Patrick White - Happy Valley

Out of this silence that was like lying with a dead body by candlelight, Vic heard her breath rise, no more. She was not afraid now, even if not being alone was almost like being alone, the way he lay. But her arms were warm, her eyes rested that glanced along the line of his shoulder and closed upon his neck. What was this before her sleep fell and a key rattled she did not know her flying fox that she wrapped up in a shawl that night Ernest took the stick and said I’ll go out to turn off the tap in the frost he took the shawl but not that no is covered up not to see it isn’t what you think the light on leaves is not the pedal Daisy that he pressed was dead it feels funny like a leaf is being dead is the frost on the tap oh cold all right you think no pity in a voice said she had on had on diamond when the dog barked only turning off a tap but not in a shawl is dead Ernest only not to look at its face you see Ernest turn back the shawl it’s cold looking at your face Vic he said is dead.

Her voice stumbled out of sleep.

Clem, she said. Clem.

He stirred.

It was a dream, Clem. It was queer.

She sat up and saw herself touching her face in the glass.

You’re a caution, he said.

The bed grumbled when he moved. He felt hungry. He yawned. Going up north, the night train, there were frankfurters at Werris Creek with the girl sleepy against the bar, and she rubbed her eyes, and the steam told you how hungry you were, not girls, not Vic or any other bit. But his jaw tightened all the same. He got up sharply off the bed and began to put on his shirt.

She looked at him standing in his shirt. She began to feel bitter again.

You’re going? she said.

It looks like that.

She wanted to talk, she wanted to talk about anything, because that furniture was one long creak, the leg of his trousers made the shadow bend.

I knew a girl called Edna Riley, she said.

She wasn’t quite sure of her voice. She had to speak.

Why Edna Riley? he said.

Oh, I dunno. She just came into me head. And you would have liked her, Clem. Edna was a good sort. She was clever too. She’d passed a lot of exams and things. She wanted to be a stenographer. When her father died she was going out with a man I knew called Lassiter, insurance I think he was. But Edna, that was what reminded me, Edna had a book on dreams. Got it at the circus, I think she said. There was a woman with a handkerchief over her eyes that read your thoughts and things. And dreams were a sort of side-line, see? And Edna bought the book. And you worked it like, suppose you dreamt of a black horse, well you looked it up and it told you what it meant, a journey or whatever it was.

She had to talk. She couldn’t stop. Her voice fluttered in the candle flame.

And what about Edna? Hagan said.

He was tying his tie. He had a scarf-pin once, that he lost, with an artificial pearl.

Edna? she said.

Her mind bumped round. She had to speak. A dream made you feel queer, like looking at your face in a mirror when you turned back that shawl.

Don’t go, Clem, she said Not yet.

Her voice rose, flickered, on a candle flame. Edna and all, it made him laugh.

And what happened to Lassiter? he said.

God, how it made him laugh.

Then it began to go round. They heard it going round and round. They heard it one two, or drag and stop, or hit against the skirting-board, as it went round, in the sittingroom. It was a noise, a foot noise. The feet went round and round the sitting-room.

Rodney Halliday trailed about in the yard. There were a few stars, and the suggestion of a clothes-line, the smoke went up from the roof. He felt a bit alone, for it does increase your sense of isolation watching smoke go up at night. Smoke by day has substance in comparison. Rodney stood watching the smoke. He knew that some day he would die. He had not realized this before. Poor Mrs Worthington’s dead, said Mother, we must write to the girls, we must wire for flowers, a sheaf I think because wreaths are like a funeral. The Worthington girls in black, and Mother put her hand to her chest, and they were eating eggs and bacon, it was breakfast time, you went on eating in spite of death. Death was in the cemetery with a smell of laurels and those crossed hands on Mr Peabody’s grave. It happened somewhere else perhaps, but death reverted to the cemetery, enclosed by ivy, the gate grated on a rusty hinge. Going down the hill ivy droned. You went on down the hill to school and hoped you would not meet Andy Everett. Effie Worthington had chapped hands. She gave you a gingerbread cake at the farm, and you bit in, it was sticky inside, and a glass of milk afterwards. But death was not here, in the hen-cluck, in the blue shadow of milk on the glass. You would die, but not yet, not yet. The gingerbread.

You knew you would die, and you did not know, it was like that. The smoke wreathed up against a star. You stopped breathing because it suddenly caught you, death. You knew what it meant in the yard, in the dark. You wanted to run away.

Rodney Halliday stood still. This moment when death assumes a personal bearing, no longer the Worthington girls in black, is a moment of significance. It was perhaps the first significant moment in Rodney Halliday’s life. Over against his fear, a sense of importance. Fixed upon this sheet of black, like a star, in his own distinct circumference, his life, till the intervention of death. He was himself. Oliver, Hilda, and George, the idea of corporate safety, were no longer this, were distinct too. The safety line is broken by the consciousness of death.

Growing up then was like this. You were ten. The moments crept, with a scent of apples at eleven o’clock, was always another eleven o’clock, or the afternoon asleep in the sun, incident loomed large in the sun detached from its shadow, there was no skirting round this forest of incident and its solid, waiting forms. This before you knew. Then time began to race down an avenue cold with stars. You wanted to put up your hands. He wanted to go and tell Margaret Quong, tell her what. Because this was something you could not tell. It happened. You knew it. That was all. Like a scent or sound, you could not tell. Or Mother crying in her room, you went in, you went away, knowing. And She said stay, waiting on the steps of the verandah with cool hands. Father stood in a corner of the dining-room, where is Mother, Rodney, he said. You looked away. Went to the window and knocked out his pipe upon the sill. You looked away. Mother closed her door when you went past, closing her door on what you knew was not changing her dress. He took it up to the post to send to Mrs Worthington, the parcel post, because Mrs Worthington is poor, she said, and an old dress, is dead. She was wearing mauve. A car came up the road out of the direction of Moorang, he could see its lights, with the unimportance of lights on a passing car. I shall grow up, I shall go to Sydney, he felt, I shall do things, I don’t know what, until. The night was very large and black. Father stooped in the dispensary, his shadow stooped, would have said, what are you doing, Rodney, if he knew, but you did not know what to say to Father, or words just came out. Father sometimes made you afraid. Father would die, the shadow on the window wiped out.

Rodney went inside. He did not know what he would do. He wanted to go to the dispensary and say, Father, I want to sit in here for a while. He felt his way along the passage to the door. He stood at the door and waited. He did not know what he would do.

Oliver opened the door and stood there looking out.

Is that you, Rodney? he said. I thought you were in bed.

No, he said. Not yet.

They stood there looking at each other, or not looking. Rodney wondered how he could say what after all you couldn’t say.