Patrick White - Happy Valley

The cyclamen stuck up straight in the lustre bowl. Queer the antics of that flower. Anyone would think it had its ears back. Bitchiness in a flower.

Or a bitch up against a fence, pressing into you, it gave you goose-flesh now, and Ernest in bed, was not like that, you said, was not and nobody believed it true, Ernest perhaps, with veins on his hand that nearly burst, and suppose your gown tore on the fence, or splinters sticking in, it might go septic, his breath said why not, ugh, and the leaves funny with that flower, because Vic loves flowers, pottering about the garden, he said, Ernest pottering in slippers she embroidered with a pricked finger, and then his arms you couldn’t help it, being the schoolmaster’s wife, you said.

She jostled the glasses viciously on the table and went into the bedroom.

Is that you, Vic? Ernest sighed.

Yes, she said.

Where you been?

Mr Hagan took me to the pictures.

Poor Ernest. But I can’t help being being, whatever I am, and what am I, creaking the bed, and that smell of asthma powder as he turns.

The pictures was lovely, she said. It was about a ranger. And he was in love with the daughter of the sheriff. It was in Texas, you see. And there was another chap called, called…I forget. Anyway it doesn’t matter. Well, this chap insulted the ranger with a whip. About the girl. It was a double insult, you see. And he was also in league with the Indians. And…

The bed groaned, snored. Vic Moriarty sat down on the chair and began to draw her stockings off.

It had begun to rain. The sound of rain on the iron roof gave you a feeling of isolation, something in the hollow sound, as if you were contained in this hollow and hung in space. Oliver Halliday and Alys Browne. He leant against the mantelpiece, silent now. He ought to be going, he felt. I have been here an hour or two, talking, she has laughed, sitting there on the couch, we have both laughed, and it has been very pleasant but unsatisfactory. And now we have exhausted all those pleasant, unsatisfactory things, and are silent, waiting for something essential that does not, perhaps will not come. It is like this with Hilda. I have never spoken to Hilda using anything but the outer convention of words. We look at each other, hoping for something that does not come, it is now too late. And Alys, it is going to be like this, there is no reason for anything else, I come here to talk or to drink afternoon tea.

She sat up straight on the sofa. Her hands were in her lap. Now that he had stopped talking she waited, not conscious of time, though it was late, with a tautness in her ears, any renewal of sound would shatter the membrane, she thought. She sat bolt upright. She had no connection with anything else. The silence made her feel like that, or the hour, as if twelve o’clock robbed your body of its awareness and tightened up your mind, making it function more acutely inside the insulation of the flesh. The rain kept coming down on the roof, regularly, then broken by a wind. He was standing there by the mantelpiece. It will happen soon, she said. She felt that she had lived only in preparation for this, that she had not dared to formulate, resisting because of many things, but conscious all the time of the trend her life was taking.

Alys, he said.

She did not answer him. She sat there on the sofa, very straight, with her hands in her lap. Her face was a bit drawn, as if she were trying to restrain emotion, like him restraining for years something he did not need. Then it began to come awake. For weeks it had been happening, he felt. And now he wanted to give expression to this, he had to. He went and got down beside her, put his face in her lap, against her hands, resting his face in her lap.

Alys, he said, I love you. It isn’t anything else. I’ve tried to reason with myself and make it something, something it isn’t at all. You were a sort of intellectual quantity that I didn’t get anywhere else. That was all I wanted. Like a lot of other illusions I’ve had for years. I’ve wanted something else. I haven’t known what I wanted. I don’t think many of us do. Except very occasionally by a sort of intuitional flash. Sometimes it’s a physical or material solution, sometimes it’s spiritual, sometimes it’s both. All of a sudden you know.

Yes, she said. Yes.

She moved and her hands touched his face, deliberately touching his face. She bent down. She wanted to touch him with her face, with her body.

Yes, I know, she said.

The rain was still coming down on the roof, a grey, infrequent sound of rain, that was no longer isolation, as in the hollow of the darkness their bodies touched. They existed in a kind of mutual agreement of touch, for which speech could find no expression, only the language of touch. After a groping with words you discarded these, and everything was suddenly explicit without.

She wanted to give him more than this. She wanted to give him everything, so that there were no barriers, and even more than that. She could not give him enough. She went into the other room, she took off her clothes, lying there in the intimate darkness, listening to him undress. She could hear him breathing. His belt as it hit the end of the bed. Her fingers moved on the sheet, almost a gesture of resistance before the intrusion of the unknown. In her room that had grown accustomed to the sounds of silk, a drawing on and off, or the brushing of hair, the feminine cadences of these, the masculine burr of leather had an altogether foreign tone.

Then he drew back the sheet and he was getting down beside her into the bed. She held her breath, conscious of a second shock, first the sound of leather, and now the notion of a stranger getting into her bed. For it was not Oliver, the man she had talked to in the sitting-room, acquainted with his features, the accent of his voice, his form in a grey suit. This was a different person. Like the touch of cold water. She did not know. She did not want. She was afraid. And perhaps he would realize that she was holding her breath for all these reasons, because she was afraid, and that was why her heart worked like an engine inside her, banging away against her side.

He was touching her again, his arms, his whole body, now their mouths were exchanging breath, resistance gone. Now she was no longer afraid. It was Oliver again, this man with the unprotected body against her own, and she must bring herself closer to his, she could not bring herself close enough. She wanted him. They wanted each other. Her whole body seemed fragmentary with the tenderness that she could not give him in the measure she wanted to give. She felt she must cry out in little gasping breaths, forcing her love into his mouth. And nothing mattered now. No longer situated in the pattern of circumstance that was Happy Valley, they drifted almost unconsciously through a dark silence in which their united bodies were a luminous point.

Then the clock began to tick. He thought it was probably an alarm clock, that voluminous tick, and getting up to go to a lecture across the water, you lay in bed and frowned at the tyranny of time, at your own obedience not to time, but to a full-faced aluminium clock. At nineteen the clock was not even a symbol of time, was something personal, animate. But now you got up, symbols or not, you just got up. He drew back the hair from her face. She lay there, did not move, her arms curled loosely round his waist, the confidence of possession in her arms. He touched her face with his lips in the dark, that was no dark, that was Alys Browne, but no dark.

Well, he said, it’s time.

Back to the inarticulation of words, he felt the inadequacy of his voice.

Mm, she said. I was almost asleep.

You’ll be able to go to sleep.

Yes, she said. I suppose.