Happy Valley (11 page)

I was in the yard, she said, playing with the chopper by the meat block. And there was a turkey came into the yard and I got frightened. I wanted to frighten it away. It was blowing out its chest. It looked so fierce. And then I dropped the chopper and cut my knee.

She was out of breath. It sounded silly to tell Miss Browne something that wasn’t to the point, only it was, and Miss Browne did not know.

Don’t let’s talk about it. We mustn’t be morbid, Miss Browne said.

Margaret was not sure what morbid meant, only that Miss Browne objected, and it sounded like a hot day, the
sounds in the yard after dinner, or a thunderstorm before it broke.

Look, I’ve brought you some bull’s-eyes, she said.

Bull’s-eyes? Margaret! said Miss Browne. When I was with Mrs Stopford-Champernowne…

There is a kind of past experience that always serves as a point for anecdotal departure, and for Alys Browne, Mrs Stopford-Champernowne was just such a past experience, a signpost pointing to a region in which Alys Browne was the heroine. And she liked to talk about herself. She liked to talk about the past, because it was something achieved and distinct, if only in small ways, like walking in Rushcutters Bay Park, or buying bull’s-eyes at a shop in Darlinghurst, and these events had crystallized, they were not like the future, formless and volatile. Margaret also liked Miss Browne to talk about herself, because in listening she became an inhabitant of that same corner in time, the recollected past, she knew the park, she knew the cupboard where they put away brown paper and string, she sat with Miss Browne in a window-seat and the Salvation Army played on Sunday evenings in the street below. Kneeling on the floor they became drunk with anecdote. The clock hung up its purpose in the sitting-room, did not exist.

We must get to work, sighed Alys Browne, because it needed an effort to extricate yourself from the past.

Then they sat at the piano, and Margaret did her scales, and Miss Browne was beating with her hand, and Margaret frowned as a note escaped control, and she wanted to play well. She was not naturally musical. Only the piano was Miss Browne. They were trying a Beethoven sonata. And
Margaret frowned. Miss Browne bent over her shoulder and made a note on the sheet. The pencil quavered in the bandaged hand. And you played with feeling, you wanted the whole of what you felt to come rushing out in a sudden chord, because the hand was a note in music or a link with Beethoven, was Miss Browne.

Alys Browne sat with a bull’s-eye in her mouth, wondered why she had become a music teacher, because it was like leading somebody in the dark. It was a false pretence. She had said very glibly: I shall teach music. She did not know what it meant. Sometimes her audacity frightened her. But nobody knew what frightened her, there was that consolation at least, just as nobody knew she had wanted to cry when she cut her hand. The bull’s-eye was warm and soothing in her mouth. And the way the doctor had spoken, he was rude, she had almost cried as the iodine plunged down into the cut, he was watching her. She was watching Margaret Quong make a mess of a Beethoven sonata. She could not help her much. And Margaret sat receiving assistance that almost did not exist, only for Margaret she would be an endless well of experience, the child would not know how shallow this was. The doctor knew. He looked at her and knew there was nothing there, she had felt it, he made her feel inadequate and naïve. There was a hard efficiency in the doctor’s face, like the face of someone who does things well facing somebody who. She turned over a page.

It is beautiful, felt Margaret Quong, she is beautiful, if only my hair was not quite so straight. I am nothing at all, sighed Alys Browne, he made me feel I am nothing at
all, and why did I think his eyes were grey, or look, but you had to look at somebody in the street, even if he meant nothing at all.

May I come in? he said.

He was standing there at the door. He had shaved. They turned round on the music stool, the two heads in the circle of light.

I don’t want to interrupt, he said. I was passing. I thought I’d see how your hand.

Oh, said Alys Browne. My hand. You’d better sit down. We shan’t be long, she said.

He was sitting down by the table, taking a book, or no, it was the Windsor Magazine. She knew it was this. She knew she wished it was not. And then she was ashamed. She could feel that her face was red. But she would have liked him to know that she read Tolstoi too, even if he thought it was affectation, he would surely think it that.

A little slower, Margaret, she said.

Margaret was taut, her back. She could not play. She would never play, with the doctor sitting behind.

Have a bull’s-eye, said Alys Browne, and she made her voice as nonchalant as she could.

I think I’ll go, said Margaret. I promised I wouldn’t be late.

She got down off the stool. Miss Browne was looking at the wall.

Oh, she said, and her voice was vague. There’s still a quarter of an hour. But of course we can always make it up.

Miss Browne was looking at the wall. Her hands lay in her lap. And there was a shadow on the wall, grotesque,
where Margaret’s head hung down, her hair hanging straight and her body drawn out into the shape of a post.

I promised Mother, Margaret said.

Don’t let me interrupt.

You’re not interrupting, said Alys, and her shadow turned.

Miss Browne wore her hair drawn back, looking over at the doctor who sat in a chair, because he had spoken, looking at a magazine. And there was nothing to say, but go to the door, Margaret trailing her shadow like a post, heavy as a post.

Good night, she said.

Oh, good night, Margaret, said Miss Browne.

Margaret opened the door and went outside. He was sitting in the chair. She looked back and his jaw was swollen with a bull’s-eye, his shadow bunched on the wall. I shall come again, she said, and we shall make up the quarter, many quarters of an hour. Then she went slowly down the steps and her feet were stubborn on the frozen path. Withdrawing into distance the shape of door dimmed, out of focus as you looked back. Her throat was tight, cold.

That silly magazine! said Alys Browne.

He did not hear. She picked up the music sheet. She wished that he had not come. She did not think she would have very much to say. She felt about seventeen, or younger than that, because reading Tennyson at seventeen, they had said she was old for her age, and looking at herself in the glass she was very wise.

Why? he said.

She laughed.

Why not?

Somebody said she was enigmatic, which meant, she knew, that you made something of nothing, a word or a glance, helping out your own inadequacies, but the doctor saw through.

Because man must cater for his imperfections. After all, he said, there’s a reality about his imperfections it’d be a pity to deny.

She could interpret that how she liked. He threw down the magazine, conscious of his own pomposity. He looked at her, saw her floundering, and said:

Well now, what about your hand?

Oh, that’s all right, she said. That was nothing at all.

She was moving about the room. She was patting things. He had put her to flight, and now she was defending herself, moving about with uneasy grace, a hardness in her voice that perhaps he ought to soften somehow, allow her to play her part. Because after all if what he said about man and his imperfections, and it had been damnably pompous, he knew, she ought to be allowed to play her part, and he would sit with his hands on his paunch, acquired to match his pomposity, and listen and applaud. Then suddenly he realized it was difficult, and perhaps he could no longer make a contact, sitting at home and talking to Hilda. Other people don’t play much of a part in our lives, said Hilda, with the conviction of a knitting needle, we don’t need them, she said. So it was rather difficult. It made you sit on the edge of your chair.

How long, how long have you been at Happy Valley? he said.

She shrugged her shoulders.

A long time. Quite a long time.

He had spent a long time diagnosing the disturbances in people’s bodies, that now had become bodies or a source of behaviour. I have got pretty smug, he said. He sat with the bull’s-eye in his cheek trying to think of something to say, but in the end he would most likely go away, admitting he was a failure, say, it is so much easier to be professional.

I used to play a bit once, he said. I used to play Bach.

Oh, she said. Bach.

She looked at him sitting there. He was rather absurd with that bull’s-eye in his mouth. He was not so formidable and going grey.

I think Beethoven means more to me. More, more feeling, she said. And depth.

But perhaps he would see through that too. She blushed. Seeing or not, he had gone across to the piano and was looking through the music lying there.

But you also play Schumann, he said.

Why not?

She had said it before, as she said it knowing, also that it meant nothing, or acted as a defence.

I mean, why shouldn’t I play Schumann? Because I like him. We can’t keep to the heights, she said.

God forbid!

He sat down and began to play something from the Kinderszenen. There was a kind of sweet enervation about the music of Schumann, just going on and on, and it was easy to succumb, as she probably succumbed, sitting up here alone and playing Schumann to herself. Hilda sat in
the Botanical Gardens on an iron seat. He bent over and touched her cheek. He said he would write a poem. There was a gentle titillation of the senses in the morning sun, in Schumann’s music. How soft you went if you gave yourself a chance. His hands became still on the keys, his shoulders bowed. She was watching him.

Why don’t you go on? she said.

Not now.

Man must cater for his imperfections.

He looked at her and smiled. She was smiling. She was standing by the fireplace, and her body had lost its rigidity, and he was looking into her, at a core that he had not noticed as she winced in the dispensary and pitied herself.

We all say lots of silly things, he said. I ought to be getting home.

He had come to look at her hand. He was the doctor manipulating a bandage. Hilda would send out the bill.

There’s one thing I’ve sometimes wondered, he said. Why are you “Alys” Browne?

I think I wanted to be different, she said, and she was surprised, because her voice did not falter, because she did not want to look down. She looked at him and said:

That’s the only reason, I suppose.

It’s a pretty honest reply.

You don’t leave many loopholes, she said.

When he had gone she sat down, she was upright, she was firmer, something had happened to her, she felt. As if her body, and perhaps her mind, had suddenly grown taut as he touched her hand, tightened the bandage, touching some nerve that had always hung slack. What is it, she
said, and why am I sitting like this, waiting, like sitting with pamphlets in my lap about California, and then not going, I never went, there was no significance in it at all, and what am I waiting for? It was one of those questions you could not answer. And why California now? she said. I don’t want to think. She went into the bedroom and lay on the bed in the dark, against cold sheets, and promptly thought harder than before, or the mind wandered in its fashion, like Schumann, and she asked herself if Vronsky or Karenin, if either of these was parallel. But that was no good. She lay on her back looking upwards into the dark. Then she began to realize how cold she was.

Where have you been, Oliver? said Hilda.

I went up to see Miss Browne. To look at her hand.

Hilda yawned.

It’s late, she said. Rodney’s been having a dream. It’s that school. He’s unhappy there.

Oliver went into the dispensary. He did not light the lamp. He stood there in the dark. Then he wondered why he had gone into the dispensary, there was something, but of course it was Birkett, and Hilda was sitting outside waiting for him to write. Rodney lay in bed afraid. Rodney was his son. He would write and they would go away, his wife and two children, the situation enforced by their going away. That was a reality, not playing Schumann in a mauve dress. Hilda and the children were all that he had ever wanted, he said, he wanted no more than affection, they were fond, they were happy, and he would write to Birkett. There was still a flavour of peppermint in his mouth. She was after all
a human being, very silly perhaps, but looking at her he was glad she was silly and that underneath the silliness there was a core, an “Alice” Browne. But it was quite irrelevant, this. Only it made you a little surprised to discover a human being. You got out of touch. And Rodney was his son, was a human being, was more than a biological fact. He must try to remember that. He must not go off at a tangent into a world of his own, until a face pointed to the possibility of human beings.

He lit the lamp and sat down to write to Birkett. He would not think about a face that was in no way remarkable. Only that she had leant against the fireplace and looking into her face had been to look into an avenue that made him feel suddenly unfulfilled and cold.

Mr Belper had just said that Australia was the country of the future, he said it as if it were a fact that had not struck anyone before, the discovery was his. He sat there in his chair, a kind of Captain Cook of platitude, only the natives made no stir, Moriarty was almost asleep, his wife was a plaintive yawn. Mr Belper loved to talk about things in a general way, things like natural resources, the national physique, and the canalization of surplus energy. Moriarty half woke up and drew his attention to the irrigation area round Mildura, but Belper coughed, and pretended he had not heard, anyway Moriarty was half asleep. Mrs Moriarty dug her finger-nails into the sofa and yawned. She was past the stage of putting up a hand. And take industry, Mr Belper said, now that new industries were opening up, which by the way reminded him of the Salvage Bay Pearl Fisheries and that was something he could recommend if Moriarty
should think of a flutter, with 640,000 5s. shares issue at par, on application 1s. on allotment 4, a very attractive speculative enterprise that he could recommend to anyone, he was in touch with the company, was interested himself, and he’d bring along a prospectus and let Moriarty have a look, because he did not believe in pushing a man in a direction he didn’t want to go.

But what can a man do on a miserable screw like mine? Moriarty said, sitting up with a fretful wheeze.

His lips were thin and blue. There was a suggestion of dry mucous in the corners of his mouth.

Now if I could get that post up on the North Shore, he said. I write. I’ve written how many times.

Yes, said his wife, it’s a crying shame. And Ernest’s health. Look, Mr Belper, he writes and writes, and what does the Board do?

For Mrs Moriarty the attitude of the Board of Education was a case of personal animosity, and she was the martyr, living here in Happy Valley listening to Mr Belper talk, if only he would go away.

You might be a lot worse off, Mr Belper said, his voice very comfortable and rich with phlegm.

Mrs Moriarty pouted and looked away. It was all very well. A great swollen gas-bag like that living in a brick house, it was all very well for the bank manager to talk, because he had a position, not a penance, and the schoolmaster was nothing at all, did not count, and she was as good as anyone, whatever that Mrs Belper might say with her red face and her coming-it-over-you ways, that told you about her cousin who was secretary at Government House,
if you liked to believe that, she didn’t for one.

Why should I be ignored? Moriarty said.

He shuffled with his slippers on the floor, his hands restive and complaining in his lap.

Don’t you worry, Ernest. Mark me, she said, there’ll come a change.

Though what the change would be, meaningful as it might sound, she really did not know. She wouldn’t let Belper get away with it though.

Mr Belper knocked out his pipe, leaning forward red and apoplectic, deciding it was time to leave. He had said what he wanted to say on the future of the country, the national physique, and the canalization of energy. It bored him when the conversation grew particular and people began to grouse. He did not like people who groused. He and Cissie never did that, removed as they were from all source of complaint. They were large and red and comfortable. They lived at the bank. And everyone called them Good Sorts. This, like most reputations, required some keeping up, though none perhaps to the same extent as the spirit of the paper cap. It became a lifelong enterprise, being a Good Sort.

You’re not going, Mr Belper? said Mrs Moriarty, surprised.

Yes, he said. The old woman. She’ll be wondering what I’m at.

Dear Mrs Belper! Mrs Moriarty sighed. She spoils you, really she does.

Bursting out of his clothes, and that woman, dirtcommon, in silk jumpers swaying about, a wonder she
had the nerve, if it wasn’t to put a stamp on a letter, and Ernest was clever, he had a mind if you drew it out, not like Joe Belper, coming and talking for hours on end till you didn’t know if your head, without a cachet in the house, she fancied herself of course because that cousin at Government House, well, if you liked to, and Joe if you like, but she didn’t, not in a public-house, and then come to the back door with her, oh, Mrs Moriarty, I’m collecting things for the church bazaar, as if you was a working woman where front doors don’t exist.

Night, Moriarty, Belper said. Keep the flag flying, eh? You’ll have to try the Board again. But what’ll we do without him? That’s what I say to the wife. Who’ll keep them up to it at the school?

Moriarty did not answer that. The Inspector told him that the standard of intelligence at Happy Valley was the lowest in the state. He wondered if Belper knew.

He sat slumped down in his chair when Belper had gone, alone in the room with the ticking of the brown mahogany clock that the Smiths had given him when he married Vic. He was going to have an attack. At night he usually had an attack, and that powder he burned made him sick, the fumes, as he leant over the tin and the smoke went into his lungs and he dropped back exhausted on the bed. He would burn a powder now if he had the strength to drag as far as the cupboard where it was kept. But Vic would come. He closed his eyes, intent on a series of previous attacks, that time in the bus, or at geography, or the party at the Chubbs’ when everybody gathered round and it was almost a distinction to be asthmatic, with Vic holding his
hand and saying, it’s always like this, Mrs Chubb, it’ll pass if only you give it time.

Well, said Mrs Moriarty, that man has a blooming cheek. Dropping ash all over the carpet too. He might as well spend his evenings in a public-house.

She had come back into the room and was moving about in a formal attempt to restore an order that she liked to think Mr Belper had dispelled.

Oh dear, she said, you’re not going to have an attack?

He nodded his head, his eyes closed, waiting for sympathy.

She looked at him and frowned, as if it was too bad, and it always came at night, and she couldn’t put up with it, she was human after all. She looked at Ernest and her whole life was a series of attacks. She looked at him in his chair, the man she had married; who was so distinguished behind his moustache, licking stamps at Daisy and Fred’s. But she hadn’t bargained for this. It’s a wonder I’m not a virgin, she felt, and distinction is all very well. But he’s thin, with that moustache getting into the tea, and those long pants he wears, says he feels cold, and fancy a man with pants showing above his socks. She punched at a cushion and frowned.

It’s too bad, she frowned.

But I can’t help it, Vic.

No, of course you can’t.

The cyclamen in its lustre bowl sprawled in wide, voluptuous curves and brushed the nap of the tablecloth. She saw her face in the bowl, looking out of shape, and pink like the flower of a cyclamen. It was funny that yesterday
the cyclamen had stuck up straight, always changing, sometimes as straight as a poker and tight in the mouth, almost spinsterly, and now it lolled, couldn’t hold up its head, it looked sort of abandoned with its droopy leaves.

Ernest said:

I’ll be getting to bed.

He began to pull himself out of the chair. He sat on the edge, his mouth open, the breath harsh on his moving lips.

Vic Moriarty looked at her husband in an access of compassion. You could see he was sick, and it made you ashamed sometimes the way your thoughts, but you could not help your thoughts lolling, those droopy leaves, wanting something else and wasn’t you human but nobody had ever called you bad, except perhaps that Mrs Enderby next to Daisy’s because the postman, he had a drooping lip, and the door closed and you stood behind it with the letters, you were all right, then Ernest came and you were all right, till the day I die, only sometimes something happened and that bloody plant drooping all over the table, you must get Ernest to bed, his poor face, and that powder, you would not sleep for hours, the smell, and he must sleep with window shut.

Come along, Ern, she said, putting a plump and momentarily tender hand into his armpit and helping him up. You poor thing, she said. It’s cruel.

He leant on her. He had always leant on her, and somehow she had buoyed him up, pneumatically, helped him along the passage, or composed a sentence for a letter that he was writing to the Board. He walked slowly with his head bowed. His chest was tight, removed, but there was a kind of exultant pain in breath torn with an effort from
the lungs, and she was supporting him.

We’ll get you into bed. And then you can burn your powder, she said.

He sat down on the counterpane. There were still six or seven essays on the Cow and Her Relationship with Man that he could not, not correct. He said:

Vic, there’s still…

Don’t you talk, she said.

He lumped down and let her take the slippers off his feet. The Cow gives us What. The Board of Education in how many ha’penny stamps he’d spent. But there was always Vic.

Vic Moriarty bustled about the room. God, she tried her best, she did, nobody could tell her that she didn’t make a good wife, fetching and carrying and handing pity on a plate, and of course she was sorry for him, she sat and watched him wheeze till it hurt, was what any normal person would call a sacrificing wife, those slippers she had made for Ernest who was like a stray dog, that little shivering whippet she found, poor Tiny that died of a chill and she nursed him in blankets, and cried, it was when she was trying that stuff on her lashes which ran when she cried, till Ernest said, and she said I must make the best of meself Ernest and you can’t complain of that, because she was good in deed, only a thought sometimes slipped, and she defied anyone to have a mind free from recreation, she did.

God, I’m tired! she said when they had got into bed and the fumes of the powder, mingled with the quenched candlewick, had invaded all the corners of the dark.

He patted her hand. He lay in bed and tried not to
wheeze so that she would be able to sleep. That water dripping in the schoolroom maundered through his head. His head was confused with fume of smoke, with the crumpled train of cows, their horns tilting at the basin on the schoolroom floor.

I had to give that Chow a pound. Oh dear, she said, we’ll have to get the mattress teased.

It was funny the way that plant sometimes stuck up straight, like an old maid that had listened to a dirty joke by mistake. She sat by Ernest in the evening and tried to take an interest in his stamps. He was holding her hand in bed, perhaps asleep, and she wished she knew if he was asleep, so as she could take away her hand. That Walter Quong driving down the street in his car and waving a yellow hand that touched her in Moorang as she wanted to cross the street. They said a Chinaman, who was it said that, it must have been Fred, the dirty brute. She took away her hand from Ernest. She thought he must be asleep. Lying there, my hubby’s blue, can’t help that, because he’s asthmatic, the poor soul. And that young chap went up to the pub, turning to look back and wave, as if, well, somebody noticed anyway, and Gertie Ansell said he was the new man for Furlows’ because her brother was down at Quongs’ when the truck, he was a man anyway, water the plant to-morrow, not much, perhaps that was why it sprawled, like that time that chap at a party Daisy had on the couch, touched his muscles, he had red hair waving back down the street, and Daisy turned on the light, said, Fred, oh go on, you couldn’t help it, go mad if you didn’t, and what was he doing going out to Furlows’, that girl there dolled up to
kill, and you never knew if Vic oh what Ernest I am almost asleep asleepernest.

Stabbed in sleep then legs apart licked a stamp or went up the hill on the curve the moon played Schumann it was chalk chalk in his bones or heartburn as he tossed the ticket took a train Rodney Rodney there on the map is Queensland yellow for Sun A for Andy when it blew blood like the spermwhale she stretched out her arm that clove white a slice of the darkness she put up her face with pins drawn back into a roll and then crackled the arpeggio you could always tack down the hem and write and write to blot out another purpose if you write.

So on, so on, with the diversity of detail and the pathetically compulsory unity of purpose that informs a town asleep. Smoke mounts faintly skywards from the chimney-pots. Dream is broken, turns, sighs. She said, she said, the wind. The cat walking on the water-butt touches with her cold pad a star, claiming it as her own, like Happy Valley extinguished by the darkness, achieving a momentary significance.