Patrick White - Happy Valley

That’s all very well, said Mrs Belper. You in flounces and a convent. But that has nothing to do with me.

She continued to shake all over, spherical and convulsed, her hands working on her skirt or over the body of a little dog crouched in the hollow of her quaking lap.

You shouldn’t’ve left that convent, she said. You should have become a nun, Alys. But I don’t understand you, of course. Living up there all by yourself. You’d have done much better in a convent, even if it’s only hens. Because, I mean to say, well, company, and somebody else’s face. And they can’t have such a bad time there or they’d all come pouring out. Take my word, it’s the priests. They get all the entertainment, and there’s no talk of the tax.

From the convent in those blue afternoons you watched the bay, white with yachts, spread out like a book when reading, an illumination, or the Lily Maid upon a barge when Tennyson was always in your lap, and the wax face of Sister Mary cut in above the rustle of her skirt, made you think that perhaps after all you should have become a nun, even without vocation, as Mrs Belper said, and not look into teacups and wonder if in the leaves, but walk in the garden by the laurels, and the variegated laurel clump, with Sister Mary holding a hand, and it was evening, and the trams hung an unimportant apostrophe between the laurel clump and the lights. Perhaps I should have done all this, she said. I don’t know. Perhaps I shall never know.

That’s what you ought to have done, Mrs Belper said. We’ll never find you a husband here.

And if I don’t want a husband? said Alys.

Well, there’s not much chance of your going off the rails. No one even for that.

What’s all this? asked Mr Belper, coming in suddenly and clapping his wife on the back.

Look out, you clumsy brute! she said. You’ve startled Trixie out of her skin.

Poor little Trixie! Trixie! Trixie, come to Father, dear.

Trixie doesn’t love Father any more. Do you pet? Joe, duckie, pour yourself some tea. If I touched the pot I’d stick to it. When d’you think it’s going to rain? We were finding a husband for Alys, Joe.

Tell it not in Bath! said Mr Belper, rolling a slightly bloodshot eye.

Always a tease, murmured his wife, feeling perhaps through her latent conscience that some excuse was necessary.

She looked at her husband all the same and waited for him to follow up, because the Belpers were like that, a kind of perpetual vaudeville act, or concert party, The Good Sorts, who bandied about a clumsy ball both for their own entertainment and their audience’s discomfiture.

I think I shall have to go home, said Alys.

Go home for what? Mrs Belper complained. What a girl you are, to be sure. Of course I don’t understand you, Alys. You could have stayed on to supper. We might have had a game of cards.

Always on the make is Cissie Belper, said her husband, faithful to the act.

Oh, shut up, Joe, for God’s sake! But doesn’t Alys make you sick?

Jostled redly the Belper faces counting through lines of intricate sound the veins and a dog’s bark one two shattering the lampshade beads. Yes, thought Alys Browne, it is time I left, though why, he will not have come.

What about the shares, Mr Belper? she said as she took her hat.

Shares? Oh yes! The shares! Don’t you be impatient, my girl. Just you trust to your Uncle Joe. He’ll hand you a nice little nest-egg, though we can’t produce any dividends yet.

Joe, you’re a marvel, said his wife, not altogether sarcastically. Mrs Belper always held her breath before the faintly miraculous conduct of stocks and shares.

But Alys thought she would go home, went out into the sunlight that was heavy on her hair, and it made her altogether heavy to walk in the hot sun, even as far as home. She walked along the road and smiled to herself until she thought it must look silly that anyone passing her on the road would wonder what she was smiling at. So she stopped. It seemed a long way home. Nowadays she always seemed to be on her way between two points, or waiting, she waited much more than in the past, though now with a sense of fulfilment in waiting, as if it were some end in itself. She could not think what would happen, but she did not much care. Most things were irrelevant now, having tea at the Belpers’, or buying shares in a company on Mr Belper’s advice. But she had sold the paddocks at Kambala that once her father had owned, and buying the shares she had said, I shall go to California soon, this is almost on the way. But this was when she was buying the shares. I shall go to California soon. Now she did not want to any more, it did not seem worth while. And the Salvage Bay Pearl Company, a prospectus in a bottom drawer, had lost the romantic possibilities which were such an inducement to buy. Those men who went down in helmets, the dark faces behind glass, walked on the bottom of the sea to gather pearls, walked through forests of sponge, like dark flowers encased in glass, it was all there behind the printed word, the ropes of weed that swayed without a wind. Reading the prospectus was to get rich, she would go to California, and all this would be on pearls, though nobody in the boat would know that Miss Alys Browne was made of pearls, a kind of pearl queen in her way. This was how many months ago? She wondered, but she did not know, and anyway she was not rich yet, and — well, she did not altogether care. Though this would be nice, she said, a change to have people like you just for your surface value, quite a change.

Her feet caught in the heavy surface of the road. If he would approve, just for a while, a certain amount of frailty, like the books she had scarcely read. But she could not always be thinking of someone else. She brushed away a face with her hand. Because she must go on being herself, or what was herself, that was what made it difficult, being herself, or thinking of someone else, which was herself? She thought of him and became at once a different person, yet in a way more herself, firmer, and more distinct. Perhaps this was it. And she wanted it like this, the start of something positive. All those superficialities, she said, all these must fall away, all that I was building up, because I was afraid, it is because I was afraid that I wanted to be different, that I wanted California, because I was afraid.

The shadows were longer on the road as she turned up towards her house. It was still sunny and hot, but with that quietness which anticipates the decline of the sun, and there was a brassy sheen on everything. In summer when your sense of perception has been numbed all day by the light and the heat, and you have sunk down into a blurred world, of which the reality is less actual than your own, because you have constructed something in desperation in which to take refuge with yourself, you first become aware again in this softer but still florid light, you discover in the external its proportionate significance. So to Alys Browne opening her gate objects became distinctly defined, as if she had been looking through a gauze all day and now it had dropped, and the fence-posts stood up with a kind of sober, detached beauty, very distinct from their environment, and the house with its long, slender shadow, and the potsherds bordering the flower-beds, and the corrugated water-tank, all these had an existence of their own, only united in this moment of depreciating sun.

Alys Browne clicked the gate. In the stillness it made a loud click. It was so still that she felt he could not be there. There was no reason why he should. She was as nothing to him, as his wife was something, and she must not think. My husband is up at Kambala, she said. She was Mrs Halliday and at the same time almost an impersonal entity, to her, personal to him. He said, you must come down and see my wife. She felt she must ask about his wife, but they talked about music instead. The way her hair that morning, slightly grey, as if she were older than he, falling down at the sides, and she said he was up at Kambala. Alys Browne walked on up the path. Suddenly she hoped he would not be there.