Patrick White - Happy Valley

Do you think anyone noticed? he said.

Noticed what? There was nothing to see.

No, he said. I suppose, I suppose not.

Her voice convinced, soothed. He steadied himself against the wall. The darkness straightened, placid on his face, was without words. That waltz came out lurkingly, more potent because so banal, and made her feel, I must be careful of myself, this is not the same person listening to a waltz who decided how many weeks ago which was the way out. She heard words launched that approached inevitably, now approaching, now removed by the music. She felt a rushing of the darkness, stationary, then coming to grief on her face. To close the eyes was only to close the eyes on something without form, already she knew, even in choosing a last gesture of mechanical resistance she realized the futility of this.

What I told you, he said. We were going away. As if I could go away. I believed myself at the time, because I wanted to believe. It had to be true, because Hilda. But, Alys, it isn’t, it isn’t true, anything of what I said.

The words strung along Oliver’s voice running together in her head.

Yes, she said, Oliver, it was true.

You don’t think I could go away?

Yes, she said, I do.

His hands, touching brick, felt her voice that was bending, bending. As in that hall the lights bent, your head, you were trying to resist before something licked out and you were going the other way.

Listen, Alys, he said. We’re not as strong as all that, we never shall be, it isn’t worth the attempt. All my life I’ve tried to resist something just a little bit stronger, without getting anywhere at all. There’s a kind of moral satisfaction attached to the effort to resist, at least we think, we make it so, it’s got to be. Because we must have our illusions, drug ourselves, they’re the one consolatory compensation for what we know to be the ideal state. So we fasten on to the moral satisfaction. Man the Moral Animal. And that’s why I said Hilda and I are going away. Going away to what? What’s a moral satisfaction?

This isn’t what we agreed, she said.

Her fingers snapped the stem of a rose.

We’ll leave out all that, he said. This is what I am. That’s what I ought to be.

Because nobility, he felt, is one of those games played by Corneille on a stage set that has not the dimensions of Happy Valley.

Or perhaps, he said, it hurts to see what I am?

Because after all it was much easier to love someone for their imperfections than to discover these afterwards. Now she would not speak, was a point of silence in a distant waltz.

No, she said, and her voice came closer. You know it isn’t that.

I think I know what it is.

And if we went away?

She wanted to speak of Hilda Halliday, whose voice reproached opening a door, or in the street always a reproach, that child looking away when she touched his hands. The eyes would not close on Hilda Halliday. Her hair strayed untidily like the strands of a colourless waltz.

Voices were going up and down the street and uniting with bodies in the splash of light that the door had let fall upon the steps. Mr Furlow stood upon the steps smiling at no particular face, his smile half sleep and a glance backward into the hall where she danced, that dress, and a bracelet on Hagan’s shoulder. She did not see him, but he was perfectly content. It was enough for Mr Furlow to have launched a casual bubble and to pat it airwards with an occasional glance. Mrs Furlow had very quickly imbued her husband with a reverence for other people’s pleasures. And this was Sidney enjoying herself. The label was stuck on, and nobody, least of all Mr Furlow, dare attempt to scrape it off.

Sidney Furlow danced against Hagan, giving herself without grace, he could feel this indifference in his arms, or as his leg encountered the taut V of her thighs, and it made him uneasy, dancing with Sidney Furlow, because he was holding something that he did not quite understand. The collar began to grow soggy round his neck. He wondered if he ought to make a joke.

This is something like a dance, he said, feeling his resources fail in an opening remark.

I never cared much for dancing, she said.

And that was as far as you got, because one way or another she hit you over the face, and it stung, and you could feel her like a piece of wire, and that scent mounting up and up, the number of unfair advantages women took. That night he walked past her room, and she stood against the blind, he had wanted to go in. Vic Moriarty over there looking as if she could kill. Damn Vic Moriarty, he said. His hand shifted on Sidney’s back, cautiously exploring the skin. But you never got closer than a shadow on the blind that moved away, or tried to shift from under your hands as if it was taking a liberty to touch what anyone would think was an invitation, the way it was cut down. His hand was unperturbed in the hollow of her back.

Not dancing, Mrs Moriarty? Mrs Belper beamed. And what have you done with your husband to-night?

Vic Moriarty, torn between graciousness and distraction, twisted up her handkerchief.

Poor Ernest, Mrs Belper, he isn’t feeling too bright, you know. So I left him at home with a book. Ernest’s always happy with a book.

Looked over to where that girl, dressed like anyone could dress if they needn’t remember the baker’s bill or Chows coming in to dun, didn’t have to put up with that, was dancing with Clem. Vic Moriarty in her blue tulle, the powder caking about her face, wilted on a brown varnished chair. She would, if she could, have given him a look, though she didn’t want to monopolize, and what was a dance, but Clem, and he said, of course I love you, Vic, like that, it made you wonder if leaving the room he wasn’t coming back again. Vic Moriarty’s looks foundered on Hagan’s face. It made you understand the papers, the woman they found with her mouth on the gas with perhaps a note from your broken-hearted Vic, only the smell of gas, and what was the use if you weren’t there to see the effect of the note, if there was, if there wasn’t, if he tore it up and said, Miss Furlow, how about the next dance. She looked at Amy Quong and frowned. You couldn’t escape from Chows. It made you want to have a good cry, Chows and Happy Valley and Clem, and oh damn Ernest, enjoy yourself, he said, as if that was an easy thing. She got up and went to the ladies’ room to see what was happening to her face.

Mrs Moriarty’s gone, said Sidney.

She did not move her head from his shoulder. Her voice was level with his ear.

And why shouldn’t Mrs Moriarty go?

She hummed a bar or two of the waltz. She felt a kind of exultation watching the retreat of blue tulle.

And why shouldn’t Mrs Moriarty go?

I’d like to dance on and on. I’d like to die dancing, she said.

Her breath was sharp in his ear. They swung up on the peak of a waltz as he felt her grow softer, a little, the motion of her breasts. It made you wonder what was her game. You walked past a window and a shadow was peeling off its dress. He pressed his arm into her waist, that quivered, she was trembling, holding off. He bit the inside of his cheek.

She knew she was trembling, wanted to snatch away or press up, press all resistance out of the body that the motion of a waltz, and his breath, and the palm of his hand had decomposed. No, she wanted to say, stop, and the music, to put her finger on that nerve that jiggered in her cheek, that she could almost have laid against, and closed the eyes, known the warm throb of a waltz touch with its hand the valley of her breasts that melted the spring at Kosciusko with the snow which showed the grass and she lay down before midday on the grass. Music faltered in a last sigh. She was almost stationary in the angle of a tightening arm, straightened against him, Hagan, who was only Hagan, she must remember it was Hagan.