Patrick White - Happy Valley

Margaret, he said.

Yes?

She did not look over from her side of the road.

Look, he said.

What?

She turned her head, biting her cheek inside. She was like that picture in the encyclopaedia.

I’ll give you that, he said.

What is it?

It’s a shell.

They began to walk in the centre of the road. He held the shell in the palm of his hand. It was pink, of curious shape, folding like the bud of a flower with brown spots on the underneath. Margaret put out her finger and touched the shell.

It’s pretty, she said.

When we lived in Sydney, he said, there was a French woman used to come to teach me French. She gave me the shell. She said it came from the bottom of the sea.

Really? said Margaret. How did she know?

I don’t know. That’s what she said.

It’s pretty all the same.

Rodney put it into her hand. Then they walked along a bit. The mud splashed up on Margaret’s stockings. She began to wipe her nose.

Her name was Madame Jacquet, Rodney said.

Margaret looked down at Madame Jacquet’s shell.

When I’m twelve I’m going to go to a proper school, said Rodney. Father says I shall be a boarder. I’ll only come home for the holidays. But now I’m only nine. I’ll have to learn Latin as well as French. Because I’m going to be a doctor. You have to know Latin for the prescriptions, I suppose.

It was good to talk to Margaret Quong, and there was a lot he wanted to tell her, about what he liked and what he didn’t. He wanted her to know. But now they had come to the turn, and she stood waiting to say good-bye.

Thank you for the shell, said Margaret Quong.

That’s all right, he said. It wasn’t much use to me.

She began to walk on, uncertainly, up in the direction of her father’s garage, where a truck had stopped for a fill at the pump. Her black woollen stockings were dotted with yellow mud. He would have to go in to lunch.

Rodney! called Margaret Quong. You can come one evening and see our litter of pups. Only if you want to, she said.

Then she went on up the hill clutching Madame Jacquet’s shell.

Somebody leaves you alone in a strange room, in a house you have scarcely been in before, and this is the surest way of feeling detached from all possible sequence of events. You are no longer part of the whole, to which in your saner moments you like to think you belong. You wait in the strange room and this is another life. You try to reconstruct this other life from the objects you see in the room, and it is all on another plane, a little monstrous, and you even think in an undertone in case it should be heard.

Well, Alys Browne was feeling something like this as she waited alone in the doctor’s room. There was no fire, and this intensified the feeling of detachment, making the objects sharper in outline, distinctly part of a life that was not her own. She sat for a bit in a leather chair holding her cut hand in her lap, feeling cold and forgotten, especially the hand, and the chair, there is nothing so calculated to make you feel forgotten as somebody else’s leather chair in a fireless room. Then she got tired of sitting. She walked about. The woman who helped was sorting out linen in the wash-house across the yard. Alys could see her from the window, and a toy cart filled with stones lying in the middle of the yard. But there was not much to see from the window other than this.

So she went and sat in the chair again. It was still a little warm from her body the time before. The air perhaps was a little bit warmer too. And on the mantelpiece there were photographs of two little boys, one of them sitting on the floor with some bricks, looking very absorbed, and the other a few years older, standing with his ears sticking out. The elder boy was Rodney; she knew him by sight, they said good morning or good afternoon whenever they passed in the street, and she liked the way his ears stuck out. Only he was rather pale out of a photograph. And there was Mrs Halliday too, sitting on the doctor’s desk with an air of having only a moment to spare, she must jump up, the photographer mustn’t mind.

She remembered when the Hallidays came, about a year ago. She supposed that she ought to call, but she didn’t call, and she said she would call later on, and then the intention lapsed. Mrs Belper called. She said that the scones were stale, and Mrs Halliday — well, there was no atmosphere in the Hallidays’ home, and Mrs Halliday such a stick, though you could see the poor woman was ill, but you must have atmosphere in a home. By atmosphere Mrs Belper meant dogs, and pokerwork candlesticks, and people dropping in and out.

Mrs Halliday sat nervously in her frame. Alys felt sorry for the doctor’s wife. She began to be more at home crossing her legs in the leather chair, for even a railway waiting-room will slowly fit itself into your scheme if you are forced to stay in it long enough. She looked at the black rug with the hole that something had burnt, falling out of the fire, or a cigarette. There were pipes on the mantelpiece. There were books, medical books, Urn Burial, a volume of poems by Donne, and a book on Kant. She had read about Kant. She was rather impressed. And perhaps the doctor would have read Turgeniev, or Anna Karenina. But you did not talk about things like that, you came for something out of the dispensary, and then you went away again, because Dr Halliday did not encourage you to talk. He said good morning in the street. Otherwise you did not exist. His eyes were very cold. They were blue, she thought, or grey, she could not be sure. He was going grey. And now they were starting to have lunch, she could hear the plates, but the doctor had not come, or had come, and Mrs Halliday…

Then somebody opened the door.

Hello, said Rodney, looking in.

He looked a little surprised. He stood awkwardly by the door. Then he went outside again, finding nothing further to say.

He wanted to get the book and read about Columbus after lunch, but with that Miss Browne sitting there, he would go away, he could wait, he did not want to talk to Miss Browne, talk to anyone, Margaret Quong, he was glad he had given the shell, and now he could go up to Quong’s garage and have a look at the pups. He went along the passage to the dining-room.

Rodney, called Mrs Halliday, where is George? Look at your coat! What have you done to yourself? Look at that mud!

Which was just what he knew she would say.

I fell down in the yard, he said.

Oh dear, she said, the way you ruin your clothes! Go and find George.

He’s coming, he said, sitting down.

Whether he was or not, he was hungry, even if cold mutton, he hated that. He took an onion out of the jar. Mother was standing there carving the joint.

I wish your father would come, said Mother, slicing a piece of fat. George! she called. Where is George? Rodney, you never help. Put those onions down at once.

All right, said Rodney. George’ll come.

He sat back and scratched his head. He wished he had someone older, like Margaret Quong, and the pups, but George was young, playing about in the backyard with a cart, or falling down and hurting himself.

There is great indignity attached to having a brother younger than yourself.

Mother! called George. I can’t, I can’t open the door.

Rodney, said Mother, can’t you see my hands are full? Can’t you open the door for George?

Oh, all right, he said. If only you would give me time.

But they drove him about. He would not take long over his lunch. He would get that book and read it alone in his room. Perhaps he would be an explorer, not a doctor after all. But perhaps there was nothing left to explore.

George was fat, and uncertain on his feet. He nearly fell over when Rodney opened the door.