’ said Marian, and then realized her mistake.

‘Not exactly. Jamesie acts as our chauffeur and generally puts up with us and cheers us up when we get melancholy.’

Marian blushed. Ought she somehow to have known that Jamesie was a ‘servant’?

‘Here the domain begins. You’ll see a rather remarkable dolmen on your left in a minute.’

The big house was out of sight now behind a dome of limestone. The landscape had become a trifle gentler and a little dried-up grass, or it might have been a tufted lichen, made saffron pools among the rocks. Some black-faced sheep with brilliant amber eyes made a sudden appearance on a low crag, and behind them rose the dolmen against a greenish sky. Two immense upright stones supported a vast capstone which protruded a long way on either side. It was a weird lop-sided structure, seemingly pointless yet dreadfully significant.

‘No one knows who put it up, or when, or why, or even how. These things are very ancient. But of course you are a scholar, Miss Taylor, and will understand far more about it than I do. Beyond the dolmen the peat bog begins and goes on for miles. There’s Gaze now.’

As the car began to descend, Marian made out on the opposite hillside a big grey forbidding house with a crenellated facade and tall thin windows which glittered now with light from the sea. The house had been built of the local limestone and reared itself out of the landscape, rather like the dolmen, belonging yet not belonging.

‘Not a thing of beauty, I’m afraid,’ said Scottow. ‘Nineteenth century, of course. There was an older house here, but it got burnt down like most of them. The eighteenth-century terrace remains and the stables. Here’s our little river. It doesn’t look very dangerous now, does it? And this is the village, what’s left of it.’

The car slowed down to rattle very slowly over a long wooden bridge across a channel of large almost spherical speckled stones. A little trickle of water, the colour of brown sherry, forced an erratic way among the stones and spread out on the seaward side into a shallow rippled expanse bordered with tangles of glistening yellow seaweed. A few white-washed one-room cottages huddled in a disorderly group near to the road. Marian noticed that some of them were roofless. No people were to be seen. Below and beyond, framed on each side by the perpendicular black cliffs, whose great height was now apparent, was the sea, total gold. The house, Riders, had come into view again behind them. The car began to climb the other side of the valley.

Marian was suddenly overcome by an appalling crippling panic. She was very frightened at the idea of arriving. But it was more than that. She feared the rocks and the cliffs and the grotesque dolmen and the ancient secret things. Her two companions seemed no longer reassuring but dreadfully alien and even sinister. She felt, for the first time in her life, completely isolated and in danger. She became in an instant almost faint with terror.

She said, as a cry of help, ‘I’m feeling terribly nervous.’

‘I know you are,’ said Scottow. He smiled, not looking at her, and again the words had an intimate protective ring. ‘Don’t be. You’ll soon feel at home here. We’re a very harmless lot.’

Behind her she heard again the high-pitched sound of the boy’s laugh.

The car bumped over a jangling cattle-grid and through an immense crenellated archway. A lodge cottage with blank gaping windows and a sagging roof stood in a wilderness of wind-torn shrubs. The uneven gravel track, devastated by rain and weeds, wound away to the left, circling upward toward the house. After the dry rocks, the earth here was suddenly moist and black, covered patchily with wiry grass of a vivid green. Red flowering fuchsia blotched the hillside among dark dishevelled clumps of rhododendron. The track turned again and the house was near. Marian descried the stone balustrade of a terrace which surrounded it on all sides, lifting it high out of the peaty earth. There was a grey stone wall some distance beyond and indications of an overgrown garden with a few bedraggled fir trees and a monkey puzzle. The car came to a standstill and Scottow switched off the engine.

Marian was appalled at the sudden quietness. But the insane panic had left her. She was frightened now in an ordinary way, sick in her stomach, shy, tongue-tied, horribly aware of the onset of a new world.

Scottow and Jamesie carried her bags. Not looking up at the staring windows, she followed up the steps to the terrace of cracked weedy paving-stones, on to the big ornate stone porch and through swinging glass doors. Inside there was a new kind of silence, and it was dark and rather cold and there was a sweetish smell of old curtains and old damp. Two maids with tall white lace caps and black streaky hair and squints came forward to take her luggage.

Jamesie had vanished into the darkness. Scottow said, ‘I expect you would like to wash and so on. There’s no hurry. Of course, we don’t usually change for dinner here, not seriously, I mean. The maids will show you to your room. Perhaps you’d like to find your way down again in half an hour or so, and I’ll be waiting about on the terrace.’

The maids were already whisking the luggage away up the stairs. Marian followed them through the semi-darkness. The floors were mostly uncarpeted, tilting, creaking, echoing, but there were soft hangings above her head, curtains in archways and vague cobwebby textiles which hung down at doors and corners and tugged her passing sleeve. At last she was ushered into a big room full of evening light. The maids disappeared.

She crossed to the window. She had the big view across the valley to Riders and the sea. The sea was peacock blue now and the cliffs were jet black, receding to where the distant islands were again to be seen against a tawny sky. She looked and sighed, forgetting herself.

The case containing her brand-new field-glasses was slung about her neck. Still absorbed in looking, she fumbled them out. They were yet a delightful toy. She focused them upon the valley. Startlingly close the wooden bridge sprang into view, and slowly the magic circle moved up the hill toward the opposite house. She came to a wall, discerning the uneven texture of the stone where the sinking sun struck it obliquely and cast small shadows; and then unexpectedly there was a stone balustrade, like the one at Gaze, and behind it a shuttered window. She moved the glasses slowly, pausing at a group of gay deck-chairs and white table with a bottle on it. The next moment she was looking at a man. He was standing on the terrace and looking straight into her eyes with lifted binoculars trained on Gaze. Marian dropped her glasses and moved hastily back from the window. The panic returned.

‘Mrs Crean-Smith is not quite ready to see you,’ said Gerald Scottow. ‘Would you be so kind as to wait here while I find the others.’

Marian had not lingered long upstairs. Recovered from her fright, she had quickly inspected her room, appreciating the eighteenth-century writing-desk, grateful for the empty varnished bookshelves, pleased with the ancient floppy chintz arm-chairs, suspicious of the powerful bedstead whose dinted brass knobs shone like soft gold, and appalled by the extremely garrulous coloured prints upon the wall which she hoped that no one would object to her removing. She washed quickly, finding hottish water in a flowery jug and basin upon a wash-stand of green and ochre tiles. Nervously venturing out into the silent stuffy corridor, she found near by a lavatory with a vast mahogany seat, which seemed warm from generations of incumbents, and a wide shallow bowl adorned with garlands of flowers. She did not know whether to be pleased or unnerved by the discovery that it matched her jug and basin.

She changed hastily into a dress and surveyed herself in a pretty satinwood mirror. There was no long glass. She powdered her long nose and combed back her short, straight, dark hair. Her face, too crowded with large features to be called ‘pretty’, might pass, she thought, as ‘handsome’, or at least as ‘strong’. But there was also her expression to be reckoned with. Geoffrey had often told her she looked sulky and aggressive. She must not look so now. He had said once, ‘Stop thinking that life is cheating you. Take what there
is
and use it. Will you never be a realist?’ Well, whatever here there
was,
she would take it with her full and devoted attention. Perhaps the era of realism was beginning. Perhaps she had been right to think that, with her love for Geoffrey, the preliminaries were over. Yet with a sudden dreadful loneliness, a sudden nostalgia for the old affectionate vanished world, she felt how desperately she would want to be needed and to be loved by the people at Gaze. She composed her face, took what courage she could from communion with herself, and went downstairs.