Free The Unicorn by Iris Murdoch Page B

a row of bottles and order herself a drink: old rites, familiar and greatly missed.
     
The last few days at Gaze had been exceptionally somnolent. She had started reading La Princesse de Clèves with Hannah and they had almost fallen asleep over it at eleven o’clock in the morning. The wind had been blowing, producing the aching restlessness of which Hannah had spoken. Gerald Scottow had been unobtrusively absent, had unobtrusively returned, had continued to be polite, dignified, charming and totally unapproachable. Violet Evercreech had been intense and attentive but had not yet again proposed the ‘little talk’. Alice Lejour had been silent. Marian had reflected long and vainly about why the Lejours were never mentioned at Gaze. She had scanned Riders frequently through her glasses and had once or twice seen a youngish man and a dog on the terrace. Feeling today lively and more than usually liberated from shyness, she resolved to question Jamesie about a lot of things before the journey should be out.
     
‘You don’t come from around here, do you? I mean, have you got fairy blood?’
     
‘No. I’m one of the other lot.’
     
‘Of course - you’re related to Mrs Crean-Smith.’
     
‘Distantly.’ He gave his little weird cry of a laugh.
     
The car descended steeply into a ravine where the road, behind a low buttressed sea-wall, almost skirted the waves. Marian felt an unpleasant thrill, almost like a sense of guilt, at the sudden proximity of the sea. She had not tried to swim again. She looked hastily inland up a hazy tree-entangled gully. A bright line of trembling light was a distant waterfall.
     
‘A pretty place.”
     
‘A rather nasty place, really. It’s called the Devil’s Causeway. There are some very funny-looking rock forms, further up, you can’t see from here.’ He added, ‘Something dreadful happened there on the night of the flood.’
     
‘What?’
     
“That little river you saw, like our river at Gaze, came suddenly roaring down from the bog and carried away a car from the road and threw it into the sea and everyone was drowned.’
     
‘How awful. Were you here when the flood happened?’
     
‘No. But Mr Scottow was.’
     
‘How long has he been here?’
     
‘Seven years.’
     
‘I suppose there’s no danger of it happening again, something like that?’
     
‘Oh no. The lake had gone, you see. You must go up on the bog sometime, to the edge anyhow. It’s pretty up there in a funny way. The local people are frightened of it, of course. They only go there in broad daylight to cut turf. Then if the sky becomes at all overcast they run. The bog certainly turns very queer colours.’
     
T expect they think their relations live there!’
     
‘I expect they do live there. I wouldn’t go up there in the dark myself for any money. There are strange lights. Anyway, unless you know the paths you can sink into it. There are brushwood paths, but you can get sucked down. A man was sunk in the bog two years ago. They heard him calling all night, but no one could get near him and he sunk in and died.’
     
Marian shuddered not only at the tale but at some relish in Jamesie’s telling of it. The boy was not all sunshine.
     
‘I suppose Denis Nolan is a local man?’
     
‘Yes, he’s one of them. He’s not really here at all. He’s one of the invisible ones. We call him the invisible man. His father was a gillie at Riders.’
     
‘At Riders, really? I met Miss Lejour the other day. She said she’d invite me over to Riders when someone called Effingham Cooper arrived.’
     
‘That’ll be a treat! Was she very full of Effingham Cooper?’
     
‘Well, now that I come to think of it she did mention his name quite a number of times. Are they - engaged, or something?’
     
Jamesie laughed shrilly. ‘Not at all. Though I expect she wanted you to think sol She’s been making herself a fool about Effingham Cooper for years, everyone knows it. And he doesn’t care for