Happy Valley (13 page)

Looking at Moriarty it was possible to conceive of the intense kind of mystical satisfaction that might arise from the healing of pain, if you were that way inclined, like on the ferry going home when you decided you would be a doctor, it was that attitude which attracted you. It was funny the way you made decisions on ferry-boats, something in the flow of water that made you think you would write a play, you would go to the War, you would become a doctor, or more accurately an instrument of mercy, because you were young at the time and the prospect had the appropriate sheen or became almost abstract in the soothing, escapeful susurration of the water, as the ferry refining thought. Moriarty moved and coughed. Then you became a doctor, a sort of hack, and getting up in the middle of the night or taking a test of water in a beaker divorced the decision from its mystical element, and you became a kind of machine for doing, it was altogether material, and of course it was only
because you were young that you imagined you saw an aura round the figure of empirical reality.

How’s it going? he asked.

Moriarty opened his lips, wordless, but with a lessening of tension in his eyes, a freedom of breath in his throat. Looking into Moriarty’s eyes you saw, sitting on the ferry-boat, yourself, and I shall be an instrument, you said, not a hypodermic and adrenalin. The adrenalin working in Moriarty’s body was responsible. Of course it was this, you knew, that unknit nerves. Only it gave you a sudden irrational satisfaction to feel your power, almost in your own hands a power to heal, like a quack, only not. You hadn’t felt like this before. It was different. As if you suddenly saw yourself at one extreme and Happy Valley at the other on a kind of balance, and now you had begun to tip it down, standing in the scales, touching with your hands Moriarty’s arm, as the scale swung with the weight, and you began to feel you had made some considerable onslaught on the battalions of energy cased up in rock and earth with which Happy Valley bludgeoned a hitherto feeble human opposition.

Halliday sat down on the bed. He leant forward slightly and listened to the loosened breathing, watched the gentler rising of the chest.

How long do you think this’ll take? Moriarty suddenly asked.

How long’ll what?

Moriarty tried to sit up. He said:

I can’t spare more than a day or two. I’ve got to get back. Or perhaps they’ll send someone, he said. Perhaps
they’ll see I ought to get away. But I oughtn’t to leave the school for more than a day or two.

We’ll have you right pretty soon, Halliday said.

To say something to Moriarty, this poor misery, even if it is just something for something to say, to ease him back on the pillow, and now he has fallen back, taking my word, depending on me, when I can’t offer more than illusory comfort, and it is mostly like this, dealing in illusions in the face of the material, and becoming reconciled to it, until now I want to give Moriarty something else.

It’s good of you, doctor, Moriarty said. My wife wants you to send a report of my health to the Board. I expect she told you. It’s very hard on poor Vic. And of course she deserves more than this. And it’s mostly been like this. I wouldn’t complain for myself, doctor. But it gets me down, her, and the school. Sometimes I can’t stop thinking about the school. The inspector tells me the standard of intelligence is very low. Of course that isn’t all my fault, but… You see, there’s nothing I can do. I can only do my best.

There was a dead hum of heat in the room. An intruding fly spun in a brown circle over Moriarty’s head. Halliday reached and swept it away.

But the fact is I’m a failure, Moriarty said. I can’t cope with them. All those children. Sitting there. You don’t know, doctor, how children can hate. Half their life is pure hate. They hate you when they know you’re weak. They hate you when they know you’re strong, because they’re afraid, they think you’re going to make use of your strength. And d’you know, doctor, I—I’m afraid of them, I think.

It upset Halliday to see someone caving in like this.
It upset him because there was nothing to do. It was like looking at some private emotional mystery that you had no right to be looking at.

I dare say most of us are afraid, he said. Not of the same things perhaps. We start off being afraid of the dark. Then your fear probably moves its centre to something more tangible. And most of it rises out of a feeling of being alone. Being alone is being afraid. Perhaps one day we’ll all wake up to the fact that we’re all alone, that we’re all afraid, and then it’ll just be too damn silly to go on being afraid.

Moriarty lay there, detached. He was not listening. You could see that.

I’m a failure, he said. You see, I’m a failure, he said.

It all depends what constitutes success, Halliday said. Being a politician and running round in a limousine on other people’s money, that’s success of a sort. Or writing books for a few million middle-aged ladies to read themselves silly enough at night so that they can sleep. A very laudable success. But there’s a worm in the kernel of most of it. Look, Moriarty, if you could persuade…

He looked down and the face had fallen asleep, or appeared to be. It was a good thing, because here he was talking about god knows what, but probably tinctured with the sourest grape. It was a dangerous theme, success.

The patient’s asleep? whispered Mrs Moriarty.

She had come all a-tiptoe to the door. She put her head round the door, taking an excessive amount of trouble to balance herself, as she thought, elegantly on her toes. She was rather wide-eyed and very pink. She had put some rouge on her cheeks, he saw. Altogether she was like that woman
standing in a doorway in Paris and trying to beckon him in.

He got up and went out of the room.

I’ll make up some medicine and send it down, he said shortly. And I’ll come and give him another injection to-night.

Oh, doctor, she said, I’m so grateful.

I’m only a doctor, he said.

Her lip that had begun to tremble, heavy with selfconscious gratitude, swelled itself into a pout. She frowned.

Yes, she frowned. All the same, you must be busy. We don’t want to take up too much of your time.

Your husband’s having a bad attack.

You don’t have to tell me that. Don’t I know it? she said. Hasn’t he had me up all night?

She put up her hand to her head.

It makes me feel quite bad, she said. I would have come in, but my head. I’m awfully sensitive, doctor. I just can’t stand it any more.

He’ll be up in a day or two. Then there won’t be anything to stand.

He took up his hat and went out into the garden, into the sun and the smell of earth that is very hot, and nettles in the sun. It licked up the smell of Mrs Moriarty, the powder caked in sweat, and he was glad, while feeling a twinge at the same time, because Moriarty there in bed, and I’m awfully sensitive, doctor, perhaps not emptying the wash-basin because of this, because an erotic blonde. There is something distinctly nauseating about love in its obese blonde aspect. Though Moriarty was not conscious of this, that wedding group over the bed, the gloves and the flowers
and all the paraphernalia of a stiff photographic convention that was almost cynical in its confidence, placing a head here, turning a shoulder just an inch towards the bride. It’s very hard on poor Vic, he said. But she pitied herself enough for two.

He trod carefully in the dust to avoid a cloud, walked at the side of the road along a margin of dead grass, kicked a bottle shard, green and swimming in the sun. Mrs Moriarty molten with self-pity and sweat. But Alys Browne had come into the dispensary that day and he had despised her for the same reason before probing, but Mrs Moriarty was not Alys, even if to her husband, she was perhaps Alys, and Alys to him. He brushed a shoal of flies away from his face. Thinking about it again, he said, and her room so cool, why do I think of music, glistening in the chords a breeze. He must send medicine to Moriarty, though more, he could not give him more, he wanted to give him more, he wanted to give so many people the impossible through the existing wall that somehow the human personality seems to erect. Only she played Chopin and it crumbled to non-existent brick and they looked at each other, each time for the first, or looked at Moriarty for the first time, as if she had made it possible. I am not in love with Alys Browne, he said, and his foot, slurring the dust, sent it up in a fine cloud. I am not in love with Alys Browne. It is only a matter of gratitude for this fresh chord struck, with something universal in its tone, that penetrates isolation, even the farthest planet, lending significance to the hitherto insignificant. It is only this.

Alys Browne and Mrs Belper, the patterns scattered and the cutting scissors, were drinking tea in the sitting-room at the bank. Alys had gone down to help Mrs Belper run something up. That was the difference between Mrs Belper and the other people, Alys Browne went to Mrs Belper, whereas the others went to Alys Browne. Another difference was that Mrs Belper thereby got something off, an issue at first illogical, but consider the distinction of Running Up, I mean as apart from Making a Dress, and she always gave a slap-up tea and really it was only right. Not that Mrs Belper was mean, she practised what she called economies. So here they were having tea, in the sitting-room at the bank, with its encrustations of pokerwork and pervading smell of dog. Mrs Belper had a passion for dogs. There was always one in her lap, or one protruding from under her skirts, the little fox-terriers that she bred, or if she answered the front door
there was always a screaming, and snarling, and gnashing of teeth from little flighty, spring-toed dogs and laborious bitches about to whelp, the pandemonium threaded through with Mrs Belper’s soothing voice, her there, there, Trixie, you know who it is, or, how nice to see you, Mrs-er, no, no, Box won’t bite, will you, Box, my lovely boy? So on the whole it is not surprising that the sitting-room, or even Mrs Belper herself, should be redolent of dogs. For she did smell of dogs, and nicotine, and she had a rich rasping cough, of which you were never certain how much was laughter and how much cough.

God bless my soul, said Mrs Belper, I’m sweating at every pore. Like a pig.

Mrs Belper is very unconventional, said Mrs Furlow once upon a time, unwilling to launch a suspicion that Mrs Belper was common, I ask you, using expressions like that. This was before she learnt about Mrs Belper’s cousin who was secretary at Government House, which made her decide that after all Mrs Belper was just a Good Sort. It did not worry Mrs Belper. Nothing annoyed her, except when other people refused to trumpet like herself, or somebody cast a disparaging eye at the pool that one of the puppies had made, as if they could help it, the lambs, she said. The Belpers’ house was like that, you had to tread warily on account of pools, and sometimes even worse.

Drink up, Alys, cried Mrs Belper. And you’re not eating a thing.

Alys Browne, sitting with her cup in her hand, removed from Mrs Belper, let her mind wander vaguely, wondered if he would come this afternoon, though of course it was not
to be expected, coming the afternoon before, when she had played that polonaise that he said. And why was a polonaise in stripes, the pink and black and yellow stripes, unfolding like a roll of stuff. All that on the floor, and the pins. And he would come perhaps and find that she was out, could not be in always, and why should she be in? Elbow on knee, she leant forward suddenly and said:

I was wondering about flounces, Mrs Belper. How they’d look. Starting perhaps from the knee. And there could be little flounces at the shoulders too.

Walking up the path would hear no sound, open the door perhaps, sit down and wait in room, waiting, while…

Me in flounces? My dear girl!

Then Mrs Belper began to laugh. It was too good. The idea. So she had to laugh, rich and rasping from cigarettes, and her breasts stirred happily beneath the large-mesh silk jumper that she wore.

Cissie Belper in flounces! she laughed. Alys, you must be off your head. And what would Joe have to say to flounces? Oh dear, no, she said.

I once had a dress with flounces, said Alys, looking down into her cup, the leaves spread like a fortune for Mrs Stopford-Champernowne to tell. It was when I was at the convent, she said.

That’s all very well, said Mrs Belper. You in flounces and a convent. But that has nothing to do with me.

She continued to shake all over, spherical and convulsed, her hands working on her skirt or over the body of a little dog crouched in the hollow of her quaking lap.

You shouldn’t’ve left that convent, she said. You should
have become a nun, Alys. But I don’t understand you, of course. Living up there all by yourself. You’d have done much better in a convent, even if it’s only hens. Because, I mean to say, well, company, and somebody else’s face. And they can’t have such a bad time there or they’d all come pouring out. Take my word, it’s the priests. They get all the entertainment, and there’s no talk of the tax.

From the convent in those blue afternoons you watched the bay, white with yachts, spread out like a book when reading, an illumination, or the Lily Maid upon a barge when Tennyson was always in your lap, and the wax face of Sister Mary cut in above the rustle of her skirt, made you think that perhaps after all you should have become a nun, even without vocation, as Mrs Belper said, and not look into teacups and wonder if in the leaves, but walk in the garden by the laurels, and the variegated laurel clump, with Sister Mary holding a hand, and it was evening, and the trams hung an unimportant apostrophe between the laurel clump and the lights. Perhaps I should have done all this, she said. I don’t know. Perhaps I shall never know.

That’s what you ought to have done, Mrs Belper said. We’ll never find you a husband here.

And if I don’t want a husband? said Alys.

Well, there’s not much chance of your going off the rails. No one even for that.

What’s all this? asked Mr Belper, coming in suddenly and clapping his wife on the back.

Look out, you clumsy brute! she said. You’ve startled Trixie out of her skin.

Poor little Trixie! Trixie! Trixie, come to Father, dear.

Trixie doesn’t love Father any more. Do you pet? Joe, duckie, pour yourself some tea. If I touched the pot I’d stick to it. When d’you think it’s going to rain? We were finding a husband for Alys, Joe.

Tell it not in Bath! said Mr Belper, rolling a slightly bloodshot eye.

Always a tease, murmured his wife, feeling perhaps through her latent conscience that some excuse was necessary.

She looked at her husband all the same and waited for him to follow up, because the Belpers were like that, a kind of perpetual vaudeville act, or concert party, The Good Sorts, who bandied about a clumsy ball both for their own entertainment and their audience’s discomfiture.

I think I shall have to go home, said Alys.

Go home for what? Mrs Belper complained. What a girl you are, to be sure. Of course I don’t understand you, Alys. You could have stayed on to supper. We might have had a game of cards.

Always on the make is Cissie Belper, said her husband, faithful to the act.

Oh, shut up, Joe, for God’s sake! But doesn’t Alys make you sick?

Jostled redly the Belper faces counting through lines of intricate sound the veins and a dog’s bark one two shattering the lampshade beads. Yes, thought Alys Browne, it is time I left, though why, he will not have come.

What about the shares, Mr Belper? she said as she took her hat.

Shares? Oh yes! The shares! Don’t you be impatient,
my girl. Just you trust to your Uncle Joe. He’ll hand you a nice little nest-egg, though we can’t produce any dividends yet.

Joe, you’re a marvel, said his wife, not altogether sarcastically. Mrs Belper always held her breath before the faintly miraculous conduct of stocks and shares.

But Alys thought she would go home, went out into the sunlight that was heavy on her hair, and it made her altogether heavy to walk in the hot sun, even as far as home. She walked along the road and smiled to herself until she thought it must look silly that anyone passing her on the road would wonder what she was smiling at. So she stopped. It seemed a long way home. Nowadays she always seemed to be on her way between two points, or waiting, she waited much more than in the past, though now with a sense of fulfilment in waiting, as if it were some end in itself. She could not think what would happen, but she did not much care. Most things were irrelevant now, having tea at the Belpers’, or buying shares in a company on Mr Belper’s advice. But she had sold the paddocks at Kambala that once her father had owned, and buying the shares she had said, I shall go to California soon, this is almost on the way. But this was when she was buying the shares. I shall go to California soon. Now she did not want to any more, it did not seem worth while. And the Salvage Bay Pearl Company, a prospectus in a bottom drawer, had lost the romantic possibilities which were such an inducement to buy. Those men who went down in helmets, the dark faces behind glass, walked on the bottom of the sea to gather pearls, walked through forests of sponge, like dark flowers
encased in glass, it was all there behind the printed word, the ropes of weed that swayed without a wind. Reading the prospectus was to get rich, she would go to California, and all this would be on pearls, though nobody in the boat would know that Miss Alys Browne was made of pearls, a kind of pearl queen in her way. This was how many months ago? She wondered, but she did not know, and anyway she was not rich yet, and—well, she did not altogether care. Though this would be nice, she said, a change to have people like you just for your surface value, quite a change.

Her feet caught in the heavy surface of the road. If he would approve, just for a while, a certain amount of frailty, like the books she had scarcely read. But she could not always be thinking of someone else. She brushed away a face with her hand. Because she must go on being herself, or what was herself, that was what made it difficult, being herself, or thinking of someone else, which was herself? She thought of him and became at once a different person, yet in a way more herself, firmer, and more distinct. Perhaps this was it. And she wanted it like this, the start of something positive. All those superficialities, she said, all these must fall away, all that I was building up, because I was afraid, it is because I was afraid that I wanted to be different, that I wanted California, because I was afraid.

The shadows were longer on the road as she turned up towards her house. It was still sunny and hot, but with that quietness which anticipates the decline of the sun, and there was a brassy sheen on everything. In summer when your sense of perception has been numbed all day by the light and the heat, and you have sunk down into a blurred
world, of which the reality is less actual than your own, because you have constructed something in desperation in which to take refuge with yourself, you first become aware again in this softer but still florid light, you discover in the external its proportionate significance. So to Alys Browne opening her gate objects became distinctly defined, as if she had been looking through a gauze all day and now it had dropped, and the fence-posts stood up with a kind of sober, detached beauty, very distinct from their environment, and the house with its long, slender shadow, and the potsherds bordering the flower-beds, and the corrugated water-tank, all these had an existence of their own, only united in this moment of depreciating sun.

Alys Browne clicked the gate. In the stillness it made a loud click. It was so still that she felt he could not be there. There was no reason why he should. She was as nothing to him, as his wife was something, and she must not think. My husband is up at Kambala, she said. She was Mrs Halliday and at the same time almost an impersonal entity, to her, personal to him. He said, you must come down and see my wife. She felt she must ask about his wife, but they talked about music instead. The way her hair that morning, slightly grey, as if she were older than he, falling down at the sides, and she said he was up at Kambala. Alys Browne walked on up the path. Suddenly she hoped he would not be there.

On the edge of the verandah sat Margaret Quong, leaning against a post, and her legs hung down into the flower-bed underneath. She sat there playing with a shell, holding it in her hands, looking at it, not at Alys Browne,
as her feet stirred poppy and marigold. Oh dear, thought Alys, that child, then he is not here, and isn’t she thin, those long legs.

Hello, Margaret, she said. I could drop.

She went and sat down on the edge of the verandah beside the child. She rested her head on Margaret’s shoulder and closed her eyes. Margaret stopped playing with the shell. Down the slope Schmidts’ cows were arriving to be milked, walking heavy with shadow into the curve of the hill.

It isn’t your lesson, is it? said Alys.

No, said Margaret. I just came.

She spoke very softly. She sat stiffly and still, holding with her shoulder the burden of Alys’s head. There was something pained and almost Gothic in the angle of her body, like a figure in a niche embodying pleasure and pain.

Have you been here long? asked Alys.

About half an hour.

So he had not come, for she would have said. Alys got up and went inside. Margaret followed her in. This silent child, and if he were to come.

I’ve been down at Belpers’, she said.

Oh.

Yes. Mrs Belper is having a dress.

She must look round the room, she felt, but not without an attempt to disguise, because Margaret might see a note, where of course there was none, or had blown away perhaps if a wind, was no wind. And why was she looking at her, this child, knowing, if only she would say, the way that children usually know and say, but Margaret different in this, her face closed up.

Why, what’s the matter, Margaret? she said.

Nothing.

You look so strange.

Margaret Quong turned away. She began to kick the floor with her heel.

The doctor was here, Margaret said.

Alys put down her hat. Yes? She wanted to say, yes, what else, tell me what else at once, and she looked at her hand that was trembling on the brim of her hat.

He was, was he? she said, and it was not her voice at all.

Margaret was very still.

And what did he want? said Alys.

Nothing. He didn’t say.

She began to arrange things, things there was no need to arrange, because Margaret looking, and yet would know. She looked at Margaret, that sullen stare that was almost tears.

I’m going now, said Margaret. I’ll come to-morrow for my lesson, she said.

Then she went very quickly, and Alys could see her marching quickly down the path through the tarnish of the late afternoon. She had wanted to say to Margaret before she left, to say what? She even called out through the door, Margaret! Margaret! to a figure that was almost distance. But anyway if Margaret turned she really had nothing to say, or so much, so much that she could not say, to Margaret whose face was heavy with tears. She felt a bit ashamed too. I am to blame for this, she said, or is one to blame, is it just that one is part of a movement for which one is not responsible, a note joined to other notes to complete a bar,
and these repeated in a pattern forming part of the general scheme. She hoped it was like this. She did not like to think she was responsible, the way Margaret looked, and she was fond of Margaret who could not see that this was different, when he came to the house and she played him Schumann, as she and Margaret played, only the whole tempo was different then, and there were moments experienced with Margaret that always must remain separate, if she could tell her that.