Happy Valley (2 page)

All the characters in this book are fictitious.

To Roy de Maistre

It had stopped snowing. There was a mesh of cloud over the fragile blue that sometimes follows snow. The air was very cold. In it a hawk lay, listless against the moving cloud, magnetized no doubt by some intention still to be revealed. But that is beside the point. In fact, the hawk has none but a vaguely geographical significance. It happens to be in the sky in a necessary spot at a necessary moment, that is, at nine o’clock in the morning about twenty miles to the south of Moorang, where the railway line dribbled silverly out of the mist that lay in the direction of Sydney, and dribbled on again into another bank of mist that was the south. Moorang was a dull silver in the early morning. There was no snow there, only frost. The frost glittered like a dull knife, over it the drifting white of smoke from a morning train. But to the south, following the trajectory of the hawk up the valley and towards the mountains,
everything was white. It was higher here. There was grey slush in the streets of the township of Happy Valley, but the roofs were a pure white, and farther up in the mountains Kambala was almost lost beneath the drift.

Happy Valley extends more or less from Moorang to Kambala, where originally there was gold, and it received its name from the men who came in search of gold, the prospectors who left the train at Moorang and rode out with small equipment and a fund of expectation. They called the place Happy Valley, sometimes with affection, more often in irony. But in time, when the gold at Kambala was exhausted, the name applied, precisely speaking, more to the township than to the valley itself. It is here that we have left the hawk coasting above the grey streets. There is not much activity in the streets. They are silent and not very prepossessing in their grey slush. And we have no business with them yet, rather with Kambala, which is almost hidden under the snow.

Ordinarily, if you could see for yourself, there would be about six or seven houses, inhabited by families of no particular distinction. The people at Kambala are a kind of half-bred Chinese, quiet and industrious, though perhaps a little sinister to the eyes of a stranger. But there is not much crime in Kambala, in spite of the large grey erection that is a gaol. There is no explanation for its size, except that perhaps the architect could not get out of his mind the days when there were nine pubs in the town, and colonies of tents down the mountainside, and English and French and Germans digging for gold. But now it is very peaceful. In the summer the police sergeant sits on the verandah of
the gaol, tilts back his chair, and swots at flies. I repeat, there is not much crime. Only the publican before the man they had at the moment once set fire to his wife, and on another occasion a drover from the Murray side ran amuck and crucified a roadman on a dead tree. Old Harry Grogan found the body. It was like a scarecrow, he said, only it didn’t scare. There was crows all over the place, sitting there and dipping their beaks into the buttonholes.

Now the gaol is covered with snow and the police sergeant is inside, writing an uneventful report that he will send later to Moorang. The gaol is an impressive white mound, the houses smaller ones. There is a general air of hibernation, of life suspended under the snow. Literally under, for in the winter the people of Kambala communicate with each other by channels or even tunnels carved through the snow. You seldom see any more than a streamer of smoke waving weakly from the arm of an iron chimney-pot or the eyelid of an eaves raised cautiously out of the snow.

In one of the hotel bedrooms the publican’s wife was giving birth to her first child. She lay on her back, a big ox-like woman with a face that was naturally red, but which had now gone putty-coloured. Sometimes she tossed about and sometimes she just lay still. She was having a child, she told herself dumbly at first, until with the increase of pain she did not know what she was having, only that she was having, having, straining, it was tearing her apart, and the doctor’s hand was on her. She closed her eyes. She had resented the doctor at first, did not want him to touch her, then by degrees she did not mind whether he touched her or not. Because the pain was there, whatever happened.
She had come from Tumut with her husband a year ago. Everyone told them they were mad. And now she began to wonder herself, somehow confounding her pain with Kambala and all that snow, snow everywhere, you could hardly see out of the window except at the top. She opened and closed her eyes and moaned. The doctor was still there looking at her.

There were two other women in the room, one a silent half-bred Chinese woman with a cast in her left eye, and the other an old woman with little greasy puffs of hair standing out over her forehead in a kind of arch. They had come in to help. Mrs Steele, the old woman with the puffs of hair, always came to assist at a birth or a death. She had helped bring a lot of children into the world. She could also lay out a body better than any woman in the neighbourhood. Now she stood by the bed and stared at the doctor with all her expert experience, and resented his presence a great deal, because apart from her own experience (she could have managed the lying in herself, only Mr Chalker, the publican, had to send to Happy Valley for the doctor), apart from this, the doctor was not old Dr Reardon who had left the district a year ago, and she could not help holding Dr Halliday responsible for this. She and Dr Reardon knew a thing or two. They were a source of mutual admiration. Dr Halliday told her to mind out. Very politely though. He was a gentleman. And this was an additional point for scorn. She refused to own that ability was a possible quality in a gentleman.

Dr Halliday stood by the bed, with his back to old Mrs Steele, looking at the patient.

You could put out the lamp, Mrs Steele, he said, without turning to look.

Mrs Steele stood like a post. The Chinese woman climbed up silently on a chair and turned down the wick of the lamp, till the light was out, and a white smoke meandered up through the glass.

The doctor looked at his watch. It was nine o’clock. He had been there since the evening before, and now it was light again, and there was a shadow of bristle about his chin. The rims of his eyes were dry and taut. They felt as if they might never close again, stuck there, glued. The calves of his legs ached. He had been there how many hours? He would not count, could not be bothered to count. But it was a weary business, and the way she moaned, weary, with that pale hair flattened back from her face. Somebody was cooking bacon and eggs. He could smell the fat, smell the wick of the now extinguished lamp, and the little oil stove against which the Chinese woman was warming her skirts. It was monstrously cold in this room, in this wooden house with the snow piled up outside. The little stove seemed to make no impression on the temperature. He shivered and put his fingers on the woman’s pulse.

She opened her eyes and looked at him blankly.

It’ll soon be over now, he said.

It was like delivering a cow, he felt. When she moaned it was almost like the lowing of a cow. And that same bewildered stare. Or perhaps he had become callous. Some people called it professional, when perhaps it was just callousness. Not like that first time, the woman in the tenement in Sydney, somewhere out in Surry Hills. She had
screamed, or that was what it sounded like, something very personal and connected with himself, so that his own body had tightened up with the screams, and he sweated behind the knees, and the afterbirth had almost made him sick. When he left the house, when he got on the tram and found himself in William Street, he could still hear the screams. They were stamped on wax inside his head, the record going round and round. At the bottom of William Street he got out of the tram and had to go into a pub to get a drink.

The poor soul’s havin’ an awful time, said Mrs Steele behind his back.

She was having an awful time. But she was strong, strong as a cow. And in a little while it would be over.

In a little while it was. The child was born dead. It was a red, motionless phenomenon that he picked up and handed to Mrs Steele, waiting to receive it in a folded towel. Mrs Steele sucked her teeth. You felt that Dr Halliday was responsible for the stillborn child. She could have delivered it better herself, and that poor soul lying on the bed, it was terrible, Mary Mother of God it was awful what women had to go through. She carried the child out of the room still sucking her teeth.

But she was strong, he repeated, in the absence of any genuine compassion. He could not summon this. He began to gather up his instruments, while the Chinese woman floated round the bed, so silent that she almost wasn’t there. He would wash his hands. There was a basin in the kitchen, the Chinese woman said. He would pack his bag, a small compact affair in darkish leather with his initials on the side in black. O.H. He had had it done in Sydney after taking
his degree, correcting the man in the shop, saying it was not A but H, for H
ALLIDAY.
It was good to have a bag with your initials on it. It made you feel important. You were less a medical student than a doctor. That was one stage, and the woman screaming in a tenement house in Surry Hills. Life in jerks, in stages. It ought to flow, theoretically, in an even rhythm, as he read (he was nineteen) in some book, and he must do something about his life, work it out into a neat formula, or make it flow beautifully. Everything would be beautiful. Then it began to move in jerks. And that was all wrong. He yawned. Perhaps Chalker would offer him bacon and eggs.

Mrs Steele was back in the room. While she was away she seemed to have caught on to the thread of the inevitable again, for she stood with her arms folded and began to compose a low, monotonous kind of recitative.

It’s funny, she said, it happened that way. It happened that way with my first. All the rest boys but the first. The first was a little girl. They’re good boys, my boys. There’s young Tom, just got a job in the post-office at Tumut. He’s good to ’is mother, Tom. Sends me money from Tumut. Tom says I oughtn’t stay on ’ere. Kambala’s no place for an elderly woman. When the summer comes I ought to go down to Tumut an’ live.

She went on like that, and Dr Halliday did not listen to her. He would be getting on down to Happy Valley. He would be there in time for lunch, leaving the publican’s wife to Mrs Steele. She would soon be about again. She was strong as a cow. Only the child was dead. So he went past the old woman, standing there as leisurely as a chorus from
Euripides, and out into the passage, where the publican sat on a deal chair smoking the frayed remains of a cigarette. He would have to say something to the publican.

Well, he said, I’m sorry, Chalker. We’ve done all we can. I’m sorry it’s turned out like this.

The publican jumped to his feet and came forward, bending a little, nervously. He was relieved now that it was all over, even if not particularly moved, because he hadn’t really stopped to think about the child. Only his wife. The possibility of reproduction only moved dimly at the back of his mind. Sometimes it moved farther into the foreground, and he thought, well, a kid would show you there was nothing wrong, and afterwards it could lend a hand in the bar, give Rita a chance of laying up. So when he sidled nervously to the doctor there was a propitiatory smile on his flabby face.

Better luck next time, eh, doctor? he said.

Then he laughed. It was a wheezy, semi-coagulated noise. Halliday found it rather unpleasant. He refused to encourage Chalker’s relief and asked if he could wash his hands. There was yellow soap in the kitchen sink. Chalker hovered, talked, coughed. He was a big man, perpetually in his slippers, with yellowish whites to his eyes. A stream of soft platitude fell about Halliday as he washed his hands, as he accepted a whisky in the bar, as he refused an offer of bacon and eggs. No, he’d be getting down. His wife.

All right, doctor, said Chalker, unlatching the front door. If there’s ever anything I can do. You never can tell, eh? You never can tell.

Tell what? How these people talked, just another
minute, as if they were afraid that this was the last human contact they would make. Halliday bent down in the tunnel of snow to fasten on his skis. And it might be up here, so quiet in the snow, a long, slow, seeping quiet. Chalker clung to the door. Literally clung. He was afraid of something slipping away, smiling feebly, and trying to make a joke. Halliday straightened up.

Good-bye, Chalker, he said.

So long, doctor. God, it’s cold, ain’t it? Freeze the snot on your nose.

He was shivering. Halliday was conscious of his own brutality as he felt his way along the tunnel and out towards the light. But he could not stop. He did not know what to say, and the man was not so much worse off than anyone else, if it came to that. Up here at Kambala or down at Happy Valley was a choice of evils. Only here the isolation was physical. That was why Chalker shivered like an unwanted dog.

At the end of the tunnel the valley widened out into a long sweep of snow. He slid off on his skis, his bag, fastened with a cord, bumping against his back. How the air cut. It shaved the flesh off your face. It made you feel lean, leaner, almost non-existent, as you arrived with a rush at the bottom of the slope. He was a little out of breath, for physically he was thirty-four. But it did not feel like that, feel like anything. He was sixteen, that night on the ferry in Sydney when he knew he could do anything, and Professor Birkett had said there was something in his poems that was not just adolescence, and he would be a writer, he would write poems and plays, particularly a play with some kind
of metaphysical theme, only the trouble was to find the theme. A crow flew out of a tree with a half-hearted caw. He had not found the theme. He was now thirty-four. Hilda said she thought it was a lovely poem, she hoped he would write one for her, one she could feel was her very own, he must call it To H.G., though she knew he must wait to be inspired. She had grey eyes that were full of sympathy as they sat on that seat in the Botanical Gardens and there was a smell of old banana skins and squashed Moreton Bay figs. It was so easy to get sympathetic on a warm morning in the Botanical Gardens. You began to talk about ideals. It was Hilda’s sympathetic eyes. Later on you began to realize that sympathy in women was largely compound of stupidity and anxiety for the future. However, that was later on.