The Unicorn Read Online Free

emotional collapse proves that she can no more perform the functions of such a pure being than she could be Beatrice, the image of love and beauty, for Effingham. But as Alice genuinely embodies an aspect of the good when Hannah abandons it, so Hannah’s suffering passes on to someone in whom it may after all be quenched, Denis Nolan. At the end, he explains to Marian that for him the sequence of events has been that when Hannah gave in to Gerald Scottow, he let himself be driven mad by jealousy: that this was why he was faithless to Hannah in giving in to Marian’s offer of love: that this drove him further into madness, so that he was not there when Hannah needed him, and so that the hatred which he felt, originally on Hannah’s behalf, for Peter was released and he murdered him. He goes off, like Harry in The Family Reunion, to come to terms with his guilt. All his explanations are too perfunctory: it is as if he cannot explain to Marian, or Iris herself cannot create in him, the Catholic and Christian presumptions about penitence and redemption which we are led to suppose lie behind his final departure. Marian is left to think of him as he goes as the last flicker ‘that showed the light through from that other world which she had so briefly and so uncomprehendingly inhabited.’ She thinks of him, like the other inhabitants of the appalling land, as having fairy blood, as being impossibly strange. But in a moment she sends the golden dog Tadg, whom Alice has brought, after him, and the sight of ‘the golden dog streaking upwards in pursuit of the man until both were lost to view in the saffron yellow haze near the skyline’ of the bog is the nearest thing we have in the book to a resolution of its symbolism about the sublime and the beautiful, guilt and unselfing. The departure of a man into a spiritual life which does after all have a story, the story of a significant suffering and redemption, is the best resolution, better even than Effingham’s vision, even if one still wants to hear that story too.
     
In her immediately succeeding novels (The Italian Girl is said to be an earlier piece of writing) Iris picked up some of the unfinished business of The Unicom – the imagination of a Catholic’s thoughts about redemption with Barney Drumm in The Red and the Green, the relation of the icon of the Trinity to the world in The Time of the Angels, the vision of love at the point of death in The Nice and the Good. Barney Drumm seems to me the most successful of these: the other two seem merely bleaker than their equivalents in The Unicorn. But The Unicorn seems to handle most richly that tangle of feelings which P. D. James records from Iris in her Time to be in Earnest: ‘Oh I’m a Christian. I don’t think I believe in God and I don’t believe Jesus Christ was divine, but I am a Christian. I nearly became a Buddhist, but then I said to myself, “Don’t be foolish, Iris. You’re a member of the Church of England.’” P. D. James wonders if she remembered this accurately: but it sounds entirely characteristic.
     
[I have to thank Professor Norman Vance for tracking down Charles Dalmon for me, and Professor A. M. Allchin for pointing out the relevance of The Bell to icons]
     
Stephen Medcalf
October, 2000
     

T HE U NICORN
     

Part One

Chapter One
 
     
“How far away is it?”
     
‘Fifteen miles.’
     
‘Is there a bus?’
     
“There is not.’
     
‘Is there a taxi or a car I can hire in the village?’
     
‘There is not’
     
‘Then how am I to get there?’
     
‘You might hire a horse hereabouts,’ someone suggested after a silence.
     
‘I can’t ride a horse,’ she said in exasperation, ‘and in any case there’s my luggage.’
     
They stared at her with quiet dreamy curiosity. She had been told that the local people were ‘friendly’, but these big slow men, while not exactly hostile, entirely lacked the responsiveness of civilization. They had looked at her a little