Patrick White - Happy Valley

He looked at her, smiling, at her eyes grown cold with composure that showed no vestige of smouldering. She stood there erect in the stream of disbanding dancers and said, almost between her teeth:

I think Mother looks as if she wants to go home.

These last moments the collected wraps the regrets stealing out furtively with a yawn as the piano lid falls touch a sort of depth that makes you walk past it is over and not glance back at figures dancing in retrospect in sleep that lamp hanging heavy and only asking for extinction says it is over it is over sighs the light at cock-crow.

If you’re not afraid, Oliver said, we’ll go a long way off. We’ll leave all this. We’ll go to America, he said. I’ll settle what I’ve got on Hilda and the boys. Some people are only happy when they’re safe. Hilda’s like that. It’s something I’ve never been able to give her, just that feeling that she wants. Now she’ll be able to find it perhaps, for herself and the boys. It’ll be better like that. Certainty.

So it was America then, as she sat with pamphlets on her knee, wondering if California.

No, Oliver, she said. I’m not afraid.

We shan’t need much, you and I. And I couldn’t touch anything that was Hilda’s. I want to get right away.

To speak like this without reason, he felt, was to give way to some long-shelved desire that was too foolish to contemplate before, its distant probability, or because the consequences made you afraid. He did not think of consequences now. The future was America, not what you would do, not the carefully docketed plans of people living in houses. He did not want to think like this. He only wanted to get away.

We shall go when? she said.

It reassured him to feel himself taken for granted. But Alys was like this, coming to her house she had taken him for granted, waited for him to come again.

To-morrow, he said. To-morrow night.

She did not speak. She felt no quickening of emotion. It would be like this, she felt, all this time I have been waiting for the inevitable. It is part of what I have expected of Oliver and me. All the time we have been going to America.

It was no longer morning climbing the hill, no specific hour that the cock crew, or voices inquired going home, that trailed feet and the vestige of a streamer. Houses yawned out of the silence, the blank faces, the heavy eyes. The signpost pointed nowhere, not to Moorang, nor to Kambala, because in the half-light these had grown purposeless. A white balloon, fallen in the grass, rested on the dew.

It blew up cold for the second day of the races, the wind teetered through the grand-stand, and especially underneath, where beer lay in cold pools on the zinc top of the bar. It was the third year, somebody said, it always rained on the third year, and in 1928 Mitchell the bookmaker skidded on the — We all know that, another said, and went out to look at the sky. It was terrible bad, a head shook, raining on the Saturday, raining special for the Cup. That big bastard Interview that they sent from Sydney, a ball-faced gelding, won a race at the Farm, they said belonged to a cove near Bombala, was stopping off at Moorang and Happy Valley to clean up a pool or two on the way home. So says you, says that stream of spittle plopping dustwards. Might’ve saved theirselves the trouble taking that bloody camel out of the train. Somebody said it would rain. And what did Arthur Quong think he was doing with that little colt, and young Stevie Everett up, already peeing his pants he was that afraid. Beer belched placidly or rumbled into surmise or grew glassy in a fixed stare. The fragment of a cigarette hung in tatters from a lip. They said the Handicap was pulled, Smith and Morefield between them, frigging about at the corner, you could see it plain with only your eyes, and that caution Morefield smiling all over his face at the scales, his mother was an old black gin up Walgett way, but that was by the by, and nobody said he couldn’t ride, that of course when he wasn’t fixed. Somebody looked out and said it had started to rain.

The crowd moved without design in the space behind the stand, shuffled on the torn cards and the spare grass, yellow still with summer, turned a yellow face to voices shouting the odds. The pulse of the crowd quickened. The throat dried. There is something desperately emotional in the voices of bookies shouting the odds, in a vein swollen above the collar stained by the week before. Chuffy Chambers stood with his mouth hanging loose. He felt his head swaying to the measure of a voice. He felt the first drop of rain run like a shiver down his skin. It was a shame, they said, a shame, raining for the Cup, and all the more shameful perhaps because no one could be held responsible. A clerk hunched his shoulders to the wind, wiped his nose with his left hand, and transferred the snot to his ledger with no degree of concern. It was 2 to 1 Wallaroo, even money Birthday. A voice tore and became a cough. Oswald Spink swore it wasn’t worth the fare, for all the money you took in a joint like this, to catch your death in a mackintosh and shout out your guts for a couple of fivers and the fun.

The horses were going out for the second race when Vic Moriarty, not wearing the hat she had got for the Cup, the big straw that the rain might spoil, walked inside the turnstile with her eyes half-closed looking a little vague, because she had discovered just that morning it suited her to look a little vague. But it was too bad, the rain, and that big straw that drooped down, giving her face a frame, like the coloured supplement of the Empress Eugénie or someone she had seen. The rain and all, she felt bad, not sleeping a wink after that dance and the way Clem went on. Vic Moriarty played with the idea of what she would say to Clem. Oh, she would say, you, and go and have half a sovereign on Spider Boy or just inquire the odds, she wasn’t sure, because she wanted to have a flutter on the Cup, but anyway she’d make someone look sick, only it was a pity she hadn’t the straw, she looked quite elegant in a big straw, and Mrs Furlow looking over, there was a pity indeed.

The horses were going out for the second race, nervous and elastic against the rain. The little nervous snorts they gave as the jockeys caught them with their heels made you lean over the fence and hold on tight to your card. Vic Moriarty felt rather gay, high up on her heels and willowy at the waist, quite elegant in fact, in spite of her mackintosh and a felt. If only they had a band, like at Randwick where you walked up and down behind the stand and people said things about your dress, and sometimes if you were lucky someone was good enough for a dozen oysters and a glass of stout. But this was Happy Valley of course, and Ernest cranky at breakfast about that egg, as if you could know the history of an egg right the way from the hen, you said, or get inside and look, I like that, but nobody’s going to spoil my day not about a bloody egg. A jockey glanced down. She smiled just enough, at her card. If only there was a band, there was nothing like a band for making, even Ernest, went to the park and he held your hand and said there was almost enough for the ring as they played Carmen, it was Sunday, and Ernest had had his hair cut the day before. That was the sort of thing that made you feel sorry for Ernest, but you couldn’t spend your whole life feeling sorry and nothing else, because look what it landed you in, if only Daisy hadn’t pushed, and those stamps, it made you laugh, going into Moorang to read a paper on stamps. You go along, Vic said, stop talking about that egg, everyone’ll feel better when you get on to the stamps.

That was eleven o’clock. They had breakfast late. Because it’s a Saturday, Vic said, yawning out of the bed. He was going into Moorang in the afternoon to read a paper in the evening to the Moorang and District Philatelists’ Club. Ernest Moriarty on Perforations, it had come round on the circular. Though what anyone sees in a stamp, said Vic, spitting a mouthful of toothpaste froth into the toilet bowl. The bowl was festooned with roses, they were pink, the toilet set a present from Fred. Ernest broke his braces. Here give them to me, she said, what you’d do without me is something I’d like to know. Ernest stood in his underpants and watched her sew.