Patrick White - Happy Valley

Come on round now, Uncle Arthur said as he smacked the horse on the neck.

Uncle Arthur did not speak to her. He knew she was there, but he did not speak, and she did not expect him to, only she liked to be there, hanging over the stable door. They never spoke very much, the Quongs. They sat there at tea, eating a tin of herrings, sitting in the room behind the store, Amy and Arthur and Margaret, and they were very complete, they ate stolidly, they passed each other the things, their hands touched and sundered, and it was enough to be there, the three of them, that was quite enough. Margaret would have liked to live at the store, Amy and Arthur would have liked it too. But this was a state they did not consider, they did not mention, though each of them knew what the others thought. There was a silent mutual agreement in almost everything the Quongs did.

Amy rumbled and poured out the tea.

Another cup, Margaret? she said.

Yes, I’ll have another. Then I must go.

She felt grown-up having tea at the store, not like at home, because Aunt Amy always made her feel like that, she talked about grown-up things. Margaret sat up straight and sipped at a cup of tea, her eyes round with abstraction, it always happened when she drank hot tea. She encouraged this. She relaxed and opened her eyes. It was warm and steamy in the back room.

May I take a quarter of bull’s-eyes? she said, when it was time to go.

All right, Amy said. It’s cold. You ought to be wearing a coat.

I’ll run, said Margaret. I’m only going up to Miss Browne’s. Thanks for the bull’s-eyes, Auntie, she said.

Amy and Arthur sat at their tea in the back room. Arthur was quietly picking his teeth. You did not say goodbye when you left, you just went out, and Amy and Arthur stared at the tablecloth, Amy rumbling, Arthur picking his teeth. You would soon come again. There was really no need to say good-bye.

Margaret Quong ran up the hill. She would be out of breath. She was always out of breath when she went to see Miss Browne. The bull’s-eyes stuck to the paper in the warm pocket of her hand. But the air was glass, the ruts sounded metallic under her feet. There was a sort of culmination in going to see Miss Browne, as if the day had slowly mounted towards this peak, this running breathless up the hill towards a rite. Tea at the store was a rite too, but calm and emotionless. There was no effort attached to having tea at the store. But I am a different person at Miss Browne’s, she said. I must sit and speak in a special way, which is the way Miss Browne sits and speaks. I would like to be like Miss Browne. I would like to wear a mauve dress. I would like to have been in Sydney, to be able to talk about the nuns.

Talking to Miss Browne was delicious with regrets and also possibilities.

Margaret knocked at the fly-proof door and went into the sitting-room. Miss Browne was kneeling on the floor. She was cutting out a dress, the patterns spread on the carpet, holding the scissors in her hand. But there was a white bandage on her hand.

Margaret dropped on her knees. She wanted to touch the hand.

Yes, said Miss Browne, I cut it. Wasn’t it stupid? I almost cried.

I once cut my knee, Margaret said.

There was a mingled pleasure and pain in pain shared with Miss Browne. And again she wanted to touch the hand, and because she was rather afraid to, she reached out with her voice instead, in a way that the voice does when it acts as proxy for a more emphatic, an unequivocal gesture.

I was in the yard, she said, playing with the chopper by the meat block. And there was a turkey came into the yard and I got frightened. I wanted to frighten it away. It was blowing out its chest. It looked so fierce. And then I dropped the chopper and cut my knee.

She was out of breath. It sounded silly to tell Miss Browne something that wasn’t to the point, only it was, and Miss Browne did not know.

Don’t let’s talk about it. We mustn’t be morbid, Miss Browne said.

Margaret was not sure what morbid meant, only that Miss Browne objected, and it sounded like a hot day, the sounds in the yard after dinner, or a thunderstorm before it broke.

Look, I’ve brought you some bull’s-eyes, she said.

Bull’s-eyes? Margaret! said Miss Browne. When I was with Mrs Stopford-Champernowne…

There is a kind of past experience that always serves as a point for anecdotal departure, and for Alys Browne, Mrs Stopford-Champernowne was just such a past experience, a signpost pointing to a region in which Alys Browne was the heroine. And she liked to talk about herself. She liked to talk about the past, because it was something achieved and distinct, if only in small ways, like walking in Rushcutters Bay Park, or buying bull’s-eyes at a shop in Darlinghurst, and these events had crystallized, they were not like the future, formless and volatile. Margaret also liked Miss Browne to talk about herself, because in listening she became an inhabitant of that same corner in time, the recollected past, she knew the park, she knew the cupboard where they put away brown paper and string, she sat with Miss Browne in a window-seat and the Salvation Army played on Sunday evenings in the street below. Kneeling on the floor they became drunk with anecdote. The clock hung up its purpose in the sitting-room, did not exist.

We must get to work, sighed Alys Browne, because it needed an effort to extricate yourself from the past.

Then they sat at the piano, and Margaret did her scales, and Miss Browne was beating with her hand, and Margaret frowned as a note escaped control, and she wanted to play well. She was not naturally musical. Only the piano was Miss Browne. They were trying a Beethoven sonata. And Margaret frowned. Miss Browne bent over her shoulder and made a note on the sheet. The pencil quavered in the bandaged hand. And you played with feeling, you wanted the whole of what you felt to come rushing out in a sudden chord, because the hand was a note in music or a link with Beethoven, was Miss Browne.

Alys Browne sat with a bull’s-eye in her mouth, wondered why she had become a music teacher, because it was like leading somebody in the dark. It was a false pretence. She had said very glibly: I shall teach music. She did not know what it meant. Sometimes her audacity frightened her. But nobody knew what frightened her, there was that consolation at least, just as nobody knew she had wanted to cry when she cut her hand. The bull’s-eye was warm and soothing in her mouth. And the way the doctor had spoken, he was rude, she had almost cried as the iodine plunged down into the cut, he was watching her. She was watching Margaret Quong make a mess of a Beethoven sonata. She could not help her much. And Margaret sat receiving assistance that almost did not exist, only for Margaret she would be an endless well of experience, the child would not know how shallow this was. The doctor knew. He looked at her and knew there was nothing there, she had felt it, he made her feel inadequate and naïve. There was a hard efficiency in the doctor’s face, like the face of someone who does things well facing somebody who. She turned over a page.

It is beautiful, felt Margaret Quong, she is beautiful, if only my hair was not quite so straight. I am nothing at all, sighed Alys Browne, he made me feel I am nothing at all, and why did I think his eyes were grey, or look, but you had to look at somebody in the street, even if he meant nothing at all.

May I come in? he said.

He was standing there at the door. He had shaved. They turned round on the music stool, the two heads in the circle of light.

I don’t want to interrupt, he said. I was passing. I thought I’d see how your hand.

Oh, said Alys Browne. My hand. You’d better sit down. We shan’t be long, she said.

He was sitting down by the table, taking a book, or no, it was the Windsor Magazine. She knew it was this. She knew she wished it was not. And then she was ashamed. She could feel that her face was red. But she would have liked him to know that she read Tolstoi too, even if he thought it was affectation, he would surely think it that.