Happy Valley (28 page)

Now that it was all over his strength flapped, his nerves, yet he felt a strange freedom, a reserve of strength. He went into the sitting-room. The silence grated, was out of key with this strange exultation almost musical in his head. He listened to glass fall, felt the splintering of glass on his hand still red. He looked at his hand. It did not seem important, whether it was red or not, only to destroy this and this, was all that was left, was right. It was all over. It had served its purpose, this room. He found himself crying into his hands. Give me your braces, she said. Blood on his mouth. He cried. But the only alternative was to go round and round, and going round and round for how many years, was a lie. He looked at the cyclamen that lay crushed upon the floor, he had lifted it out by the stem, out of the lustre bowl, and it lay bruised, surprised, its pink ears full of query still. He crushed it with his heel.

He would go out now. There is a dead woman in the other room, he said aloud. It was one of those things you
could not believe. It made him laugh. He looked back over the debris of the sitting-room, the mahogany clock that the Smiths gave, the cyclamen crushed upon a field of glass, all these symbols that had fulfilled their purpose in the life of Vic and Ernest Moriarty. Ernest Moriarty was the man, he said, and what sort of a man, and why to kill his wife.

He began to walk out along the road in no particular direction, just to walk. The air tightened his chest. Vic said, burn a powder, dear, you’ll feel better, she said. Was the wife of a man called Ernest Moriarty. He taught in the school. It wasn’t as if there was a reason for what he done, the paper said, the checks, you wonder what enters people’s heads. Ernest Moriarty walked on. The chief reason was there was no reason. He began to cough. It tightened up, his chest, his life that straggled out over years, as if someone had pulled the reel, and with a jerk, was at least a purpose, to feel this. He was walking. He was walking. Feet sounded on the metal, told him he was there, and the thin crackle of ice. Then he stopped and he was not there. There was no evidence that Ernest Moriarty was even a name until he walked. Out of his eyes water ran, not tears. For tears are personal. Walking or not, he was the dark. That slow darkness. His hand felt towards ice, did not try to reject what it became.

The light wedged into darkness, split it up into two sectors, with the car spinning down the path of light. Houses, no longer the real structure of houses, were pale beside the road, the paper facades, or masks representative of sleep in a kind of silent allegory. A rabbit crossed the road, lacking in substance, to join the dark. Only the car in fact, you felt, had some reality or purpose. They had given it this with their bodies that sat up straight. They had not relaxed yet, like people going on and on in a car, on journeys that might be without end to judge by the expression of a face, They still sat up straight with a rigidity of purpose. We shall get somewhere, they said. This is why we are doing it. Even if the luggage be without labels there is nevertheless a goal.

Though what this is, said Alys Browne, sitting here with Oliver, if not Oliver what else, America or Africa, but it is still Oliver, still, is always this. She began to relax
a little, into a smile that was half sleep and thought that winds round the irrelevant, a cup of coffee, or the stockings left behind. But she felt warm. She could feel his coat jutting into the half-reality of a dream world and making it almost tangible. This is real now, she said. It is only just beginning, asleep, awake, is still Oliver.

I’m hungry, Oliver, she said.

We’ll stop in Moorang, at the station, and get some coffee, he said.

Yes, she said, that half-sleep. Coffee at the station always smells.

She did not mind. Talking of this with Oliver, the ordinary things, and their whole life, begun already, would be a succession of ordinary things that touched on the personal shore and became significant. She smelt the coffee in a station cup, warm in her throat, she felt warm.

He felt her relax as talk of coffee sent the mind back, right back, that bistro in the Rue de, he forgot, there was nothing between the moment and this, to sitting in a rainy night where khaki smelt, and the khaki coffee, or she asked for a café crème, were inseparable because wet, they clung, the fold on leg, and going out into the rain you knew that you were going home, the War was over, the long years, and time stretched out blank waiting for an impression that you would make now. It had waited for this. The other shapes were not, that you thought, that you imagined before Alys Browne.

Oliver Halliday, driving his car from Happy Valley to Moorang, swung out to avoid something that he was not sure, on the road, if this. The trees were grey and sharp in
the stationary light, the wheel solid, he felt steel, anchored to this the returned thought.

I’ll have to go back and look, he said,

Hearing words, she knew they had returned out of another world. He would go and look. She closed her eyes. She did not want to look, not so much at something on the road, as at the sharp outline of trees. Opening the eyes the light stopped short. She could not see along the road, because it ended that leaden ridge, so very heavy in the headlight, the car clamped down. There was no connection with motion in the passive body of the car. Or herself. Or herself. She could not move, she would never move out of the shackles of the present moment, she could not even unclasp her hands,

Oliver went back. It was Ernest Moriarty lying on the road. He was dead.

A bird flapped, slow, out of a grey tree.

He stood looking at the body of Ernest Moriarty, dead some little time, it was almost cold, like any other body, stiff and a little ludicrous in its unconsciousness. The insignificance of Moriarty was somehow underlined by his being stretched in the middle of the road. There was blood on his face, the fall. Death made you feel in a way detached, looking down at Moriarty like this. Moriarty walking out along the road from Happy Valley and falling dead, this automaton, was no more automaton than, only you did not fall dead, you stopped short, returned to the inevitable starting-point. You did not escape from Happy Valley like this. That bird flapping brushed the mind free of stray impossible thoughts.

He went through the gesture of stooping, of touching the body again. He would take it back, the doctor, they would want to ask. Hilda’s face drawing the curtains would twist in pity because, and Moriarty pity, Hilda and Moriarty who were joined in Happy Valley by a link of frustration and pain. Only Moriarty was dead, not Hilda. He put his arms round the body to lift it up. Hilda tried to hide her handkerchief that he knew was stained with blood. He wanted to cry out into the face of the dead man who weighed him down with his weight, that he must drag back, back, that he must take back to Happy Valley. Then he stooped under the weight.

It’s Moriarty, he said. Something’s happened. He’s dead.

She heard the door close. She did not speak. We shall go back now, she felt. She did not question death, or wonder at something felt already in her leaded hands. She did not turn to verify the fact. It lay in Oliver’s voice, in the live moment, in what they were doing, as well as in the body of the dead man. And this, this Moriarty who is dead, walked down the street yesterday. We shall go to America, we said. She felt the cold weight of the impossible. It lay behind her in the car. She heard it bump as they drove along the road.

Alys, he said, we’ll have to stay. They’ll want to know. Just for a little. I want you to understand that.

She heard no conviction in his voice. She did not expect it.

I’m glad he didn’t have to lie there long, she said. I’m glad we came.

She did not want to talk about what was now, she did not want to recall this. They drove along the road to find Moriarty, the reason was this.

Then they were driving up the street, without stir, that had not noticed their departure. No dog barked at a return that was almost without a setting out, no expression of surprise on the face of house. How dead the houses, and unreal, she felt, though it is we that are unreal, slipping back like shadows, carrying in the back of the car the body of a dead man. And all these plans we have made. The words we have spoken are dead, yet without the reality of this dead man. He has achieved something where we have failed.

Oliver opened the door of the car.

I’ll have to take him in, he said. If you wait a little I’ll drive you back.

This was Dr Halliday. She sat and listened to him speak. Mrs Halliday told her to wait. His eyes were grey, no, blue, his professional manner cold. She watched the doctor carry up the path something that made him stoop, as if he were an old man. She did not feel at all bitter. It did not make you feel bitter to trace the natural course of things. But she felt she was going to cry, this sudden release of emotion, somewhere out of her the tears, out of another person left back on the road.

Oliver, manoeuvring the body of Moriarty in through the hall door, knew he must face something, what he did not know, but the silence, but the lamplight trailing across the linoleum squares, and this open door, dark in the face of the house, were more than superficial detail, made his
heart beat. That cyclamen bruised black across the pink and the tangled mechanism of a clock in the hearth. Moriarty lay on the sofa in what had been the sitting-room, perfectly serene, and unconnected with all this, once so intimately his. He had cast it off. And Mrs Moriarty? He stood in the doorway of the back room, watched this thing that had been a woman, now unmoving, the pulpy face, and the sheet slipped, and the candle dim in its pool of wax. He did not experience horror, it was too far removed from any human element, this heap of cold flesh, the breath gone from its mouth. Then it began to come back, the situation in which he stood, he and Alys and Hilda and the Moriartys linked in this frail wooden house. Our bodies similar to these, though moving still, the same passions, the fears, of face that said, Ernest must write to the Board, she said, Ernest must escape, because I love my wife, poor Vic, what she puts up with, doctor, before the needle plunged and the face relaxed in temporary peace. Peace out of chaos, out of Happy Valley, we must look for this, we must go to Queensland, Hilda said, because Happy Valley is pain and the kind of irrational impulse on which the Moriartys have come to grief. The flame of the candle sank in its pool. He watched the body lose its shape. He stood in the dark.

It flowed round him, his impotence, in no way alleviated by this removal of forms. She was still there, and Moriarty in the next room, and the debris of furniture. They have tried to cast off the insuperable, they have broken themselves, he felt, and Alys and I slipping down the road, headed for what vague dream, are just as irrational perhaps. He could not suppress his anger that rose against no definite
cause, was a groping in the dark. It was this that made you want to beat your head against the wall, substituting wall for the intangible. Or Happy Valley. A clock in the distance drew him to the present. He was cold with sweat.

Go down the street, tell, he said, tell Hilda and the others you have won, only not you, something thrown in the road as a sort of ironical gage to pick up and carry back, they let you get as far as that knowing you would return, impotent. Because you cannot cast off the shell the ways and customs, except in death, as Moriarty has. You substitute fortitude, like Hilda, who is fortitude, sleeping in her wooden room, and call it a moral victory. He felt all the bitterness of a moral victory that was not rightly his.

Moriarty lay in the frail remains of what had been his outer life. Oliver bent in the sitting-room, fumbled through glass, to pick up the fragments of a clock. The sitting-room was hideous with the lack of consciousness of a room desecrated and left, in a way undisturbed, in a way that you felt Moriarty’s was only a part success. The spring of the clock straggled loosely in his hand. Sitting in the Botanical Gardens, it was summer, he pushed back a strand of Hilda’s hair beneath her hat, her face broke up when he read a poem, banal as a poem at sixteen, she said, Oliver, I know now what it means. He was breaking Hilda, for what, for slipping down the road with Alys, whom he loved, towards some greater, though still undefined certainty. Hilda must stare at the remains, like a broken clock, listen for the tick, with the expression of Hilda looking at something she does not understand. I love Alys, he said. It was not a protest. It did not sound like this. Unlike Hilda and the fragments of
Moriarty’s house, Alys would remain intact.

He went outside to where the car stood in the dark.

Alys? he said.

He found, half expecting, she had gone. Emotion could not unravel itself out of a sudden weariness. You accepted this. You could not think.

Then he went up the street to the police-station and rang the bell.

Sidney Furlow got out of bed. That finger of grey was too much, pointing out of the dark. She pulled at the curtains and they closed, she stood holding the dark, her feet were hot on the floor. It was now what time, as if time had any bearing on night, what time it was when it was still night. Waking up with the sheets twisted, you were seven, you could not move, you wondered if night would ever, if you could move a finger ever again. But that at least was waking up, not wondering if you held your head in the basin under a tap, or sheep, or an aspirin. Mother said aspirin had a capital A. Mother and Father were two names, capitals or without, and you wondered, you wondered what else, and what went on beyond a person’s face that was better not to see.

She went and lay on the bed again. The sheets were still hot. Going past the cottage was no light, said I’ll go
for a walk before bed, but of course in a coat, it’s cold, and my head, and it’s not far just round and about, the way they watch you to see what, and nothing to see, no light, you knew that, but had to see, and walk round and round, remember at the races, and this, it was this now, why shouldn’t Mrs Moriarty go. She turned over and forced her face into the pillow that was soft and hot. It gave. It was so easy. You pressed your face and it gave in. Was feathers, or tulle, and crying in the rain. But now there was no rain. She lay on her back and listened, heard nothing, no horse. She felt exhausted, though without the capacity for sleep.

Or anything at all, wondered what this is for, as touching with the fingers the breast and thighs, these instruments of languor and passion, wondered for what if not, if not, what you did not like to think, and thought, watching for people to recognize, like Mrs Moriarty, you knew at once, he knew because riding into town, did not say Mother is going home, but take me, I want this, I want to feel. She twisted her fingers in the sheet. Sidney Furlow, she said with contempt. She wanted to throw a bomb into all this, to destroy, or tear a sheet. Lacking the means, you lay back, were a Furlow, which was nothing, or as good as nothing, or a name and a house and occasional paragraphs in the papers. This was not power, like fire that swept down the gully, or you pressed your feet into its sides, felt the wind move. This is what I want, she said, and the other, say take me, when his voice fell, saw he was afraid. He is afraid, of me afraid. There is something contemptible about a man afraid, and at the same time desirable, you want to possess this fear in a human body, his arms when
he danced, but above all the body which you know is so much masquerading strength. Breaking a horse, he laughed to see it stand cowed, feeling it tremble between his legs. Hagan, she said. It had a rough, clumsy sound in her mouth. She found herself thinking of Roger Kemble. That was the difference perhaps.

Somebody speaking in sleep was a long way off.

Sidney Furlow got out of bed and put on her fur coat, felt the soft voluptuousness of fur against her neck. Mrs Furlow had paid a lot, not so much for the sake of the fur as for the privilege of paying a lot. But there was also something of the swings and the roundabouts in Mrs Furlow’s attitude, take my daughter, take my mink, it was something like that. We shall settle this, Sidney said. It gave her some satisfaction to say it between her teeth, in the dark that was sleep, her mother asleep, and her father, skipped over that, walked down the passage towards air, she must have air. The coat was heavy. She had burnt it once with a cigarette. She moved inside it, her body, as if she were something apart or withdrawing from the contact of fur when she slipped out on to the verandah. You could smell the frost. She began to shiver. She felt at once hot and cold, certain and afraid, it was always like that. Inferiority Furlow, Helen said, inferiority damn, that made you break the mirror at Helen’s feet, shiver it cold on the floor, and Helen laughed, because she was a whore, or a whore slipping out in fur between the trees. She could feel in her hair the twigs, the plum-trees. If you were a whore to want the not-want, feel the boughs of trees, press yourself against a tree, was hard and sterile a tree. The plum-trees bore fruit about once in
three years. Not even this in bed you lay, waited, speaking words the dark heard, Hagan said, a whore in tulle or a fur coat. Mother said, always remember who you are, as if you could remember and forget at once. What if I am a whore, she said, what if I want something in the place of nothing.

She walked and felt the grass sharp against her legs, twigs pause in her hair, slip, she was walking beyond trees, would walk up and down till light, she knew where it came beyond that hill, where you looked for light when you could not sleep. In the stable something stirred chaff, a cat perhaps, or mice. The sleepy sound of chaff that fell beneath rafters. She was very remote from this, and horses feet mounting out of a well, up and up, they came up the hill with no body, she looked out to attach some form to a sound.

Getting off a horse was the chime of steel, a voice. He was getting off a horse. Hagan stood on the gravel. She knew. She held herself against a door, very flat, heard the horse shake itself free of the bit.

What, he said, brushing with the saddle, she felt the flap brushing her side, what the devil? You! he said.

Yes, she said. I couldn’t sleep.

He went on into the saddle-room. She stood holding her coat.

You ought to go back to bed, he said.

His voice not intent on the present, she felt, was not on her, his head bent, was thinking. She dug her nails into a crack in the door.

Yes, she said. I ought.

Hagan, she wanted to say, now, as she heard him go
down the hill, as if she did not exist. Something heavy in his step, was not there, was gone.

She ought to go back to bed, trail across the yard a coat, not more, that was softly remonstrative against the skin. It was still not morning, not anything, to lie, Sidney Furlow in bed. She pressed her mouth into the pillow, soundless, conscious of sheets that had grown cold.

Thinking you have not slept is almost as good an excuse as not having slept for complaining about the toast. She felt awful, her head. Her eyes were heavy, dark about the lids.

This toast is awful, she said. It’s soft.

Ask for some more, said Mr Furlow.

Mr Furlow sat in the rustle of yesterday’s paper and the scent of marmalade. He felt at his best at breakfast, which they ate at half-past eight, because it salved Mr Furlow’s conscience to eat his breakfast early if not to do anything else. It was a matter of principle, like eggs and bacon as a standing dish and kidneys or something else besides. And the men would go out to work. They were Mr Furlow’s men. He sat with his back to the log fire. He was very satisfied.

Sidney crumbled a piece of toast, conscious of the warmth of the room, suspended in this, a sort of cloud. She wanted to close her eyes, to protest against the solidity of the furniture and her father’s composure as he passed up kidneys into his mouth. Coming into the dining-room, she had kissed him on the cheek. You did this, it was eightthirty, and a kiss, and Father asking you how you slept. To cut it out of the succession of days there was nothing you would have missed. Father’s face smelt of soap. It made her
feel dirty. She wanted to cry. The fire sizzled, a damp log.

Your mother’s got on to the telephone, he said.

It was not a reproof. Mr Furlow was really too far immersed in the complaisance arising from kidneys to feel anything like a reproach. Besides, he liked to sit with Sidney, sometimes alone, to know that she was there, physically at least. They understood each other, he felt, not that he would have admitted this to his wife, not that he would have been able to explain the nature of this understanding, or even on what it was based. Mr Furlow avoided explanations as savouring of intellectual enterprise. But it was there, this understanding, all the same.

He looked at her over his glasses and said:

How about some kidneys, pet?

It was his contribution to the relationship.

No. I feel like lots of coffee, she said.

It made her look down into the cup, this glance. She was ashamed. Father sitting in his chair, was a chair, it was like loving a chair, a habit acquired over a space of years. At the seaside once, they sometimes went to Terrigal, she trod on an anemone and crushed it into the rock. Then she crushed two or three more. It gave her a sensation of mingled pity and horror watching the shreds of jelly on the rock. She stirred her coffee. She was afraid of thinking like this.

Mrs Furlow came into the room. Something about her slapped right into the atmosphere, upsetting any equilibrium at once. For Mrs Furlow was perturbed. She was twisting her wedding-ring.

The most terrible thing, she said.

Mr Furlow shielded his plate with his hand. He objected strongly to being upset. There was a helpless protest in the shape of his hand.

Really a shocking thing, she said. It appears, so Mrs Belper says, that Mrs Moriarty is dead.

Here Mrs Furlow paused, not altogether unaware, whatever her agitation, of dramatic possibilities.

Sidney felt her heart twist. A sort of exultation. She got up, she could not sit.

And Moriarty, announced Mrs Furlow, with the clarity of a Greek messenger. They found him lying in the road. Quite dead. A cardiac seizure, Mrs Belper says.

It began to penetrate beyond Mr Furlow’s face.

Yes? said Sidney. Yes, what else?

Because there must be something, she did not know, because walking down the hill, the head bent, and you ought to be in bed, he said, a voice that in the dark, was no connection, but…She heard the fire singing in the grate.

Yes, said Mrs Furlow. If it were only that. Of course I never liked the man. His look. You could see there was something. I remember the day he came, sitting in the office in that big coat. And Mrs Belper says the poor woman’s face was simply pulp. They don’t know, to be sure. But supposing, why, Stan, suppose if they send the police? They’re sure to send someone out.

For what? said Sidney.

Her voice came out hard and strong. It made Mrs Furlow stare.

For Hagan, of course. Fancy, Stan, the police!

Mr Furlow’s mind closed in despair with a wandering thread of argument.

But what about Moriarty? he said.

Moriarty? The poor man’s dead. And then that brute. There was something going on, Mrs Belper says. She says they’re sure to send the police.

Of course there was something going on. Mrs Moriarty was Hagan’s mistress.

Sidney
dear
! The woman’s dead. Mrs Belper says she was covered in blood. There’ll be an inquest. They’re guarding the house. And a trial if Hagan…

If Hagan was there.

She felt very taut and erect. No nerve now to bleat the voice to think what because to think and say above all say.

But Hagan was. So Mrs Belper says. The Chambers boy saw him in the lane. Just at the time it all took place.

And Moriarty? Mr Furlow said.

Moriarty is dead.

Mrs Furlow dabbed her face more with her fingers than with her handkerchief.

Sidney took the back of a chair. She felt the smooth mahogany scroll. It had belonged to Mrs Furlow’s grandmother, or a great aunt.

The Chambers boy, she said. And what evidence is that?

Well, we know he’s a little soft in the head. But in the lane, Mrs Belper says.

Sidney Furlow gathered her breath. She went to the window, tracing with her finger no particular pattern in
the mist, in which the trees swam, then took more definite shape.

There will be a trial, she said, and Chambers will give his evidence. A half-wit.

She watched the cold stems of trees, frost silver in the grass.

But Hagan was not there, she said.

But Sidney,
dear
!

Hagan was in my room. I slept with Hagan, she said.

The brutality of words shattered the silence and a coffee cup. She did not turn. She stood watching the trees. Then voices penetrating, no longer congealed, flowed, the coffee, its drip drip, or the protest of a voice, she did not know.

Mrs Moriarty was Hagan’s mistress, she said. I love Hagan. I slept with him. I love him. I shall marry Hagan, she said.

Mrs Furlow’s world spun. Words were no words, were a mouth open stupidly.

I don’t care, Sidney said, it beat out on the window pane. Whatever Mrs Moriarty was, I shall marry Hagan, she said.

She turned and faced the debris of human emotion in the dining-room. She held herself very straight, her cheeks drawn in. She did not belong to this, could watch like the shreds of jelly on a rock, the contour of a face or the angle of a shoulder, from which she was separated by kind and substance. Mrs Furlow began to cry.

Sooner or later, Sidney said, it would have happened like this.

Wondered why she said what, without explanation, must remain a riddle for faces, or always a riddle for faces that could not understand the gradual accumulation of years and waiting for the ultimate explosion. Mother’s face crumpled without the protection of hands, sat there, Father, this is also Father. She could not look at her father’s face. She smoothed the back of a chair, following with her fingers the curve of a mahogany scroll.

Mr Furlow tried to get up from his seat. The heat of the fire and the sight of messed-up kidneys on his plate. He could not get up, stared at the plate, tried to marshal his thoughts that flapped wildly in a morass of half-delineated images of which Sidney was the focus point. To a rudimentary mind all shock is at first almost physical. This is why the collar clung, the tongue swelled, in the ears a roaring of blood. Then in the confusion, Sidney, or Hagan and Sidney, Sidney and Hagan, or Sidney, Sidney. Saw sprawled in the mud that was not kidney, the face torn by gravel, walked past the door at night on tiptoe, where a night-light in its saucer wavered, went past, past this to the drawing-room, the air was cool before fires, like diamonds on a hot wrist, or the ice-cream spooned up on a high stool. He began to mumble something that was not anything at all. For Mr Furlow the impossible had happened. His eyes were groping round the room, from object to object, these material stays on which his life had rested until this, finding no explanation, there was nothing on which the glance might rest secure.