Happy Valley (3 page)

It was warm now, tramping along the level on skis. He would be in a sweat by the time he reached the place where he had left the car. You left the car at Halloran’s Corner when you came up to Kambala in winter time. Snow never fell very heavily as far down the mountains as that. But it was cold. It was colder at Happy Valley than anywhere else in the world. Take your scarf, dear, Hilda said, poke it into your waistcoat over your chest. She coughed as she served apple dumplings to the boys, and Rodney said he hated apple dumplings, they stuck in his throat, he began to cry. Hilda said, dear, dear, Oliver, you’ll have to do something about that child, he’ll finish by driving me off my head, I can’t stand any more.

Oliver Halliday, father of a family. That’s what he was. And it didn’t feel any different, in essentials, from what it was at sixteen. Wrongly, no doubt. Just this coating of
the essential sameness with superficial experience. There hadn’t been any adjustment, he hadn’t had time. The way you were going to do everything, make your life flow in an even rhythm, like that damn pretentious book. He had copied out bits of it, too. It made you feel rather intellectual to write down things about the Life Stream and Cosmic Force in coloured inks. That was sixteen, Cosmic Force, and cultivating an expression of intensity in the glass before going in to tea. He works very hard, said Aunt Jane to Mrs Meadows, so that he would not hear, but he did. He wrote interesting letters too, bits of thoughts and things going over on the troopship, and sang bawdy songs in the evening. There was a man called Wright, a shearer with cross eyes, singing, and the streamers that morning as the boat slipped away, and Aunt Jane saying, this’ll kill me, Oliver, why you had to do it I’ll never know. He felt very proud when he told them he was nineteen. Nobody would have known. He was big. But he was frightened lying in his bunk at night, and the way the men snored, and the sea seemed eternity, and perhaps Hilda would forget what she said, that she would marry him when he came back, because she was proud he was going to the War. On the newspaper placards in Sydney the War was cold print. You went to the War. Then suddenly in the Indian Ocean you were going to God knows what, and it wasn’t so good, but it couldn’t go on for ever, it was already ’18. Perhaps he would get a medal, and newspaper placards in Sydney, because he was sixteen, would say…Once he was sixteen.

Oliver Halliday wiped his face with a handkerchief. There was something vicious about letting your mind run
on like that. You felt a bit ashamed as soon as you pulled yourself up. It was like reading in the lavatory or lying too long in a hot bath. If he had a gun he’d take a pot at that hawk, put a shot in its belly for lunch, and it would fall down and lie on the snow, its blood red on the snow, dead. But there would be no pain before annihilation. All its life it would probably know no pain, not like Mrs Chalker writhing about on the bed at Kambala. The hawk was absolved from this, absorbed as an agent into the whole of this frozen landscape, into the mountains that emanated in their silence a dull, frozen pain while remaining exempt from it. There was a kind of universal cleavage between these, the agents, and their objects: the woman at the hotel, forcing the dead child out of her womb, or the township of Happy Valley with its slow festering sore of painfully little intrigue. It was a medieval attitude perhaps. But they were still living in the Middle Ages with their dark fears and antidotal faiths. His skis made a long slurring noise on the snow. A handful of snow rattled from off a tree, falling down out of the interstices of twigs. The arches of the trees were white with snow, almost Gothic in structure. Like a cathedral, he felt. Miserere of the crows. A plump black crow peering out of the window of a briar like a priest from his confessional.

There was still some use for the Holy Roman Church. It taught you to turn pain and the fear of it to some spiritual use. But you weren’t a Catholic, and pain only made you bitter, or made you ashamed because you were bitter and afraid. He said his prayers every evening on the troopship, quietly to himself in his bunk. He lay there feeling afraid,
getting closer, and closer, and then the War stopped. Of course it had to stop. He was sorry in a way, because a gesture like enlisting when you were sixteen, and afraid, wasn’t as big when you couldn’t carry it through to the logical conclusion and give everyone the impression you were brave, even though bravery was something forced on you whether you liked it or not. But he went to London. He had two weeks in Paris, where everyone was very tired, and old, spiritually, and nobody took any notice of him at all. He felt far younger than he had ever felt copying Great Thoughts into a notebook at home, but it was a fresh sensation, he appreciated it, walking about the streets in Paris and everyone else preoccupied. But he was worried because everyone was old and when he went out of the city into the country, to Saint Germain or the forest at Fontainebleau, the country was young. That was the strange part. It was stranger because at home everything was reversed. The people were young, adolescent, almost embryonic. When he got back from Europe he looked at them and there was nothing there. Life was a toy, you rattled it. But the country was old, older than the forest at Fontainebleau, there was an underlying bitterness that had been scored deep and deep by time, with a furrow here and there and pockmarks in the face of black stone. Over everything there was a hot air of dormant passion, of inner war, that nobody seemed to be conscious of. In Sydney you went to parties. In Happy Valley you fornicated or drank. You swung the rattle for all you were worth. You did not know you were sitting on a volcano that might not be extinct. It puzzled him at first.

And he wanted to get away again. Even when he was married he wanted to get away. And Hilda said, you’re restless, dear, you’re tired, if only you could take a week or two we might drive down to Wollongong. He married Hilda when he was twenty-four. That was eight years. But waiting was Hilda’s strong suit, for more than eight years. Rodney was nine and George four. And he was still only sixteen, which was something that Hilda did not know though she knew pretty well everything else. It was far better to be like Hilda, complete in superficialities, complete in your own conception of completeness. He had only once felt complete. It was an accident, he felt, and being in Paris, it was somewhere round about the Luxembourg, and he had gone into a church, he did not know why, it was an ordinary church, but perhaps there was a cold wind, anyway he went inside. The organ was playing. He could remember that his feet were cold and there was a smell of varnish. The organ was playing a Bach fugue. He knew it was Bach because he had picked out bits of Bach on the piano at home. And then he was at home again, but not at home, it was in the church in the neighbourhood of the Luxembourg, it was in France, with old German Bach streaming out of the organ loft, and the War had stopped, and he was losing his breath, he was losing…Then he sat very still. He supposed he was breathing. He did not know. But he knew he was crying. He did not care if he cried; there was nothing wrong with this sort of crying and nobody would see. The music came rushing out of the loft, unfurling banners of sound. You could touch it. You could feel it. You could feel a stillness and a music all at once. You were at once floating and
stationary, in time, all time, and space, without barrier, passing with a fresher knowledge of the tangible to a point where this dissolved, became the spiritual.

A great boulder of black rock rose nakedly at the edge of the whitened road. He stopped and kicked at it with his ski. The tangible. There is a stubborn, bitter ring if you kick at a piece of black rock. And how would serene, Christian, German, eighteenth-century Johann Sebastian have dealt with a lump of antipodal rock? Serenity perhaps was the effect of environment, not so much the result of spiritual conflict. At least you would like to think that. It would make things easier. You could give up the ghost at the start. But you did not give up the ghost, you went on swerving, wheeling, in the direction of Happy Valley, ducking beneath the arm of a tree when it nearly hit you in the face, half closing your eyes to keep out the spray of snow and the wind, and it was exciting, and you held your breath, hoping this wasn’t your last moment, almost, but not the last.

Oliver Halliday caught the point of his ski in a trough of snow and fell over in a heap, though it might have been a knot, it felt like a knot. He had that blue, constricted sensation of being winded. He felt that his face was a distinct, bright blue, then that his toes were hurting. He put his hand on the snow to raise himself up, sank in an inch or two, touched the ground. He was almost out of the snow. He would take off his skis and walk, if he could walk, if he wasn’t dead, but he felt he was dead, physically more than thirty-four. So he lay back on the cold snow, to consider the situation, and it was good and cold lying there, the way the ribs moved with his panting, in and out. His ribs moved
in and out the day he won the quarter-mile, and the cup he received from the Governor dropped on the gravel drive as coming down, and somebody sniggered, he was very foolish bending to pick up the cup. He laughed. He was lying on his back in the present. His bag made a pillow under his neck. He was laughing up at a patch of sky that looked rather chaste and bewildered in the scud of cloud. Once he had written nature poems, on clouds and things. But he did not do that any more. He would get to his feet, and take off his skis, and after reaching the car he would drive on home to lunch, probably find cold mutton and pickles out of a bottle, it was a Monday, and Hilda said, you can’t expect anything hot on Monday, there’s always the wash. So the present was cold mutton and pickles, not nature poems about a cloud or mountains, he used to be keen on the idea of mountains, they recurred over and over again, generally blue, or else there was a mist, but that was before he had heard of Kambala. The way that man clung to the door, shivering on the mountaintop, perhaps standing there still, waiting for someone to come, and the whole winter nobody would come except a half-baked Chinese, creeping along the snow tunnel from one of the other houses.

But you needn’t think, of course. The Miracle of Thought, he had read somewhere, in a Sunday newspaper. God making a clockwork toy and feeling pleased with it, then scratching his head and seeing that it might work too well, so he put in an extra mechanism in a moment of compassion, you just pushed down a lever and the action was held up.

He walked along slowly. He would not think. There was
the car now, with a thin powdering of snow on the roof. He began to whistle a tune, a Ständchen. Elisabeth Schumann sang it on the gramophone. It was thin and very cold and very sexless, but there were moments when it persisted it coming into your head, jamming down the lever, on cold, thin, sexless mornings walking over the snow.

The hawk continued to circle in wide, empty sweeps. It might have been anywhere, heading towards Kambala, over the roofs of Happy Valley, or aimless in the sky above the Moorang road.

I’d shoot that bird if I had a gun, Clem Hagan said.

He hadn’t a gun, so he knew he was perfectly safe. It was probably a damn side too far off. You couldn’t tell. But he hadn’t a gun and it was all right.

It’s a hawk, said Chuffy Chambers, hunched up stolidly at the wheel.

Go on! You’re telling me something new.

The mail truck churned its way from Moorang. The road was a sticky yellow-brown, for the little snow that had fallen on the lower slopes had thawed, and the country was visible now in its customary nakedness. The mail truck groaned and laboured on its way. On either side of the road
there were stretches of grey winter grass, and trees that were grey in winter and summer too. A flock of ragged ewes scampered with a scattering of black dung into a hollow and out of sight. In the back of the truck the mail bags jostled. There were also some bags of corn, Hagan’s luggage, an incubator, and a separating machine. When the truck skidded the separating machine struck the incubator with a loud metallic ring.

That was a near one, said Hagan, holding the door.

Yes, agreed Chuffy Chambers, that was a near one right enough.

He settled over the wheel again. He was not conversationally ingenious. He liked to sit and spit, or smile at other people’s remarks, and when no remarks were made he merely sat. As Hagan was a stranger, to-day he sat. Every day he drove the lorry from Moorang to Happy Valley twice. His chief significance was as a link between two geographical and economic points, though he could also play the accordion and was consequently in demand when there were dances at Happy Valley at the School of Arts. Twice a year there was a dance at the School of Arts, in race week and during the agricultural show. Then Chuffy Chambers sat on the platform with the rest of the band, his yellow hair smoothed down, and the girls smiled at him as they danced past, and he felt extremely satisfied. There was no one could play the accordion so good as Chuffy Chambers, they said.

Hagan began to shiver. He turned up the collar of his overcoat, which was a greenish grey and fell to his ankles when he stood up. He had never felt so cold. Not even up
in the north, he came from New England, had he ever felt so cold. It was a godforsaken part of the world. There was probably worm in the sheep. And perhaps he’d been a fool to come, only the money that Furlow offered was a rise on anything he’d had before. And what you couldn’t do with money! In Sydney, in at the Australia or the Metropole, you weren’t an overseer any more. This was what made you stop to consider money, all those faces in a ring round the bar. So he wrote to Furlow that he’d come. He was going to have a cottage to himself, and a cook, and there were also a couple of jackeroos. He would feel no end important as overseer to jackeroos. But the country, it made you sick, just to look at, not a blade of grass, though they said it was the country for sheep. Still, you always said that once you’d landed yourself in a mess just to make the best of things. He took out a tin of tobacco and started to roll a cigarette.

It’s cold, he said.

Yes, said Chuffy, it’s cold.

Anything doing out here? In Happy Valley, I mean.

Oh, I dunno. Now an’ again. There’s the races. There’s the pictures once a month in a ’all that belongs to Quongs’.

Chows, eh?

Yes. There’s Chows. Quongs is Chows that run the store. They got a good shop. You can get anything at Quongs’.

Hagan rolled his cigarette. You could never say much for a place that was run by Chows. Chows or dagoes. They always took away the profits from anyone else. He spat out over the side of the truck, to emphasize his dislike of Chows. His fingers were very red as he smoothed out the
white cylinder that soon would become a cigarette. On the backs of his hands there was reddish hair that had crept out as an advance guard from the wrists.

What about girls? asked Hagan, licking the flap of the cigarette.

Yes, there’s girls, said Chuffy.

What sort of girls?

Same as most places I suppose. All sorts of girls.

Oh.

Chuffy Chambers did not like to talk about girls, because they were a sort of unrealized ambition with him, and even if they said, Chuffy, you play the accordion so good, they never said more than that. They laughed. They said he was loopy. Though he treated his mother well, he was a good boy, Chuffy, but—well, he wasn’t quite all there, and you couldn’t treat him altogether serious because of that, or go with him or anything like that. So Chuffy Chambers always squinted and felt embarrassed when anyone spoke about girls. He felt a hot sensation inside his shirt next to the holy medals and the sacred hearts. For Chuffy was religious, he was a Catholic. When Father Purcell came from Moorang to Happy Valley he went to Mrs Chambers’ for tea, and it made you feel good to have a priest in the house. It was a great consolation to be religious. The Protestants called him a Micky, but he didn’t mind. It gave him a kind of secret superiority over the other boys who went with girls, and when things got too bad he told himself he didn’t want to go with girls, it was bad, he touched the holy medals and told himself it was wrong.

Like most places, eh? Yes, I suppose you’re right.

Men who work a lot in the open, especially men who work with sheep, have a habit of repeating things, even trivial things, several times, perhaps because conversation is scarce and it gives them a sense of company to have a phrase coming out of their mouths, even if the phrase is already stated. Clem Hagan was like this. He repeated a remark ponderously, sometimes with a different intonation just for variety’s sake. He stared out in front of him with an expression that might have been interesting if you didn’t know it was due to his having spent most of his life looking into the distance for sheep. Anyone who stares long enough into the distance is bound to be mistaken for a philosopher or mystic in the end. But Hagan was no philosopher, that is, he searched no farther than the immediate, sensual reality, and this translated into simpler terms meant a good steak with juice running out at the sides and blonde girls with comfortable busts.

He had the immense self-confidence of men who are successful in their sensuality. If you saw him walking, he walked slowly with his legs a little apart and his arms a little bent and the trousers tight across his behind. Or when he smiled there was a bit of gold in one of his front teeth that flashed, and they liked that. He only had to lean up against a bar and smile and they were ducking about behind the bottles, yes, Mr Hagan and no, Mr Hagan, and pouring out whisky when it should have been gin. Everything happened so easily. He tilted his hat over his eyes. He wore his hat perpetually on a tilt which made him look rather lazy, as if he had had too much, and you were just a moment too late, a pity, but there it was, and opening
your mouth and breathing hard wouldn’t help matters at all.

Hagan sighed. He was getting cramp in his legs. His trousers were catching him in the crutch. And he wanted to make water too. There was no end to the yellow pasty road. In the back of the truck, if you could judge by the jangle, the incubator had come into permanent conjunction with the separating machine. There was the hell of row, and the country going on and on, it was how many miles, mean and sour, there was probably fluke in the sheep, and he did not know why he had come. She said her name was Bella, that red-haired one. She had a behind like a cart-horse, wicker-patterned, after sitting in that wicker chair drinking a gin and ginger beer. She said she got the wind awful bad, but she just loved ginger beer, and wasn’t it funny the way it got sticky on your fingers, she said. She liked ginger ale too, but didn’t it prickle up your nose. On the whole it was pretty dull. He had torn up her card and thrown it down the lavatory in the train. That was the worst of women, they were dull, talking about ginger beer, or when you began to tell them about yourself they shut up at once and began to hum and then came out with something about a paper pattern they’d got out of a magazine or who was taking them to the races Saturday week. You cut up rough with them sometimes, and you wouldn’t go with them any more, and then you went. Or sometimes you gave them a date, like that night about eleven girls waiting outside the King’s Cross picture show, and you went past in a tram and laughed to see them all there, looking at each other and waiting and people wondering what was the gala show.
But it served women right, coming up to you in the street, served them bloody well right.

Hagan laughed.

Eh? said Chuffy Chambers.

All sorts of girls, said Hagan, spitting over the side again.

Lurching away, he’d have to get down or…

Here, you, he said. What’s your name?

Chambers.

What Chambers?

Chuffy Chambers.

What sort of a name do you call that? Anyway, stop this bus. I’ve got to get down and have a leak.

The truck gave a complicated emotional groan and stopped to let Hagan get down. Chuffy Chambers sat at the wheel. He had gone a little red because he had said his name was Chuffy Chambers, but he couldn’t help it, they called him that. He could not remember how it began, but it had always been like that, they said come here Chuffy, and he came. His real name was William.