He went through the gesture of stooping, of touching the body again. He would take it back, the doctor, they would want to ask. Hilda’s face drawing the curtains would twist in pity because, and Moriarty pity, Hilda and Moriarty who were joined in Happy Valley by a link of frustration and pain. Only Moriarty was dead, not Hilda. He put his arms round the body to lift it up. Hilda tried to hide her handkerchief that he knew was stained with blood. He wanted to cry out into the face of the dead man who weighed him down with his weight, that he must drag back, back, that he must take back to Happy Valley. Then he stooped under the weight.
It’s Moriarty, he said. Something’s happened. He’s dead.
She heard the door close. She did not speak. We shall go back now, she felt. She did not question death, or wonder at something felt already in her leaded hands. She did not turn to verify the fact. It lay in Oliver’s voice, in the live moment, in what they were doing, as well as in the body of the dead man. And this, this Moriarty who is dead, walked down the street yesterday. We shall go to America, we said. She felt the cold weight of the impossible. It lay behind her in the car. She heard it bump as they drove along the road.
Alys, he said, we’ll have to stay. They’ll want to know. Just for a little. I want you to understand that.
She heard no conviction in his voice. She did not expect it.
I’m glad he didn’t have to lie there long, she said. I’m glad we came.
She did not want to talk about what was now, she did not want to recall this. They drove along the road to find Moriarty, the reason was this.
Then they were driving up the street, without stir, that had not noticed their departure. No dog barked at a return that was almost without a setting out, no expression of surprise on the face of house. How dead the houses, and unreal, she felt, though it is we that are unreal, slipping back like shadows, carrying in the back of the car the body of a dead man. And all these plans we have made. The words we have spoken are dead, yet without the reality of this dead man. He has achieved something where we have failed.
Oliver opened the door of the car.
I’ll have to take him in, he said. If you wait a little I’ll drive you back.
This was Dr Halliday. She sat and listened to him speak. Mrs Halliday told her to wait. His eyes were grey, no, blue, his professional manner cold. She watched the doctor carry up the path something that made him stoop, as if he were an old man. She did not feel at all bitter. It did not make you feel bitter to trace the natural course of things. But she felt she was going to cry, this sudden release of emotion, somewhere out of her the tears, out of another person left back on the road.
Oliver, manoeuvring the body of Moriarty in through the hall door, knew he must face something, what he did not know, but the silence, but the lamplight trailing across the linoleum squares, and this open door, dark in the face of the house, were more than superficial detail, made his heart beat. That cyclamen bruised black across the pink and the tangled mechanism of a clock in the hearth. Moriarty lay on the sofa in what had been the sitting-room, perfectly serene, and unconnected with all this, once so intimately his. He had cast it off. And Mrs Moriarty? He stood in the doorway of the back room, watched this thing that had been a woman, now unmoving, the pulpy face, and the sheet slipped, and the candle dim in its pool of wax. He did not experience horror, it was too far removed from any human element, this heap of cold flesh, the breath gone from its mouth. Then it began to come back, the situation in which he stood, he and Alys and Hilda and the Moriartys linked in this frail wooden house. Our bodies similar to these, though moving still, the same passions, the fears, of face that said, Ernest must write to the Board, she said, Ernest must escape, because I love my wife, poor Vic, what she puts up with, doctor, before the needle plunged and the face relaxed in temporary peace. Peace out of chaos, out of Happy Valley, we must look for this, we must go to Queensland, Hilda said, because Happy Valley is pain and the kind of irrational impulse on which the Moriartys have come to grief. The flame of the candle sank in its pool. He watched the body lose its shape. He stood in the dark.
It flowed round him, his impotence, in no way alleviated by this removal of forms. She was still there, and Moriarty in the next room, and the debris of furniture. They have tried to cast off the insuperable, they have broken themselves, he felt, and Alys and I slipping down the road, headed for what vague dream, are just as irrational perhaps. He could not suppress his anger that rose against no definite cause, was a groping in the dark. It was this that made you want to beat your head against the wall, substituting wall for the intangible. Or Happy Valley. A clock in the distance drew him to the present. He was cold with sweat.
Go down the street, tell, he said, tell Hilda and the others you have won, only not you, something thrown in the road as a sort of ironical gage to pick up and carry back, they let you get as far as that knowing you would return, impotent. Because you cannot cast off the shell the ways and customs, except in death, as Moriarty has. You substitute fortitude, like Hilda, who is fortitude, sleeping in her wooden room, and call it a moral victory. He felt all the bitterness of a moral victory that was not rightly his.
Moriarty lay in the frail remains of what had been his outer life. Oliver bent in the sitting-room, fumbled through glass, to pick up the fragments of a clock. The sitting-room was hideous with the lack of consciousness of a room desecrated and left, in a way undisturbed, in a way that you felt Moriarty’s was only a part success. The spring of the clock straggled loosely in his hand. Sitting in the Botanical Gardens, it was summer, he pushed back a strand of Hilda’s hair beneath her hat, her face broke up when he read a poem, banal as a poem at sixteen, she said, Oliver, I know now what it means. He was breaking Hilda, for what, for slipping down the road with Alys, whom he loved, towards some greater, though still undefined certainty. Hilda must stare at the remains, like a broken clock, listen for the tick, with the expression of Hilda looking at something she does not understand. I love Alys, he said. It was not a protest. It did not sound like this. Unlike Hilda and the fragments of Moriarty’s house, Alys would remain intact.
He went outside to where the car stood in the dark.
Alys? he said.
He found, half expecting, she had gone. Emotion could not unravel itself out of a sudden weariness. You accepted this. You could not think.
Then he went up the street to the police-station and rang the bell.
28
Sidney Furlow got out of bed. That finger of grey was too much, pointing out of the dark. She pulled at the curtains and they closed, she stood holding the dark, her feet were hot on the floor. It was now what time, as if time had any bearing on night, what time it was when it was still night. Waking up with the sheets twisted, you were seven, you could not move, you wondered if night would ever, if you could move a finger ever again. But that at least was waking up, not wondering if you held your head in the basin under a tap, or sheep, or an aspirin. Mother said aspirin had a capital A. Mother and Father were two names, capitals or without, and you wondered, you wondered what else, and what went on beyond a person’s face that was better not to see.
She went and lay on the bed again. The sheets were still hot. Going past the cottage was no light, said I’ll go for a walk before bed, but of course in a coat, it’s cold, and my head, and it’s not far just round and about, the way they watch you to see what, and nothing to see, no light, you knew that, but had to see, and walk round and round, remember at the races, and this, it was this now, why shouldn’t Mrs Moriarty go. She turned over and forced her face into the pillow that was soft and hot. It gave. It was so easy. You pressed your face and it gave in. Was feathers, or tulle, and crying in the rain. But now there was no rain. She lay on her back and listened, heard nothing, no horse. She felt exhausted, though without the capacity for sleep.