Patrick White - Happy Valley

He looked down at the fragments of a broken match. He looked at the lamp. He stood in the fragments of thought that the evening had strewn round, and momentary anaesthesia wrapped soothingly in black. Before it had returned, the room, that was also Vic, and not Vic, had slipped into the next room and there was…The breath rose in his chest. He could not breathe, move, heard the door, the footsteps, the rattle of his own breath. He could only stand in the sitting-room, where her hand trimmed a leaf, she said, there’s something saucy about this plant, they say you’ve got to keep it moist, though God, I’m tired of this suite, I’m tired, I’m tired, when I used to care for pink, but look at the spots, and the hole that Belper burnt, and why’ve we got to stay here all our lives, it makes me feel like suicide, only nobody would care. Vic’s life in a room was this, was pink, her hand touched, tied a bow. We’re making this, you said, it’s us, and I’m glad, Vic, you said, because… The cyclamen looked a waxen pink. The petals fluttered in his breath, that came fast, were without defence. His legs began to move.

He began to go into the other room. It was no longer the bedroom, this, it was the other room. Two separate worlds. I’ve got to go in, he said. He could feel the sweat on his chest. It ran down cold. It was a long way, and the silence, and the sounds that break through silence made it longer still. But he opened the door, he stood, she watched him stand, there was only the silence between them, and the candlelight.

She could not speak. There was nothing to say now. She sat on the bed still, as if Hagan had only gone and fear had arrested a sheet in its passage to the floor. She thought, if Fred, if Daisy, if Clem going down the street perhaps for the last time, and the time that Tiny died she cried the dream she had with Ernest’s face the shawl. This made her hand stir, touch her skin, she was naked, sitting there, with Ernest in the doorway, and his face, and his face.

Ernest, she said, and it came out as if her tongue was sticking to the word, afraid to release it on a doubtful errand, let it go out towards a face that was not Ernest’s face.

Waiting for the moment that would break the tension, it must come soon, or something break, Vic Moriarty pressed back against the wall and Ernest Moriarty standing at the door watched each other crumble away, the face known, the personality, all eliminated except the basic flesh and bone and the passions that actuated these. And that is what made her afraid. Because this was not Ernest here, the face altered in line by the passing of a few hours. She began to make little convulsive gestures with her arms against the wall. The shadow followed laboriously.

What are you standing, why don’t you move? she said.

His face looked blue. Her voice stopped, thickening with fear.

All right, she rasped. All right then, we know, she rasped.

The shadows bent down. Perhaps it was the shadow on his face that she could not properly see, was not the expression that she thought.

Ernest, she said, Ernest, wailed against the wall, beat back her voice into her mouth, her fear. If only you’ll listen, she said, I’ll tell you. Ernest, it was like this.

He stood there. Her mouth froze.

Then she watched him coming forward. His arms were stiff. He was coming forward. She could look into his eyes. Oh God, then it was this that you did not like to think, or dream, as you lay on a bed and felt his breath coming hot, his hands.

No, not this, Ernest, she screamed. I didn’t. No. I’ll tell. But not this.

He got her up against the wall, felt her quiver, her body afraid that lay on the bed, they said the letter said, if only he had the breath to press, as looking into an eye it came up close, it swam, it flowed, and light delved down, he must press down with all his might, and they caught him in the train, and they strung him up, with the loops of telephone wire cutting right into the throat, snapped.

There was no sound in her throat, as if words had solidified, had stuck. Her hair hung floorwards. She drooped. This thing on the bed. He looked at it through the blur of his almost exhausted breath. Then it slipped down, the hair drifting and the sheet, it fell lumped upon the floor. He looked at it. He wanted to crush out, the hands on neck, all semblance of a lie, even if his lungs tore and this was his last act. Because if she was not dead, he said, if she was not dead…His hands fumbled, stopped.

Ernest Moriarty looked down. He was kneeling on the floor beside. The sheet was red. He looked down at a face and the tongue swollen, clapper-wise, that he held in his hand protruding from the mouth of what had been a woman, like the face, was no longer this, this thing, no longer Vic. I have killed Vic, he said, she is gone. He pulled savagely, impotently, at the tongue of the thing that was no longer Vic.

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.