Patrick White - Happy Valley

Where’s Rodney? he asked, with an onion on his fork.

Poor Rodney, sighed Hilda. He’s…

Then she thought better.

He’s finished. He’s in his room.

Then why poor Rodney?

I don’t know. He seems to be out of sorts.

She would not tell him now. He was tired. But later she would speak to him about Rodney and the boarding-school, and the fowl feed, and the sick hen. She would not tell him about the sheet Mrs Woodhouse tore because he might be annoyed. Detail irritated Oliver.

Rodney’s been crying, said George.

Run along out and play, said Hilda. Look, it isn’t raining any more.

The fire burnt with the intimate crackle of a wood fire when the heat has almost dried the wood. Oliver did not look at Hilda. He ate. You knew she was keeping something for later on. You ought to be grateful for all these little subterfuges. You were in a way, only, only there was something both irritating and pathetic in a perpetual cosseting that was only so much time squandered in the face of the final issue. Hilda tried not to see this, or would not, was afraid to see. She built herself a raft of superficialities and floated down the stream. She tried to drag him on to her raft, and when he almost upset it she did not complain. I must be nice to Hilda, he said. I am growing morose and introspective. It’s the climate, or age. Those evenings going to Professor Birkett’s and talking over beer, the inner life provided a series of formulas for pleasant solution, and you came away with a mind neatly docketed for future reference. Nothing could jostle a theory, it was cut and dried. Then you lost the labels in time, and you started again, or tried to start, and it was a case of order out of chaos, and you wanted to tip the whole lot overboard, only that was impossible, because Hilda and Rodney and George clung to the fragments, were founded on something that you thought had existed before. And why had Rodney cried? He went on cutting up the mutton, listening to the fire. It was peaceful, and he was glad it was peaceful. His legs ached. He was very tired.

Oh dear, said Hilda suddenly. I’d quite forgotten, Oliver. Miss Browne is waiting in your room.

She can wait a little longer, he said flatly.

Perhaps you ought…She must have been there three-quarters of an hour. She said she had cut her hand.

Oliver put down his knife and fork. He went down the passage towards the room that he used as a combined dispensary and consulting-room. When he went in he was still finishing a mouthful of food.

Good morning, she said, getting up out of the chair. I didn’t want to disturb you at your lunch. I could go away, she said, or, or just as you like.

Because he frowned it put her off, taking away the words. She saw that his eyes were blue, not grey. She saw that he had not shaved. But of course he had been away all night. He looked rather gaunt, like a saint with a beard in that book of saints, or not a saint at all, just tired and unshaven. But she wished she had not come at all, the way he frowned, she blamed the sudden spirit of panic that had made her long for company.

Let’s see, he said. You’ve cut your hand.

She took off the handkerchief.

There’s not much wrong with that, he said. I thought it sounded like six stitches at least.

Oh no. I hope not. I should hate stitches. Don’t they hurt?

He had taken a bottle of iodine and a swab of cotton-wool.

Of course they hurt.

He said it almost between his teeth, she thought, as if… Then the iodine plunged down into the cut, and suddenly she was hot behind the knees, and she laughed rather stupidly, holding her wrist as hard as she could. She wanted to walk about, and bite her lip, she could feel the breath mount in her throat, pushing to form itself into a moan. Then she looked at him. He was looking at her. He was very detached. She had shrunk to the significance of something pinned to a sheet of paper or writhing underneath a lens. Then he was not looking at her, she saw, it was her imagination, or he had been looking and suddenly withdrew into some world of which she may or may not have been, and probably not, some possible indication. He turned away and brought a bandage and some lint.

That hurt quite enough, she said.

He did not answer. He bound her hand. His fingers were cold. He manipulated her hand as if it were a parcel of bones and tissues, detached from the body, no connection with this. She did not feel there was any necessity to be quite so professional, it reached a point where it became rude, and she found herself thinking of Mrs Stopford-Champernowne, the old lady whose tatting she used to pick up, and whose mind and body had the soft, comfortable texture of an eiderdown. She did not like Dr Halliday, because he did not like her, and she grew ashamed of a whole lot of things, half-formed thoughts connected with Dr Halliday, how she had imagined as she sat alone in the room that she would ask him if he had read this or that, and perhaps he would have thought she was distinguished. Because in her more private moments Alys Browne wanted very badly to be thought distinguished, and that is why she read Anna Karenina and played Schumann in the late afternoon.

There you are, he said, in a voice that suggested now I can get back to my lunch.

There was nothing more to say. She let him show her out to the door, she ran down the steps, she went on up the street. She felt more sober too, as if she had rid herself of the waste ends of a lot of surplus and superficial emotions. There was that dress for Mrs Belper that she must do. And she tried not to think of Dr Halliday, who thought she was a fool, and it is always uncomfortable to put yourself in a light in which you shine only as a fool.

You’ll have to shoot that poor hen, said Hilda.

She was standing by the dining-room window when he got back. Hilda finding the substance of pity in a hen trailing across the yard, or Hilda herself was pity, he felt, like an allegorical figure he had seen in a French church, the sad Gothic emptiness of the hands, standing in Happy Valley, only it was Hilda, and she was inclined to wear jumpers, blue or grey, that she knitted herself, and she wore her hair in a kind of coil with strands falling, straggling at the side. He put up his hand to his head. That Browne girl pitying herself because she had cut her hand was unreal, or he, or Happy Valley, was unreal, removing itself into a world of allegory, of which the dominating motif was pain. Sitting on the ferry he had wanted to write a play, but he could not find a theme, not like a sculptor who carved Hilda on an altar-piece. You looked through the Browne girl and there was nothing, except a little veil of self-pity. It is half-past two. You stand in the dining-room and pity yourself, and that is different, but the same, appalling in someone else, inevitable in yourself, but the same.

You haven’t had your pudding, Hilda said.

I don’t want any pudding.

Oliver…

She was looking at him, wanting to say something that wasn’t easy to say, and she rubbed her hands together as if they were cold. Both of them wanting to say something and then it only came in words.

It’s about Rodney, she said. He’ll have to go to another school. He’s beginning to see that he’s different. Different from the others, I mean. They persecute him. We’ll have to send him to Sydney to a proper school.

Yes, I know.

His head ached.

We’ll have to make the effort, she said.

All right. I’ve got to think. It’ll mean expense. You must give me time, Hilda. I can’t manage it all at once.

Here he was defending himself. She looked anxious, anxious for Rodney, or anxious for herself. Hilda coughed in bed at night. She turned about in bed at night and said, I can’t sleep, Oliver. What time is it? I can’t sleep, she said. My mouth’s dry. Perhaps you’d get me a glass of water. Because I can’t sleep. And now he looked at her as she stood there speaking for Rodney, and again there was so much he wanted to say, remembering Dr Bridgeman and how she hid her handkerchief. But there seemed no words in which to express compassion for a human being with whom you were in close relationship. It became even more difficult then.