Patrick White - Happy Valley

During the summer you looked at things with your eyes half closed, and the landscape was almost impressionist, colour and forms broken by the heat. But with the recession of the hot weather a line no longer wavered, was unequivocal. That sweep of the hill behind the town that had shimmered all summer was now static, classical, had the firmness of a Poussin in the afternoon. Late in the afternoon the sky, clarified by the early frosts, was a suave enamel blue. Autumn waited for winter with no storm of transition, only a peaceful air of anticipation was abroad to mark the change, this pause between two dominant seasons. You hardly took autumn into account. So little happened, apart from the steadying of outline and molten colour cooling off.

Sunday was still outwardly a long passage of tranquillity for Amy Quong. She lay on her bed after dinner, on the cotton counterpane, her eyes fixed half-way between consciousness and sleep. The Virgin Mary was a vague blur, soothing, the pink and the white. And now the week was over. Voices down in the street mingled with the clanking of a bucket in the backyard. She looked at the Virgin Mary. She was outwardly content. They had bought a plot of land below Harkers’. They were going to sow potatoes there. Potatoes, said Ethel Quong, that’s all very well, that’s you Quongs all over, thinking what you’re going to get, but what about my child? Arthur said, Ethel, don’t you fuss, which was singularly unusual for Arthur Quong, committing himself to so many words. In Amy’s room, incense barely patterning the air, invaded the primness, the white and pink, and softened the crucifix of varnished oak. Her forehead was golden, polished wax. Mrs Ball said to Mrs Schmidt, I’d’ve give him in charge, if it’d been a child of mine. Exactly, said Mrs Quong, or tell the Inspector, or… Her arms were blue, Mrs Everett told Mrs Schmidt, you wouldn’t think that little runt, must have been off his head. Arthur would plough the land himself. He would borrow a horse from Schmidts. He’s a danger, said Mrs Schmidt, and what about us, what about Emily, don’t like sending her down to school. A bell pealed on the hill from the Protestant church. Voices locked and unlocked in the street. Walter said, and he laughed, his belly inside his overalls, said a man had to keep his end up and not even Margaret was a saint. Ethel said Walter always said the opposite just because he wanted to annoy, and she didn’t propose to stand around watching someone maltreat her child, because she was her child, both God and Walter knew, and she felt her responsibility, she couldn’t understand these Quongs.

Later in the afternoon Amy Quong went and sat on the verandah in front of the store. Her face was a smile for people passing in the street, was Miss Quong, a symbol of respect, rocking in her chair with her feet not touching the floor. In the street a stagnation of Sunday with its silence of weatherboard, the long shadows on the road, gradually licking up the light, like the cat on the porch opposite licking at her paw with pink, voluptuous tongue. Occasionally people passed by, the unsubstantial Sunday forms, stirring the silence furtively. There were some of Rudds and some of Andersons and some of Maconagheys. Amy Quong smiled at them all. There was also Schmidts’ youngest little girl. She was very fair and pink. Unlike Margaret, thought Amy, who felt herself sort of attracted to the pink and fair. But Margaret was a Quong. The day she went to see Ethel after Margaret was born she was glad the child was a Quong, though of course she could not have been anything else, what ever Ethel might have planned. Amy Quong rocked in her chair, nodding at the passers-by. Quongs had been at Happy Valley longer than most of these. The store that was built by old Quong squatted in its dirty crackle-pink, impervious to paint. Margaret was the granddaughter of old Quong. Coming one evening into the store, she cried on Amy’s shoulder, she would not speak, she put her arms round her aunt’s neck, and Amy experienced that almost demonstrative emotion that Margaret or Arthur sometimes stirred. Margaret’s arms were a black-blue. He had hit her with the ruler, Margaret said. Good evening, Mr Turner, smiled Amy Quong, and the rockers of the chair made a crunching sound on the verandah floor. Ethel said she’d prosecute the man, the brute, and that wife of his was little better than a Sydney tart. Amy trembling over Margaret’s head. She and Arthur and Margaret who were Quongs, not so much Walter, and Ethel had only married in. A lustre bowl caught the light, twisted a face in tears. Amy smoothed Margaret’s hair with her soft and almost boneless hand. What will it do, said Amy, sitting in the back room with Ethel, what will it do, she said, writing, or telling the Inspector, not very much, no, Ethel, we’ll see, we’ll wait a little, she said. Ethel grumbled. She went home. She never liked to be found at the store. The shadows got lower on the street. Amy sat with her hands in her lap, twisted them into a ball against the cold.

Dr Halliday drove down the hill out of the direction of Kambala, where he had spent the day. In the garden in front of Everetts’ old Mrs Everett in her Sunday black nudged Mrs Ansell and winked. The lids of her eyes were a scaly red. I took Dorcas into Moorang, to Dr Burton, Mrs Ansell said, wouldn’t trust that Halliday, not with any girl of mine, not if I was in the room meself. Halliday’s car drove past contained in its own intimate hum. Oliver and Rodney sat in front complete in their own intimate thoughts. There were rifles in the car. Come on, Rodney, Oliver had said, we’ll take out the rifles, we’ll go on up to Kambala for the day, ask your mother for some sandwiches, and don’t make it mutton again. Yes, Father, Rodney said. He lay on his stomach on the verandah, he was reading Antony and Cleopatra, the battles, and he could not unravel, but did not want to go to Kambala, was sure of that, to shoot rabbits with Father, he bit his lip. It isn’t often we have a day together, Father said. That made you feel shy. Driving up to Kambala was a long period of silence, of shyness, of searching for something to say and feeling a long way off, as Father sat at the wheel and you wished you were farther, on the verandah, or Egypt, and somewhere she put a pearl into a cup of vinegar and drank it right off.

They shot three rabbits. Then they ate their sandwiches in the shade. Rodney walled up a beetle in a tower of earth. Should they skin the rabbits, Oliver said. Rodney said he hated the feel of a rabbit that was skinned. Anyway, said Oliver, he was going to have a nap. He lay on his back in the shade with his hat tilted over his face, so that Rodney dared look at him, stretched on the ground, the way he sometimes looked at Father when he was asleep. The beetle dug its way out of a tower of crumbling earth. We shall be here all day, Rodney felt, I know that, but better at least if he sleeps, if I had brought a book, and perhaps I shall not be a doctor or even an explorer, I shall write books, only about what, that is where it gets hard, or about love, only you didn’t know, and books were mostly about love, there was always an Antony and Cleopatra, even in the Bible that sort of thing, a concubine, or perhaps you could write a travel book, like Columbus, about a voyage, where there needn’t be any love, if you had ever been for a voyage, but I shall go to Sydney soon. He looked at Oliver stretched out on the ground. A whip-bird called in the bush. We shall go to Sydney, Mother said. She sighed. But somehow there had to be love or it wasn’t a book, that is, a proper book, not those ones about Red Indians that were being put away for George, those were for children, and I am growing up, I suppose I shall have to marry, perhaps Margaret Quong, only she is Chinese, but that might be sort of Cleopatra, I am Antony, and Father Antony, she was a concubine. He dug a little hole in the ground. He put the beetle inside and watched it try to climb out.