He stood there. Her mouth froze.
Then she watched him coming forward. His arms were stiff. He was coming forward. She could look into his eyes. Oh God, then it was this that you did not like to think, or dream, as you lay on a bed and felt his breath coming hot, his hands.
No, not this, Ernest, she screamed. I didn’t. No. I’ll tell. But not this.
He got her up against the wall, felt her quiver, her body afraid that lay on the bed, they said the letter said, if only he had the breath to press, as looking into an eye it came up close, it swam, it flowed, and light delved down, he must press down with all his might, and they caught him in the train, and they strung him up, with the loops of telephone wire cutting right into the throat, snapped.
There was no sound in her throat, as if words had solidified, had stuck. Her hair hung floorwards. She drooped. This thing on the bed. He looked at it through the blur of his almost exhausted breath. Then it slipped down, the hair drifting and the sheet, it fell lumped upon the floor. He looked at it. He wanted to crush out, the hands on neck, all semblance of a lie, even if his lungs tore and this was his last act. Because if she was not dead, he said, if she was not dead…His hands fumbled, stopped.
Ernest Moriarty looked down. He was kneeling on the floor beside. The sheet was red. He looked down at a face and the tongue swollen, clapper-wise, that he held in his hand protruding from the mouth of what had been a woman, like the face, was no longer this, this thing, no longer Vic. I have killed Vic, he said, she is gone. He pulled savagely, impotently, at the tongue of the thing that was no longer Vic.
Now that it was all over his strength flapped, his nerves, yet he felt a strange freedom, a reserve of strength. He went into the sitting-room. The silence grated, was out of key with this strange exultation almost musical in his head. He listened to glass fall, felt the splintering of glass on his hand still red. He looked at his hand. It did not seem important, whether it was red or not, only to destroy this and this, was all that was left, was right. It was all over. It had served its purpose, this room. He found himself crying into his hands. Give me your braces, she said. Blood on his mouth. He cried. But the only alternative was to go round and round, and going round and round for how many years, was a lie. He looked at the cyclamen that lay crushed upon the floor, he had lifted it out by the stem, out of the lustre bowl, and it lay bruised, surprised, its pink ears full of query still. He crushed it with his heel.
He would go out now. There is a dead woman in the other room, he said aloud. It was one of those things you could not believe. It made him laugh. He looked back over the debris of the sitting-room, the mahogany clock that the Smiths gave, the cyclamen crushed upon a field of glass, all these symbols that had fulfilled their purpose in the life of Vic and Ernest Moriarty. Ernest Moriarty was the man, he said, and what sort of a man, and why to kill his wife.
He began to walk out along the road in no particular direction, just to walk. The air tightened his chest. Vic said, burn a powder, dear, you’ll feel better, she said. Was the wife of a man called Ernest Moriarty. He taught in the school. It wasn’t as if there was a reason for what he done, the paper said, the checks, you wonder what enters people’s heads. Ernest Moriarty walked on. The chief reason was there was no reason. He began to cough. It tightened up, his chest, his life that straggled out over years, as if someone had pulled the reel, and with a jerk, was at least a purpose, to feel this. He was walking. He was walking. Feet sounded on the metal, told him he was there, and the thin crackle of ice. Then he stopped and he was not there. There was no evidence that Ernest Moriarty was even a name until he walked. Out of his eyes water ran, not tears. For tears are personal. Walking or not, he was the dark. That slow darkness. His hand felt towards ice, did not try to reject what it became.
27
The light wedged into darkness, split it up into two sectors, with the car spinning down the path of light. Houses, no longer the real structure of houses, were pale beside the road, the paper facades, or masks representative of sleep in a kind of silent allegory. A rabbit crossed the road, lacking in substance, to join the dark. Only the car in fact, you felt, had some reality or purpose. They had given it this with their bodies that sat up straight. They had not relaxed yet, like people going on and on in a car, on journeys that might be without end to judge by the expression of a face, They still sat up straight with a rigidity of purpose. We shall get somewhere, they said. This is why we are doing it. Even if the luggage be without labels there is nevertheless a goal.
Though what this is, said Alys Browne, sitting here with Oliver, if not Oliver what else, America or Africa, but it is still Oliver, still, is always this. She began to relax a little, into a smile that was half sleep and thought that winds round the irrelevant, a cup of coffee, or the stockings left behind. But she felt warm. She could feel his coat jutting into the half-reality of a dream world and making it almost tangible. This is real now, she said. It is only just beginning, asleep, awake, is still Oliver.
I’m hungry, Oliver, she said.
We’ll stop in Moorang, at the station, and get some coffee, he said.
Yes, she said, that half-sleep. Coffee at the station always smells.
She did not mind. Talking of this with Oliver, the ordinary things, and their whole life, begun already, would be a succession of ordinary things that touched on the personal shore and became significant. She smelt the coffee in a station cup, warm in her throat, she felt warm.
He felt her relax as talk of coffee sent the mind back, right back, that bistro in the Rue de, he forgot, there was nothing between the moment and this, to sitting in a rainy night where khaki smelt, and the khaki coffee, or she asked for a café crème, were inseparable because wet, they clung, the fold on leg, and going out into the rain you knew that you were going home, the War was over, the long years, and time stretched out blank waiting for an impression that you would make now. It had waited for this. The other shapes were not, that you thought, that you imagined before Alys Browne.
Oliver Halliday, driving his car from Happy Valley to Moorang, swung out to avoid something that he was not sure, on the road, if this. The trees were grey and sharp in the stationary light, the wheel solid, he felt steel, anchored to this the returned thought.
I’ll have to go back and look, he said,
Hearing words, she knew they had returned out of another world. He would go and look. She closed her eyes. She did not want to look, not so much at something on the road, as at the sharp outline of trees. Opening the eyes the light stopped short. She could not see along the road, because it ended that leaden ridge, so very heavy in the headlight, the car clamped down. There was no connection with motion in the passive body of the car. Or herself. Or herself. She could not move, she would never move out of the shackles of the present moment, she could not even unclasp her hands,
Oliver went back. It was Ernest Moriarty lying on the road. He was dead.
A bird flapped, slow, out of a grey tree.
He stood looking at the body of Ernest Moriarty, dead some little time, it was almost cold, like any other body, stiff and a little ludicrous in its unconsciousness. The insignificance of Moriarty was somehow underlined by his being stretched in the middle of the road. There was blood on his face, the fall. Death made you feel in a way detached, looking down at Moriarty like this. Moriarty walking out along the road from Happy Valley and falling dead, this automaton, was no more automaton than, only you did not fall dead, you stopped short, returned to the inevitable starting-point. You did not escape from Happy Valley like this. That bird flapping brushed the mind free of stray impossible thoughts.