Happy Valley Read Free Page B

Botanical Gardens and there was a smell of old banana skins and squashed Moreton Bay figs. It was so easy to get sympathetic on a warm morning in the Botanical Gardens. You began to talk about ideals. It was Hilda’s sympathetic eyes. Later on you began to realize that sympathy in women was largely compound of stupidity and anxiety for the future. However, that was later on.
    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 ofthe 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 runon 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