Читать онлайн «Happy Valley»

Oh, I dunno. She just came into me head. And you would have liked her, Clem. Edna was a good sort. She was clever too. She’d passed a lot of exams and things. She wanted to be a stenographer. When her father died she was going out with a man I knew called Lassiter, insurance I think he was. But Edna, that was what reminded me, Edna had a book on dreams. Got it at the circus, I think she said. There was a woman with a handkerchief over her eyes that read your thoughts and things. And dreams were a sort of side-line, see? And Edna bought the book. And you worked it like, suppose you dreamt of a black horse, well you looked it up and it told you what it meant, a journey or whatever it was.

She had to talk. She couldn’t stop. Her voice fluttered in the candle flame.

And what about Edna? Hagan said.

He was tying his tie. He had a scarf-pin once, that he lost, with an artificial pearl.

Edna? she said.

Her mind bumped round. She had to speak. A dream made you feel queer, like looking at your face in a mirror when you turned back that shawl.

Don’t go, Clem, she said Not yet.

Her voice rose, flickered, on a candle flame. Edna and all, it made him laugh.

And what happened to Lassiter? he said.

God, how it made him laugh.

Then it began to go round. They heard it going round and round. They heard it one two, or drag and stop, or hit against the skirting-board, as it went round, in the sittingroom. It was a noise, a foot noise. The feet went round and round the sitting-room.

Rodney Halliday trailed about in the yard. There were a few stars, and the suggestion of a clothes-line, the smoke went up from the roof. He felt a bit alone, for it does increase your sense of isolation watching smoke go up at night. Smoke by day has substance in comparison. Rodney stood watching the smoke. He knew that some day he would die. He had not realized this before. Poor Mrs Worthington’s dead, said Mother, we must write to the girls, we must wire for flowers, a sheaf I think because wreaths are like a funeral. The Worthington girls in black, and Mother put her hand to her chest, and they were eating eggs and bacon, it was breakfast time, you went on eating in spite of death. Death was in the cemetery with a smell of laurels and those crossed hands on Mr Peabody’s grave. It happened somewhere else perhaps, but death reverted to the cemetery, enclosed by ivy, the gate grated on a rusty hinge. Going down the hill ivy droned. You went on down the hill to school and hoped you would not meet Andy Everett. Effie Worthington had chapped hands. She gave you a gingerbread cake at the farm, and you bit in, it was sticky inside, and a glass of milk afterwards. But death was not here, in the hen-cluck, in the blue shadow of milk on the glass. You would die, but not yet, not yet. The gingerbread.