Patrick White - Happy Valley

Oliver Halliday sat in the dispensary waiting for words to formulate a decision, it would be no more than this, a formality, he would write, he would say, Dear Alys. Then he stopped short. The life of the house flowed almost in its habitual stream, except that Hilda was making a list. We shan’t take everything, she said, all that distance, the expense, but we’ll take the dining-room table and chairs, they were a present from Aunt Jane, and the tea service, it’s good, and the mirror in the sitting-room. Oliver Halli-day’s mind was blank, like a sheet of paper, because it was less painful, a business letter or a blank. Hilda wrote spasmodically. She would not think, not since the Moriartys, and the car she heard was not a dream that set out and returned, and finding Moriarty on the Moorang road. Her hand jerked with the pricking of a thought. But she would write, she would make a list, this would be some assurance. Oliver said that Garthwaite had a little girl. She had gone in to look at George before the car returned. It was only last night. The couch in the dispensary had broken springs, it was not practical to take, because Queensland such a way. Oliver said that Moriarty was dead, and the glance faltered above bacon, it was breakfast time, and the mind sickened not for Moriarty, who was dead, chronic asthma affects the heart, he said, cut up the bacon in pieces on his plate, she could not cut, piecing in her mind the fragments, going in to look at George, and the car, she must mend the tab of his coat, she would take the Chinese vase and the carpet in the sitting-room, were moths in Queensland like anywhere else, heard the car rumble and stop, Moriarty’s heart or her own, and the possibility of Queensland. Hilda Halliday made a blot.

Soon it would be lunch, Rodney coming home from school, and boiled mutton and caper sauce.

Oliver looked for assistance at a photograph. It was Hilda’s face. She sat on the edge of a chair waiting to spring up. Hilda’s face receiving the news of Moriarty’s death, he had told her at breakfast, turned to Alys, because Hilda knew, fumbling with her plate, said it was fortunate you went along the road, he might have lain there all night, which was uttering words, like writing a letter to Alys dead, and the emotions he must kill, because only in this way it was possible to write. Dear Alys and the date. Time frozen on the 23rd would not flow, the words, or the hand move across the page.

He got up and walked about. He heard Hilda in the dining-room. They were laying the table for lunch. Alys would receive a letter to say Hilda and I are going away together with the furniture and the accumulation of habit contained inside this shell of a house, this is our life, it will continue like this, in Queensland or anywhere else. A bald statement on a blank page. Emotion destroyed both confidence and conscience, even life, and for this must be suppressed, the way she lay on that bed without Hilda’s face, was nothing divorced from the debris of a clock and a broken cyclamen, the fragments that Hilda clung to, they were hers, we shall take the tea service, Oliver, she said. We. It was Hilda’s life. It was planned.

He sat down and took up the pen, conscious of words, it must not be more than this, like Dear Alys, a name. Then he began to write.

Perhaps I would have said last night what I am going to write now. It might not have been so difficult. I don’t know. But I came outside and found you had gone. Perhaps you thought it was best, I mean, to go without saying any more. Because all through this you’ve been so much more aware than I of what we were doing and what we ought to have done. It was my fault, my weakness, that I wouldn’t let you follow your own judgment. I did not want to face the truth.

He looked up through the window where the clothesline cut across the sky, the drops of moisture on the cable, and beyond it the valley swept back, very tangible, no longer receding into a cloud that the mind substituted. He was free of this. The valley was earth and rock, he saw. His elbows pressed into the desk.

I hope you realized, going away, what I think you did. I went into the house. She was, of course you’ll have heard, dead. There was all the futility and pain of wilful destruction about that house and two people trying to escape from the inevitable. Talking of the inevitable may sound defeatist perhaps. We might have escaped down that road to some form of personal happiness. But, Alys, I can’t, I won’t willingly destroy, after facing the meaning of destruction in that house. Man hasn’t much of a say in the matter, I know. He’s a feeble creature dictated to by whatever you like, we’ll call it an irrational force. But he must offer some opposition to this if he’s to keep his own respect. I don’t know why I’m talking like this. You knew it all before. You realized and I didn’t. Now I do. That is the difference. So I want you to try and accept what you were willing to accept before.

Words these with Alys rounding behind words put out her hand sitting on the verandah before dark and touched. Emotion drifting back pressed the eye, must not, must write, reject the images you wanted to construct.

In a couple of weeks Hilda and I shall have gone away. I don’t think of the future. I know it is there, without any great significance. I can’t take any other view after what we have experienced, you and I. I tell myself it will still be there, that this is something which no passage of time or external pressure can destroy. Perfection is never destroyed. I would like to thank you in more than words for all these weeks of happiness, for all you have helped me to see and feel. My darling, I could never thank you for this.

In the dining-room they were laying the table. He forgot the scratching of a pen.

It is too much, impossible, like trying to assess the future, which I accuse of emptiness without a second thought, forgetting what I have already and shall always have. Because I love you, Alys, still. This is my existence, loving you. This is its whole point. Going away is only going away, a mere exchange of environment. Because I love you, my darling, and I want you also to remember that. Once I have said this there is nothing left. I have said as much as I can.

Alys dear, Alys, in the halting of a pen. Knocking, the door was opened, a voice said:

Lunch is ready, Oliver. Don’t let it get cold.

He sat staring at a written page. She watched him from the door, his back, beyond it sensing that this, she did not know, but felt, it made her hold her breath.

Yes, he said. I’ll come. But I want to run down to the post first.

Hilda watched from the door. She wanted to come forward and say, yes, Oliver, I know, to say the things that you never said, and not even now. Pity on Hilda Halliday’s face strayed with her hair, wavering, was ineffectual, like her life, sometimes she realized how ineffectual she was. You put up the strands of your hair that almost at once fell back again. So she halted by the door, wondering, she could only see his back, wondering what she could say, felt her achievement lie heavy, this exultation that said then this is Queensland and now we are really going away. Happy Valley stretched out beyond the window, grey and emphatic, but she felt safe, she had her hand on certainty.

I wonder if the Garthwaites would take some of the furniture, she said.

It tumbled into the room. It was not what she would have said. Her hand tightened on the knob.

I dare say they might, said Oliver.

The voices of George and Rodney mingled in the dining-room.

Well, hurry up, dear, she said. There are the boys.

Oliver Halliday went down to take a letter to the post. He avoided the house where the Moriartys had lived, and the figures bunched in the street beyond the fence. The town was very quiet beyond its focal point, all emotion concentrated upon this centre of extinct desires. It was quite dead this house, whatever any spectator might do towards fanning it with his stare into a semblance of life. It sickened Oliver Halliday. He felt he was part of the house.