Patrick White - Happy Valley

Well, I guess I’ll push off, Hagan said.

Felt a fool skulking out, though your pants were on, it might have been worse meeting someone in your shirt. He stood in the passage, waiting. His hat. The sitting-room door was an enamel knob. He waited for the knob. He heard the feet. There was no sign. He wasn’t one to look for trouble out in the middle of the road. So he took up his hat. He went down the passage away from the door, almost on his toes. It was easier to breathe in the yard, easier in the lane, where your eyes still waited for the turning of a knob. He began to whistle softly. It was company. A waltz something, that you didn’t mind if Sidney Furlow, you were satisfied, it almost mightn’t have been Vic, she said, Mrs Moriarty gone, and good night, Sidney, you said. She lay on the bed in a funk. Though it gave you the creeps, Moriarty in that room, like a circus horse on the track, or a brokendown cab-horse with gammy knees plodding along William Street, and if that knob had turned you would have said what. Christ, he said, Christ. His breath whistled through his teeth. Not that you were afraid, or anything like that. A white blur was no knob, was moving up the dark, was what.

Who’s that? he said, his voice hollow in the lane.

His eyes fixed upon a white blur that would not take more definite shape. He stopped against the fence.

Eh? said the blur. It’s me.

Then that loony Chambers lumbering up the lane. Hagan saw his face drift past, or the white suggestion of a face. Said his name was Chuffy Chambers, the bulging eye, and they let it go round loose. It made him swear as he went on down the lane.

Chuffy Chambers, lumbering in the dark, felt his skin tingle at a voice. Sometimes he could not sleep at night, he wandered up and down, his feet were soft in the nettles that grew at the side of the road. Hagan, he said it over, rough against his tongue. He could feel himself beginning to shake, with Hagan, with a name mouthed, and holding on to the fence the light at Moriartys’ danced. He felt he must spit out a name that, winding round his tongue, stuck. He must get it out. It trickled down his chin. Then he began to feel better, purified in a way. The stars flowed back. He used to lie on the verandah, when it was summer of course, and count the stars, but he never counted very far.

Chuffy Chambers meandered along the lane, like a name meandering in his head, though only the shape of a name, no emotion now attached. He heard the call of a cat, raucous with love, saw the black pool that was cat elongate and press itself through a hole in Moriartys’ fence. The call echoed frostily. It pierced through the skin with a little shiver, reaching out to touch Ernest Moriarty’s back stooped in the sitting-room. He heard the cry of the cat. He straightened up. He stared at the pattern of familiar objects that were only just there, for the first time taking shape, knew all these again, though different. They pressed down like the pressure of a clock, he had heard, heard, in the pace of feet walking, were his feet, stopped. He knew he had been walking round the room, but why, but why, and why the clock. Then he remembered the hat. His mind pitched back. He was calm enough. Even if the hat.

She said, you’ll take your pyjamas, and the Crown, you’ll wear your pyjamas, the egg, she said, and of course it must rain because of my straw hat. But going into Moorang you forgot that this was Vic, or a straw hat, or the rain, was a pain in your chest that truck that jolted over the ruts, and your head swam past telephone poles, or wires in loops of telephones that said the voice anonymous. It was in the album, now perhaps, pressed against Senegal, only you did not look, see the lamp you lit when the match broke. He could not remember lighting the lamp. You will read a paper on stamps, they said, in the circular, and that was why in Moorang, in the main street, would read a paper on stamps, afterwards coffee, with a discussion, that this must be remembered or written down in a book with an imposition from Arthur Ball when the ink fell on the floor. But not Vic. Ink fell on a name, obliterated a face. Then he was going round and round, he felt he had been going round and round, his head or his feet, of which there was no trace on the carpet when looking, only where the coffee fell, but someone had been walking where there was no track. Or sign. No hat in the hall. All those faces at the school waited for a talk on stamps, and that was why you were there, the moustache and the twitching eye, or Miss Porter who would pour out coffee that did not fall, like ink, like not in school, because this was not the school, because Miss Porter said the advance of history commemorated by the philatelist by a cup of coffee or a stamp, take care Mr Moriarty, she said, a cup of coffee will pick you up if you fall, it’s tiring to read a paper, she said.

Ernest Moriarty felt the room sway. It did not hit him on the head. He parried the ceiling with his hand. It settled down like the pressure of misery, like a cat calling in the dark, the deep swell of pent-up misery. I am here, he said, not Moorang, I have come why, because there is no longer a paper to be read, all this is over, like so much. You could feel it crumble as if a drink, and sitting in at Moorang having a drink, you would not stay, Miss Porter, you said, because Vic says I must go to the Crown, and that is the state of affairs, to have a drink, to feel a chair crumble and the shape of table in a glass of port, though not port said Vic, she said, you know, Ernest, how your chest, even at Christmas-time when Uncle Herbert sent what he would not have sent if they hadn’t given him commission on a bottle or two of port, but drink, Ernest, it’s only for your good that I say, the barman said it was fine old tawny, his wife was expecting, and sitting in at Moorang the face dissolved that expected nothing much.

The lamp had a milky china shade. It was an Aladdin lamp in the catalogue. He felt bad. He felt bad in at Moorang drinking fine old tawny port. His chest was a ravine of pain, the breath rare and hot that struggled up, he could not get up far enough, he could not drag a weight. And the voices, they went on, the voices in a bar, the random voices that said, that commercial in a check suit, the mechanic who had lost his mother the week before, said he was strung up and it bloody well served him right, because her head was beaten in, and it must have been a hammer, they thought, anyway she didn’t last long, not after the doctor came, and they caught him in the train near Scone, it was his second wife, she had a little money put by, she once had a pub in Singleton, anyway the bloke was strung up, took what was coming as cool as if, and it wasn’t as if there was reason for what he done, but then if you read the papers you often wondered what entered people’s heads, there wasn’t reason for much. Cripes, said the barman, you’re looking off, he said. Then they turned, the random faces in bars. The looped wires of telephones said, the voice said, anonymously, I don’t want to intrude because Hagan is expecting your wife, so let’s go, Ernest, let go, let go of my hand, it’s only the port and you see it’s like this, my chest and to-morrow geography, must go. They put him on the floor and shot water on his face. I’ll be better, he said, I’ll be getting home, I’ll be getting back to Happy Valley, somehow this, even at night, before the water soak, I had no business drinking port, even at Christmas it doesn’t do. Collins was starting for Happy Valley, they said, out in the garage now, would a lift, would do, the barman said. He still felt queer, his chest. But he had to go home, had promised this. He left his pyjamas at the Crown.

All his life Ernest Moriarty had been going round and round, the small circles of habit, that yet was not as satisfactory as going round and round in a room, not so comfortingly blank. All your life you had been going round in circles for a purpose, at least you thought, you did not know it was non-existent. Now you had come to a stop, the purpose gone. He felt that coming home in Collins’s truck. The wind was black. He felt it was all over, only a few straws of habit clung, you could not shake them off, like coming home, like opening the gate, like wiping your boots on the mat. He put his key in the lock, heard it rattle, wondered what he was waiting for. The frost. He went round to turn off the water-tap. The time the wash-house tap burst there was no end of a mess, and it’s washing day, said Vic, it’s a pity you’re not a plumber, Ernest, she said. It was a pity he wasn’t what he wasn’t. But there was no reason for him to be — well, anything, or what was the reason for anything when he hit her on the head. Or a hat in the hall, or a light. He went into the sitting-room. It all shelved away, and there was no reason for a lamp to walk round, round, breaking a match to find how frail, and so many more in the box, thirty or forty perhaps, as frail as a match.