Waiting, waiting for what, Happy Valley waiting in the dark, is the question without answer. There is no collaboration between human curiosity and the attitude of inanimate things, least of all in the dark, when the answer to the question in the dark might prove a momentary, if not the ultimate solution. So there is no choice but to fall asleep, as Rodney Halliday falls asleep, crumpled up against the wall. There is always this advantage in sleep, you cannot feel you are cheated, until of course the moment of waking, and that is a long way off. So Rodney Halliday sleeps, and his face is once more ten years old. So Walter Quong stirs in the grass at the side of the road and his world is non-dimensional, escaping the nettle’s touch. His dream is unimportant, except as a dream.
Alys Browne sat with her bag in the sitting-room. She waited. She heard the car coming up the hill. All this that I am leaving, she felt, has fulfilled its importance, there is no sorrow attached to discarding objects that are no longer necessary, it is right that I should touch nothing, that I should simply walk out. She thought a bit about Mrs Stopford-Champernowne, the wind blew through the grass in the Park, and on Sunday afternoon the Salvation Army played, she thought a bit about the convent and the face of Sister Mary and over the wall the violet sparks from trams, all this was a dream, she felt, and Hilda Halliday. Then her mind stopped short. She got up. She wanted to walk about. It is wrong to dream, she said, Oliver is reality. She found herself clenching her hands. I want to live, she said, I have a right to this as much as Hilda Halliday, I shall not be possessed by this half-life, this dream, or is it a dream, or is it a dream, or is Oliver a dream. Oliver is coming up the hill. We are going away somewhere, only somewhere, there are no labels, and here we shall live. This is right.
Alys, Oliver said, it was his voice outside.
It was right, his voice said, as she turned down the lamp, turned it right down, and it was dark, she could see no longer the Alys Browne, part of books and pictures accumulated in a room, an apology for life, or the lack of it. Happy Valley is asleep, she felt, I am no longer part of Happy Valley, this poor dream, this substitute for reality.
Alys? Oliver called.
Yes, she said. I’m coming.
She stood alone in the darkened room, the shreds of past emotions slipping away. There is nothing I regret, she said, there is nothing I, not even Hilda Halliday. These are part of sleep.
26
They heard it going round and round. Two figures detached by fear were large in candlelight. There was no connection now between Hagan and Vic, for the moment not even the connection of a voice. Fear was a personal preoccupation. While feet trailed round the sitting-room.
Hagan felt his heart bump, then go on its normal way. It made him snort. It wasn’t as if you were afraid, it wasn’t that that gave you a bit of a start to hear. It made him angry to think anyone thought him afraid.
How do you like that? he said, and his voice came with a snort. That’s old Who’s-this back. Makes a cove look funny, he said.
Vic sat on the bed. She did not speak. The sheet streamed floorwards from her breasts. She held it to her breasts, that escaped, hung yellow and static in the candlelight. He was speaking what she did not hear, she felt, she heard the feet.
Well, I guess I’ll push off, Hagan said.
Felt a fool skulking out, though your pants were on, it might have been worse meeting someone in your shirt. He stood in the passage, waiting. His hat. The sitting-room door was an enamel knob. He waited for the knob. He heard the feet. There was no sign. He wasn’t one to look for trouble out in the middle of the road. So he took up his hat. He went down the passage away from the door, almost on his toes. It was easier to breathe in the yard, easier in the lane, where your eyes still waited for the turning of a knob. He began to whistle softly. It was company. A waltz something, that you didn’t mind if Sidney Furlow, you were satisfied, it almost mightn’t have been Vic, she said, Mrs Moriarty gone, and good night, Sidney, you said. She lay on the bed in a funk. Though it gave you the creeps, Moriarty in that room, like a circus horse on the track, or a brokendown cab-horse with gammy knees plodding along William Street, and if that knob had turned you would have said what. Christ, he said, Christ. His breath whistled through his teeth. Not that you were afraid, or anything like that. A white blur was no knob, was moving up the dark, was what.
Who’s that? he said, his voice hollow in the lane.
His eyes fixed upon a white blur that would not take more definite shape. He stopped against the fence.
Eh? said the blur. It’s me.
Then that loony Chambers lumbering up the lane. Hagan saw his face drift past, or the white suggestion of a face. Said his name was Chuffy Chambers, the bulging eye, and they let it go round loose. It made him swear as he went on down the lane.
Chuffy Chambers, lumbering in the dark, felt his skin tingle at a voice. Sometimes he could not sleep at night, he wandered up and down, his feet were soft in the nettles that grew at the side of the road. Hagan, he said it over, rough against his tongue. He could feel himself beginning to shake, with Hagan, with a name mouthed, and holding on to the fence the light at Moriartys’ danced. He felt he must spit out a name that, winding round his tongue, stuck. He must get it out. It trickled down his chin. Then he began to feel better, purified in a way. The stars flowed back. He used to lie on the verandah, when it was summer of course, and count the stars, but he never counted very far.
Chuffy Chambers meandered along the lane, like a name meandering in his head, though only the shape of a name, no emotion now attached. He heard the call of a cat, raucous with love, saw the black pool that was cat elongate and press itself through a hole in Moriartys’ fence. The call echoed frostily. It pierced through the skin with a little shiver, reaching out to touch Ernest Moriarty’s back stooped in the sitting-room. He heard the cry of the cat. He straightened up. He stared at the pattern of familiar objects that were only just there, for the first time taking shape, knew all these again, though different. They pressed down like the pressure of a clock, he had heard, heard, in the pace of feet walking, were his feet, stopped. He knew he had been walking round the room, but why, but why, and why the clock. Then he remembered the hat. His mind pitched back. He was calm enough. Even if the hat.
She said, you’ll take your pyjamas, and the Crown, you’ll wear your pyjamas, the egg, she said, and of course it must rain because of my straw hat. But going into Moorang you forgot that this was Vic, or a straw hat, or the rain, was a pain in your chest that truck that jolted over the ruts, and your head swam past telephone poles, or wires in loops of telephones that said the voice anonymous. It was in the album, now perhaps, pressed against Senegal, only you did not look, see the lamp you lit when the match broke. He could not remember lighting the lamp. You will read a paper on stamps, they said, in the circular, and that was why in Moorang, in the main street, would read a paper on stamps, afterwards coffee, with a discussion, that this must be remembered or written down in a book with an imposition from Arthur Ball when the ink fell on the floor. But not Vic. Ink fell on a name, obliterated a face. Then he was going round and round, he felt he had been going round and round, his head or his feet, of which there was no trace on the carpet when looking, only where the coffee fell, but someone had been walking where there was no track. Or sign. No hat in the hall. All those faces at the school waited for a talk on stamps, and that was why you were there, the moustache and the twitching eye, or Miss Porter who would pour out coffee that did not fall, like ink, like not in school, because this was not the school, because Miss Porter said the advance of history commemorated by the philatelist by a cup of coffee or a stamp, take care Mr Moriarty, she said, a cup of coffee will pick you up if you fall, it’s tiring to read a paper, she said.