Patrick White - Happy Valley

Yes, she said. Hilda.

Was an abstract idea, his wife, the woman that opened the door and said he was up at Kambala, without ever achieving much more personality than this, somehow she did not think of Hilda, and why, was more than a cipher.

I’m doing it for Hilda, he said. And there’s the children. This is nothing to do with you. It isn’t much to do with me. But we’re going away. We’re going to Queensland, he said, feeling the triteness of explanation in his voice, but perhaps it was less painful like this, details, like looking up trains. I’m exchanging practices with a man called Garthwaite, he said. Hilda can’t stand the climate here. We’ll leave Rodney in Sydney on the way. He’s got to go to school.

The slowness of cows across the hill, cow-words as meaningful. But soon it would be dark. She waited for the darkness. Perhaps it would be easier then, or more difficult, because they said you said things anaesthetized.

We haven’t spoken much about Hilda, she said.

We haven’t had much time.

All time this woman was his wife until you woke up and saw, saw yourself and the callousness of women in love.

Why doesn’t one think about these things? she said. Is it that one’s deliberately brutal, that one doesn’t let oneself, or is one made to isolate oneself from what one doesn’t want to think?

He put out his hand and touched her in the dark. She had hoped he would not touch her. It was easier to live in the intellect, in a sort of clarity of mental perception, almost not yourself. But he was touching her, bringing her back into the muffled region of emotional pain.

But I couldn’t think, she said. I knew vaguely. But I just couldn’t think. You see, when you know it’s going to be something important, perhaps nothing so important will ever happen to you again, you can’t throw it away. You can’t, she said. You can’t.

And now? he said.

Yes, she said. Now.

One word can make a silence silenter, he felt, her Now falling like a bead of lead through the darkness, right to the bottom of what, now what. He did not know. He pressed her hand and waited.

It’ll still be that important thing, she said.

If you feel that.

Well, what?

That’s what I’ve had to tell myself, Alys. If two people feel like that it can’t be altogether negative.

They sat still, intimate, because it was all said. She hoped he would not speak again, would leave it like this, or perhaps to the fugitive comfort of touch that was so much more considerate than words. He would go away, with Hilda and the children, those three strange people, she could never think of them as being anything but strange, or as having a greater reality than herself. They would go to Queensland. She followed her mind down the vague avenue of the future, only a little way, she preferred to stop, because it seemed meaningless and nothing would take shape, no definite image of Alys Browne either here or elsewhere, as if she had been discarded from the pattern of time. But I have meant something, she said, it is not altogether wasted if I have meant something, as he said, he said, this was my purpose, and it is something to have a purpose, to know it, above all that, to realize. She stroked his hand back and forth.

Alys? he said.

Yes, dear.

She put her hand on his mouth. She closed his mouth, her mind, in a little circle of the present that resisted the intrusion of time.

Happy Valley flickers up into excitement when the autumn race meeting comes round, kindled by a sort of self-importance and craving for display that you feel a week or two before the arrival of these two days, the Friday and the Saturday, not to mention Friday night when they hold the dance at the School of Arts, or as the bills have it, the Grand Race Week Ball. The posters are yellow, done by the local press, you see them cracked on a paling fence, or the smaller ones at Quongs’ and in Hills’ Tea Shop window, a rendezvous for flies, and washed paler by a yellow autumn sun. It makes you feel good to stand and look at the posters and think of the excitement of which they are the advance publicity. You can feel a hum blowing up in the wires between Moorang and Kambala, and Happy Valley and Glen Marsh, but centring in Happy Valley, you can also feel that. Stung to activity by the tingling of the wires, this is no longer so detached, as the press stutters at the office of the Happy Valley Star, as the girls sew the buttons on their gloves or a different flower on last year’s dress, as the horses arrive in floats from Moorang in their yellow bandages and rugs, and the tempo is brisker in the main street.

By Friday they are all in town, and you can’t get a room at the pub or scarcely lean an elbow on the bar for all the people that have come, the cockie farmers, the Kambala Chows, that little man with the broken nails and the cap, or broken-voiced bookies and their clerks, and the vaguer faces without purpose that peer from a corner over a dark glass of stout. In the smoke the remarks drift, on form, on the rainfall, on the wool clip, and somebody says that somebody said that Winapot was a cert. Dogs bristle in the street, a yellow bitch with her lip drawn under the dusty wing of a car. Somebody says it’ll rain, or it won’t, Saturday at least, because every third year it rains, and in 1928 Mitchell the bookmaker skidded on the Moorang road and they found his body under the car, you couldn’t recognize his face. Looks in the glass and wonders if the green organdie, the pursed mouth censorious, if anyone can remember the year before, which a press would make as good as new, if only, if only. Dab a little here for certainty. Vic Moriarty examines her perm. Gertie Ansell squeezes a spot. And thought toys with a possibility of the fabulous, all the things you have put away for the best part of a year, twenty more pounds towards the mortgage, or that boy from the baker’s in at Moorang, or the less specifically defined hopes that spring up out of the unconscious and flutter through the fever of two significant days.

It was like this then. Calmer on Friday, though working up towards Friday night when they opened the School of Arts, when the darkness got a bit reckless, that saxophone carving its way through the wall, and the ferns panting from their paper-swaddled pots, with a quivering of trifle, and whose giggle protesting against what. Music launched out, struck back deviously, got beneath the senses, and you danced, you danced, even if it got a bit too hot, and what was heat on Friday night, the light flare falling on a face in sweat, the floor glazed by the motion of feet, when you danced on that long and undulating skein that ravelled out of the accordion.

Chuffy Chambers plays so good, the girls said as they danced past, those crumpled flowers in taffeta who glanced up between his legs towards a smile that was Chuffy Chambers playing his accordion. Chuffy Chambers liked to play. He felt warm against the holy medals he wore next to his skin, felt important with smiles and the variations wrung from accordion stops. He could play all night on a glass of beer, or give way to the saxophone, the piano, and the drums, and just smile at the moving blur of sound. Only that boiled shirt said, walking up the hill to the pictures, chuffs along behind the girls, made the shame, the spittle come in his mouth, and a sudden creeping away down the lane, saw he was with her again wearing a blue dress, she had a sort of hoop in her hair covered with white flowers. The incubator rattled, asked his name, and Chuffy Chambers, he said, because he had never been called anything else, and what sort of a name, he said, till I get down. Hagan in a boiled shirt made Chuffy Chambers’s pleasure recede. He looked down at his finger-joints jerking over the accordion stops.