Thought, flowing smoothly through Amy Quong, twisted Clem Hagan’s lip. He felt better after the beer, though not altogether satisfied, still with that bitter disappointment beer leaves in the throat. He hitched up his trousers, because he wore a belt, couldn’t stand anything but a belt, and his hand touched the surface of his wet shirt that had almost lost its shape. He frowned at the convention of a boiled shirt, at dressing up for what. And somebody wore diamonds. No wonder there was revolution, if only to rip the diamonds off a woman’s throat. His hands felt rough. Vic said, who was a good sort, put your hands here, Clem, but did not want to think about Vic, getting a kick out of hands. He felt ashamed of his hands. Diamonds made you ashamed, and if you went up and said, you had a damn
good mind, you were just as good as diamonds, wouldn’t she have a dance, just for old times’ sake, yes, that was it, and she’d know, the way that whip stung, what you were smiling at. He trod a cigarette into the concrete floor. Miss Furlow, you’d say. What the hell was the use of waiting, and feel the sweat come on your hands, when you hadn’t been killed this far there was no harm in trying again. The floor was undulating overhead.
They’ve put too much stuff on that floor, Mr Belper complained.
Standing on the edge, disconsolate, rather bilious about the eyes, it was the remark a man makes to comfort himself, not really meant for anyone else, not that anyone else would have bothered to reply. Mr Belper soothed the collar eating into his neck. He had an expression of bottled-up concern increased by his environment. All he could think was, what will Cissie say, that purple lace, without daring to linger on the subject of his wife’s displeasure. Mr Belper hunched his shoulders, a man protecting himself from a cataclysm that nobody else could suffer. He had lost all desire to slap anyone’s back. He went outside to make water in the dark.
It Couldn’t be November, It Wouldn’t be December, but Some-dhay panted with persistence from the saxophone, with the crushing optimism of a saxophone, moved the foot to measure not time but boredom traced in powder on the floor. Her foot, describing an F, had smudged the S. And Mother will talk to Mrs Saunders, and Mrs Lithgow, and Mrs Bligh. She took a mirror out of her bag, noticed with some bitterness the smudge that was her mouth, and slashed it into shape again. Three hours of watching a lot
of louts enjoy themselves inclines the face to wilt. I look bloody, she remarked mentally. As if it were the result of being looked at by a lot of louts, who if they weren’t louts would be worse, that mauling prerogative of men of your own class. Or someone else. The way he danced with that little tart in the blue tulle. Oh, God.
Sidney Furlow looked up quickly with a suspicion she had said something aloud. There was no indication, no quiver of Mrs Furlow’s back. Her foot slid again, sighed along the floor, on the margin of the dance. The bracelet melted into her wrist. Who was Mallarmé, some old stick, to know better how you felt than you did yourself, or what did you feel exactly, only wanted to hit out, that day at a snake, or sink down against blue tulle, those hands, they were rough, catching in the tulle perhaps, to tear. Helen said it did hurt a bit. She pressed her foot against the floor. Encountered feet.
Will you, he said, how about?
His voice began to disintegrate, as it had that day, as if it were afraid, Hagan afraid.
She looked up into Hagan’s face. She felt herself shrinking in. She felt herself shrinking right in, gathering herself to strike. And he stood there, foolishly, trying in spite of his voice to ask her to dance. She got up without speaking, looked over his shoulder, she could feel his breath on her neck as she accepted his arms.
Mrs Furlow smiled at Hagan. After all, she was conferring an honour, not Sidney but she. Then her smile slid away as her mind encountered Roger Kemble and that terrible afternoon.
They make a fine couple, Mrs Belper said.
Er, what was that? Mrs Furlow murmured faintly, though of course Mrs Belper did not mean, only a stray and rather vulgar remark, because poor Mrs Belper was slightly vulgar in spite of her cousin at Government House.
A waltz clung turgidly to the air, making Mrs Belper nod her head, heavy with the vague nostalgia of a waltz and the fumes of a late glass of beer. It was the sort of waltz that made you love a waltz, if you were that way inclined. It strayed outside where the darkness obstinately refused to produce a moon.
She was leading him anywhere, through the dust, he could feel his feet in the dust, and the peeled stem of a rose, and the fluctuating phrases of a waltz. He did not mind where she led him, was too tired, was dust, was waiting for this, to be led by Alys out of a dilemma, and all the unreal frustration that lies hidden in the banal phrasing of a waltz. Hilda loved a waltz. It made her talk about old times.
Where are we going, Alys?
I don’t know, she said.
She did not know. It was dark, and sufficient in that. We are losing ourselves, she felt, if only we could succeed and lose ourselves sufficiently, but there are the windows still, and that facade and a street, but touching his arm I am proof against all these, against all those doubts that I haven’t been able to avoid since we are going away, Alys, he said.
I’m all right now.
Rest, she said.
His hand was touching stone, or brick; he could feel the cement between the cracks, supported by Alys and a brick wall.
Do you think anyone noticed? he said.
Noticed what? There was nothing to see.
No, he said. I suppose, I suppose not.
Her voice convinced, soothed. He steadied himself against the wall. The darkness straightened, placid on his face, was without words. That waltz came out lurkingly, more potent because so banal, and made her feel, I must be careful of myself, this is not the same person listening to a waltz who decided how many weeks ago which was the way out. She heard words launched that approached inevitably, now approaching, now removed by the music. She felt a rushing of the darkness, stationary, then coming to grief on her face. To close the eyes was only to close the eyes on something without form, already she knew, even in choosing a last gesture of mechanical resistance she realized the futility of this.
What I told you, he said. We were going away. As if I could go away. I believed myself at the time, because I wanted to believe. It had to be true, because Hilda. But, Alys, it isn’t, it isn’t true, anything of what I said.
The words strung along Oliver’s voice running together in her head.
Yes, she said, Oliver, it was true.
You don’t think I could go away?
Yes, she said, I do.
His hands, touching brick, felt her voice that was bending, bending. As in that hall the lights bent, your head,
you were trying to resist before something licked out and you were going the other way.
Listen, Alys, he said. We’re not as strong as all that, we never shall be, it isn’t worth the attempt. All my life I’ve tried to resist something just a little bit stronger, without getting anywhere at all. There’s a kind of moral satisfaction attached to the effort to resist, at least we think, we make it so, it’s got to be. Because we must have our illusions, drug ourselves, they’re the one consolatory compensation for what we know to be the ideal state. So we fasten on to the moral satisfaction. Man the Moral Animal. And that’s why I said Hilda and I are going away. Going away to what? What’s a moral satisfaction?
This isn’t what we agreed, she said.
Her fingers snapped the stem of a rose.
We’ll leave out all that, he said. This is what I am. That’s what I ought to be.
Because nobility, he felt, is one of those games played by Corneille on a stage set that has not the dimensions of Happy Valley.
Or perhaps, he said, it hurts to see what I am?
Because after all it was much easier to love someone for their imperfections than to discover these afterwards. Now she would not speak, was a point of silence in a distant waltz.
No, she said, and her voice came closer. You know it isn’t that.
I think I know what it is.
And if we went away?
She wanted to speak of Hilda Halliday, whose voice
reproached opening a door, or in the street always a reproach, that child looking away when she touched his hands. The eyes would not close on Hilda Halliday. Her hair strayed untidily like the strands of a colourless waltz.
Voices were going up and down the street and uniting with bodies in the splash of light that the door had let fall upon the steps. Mr Furlow stood upon the steps smiling at no particular face, his smile half sleep and a glance backward into the hall where she danced, that dress, and a bracelet on Hagan’s shoulder. She did not see him, but he was perfectly content. It was enough for Mr Furlow to have launched a casual bubble and to pat it airwards with an occasional glance. Mrs Furlow had very quickly imbued her husband with a reverence for other people’s pleasures. And this was Sidney enjoying herself. The label was stuck on, and nobody, least of all Mr Furlow, dare attempt to scrape it off.
Sidney Furlow danced against Hagan, giving herself without grace, he could feel this indifference in his arms, or as his leg encountered the taut V of her thighs, and it made him uneasy, dancing with Sidney Furlow, because he was holding something that he did not quite understand. The collar began to grow soggy round his neck. He wondered if he ought to make a joke.
This is something like a dance, he said, feeling his resources fail in an opening remark.
I never cared much for dancing, she said.
And that was as far as you got, because one way or another she hit you over the face, and it stung, and you could feel her like a piece of wire, and that scent mounting
up and up, the number of unfair advantages women took. That night he walked past her room, and she stood against the blind, he had wanted to go in. Vic Moriarty over there looking as if she could kill. Damn Vic Moriarty, he said. His hand shifted on Sidney’s back, cautiously exploring the skin. But you never got closer than a shadow on the blind that moved away, or tried to shift from under your hands as if it was taking a liberty to touch what anyone would think was an invitation, the way it was cut down. His hand was unperturbed in the hollow of her back.
Not dancing, Mrs Moriarty? Mrs Belper beamed. And what have you done with your husband to-night?
Vic Moriarty, torn between graciousness and distraction, twisted up her handkerchief.
Poor Ernest, Mrs Belper, he isn’t feeling too bright, you know. So I left him at home with a book. Ernest’s always happy with a book.
Looked over to where that girl, dressed like anyone could dress if they needn’t remember the baker’s bill or Chows coming in to dun, didn’t have to put up with that, was dancing with Clem. Vic Moriarty in her blue tulle, the powder caking about her face, wilted on a brown varnished chair. She would, if she could, have given him a look, though she didn’t want to monopolize, and what was a dance, but Clem, and he said, of course I love you, Vic, like that, it made you wonder if leaving the room he wasn’t coming back again. Vic Moriarty’s looks foundered on Hagan’s face. It made you understand the papers, the woman they found with her mouth on the gas with perhaps a note from your broken-hearted Vic, only the smell of
gas, and what was the use if you weren’t there to see the effect of the note, if there was, if there wasn’t, if he tore it up and said, Miss Furlow, how about the next dance. She looked at Amy Quong and frowned. You couldn’t escape from Chows. It made you want to have a good cry, Chows and Happy Valley and Clem, and oh damn Ernest, enjoy yourself, he said, as if that was an easy thing. She got up and went to the ladies’ room to see what was happening to her face.
Mrs Moriarty’s gone, said Sidney.
She did not move her head from his shoulder. Her voice was level with his ear.
And why shouldn’t Mrs Moriarty go?
She hummed a bar or two of the waltz. She felt a kind of exultation watching the retreat of blue tulle.
And why shouldn’t Mrs Moriarty go?
I’d like to dance on and on. I’d like to die dancing, she said.
Her breath was sharp in his ear. They swung up on the peak of a waltz as he felt her grow softer, a little, the motion of her breasts. It made you wonder what was her game. You walked past a window and a shadow was peeling off its dress. He pressed his arm into her waist, that quivered, she was trembling, holding off. He bit the inside of his cheek.
She knew she was trembling, wanted to snatch away or press up, press all resistance out of the body that the motion of a waltz, and his breath, and the palm of his hand had decomposed. No, she wanted to say, stop, and the music, to put her finger on that nerve that jiggered in her cheek, that she could almost have laid against, and closed the eyes,
known the warm throb of a waltz touch with its hand the valley of her breasts that melted the spring at Kosciusko with the snow which showed the grass and she lay down before midday on the grass. Music faltered in a last sigh. She was almost stationary in the angle of a tightening arm, straightened against him, Hagan, who was only Hagan, she must remember it was Hagan.
He looked at her, smiling, at her eyes grown cold with composure that showed no vestige of smouldering. She stood there erect in the stream of disbanding dancers and said, almost between her teeth:
I think Mother looks as if she wants to go home.
These last moments the collected wraps the regrets stealing out furtively with a yawn as the piano lid falls touch a sort of depth that makes you walk past it is over and not glance back at figures dancing in retrospect in sleep that lamp hanging heavy and only asking for extinction says it is over it is over sighs the light at cock-crow.
If you’re not afraid, Oliver said, we’ll go a long way off. We’ll leave all this. We’ll go to America, he said. I’ll settle what I’ve got on Hilda and the boys. Some people are only happy when they’re safe. Hilda’s like that. It’s something I’ve never been able to give her, just that feeling that she wants. Now she’ll be able to find it perhaps, for herself and the boys. It’ll be better like that. Certainty.