The Unicorn Read Online Free Page A

strangely when she told them where she was going. Perhaps that was it.
     
She saw now that it was foolish and even discourteous not to have announced her exact time of arrival. It had seemed more exciting, more romantic and somehow less alarming to come at her own pace. But now that the bedraggled little train which had brought her from Greytown Junction had coughed away among the rocks, leaving her in this silence a spectacle for these men, she felt helpless and almost frightened. She had not expected this solitude. She had not expected this appalling landscape.
     
‘There’s Mr Scottow’s car now,’ said one of the men, pointing.
     
She stared through the afternoon haze at the empty hillside, at the receding shelves of yellowish grey rock, bare and monumental. Smooth segments of wall here and there suggested the twists and turns of a steeply descending road. By the time she saw the Land Rover approaching, the men had withdrawn from her in a little group, and by the time the vehicle had entered the station yard they had disappeared altogether.
     
‘Are you Marian Taylor?’
     
With a relieved sense of regaining her identity she took the hand and reassuring grip of the tall man who stepped out of the car.
     
‘Yes. I’m so sorry. However did you know I was here?”
     
‘As you didn’t say when you were coming I asked the station-master at Greytown to look out for you and to send a message with the post van when he saw you waiting for our train. The van gets to Gaze a good half-hour before the train is due. And I thought you shouldn’t prove hard to identify!’ He gave a smile with this which made the remark complimentary.
     
Marian felt both rebuked and looked after. She liked the man. ‘Are you Mr Scottow?’
     
‘Yes. I should have said. I’m Gerald Scottow. Are these all your bags?’ He spoke with a pleasant English voice.
     
She followed him towards the car, smiling and dignified, hoping that she was making a good impression. That had been a very foolish moment of fright just now.
     
‘In we go,’ said Gerald Scottow.
     
As he pushed her bags into the back of the Land Rover she saw in the shadowy interior what she took at first to be a large dog, but then recognized as a very pretty boy of about fifteen. The boy did not get out, but bowed to her from behind the luggage.
     
“This is Jamesie Evercreech,’ said Scottow, as he settled Marian in the front.
     
The name meant nothing to her, but as she greeted him she wondered if he were perhaps her prospective pupil.
     
T hope you had a decent tea at Greytown? Dinner will be late tonight. It’s awfully good of you to join us in this Godforsaken spot.’ Scottow started up the engine and the car set off back toward the twisting rising road.
     
‘Not at all. I’m most thrilled to come to this part of the world.’
     
‘Your first visit, I suppose? The coast-line is all right. Beautiful perhaps. But the land is dreadful. I doubt if there’s a single tree between here and Greytown.’
     
As Marian, who had also noticed this, was trying to think of a way of turning it into a merit, the Land Rover took an abrupt turning and the sea came into view. She exclaimed.
     
The sea was a luminous emerald green streaked with lines of dark purple. Small humpy islands of a duller paler green, bisected by shadows, rose out of it through rings of white foam. As the car kept turning and mounting, the scene appeared and reappeared, framed between fissured towers of grey rock which, now that she was close to it, Marian saw to be covered with yellow stonecrop and saxifrage and pink tufted moss.
     
‘Yes,’ said Scottow. ‘Beautiful certainly. I’m afraid I’ve got too used to it, and we have so few visitors to see it with new eyes. You’ll see the famous cliffs in a minute.’
     
‘Do many people live about here?’
     
‘It’s an empty land. As you can see, there’s scarcely any earth. And inland where there is earth it’s mostly bog. The