Happy Valley by Patrick White Read Free Book Online

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.

4
    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