Happy Valley by Patrick White Read Free Book Online Page A

fifteen—and she stayed at a convent for four years, and learnt the piano and needlework. This did not worry her father, because he was too busy speculating in land and being a character in pubs. He said, all right, if Alys wantsto be a lady and learn needlework in a convent, all right. So it suited everyone, especially Alys, who got on well with the nuns without being particularly tractable, for she did not want to become a nun herself. She did not know exactly what she wanted to become. She read books. She thought it would be nice to fall in love, if only she knew how to go about it, and there was not much opportunity in a convent.
    She read a lot of books, and she read poetry, particularly Tennyson. When she was seventeen she had the reputation of being pretty well read and rather a mysterious person, which pleased her a lot. She began to cultivate a mysterious look. She wrote a concentrated backhand with the greatest ease. And then she thought she would change her name. Because she had been christened “Alice,” and that of course did not go at all with mysterious looks, so she began to sign herself “Alys” Browne, which was more to the point, she felt. But that was a good many years ago. It was a long time since she had stopped to write in a concentrated backhand, and in Happy Valley there was nobody to appreciate mysterious looks. Only the name “Alys” remained, had become a habit, she really did not know why. It was on a little brass tablet at her front gate, A LYS B ROWNE , P IANO-FORTE.
    Teaching the piano at Happy Valley put her in a pretty good position. She could have gone about with Mrs Belper if she liked. And it was partly because she didn’t that Mrs Belper said she was neurotic. But Alys liked to be independent. When she left the convent—she was then nineteen—she went to be a companion to Mrs Stopford-Champernowne, an old lady who did tatting and snored. Mrs Stopford-Champernowne should by rights have beena bitch, but she was nothing of the sort, and Alys was very happy there, living in Sydney, and picking up the old lady’s tatting, and practically running the house. She even got rather fat. But she did not feel particularly independent. She thought she would go to California. So she went to a shipping office and got some pamphlets. But she did not go to California; she sat with the pamphlets in her lap in the evening at Mrs Stopford-Champernowne’s, and she began to ask herself if she knew what independence was. She could not altogether decide. Sometimes she thought it was something to do with money, and sometimes something more abstract, more spiritual. She had read a poem by Henley, something about My head is bloody but unbowed. It was all very difficult, what was she going to do.
    It was about this time that she got the wire to say her father had died in the ditch. This was disconcerting. She began to feel she was alone, and not independent, or was independence being alone, or what. Butcher Browne left her very little money, so she was not independent in that respect. Some acres of land near Kambala and a weatherboard house at Happy Valley, that was what she got. She began to grow thin again, consoling herself by saying it was better that way, she was thin by nature. She made herself a new dress to celebrate the change, and said to herself when she put it on, I was falling asleep in all that fat, I look a hundred times better thin, though I am really rather plain.
    Here I am, she said to herself, Alys Browne, thin and plain. I cannot call my hair anything but nondescript. My eyes are not so bad, though of course that is only an excuse. I have nothing to stop me from going to California, exceptthat I cannot make the effort, and after all it is such a long way, and they say the Tasman Sea is rough.
    In the end she went to Mrs Stopford-Champernowne and said:
    Mrs Stopford-Champernowne, my father has left me a little money and a house at Happy Valley. That is where I come from, you know. I