Free The Unicorn by Iris Murdoch

you?’ In some way she could hardly bear the bat either.
     
‘There’s nothing I can do for it,’ said Nolan. He picked the bat up quickly with one hand, gently. His hands were small and very dirty. He put the creature in a box on the table.
     
‘Help yourself to some whiskey, Marian. Have you brought the books? Good. I hope you won’t mind waiting a few minutes. Denis is just going to cut my hair.’
     
This surprised Marian. She had connected Nolan, in so far as she had thought of him at all, with the out-of-doors. She had thought of him as something rather elusive and muddy to be associated with the mysterious horses which were kept somewhere at the far end of the rhododendron slope. She would have thought him ill enough fitted to the role of valet de chambre.
     
Nolan seemed rather embarrassed and surly at the prospect of a witness. Hannah Crean-Smith, however, had settled herself into a chair and drawn a towel round her shoulders and there was nothing for him to do but to begin. He picked up the comb and scissors and began to handle the plentiful mass of red-golden hair.
     
Marian felt embarrassed too, as if she were being forced to be present at too intimate a rite. Yet she noticed with a sort of admiration the feudal indifference with which her employer treated the odd little occasion.
     
Nolan was surprisingly competent. Once he had started, his face softened into a dignified intentness as he flicked the silky stuff this way and that and snipped at it busily. The bright golden clippings furred the towel and sifted quietly to the floor. Marian observed for the first time that he was quite a good-looking man. The dry shaggy locks of blue-black hair framed a firm, ruddy, small-featured face, wherein now the surly look could be seen as a look of cautious watchfulness. And then there were the very striking eyes. Marian met them now with a sudden shock as Nolan, aware of her scrutiny, took her gaze for a moment over the red-golden head. His glance was like the flash of a kingfisher. She shifted her attention hastily to Mrs Crean-Smith’s face. It wore a dreamy expression.
     
‘I really don’t know what I’d do without Denis.’ Mrs Crean-Smith, her head immobile under the still-active scissors, reached a hand back and took hold of Nolan’s tweed jacket. Her hand nuzzled into his pocket. Marian looked away. Her averted gaze took in the photograph upon the desk.
     
‘You’ve been singeing your hair with those cigarettes again.’
     
‘I am bad, aren’t I!’
     
Marian had noticed the curiously frizzled appearance of the front hair.
     
That’s done now.’ Nolan whisked away the towel and shook the cuttings into the fire, where they flamed up. He knelt and gathered the pieces from the floor. As he grovelled at her feet, Mrs Crean-Smith caressed his shoulder with a light almost shy touch.
     
Marian was troubled. Yet the scene had a great naturalness about it and she sensed that it had happened, somewhat like this, many times before.
     
‘Now my shoes and stockings. I may want to go out later.’
     
Nolan brought her stockings and watched expressionlessly while, with a hint of petticoats and suspenders, she put them on. Then he knelt again to put on her shoes.
     
Marian saw that the soles of the shoes were unworn. She said, in order to break the silence which distressed her, ‘What pretty new shoes.’
     
“They are not new,’ said Mrs Crean-Smith. They are seven years old.’
     
Nolan looked up at her.
     
Marian had again the rather uncanny feeling of puzzlement with which her employer often affected her. She could still not make out whether Mrs Crean-Smith were not somehow ill, or convalescing from some grave ailment. The way the people of the house treated her sometimes suggested this. The idea had also at one point come into her mind, put there by something scarcely definable in Gerald Scottow’s manner, that Mrs Crean-Smith might be not always, entirely, absolutely right in the head.