Patrick White - Happy Valley

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.