Patrick White - Happy Valley

Mrs Moriarty closed the window with a bang. Her bosom rose in an access of breath. There were little dots of sweat on her upper lip, on her pout. She rubbed her hands, Walter’s hands that were small and plump. The very idea of a Chinaman. Then she went out to the back to see if Gertie had fetched the steak.

The pool from Amy’s umbrella lay on the sitting-room floor.

Alys Browne lived by herself on the outskirts of the town just near a kink in the Kambala road. There were no other houses very close to her, though from her bedroom window she could see the bright red water-tank near the Belpers’ house that provided such a nice piece of unconscious colour in the midst of the town’s otherwise neutral tones. As a matter of fact Alys disliked the water-tank, because it slapped you in the face, she said, and she was rather given herself to a compromise in colour, something in the nature of a pale grey, or mauves. Mauve is a dangerous colour. If you see a woman who is wearing mauve you can bet right away she is a silly woman, and if you get close enough up to her she will have a particular scent that always goes with mauve, and if you are introduced to her — well, you will wish you hadn’t been. But Alys Browne was not in every respect a mauve woman, though she liked to wear mauve, for she had at least a spine, you did not feel she was a dangling bundle of chiffon rags. And she had some definite opinions of her own, which nobody had the opportunity to hear because she always lived alone.

Mrs Moriarty said that Alys Browne was a snob. Mrs Belper said she was neurotic, whether it hit the mark or not, for this was a word Mrs Belper had learnt from an article on popular psychology in a woman’s magazine, and having learnt it she had to use it somehow, she just had to, and of everyone in Happy Valley Alys Browne was the most likely mark. Anyway, she lived alone and seemed to like it, and that in itself was something queer.

Like most people who live alone, Alys was lonely, and like most lonely people living alone, she said she liked living alone. She was the daughter of Butcher Browne, who had owned land up at Kambala in the gold-rush days and had made money and lost it before Alys had time to think what money was. He speculated a bit. He drank a lot. He once rode a heifer down the main street. In fact Butcher Browne was a character. Finally he died of delirium tremens in a ditch while Alys was away in Sydney being companion to a Mrs Stopford-Champernowne.

Alys had not known her father very well. She was an independent sort of person, she liked to get away by herself. So she said, Father, I am going to Sydney, I am going to a convent. So she went to Sydney — this was when she was fifteen — and she stayed at a convent for four years, and learnt the piano and needlework. This did not worry her father, because he was too busy speculating in land and being a character in pubs. He said, all right, if Alys wants to be a lady and learn needlework in a convent, all right. So it suited everyone, especially Alys, who got on well with the nuns without being particularly tractable, for she did not want to become a nun herself. She did not know exactly what she wanted to become. She read books. She thought it would be nice to fall in love, if only she knew how to go about it, and there was not much opportunity in a convent.

She read a lot of books, and she read poetry, particularly Tennyson. When she was seventeen she had the reputation of being pretty well read and rather a mysterious person, which pleased her a lot. She began to cultivate a mysterious look. She wrote a concentrated backhand with the greatest ease. And then she thought she would change her name. Because she had been christened “Alice,” and that of course did not go at all with mysterious looks, so she began to sign herself “Alys” Browne, which was more to the point, she felt. But that was a good many years ago. It was a long time since she had stopped to write in a concentrated backhand, and in Happy Valley there was nobody to appreciate mysterious looks. Only the name “Alys” remained, had become a habit, she really did not know why. It was on a little brass tablet at her front gate, ALYS BROWNE, PIANO-FORTE.

Teaching the piano at Happy Valley put her in a pretty good position. She could have gone about with Mrs Belper if she liked. And it was partly because she didn’t that Mrs Belper said she was neurotic. But Alys liked to be independent. When she left the convent — she was then nineteen — she went to be a companion to Mrs Stopford-Champernowne, an old lady who did tatting and snored. Mrs Stopford-Champernowne should by rights have been a bitch, but she was nothing of the sort, and Alys was very happy there, living in Sydney, and picking up the old lady’s tatting, and practically running the house. She even got rather fat. But she did not feel particularly independent. She thought she would go to California. So she went to a shipping office and got some pamphlets. But she did not go to California; she sat with the pamphlets in her lap in the evening at Mrs Stopford-Champernowne’s, and she began to ask herself if she knew what independence was. She could not altogether decide. Sometimes she thought it was something to do with money, and sometimes something more abstract, more spiritual. She had read a poem by Henley, something about My head is bloody but unbowed. It was all very difficult, what was she going to do.

It was about this time that she got the wire to say her father had died in the ditch. This was disconcerting. She began to feel she was alone, and not independent, or was independence being alone, or what. Butcher Browne left her very little money, so she was not independent in that respect. Some acres of land near Kambala and a weatherboard house at Happy Valley, that was what she got. She began to grow thin again, consoling herself by saying it was better that way, she was thin by nature. She made herself a new dress to celebrate the change, and said to herself when she put it on, I was falling asleep in all that fat, I look a hundred times better thin, though I am really rather plain.

Here I am, she said to herself, Alys Browne, thin and plain. I cannot call my hair anything but nondescript. My eyes are not so bad, though of course that is only an excuse. I have nothing to stop me from going to California, except that I cannot make the effort, and after all it is such a long way, and they say the Tasman Sea is rough.

In the end she went to Mrs Stopford-Champernowne and said:

Mrs Stopford-Champernowne, my father has left me a little money and a house at Happy Valley. That is where I come from, you know. I have decided to go back to Happy Valley to live. I shall give piano lessons. And then I can also sew.

Very well, my dear, said Mrs Stopford-Champernowne, if you’ve made up your mind. I suppose you know best.

So it was all settled. Alys was rather surprised. It had settled itself, this going back to Happy Valley, she did not know exactly why. She could not explain. But anyway, she told herself, I shall be more independent giving music lessons, more independent than picking up tatting and walking with Mrs Stopford-Champernowne in Rushcutters Bay Park.

She had been back now what seemed a long time, it might have been six years, or was it seven? Nothing had happened to her. She felt she was just the same, though of course she wasn’t. There had in fact been a young man in Sydney, a young man in a bank, who brought her chocolates, but she had never cared for chocolates, and there was nothing in the young man to make her start to like them better. There was nothing in that, she said. And, after all, falling in love was a secondary process. She might still go to California. She had sold her paddocks up near Kambala and had given the money to Mr Belper to invest. There were no dividends yet, but when there were she might go to California. But why California? It suddenly struck her like that. And she did not know. Perhaps that was a secondary process too. Perhaps she did not want to go away, or wanting to go away had got itself into her head as a substitute for something else. Sometimes she stopped to think about that, but she could not discover a satisfactory answer. Satisfactory answers are generally scarce.