Patrick White - Happy Valley

Thinking you have not slept is almost as good an excuse as not having slept for complaining about the toast. She felt awful, her head. Her eyes were heavy, dark about the lids.

This toast is awful, she said. It’s soft.

Ask for some more, said Mr Furlow.

Mr Furlow sat in the rustle of yesterday’s paper and the scent of marmalade. He felt at his best at breakfast, which they ate at half-past eight, because it salved Mr Furlow’s conscience to eat his breakfast early if not to do anything else. It was a matter of principle, like eggs and bacon as a standing dish and kidneys or something else besides. And the men would go out to work. They were Mr Furlow’s men. He sat with his back to the log fire. He was very satisfied.

Sidney crumbled a piece of toast, conscious of the warmth of the room, suspended in this, a sort of cloud. She wanted to close her eyes, to protest against the solidity of the furniture and her father’s composure as he passed up kidneys into his mouth. Coming into the dining-room, she had kissed him on the cheek. You did this, it was eightthirty, and a kiss, and Father asking you how you slept. To cut it out of the succession of days there was nothing you would have missed. Father’s face smelt of soap. It made her feel dirty. She wanted to cry. The fire sizzled, a damp log.

Your mother’s got on to the telephone, he said.

It was not a reproof. Mr Furlow was really too far immersed in the complaisance arising from kidneys to feel anything like a reproach. Besides, he liked to sit with Sidney, sometimes alone, to know that she was there, physically at least. They understood each other, he felt, not that he would have admitted this to his wife, not that he would have been able to explain the nature of this understanding, or even on what it was based. Mr Furlow avoided explanations as savouring of intellectual enterprise. But it was there, this understanding, all the same.

He looked at her over his glasses and said:

How about some kidneys, pet?

It was his contribution to the relationship.

No. I feel like lots of coffee, she said.

It made her look down into the cup, this glance. She was ashamed. Father sitting in his chair, was a chair, it was like loving a chair, a habit acquired over a space of years. At the seaside once, they sometimes went to Terrigal, she trod on an anemone and crushed it into the rock. Then she crushed two or three more. It gave her a sensation of mingled pity and horror watching the shreds of jelly on the rock. She stirred her coffee. She was afraid of thinking like this.

Mrs Furlow came into the room. Something about her slapped right into the atmosphere, upsetting any equilibrium at once. For Mrs Furlow was perturbed. She was twisting her wedding-ring.

The most terrible thing, she said.

Mr Furlow shielded his plate with his hand. He objected strongly to being upset. There was a helpless protest in the shape of his hand.

Really a shocking thing, she said. It appears, so Mrs Belper says, that Mrs Moriarty is dead.

Here Mrs Furlow paused, not altogether unaware, whatever her agitation, of dramatic possibilities.

Sidney felt her heart twist. A sort of exultation. She got up, she could not sit.

And Moriarty, announced Mrs Furlow, with the clarity of a Greek messenger. They found him lying in the road. Quite dead. A cardiac seizure, Mrs Belper says.

It began to penetrate beyond Mr Furlow’s face.

Yes? said Sidney. Yes, what else?

Because there must be something, she did not know, because walking down the hill, the head bent, and you ought to be in bed, he said, a voice that in the dark, was no connection, but…She heard the fire singing in the grate.

Yes, said Mrs Furlow. If it were only that. Of course I never liked the man. His look. You could see there was something. I remember the day he came, sitting in the office in that big coat. And Mrs Belper says the poor woman’s face was simply pulp. They don’t know, to be sure. But supposing, why, Stan, suppose if they send the police? They’re sure to send someone out.

For what? said Sidney.

Her voice came out hard and strong. It made Mrs Furlow stare.

For Hagan, of course. Fancy, Stan, the police!

Mr Furlow’s mind closed in despair with a wandering thread of argument.

But what about Moriarty? he said.

Moriarty? The poor man’s dead. And then that brute. There was something going on, Mrs Belper says. She says they’re sure to send the police.

Of course there was something going on. Mrs Moriarty was Hagan’s mistress.

Sidney dear ! The woman’s dead. Mrs Belper says she was covered in blood. There’ll be an inquest. They’re guarding the house. And a trial if Hagan…

If Hagan was there.

She felt very taut and erect. No nerve now to bleat the voice to think what because to think and say above all say.

But Hagan was. So Mrs Belper says. The Chambers boy saw him in the lane. Just at the time it all took place.

And Moriarty? Mr Furlow said.

Moriarty is dead.

Mrs Furlow dabbed her face more with her fingers than with her handkerchief.

Sidney took the back of a chair. She felt the smooth mahogany scroll. It had belonged to Mrs Furlow’s grandmother, or a great aunt.

The Chambers boy, she said. And what evidence is that?

Well, we know he’s a little soft in the head. But in the lane, Mrs Belper says.

Sidney Furlow gathered her breath. She went to the window, tracing with her finger no particular pattern in the mist, in which the trees swam, then took more definite shape.

There will be a trial, she said, and Chambers will give his evidence. A half-wit.

She watched the cold stems of trees, frost silver in the grass.

But Hagan was not there, she said.

But Sidney, dear !

Hagan was in my room. I slept with Hagan, she said.

The brutality of words shattered the silence and a coffee cup. She did not turn. She stood watching the trees. Then voices penetrating, no longer congealed, flowed, the coffee, its drip drip, or the protest of a voice, she did not know.

Mrs Moriarty was Hagan’s mistress, she said. I love Hagan. I slept with him. I love him. I shall marry Hagan, she said.

Mrs Furlow’s world spun. Words were no words, were a mouth open stupidly.

I don’t care, Sidney said, it beat out on the window pane. Whatever Mrs Moriarty was, I shall marry Hagan, she said.

She turned and faced the debris of human emotion in the dining-room. She held herself very straight, her cheeks drawn in. She did not belong to this, could watch like the shreds of jelly on a rock, the contour of a face or the angle of a shoulder, from which she was separated by kind and substance. Mrs Furlow began to cry.

Sooner or later, Sidney said, it would have happened like this.

Wondered why she said what, without explanation, must remain a riddle for faces, or always a riddle for faces that could not understand the gradual accumulation of years and waiting for the ultimate explosion. Mother’s face crumpled without the protection of hands, sat there, Father, this is also Father. She could not look at her father’s face. She smoothed the back of a chair, following with her fingers the curve of a mahogany scroll.

Mr Furlow tried to get up from his seat. The heat of the fire and the sight of messed-up kidneys on his plate. He could not get up, stared at the plate, tried to marshal his thoughts that flapped wildly in a morass of half-delineated images of which Sidney was the focus point. To a rudimentary mind all shock is at first almost physical. This is why the collar clung, the tongue swelled, in the ears a roaring of blood. Then in the confusion, Sidney, or Hagan and Sidney, Sidney and Hagan, or Sidney, Sidney. Saw sprawled in the mud that was not kidney, the face torn by gravel, walked past the door at night on tiptoe, where a night-light in its saucer wavered, went past, past this to the drawing-room, the air was cool before fires, like diamonds on a hot wrist, or the ice-cream spooned up on a high stool. He began to mumble something that was not anything at all. For Mr Furlow the impossible had happened. His eyes were groping round the room, from object to object, these material stays on which his life had rested until this, finding no explanation, there was nothing on which the glance might rest secure.