Patrick White - Happy Valley

Somebody’s got to go.

He was small and brown and gentle. He had a soft, gentle voice. He didn’t like people, except Amy, who was his sister, and that is why he did not want to go to Moriartys’, because he did not like people, though he knew he ought to go. Amy would go to Moriartys’. She usually went. He looked at her slowly out of a pair of eyes that most people in town thought queer. There was a white rim near the edge of each iris. The iris was brown. So the general effect reminded you of marbles, the superior glass taws that you kept in a bag by themselves. The children were a bit afraid of Arthur Quong on account of his eyes. If they came into the shop they hoped they would encounter Amy, who was also small and gentle, but with a black bun at the back of her head and without the white rings in her eyes.

Amy was also more European. They were only half Chinese. Their father, old Quong, had taken a poor Irish girl, who was the mother of Amy and Arthur, and of Walter Quong, but Amy and Arthur did not speak about Walter much. And now old Quong was dead, and the Irish woman he married, she died first, because she hadn’t much vitality. But old Quong lived a long time. He had come into the country with a bundle on his back, and sold things to the miners at Kambala, bootlaces and things, laughing a lot and being cheerful, and they liked him up at Kambala and showed him how to wash for gold. So old Quong sometimes washed for gold, but he continued to sell things to the miners, and then he put up a hut at Happy Valley. The miners used to get off the coach and talk to Quong on the way down. Now the hut was a weatherboard building with an upper story and General Store painted on the front. This happened about seven years before old Quong died.

You shouldn’t’ve let her have that ribbon last week, said Amy.

All right, said Arthur, you would have thought sulkily. All right, he said, we’ll leave it at that.

But he wasn’t sulky. He just didn’t want to think of ribbons and things like that, or of what Mrs Moriarty owed. It was Amy who ran the store. Arthur thought of bigger things. The hall where they had the picture show, that was one of Arthur’s ideas, and he speculated in land, and he had a racehorse in a stable out at the back. The horse was a neat bay colt that stood deep in straw all day and neighed if you went across the yard. Arthur Quong spent most of the day going across the yard. He squatted in the corner of the stable, or rubbed down the horse’s back with a slow and gentle purr to match the delicate progress of his hand. But he hissed when he finished off on the flank, he gave a sharp electrical flick, making a pattern on the horse’s flank, he quivered with a wiry intensity standing up on the balls of his feet. He loved the colt. He put his hand on the horse’s neck, something almost emotional in his touching the muscular neck, a tautness in his body, a tautness also in the horse that arose from the conjunction of skin and hide. He wanted to rest his head against the horse, and close his eyes that were no longer brown and gentle, but brown and sharp.

The Quongs also had a big new Buick which stayed in the garage most of the time because they seldom went out. I can’t see the use of that car, said Mr Belper grudgingly. People used to make guesses at how much the Quongs had got. You never knew. You never knew with Chows. And this was a source of bitterness. Because when a man has money and you think it’s probably a lot, not that you’ve ever found out, it’s a constant source of bitterness. At least, in Happy Valley it was that way.

Amy Quong put on her mackintosh. She wore a brown skirt with a blouse, and black shoes that laced up, with the laces dangling in a bow. She also wore gold-rimmed spectacles. Taking an umbrella from the back room, she prepared to go into the street.

These Moriartys, murmured Amy Quong, that voice blurred and indeterminate like the corners of the shop.

Walking up the street, she held the umbrella to shield her face from the rain pitching on a slant. It was muddy in the street, but not very far to where the Moriartys lived. Amy walked with short steps, plumping into the mud. She smiled a little because of the way Arthur looked when she told him off. Arthur was one of the passions in her life, of which there were three, very deep and difficult to extricate. But there is no point in taking out Amy’s passions in the street, and, besides, she had come to Moriartys’ door. To the back door, that is. You went round to the back.

Good morning, Miss Quong, said Gertie Ansell, the girl that helped Mrs Moriarty in the house. She wore a pale blue woollen dress and her hands hung down, red and blunt.

I want to see Mrs Moriarty, said Amy Quong.

Yes, Miss Quong, said Gertie.

She went back into the house.

A brown, feeble hen was pecking at the ground just inside the wash-house that was across the yard. It was a poor layer, Amy felt, you could tell that by its comb. The mangle looked as if it was broken, gaping there with that chemise hanging half-way out.

Oh, Miss Quong, said Gertie, coming back, Mr Moriarty’s down at the school. I’m afraid he won’t be back till lunch. I’m ever so sorry, she said, simpering a little and rubbing her dress.

I want to see Mrs Moriarty, said Amy.

Oh.

The girl stood in the doorway rubbing her dress.

You’d better come in, she said, but she seemed uncertain as if — well, it wasn’t her fault after all.

Amy waited in the front room. It was rather pink. She put her umbrella in a corner, standing it against the wall. Then she sat down to wait. On the centre table there was a cyclamen in a big silver lustre bowl that caught the light and gave out reflections of the objects in the room, all of them a bit distorted, the lampshades drawn down into nightcaps, long and pink. It was a lovely bowl. She had to get up and touch it because it was so lovely, and the reflections there, she had never seen anything so lovely before. Her breath made a cloud of mist on the lustre surface. I wouldn’t mind having that, she said.

Because, after Arthur, you might say that Amy’s passion was things; she would have called them things herself, and she had a number of things, the lids of scallop-shells and a Chinese dressing-gown that she bought at a shop near the Central Station in Sydney. She lived in a kind of mystical attachment to her things; she lived with them in the cocoon of custom that led her to dust them, to take them up and put them down. And she wanted more; she was always anxious to add a thread to the soft and necessary structure of the cocoon.

She gave a little sigh and sat down again to look at the bowl. She would have put it in her room under the picture of the Virgin Mary, and she would have stood a tin inside and burnt incense there. She liked the smell. She lay on her bed on a Sunday afternoon and smelt the smell of incense and looked at the picture of the Virgin Mary that hung near a crucifix in varnished oak. Incense made her close her eyes. She lay on her bed on the cotton quilt and there was a strange, beautiful atmosphere that she could not explain, only that it was bound up with the Virgin Mary and her things, and Arthur was pottering about in the yard, perhaps carrying feed to the horse. So on Sunday afternoon the three threads of Amy Quong’s passion became tangled in a complex knot that she did not know how to untie. She did not want to, only to close her eyes.

The cyclamen in the lustre bowl sprawled in wide, voluptuous curves.

Yes? asked Mrs Moriarty, opening the door.

She did not waste a good-morning on a Chow, you didn’t beat about the bush, especially if you knew that the Chow had come with the inevitable and tiresome demand.

I’m sorry, she said to Amy. You see, I haven’t had time to dress. Working about the house in the morning, it spoils your clothes. Gertie, she called back through the door, don’t you dare forget that steak. These girls, she said to Amy, you can’t call them servants at all.