Happy Valley by Patrick White Read Free Book Online Page B

have decided to go back to Happy Valley to live. I shall give piano lessons. And then I can also sew.
    Very well, my dear, said Mrs Stopford-Champernowne, if you’ve made up your mind. I suppose you know best.
    So it was all settled. Alys was rather surprised. It had settled itself, this going back to Happy Valley, she did not know exactly why. She could not explain. But anyway, she told herself, I shall be more independent giving music lessons, more independent than picking up tatting and walking with Mrs Stopford-Champernowne in Rushcutters Bay Park.
    She had been back now what seemed a long time, it might have been six years, or was it seven? Nothing had happened to her. She felt she was just the same, though of course she wasn’t. There had in fact been a young man in Sydney, a young man in a bank, who brought her chocolates, but she had never cared for chocolates, and there was nothing in the young man to make her start to like them better. There was nothing in that, she said. And, after all, falling in love was a secondary process. She might still go to California. She had sold her paddocks up near Kambala and had given the money to Mr Belper to invest. There were no dividends yet, but when there were she mightgo to California. But why California? It suddenly struck her like that. And she did not know. Perhaps that was a secondary process too. Perhaps she did not want to go away, or wanting to go away had got itself into her head as a substitute for something else. Sometimes she stopped to think about that, but she could not discover a satisfactory answer. Satisfactory answers are generally scarce.
    In the meantime there was plenty to do. Before the dances she made dresses for the girls. They came up to see her, bringing their patterns, and she generally helped them to decide whether it was to be taffeta or something else. She also did most of the sewing for Mrs Furlow at Glen Marsh. Mrs Furlow drove herself in, perhaps with Sidney, bringing anything she wanted done. And it was a kind of royal progress, Mrs Furlow’s visit, because she was the wife of the richest man in the neighbourhood. But Sidney Furlow, who was her daughter, usually sat in the car. She had a very red mouth and had been to a finishing school.
    If I were Sidney Furlow, Alys sometimes said. Then she stopped. Sometimes you want to go on being yourself, if only for very inadequate reasons, as if you know you will suddenly turn into a direction that is inevitable and you only have to wait. So she continued to sew and give music lessons. She could not play very well, but well enough. And sometimes she played for her own pleasure, she played Schumann, and after that Chopin, and then Beethoven with anxiety. But she liked Schumann best, because he made her feel slightly melancholy, and she just went on and on into a mental twilight and a finale of original chords.
    She read too. She had started some of the Russians, Anna Karenina, and Turgeniev, but Tennyson sounded funny now, she could not read him any more. She liked to sit down at tea, and take off her shoes, and read a chapter of Anna Karenina, though sometimes she found it a bit of an effort and lapsed to the Windsor Magazine. Tolstoi was interesting though. She had spilt some tea on the seventysecond page. It gave the book a comfortable, intimate appearance, and she liked it better after that, as if she had always had it with her and had read it several times.
    This was Alys Browne. She had got up early on the morning that Dr Halliday delivered the publican’s wife, that Hagan came to Happy Valley in the truck, and that Mrs Moriarty had been visited by Amy Quong. She did not know why she got up early, but she pushed back the bedclothes and got up. There was snow on the ground. And later in the morning it began to rain. It will rain and rain, and I shall not go out, and to-morrow perhaps it will rain, she said, and I am perfectly happy, why, she said.
    It was then that she cut her hand. She was