Patrick White - Happy Valley

All that day, in the apparently unconscious body of the town, a fever burned, excited by the mingling of surmise and fact, and articulated in the afternoon by the wind that blew up, cutting a phrase here and there, so that a word stood out hot. Mrs Belper, speaking through the stammer of the telephone, as if the wires were infected too and eager in their delirium, told Alys Browne how Dr Halliday, called to a case along the Moorang road, had found the body of Moriarty and had brought it back. Dr Halliday and It. She had ceased to play a part, was disconnected from the flow of events, surmise as well as fact when, in the late afternoon, it was dark and she had drawn the curtains, Mrs Belper reminded her that this and this had occurred and perhaps she would like to know. Alys Browne was glad that it was dark, and that the dark voice of Mrs Belper was only the telephone.

Like Oliver and Hilda Halliday, Alys had been left high and dry by the ebb of emotion into the town, until now this voice penetrated, wandered when she hung up the receiver like a theme through her returning consciousness. That a murder had been done, the voice said. That Dr Halliday returned along the road. Alys Browne, the negative coefficient, cancelled out to provide what, for Happy Valley, is the solved equation. I have always been this, she felt, the negative coefficient in Oliver’s equation, Oliver, Hilda, and Alys Browne. So why now, why this bitterness starting out of the telephone? I am still the same person, she said, that played Schumann haltingly, that groped through the tangle of experience, feeling her way, without asking is this really the direction. There were very few questions. And does time become, with experience, the perpetual question? In the convent questions were under lock and key, that smooth air, she looked back, like laurel leaves, rubbed against itself and did not encounter more than the grating of a tram and this in distance. There is an agelessness about the faces of nuns that I regret, she said, and the lock-andkey existence of nuns. Or I regret those afternoons before, playing Schumann at five o’clock, with the always clear perspective of five o’clock before the intrusion of experience, which is also the recurring question, the why, the why. I sit up here and think, time is no longer the bemused acceptance of events, this is what Oliver has done. This is why I am bitter, she said. I cannot accept this, that Oliver should have given me a mind, that is part of Oliver’s mind, the constant reminder. She wanted to say, let me go. She wanted to escape, as she had in Mrs Belper’s voice, from the flow of events. But Oliver was there, if not in substance, it was still Oliver. She pressed her hands into her face, she heard again the dark stammer of the telephone, or was it the ringing of a bell, the bell.

A letter to hold, or to open, it was immaterial which, would have no bearing now on the life of Alys Browne. She sat holding a letter in her hand. She lived by herself on the edge of the town, giving piano lessons or running up a dress. This, she said, is Alys Browne, this must be her purpose that shall not alter, but fixed like a water-tank on the rim of the hill, almost, though without the utility of this.

The issue already settled in the mind, there was no need to open a letter that crackled in the hand, that the hands opened, that the eyes read. Reading words, she said, this is apparently also me, for someone else, is it really me, sitting in a car last night what I am going to write now, because all through this you’ve been so much more aware, walking in a dream and still aware, perhaps, because I love you, Alys, still, this is my existence, loving you, this is its whole point. This is Oliver. I am this to Oliver, despite the pressure of time, and going away is only going away, a mere exchange of environment, or light for shadow, or light for light.

Alys Browne sat by lamplight holding in her hands a letter that was more than this. It was moving, moving, she could not touch with her hands the circle of light that receded, without circumference, there was no limit to the endless efflorescence of light. Happy Valley was dead. I shall go away, she said, to California, perhaps, but always into the light. There is no fear attached to going away by oneself, there is nothing that can destroy, no pain that is final. Then she realized she was crying with the shreds of paper in her hand.

A man or woman murdered ceases to be an entity, the same with the murderer, they are names or a column in the news. It is difficult to fasten motives and passions to these that legal inquiry has stripped and print depersonalized. You are finished with the human element. Ernest Moriarty, school-teacher, forty-four, murdered his wife, Victoria Mabel Moriarty, thirty-five, at Happy Valley, and subsequently died of heart-failure on the Moorang road. That is all. Eustace Wing, commercial traveller, propped his paper up against a bottle of tomato sauce in the Narrabri station refreshment room, hoped that his indigestion, hoped he would catch his train. In Sturt Street, Broken Hill, Mrs Euphemia Richardson cut up her Sydney Evening Moon, with a view to the earth closet, into conventional squares. There was a picture of Victoria Moriarty in her wedding dress. At Newcastle in the tram Herbert Kennedy, coal-miner, going home with a pound of brisket, read from the parcel that William Chambers, twenty-three, mailman and lorry driver, had given complicating evidence.

On the night of the 23rd, said William Chambers, I was in the lane back of Moriartys’ when Hagan came out of the house. He seemed kind of upset. You could see. Just one minute, said Mr E. G. Filey. You could see. But surely it was dark? Well, yes, it was dark. But you could kind of see, you could see Hagan was looking queer. I ask you, said Mr Filey, is this the kind of evidence the jury can respect?

The jury, composed of Antonio Lopez, fruiterer, Arnold Winterbottom, publican, James Thripp, grazier, Stanley Merritt, horse-dealer, and various others, was inclined to laugh. They knew, Winterbottom at least, that William Chambers, they called him Chuffy out at Happy Valley, was not right in the head, though driving the lorry, a sober boy, and his mother told Mrs Winterbottom herself, poor Chuffy, she said, he’s simple, but he’s good, and that you could see in the box, his head was a size too big. I saw Hagan come out of the house, Chuffy Chambers said. His lip was a size too big, trembling, and confused. You saw him come out how many times? asked Mr E. G. Filey in the act of blowing his nose. Everybody laughed.

And the man Hagan, this name? Gertrude Ansell, seventeen, employed by Mrs Moriarty as general servant, twisted her hands, they were very red, and played with a wart on her left wrist. Mr Hagan came to see Mrs Moriarty on and off, Gertrude Ansell said. What did she mean by on and off? Twice a week. She thought they were friends. What did she mean by friends? Well, she did not know. Gertrude Ansell went red. Anyway, Mrs Moriarty sometimes had sandwiches cut, and glasses put in the sitting-room, and Mr Hagan brought chocolates, and sometimes they went to a dance. There was nothing else that the witness had seen? Not exactly, said Gertrude Ansell, feeling herself perspire.

Mr Filey complained that his client was being needlessly involved. He would like to draw the attention of the jury to statements already made by Miss Emily Porter, matron of the Moorang Hospital and president of the Philatelists’ Club, and by Clarence Westrupp, bartender at the Crown. On the night of the 23rd, Miss Porter said, Moriarty read a paper on perforations, seemed nervy and preoccupied, and after the discussion went away refusing a second cup of coffee. His hand was shaking, she said. Clarence Westrupp stated that Moriarty looked like death when, in the bar-room of the Crown, he went right out to it, and fell flat on the floor. They threw water on his face. When he came to he spoke kind of queer, said he would go home, they got him a lift in Collins’s truck.