STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN
Chapter Six                                                                                                               Part Six


                               I am at the foot of a mountain.  I sit in the cool of a forest.  I am enclosed and safe in deep coniferous green.  I sit here blind to the rest of France, its cities and landscapes I have roamed, its wide, regal rivers and dusty summer roads.  I sit here to revisit them inwardly in my mind's clear visions and I sit here to write.
                             France's fields are once again sown with life and growing with tall, proud maize, yellow wheat and golden corn.  There are vineyards of succulent vines in neat ordered lines, there are crops of dark green tobacco and there are miles of sunflowers , giddy headed and laughing in the breeze.   
                            I remember walking down a lane.  It was long and winding and it rose over ridges, then fell again to rise over the next.  And as I climbed and reached the crest of each ridge, I could see another stretch of land before me, like a painting of colours growing from the ground.  Each painting was different and each one was beautiful.  Sometimes there were sleepy farmsteads, as old and timeless as the land, their ancient walls quietly tumbling while their rafters showed like ribs through the red tiled rooves.
                          I climbed a steep slope through a field of stubbled straw.  At first I did not see the grazing cows because they were straw coloured too.  Then I saw the lazy shake of the head and some large brown eyes.  I looked around at the hidden herd.  They were silent, unhurried and chewing.  They barely moved from their painting.  Sometimes an ear would flick or a slow, single step was taken towards another mouthful of straw.  Then the sun began to sink and the straw cows with their straw field were tinged with the palest pink.  I felt like a small boy in a world of enchantment where God is not a wrathful Lord but a kind magician.
                          I crossed other terrains that were dry and hostile, their land blistered by the sun.  I crossed the marshes of wild horses and there I had feelings of madness and death.  I tried to cross quickly to avoid them but my heart was nervous and oppressed, heavy and burning, like white hot lead, molten and running with fire.  I felt panic.  I felt there was an assailant behind me driving me forward too fast so that I would fall and drown in foul mud.  There was no escape.  Capture was imminent.  Running was futile and the more futile it became the more I ran.  These moods were feverish and tangled.  They wove darkness and unhappiness around me like a black shroud that kept out light.  There were no reasons.  The suffering was suffered but unexplained.
                        At last I came to a town.  The strength of the sun turned its pale stone to white so that its beauty stood clear and sharp beneath the sapphire sky.
                             I found the market place.  I stood amidst its bustle.  I felt the touch of humanity as its crowds brushed past me and I heard its voices, its shouts and its whispers close to my ears. My dark pain was eased and my loneliness withdrew.  I stayed all day and watched the colours. Canopied stalls and barrows of peppers, tomatoes and aubergines, ripe and shining.  Pale pinks and greys of shellfish.  Yellow cheese and dark red hams.  Chickens and hens scratched and flapped in their cages.  Pigs squealed.  There were rolls of bright cloth, rows of leather shoes, piles of pots and pans and pyramids of brown and white eggs.  It was a place of plenty.  It was a place of sweat and haste, frowning brows, and lips moving fast with the fury of barter and business.
                           At midday the church bells rang out.  A young woman came to me with wine, bread and cheese.  She was small and elfin, dark eyed and olive skinned.  She wore a cotton dress of red flowers on pale green, her arms were bare to the summer heat and her hair was in long black braids.  In the evening when the market disbanded and drifted away, leaving me alone in an empty square, she was still there.  She took my hand and led me to her home.  She nursed my weariness and she gave me her warm, unashamed love.  Her dark, lithe body was gentle and wild, silent and alive.  Her young girl's breasts, the sweet dew between her slender legs, she gave and I took.  I stayed with her too long.  I stayed with her until one day I saw her pretty eyes were seeing me forever, then I knew I had to go.
                         As I left the town I saw its broken bridge.  Half a bridge spanning half a river, as though its heart had broken half way across and it was never able to reach out and touch the other side.  She yearned so to give.  I could not give myself just so that I might take.  I left her with a child growing inside.  I hope she will not always be sad.
                       There is only one I search for.  Her eyes were filled with the fear of giving.  She stood before me in the woods knowing that her fate was to give herself and lose herself without knowing where or why.  And all I could do was give her an apricot stone.
                       Now that I sit in the quiet of this forest I realise that the apricot seed is my heart.  It is my heart that I put in the palm of her hand.  I am still compelled to search for her even though I do not know her name.  So I know that she has kept my heart and I will search until I have found her.
                      First I must sleep.  Then I must leave this verdant womb and climb the mountain.  I must climb high so that I can fall and climb again.
                      There is so much more to understand.    
                     


















                            

                                      STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN

Chapter Six                                                                                                           Part five



                              This morning I arrived in Southampton.  I went straight to he docks.  I helped load a cargo of fine walnut furniture and in return for my labour a kind captain has let me aboard to sail the channel.  
                               I was once before bound for the same shores, but they were the shores of a battle field not the shores of France.
                              The day is pale grey.  Gulls surround the ship with their ugly flapping and squawking.  In spite of their noise I feel peaceful, I feel free, no wishes, no purpose, no burden, no soldier's pack, no rich man's wallet, just a pocket knife and a lead pencil in the pockets of my leather jerkin and I carry my precious book of words already written and pages yet to be filled, in the deepest most secret pocket , close to my heart.
                              I look at the grey waters of the channel and I wonder at all the depths and all the secrets of all the seas and all the oceans.  On land I stand above the ground so that I have to stand and live as a man, but I cannot stand on the sea, it is not my home, it overpowers my existence, it humbles me, it drowns my confusion, it drowns my life and its meaning and makes me feel at peace.  The ocean is independent, unrepressed in storm or calm.
                             I watch the waves drawing and swelling.  I watch the ebb and the flow and I wonder what lies ahead, what will be given to me and what will be taken away.  I try to think but I cannot, my peace is such that there is no future, no past, just the ocean.
                            If ever I do not find the girl in the woods and cannot know her name, then I will let the sea bury me.  Like the unicorn, I will let the ocean swallow me and make me a part of it, another myth it will hold, another secret that is glorious and free.






















   

                                        STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN
Chapter Six                                                                                                              Part Four



                    I have returned to my tower.  The war is over.  My body is whole.  My life is mine.  I feared death so badly.  Every day I thought it would take my search from me so that I would never be found.  I saw the faces of the dead.  Wide, staring, rigid fear as the moment of their death showed them that they were lost forever.
                    The sky was light with no sun and dark with no moon.  Sun and moon had forsaken us.  Every day and every night there was mud.  Every day and every night there was blood.  Every day and every night there was screaming.  When the shells and the gunfire ceased, the silence was wretched, too long and too evil to bare. Our breaths and heartbeats were soundless as we listened to the black silence and while we waited for more gunfire the gas would seep in.
                    All of this we returned to the enemy.  We exchanged our deaths for theirs, our mutilations for theirs.  Our guns and their guns were made by women whose labour had been withdrawn from homes and fields.  Our gas and their gas were cruel, cunning chemicals produced by the minds of learning and science.  On both sides were men who dug ourselves into the ground and lived as rats.  If our flesh was not ripped and our blood not spilt then we waited for the gas to dissolve our lungs, and if not the gas, then we waited for the trench mud to rot us from the feet up and turn us into gangrene.  Why ?
                   One night the reaper showed himself to me.  Guns rattled.  Shells sang.  I ran crouching, ready to throw myself down.  My boots were caught in barbed wire and the ground exploded before my face.  No fire, no flash, just a wave of dark earth under which I lay suffocating.  It closed in around my face, around each limb, no part of me could move. Its weight pressed down on my ribs and chest and my breath began to empty from my body. I waited for the scythe to sweep low, for my search to end, for my life to escape me into sleep and death.  And as I lay waiting I could still hear the sergeant's commands.  Commands I had obeyed. Commands that had led me to my grave.  I heard hunger in his voice and although I was buried deep in the ground I saw madness in his eyes.  They were predator's eyes, they trembled with an intensity, a vile greed.  The sergeant had led us like a lion, no soldier had doubted him.  In our foot weary weakness his strength had made our dead limbs move.  He held his face in stiffened expressions of forthrightness, concern and even kindness.  I lay beneath my mound of earth and saw clearly that the masks his face had worn had mocked us.  It was not strength but fear he had sown and nurtured inside us.  He had disguised his devilry and confused our souls.  Our minds were inert.  Our hearts were pushed down beneath the bulk of a dark mountain that was ignorance and blindness.  The sergeant stood at its summit, wielding supremacy and power.  He gained our trust and summoned our deaths.  Our obedience was unsuspecting while he despatched his orders to the reaper, the most obedient and servile of all his subjects.              
                        I would not die for the sergeant.  My body surged up. The heavy mud flowed like the loose, caressing waters of the ocean and I rose from my burial to see that the black velvet sky was jewelled with many bright stars.  My search had not reached its end.  I had to find the girl in the woods.  I had to know her name.
                       The sergeant did not see my shadow return.  He was alone in the trench.  He looked out at all that was destroyed, his breath rasped hard and fast, his joy was insane.  I faced him.  My strength rose and burned like the sun.  I looked into his eyes.  I saw treachery, I saw malevolence. He was a soul of Satan, a purveyor of death.  I had never before seen these truths, I had never believed in these evils.  Anger pierced me like white fire.  I felt his darkness tremble, discovery was striking down his guise, his pretence was tumbling like walls, there was nowhere for him to hide.  I was killing him with white fire and black silence.  There was nowhere he could run.  Satan had turned his back on his servant.  The sergeant was alone.
                        Few returned.  Those who did had heard their misplaced deaths being called in the sergeant's command. They too had snatched at life and been reborn.  Behind their pale faced exhaustion their fires burned with the awfulness of the revelation and the terror of its truth.
                        Our small company retreated.  Days of marching followed.  The sergeant led us.  We killed him slowly.  We watched his madness writhe to our cold immunity.  The sergeant awaited our mutiny.  He tried to resume his insidious ways but his cruelty would not manifest itself in us.  We would not liken ourselves to him.  We would not blackmail, we would not persecute, we would not speak. Our anger was silent, our violence was enclosed in calm. 
                        We came to a wood one warm day.  We sat in dappled shade with our backs against the trees and we dozed.  There was birdsong high up in the branches.  I heard the snap of a twig underfoot.  I opened my eyes.  The sergeant had realised that he was a prisoner and was trying to escape his guards. I picked up my rifle and shot.  I shot him dead.  I shot him in the back.  I shot him in cold blood.  I shot him in hatred.
                        I have returned to my tower, yet I feel I have not returned.  I must leave again at dawn to continue my search.  I will not return until I am found.  May be I am the unicorn.  There is so much  I do not understand.






















                   

                          STARSHINE, THE OCEANAND THE UNICORN
Chapter Six                                                                                                   Part Three


                             I have returned to my tower.  I return to my house as I left, with nothing. 
                             I looked back to when I left here.  It was dawn.  I walked many miles through the early mists, then I climbed a hill.  I climbed up high out of the mists and into the sun. I stood on the hill top.  All that I had been was behind me, left in shadow.  I looked out over the world.  A mist lay over it but I knew that it was there.  It was there for me.  I was filled with ecstasy.  I walked its pathways and lanes, I worked its fields and seasons.
                             Colour, texture, sky and earth, summer heat and winter chill, they touched and clothed me and I lived within them.  I ate, I drank, I slept, I woke, I ploughed, I sowed, I harvested.  I made no judgements. My mind was silent.  I toiled, I let my body flow with land and season.  At harvest time and Midsummer's night, farmsteads revelled.  Folks feasted and the fiddler played.  I sang, I danced, I made love to bright eyed maidens whose kisses were warm and yielding, their caresses unhindered, their secrets unsealed and flowing.  All this time I was happy.
                            Then one day the sky was dark grey and a heavy rain fell, I was leading two sturdy shires while Sam guided the plough.  Sam was a man of the land and its creatures.  Sturdy and tall like his horses as he fought his bare chested battle with the soil.  He fought for his family's livelihood come drought or storm and he never lost.  Sweat on muscled shoulders, naked back and muddy arms as he struggled to guide the heavy plough.  Its blades were dragged through thick, wet earth, turning over the brown sticky mud and churning up stones and the dead white roots of the last crop, like scattered bones.  I felt a darkness and a fear.  It filled me.  I did not know whether it was a nightmare not remembered or one not yet seen.  Then I saw the gypsy at the side of the road.  We stopped the plough.  Sam walked over and offered the lonely traveller bread and cheese.  She thanked him for his kindness and she warned him to stay at home with his plough for there was another field of mud and another dark sky across the water from which he would not return.  Sam laughed, his heart did not head her.  She looked at me.  I stood with the horses.  I saw her tired, furrowed face and her deep sad eyes where secrets hide.  Her sorrow was my sorrow.  The darkness is yet to come.
                    So I put away pen and paper and go to war.  The moon is but a fingernail.  Time is still unwound and sleeping.  I am still lost.  I wish I knew her name. 























      

                                      STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN
Chapter six                                                                                                            part two



                      I have been to London and returned again to my tower and my desk.  It is three days since I saw her. But what are days?  What are nights ? What is time ? Now that I have begun this journey time must be ignored.  Haste would lead me to some vile compromise, a disillusionment that it would have been better never to have begun, never to have stepped out onto the road.  It is not a journey of roads and directions I will choose and then travel, it is a journey of roads and directions that will come to me when it considers me ready and there will be no accounting for the passing of years, if I am to find her.
                     Time has always stood like a cloaked spectre at my shoulder, pushing me on towards death, holding up its black robes to block out the lights of discovery and reflection.  There will be no clocks or calendars while I search. 
                      My trip to London was the first stage of my journey.  It was a preparation, a purchasing of a ticket.
                    I had packed all my clothes and trinkets, my suits, my tweeds, every outfit for every occasion, my insignia of wealth and belonging.  They filled three trunks.  At Waterloo station I watched them being unloaded from the train.  I looked at them on the platform. They were unnamed and unlabelled.  I walked away.  My step was light as though I had shed many skins that had grown hard on my back and shadowed my heart.
                   I walked through the city from office to office, from broker to banker to lawyer. My task was to extricate myself from the web of finance and the compulsive, infinite weaving of its sticky threads.  I sold my stocks and recalled my shares.  I held my wealth in one hand in deeds, bonds and bankers' notes, three million pounds, just pieces of paper.  I folded them down and put them inside a small leather pouch.  I drew and tied the thongs and the pouch was closed.  I placed the pouch inside a leaden box embossed with a unicorn.  I sealed the box with candle wax.  I took the sealed box to my bank and locked it in a vault.  I went to m y lawyer and gave him the key to the deposit box.  Then I was free.
                          The summer heat baked the city streets, while each office was chilly.  I carried the sun with me into each meeting, its light shone from my eyes.  My face was stern while my heart smiled.  I said little.  I watched.  I had once carried their faces and their armour as my own.  I had also been a warrior blind to the loss of life in battle.  But now I had laid down my shield and my spear, my knuckles were no longer white with the need to clutch them and believe in their protection.  I had no protection and no weapon.  My defencelessness was my power.  I had uncovered my body and my face.  The light that shone from my eyes said,
                                                                                      " This is who I am "
                                                                                                                       In every office, across every desk my silence said,
                                             " This is who I am. "
                                                                               They could not draw me back through the wheels and the cogs because my silence simply said,
                                                                         " No. "
                                                                                      I could not be drawn back to their sense of duty, their established patronage and competition.  My silence said,
                                                                                                    " No. "
                                                                                                                I watched their fear rise as they realised that to question me was to question what was to them unquestioned.  I watched my conquered rivals falter and die.  My commands were obeyed and my enemies slain.
                       I gave Mr Hodgekins the key.  I told him it must be submitted to no one but the unicorn.  I did not know why. I hope I am not the unicorn.
                       Tomorrow I will leave this notebook and pen in my desk in my tower.  Tomorrow I will leave this house.  I will wander through its rooms and touch its furniture.  I will wait until the old grandfather clock stops and then I will leave.  I will leave Time unwound and sleeping.
                       I love this house.  My mother and father lived here.  They were distant and quiet.  I did not know them.  They did not know me.  I lived here alone as a child and still I live here alone.  This is my home.  Tomorrow I must close it up.
                       But I will return.  I sit at my desk and look through the window of my tower.  It is night and the moon is full.  Clouds like black smoke pass in front of the bright moon so that it fades and clears but it never disappears.                      
























  























   

                                  STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THEUNICORN
Chapter Six                                            The Ocean                                                   Part ten


                     Joe awoke still huddled on the floor.  It was dawn.  Outside the sky was pink.  He looked around the room, Clare has disappeared.  He ran upstairs to the tower.  The puzzle lay unfinished on the floor, but he knew now what the puzzle would say.  It was the school desk beneath the window that was the only thing left for him to know and understand.  He sat at the desk and lifted up its lid. Inside there was a pocket sized book bound in leather.  The ink well rattled as he brought the lid down too suddenly with a bang, in  his eagerness to discover the contents of the book.  He looked through it, the pages had yellowed, it had been written in a neat, slanting hand, the first half in watery brown ink and the last half in faint lead pencil. He turned back to the beginning and sitting at the desk with his face bent close to the page and his tired eyes squinting at the faded lettering, he began to read.



                                              ------------------------------------------------------




              Today I saw a girl in the woods.  She was beautiful.  She was lost.  I love her.  She stood before me but I have to search for her to find her.  If I find myself I will find her.  I ate the flesh of an apricot and I gave her the seed.  Then I left her to begin my search.
               So I sit at my desk in my tower and write. There is only this school desk.  Algebra and alphabet, history books and maps, my sweet governess, her soft eyes and tidy bun of shiny hair are all gone.  I am alone with the memory of the girl in the woods.
               Her figure is slight and nimble.  Her face is uncertain and childlike.  Her eyes are deep brown, they are intense, foreboding sadness, filled with a fear too close to see, filled with a thousand tears not yet shed.  Her hair is the red brown of chestnut, its thick locks flow over her shoulders, uncombed, disarrayed.  She is clothed in wealth and sophistication that is not hers.  She wears cream satin and white lace  but she has walked through the fields and the earth's dust has marked them. Her dress is a casing that cannot contain her.  She is wild. She is fay.  I know this vision but I do not know her name.  I wish I knew her name.   




















   

                                SUNSHINE, THE OCEAN ANDTHE UNICORN
Chapter Five                                                                                                   Part Ten




                              In the drawing room Joe lost his smile.  The air was leaden, filled with Clare's anger and Joe felt all his hope turn bad inside him.  The necklace was broken, the pearly beads were scattered over the carpet.  Clare sat stiff and upright in a chair beside the dying fire. Her hair was mussed as though she had dragged her fingers through it in grief and despair. Joe looked at her bitter profile.  She would not turn her head to him.
                                                                        " Damn you !"
                                                                                                   She spat out the words like an old crone.  The godmother whose love he wanted had turned into a witch, an evil witch.  Confusion and pain ran amok, the chaos inside him paralysed him so that even his tears could not flow.  He understood nothing.
                     " Damn you ! " she said again.  " Damn you and damn those beads.  I can smell the blood on those beads.  How dare you bring them to me ! "
                     Joe fell to the floor, his tears flowed, they flooded and choked him.  He had thought he was safe here , but Clare knew of his guilt.  He screamed and writhed unable to bear what she could see.  He was a prisoner of his own fear and guilt, he did not even know how it was that he had come by them, but he had and fear and guilt were his and they imprisoned him.  His hands were covered in blood and death, he did not know why, but they were and they were his hands.
               His screaming stopped, he sobbed and his body trembled and shivered as the crying left him.  He opened his swollen eyes.  He saw Clare rekindling the fire.  Her joints were stiff, he could see that it pained her to move.  He no longer felt her anger in the room.  He felt weak but there was a calmness in him after his crying.  Clare sat down again. Joe looked up at her,
                                                                                                                           " Forgive me, " he said and more tears fell silently from his eyes, " Forgive me. "
               " Come here. " she said softly.  He went to her, he knelt beside her and laid his head in her lap.  They sat in silence and she stroked his hair. Then she said,
                                                                                                      " Why did you bring me the pearls? " Her voice soothed him, there was no anger in the question, so he answered easily."
                 " Because you used to have some pearls.  You treasured them.  You said they comforted you."
                  They sat in more silence.  Then Clare began to talk, her gentle hand still stroking his hair and Joe listened knowing that her words would bring him solace and healing.
                  " Yes I treasured them.  But they were never a comfort to me. That necklace was a yoke that made my head hang sad and heavy, and the years that I wore it were long and weary.
                           It was given to me the same day I saw George for the first time in the woods, the same day that I planted his apricot stone.  I did not run from my husband as his mother wanted me to.  Instead I chose to be a dutiful and loving wife.  So his mother awarded me with the pearls.  She handed them down to me as they had been handed down to her and in my innocence I accepted them as a gift and thought them very beautiful.  But they were a punishment.  I had not heeded her warning so she handed me down a yoke, a bondage to a poisoned man, an enslavement of fear and ignorance of my own heart, a weight that would bury my soul and my self expression and then taunt my emptiness.
                Even when I left my husband and sucked and spat his poison from my wounds, I still wore the pearls believing them to be my friend. But they were never a friend, they remained as a scar of my marriage, an excuse for weakness.  The necklace was still a yoke in which I locked myself so that I was never quite free, always restricted, still afraid of myself.  The pearls became a burden of shame and bitterness at my willingness in marriage to be hollowed out and broken like a china doll.  I had put up no defences.  I had been weak.  Instincts and intuition had been ignored even though they had cried out to me each time his slow poison had reached in and taken another part of me.  I had laid them by the wayside while I travelled a dark road.  I had courted my own madness.  I could not forgive my husband, neither could I forgive myself.  
                         Like the crocodile in the dream.  I swam from it in fear, a fear that it had put into me.  But when I climbed out of the water and looked back it had not moved from the centre of the river.  Just as my husband had filled me with fear, he could not finally kill me or destroy me, but in my fear and madness I imagined that he could.  I could have left him any time, I could have swum for the shore and left him stationery in the middle of the river.  It was the fear in my imagination that weakened me all the more and so prolonged my marriage and my unhappiness.  As in the dream I did eventually reach a shore and my body became strong again and the barren landscape of my life became fertile. 
                       More and more I began to find peace of mind when I lived in Bath and on my travels in Europe.  I stayed away from darkness.  I ran from the shadows to the light and saw beauty in everything.  I found joy but not love.  I found joy in solitude, in loneliness.  I made the world mine, I made it what I wanted it to be. I would not let the darkness in. I would not let other people in, in case they brought the darkness with them.  I skirted the darkness, I narrowed my life to avoid it.  Still I wore the pearls and still they restricted me.  I knew there was a bigger world beyond the one I lived in, a vast world where darkness lived alongside light, where there had to be evil for there to be goodness. I knew there was a life to be led in that world, a long and full life that was waiting for me to lead it.  I kept trying to reach it, but while I wore the pearls I could not.  All the gates were locked and I was afraid to unlock them.  I knew what had to happen but I could not make it happen while I carried my fear and my shame.  I had to know that weakness was not shameful but a strength in itself.  I had to realise that my marriage was just a small part of my life and that what it had taught me about myself would stand me in good stead.  I had to forgive my husband.  But forgiveness was a hard mountain to climb.  I kept thinking that I was reaching its summit when more of the mountain would appear, and the summit would still loom way above me, its sides smooth and sheer.  I could not forgive my husband for his cold, loveless eyes and stony heart.  I could not forgive his constant need to take and destroy.  Though his life was surrounded by riches it was spiritless, it was a poor and squalid life with no feeling and no colour.  And because his soul was so full of hatred, his bitterness had constantly ridiculed and destroyed mine so that my soul had had to fight to stay alive and so many times it had nearly died.  I could not forgive those years that had been so wasteful and so full of pain. 
                           I kept on trying to climb that mountain and every time I slid back a little I would try and understand the good that had come from marriage.  I had leant to trust my intuition, to trust my instincts.  I knew now that I believed myself, I believed that what my eyes saw was true and there could be no doubting them.  This discovery meant that I could live a full and burning life, it meant that I was filled with myself, I was no longer empty and waiting to be filled with whatever came my way be it good or bad.  I was no longer a china doll, hollow and broken.  I  was me, strong mind, strong body and strong spirit.  All this was good, but I still could not reach that mountain top. My heart had to expand to acknowledge the darkness in order to find the light, to accept evil in order to find good. My shoulders had to broaden to carry sorrow and joy alongside one another.  I knew all these things but I could not make them happen alone.
           So you see Joe, it was only when George threw those godforsaken pearls back into the ocean that I became free.  George freed me.  Love freed me.  He unclasped the necklace, he broke each pearl from its knotted string and scattered them over the ocean where I watched them sink out of sight beneath the dark waves.  And suddenly there were no chains around my heart, no reins that held me back.  There was nothing I could not do, there was nothing and no one to fear. It was a sweet and long awaited release.  It was like new birth, new life out of the old one in one light breath, young yet wise, tender yet wild and the breeze was light and easy around us and love whispered and love smiled.  The end of one journey and the beginning of the next.
                     If I had not been freed then maybe my own heart might have turned  cold and stony and my soul might have finally died having been unable to climb the Forgiving Mountain's high summit.  And even though I had left him, my husband would have defeated me because I would have likened myself to him and my life would have had no beauty, only bitterness and sour immortal tears.
                    The pearls had at last disappeared and I forgave my husband and hoped that one day he might be rid of his poison and find an end to his misery. 
                    The boat rocked gently, the water lapped at its sides.  We watched the stars in the sky and their reflection in the water.  Our souls were reflections of each others', to be filled by each other was to be filled by ourselves, at last we were whole.  We made our plans for the future. We had both been the poorer for wealthy lives so we would leave George's money in its wax sealed leaden box, where it would wait for the Unicorn.  We would come back to this house where the clock no longer moved so that time would not push and pull at our lives and when it was all over and one of us died, then the other would take no food, fade and follow after.
                      Then we went back into the confines of the Ark and I no longer feared its beasts because I knew that beyond lay the Starshine and the Ocean, and it was there George and I would live and burn with a light that would see and know and feel all that lay between the ocean bed and the highest star.  Once my fears had left me I knew that I could live both inside and outside the Ark and now the Ark was no longer my prison I looked again at its passengers and was able to see the beautiful alongside the ugly.  The crocodiles and the snakes still made me shudder, but alongside the evil there were the selfless and the generous.  The lion was strong and warm.  I saw the elegant shy-eyed gazelles.  I saw the apes laughing and fooling.  There was much that was joyful alongside the sorrowful.
                       Only the Unicorn was missing.  George and I had left the Ark to go and find the Unicorn, but once we found Starshine and the Ocean we had stopped looking. George said the Unicorn was long gone beneath the waves and that my pearls had followed him. George knew the Unicorn better than I, he had often thought that he himself might be the Unicorn.  But I was still curious.  I often wondered about the Unicorn. " 
                     Clare's hand lay gently on Joe's head,
                                                                                 " And at last I have found him, " she said. 
                     Joe lifted his head from her lap and looked at her. Her eyes thanked him.
                     " It was you I was waiting for before I died.  I wanted to tell you how it all began. "
                     At last Joe knew who he was and knowing that he was the Unicorn made him feel at peace.  He knew that his crimes were not his but a part of everything and he knew that there was a place for him even though it was not in this world.  His burdens of fear, guilt and confusion were lifted from his shoulders and he huddled on the floor at Clare's feet like a contented little boy.
                     " Tell me about the Unicorn. " he said
                     So Clare begun one last magical story while Joe closed his eyes and waited for the comforts of sleep.
                    " The Unicorn was beautiful, pure white, sleek powerful flanks and clear blue eyes in a proud head adorned with its regal horn.  The Unicorn was headstrong and free.  He had never known the chains of fear, he had no dealings with greed or self pity, only desire and with desire as his companion he climbed the mountain with ease to stand on its summit and know freedom.
                   The Unicorn knew that to fear death was to fear life and when the flood came he sought refuge in it, rather than in the Ark.
                   He stood on the mountain top and saw that the flood was coming.  He watched the long procession of God's creatures enter the Ark two by two and he knew that he could not follow.  For once inside the Ark the confinement would destroy him.  If his freedom were taken from him then he would be empty and his desire would be misled into chaos and confusion.  With nowhere to run and no mountains to climb he would be shackled to the fears and sorrows of those around him and his emptiness would be filled with their poisons until all his pure white turned black and insane.  And inside his prison the crazy, black unicorn would toss its head and wild mane, its eyes would darken and quiver with frightened white.  It would buck and rear and gallop in mad, directionless circles, wreaking havoc and destruction, and spilling the blood of its fellow inmates as its twisted horn impaled the innocent and the guilty alike.
                   So the pure white unicorn stood on his mountain top and watched the Ark sail away and the water whispered to him and closed around him like a gentle shroud and he was unfearing and free as the flood carried him away. "