Patrick White - Happy Valley

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.