Patrick White - Happy Valley

There has been no change that I am aware of, he said, or at least I don’t think so, even if I am honest with myself. But I don’t want to ask myself too much. I am happy as I am, even stuck here in this hole, it is not so important now, perhaps after all it was only a matter of time, kick against the pricks and you hurt yourself, stop and you forget. It was like that. Or perhaps the possibility of Birkett’s arranging something was designed as an envelope against discomfiture, mental discomfiture, that is. For it is miserable here in summer, that hot wind beating against the gauze with the hum of flies, and the dead bodies of flies bloated and obscene upon the window-sill. But I take off my coat and it is better. The shirt clings to the skin. There is no draught of air in the dispensary, only the passive blanket of heat threaded with vague chemical smells. This is nothing but an external discomfiture. Just as bumping along a dusty road, hanging to the wheel, when I go to see a case, the act itself recedes, together with purpose, and the trees blur, and the murmur of advice, the yes, doctor, and no, doctor, in the kitchen afterwards.

So he began to feel lighter. Hilda could hear him whistle in the dispensary, laugh as he told a patient what to do. She watched him with George in the yard, twisting a piece of tin into the shape of a boat, and sailing it in a tub. On the whole she was glad. But she waited for the mail, to see if anything had been effected to change Queensland from a possible future into an immanent certainty.

Don’t you worry, Hilda, he said. We can’t fix everything in a day.

This was when he found her looking out of the window with that air of hopelessness that seems to attract people to windows, as if they only have to look outside and find a solution stalking up the road. He patted her on the back. He thought, poor Hilda, and all my present tranquillity is nothing to her, it cannot reach inside and touch that kernel which, incidentally, I have never touched and don’t know how. It either comes in a flash, or it doesn’t, and here it didn’t, but all the same we have made something of our lives, there are Rodney and George, and I am something to Hilda, apparently some kind of necessary stay.

To the people of Happy Valley Oliver Halliday became what old Dr Reardon, lamented of Mrs Steele, had been before. It was once What Dr Reardon Said, it was now What Dr Halliday Says. He drove up to Kambala, in summer you could drive all the way, and treated Mrs Steele for ulcer of the leg. She had it very bad. Of course she had not gone to Tumut to live with her son Tom, she would try another winter, she said, even though she had an ulcer awful bad. She said, did Dr Halliday remember that night when poor Mrs Chalker? Well, Mrs Chalker was expecting again, and she hoped, the ulcer willing, to help Dr Halliday at the lying in, because it would take the two of them, Dr Halliday and Mrs Steele, to deliver Mrs Chalker, it would. So it was quite an occasion when Oliver went up to look at Mrs Steele’s ulcer at Kambala. She gave him a basin of potted meat and some cuttings of plants. Because, she said, he got the money out of the insurance and she did not want him to feel he was getting nothing out of her. Her potted meat was famous, she said. When he got it down to Happy Valley the heat had sent it bad.

Driving down from Kambala along the hot metal road, you passed the bright red water tank and the house where Alys Browne lived, standing a little back. Sometimes he went to see Alys Browne. He went up the path and, listening for the level silence or a groping peace, he would either continue up the path or else retreat. She was never surprised to see him now. She had reached the stage when she no longer felt bound to say to her friends; oh, Dr Halliday was here to-day, only as she had few visitors she had skipped that stage, and nobody really knew. She felt she would not have minded if they did. But, as they didn’t, there was no necessity to tell.

So Oliver Halliday called in on her sometimes on his way down from Kambala. He began to think it was the natural thing to do. After all, it was only sociable. You couldn’t shut yourself away, or you had too long, and now it was time you made the effort, and Alys Browne gave you pikelets for tea. You dropped your hat on the floor and fell down without any ceremony into a chair. Like going across the bay to see Birkett, at sixteen, and forgetting ceremony as you talked, as you put up your feet, before Hilda said the cretonne would have to be cleaned. Now again you remembered how to unbend. It was hot drinking tea in the afternoon. Your shirt stuck to your skin. But Alys Browne’s sitting-room seemed to encourage a breeze, perhaps the way it was placed up on the hill, perhaps because of that. Anyway a breeze, actual or otherwise, meandered occasionally through the room, without apparent purpose, like the conversation of two people drinking tea in the heat, a kind of accompaniment to the act of drinking, with nothing deliberate about it.

When he came to think about it Alys was on the whole far from being a deliberate person herself. There are people who imply things deliberately by their conversation, or whose whole personality is a deliberate implication of their particular tastes and antipathies, so that their whole existence suggests they are hitting the nail on the head. But this was not Alys Browne. Her life was if anything an under-statement of the fact, a system of delicate, and undoubtedly unconscious, indirect implication. That was why you did not notice her at first, why he had looked through her in the dispensary and seen nothing worth noticing. You thought she was vague and rather silly. Well, perhaps she was silly, but not fundamentally so. She suggested things in a glance or a phrase that were an emphatic denial of this. And then, because of that, you got to like her for her silliness too, or for your own stupidity in not seeing through it before.

Sometimes she played for him when he went up there in the afternoons. He said:

Play me something. Play me some Chopin, or Schumann, or something like that.

Is that how I stand? she said.

Not altogether.

But almost.

She protested, but she played it, and he knew that in spite of her protesting she liked to play it, and he knew that she knew. They both knew it was what they wanted. What he did not know was that he had wanted this so much, for a very long time, suppressing the fact till Alys Browne released it.

That sort of thing happens and you can’t think why you have put it off so long, almost as if there was a certain amount of immorality attached, or a sense approach to music like a sense approach to a person. But there was nothing erotic in his attitude to Alys Browne. He wasn’t in need of anything like that. He was not in love with her. She was a necessary accompaniment to Hilda, who was his wife, who was the mother of two children, which were also his. If I have never loved Hilda, he said, it is because she has never wanted love, at least, love in the sense that Chopin or Schumann implies. You could never connect Hilda with that, it was just incongruous. For that matter, nor did you connect Alys Browne with more than the outer form of the music that she played. She did not, he did not expect anything else, otherwise he would not be sitting here listening to her as she played, would have stayed away, would have…To think of falling in love with Alys was to take up your hat and go.

All this was happening in the summer. He went about and he began to see he had wasted a lot of time in just going about. It was hot, but he did not mind it. It would be hotter, he said, when they went to Queensland, for of course they would go in time, but it was a pity it should have to happen just when he was getting to know people, and it was almost like getting to know people for the first time.