Happy Valley (18 page)

I’ll give you what! Andy Everett gasped.

Emily Schmidt gave a little shriek.

Ernest Moriarty stirred. As they hit that stump shrieked out it was his name she had not forgotten looking back or whose name he thought Ernest could not tell or Clem as she clung against that stump his back sticking through his side and you couldn’t ride fast with one hand she had and blood and that dust half blood clogging feet stuck shouting at you eyes as you stood in eyes of children turned up hate and began to scream those screaming eyes like a dream like a dream take off your coat and it is not a dream scream advance and touch her she is not dead yet on forward out of this scream.

It hit the mouth with a stupid thud. It fell. It rolled roundly nonchalant and settled by Margaret Quong.

I’ll give you what! Andy Everett gasped.

Emily Schmidt gave a little shriek.

Vic, murmured Moriarty. Vic.

The eye glazed with sleep fastened on a reality, this orange rolling across the floor. Eyes stared at eye. They were staring, action arrested, as they sat twisted in seats, or hand raised, but everywhere a semblance of fear, of hate.

Vic, he whispered again.

Crashing against that stump. They might have been frozen as they looked at him.

What is it? he said. He got up on his feet, put his hand on the chair as he swayed. What is it? Stare at me, he said. Go on!

They recoiled from his voice. It was a strange voice. It made them afraid. Heads bent over books to disguise fear. They crouched.

Yes, he shouted. We know where we stand. There’s no use beating about the bush.

He took up a ruler and beat on the desk. The way she looked back her face distorted, you knew it was a dream or not a dream, or all this, the stubborn faces fastened over a history book. He began to choke. Clinging to Hagan’s back.

Yes, he shouted. It’s all very well.

They seemed to crouch lower, were afraid now, of something that they did not understand. What has happened, the pulse asked, in the throat, what is the matter, the heart beat in soft, rubbery thuds.

He was going to have an attack. He felt old, sick. He was getting old sitting at a desk in Happy Valley. He wrote to the Board, which was officially unmoved. It was all very well, like walking up a shelving beach that rolled back, each
pebble a step, or a dream, or a dream. She would say, what is the matter, Ernest, and he would say, nothing, could not tell her it was a dream. Oh God, and what was going home and going home. To-morrow was going home. To-morrow was to-morrow was Shakespeare was. The trees were dead, those grey trees at the turn, and the wind clattering in a dead branch, sitting at a desk a dead branch tapping on the desk tap tap. That orange on the floor. Now they were afraid. The orange lay still. He would make them more afraid. Beating on the desk a ruler beat looked at the hand saw the centimetre beat.

Do you think it’s any pleasure to me? he gasped, going down among the benches, his breath torn, a screech from his chest. Do you think it isn’t misery for every one concerned? You or me, it’s all the same thing. We all know where we stand.

Sitting on that bike with her skirt drawn up over her knees, his hand. His breath was a moan as he slashed, with the ruler slashed, slashed, did not care, make them afraid. Margaret Quong crouched over the desk, held her hands to her head. Emily Schmidt sidled away. The blows were falling on Margaret Quong. The edge of the ruler cut into her wrists. She sat crouched down protecting her head.

There was a silence of fear in the room. Waiting. Things began to integrate again, the other side of his spectacles that were no longer blurred, the room taking its habitual shape, brown and banal as it always was. It was no other afternoon, in fact. Just an afternoon. Only he felt sick, was spent now, standing there with a ruler in his hand. He went back to his table. He arranged the exercise books. He had
to hang on to the edge of the table because his breathing was bad.

Margaret Quong crouched still, feeling not so much physical pain as fear, and a welling of disconnected sorrow, the way an emotion fastens itself to a pretext that is not, properly speaking, its own. Emily Schmidt’s face was white with momentary sympathy. She felt the pain of the blows that might have been hers. She turned towards Margaret a white face. But the others looked at their books. Margaret’s look was a blank page, from wondering why this, she could not understand, or why it went on inside her the voice dulled by a bull’s-eye in the cheek, beating, beating time, or why were you born, why this. She sat with her arms pressed into her neck. Alys Browne, she had written in the margin of the history book. It would have been easier if there had been the two of us, she said, as they walked up the hill, arm round waist, entwined, because when two were one it was easier. Margaret Quong’s arm was numb with reflected pain.

Later on they went home, as they did any other afternoon, though quieter first at the door, then gathering in a tumult as they got outside, a little eddy of passion in the dust. Ernest Moriarty sat on at the table in the empty room in company with the clock. The room was empty. He could not think. His head was empty. He would go home up the hill, when his breathing grew easier, past the turn where those dead trees stood and clattered in the wind. The day they came Vic said, so this is Happy Valley, she said, I don’t know why you’ve brought me here. He sat at the table and clenched his hands till they went knuckle-white.

Sidney Furlow walked beneath the plum-trees on her own. He had written to her, she had the letter in her hand, and she knew what it was about, that it would be like the others, so she had not opened it. The plum-trees were thin and black-boughed. They only bore fruit about once every three years. They were very old. But when there was blossom on the boughs you forgot their age, you put up your face against the cool, drooping boughs. She held the letter in her hand, unopened. It might have been a bill, a debt, as if she owed Roger Kemble something that she could not pay. Her face was sullen under the trees. She leant her head against a black trunk and felt the roughness of the bark. How long is this going on, she said, and what good is it going to do, whether I write to him or not, say I meant what I said, or say nothing at all. As if I had the power to make him happy, depending on me, something depending on me. The
power. To hold his letter in her hand gave her a sense of power, and tearing them up, and the one she had poked into the incinerator, watching it curl brown, had quickened her pulse a little, though not very much. It was a pretty negative emotion that arose out of being able to control the life of Roger Kemble. She did not want this. People on the whole were pretty negative. The nice people you met at races and dances, whose niceness was about the only reason for their being, and consequently niceness had become an all-time job. But it left a pappy taste in your mouth, like coconut milk, and once you had tried it you didn’t want to again. Only, only a sometimes hankering not to be Sidney Furlow at least, though standing outside would hate perhaps the you discarded, probably discover something as futile as niceness, something just as negative underneath.

She felt the bark against her forehead, scored and rough. She held the letter in her hand, tore it, following no design. The letter fluttered away in little jagged scraps. It lay white on the ground. It was the fourth letter she had destroyed. She did not even feel a sense of power now that she had destroyed the fourth. It had become a habit. Why it had ever been anything else. She laughed. In tearing a letter up. Or burning a letter and feeling that you were responsible, as if the fire. That time in the gully up near Ferndale was what you felt, what you could not express, when the fire ran down the gully from tree to tree and they felled a belt of timber to break the fire, and dug a ditch all night in a fever, all those men working like a lot of marionettes, up and down their arms, their faces black, and beating with branches to turn the course of the fire. There was something
magnificent in the progress of fire. Then Roger Kemble wrote on white notepaper with a crest and asked you to marry him. She touched with her toe a fragment of white paper lying on the ground. He could not understand the leaping of fire against those trees, or why she had clenched her hands, or the way her heart, because it had a positive power that made men move their arms in abject unison like so many marionettes, it was pitiful to see, and exciting. She kicked her toe fiercely against the root of the tree.

Mother cried because she thought the fire would pass Ferndale and reach Glen Marsh, and you almost prayed for it with your throat dry to reach Glen Marsh. Mother making a family tree and hanging it on the wall. The crackle of green wood, the spitting of sap, they beat the fire with boughs. The Furlows of Glen Marsh perched on a tree, so many twigs to a branch. What a lovely fire, she said, what a lovely fire. Like saying, thank you for the
lovely
dance, only you did not mean it then, and this, this leaping of fire, your whole body worshipped the rhythm was the dance serpentine with flames. It did not reach Glen Marsh. It burnt itself out. It was not the men, nothing they had done, it just burnt itself out, a sort of hara-kiri of the fire. And Mother said, thank God, because she felt it would not be blasphemy to say it on such an occasion as this, so much saved, lives perhaps, and the way the men had worked, as if it had been the men, and not the fire that had died of its own will.

Sidney Furlow walked beneath the plum-trees. She walked over the scraps of paper that lay scattered on the ground. She went on towards the stables. She felt impotent.
A wilderness of hours lay between lunch and tea. The yard was a wilderness of silence. In the stable was the colt that Hagan had been breaking. He stood there dejected now with the saddle on his back, would stand there all day, smarting and galled, the flies jetting the corners of his eyes. He snorted when he looked across the gate of the stall. His flanks quivered. Eyeing her to see. That big brute riding the colt in the yard, she had seen, seen the horse ball in the air, shatter the ground, with Hagan unshaken on his back, then accepting dejection, and now standing all day learning the shape and purport of the saddle on his back. This was a triumph of man. The power of man, subjecting the brute to acquiescence, though not subjecting fire. A conflict for superiority between two brutes. He swayed a little as the colt struck the ground, then he was upright in the saddle again. The colt now eyed her to see.

Why not? she said. She opened the stall gate. The colt sidled, snorted, stared at her out of his white face, out of his bloodshot eyes. He was a big, muscular bay animal. He stood there, afraid, in the pools of stagnant urine and the piled dung on the stall floor. All that week Hagan had been riding him. He was still bewildered. He quivered when she touched the bridle rein. She did not give a damn what happened, what was said, what Mother said, as she led the colt, cautious in its step, across the yard. But she had to ride the colt. It was her funeral. She led the horse down the hill to a small hollow out of sight of the house.

There, she said, as she flung the reins back over his neck. She felt excited, the horse excited, blowing out his nostrils and spraying her with fear.

He was still when she mounted, quite still, only for a trembling between her legs, but he made no move, and she sat there tautly, waiting for something to happen, waiting for a thunderbolt. Touched him with her spurs then. She anticipated the shudder and the grunt, bent to the movement of the horse, as he hunched his back and curved in the air, her breath left her as he touched the ground. Oh but it was good, good, and she laughed, holding him with her spurs, turned him up the paddock, let the wind slip past and the blurred grass. She clung to the horse as he rooted back, she laughed, she spurred him on and they passed over the hill. Tried to shake her off and she clung to him, or hit him across the shoulder with her crop, striking the sweat bands and the white foam. There was foam on the leather crop. She could feel the straining of his mouth, straining at her hands. This was power. You could feel it in your hands. You could feel the hot air of the flames on your face. Something you could not explain. Something fierce and irrational, in the striving of the horse, in the progress of the flame. You became part of it, or overcame it and were swallowed up in a spasm of violence.

She drew him in on the flat. He reared up, beating the air. Then he stood still, hunched again, with his tail between his legs.

Taking him out for some air? asked Hagan.

Coming up behind her like that. Hagan approached her on his horse, riding in an easy jog with one hand planted confidently on his thigh.

He’s broken by now all right, he said, looking ironically not so much at the horse.

You’ve done your job very well, she said. That goes without saying, of course.

I kind of irritate you, he said.

No!

She started the colt into a walk. He went pretty stupidly, in a daze. She was breathless, could not sort her emotions, coming up behind her like that, and blowing his trumpet, not that you expected anything else, not from Hagan, damn his eyes, skulking along, anyway she had ridden the horse.

You know how to sit him, he said.

I ought to. I’m not a child.

That doesn’t follow.

She knew, and she bit her lip.

He looked at her, the way she hated him. She had guts though, riding that horse, he had said she had guts the day she ran down the hill, only he would not tell, he would not put ideas in her head, the sulky little bitch that wanted a good smack on her arse, running down the hill, there wasn’t too much of it, but room enough for what it deserved. That was what most of them wanted, call me Vic and all that and then dropping you like a scone, to tune them up, this one too, only you wanted nothing like that, didn’t want to get bitten, want…She could sit a horse though, you could see that, easy in the saddle. Didn’t want that. Didn’t want…

Going far? he said.

That depends.

I’m going up here to look at a fence.

She did not answer. But she rode along. She could turn off soon, but she would go a little. She was seated higher
than Hagan on his rather stocky little mare. She felt a sense of easy achievement as she rode along. Her body swayed with the horse, soothed, or purged of the emotion that led her to take the horse from the stall.

He rode along beside her. He smiled to himself. Doing him an honour, Miss Sidney Furlow. She had a small waist inside that coat. She was neat enough in her own line, but a line that wasn’t his.

I shall keep this horse, she said.

If you’ve made up your mind it’s as good as yours.

His irony started to prick her again.

Don’t you believe in getting what you want?

Yes, he said, I’m with you there.

Well then, she said.

Sometimes, he said, and he looked at her under the tilt of his hat, sometimes it’s too damn easy, isn’t worth having when you get it. That’s what I mean.

Telling her something that she knew. Because she knew that. As if she wanted the horse, would say, Father, I’m going to ride that horse, she would have it, would not want it any more. It was always like that, was Roger Kemble, made you tear up the letter, made you feel a sort of contempt for anything you could reach straight out and take. Their stirrups clinked in the silence. Riding with Roger had been like this, a clinking of stirrups as toes touched. Only this was Hagan now. He sat confidently astride his horse, rather thick in the thigh. His hands moved with the reins, were square and coarse.

Hold on a minute, he said.

He suddenly put out his hand and held her arm. She
stopped. She did not understand. She felt the pressure of his hand, and the quickening of a pulse, and a confusion of bewildered thought, that wanted an explanation, to explain to her face that was red, she felt, why the pressure of this hand. But without explanation he had jumped down from his horse, was standing in the tussocks knee-deep, had taken a stick, was standing with his arm raised. Then she saw it was a snake among the tussocks, glistening and loosely curled. The colt snorted. She felt the quivering of his neck, of her own body as the snake loosened its loose coils, it was unwinding, straight and black in the yellow grass. He must get it, she felt, he must kill this snake. She leant forward in her saddle with the movement of the snake’s body, that easy rhythm of glistening flight, she could feel a cry rising in her throat, not of fear, but rather of encouragement or more than this, she was directing his arm, it was her arm, she wanted to kill that snake. Then he brought down the stick. The snake writhed like a worm in knots. He struck it again on the spine, three times. The snake was a quivering of nerves.

Good, she cried. Oh, good!

She had to jump down from the horse and see, reins looped about the fetlock, steady him, and now see, it is dead, almost quite still. She ran forward and bent over the snake. It was not the first she had seen killed, there were many others, but now a pulse in her throat made it almost the first.

I wish I’d killed it, she said.

It’s dead, whoever killed it, said Hagan, letting the stick fall,

Yes, she said, but I’ve never killed a snake. I’ve always
been afraid. But I think I could have killed this one. A snake nearly bit me when I was a child.

He looked at her, rather insolent.

That can’t have been so very long ago, he said.

She looked back at him, insolent too. She laughed harshly.

A very long time ago, she said. But something apparently sticks in the mind.

This was Sidney Furlow showing off, the little bitch, if only he could take a lump of wood, treat her almost like a snake. But he looked at her and felt his throat go dry, he felt a bit small, though of course she was only showing off, and he was as good as a Furlow, would like to put her on the ground and show her a Furlow got off in the same place as anyone else.

She had turned away. She was bending over the snake, taut as her body crouched and touched the body of the snake.

It’s quite dead, she said softly.

He couldn’t stop looking at her. She made him feel very small. Often like this. Had to assert himself. There wasn’t a woman made him feel like that, only this lean bitch.

She picked up the snake. She held it by a limp tail. Her face was half exultation, half disgust.

Put it down, he said roughly.

Why?

Because it mightn’t be dead.

She shrugged her shoulders. With her other hand she slowly caressed the long body of the snake. She was fascinated by a dead snake.

Don’t be a damn fool, he said.

He knocked it out of her hand. She looked at him, putting out her jaw a little, gathering force.

Why, Hagan? she said. I shall do exactly what I like.

Looking at him made him feel small, made him, made him…

But you, you, he said, he began to stutter.

What are you trying to say?

Smiling at him that way, and a word wouldn’t come, the bitch, like swaying on that horse as much as to invite. He went at her suddenly. That thin month. He had her in his arms. He opened her mouth. She was nothing. She was no more than any of the others. Touching her he reasserted himself, was reinstated in his own esteem.

A second was a long time. She had no strength. She was opening up, her whole body, her whole life falling apart in two halves, and in the centre there was nothing, or air or languor, as she clung to his body not to fall, felt her arms put out tendrils, touched the roughness, wetness of his shirt. She closed her eyes. Helen said, no, not that, not, and she stuffed the sheet into her mouth. Her body was a shudder of disgust. She could only hear the quick clapping in her ears. She pulled herself away. Oh God, she said, and her whole mouth was twisted with disgust. She hated him, hated him. She hated him with her eyes, with her whole body that he had touched.