Happy Valley Read Free

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 hadscreamed, 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 takinghis 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