The Unicorn Read Online Free Page B

nearest settlement is at Blackport, and that’s a miserable fishing-village.’
     
‘Isn’t there a village at Gaze?’ Marian asked, her heart sinking a little.
     
‘Not now. Or scarcely. There used to be some fishermen’s cottages and a sort of inn. There was a bit of moor up above and a lake, and a few people would come for the shooting and that, though it was never fashionable. But the place was killed by a big storm some years ago. The fishing-boats were all lost and the lake came flooding down the valley. It was quite a famous disaster, you might have read about it. And now the moor is just another piece of bog, and even the salmon have gone away.’
     
Marian thought to herself, with a sudden foreboding, that perhaps Geoffrey had been right after all. They had looked at the map together and he had shaken his head over it. Yet Gaze had been marked in quite large letters and Marian had been sure it must be a real civilized place with shops and a public house.
     
Elation and despair had so fiercely ebbed and flowed in her during the last month; she realized now how naive it had been to envisage her journey’s end as the beginning of some sort of happiness. Her love for Geoffrey had not been her first love, but it had had the violence of a first occasion together with a depth and a detail which come from commerce with the judgement. She was no longer, after all, so young. She was very nearly thirty; and her sense of her life hitherto as a series of makeshift stage-setting preliminaries had made her the more rapaciously welcoming to what seemed at last an event. Totally disappointed, she had faced her loss with fierce rationality. When it had become clear that Geoffrey did not and could not love her she had decided that she must go. She had been settled, perhaps too settled, in her job as a schoolmistress. Now it was suddenly plain that the same town, the same country even, must not contain herself and him. She admired in herself this ruthlessness. But she admired even more what came later: how, after she had ceased wanting to blot him entirely from her mind, to make him not to be, they had found that they could after all talk good sense and kindness to each other. She was, then, consciously generous. She let him console her a little for the loss of him; and had the painful gratification of finding him almost ready to fall in love with her at about the moment when she, amazingly, disgracefully, was beginning to recover.
     
She had noticed it quite by chance, the curious little advertisement Geoffrey had told her teasingly that she was simply impressed by a grand name and a vision of ‘high life’. She was attracted indeed by the name, Gaze Castle, and by the remote and reputedly beautiful region. A Mrs Crean-Smith was advertising for a governess with a knowledge of French and Italian. A high salary was mentioned; suspiciously high, Geoffrey said, even considering it was a lonely place. He had been against the plan; partly, Marian felt, with a rueful tenderness for him, out of a kind of jealousy, a kind of envy, at seeing her so soon whole again and ready for adventure.
     
Marian had written, naming her qualifications, and had received a friendly letter from a Gerald Scottow. Correspondence followed, and she was offered the job, but without having found out, or quite liking to enquire, the age and number of her prospective pupils. Nor could she quite make out from Mr Scottow’s manner whether he was a friend or a relative or a servant of the Mrs Crean-Smith on whose behalf he wrote.
     
Marian turned her head now in a cautious manner and surveyed Gerald Scottow. This was easy to do, since he sat between her and the great view of the sea. She would have liked to turn round too and look at the boy whose silent presence behind her she most uneasily felt, but she was too shy to do that. Scottow certainly seemed to be, in a terminology which Geoffrey would have been quick to taunt her with adopting, one of ‘the