Patrick White - Happy Valley

Sidney Furlow sat with the bracelet in her lap, touched with her hand the cool fire qui reflète encore calme dormant Hérodiade au clair regard de diamant, and would sit there without purpose, because there was no purpose in doing what in another room, seule, the evening coming home across the paddock a figure that made the blind fall on ma monotone patrie.

Hilda went about nowadays quietly, indomitably, nursing her certainty. She coughed, but she was not conscious of her cough. They would go away. He had written. They would go away. In Hilda’s mind the remaining weeks were mentally ticked off. She lived exterior to these, or disregarded them as so many dead leaves, the bundle of an old calendar waiting to be torn off. The shortening of the autumn days, the first frosts, the ritual of the household, were part of an incidental mechanical process that scarcely touched Hilda Halliday.

Oliver watched Hilda. He could not feel any bitterness, she was more a stranger than anything else, who had no part in his life and who must be allowed to pursue the rhythm of her own. She had never been anything else. Looking back, he said, Hilda has been nothing more than a sort of inevitable presence, appearing at the necessary moments in my life, and neither of us thought that this was wrong, neither of us imagined that we had anything else to expect, until something quite casual threw the emptiness into relief, and now we have not even the benefit of illusion, must recognize all the waste of emptiness. The children, Hilda says, there are the children, content to ignore the fact that they have sprung from an illusion. Hilda says this, it is part of her religion to say it, the religion of the world, of Happy Valley with its eyes closed to the possibilities of truth. Perhaps it is better like this. Perhaps Hilda is wiser. Only you regretted the sudden illumination in a face that was not altogether confined to a face, that overflowed and pointed out significant contours in the darkness. This was Alys. And on reflection you knew that this was right, morally, if not conventionally, was not a sort of moral disintegration as you tried to think in your thoughts, this was the world thinking, and you could not forget the world. Hilda would not let you forget, nor Happy Valley, that old woman virulent above a dead geranium in a window-box, no sap but the dead flapping of a conventional tongue that said, mind you, Mrs Ansell, was an eye glassy with hate, because afraid, because you are afraid to see other people give rein to those desires that you have never dared loosen yourself. So you let loose a wind of hate that flapped in the dead geranium leaves. Alys was untouched by this, did not seem to realize. That was the odd thing about Alys Browne, as if her consciousness of outer activity had become numbed by her intentness on an inner change. It was in her face. He loved her face. He had only to contemplate this, or no more than the recollection of it, to feel the conventional realities dissolve into a state in which the trivial and hard wore an aspect that was pitiable. I have learnt this, he felt, that it is pitiable, this Happy Valley, even in its violence that at first you thought deliberately destructive and cruel there is a human core that makes you overflow with pity for it. And this is not the pity of Hilda, which is founded on fear, a pity for man in his hopeless struggle against an ultimately triumphant force, not this that I have learned from Alys, is not Alys, compassion is not fear.

All this was taking place in Happy Valley the same autumn, which was superficially the same as any other autumn, as far as its natural details were concerned. But as I have said before, one of the most noticeable features of Happy Valley was its apparent remoteness from the human element, or perhaps an ironical half-recognition, laying a trap in the shape of its own activities and then letting things slide. Autumn was a season of preliminary cold and suppressed winds. Nothing much appeared to happen besides, though a lot was really happening all the time. Because it was at this moment that Amy Quong felt those dormant and really frightening passions begin to stir, that Clem Hagan was coming into town of an afternoon and going to Moriarty’s house, that Moriarty felt things closing in, all those eyes and faces at the school, and that Sidney Furlow was trying to suppress the realization of her own desires. They each had their own problem, and nobody else had theirs, which is only natural perhaps, it is usually like that. And all the time Happy Valley was preparing for winter, and those that were afraid of winter had begun to be afraid, which those who have not experienced Happy Valley in winter-time will certainly not understand. If you have you will know, you will realize the extreme brutality to which man can be subjected, whatever you may have experienced of this, of brutality I mean, in winter at Happy Valley it seems to be epitomized.

Oliver Halliday did not think of this. Before midwinter, said Hilda, we shall go away, we shall go to Queensland, we shall escape. So he could not but feel that time was arrested for the moment, that he would not participate in the coming phase. Nor did Alys think about winter much, because she had ceased to be afraid, come or not she did not very much care. That is the worst of arrested consciousness, because inevitably you must get jerked back. It was still autumn, not very long before the races, that Oliver went up to do it. He did not know exactly what he would do, or say, it was too painful to think about.

So he did not think. He went up the hill one evening to where Alys lived. I am going to break something now, he felt, all the best in me, not that that matters very much, only there is someone else involved. He walked up the hill. He felt rather old and out of breath, in a way that he had not noticed before. But, after all, it is only natural, he said.

Alys was on the verandah darning stockings when he came up to the gate. She glanced up, and down again, like someone catching sight of a person who comes a lot to the house, so often that you make no special stir or preparation, hardly move in fact, because this person has become a part of your life and this you accept as a matter of course.

Pull up that chair, she said. No. That one has a nail.

Has it? he said vaguely, watching the passage of her needle through the silk, with the smooth rhythm of silk. Her face, bent, did not notice him, only the inflections of her voice told him she was conscious of his presence. Sometimes he closed his eyes and listened to her voice.

Funny, she said. All these years, and I haven’t banged in that nail.

All those years when I was waiting, felt Alys Browne, when it was so much waste time, and, looking back, really most of it has been waste, that convent in Sydney and living up here, which was also as good as a convent, not so much physically as mentally, accepting what I was taught to accept, but waiting as waiting is not so much waste time if it is part of a design. She drew the stockings through her hands. The air was getting sharp.

We’ll have to go in, she said.

No, he said, don’t go in.

He sat with his back against one of the verandah posts.

What have you got to tell me? she asked.

Nothing, he said.

Got to tell like a child that said nothing she made him feel when Aunt Jane and those apples feeling sick was reversed he said this Alys a child or a girl out of a convent got to tell was reversed and she put out a hand to help that she held up with blood and there was something to tell.

It’ll come in time, I expect, she said.

He did not speak. She put her hand in a stocking and held it up to the light.

Alys, he said, Hilda and I have got to go away.

She held the stocking with an effort against the light, or it stayed there, she did not know, look, and it was getting dark, and the light, and Schmidts’ cows lined across the hill dragging a rope of shadow, like words out of the mouth that would not come, or a numb thought. She felt isolated in a small patch of light. She had been jerked out of the succession of events, that had happened, that were passing on, but she had become stationary.