Happy Valley (10 page)

Good day, said Mr Furlow, cautiously closing the door.

He tried to look solemn and businesslike as he sat down in his chair. He tried to find something to say.

You’ve been having a drop of rain, said Hagan.

Yes. A nice drop of rain.

Hagan sat there holding his hat. He had sobered up.

Nice mob of ewes up on the hill, he said.

Yes. A nice mob of ewes.

Merinoes?

Eh? said Mr Furlow. Oh, yes. Merinoes.

He sighed and folded his hands on his paunch.

I’m trying a Lincoln cross, he said.

He felt he had made a contribution to the conversation. He was satisfied.

Mutton? asked Hagan.

Yes.

A dopey old fool, you could see that, and the money rolling into his pocket, it beat you the way it happened, just for sitting there, it made you feel sore, working for a soft old bladder and trying your luck at a ballot and never doing any good, you hadn’t any luck, it seemed to be fixed in a ballot who was to draw the land, but you were as good as any of them if it came down to brass tacks, only you hadn’t a chance. Hagan shifted in his chair. The silence was getting him down. He beat a tune with his fingers on a typewriter lid. Then he realized what he was doing and stopped.

Mr Furlow cleared his throat.

Well, he said, that’s about all I’ve got to say. If you go on round to the back the groom’ll show you where to go. We can talk things over to-morrow. We can take a ride round the place. I hope you’ll be comfortable, he said.

Then he opened the door.

I’ll be all right, Hagan said.

Out in the passage there was a woman, it was Mrs Furlow, beating against a door.

Sidney, I insist! she called. I insist that you go out!

She stood there in the passage, her voice pretty high with anger, knocking away on the door. Hagan went along the passage towards the back. She did not seem to notice him. She was too busy banging on the door, hitting it with her rings. You could see well enough who ran the place, not that old coot talking about his Lincoln cross. She was
making the devil of a row on that door.

Oh, for God’s sake, cried another voice, and it was harsh, it sounded as if it would tear. You treat me like a blasted child!

A great scurrying then, and he was at the back door, and someone was coming, he wanted to look back, but he had to open the door, and he couldn’t very well look back even if…He opened the door on to the back verandah. And somebody was coming, coming slap up against him, almost jamming him in the door. A girl ran out on to the verandah. She was a white blur, her dress, as it pushed past him, and the feel of her arm on the back of his hand. She looked back a moment angrily, taking her anger from the woman and fixing it on him, he felt. She looked a bit of a bitch, with that sharp, red, painted mouth. Her breath had come past him with a rush. But she did not stand there looking at him, or say anything, say she was sorry, she ran on.

What’s been happening now? asked Mr Furlow fretfully.

She, she…, wailed Mrs Furlow.

Hagan did not hear what She had done. She was running down the hill in the mud, in a pair of high-heeled shoes that went over as she ran, and the mud splashed up on her dress. She was thin, there wasn’t much of her, not his type at all. Anyway, he couldn’t stand on the verandah all the afternoon. He would have to find that groom. He went down the step and across the yard. The girl had reached the bottom of the hill, had pulled open the door of a shed and gone inside, slamming the door after her. She had some guts the way she ran, even if that little behind, he’d never had
anyone thin, not like that woman in the jacket, you couldn’t see her running down the hill. He went on across the yard. His hat was tilted over his eyes, he walked with his elbows slightly bent, stiffly in his suit of best clothes. He whistled a tune that he had heard somewhere on the gramophone. In front of the stable door a red cock was treading a hen.

When Margaret Quong had finished dinner she helped her mother wash up the plates. She stood with a towel waiting to receive the rinsed plates. And she was at once both deft and absent, wiping, staring out of the window, and digging with her tongue into a hole in one of her back teeth. She began to hum. She had eaten a bit too much. It was still too early to go back to school. In fact, she had just that feeling of detachment and suspended time which makes your eyes expand, or at least it seems like that, and it is difficult to think of much, or thought has no connecting thread, and reaching back with your tongue to a hole in a back tooth is a gesture of well-being, comfortable, almost voluptuous.

Anyone’d think, said her mother, that this was a hotel.

Margaret did not answer. She seldom answered her mother. Words beat on the border of her mind, but did not penetrate. If she selected a remark from out of the habitual
wash of words it was one that needed a reply, one of those remarks that form the structure of an inevitable relationship. So now she hummed, and let her mother look at the clock, and frown, and say:

Coming in at any hour for meals. Just like a hotel.

Mrs Quong flicked the water from her fingers. It fell back into the sink. It spattered with a little hiss, like the voice of Mrs Quong. Then she drew down her sleeves.

Ethel Quong was sour and thin, her whole aspect was a little virulent, so that people avoided her, and she said she had no friends at all because she was married to a Chinaman. And why had she married Walter Quong, they said. Well, it had happened like this. Ethel had a friend called Mabel Still who lived at Clovelly and was married to a man who travelled in Ford parts. Still took in a number of the towns in the south of the state, like Tumut, and Batlow, and Moorang, and he went to Happy Valley too, not that there was much business there, only a Chinaman called Walter Quong, Mabel said. He kept a garage. He was ever such a good chap, they said, and you had to be broadminded, and what was a Chinaman, they said. At this time Ethel was a housemaid at Government House. She used to visit Mabel Still, go out to tea on her afternoon off, or in the evening to a movie. Yes, she said, you ought to have a broad mind. She agreed with Mabel over that. Mabel lent her books on sex. She felt very proud of her broad mind. You had to move with the times. She went a lot to the Stills, and there she met Mr Quong, he was up in Sydney, on business, he said, and Harry Still had asked him along. Mabel said, couldn’t you see Walter Quong was a good chap? Ethel
had to agree. She didn’t really like the idea of hobnobbing with a Chinaman, but if you had a broad mind, and anyway you called him a Chinese, and he was only half. They had a game of cards after supper. Walter asked if he could take her home. She let him drive her some of the way.

She had to admit to Mabel that she liked Walter Quong. He took her over to Manly one day. It was rather hot. Walter took off his coat, and made some jokes, and nobody stared too much, so she enjoyed herself. A Chinaman was like anyone else, she told herself. They went on the roundabout. He gave her an ice-cream in a cone. Then they sat on the beach and it began to get dark, with the sea coming in very cool and continuous and a hot scent off the pines. It was very pleasant running the sand through your fingers and listening to the sea and Walter’s talk. But she said that she ought to go. Now, he said, why did she have to go, when he knew that she had the evening off, was she meeting a friend, and she laughed and said, no, she hadn’t a friend, but they ought to be getting back. Walter said it was all nonsense. Well, perhaps it was. You could see the surf whiten on the shore through the darkness. It was cooler in the dark. She lay back on the sand. That was the way it happened when she hadn’t meant it to, she told Mabel afterwards. She didn’t know why she had let it happen, only something came over her on the beach, and she was letting Walter, but of course she needn’t see him again. Only supposing. Yes, said Mabel, supposing, only it wouldn’t. But it did. And that is why Ethel married Walter Quong. She called the child Margaret. She had narrow eyes. There’s no mistake, said Ethel, your sins will always find you out.

Margaret was spreading the towel to dry.

You’re growing out of that dress, said her mother. You’re all wrist.

She looked at Margaret and frowned, because she was long and gawky, those long straggling legs under the dark woollen skirt, and the drawn-out wrists, and the eyes. Margaret continued to pat the towel. The woollen pocket of her dress hung down with the weight of Rodney’s shell. She was feeling happy. She would go for a music lesson after tea.

Look at the time, said her mother. Anyone’d think it was out of spite.

What is? said Walter, coming in.

I don’t know what you expect, she said, coming in at such an hour. And look at all that mud on your boots.

Yes, he said. It’s muddy outside.

He looked at her and smiled. Walter was always ready to smile. It was the most natural activity of his yellow face.

Well, she said, we don’t want to have it muddy in here.

Where d’you expect me to put my feet?

I don’t mind where, she said, only I don’t want mud on the floor.

I can’t walk on the ceiling, Ethel. I’m sorry, it can’t be done.

And I don’t want cheek. Dinner’s over, anyway.

Good, said Walter. I had a bite down with Arthur. I just dropped in to see how you were.

Then he smiled yellowly out of his fat and went outside to tinker with the Ford.

She looked out of the back door. She was thin and sour. She watched him, fat and yellow, crawling under the car.
She was exasperated, she was drying up, and Walter only smiled. Or put her to shame with that girl he asked to the cemetery, or the time he got drunk at Moorang and tried to make water through the keyholes all along the main street. And then he only smiled. Mrs Quong’s face was taut with bitterness as she turned away from the door.

You’d better look sharp, she said to Margaret.

Because it irritated her to see that child looking at herself in the glass. Margaret in a red tam-o’-shanter pulling it down over her eyes. You would hardly believe she had a dash of anything but Chinese.

There’s no need for
you
to go wasting time on the glass, said Mrs Quong.

But Margaret let the stream of her mother’s bitterness flow over her, because their relationship was like that and the voices of some people, like the beat of a clock, like the creaking of the furniture, part of the exterior envelope of sound, beating and creaking, but failing to penetrate to the substance. At least, as far as we are aware. For there is a general cumulative effect and sometimes an ultimate explosion. But Margaret said placidly:

Good-bye, Mother. I shall be late. I’m going to tea at the store. And there’s my music lesson after that.

Then she was clicking the front gate, and it was part of custom, like her mother’s voice, it was part of what you took for granted, that slid away consciously, when perhaps all the time it was making a more indelible impression. Then she was going down the street, skipping a step or two every few yards. The sky was blue again, but cold. The houses huddled wetly between their sodden strips of garden
and their backyards. There were wet nettles in the ditches beside the road.

In summer there was a hot, pungent smell about the nettles in the roadside ditches. It was one of the predominating smells of Happy Valley. It made you feel warm and indolent, just as the cold sky isolated you from the landscape on certain winter afternoons and you were walking on top of the earth, against the sky, and it made you feel cold and strangely unattached to even the most tangible and conspicuous objects. But all of this may seem very irrelevant to the figure of Margaret Quong, skipping puddles on the road, and walking schoolwards. Only the landscape sometimes felt like that, it became the scent of nettles or a fragment of cold sky and she was very conscious of these, she was more conscious of them than the beat of her mother’s voice, or perhaps because of it, she was thrown back into a world of sensory experience.

When she went into school they began to do geography, they were considering the rainfall of Central Asia, and it did not seem very necessary, this. The stove cracked. The chalk squealed on the board. Geography did not move her at all, not like it did Rodney Halliday, who leant forward on his elbow with his ears sticking out. She took out the shell from her pocket and had a look. It was smooth and pink. It was very satisfying to touch the shell under the desk, and he said it came from the bottom of the sea.

What’s that? whispered Emily Schmidt.

Nothing, said Margaret.

She put the shell in her pocket again. Emily Schmidt stuck out her tongue.

Margaret looked at the desk. Her hair hung down black and straight, or rested on her shoulders at the back. She would put the shell in a box which already contained the harebells she had picked with Miss Browne, an ivory rose, and some silkworms’ eggs. Uncle Arthur had given her the ivory rose. It was real ivory, Aunt Amy said. Rodney Halliday was very pale, leaning forward on his elbow like that. Aunt Amy was an old maid. Rodney was nine years old. Miss Browne was twenty-seven, she had worked it out. I am thirteen, she said, and when I am a little older I shall go and work at the store, I shall help Aunt Amy, two old maids, because that is what I shall become. I shan’t care, she said. Miss Browne’s hands were smooth and white, smooth as a shell, as she taught a scale or tacked down the hem of a dress. And Rodney had a cut on his hand. Miss Browne was almost an old maid. Rodney looked at a cow in a paddock. Miss Browne washed her hair and knelt in front of the fire to let it dry. Miss Browne smiled. She liked a lot of butter on a pikelet, she said.

Margaret sighed. They were still doing geography.

When afternoon school was over she went along to the store where Aunt Amy was serving Mrs Schmidt with some candied peel. It was getting dark in the store. They had lit the lamps. The jars shone, and the scales, and the bacon-cutting machine. Aunt Amy laughed as she weighed the peel. It was a little, glistening, humorous laugh.

Hello, Auntie, Margaret said.

She was fond of Aunt Amy. She had finished school. She threw her tam-o’-shanter on the chair and went on out to the back. It was all over for the day, or the day had just
begun, you noticed things, you wanted to skip, you hung over the stable door and watched Uncle Arthur giving the colt a bran mash. The colt whinnied and tossed his head, the light on his flank from the lantern that hung by a nail on the wall. And Uncle Arthur purred, or swore a little at the horse as he laid back his ears or pawed the bedding with his hoof. The hoofs were black and clean, painted over with oil and tar.

Come on round now, Uncle Arthur said as he smacked the horse on the neck.

Uncle Arthur did not speak to her. He knew she was there, but he did not speak, and she did not expect him to, only she liked to be there, hanging over the stable door. They never spoke very much, the Quongs. They sat there at tea, eating a tin of herrings, sitting in the room behind the store, Amy and Arthur and Margaret, and they were very complete, they ate stolidly, they passed each other the things, their hands touched and sundered, and it was enough to be there, the three of them, that was quite enough. Margaret would have liked to live at the store, Amy and Arthur would have liked it too. But this was a state they did not consider, they did not mention, though each of them knew what the others thought. There was a silent mutual agreement in almost everything the Quongs did.

Amy rumbled and poured out the tea.

Another cup, Margaret? she said.

Yes, I’ll have another. Then I must go.

She felt grown-up having tea at the store, not like at home, because Aunt Amy always made her feel like that, she talked about grown-up things. Margaret sat up straight
and sipped at a cup of tea, her eyes round with abstraction, it always happened when she drank hot tea. She encouraged this. She relaxed and opened her eyes. It was warm and steamy in the back room.

May I take a quarter of bull’s-eyes? she said, when it was time to go.

All right, Amy said. It’s cold. You ought to be wearing a coat.

I’ll run, said Margaret. I’m only going up to Miss Browne’s. Thanks for the bull’s-eyes, Auntie, she said.

Amy and Arthur sat at their tea in the back room. Arthur was quietly picking his teeth. You did not say goodbye when you left, you just went out, and Amy and Arthur stared at the tablecloth, Amy rumbling, Arthur picking his teeth. You would soon come again. There was really no need to say good-bye.

Margaret Quong ran up the hill. She would be out of breath. She was always out of breath when she went to see Miss Browne. The bull’s-eyes stuck to the paper in the warm pocket of her hand. But the air was glass, the ruts sounded metallic under her feet. There was a sort of culmination in going to see Miss Browne, as if the day had slowly mounted towards this peak, this running breathless up the hill towards a rite. Tea at the store was a rite too, but calm and emotionless. There was no effort attached to having tea at the store. But I am a different person at Miss Browne’s, she said. I must sit and speak in a special way, which is the way Miss Browne sits and speaks. I would like to be like Miss Browne. I would like to wear a mauve dress. I would like to have been in Sydney, to be able to talk about the nuns.

Talking to Miss Browne was delicious with regrets and also possibilities.

Margaret knocked at the fly-proof door and went into the sitting-room. Miss Browne was kneeling on the floor. She was cutting out a dress, the patterns spread on the carpet, holding the scissors in her hand. But there was a white bandage on her hand.

Margaret dropped on her knees. She wanted to touch the hand.

Yes, said Miss Browne, I cut it. Wasn’t it stupid? I almost cried.

I once cut my knee, Margaret said.

There was a mingled pleasure and pain in pain shared with Miss Browne. And again she wanted to touch the hand, and because she was rather afraid to, she reached out with her voice instead, in a way that the voice does when it acts as proxy for a more emphatic, an unequivocal gesture.