Really a shocking thing, she said. It appears, so Mrs Belper says, that Mrs Moriarty is dead.
Here Mrs Furlow paused, not altogether unaware, whatever her agitation, of dramatic possibilities.
Sidney felt her heart twist. A sort of exultation. She got up, she could not sit.
And Moriarty, announced Mrs Furlow, with the clarity of a Greek messenger. They found him lying in the road. Quite dead. A cardiac seizure, Mrs Belper says.
It began to penetrate beyond Mr Furlow’s face.
Yes? said Sidney. Yes, what else?
Because there must be something, she did not know, because walking down the hill, the head bent, and you ought to be in bed, he said, a voice that in the dark, was no connection, but…She heard the fire singing in the grate.
Yes, said Mrs Furlow. If it were only that. Of course I never liked the man. His look. You could see there was something. I remember the day he came, sitting in the office in that big coat. And Mrs Belper says the poor woman’s face was simply pulp. They don’t know, to be sure. But supposing, why, Stan, suppose if they send the police? They’re sure to send someone out.
For what? said Sidney.
Her voice came out hard and strong. It made Mrs Furlow stare.
For Hagan, of course. Fancy, Stan, the police!
Mr Furlow’s mind closed in despair with a wandering thread of argument.
But what about Moriarty? he said.
Moriarty? The poor man’s dead. And then that brute. There was something going on, Mrs Belper says. She says they’re sure to send the police.
Of course there was something going on. Mrs Moriarty was Hagan’s mistress.
Sidney dear! The woman’s dead. Mrs Belper says she was covered in blood. There’ll be an inquest. They’re guarding the house. And a trial if Hagan…
If Hagan was there.
She felt very taut and erect. No nerve now to bleat the voice to think what because to think and say above all say.
But Hagan was. So Mrs Belper says. The Chambers boy saw him in the lane. Just at the time it all took place.
And Moriarty? Mr Furlow said.
Moriarty is dead.
Mrs Furlow dabbed her face more with her fingers than with her handkerchief.
Sidney took the back of a chair. She felt the smooth mahogany scroll. It had belonged to Mrs Furlow’s grandmother, or a great aunt.
The Chambers boy, she said. And what evidence is that?
Well, we know he’s a little soft in the head. But in the lane, Mrs Belper says.
Sidney Furlow gathered her breath. She went to the window, tracing with her finger no particular pattern in the mist, in which the trees swam, then took more definite shape.
There will be a trial, she said, and Chambers will give his evidence. A half-wit.
She watched the cold stems of trees, frost silver in the grass.
But Hagan was not there, she said.
But Sidney, dear!
Hagan was in my room. I slept with Hagan, she said.
The brutality of words shattered the silence and a coffee cup. She did not turn. She stood watching the trees. Then voices penetrating, no longer congealed, flowed, the coffee, its drip drip, or the protest of a voice, she did not know.
Mrs Moriarty was Hagan’s mistress, she said. I love Hagan. I slept with him. I love him. I shall marry Hagan, she said.
Mrs Furlow’s world spun. Words were no words, were a mouth open stupidly.
I don’t care, Sidney said, it beat out on the window pane. Whatever Mrs Moriarty was, I shall marry Hagan, she said.
She turned and faced the debris of human emotion in the dining-room. She held herself very straight, her cheeks drawn in. She did not belong to this, could watch like the shreds of jelly on a rock, the contour of a face or the angle of a shoulder, from which she was separated by kind and substance. Mrs Furlow began to cry.
Sooner or later, Sidney said, it would have happened like this.
Wondered why she said what, without explanation, must remain a riddle for faces, or always a riddle for faces that could not understand the gradual accumulation of years and waiting for the ultimate explosion. Mother’s face crumpled without the protection of hands, sat there, Father, this is also Father. She could not look at her father’s face. She smoothed the back of a chair, following with her fingers the curve of a mahogany scroll.
Mr Furlow tried to get up from his seat. The heat of the fire and the sight of messed-up kidneys on his plate. He could not get up, stared at the plate, tried to marshal his thoughts that flapped wildly in a morass of half-delineated images of which Sidney was the focus point. To a rudimentary mind all shock is at first almost physical. This is why the collar clung, the tongue swelled, in the ears a roaring of blood. Then in the confusion, Sidney, or Hagan and Sidney, Sidney and Hagan, or Sidney, Sidney. Saw sprawled in the mud that was not kidney, the face torn by gravel, walked past the door at night on tiptoe, where a night-light in its saucer wavered, went past, past this to the drawing-room, the air was cool before fires, like diamonds on a hot wrist, or the ice-cream spooned up on a high stool. He began to mumble something that was not anything at all. For Mr Furlow the impossible had happened. His eyes were groping round the room, from object to object, these material stays on which his life had rested until this, finding no explanation, there was nothing on which the glance might rest secure.
She could feel this. She could feel it pressing down on her, and at the same time she was breaking away, out of her immediate environment. She could feel a certain ebb and flow of pity, though faint, as if this were the death, not without regret, of a deep emotional undertone. But she must free herself, she must get away, discard pity to live.
She went out of the room. It meant very little now, or the house, or the servants she heard in the kitchen quarters conducting the ritual of the day. Because she had to go down the hill, there somewhere would make the next logical move. The air on her face was keen with purpose, like her step. She walked past the stable and the insignificant figure of a groom. Down the hill the shed, where he had watched, where, closing the door, she had stood in a kind of stupor against the ploughs, escaped from something in the house and still wondering what, and what was her life but a succession of days, or her body, of which she was afraid, that she pressed against the arm of a plough. She went past the shed. There was no question of defeat, the issue already palpable in her mind.
Hagan stood over by the wagon shed giving orders to the men. She saw his back and the mesh of a knitted jacket that he wore. No fear now, but power to turn a back, and watch, and see.
Hagan, I want a word with you, she said.
His hat cocked over an eye that sized her up, wondering what now, wore an assurance that could not deceive her confidence. It made her laugh, the way a man always put out a hand to take as his due what was sometimes air. This will be my party, she said. It allowed her to look him in the eyes.
Well? he said.
Smiled that tooth, as much as to indicate, and the legs apart, planted on the ground that nothing would shake. She looked through his body, holding back a moment the words that would blast. The fold of his arms brought him physically close. There was no tremor in sensing this.
Mrs Moriarty is dead, said Sidney Furlow.
Watched the skin for the pallor that crept up. This is Hagan afraid, she said, I have made him afraid, now dependent on my words.
And Moriarty dead on the road. He must have walked out and died. They say it was heart. A perfectly natural death. But his wife, his wife was murdered, she said.