Patrick White - Happy Valley

She could feel this. She could feel it pressing down on her, and at the same time she was breaking away, out of her immediate environment. She could feel a certain ebb and flow of pity, though faint, as if this were the death, not without regret, of a deep emotional undertone. But she must free herself, she must get away, discard pity to live.

She went out of the room. It meant very little now, or the house, or the servants she heard in the kitchen quarters conducting the ritual of the day. Because she had to go down the hill, there somewhere would make the next logical move. The air on her face was keen with purpose, like her step. She walked past the stable and the insignificant figure of a groom. Down the hill the shed, where he had watched, where, closing the door, she had stood in a kind of stupor against the ploughs, escaped from something in the house and still wondering what, and what was her life but a succession of days, or her body, of which she was afraid, that she pressed against the arm of a plough. She went past the shed. There was no question of defeat, the issue already palpable in her mind.

Hagan stood over by the wagon shed giving orders to the men. She saw his back and the mesh of a knitted jacket that he wore. No fear now, but power to turn a back, and watch, and see.

Hagan, I want a word with you, she said.

His hat cocked over an eye that sized her up, wondering what now, wore an assurance that could not deceive her confidence. It made her laugh, the way a man always put out a hand to take as his due what was sometimes air. This will be my party, she said. It allowed her to look him in the eyes.

Well? he said.

Smiled that tooth, as much as to indicate, and the legs apart, planted on the ground that nothing would shake. She looked through his body, holding back a moment the words that would blast. The fold of his arms brought him physically close. There was no tremor in sensing this.

Mrs Moriarty is dead, said Sidney Furlow.

Watched the skin for the pallor that crept up. This is Hagan afraid, she said, I have made him afraid, now dependent on my words.

And Moriarty dead on the road. He must have walked out and died. They say it was heart. A perfectly natural death. But his wife, his wife was murdered, she said.

Hagan looked as stupid as — well, a big man suddenly afraid.

Moriarty murdered his wife? he said.

Hagan’s voice halting, uncertain, had given her courage once, though not now, there was no necessity for this as, watching his face, she said:

Perhaps.

At a little distance one of the men was standing cracking his whip.

She’s dead, he said stupidly.

Sidney Furlow saw his throat move, the motion not of compassion, but of fear, she felt. There is great absurdity attached to the Adam’s apple in a man’s throat.

Death pinned itself to Vic lying naked on a messedup bed. And don’t go yet, Clem, she said, with the knob waiting to turn, and that little runt waiting inside, mad, because he must have been mad, going round the room like that, you heard, and a mad china eye of knob, not a bull on the mantelpiece that you killed before it was meat, you killed the bull, its blood, was murdered she said, was standing over the bed in the lane, was going down the lane away, perhaps she said was Moriarty or not perhaps, or who was in the room. She stood close to him, watching. He could feel her eyes.

You don’t think, he said. I didn’t do it. I didn’t. Listen, Sidney, I’ll tell you how it was. But if you think…

I don’t.

She stood very firm on the balls of her feet, playing his emotion, sensing the tug.

But Chuffy Chambers was in the lane. Chuffy Chambers saw.

Walling up a beetle or a cockroach as the earth fell in its scramble, that you finally took in your hand and set free.

You’ve got to listen to me, Sidney, he said.

He had to find a way to say, he wanted to go away, he wanted to hang on to something that was not brick, a word, you done it, they said.

Why? said Sidney Furlow. Why should you be afraid?

He looked at her, asking for release.

Because you were not there, she said. Who is Chuffy Chambers? Think. Was there anyone else?

No, he said. No.

Then you weren’t there. You were in my room, she said.

Sidney Furlow you wanted before going cold the room she took off her dress was shadow when you went past and could not touch she was Sidney Furlow mad Moriarty dead and Vic and this was what that she said. His hands were helpless at his sides.

You must have gone crazy, he said.

I’m making you an offer.

Looking at the ground, his head bent, for a sign that was not there of what she meant.

And what after that? he said.

His voice was distant and still. She heard him laugh at a broken colt.

I’ll make you a second offer, she said. I shall marry you. We’ll go away.

Your father?

I do what I want, she said.

At a little distance one of the men was slowly cracking a whip. It cut in with a steady stroke like Sidney Furlow’s voice. It sang in his ears.

Do you understand?

Yes, he said. It was not Hagan’s voice.

She heard it going back up the hill, he stood kicking the ground with his toe, and yes, he said, or she, speaking for Hagan, was Mrs Hagan, living up north probably, would buy a place, you must ask my husband she said, my husband sees to my affairs, will buy or sell, though on my initiative, it is understood. She felt very self-contained. I have done this, she said, I, I is me is he but me. They would have some children perhaps. You may come in, Clem, she would say, open the door, don’t be afraid, would touch with her mouth a mouth that waited, always waited. Going up the hill she stroked her arms with her hands. She felt the texture of her dress. She touched no tremor, only the firm substance of her arms.

The eruption of passion in Moriarty’s house stirred up the stagnant emotions surrounding it. The leaves of the geranium, that heavy green, could not disguise the face that peered, the breath on glass, the indication of a quickened pulse, as come here, Maud, the voice said, there’s the sergeant going in. Or they stood in the street, outwardly static, by the fence, the faces bared by expectation, the mouth drooped. There was no awe. The hush in the street in front of a murderer’s house is never so much the sign of awe as of exultation, as if we have been waiting for this, to be lifted out of the trough on somebody else’s wave. Who’d have thought that Moriarty, or Hagan if it was, they said. The mind of the crowd dramatized the situation, peopled the scene with vague shadows of its own, substituted with a shiver, because after all it might have been. It made the spittle come in your mouth, the possibility of this. The geranium quivered behind the glass.

The emotion of Happy Valley had flowed to a certain point. Drained of this, the rest of the town stood high and dry, the landscape dead, removed. Oliver Halliday saw from his window the desolate line of the hills, jagged in the higher reaches, then falling to a slow curve, describing the course of a fever, it could have been this, on a large scale, or not so large, on which you might read the action of the pulse, sense the tick tick of the brain, visualize the shadow bending down that the hand resisted, passed through, became a scream or the fixed cavern of a mouth. All this was last night, or farther, but really last night, he said, was opening the door on what the papers will call a murder, that you might in ordinary circumstances read without a qualm, because that is different, somebody else’s murder is not the same. He began to smile. It made his face twitch. Because the awfulness of murder is relative to the moment and the circumstances, becomes a joke in the train or looms in the dark room, dependent perhaps on the digestive juices. But the act is insignificant, and those concerned. Like the significance of two people running away from themselves, the dwarf figures that magnify their own importance, tossing out a reply to the world, this is what we think, they say, as if they existed except on sufferance as part of a design. Alys Browne, said Oliver, tracing with his pen, and all that we have thought and felt, all this, like a murder, is a relative experience, perhaps a joke in the train. Or not. Or not. He felt his anger swelling inside him. No, he said, no. He dug the pen into the desk. But it increased his sense of impotence.