Patrick White - Happy Valley

To commemorate what we have experienced here there is now nothing, Oliver felt, as he leant against the windows in the dispensary, unless you can impregnate a place with all you have suffered and enjoyed, leaving these as a heritage for the tenants who come next. Altogether he did not envy Garthwaite his lease, if this were in fact possible. And feeling your chin that you had shaved so badly this morning, Oliver, said Hilda from the bedroom, we must try to get away in good time because the children must not stay up late, you wondered what was left of the confusion of emotions beneath the tissues and the bone, you thought perhaps that these after all had been imparted to the house or, if not to this, floated volatile in the Happy Valley air. Because in a way you were swept clean, the bare boards with the bough of a substanceless tree stencilled on the winter light.

Oliver, Hilda said, as she came into the room, have you brought round the car?

Yes, he said. When you’re ready we’ll go. I don’t think there’s anything we’ve got to do.

No, she said. The sooner we — I mean, the boys will be getting out of hand.

Hilda’s voice penetrated with more purpose than you expected, it did not waver now, it was a core of reality in the shadows of this room. Like Hilda, a voice that said, it was night, Oliver, with an effort in a voice, I want to talk, it’s the last night, and we’ve never talked about this, there’s very little we’ve talked about. Whether on an iron seat in the Botanical Gardens in a heavy summer light or lying beside Hilda in bed, in the dark, all those years you had not talked about much, penetrated the surface word, though after all very few people achieve this, but Hilda was making an effort in the dark, you felt it in her hand, the fingers with the ring that time had loosened, touching you with more than Hilda’s hand. He looked at Hilda now. He looked at the face that had been this voice, when he had been glad of darkness and the touch of Hilda’s hand. Because I know, Oliver, how you feel, it came to him from a great distance, then closer, it was very close, you mustn’t think I don’t understand or that I’m saying this because it’s all over. She was speaking of Alys, not by tentative allusion, but making a direct approach. It was an undiscovered quality in Hilda, that she had just discovered for herself, you could still sense it in her voice, the note of discovery groping towards confidence. And because it was strange, he wanted at first to resist, because it was touching on something they had never mentioned, more than touching, it suffused a whole experience. Hilda could now identify herself with this, joined to Alys by a link of pain. Lying on your back, you did not resist after the first moment, this intimacy with Hilda that you had often tried to achieve and in which you had failed, it was Hilda who had accomplished it, speaking in the dark and opening with courage an old wound. But Hilda was always fortitude, an abstract virtue, you wondered what else until, feeling her voice, her hand in the dark, you knew. It will be hard, she said, as if she spoke to Rodney, there’ll be lots of nicer little boys, so Rodney, dear, but not Rodney, it will be hard, though when we go away we’ll try, we’ll both try, Oliver. Feeling in the darkness when your head touched, you were not Rodney, it was Hilda, it was not Alys, or all these welded together by Hilda’s hand. I love Alys, Hilda, you said, or Hilda, or Alys, it was immaterial, to darkness or a hand. You would sleep. You felt Hilda’s lips falter in a kiss that was sleep, that you wanted to say, Hilda, this is all over for better or worse, some purpose perhaps that we can’t discern, because it is dark, it is anywhere, not Happy Valley, it is anywhere.

Now they were standing in the dispensary.

We’ll start, shall we? Hilda said.

Mother! screamed George. Rodney won’t give me his knife. I want to have Rodney’s knife. Rodney’s cut his name on the door.

No, George, Hilda called, you mustn’t have Rodney’s knife. Father’s ready. We’re going now.

Rodney sat in the car. They were going away.

Where’s the thermos? Hilda said. George, you sit with Rodney in the back. And don’t lean out of the car. You must promise Mother not to do that.

Dr Oliver Halliday got into the car. They had taken the plate off the fence, stripped off this label that would be stuck on somewhere else. Dr Henry Garthwaite would arrive the following day. The house waited to receive a life, or stood giving up a ghost, whichever way you liked. The car drew away down the hill.

We’re going! We’re going to Queensland! shouted George.

Rodney felt his skin prick. He looked down the street, that was now almost another street, its sole importance withdrawn. The plum-tree by Mrs Heffernan’s fence stood in another morning. The letter-box at Perrys’ was blue, blue, not green that you thought. It was another street with Perrys’ blue letter-box marking the transition from the known. He always thought it was green. Come here, Green-face, they said, that you skipped, you smiled to see the fence roll past, hitched to something beyond the town. It made you wonder if your breath, tumbled in your chest, was coming or not, and that sick sick, ticking away in your stomach, made you press with your hands against your belt. In Sydney there were trams, at the Circular Quay the peanut man. You swam down through the water, opened your eyes, it was morning there, yellow against the sand. Rodney Halliday’s eyes, fixed beyond the present, were the eyes of the swimmer under water opening on another world.

Oliver made the turn.

Slipping away the ghost gives the live part of the body purged if it were possible to accept this the wind alive on the face on Oliver Halliday on Hilda Halliday his wife on George and Rodney Halliday that are baptized afresh by wind that points down the valley beyond the post the so many miles that are just so many miles into the future that is Rodney and George may I be an explorer Rodney said if there is anything left to explore that woman’s face with the dead child you looked down and saw a chart which did not indicate much more than pain and its possibilities but not the life until Moriarty relaxed and you saw the hinterland indicated in the flesh was more than plunging a needle was Alys shading her eyes Oliver look I can’t offer you much only my life that is also the life of all these people the Moriartys the Everetts the Schmidts moving beneath the lens the house front the geranium.

There are Quongs, Rodney said.

They stood on the store verandah, Amy, Arthur, and Margaret Quong, a little consolidated group. Margaret waved. Sometimes you thought that the Quongs were exotic, foreign to Happy Valley, but not as they stood outside the store, this first and last evidence of life. You never got beneath the Quongs, the brown, aloof faces, the silent glance. The road down the valley was a brown curve, distinct and aloof like Amy Quong. In spring the hillside flickered up, in winter died to a dull grey, there was not much more evidence of any emotional quantity. Amy Quong lay on her bed, Sunday afternoons, watched the smoke from incense dwindle in a lustre bowl. She had bought it for five shillings at the sale, it was now hers, the only tangible sign of any inner confusion that may have been. The bowl reflected nothing of the past, that other face, and the rain that morning on the window-pane. Possessions are tragically adaptable. Amy Quong saw her room suspended in the lustre bowl, her life rounded and intensified. To touch the bowl was to touch not conscience, but achievement, but the moment, because the dead woman was hardly this, or the letter, the pen hesitant before a word, that was only anonymous after all, that was only means to an end. Amy linked her arm through Margaret’s. Looking back through the window of the car, you saw the Quongs recede.