Patrick White - Happy Valley

A little slower, Margaret, she said.

Margaret was taut, her back. She could not play. She would never play, with the doctor sitting behind.

Have a bull’s-eye, said Alys Browne, and she made her voice as nonchalant as she could.

I think I’ll go, said Margaret. I promised I wouldn’t be late.

She got down off the stool. Miss Browne was looking at the wall.

Oh, she said, and her voice was vague. There’s still a quarter of an hour. But of course we can always make it up.

Miss Browne was looking at the wall. Her hands lay in her lap. And there was a shadow on the wall, grotesque, where Margaret’s head hung down, her hair hanging straight and her body drawn out into the shape of a post.

I promised Mother, Margaret said.

Don’t let me interrupt.

You’re not interrupting, said Alys, and her shadow turned.

Miss Browne wore her hair drawn back, looking over at the doctor who sat in a chair, because he had spoken, looking at a magazine. And there was nothing to say, but go to the door, Margaret trailing her shadow like a post, heavy as a post.

Good night, she said.

Oh, good night, Margaret, said Miss Browne.

Margaret opened the door and went outside. He was sitting in the chair. She looked back and his jaw was swollen with a bull’s-eye, his shadow bunched on the wall. I shall come again, she said, and we shall make up the quarter, many quarters of an hour. Then she went slowly down the steps and her feet were stubborn on the frozen path. Withdrawing into distance the shape of door dimmed, out of focus as you looked back. Her throat was tight, cold.

That silly magazine! said Alys Browne.

He did not hear. She picked up the music sheet. She wished that he had not come. She did not think she would have very much to say. She felt about seventeen, or younger than that, because reading Tennyson at seventeen, they had said she was old for her age, and looking at herself in the glass she was very wise.

Why? he said.

She laughed.

Why not?

Somebody said she was enigmatic, which meant, she knew, that you made something of nothing, a word or a glance, helping out your own inadequacies, but the doctor saw through.

Because man must cater for his imperfections. After all, he said, there’s a reality about his imperfections it’d be a pity to deny.

She could interpret that how she liked. He threw down the magazine, conscious of his own pomposity. He looked at her, saw her floundering, and said:

Well now, what about your hand?

Oh, that’s all right, she said. That was nothing at all.

She was moving about the room. She was patting things. He had put her to flight, and now she was defending herself, moving about with uneasy grace, a hardness in her voice that perhaps he ought to soften somehow, allow her to play her part. Because after all if what he said about man and his imperfections, and it had been damnably pompous, he knew, she ought to be allowed to play her part, and he would sit with his hands on his paunch, acquired to match his pomposity, and listen and applaud. Then suddenly he realized it was difficult, and perhaps he could no longer make a contact, sitting at home and talking to Hilda. Other people don’t play much of a part in our lives, said Hilda, with the conviction of a knitting needle, we don’t need them, she said. So it was rather difficult. It made you sit on the edge of your chair.

How long, how long have you been at Happy Valley? he said.

She shrugged her shoulders.

A long time. Quite a long time.

He had spent a long time diagnosing the disturbances in people’s bodies, that now had become bodies or a source of behaviour. I have got pretty smug, he said. He sat with the bull’s-eye in his cheek trying to think of something to say, but in the end he would most likely go away, admitting he was a failure, say, it is so much easier to be professional.

I used to play a bit once, he said. I used to play Bach.

Oh, she said. Bach.

She looked at him sitting there. He was rather absurd with that bull’s-eye in his mouth. He was not so formidable and going grey.

I think Beethoven means more to me. More, more feeling, she said. And depth.

But perhaps he would see through that too. She blushed. Seeing or not, he had gone across to the piano and was looking through the music lying there.

But you also play Schumann, he said.

Why not?

She had said it before, as she said it knowing, also that it meant nothing, or acted as a defence.

I mean, why shouldn’t I play Schumann? Because I like him. We can’t keep to the heights, she said.

God forbid!

He sat down and began to play something from the Kinderszenen. There was a kind of sweet enervation about the music of Schumann, just going on and on, and it was easy to succumb, as she probably succumbed, sitting up here alone and playing Schumann to herself. Hilda sat in the Botanical Gardens on an iron seat. He bent over and touched her cheek. He said he would write a poem. There was a gentle titillation of the senses in the morning sun, in Schumann’s music. How soft you went if you gave yourself a chance. His hands became still on the keys, his shoulders bowed. She was watching him.

Why don’t you go on? she said.

Not now.

Man must cater for his imperfections.

He looked at her and smiled. She was smiling. She was standing by the fireplace, and her body had lost its rigidity, and he was looking into her, at a core that he had not noticed as she winced in the dispensary and pitied herself.

We all say lots of silly things, he said. I ought to be getting home.

He had come to look at her hand. He was the doctor manipulating a bandage. Hilda would send out the bill.

There’s one thing I’ve sometimes wondered, he said. Why are you “Alys” Browne?

I think I wanted to be different, she said, and she was surprised, because her voice did not falter, because she did not want to look down. She looked at him and said:

That’s the only reason, I suppose.

It’s a pretty honest reply.

You don’t leave many loopholes, she said.

When he had gone she sat down, she was upright, she was firmer, something had happened to her, she felt. As if her body, and perhaps her mind, had suddenly grown taut as he touched her hand, tightened the bandage, touching some nerve that had always hung slack. What is it, she said, and why am I sitting like this, waiting, like sitting with pamphlets in my lap about California, and then not going, I never went, there was no significance in it at all, and what am I waiting for? It was one of those questions you could not answer. And why California now? she said. I don’t want to think. She went into the bedroom and lay on the bed in the dark, against cold sheets, and promptly thought harder than before, or the mind wandered in its fashion, like Schumann, and she asked herself if Vronsky or Karenin, if either of these was parallel. But that was no good. She lay on her back looking upwards into the dark. Then she began to realize how cold she was.

Where have you been, Oliver? said Hilda.

I went up to see Miss Browne. To look at her hand.

Hilda yawned.

It’s late, she said. Rodney’s been having a dream. It’s that school. He’s unhappy there.

Oliver went into the dispensary. He did not light the lamp. He stood there in the dark. Then he wondered why he had gone into the dispensary, there was something, but of course it was Birkett, and Hilda was sitting outside waiting for him to write. Rodney lay in bed afraid. Rodney was his son. He would write and they would go away, his wife and two children, the situation enforced by their going away. That was a reality, not playing Schumann in a mauve dress. Hilda and the children were all that he had ever wanted, he said, he wanted no more than affection, they were fond, they were happy, and he would write to Birkett. There was still a flavour of peppermint in his mouth. She was after all a human being, very silly perhaps, but looking at her he was glad she was silly and that underneath the silliness there was a core, an “Alice” Browne. But it was quite irrelevant, this. Only it made you a little surprised to discover a human being. You got out of touch. And Rodney was his son, was a human being, was more than a biological fact. He must try to remember that. He must not go off at a tangent into a world of his own, until a face pointed to the possibility of human beings.