Patrick White - Happy Valley

She had to admit to Mabel that she liked Walter Quong. He took her over to Manly one day. It was rather hot. Walter took off his coat, and made some jokes, and nobody stared too much, so she enjoyed herself. A Chinaman was like anyone else, she told herself. They went on the roundabout. He gave her an ice-cream in a cone. Then they sat on the beach and it began to get dark, with the sea coming in very cool and continuous and a hot scent off the pines. It was very pleasant running the sand through your fingers and listening to the sea and Walter’s talk. But she said that she ought to go. Now, he said, why did she have to go, when he knew that she had the evening off, was she meeting a friend, and she laughed and said, no, she hadn’t a friend, but they ought to be getting back. Walter said it was all nonsense. Well, perhaps it was. You could see the surf whiten on the shore through the darkness. It was cooler in the dark. She lay back on the sand. That was the way it happened when she hadn’t meant it to, she told Mabel afterwards. She didn’t know why she had let it happen, only something came over her on the beach, and she was letting Walter, but of course she needn’t see him again. Only supposing. Yes, said Mabel, supposing, only it wouldn’t. But it did. And that is why Ethel married Walter Quong. She called the child Margaret. She had narrow eyes. There’s no mistake, said Ethel, your sins will always find you out.

Margaret was spreading the towel to dry.

You’re growing out of that dress, said her mother. You’re all wrist.

She looked at Margaret and frowned, because she was long and gawky, those long straggling legs under the dark woollen skirt, and the drawn-out wrists, and the eyes. Margaret continued to pat the towel. The woollen pocket of her dress hung down with the weight of Rodney’s shell. She was feeling happy. She would go for a music lesson after tea.

Look at the time, said her mother. Anyone’d think it was out of spite.

What is? said Walter, coming in.

I don’t know what you expect, she said, coming in at such an hour. And look at all that mud on your boots.

Yes, he said. It’s muddy outside.

He looked at her and smiled. Walter was always ready to smile. It was the most natural activity of his yellow face.

Well, she said, we don’t want to have it muddy in here.

Where d’you expect me to put my feet?

I don’t mind where, she said, only I don’t want mud on the floor.

I can’t walk on the ceiling, Ethel. I’m sorry, it can’t be done.

And I don’t want cheek. Dinner’s over, anyway.

Good, said Walter. I had a bite down with Arthur. I just dropped in to see how you were.

Then he smiled yellowly out of his fat and went outside to tinker with the Ford.

She looked out of the back door. She was thin and sour. She watched him, fat and yellow, crawling under the car. She was exasperated, she was drying up, and Walter only smiled. Or put her to shame with that girl he asked to the cemetery, or the time he got drunk at Moorang and tried to make water through the keyholes all along the main street. And then he only smiled. Mrs Quong’s face was taut with bitterness as she turned away from the door.

You’d better look sharp, she said to Margaret.

Because it irritated her to see that child looking at herself in the glass. Margaret in a red tam-o’-shanter pulling it down over her eyes. You would hardly believe she had a dash of anything but Chinese.

There’s no need for you to go wasting time on the glass, said Mrs Quong.

But Margaret let the stream of her mother’s bitterness flow over her, because their relationship was like that and the voices of some people, like the beat of a clock, like the creaking of the furniture, part of the exterior envelope of sound, beating and creaking, but failing to penetrate to the substance. At least, as far as we are aware. For there is a general cumulative effect and sometimes an ultimate explosion. But Margaret said placidly:

Good-bye, Mother. I shall be late. I’m going to tea at the store. And there’s my music lesson after that.

Then she was clicking the front gate, and it was part of custom, like her mother’s voice, it was part of what you took for granted, that slid away consciously, when perhaps all the time it was making a more indelible impression. Then she was going down the street, skipping a step or two every few yards. The sky was blue again, but cold. The houses huddled wetly between their sodden strips of garden and their backyards. There were wet nettles in the ditches beside the road.

In summer there was a hot, pungent smell about the nettles in the roadside ditches. It was one of the predominating smells of Happy Valley. It made you feel warm and indolent, just as the cold sky isolated you from the landscape on certain winter afternoons and you were walking on top of the earth, against the sky, and it made you feel cold and strangely unattached to even the most tangible and conspicuous objects. But all of this may seem very irrelevant to the figure of Margaret Quong, skipping puddles on the road, and walking schoolwards. Only the landscape sometimes felt like that, it became the scent of nettles or a fragment of cold sky and she was very conscious of these, she was more conscious of them than the beat of her mother’s voice, or perhaps because of it, she was thrown back into a world of sensory experience.

When she went into school they began to do geography, they were considering the rainfall of Central Asia, and it did not seem very necessary, this. The stove cracked. The chalk squealed on the board. Geography did not move her at all, not like it did Rodney Halliday, who leant forward on his elbow with his ears sticking out. She took out the shell from her pocket and had a look. It was smooth and pink. It was very satisfying to touch the shell under the desk, and he said it came from the bottom of the sea.

What’s that? whispered Emily Schmidt.

Nothing, said Margaret.

She put the shell in her pocket again. Emily Schmidt stuck out her tongue.

Margaret looked at the desk. Her hair hung down black and straight, or rested on her shoulders at the back. She would put the shell in a box which already contained the harebells she had picked with Miss Browne, an ivory rose, and some silkworms’ eggs. Uncle Arthur had given her the ivory rose. It was real ivory, Aunt Amy said. Rodney Halliday was very pale, leaning forward on his elbow like that. Aunt Amy was an old maid. Rodney was nine years old. Miss Browne was twenty-seven, she had worked it out. I am thirteen, she said, and when I am a little older I shall go and work at the store, I shall help Aunt Amy, two old maids, because that is what I shall become. I shan’t care, she said. Miss Browne’s hands were smooth and white, smooth as a shell, as she taught a scale or tacked down the hem of a dress. And Rodney had a cut on his hand. Miss Browne was almost an old maid. Rodney looked at a cow in a paddock. Miss Browne washed her hair and knelt in front of the fire to let it dry. Miss Browne smiled. She liked a lot of butter on a pikelet, she said.

Margaret sighed. They were still doing geography.

When afternoon school was over she went along to the store where Aunt Amy was serving Mrs Schmidt with some candied peel. It was getting dark in the store. They had lit the lamps. The jars shone, and the scales, and the bacon-cutting machine. Aunt Amy laughed as she weighed the peel. It was a little, glistening, humorous laugh.

Hello, Auntie, Margaret said.

She was fond of Aunt Amy. She had finished school. She threw her tam-o’-shanter on the chair and went on out to the back. It was all over for the day, or the day had just begun, you noticed things, you wanted to skip, you hung over the stable door and watched Uncle Arthur giving the colt a bran mash. The colt whinnied and tossed his head, the light on his flank from the lantern that hung by a nail on the wall. And Uncle Arthur purred, or swore a little at the horse as he laid back his ears or pawed the bedding with his hoof. The hoofs were black and clean, painted over with oil and tar.