Happy Valley (5 page)

She held it by a corner, munificently. Her little finger was crooked.

Thank you, said Amy. I shall come on Saturday for the rest.

She got up. Her yellow face was slightly pink. She took up her umbrella that was standing against the wall.

The cheek of these people.

You should have left your umbrella outside, said Mrs Moriarty sharply, looking down at the pool.

I’m sorry, said Amy.

I shall have to wipe it up.

It’s not on the carpet.

No. It’s not on the carpet. Gertie! she called. Of course
she’s gone for the steak. I shall have to wipe it myself.

It was humiliating. She ought to have servants. Showing people like Amy Quong to the door, that was what Ernest had brought her to, if only he could get that job up on the North Shore. She watched Amy go down the street, treading calmly in her mackintosh, with a black bun that glistened behind her head. God, what a place it was, that street that you looked down every day and nobody ever came.

Poor Vic, you’re not very happy, said Ernest sometimes, and patted her hand, and she felt a bit warmer towards him then, because he could see, though it wasn’t a helpful remark, and it would not make her happier patting her hand. She went back into the sitting-room. There was something she ought to do. Lucy Adelon’s Almond Lotion whitens the hands, an application morning and night, perhaps if she wore gloves, if she slept in gloves, with Ernest patting her hand and wheezing, she could not sleep for hearing him wheeze. She had liked his moustache. It looked distinguished, a schoolmaster with a moustache, and Daisy marrying a grocer, and she could not live with Daisy and Fred, in Marrickville at a grocer’s shop. She had learnt to paint flowers on crêpe de chine. Ernest said she had beautiful taste, which was beautiful coming from behind his moustache that made him distinguished, that made her cultured, crêpe de chine flowers, and marrying a schoolmaster was one up on Daisy and Fred. He collected stamps. He brought his album to show, bending over and telling her the names, it was an educational hobby, he said, he believed in educational hobbies, and if she liked he would show her how he stuck them in, you licked the end of the funny tag,
would she like to lick, and she had a lick, that funny taste on your tongue, and she licked a lot, she licked one that Ernest licked, oh dear, she said, going quite red and Ernest going red, he asked if she went to the pictures ever, he had seen the Shackleton film and wasn’t it an education to see what Man could do, so perhaps she would come with him one night, there was a film about Queensland aboriginals on at the Rialto all next week.

She sat down in the sitting-room. There was something she had to do. She yawned, her whole face yawned, the little golden curls quivered at the side. When she went to bed at night she took a comb and frizzed them out. Ernest said she had pretty hair. Oh dear, she said, this place isn’t good for your asthma, Ernest, she said. They don’t give you a proper screw. You’re killing yourself, she said, which was as good as saying you’re killing me. Only I’m fond of Ernest, you can’t live with anything long without feeling it’s the furniture, that suite Mrs Belper has, running up bills indeed, and if only you had money you could show them what. You could live in a flat in Sydney, you could have a cook, and a maid with a cap. If Ernest got that job up on the North Shore she would have breakfast in bed, she would join a library and read in bed. She would be in the Sydney Morning Herald on the Ladies’ Page, because of course she would play bridge, you had to play bridge, even if you hated cards, because it was a social obligation, and the paper would say: On Tuesday afternoon Mesdames Smith, Brown, Moriarty etc. etc. had bridge tables at David Jones’s, and perhaps a description of her dress, she would wear powder-blue.

She sat with a chilblain on her foot, the window letting in the rain. That was Happy Valley. God, that street. And the window was stuck. Across the way a geranium had died in Mrs Everett’s pot. And this damn window stuck, breaking your nails, and the rain.

Walter Quong drove past in a brand-new Ford. He had a round, fat yellow face that closed itself in smiles. He was waving his hand, and that was just like his cheek, as if she was one to spend her time waving from her window at Chinamen. She never waved to Walter Quong. He had tried to help her across the street, in Moorang, because it was dark, he said, and couldn’t he drive her back, as he took her by the elbow, his hand, but she said she thought she would wait. After all the stories you heard about Walter Quong, it was like his cheek, what with that Everett girl at the cemetery, and old Mrs Everett jumping out, from behind a stone, they said, and hitting him over the head with a jar that someone had taken to fill with flowers. All the same it made you laugh, Walter Quong finding old Mrs Everett instead. Then he wanted to help her across the street. Those yellow, puffy hands.

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, A
LYS
B
ROWNE
, P
IANO-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.

In the meantime there was plenty to do. Before the dances she made dresses for the girls. They came up to see her, bringing their patterns, and she generally helped them to decide whether it was to be taffeta or something else. She also did most of the sewing for Mrs Furlow at Glen Marsh. Mrs Furlow drove herself in, perhaps with Sidney, bringing anything she wanted done. And it was a kind of royal progress, Mrs Furlow’s visit, because she was the wife of the richest man in the neighbourhood. But Sidney Furlow, who was her daughter, usually sat in the car. She had a very red mouth and had been to a finishing school.

If I were Sidney Furlow, Alys sometimes said. Then she stopped. Sometimes you want to go on being yourself, if only for very inadequate reasons, as if you know you will suddenly turn into a direction that is inevitable and you only have to wait. So she continued to sew and give music lessons. She could not play very well, but well enough. And sometimes she played for her own pleasure, she played Schumann, and after that Chopin, and then Beethoven with anxiety. But she liked Schumann best, because he made her feel slightly melancholy, and she just went on and on into a mental twilight and a finale of original chords.

She read too. She had started some of the Russians, Anna Karenina, and Turgeniev, but Tennyson sounded funny now, she could not read him any more. She liked to sit down at tea, and take off her shoes, and read a chapter of Anna Karenina, though sometimes she found it a bit of an effort and lapsed to the Windsor Magazine. Tolstoi was interesting though. She had spilt some tea on the seventysecond page. It gave the book a comfortable, intimate appearance, and she liked it better after that, as if she had always had it with her and had read it several times.

This was Alys Browne. She had got up early on the morning that Dr Halliday delivered the publican’s wife, that Hagan came to Happy Valley in the truck, and that Mrs Moriarty had been visited by Amy Quong. She did not know why she got up early, but she pushed back the bedclothes and got up. There was snow on the ground. And later in the morning it began to rain. It will rain and rain, and I shall not go out, and to-morrow perhaps it will rain, she said, and I am perfectly happy, why, she said.

It was then that she cut her hand. She was slicing some onions in the kitchen for lunch, and the knife went down on her finger into the flesh. And she looked at the blood as it ran from her finger and soaked into the cracks in the wood. That just goes to show, she said, and knew at once that it sounded stupid, that she must do something, because her finger, and the blood. She wrapped her hand in a handkerchief. The rain was coming down on the roof, it made a noise on the corrugated iron. She was holding her hand in the handkerchief, staring stupidly out at the rain. This was the spirit of independence, cutting your finger on a wet
day, and everything went out of you as you felt the blood through the handkerchief. They said if you tied a tourniquet, if you had some string, if you held it under the tap, the cold water would congeal. The rain kept coming down as she held her finger under the tap, in spouts, the rain, the waterspouts. And the string was loose. She couldn’t tie it with one hand. Perhaps I am affected, she said, playing Schumann and pretending to like Anna Karenina more than the Windsor Magazine, though I like it quite a lot. But if I were not affected I could tie a piece of string, or stand blood, and I can’t stand blood, the way Mrs Everett when she tore her leg.

It was nearly lunch-time, she saw. But she did not want any lunch. She thought she would like to cry. But it’s never much good crying on your own. That hill up there was grey, with a feathering of grey grass. In the spring it was green. She went up and lay on the hill in spring, that was a long way off, it was not spring, everything was a long way off.

Then she saw that the bleeding had stopped. I have been a fool, she said, as she wrapped up her hand again, but there was nobody here to see, that is one of the consolations of living alone. There was a pool of darkish blood on the table-top. But I don’t like blood, or iodine, I ought to have iodine, to keep it in the house.

So altogether she felt very much alone. The fire in the sitting-room was almost out. It was exhausted, she was exhausted, she felt. She would go down to the doctor’s and get him to bind up her hand, even if Mrs Halliday was cross to see her arrive in the middle of lunch. She would go down in spite of that. She would walk perhaps through
the dining-room, disturbing them at their lunch, and she would be glad to see them sitting there, because it was good to look at faces after you had cut your hand, after you had discovered you were not as self-supporting as you thought. So she put on her coat and she went down the hill, holding her hand inside the flap of her coat. She walked in the rain without minding. It did not seem very relevant, or the mud, if only she could get to the doctor’s house and see them sitting at their lunch. Passing people in the street you did not think, walking without a hat, and that man in a hat looking at your face.

When she got to the Hallidays’ Mrs Halliday came to the door. She was having a busy morning, she let you know. Her hair told you as much.

The doctor isn’t here, Mrs Halliday said. He’s up at Kambala. To see a case. He’s been there all night.

That was not helpful, to say the least.

But he ought to be back soon. He can’t be away much longer. If you would like to wait.

I’ll wait a little, Alys said.

Mrs Halliday took her into the doctor’s room.

There, she said.

Then she left her. It was Monday morning. There was such a lot to do.