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.
Oliver Halliday sat in the dispensary waiting for words to formulate a decision, it would be no more than this, a formality, he would write, he would say, Dear Alys. Then he stopped short. The life of the house flowed almost in its habitual stream, except that Hilda was making a list. We shan’t take everything, she said, all that distance, the expense, but we’ll take the dining-room table and chairs, they were a present from Aunt Jane, and the tea service, it’s good, and the mirror in the sitting-room. Oliver Halli-day’s mind was blank, like a sheet of paper, because it was less painful, a business letter or a blank. Hilda wrote spasmodically. She would not think, not since the Moriartys, and the car she heard was not a dream that set out and returned, and finding Moriarty on the Moorang road. Her hand jerked with the pricking of a thought. But she would write, she would make a list, this would be some assurance. Oliver said that Garthwaite had a little girl. She had gone in to look at George before the car returned. It was only last night. The couch in the dispensary had broken springs, it was not practical to take, because Queensland such a way. Oliver said that Moriarty was dead, and the glance faltered above bacon, it was breakfast time, and the mind sickened not for Moriarty, who was dead, chronic asthma affects the heart, he said, cut up the bacon in pieces on his plate, she could not cut, piecing in her mind the fragments, going in to look at George, and the car, she must mend the tab of his coat, she would take the Chinese vase and the carpet in the sitting-room, were moths in Queensland like anywhere else, heard the car rumble and stop, Moriarty’s heart or her own, and the possibility of
Queensland. Hilda Halliday made a blot.
Soon it would be lunch, Rodney coming home from school, and boiled mutton and caper sauce.
Oliver looked for assistance at a photograph. It was Hilda’s face. She sat on the edge of a chair waiting to spring up. Hilda’s face receiving the news of Moriarty’s death, he had told her at breakfast, turned to Alys, because Hilda knew, fumbling with her plate, said it was fortunate you went along the road, he might have lain there all night, which was uttering words, like writing a letter to Alys dead, and the emotions he must kill, because only in this way it was possible to write. Dear Alys and the date. Time frozen on the 23rd would not flow, the words, or the hand move across the page.
He got up and walked about. He heard Hilda in the dining-room. They were laying the table for lunch. Alys would receive a letter to say Hilda and I are going away together with the furniture and the accumulation of habit contained inside this shell of a house, this is our life, it will continue like this, in Queensland or anywhere else. A bald statement on a blank page. Emotion destroyed both confidence and conscience, even life, and for this must be suppressed, the way she lay on that bed without Hilda’s face, was nothing divorced from the debris of a clock and a broken cyclamen, the fragments that Hilda clung to, they were hers, we shall take the tea service, Oliver, she said. We. It was Hilda’s life. It was planned.
He sat down and took up the pen, conscious of words, it must not be more than this, like Dear Alys, a name. Then he began to write.
Perhaps I would have said last night what I am going to write now. It might not have been so difficult. I don’t know. But I came outside and found you had gone. Perhaps you thought it was best, I mean, to go without saying any more. Because all through this you’ve been so much more aware than I of what we were doing and what we ought to have done. It was my fault, my weakness, that I wouldn’t let you follow your own judgment. I did not want to face the truth.
He looked up through the window where the clothesline cut across the sky, the drops of moisture on the cable, and beyond it the valley swept back, very tangible, no longer receding into a cloud that the mind substituted. He was free of this. The valley was earth and rock, he saw. His elbows pressed into the desk.
I hope you realized, going away, what I think you did. I went into the house. She was, of course you’ll have heard, dead. There was all the futility and pain of wilful destruction about that house and two people trying to escape from the inevitable. Talking of the inevitable may sound defeatist perhaps. We might have escaped down that road to some form of personal happiness. But, Alys, I can’t, I won’t willingly destroy, after facing the meaning of destruction in that house. Man hasn’t much of a say in the matter, I know. He’s a feeble creature dictated to by whatever you like, we’ll call it an irrational force. But he must offer some opposition to this if he’s to keep his own respect. I don’t know why I’m talking like this. You knew it all before. You realized and I didn’t. Now I do. That is the difference. So I want you to try and accept what you were willing to accept before.
Words these with Alys rounding behind words put out her hand sitting on the verandah before dark and touched. Emotion drifting back pressed the eye, must not, must write, reject the images you wanted to construct.
In a couple of weeks Hilda and I shall have gone away. I don’t think of the future. I know it is there, without any great significance. I can’t take any other view after what we have experienced, you and I. I tell myself it will still be there, that this is something which no passage of time or external pressure can destroy. Perfection is never destroyed. I would like to thank you in more than words for all these weeks of happiness, for all you have helped me to see and feel. My darling, I could never thank you for this.
In the dining-room they were laying the table. He forgot the scratching of a pen.
It is too much, impossible, like trying to assess the future, which I accuse of emptiness without a second thought, forgetting what I have already and shall always have. Because I love you, Alys, still. This is my existence, loving you. This is its whole point. Going away is only going away, a mere exchange of environment. Because I love you, my darling, and I want you also to remember that. Once I have said this there is nothing left. I have said as much as I can.
Alys dear, Alys, in the halting of a pen. Knocking, the door was opened, a voice said:
Lunch is ready, Oliver. Don’t let it get cold.
He sat staring at a written page. She watched him from the door, his back, beyond it sensing that this, she did not know, but felt, it made her hold her breath.
Yes, he said. I’ll come. But I want to run down to the post first.
Hilda watched from the door. She wanted to come forward and say, yes, Oliver, I know, to say the things that you never said, and not even now. Pity on Hilda Halliday’s face strayed with her hair, wavering, was ineffectual, like her life, sometimes she realized how ineffectual she was. You put up the strands of your hair that almost at once fell back again. So she halted by the door, wondering, she could only see his back, wondering what she could say, felt her achievement lie heavy, this exultation that said then this is Queensland and now we are really going away. Happy Valley stretched out beyond the window, grey and emphatic, but she felt safe, she had her hand on certainty.
I wonder if the Garthwaites would take some of the furniture, she said.
It tumbled into the room. It was not what she would have said. Her hand tightened on the knob.
I dare say they might, said Oliver.
The voices of George and Rodney mingled in the dining-room.
Well, hurry up, dear, she said. There are the boys.
Oliver Halliday went down to take a letter to the post. He avoided the house where the Moriartys had lived, and the figures bunched in the street beyond the fence. The town was very quiet beyond its focal point, all emotion concentrated upon this centre of extinct desires. It was quite dead this house, whatever any spectator might do towards fanning it with his stare into a semblance of life. It sickened Oliver Halliday. He felt he was part of the house.
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.