Patrick White: Happy Valley

It was warm now, tramping along the level on skis. He would be in a sweat by the time he reached the place where he had left the car. You left the car at Halloran’s Corner when you came up to Kambala in winter time. Snow never fell very heavily as far down the mountains as that. But it was cold. It was colder at Happy Valley than anywhere else in the world. Take your scarf, dear, Hilda said, poke it into your waistcoat over your chest. She coughed as she served apple dumplings to the boys, and Rodney said he hated apple dumplings, they stuck in his throat, he began to cry. Hilda said, dear, dear, Oliver, you’ll have to do something about that child, he’ll finish by driving me off my head, I can’t stand any more.

Oliver Halliday, father of a family. That’s what he was. And it didn’t feel any different, in essentials, from what it was at sixteen. Wrongly, no doubt. Just this coating of the essential sameness with superficial experience. There hadn’t been any adjustment, he hadn’t had time. The way you were going to do everything, make your life flow in an even rhythm, like that damn pretentious book. He had copied out bits of it, too. It made you feel rather intellectual to write down things about the Life Stream and Cosmic Force in coloured inks. That was sixteen, Cosmic Force, and cultivating an expression of intensity in the glass before going in to tea. He works very hard, said Aunt Jane to Mrs Meadows, so that he would not hear, but he did. He wrote interesting letters too, bits of thoughts and things going over on the troopship, and sang bawdy songs in the evening. There was a man called Wright, a shearer with cross eyes, singing, and the streamers that morning as the boat slipped away, and Aunt Jane saying, this’ll kill me, Oliver, why you had to do it I’ll never know. He felt very proud when he told them he was nineteen. Nobody would have known. He was big. But he was frightened lying in his bunk at night, and the way the men snored, and the sea seemed eternity, and perhaps Hilda would forget what she said, that she would marry him when he came back, because she was proud he was going to the War. On the newspaper placards in Sydney the War was cold print. You went to the War. Then suddenly in the Indian Ocean you were going to God knows what, and it wasn’t so good, but it couldn’t go on for ever, it was already ’18. Perhaps he would get a medal, and newspaper placards in Sydney, because he was sixteen, would say…Once he was sixteen.

Oliver Halliday wiped his face with a handkerchief. There was something vicious about letting your mind run on like that. You felt a bit ashamed as soon as you pulled yourself up. It was like reading in the lavatory or lying too long in a hot bath. If he had a gun he’d take a pot at that hawk, put a shot in its belly for lunch, and it would fall down and lie on the snow, its blood red on the snow, dead. But there would be no pain before annihilation. All its life it would probably know no pain, not like Mrs Chalker writhing about on the bed at Kambala. The hawk was absolved from this, absorbed as an agent into the whole of this frozen landscape, into the mountains that emanated in their silence a dull, frozen pain while remaining exempt from it. There was a kind of universal cleavage between these, the agents, and their objects: the woman at the hotel, forcing the dead child out of her womb, or the township of Happy Valley with its slow festering sore of painfully little intrigue. It was a medieval attitude perhaps. But they were still living in the Middle Ages with their dark fears and antidotal faiths. His skis made a long slurring noise on the snow. A handful of snow rattled from off a tree, falling down out of the interstices of twigs. The arches of the trees were white with snow, almost Gothic in structure. Like a cathedral, he felt. Miserere of the crows. A plump black crow peering out of the window of a briar like a priest from his confessional.

There was still some use for the Holy Roman Church. It taught you to turn pain and the fear of it to some spiritual use. But you weren’t a Catholic, and pain only made you bitter, or made you ashamed because you were bitter and afraid. He said his prayers every evening on the troopship, quietly to himself in his bunk. He lay there feeling afraid, getting closer, and closer, and then the War stopped. Of course it had to stop. He was sorry in a way, because a gesture like enlisting when you were sixteen, and afraid, wasn’t as big when you couldn’t carry it through to the logical conclusion and give everyone the impression you were brave, even though bravery was something forced on you whether you liked it or not. But he went to London. He had two weeks in Paris, where everyone was very tired, and old, spiritually, and nobody took any notice of him at all. He felt far younger than he had ever felt copying Great Thoughts into a notebook at home, but it was a fresh sensation, he appreciated it, walking about the streets in Paris and everyone else preoccupied. But he was worried because everyone was old and when he went out of the city into the country, to Saint Germain or the forest at Fontainebleau, the country was young. That was the strange part. It was stranger because at home everything was reversed. The people were young, adolescent, almost embryonic. When he got back from Europe he looked at them and there was nothing there. Life was a toy, you rattled it. But the country was old, older than the forest at Fontainebleau, there was an underlying bitterness that had been scored deep and deep by time, with a furrow here and there and pockmarks in the face of black stone. Over everything there was a hot air of dormant passion, of inner war, that nobody seemed to be conscious of. In Sydney you went to parties. In Happy Valley you fornicated or drank. You swung the rattle for all you were worth. You did not know you were sitting on a volcano that might not be extinct. It puzzled him at first.

And he wanted to get away again. Even when he was married he wanted to get away. And Hilda said, you’re restless, dear, you’re tired, if only you could take a week or two we might drive down to Wollongong. He married Hilda when he was twenty-four. That was eight years. But waiting was Hilda’s strong suit, for more than eight years. Rodney was nine and George four. And he was still only sixteen, which was something that Hilda did not know though she knew pretty well everything else. It was far better to be like Hilda, complete in superficialities, complete in your own conception of completeness. He had only once felt complete. It was an accident, he felt, and being in Paris, it was somewhere round about the Luxembourg, and he had gone into a church, he did not know why, it was an ordinary church, but perhaps there was a cold wind, anyway he went inside. The organ was playing. He could remember that his feet were cold and there was a smell of varnish. The organ was playing a Bach fugue. He knew it was Bach because he had picked out bits of Bach on the piano at home. And then he was at home again, but not at home, it was in the church in the neighbourhood of the Luxembourg, it was in France, with old German Bach streaming out of the organ loft, and the War had stopped, and he was losing his breath, he was losing…Then he sat very still. He supposed he was breathing. He did not know. But he knew he was crying. He did not care if he cried; there was nothing wrong with this sort of crying and nobody would see. The music came rushing out of the loft, unfurling banners of sound. You could touch it. You could feel it. You could feel a stillness and a music all at once. You were at once floating and stationary, in time, all time, and space, without barrier, passing with a fresher knowledge of the tangible to a point where this dissolved, became the spiritual.

A great boulder of black rock rose nakedly at the edge of the whitened road. He stopped and kicked at it with his ski. The tangible. There is a stubborn, bitter ring if you kick at a piece of black rock. And how would serene, Christian, German, eighteenth-century Johann Sebastian have dealt with a lump of antipodal rock? Serenity perhaps was the effect of environment, not so much the result of spiritual conflict. At least you would like to think that. It would make things easier. You could give up the ghost at the start. But you did not give up the ghost, you went on swerving, wheeling, in the direction of Happy Valley, ducking beneath the arm of a tree when it nearly hit you in the face, half closing your eyes to keep out the spray of snow and the wind, and it was exciting, and you held your breath, hoping this wasn’t your last moment, almost, but not the last.