Happy Valley (4 page)

If you could go up with the hawk you would see Happy Valley there in the hollow, the township I mean, still some way from the truck. The truck won’t get there till later on. But we have to go on a bit, only spatially, that is. For it is still pretty early, and not much activity trickling through the streets, not that there ever is in Happy Valley, except for the show or the races or polling day. So now there is very little doing, and we are looking down from above, and we are not particularly impressed by any beauty of design. Because somebody once built a house, I think it was probably old Quong, and someone else come along and built another, some little way off, just far enough to show that there was no love lost in the act. And it went on like that, just building here and there, without co-operation. There never was co-operation in Happy Valley, not even in the matter of living, or you might even say less in the
matter of living. In Happy Valley the people existed in spite of each other.

To go one step farther, the country existed also in spite of the town. It was not aware of it. There was no connecting link. Just as Oliver Halliday noticed when he got back from Europe, the country slept, inwardly intent on some secret war of passion or trying to separate the threads of old passions spent. This made the town seem very ephemeral. In summer when the slopes were a scurfy yellow and the body of the earth was very hot, lying there stretched out, the town, with its cottages of red and brown weatherboard, reminded you of an ugly scab somewhere on the body of the earth. It was so ephemeral. Some day it would drop off, leaving a pink, clean place underneath.

But that day has not arrived yet. And as it is not even summer, the town does not look so much like a scab, though most of the snow has melted to slush and you can see the country round about, and the road to Kambala, and the road to Moorang, and the less official road out to Glen Marsh, which is the Furlows’ place. Up at the top of the hill, where the Belpers live, there is a bright red water-tank. It is a nice bit of unconscious colour. I say unconscious because nobody thought about that sort of thing, not even Mrs Belper, who in spite of breeding dogs had her Artistic Side. She even did pokerwork in her spare time. But mostly at Happy Valley you just lived. That was unconscious too, but more unavoidable. You ate and slept and dusted and cooked and hung out the washing on Monday morning.

It was Monday morning now, so there were several lots of washing hanging out in the backyards and beginning to
look white against the dirty snow. Then the drizzle began to come, so you had to go out and gather your washing in. You shouted remarks on the weather over the fence, then billowed away. There wasn’t much else going on. A pounding noise came out of the blacksmith’s shop, and a smell of burning hoof. A pale little yellow sheep-dog bitch, with a collar several sizes too big, pointed a pink nose to the wind and trod delicately down the street.

I’m going up to Moriartys’, said Amy Quong.

At first Arthur said nothing at all. He never said much, but he knew that over the present case there was less to say than he usually said. He took up a bunch of liquorice straps and hung them on another nail.

I’ve said all this week I’m going to Moriartys’.

Arthur grunted and turned away.

Somebody’s got to go, she said.

Arthur dusted a flitch of bacon. The texture was a kind of smooth-rough. It was also pleasant to smell. The whole store was pleasant to smell if you had a taste for incongruities. That is the particular advantage of a general store. Arthur nervously dusted the bacon and said:

Somebody’s got to go.

He was small and brown and gentle. He had a soft, gentle voice. He didn’t like people, except Amy, who was his sister, and that is why he did not want to go to Moriartys’, because he did not like people, though he knew he ought to go. Amy would go to Moriartys’. She usually went. He looked at her slowly out of a pair of eyes that most people in town thought queer. There was a white rim near the edge of each iris. The iris was brown. So the general effect
reminded you of marbles, the superior glass taws that you kept in a bag by themselves. The children were a bit afraid of Arthur Quong on account of his eyes. If they came into the shop they hoped they would encounter Amy, who was also small and gentle, but with a black bun at the back of her head and without the white rings in her eyes.

Amy was also more European. They were only half Chinese. Their father, old Quong, had taken a poor Irish girl, who was the mother of Amy and Arthur, and of Walter Quong, but Amy and Arthur did not speak about Walter much. And now old Quong was dead, and the Irish woman he married, she died first, because she hadn’t much vitality. But old Quong lived a long time. He had come into the country with a bundle on his back, and sold things to the miners at Kambala, bootlaces and things, laughing a lot and being cheerful, and they liked him up at Kambala and showed him how to wash for gold. So old Quong sometimes washed for gold, but he continued to sell things to the miners, and then he put up a hut at Happy Valley. The miners used to get off the coach and talk to Quong on the way down. Now the hut was a weatherboard building with an upper story and General Store painted on the front. This happened about seven years before old Quong died.

You shouldn’t’ve let her have that ribbon last week, said Amy.

All right, said Arthur, you would have thought sulkily. All right, he said, we’ll leave it at that.

But he wasn’t sulky. He just didn’t want to think of ribbons and things like that, or of what Mrs Moriarty owed. It was Amy who ran the store. Arthur thought of
bigger things. The hall where they had the picture show, that was one of Arthur’s ideas, and he speculated in land, and he had a racehorse in a stable out at the back. The horse was a neat bay colt that stood deep in straw all day and neighed if you went across the yard. Arthur Quong spent most of the day going across the yard. He squatted in the corner of the stable, or rubbed down the horse’s back with a slow and gentle purr to match the delicate progress of his hand. But he hissed when he finished off on the flank, he gave a sharp electrical flick, making a pattern on the horse’s flank, he quivered with a wiry intensity standing up on the balls of his feet. He loved the colt. He put his hand on the horse’s neck, something almost emotional in his touching the muscular neck, a tautness in his body, a tautness also in the horse that arose from the conjunction of skin and hide. He wanted to rest his head against the horse, and close his eyes that were no longer brown and gentle, but brown and sharp.

The Quongs also had a big new Buick which stayed in the garage most of the time because they seldom went out. I can’t see the use of that car, said Mr Belper grudgingly. People used to make guesses at how much the Quongs had got. You never knew. You never knew with Chows. And this was a source of bitterness. Because when a man has money and you think it’s probably a lot, not that you’ve ever found out, it’s a constant source of bitterness. At least, in Happy Valley it was that way.

Amy Quong put on her mackintosh. She wore a brown skirt with a blouse, and black shoes that laced up, with the laces dangling in a bow. She also wore gold-rimmed
spectacles. Taking an umbrella from the back room, she prepared to go into the street.

These Moriartys, murmured Amy Quong, that voice blurred and indeterminate like the corners of the shop.

Walking up the street, she held the umbrella to shield her face from the rain pitching on a slant. It was muddy in the street, but not very far to where the Moriartys lived. Amy walked with short steps, plumping into the mud. She smiled a little because of the way Arthur looked when she told him off. Arthur was one of the passions in her life, of which there were three, very deep and difficult to extricate. But there is no point in taking out Amy’s passions in the street, and, besides, she had come to Moriartys’ door. To the back door, that is. You went round to the back.

Good morning, Miss Quong, said Gertie Ansell, the girl that helped Mrs Moriarty in the house. She wore a pale blue woollen dress and her hands hung down, red and blunt.

I want to see Mrs Moriarty, said Amy Quong.

Yes, Miss Quong, said Gertie.

She went back into the house.

A brown, feeble hen was pecking at the ground just inside the wash-house that was across the yard. It was a poor layer, Amy felt, you could tell that by its comb. The mangle looked as if it was broken, gaping there with that chemise hanging half-way out.

Oh, Miss Quong, said Gertie, coming back, Mr Moriarty’s down at the school. I’m afraid he won’t be back till lunch. I’m ever so sorry, she said, simpering a little and rubbing her dress.

I want to see Mrs Moriarty, said Amy.

Oh.

The girl stood in the doorway rubbing her dress.

You’d better come in, she said, but she seemed uncertain as if—well, it wasn’t her fault after all.

Amy waited in the front room. It was rather pink. She put her umbrella in a corner, standing it against the wall. Then she sat down to wait. On the centre table there was a cyclamen in a big silver lustre bowl that caught the light and gave out reflections of the objects in the room, all of them a bit distorted, the lampshades drawn down into nightcaps, long and pink. It was a lovely bowl. She had to get up and touch it because it was so lovely, and the reflections there, she had never seen anything so lovely before. Her breath made a cloud of mist on the lustre surface. I wouldn’t mind having that, she said.

Because, after Arthur, you might say that Amy’s passion was things; she would have called them things herself, and she had a number of things, the lids of scallop-shells and a Chinese dressing-gown that she bought at a shop near the Central Station in Sydney. She lived in a kind of mystical attachment to her things; she lived with them in the cocoon of custom that led her to dust them, to take them up and put them down. And she wanted more; she was always anxious to add a thread to the soft and necessary structure of the cocoon.

She gave a little sigh and sat down again to look at the bowl. She would have put it in her room under the picture of the Virgin Mary, and she would have stood a tin inside and burnt incense there. She liked the smell. She lay on her bed on a Sunday afternoon and smelt the smell of incense
and looked at the picture of the Virgin Mary that hung near a crucifix in varnished oak. Incense made her close her eyes. She lay on her bed on the cotton quilt and there was a strange, beautiful atmosphere that she could not explain, only that it was bound up with the Virgin Mary and her things, and Arthur was pottering about in the yard, perhaps carrying feed to the horse. So on Sunday afternoon the three threads of Amy Quong’s passion became tangled in a complex knot that she did not know how to untie. She did not want to, only to close her eyes.

The cyclamen in the lustre bowl sprawled in wide, voluptuous curves.

Yes? asked Mrs Moriarty, opening the door.

She did not waste a good-morning on a Chow, you didn’t beat about the bush, especially if you knew that the Chow had come with the inevitable and tiresome demand.

I’m sorry, she said to Amy. You see, I haven’t had time to dress. Working about the house in the morning, it spoils your clothes. Gertie, she called back through the door, don’t you dare forget that steak. These girls, she said to Amy, you can’t call them servants at all.

Mrs Moriarty was, in fact, not dressed, or only half. She only explained to Amy because she didn’t know what to say. She had a kind of pout that was turning from charm to fat, and you had to admit that Mrs Moriarty was fat, even if her admirers called her plump. She was little and pink, with the pink pout underneath a lace cap, and there was the ribbon she had bought from Quongs’ about a week ago. Sometimes she said she was thirty-two and sometimes
thirty-three, but that is only by the way.

I’ve come about the five pounds, said Amy, looking down at the floor.

Oh, yes. Yes. Is it five pounds?

Yes, said Amy, looking at the floor.

Dear, said Mrs Moriarty, the way these things mount up!

She stood by the mantelpiece. She was wearing a skirt, and a pink jacket, a bed-jacket perhaps, for there was a swan’s-down round the neck. It was fastened across her bust with a paste brooch.

I wouldn’t’ve come, Amy said, only—only the time before…

Mrs Moriarty frowned, because having her up on the mat like this, and a Chow at that, but it was all you could expect from a place like Happy Valley, why Ernest had ever brought her there, when they could have lived in Sydney in a flat. So she pouted and frowned, and picked at a spot or two of egg that had dried in the region of the paste brooch. It was very silent in the front room, only the silly tick of a brown mahogany clock that someone had given Ernest for a wedding present, they had made it clear that the clock was for Ernest, and she hated it, she wanted a French gilt clock like her sister had, only that one wasn’t French.

Let me see now what I can do, said Mrs Moriarty, delving down apparently into the depths of her mind, and the sigh gave you to understand it was a considerable depth.

The Chow woman was saying something about small profits and quick returns, or small returns, or something, or something. It was a lie. Mrs Moriarty smouldered. The
way they let Mrs Furlow and Mrs Belper and that doctor’s wife run up bills, it was humiliating, she said, just because she wasn’t one of the Upper Three, but the schoolmaster’s wife, and the way that old Belper woman ran about smelling of dogs, poking in her nose, that was what made her sick. She tapped with a finger on the mantelpiece. You couldn’t help it if your face got lines. She must remember to write to Sydney for that lotion, perhaps they would give her a bottle on trial. And the Quong woman was sitting there, and she would have to give her a pound, so perhaps the postal note was more than she could afford, or go into Moorang on Saturday, or…

Mrs Moriarty fished out her bag; it was poked down behind a pink satin cushion, not on account of burglars, but because it usually got there on its own. It hurt her to part with a whole pound.

There, she said. There is a pound.