Patrick White - Happy Valley

Come along, Ern, she said, putting a plump and momentarily tender hand into his armpit and helping him up. You poor thing, she said. It’s cruel.

He leant on her. He had always leant on her, and somehow she had buoyed him up, pneumatically, helped him along the passage, or composed a sentence for a letter that he was writing to the Board. He walked slowly with his head bowed. His chest was tight, removed, but there was a kind of exultant pain in breath torn with an effort from the lungs, and she was supporting him.

We’ll get you into bed. And then you can burn your powder, she said.

He sat down on the counterpane. There were still six or seven essays on the Cow and Her Relationship with Man that he could not, not correct. He said:

Vic, there’s still…

Don’t you talk, she said.

He lumped down and let her take the slippers off his feet. The Cow gives us What. The Board of Education in how many ha’penny stamps he’d spent. But there was always Vic.

Vic Moriarty bustled about the room. God, she tried her best, she did, nobody could tell her that she didn’t make a good wife, fetching and carrying and handing pity on a plate, and of course she was sorry for him, she sat and watched him wheeze till it hurt, was what any normal person would call a sacrificing wife, those slippers she had made for Ernest who was like a stray dog, that little shivering whippet she found, poor Tiny that died of a chill and she nursed him in blankets, and cried, it was when she was trying that stuff on her lashes which ran when she cried, till Ernest said, and she said I must make the best of meself Ernest and you can’t complain of that, because she was good in deed, only a thought sometimes slipped, and she defied anyone to have a mind free from recreation, she did.

God, I’m tired! she said when they had got into bed and the fumes of the powder, mingled with the quenched candlewick, had invaded all the corners of the dark.

He patted her hand. He lay in bed and tried not to wheeze so that she would be able to sleep. That water dripping in the schoolroom maundered through his head. His head was confused with fume of smoke, with the crumpled train of cows, their horns tilting at the basin on the schoolroom floor.

I had to give that Chow a pound. Oh dear, she said, we’ll have to get the mattress teased.

It was funny the way that plant sometimes stuck up straight, like an old maid that had listened to a dirty joke by mistake. She sat by Ernest in the evening and tried to take an interest in his stamps. He was holding her hand in bed, perhaps asleep, and she wished she knew if he was asleep, so as she could take away her hand. That Walter Quong driving down the street in his car and waving a yellow hand that touched her in Moorang as she wanted to cross the street. They said a Chinaman, who was it said that, it must have been Fred, the dirty brute. She took away her hand from Ernest. She thought he must be asleep. Lying there, my hubby’s blue, can’t help that, because he’s asthmatic, the poor soul. And that young chap went up to the pub, turning to look back and wave, as if, well, somebody noticed anyway, and Gertie Ansell said he was the new man for Furlows’ because her brother was down at Quongs’ when the truck, he was a man anyway, water the plant to-morrow, not much, perhaps that was why it sprawled, like that time that chap at a party Daisy had on the couch, touched his muscles, he had red hair waving back down the street, and Daisy turned on the light, said, Fred, oh go on, you couldn’t help it, go mad if you didn’t, and what was he doing going out to Furlows’, that girl there dolled up to kill, and you never knew if Vic oh what Ernest I am almost asleep asleepernest.

Stabbed in sleep then legs apart licked a stamp or went up the hill on the curve the moon played Schumann it was chalk chalk in his bones or heartburn as he tossed the ticket took a train Rodney Rodney there on the map is Queensland yellow for Sun A for Andy when it blew blood like the spermwhale she stretched out her arm that clove white a slice of the darkness she put up her face with pins drawn back into a roll and then crackled the arpeggio you could always tack down the hem and write and write to blot out another purpose if you write.

So on, so on, with the diversity of detail and the pathetically compulsory unity of purpose that informs a town asleep. Smoke mounts faintly skywards from the chimney-pots. Dream is broken, turns, sighs. She said, she said, the wind. The cat walking on the water-butt touches with her cold pad a star, claiming it as her own, like Happy Valley extinguished by the darkness, achieving a momentary significance.

It was no longer winter at Happy Valley. You began to wonder if it could ever be anything else, and there was really no reason why it should, why Happy Valley should take part in the inevitable time process rather than stay concealed in some channel up which either time or circumstance had forgotten to press. Then it happened when you forgot to wonder. On the hillside you began to see the whorls of barley grass, wavelike and consolidated when there was a wind. Lambs tilted at the ewes. The frost thawed early under the sun. But all this was incidental, you felt, there was no reciprocation on the part of man, almost no connection with the earth, or else it took longer for the corresponding tendency to penetrate and touch the instincts with which he is endowed. It was like this, very slow, until with an undertone of protest that time ignored, flowing blandly, even through Happy Valley it flowed, he was caught up, whatever his private argument might be, and pitched beyond reach of his own intentions. At Happy Valley man was by inclination static. That was the rub. Watch a man complaining at sundown over a glass of beer, watch him wipe the dust off his mouth, listen to his pale, yellow voice, if you want to understand what I mean. Because there you will find that static quality I’m trying to suggest, I mean, the trousers hanging on, but only just. Well, time got over this and any more positive protest, though things continued much the same, the washing on the line Mondays, the geranium dead on old Mrs Everett’s window-sill, with Mrs Everett’s geranium face wilting and inquisitive above the pot. Mrs Everett, like her geranium, no longer underlined the seasonal change. She twittered in a dead wind. She clung on through habit adhering lichen-wise to the rock.

Mrs Everett’s brown face was more than this, was the face of Happy Valley seen through dust, those dust waves churned by a car passing down the main street. Because it was no longer spring. Spring was a transitory humour or exhalation that dried and evaporated, disappeared with the barley grass and the weaned lamb. Happy Valley became that peculiarly tenacious scab on the body of the brown earth. You waited for it to come away leaving a patch of pinkness underneath. You waited and it did not happen, and because of this you felt there was something in its nature peculiarly perverse. What was the purpose of Happy Valley if, in spite of its lack of relevance, it clung tenaciously to a foreign tissue, waiting and waiting for what? It seemed to have no design. You could not feel it. You anticipated a moral doomsday, but it did not come. So you went about your business, tried to find reason in this. After all, your existence in Happy Valley must be sufficient in itself.

Oliver Halliday had written to his friend Professor Birkett one night in winter as we have seen. He wanted to go and live in Queensland, ostensibly because of Hilda, his wife, actually for many other reasons, some of them conscious, more of them not. Birkett will arrange it, he said, with this man Garthwaite, who wants to exchange practices with somebody in the south. Hilda will be better in a warmer climate, her health. And Rodney will go to school in Sydney. We shall all be better, happier. We have said that before, in Sydney, in coming to Happy Valley, but this time it will be different. It is always different the next time. So he waited for Birkett’s reply, and Birkett said he would see, and now it was no longer spring, it was summer again, and a hot wind blew down from the mountains, and Hilda said, hasn’t your Birkett done anything yet? She began to look anxious again. You’ve got to have patience, Oliver said. He had written to Birkett. He felt absolved. Even Hilda’s anxious cough did nothing to his conscience now it was as if he were responsible for nothing, least of all for himself.