Happy Valley by Patrick White

Walter’s eyes. Chinese eyes, said Ethel Quong with very definite bitterness. Ethel Quong was Walter’s wife, and before she had married Walter, before Margaret was born, she had been a housemaid at Government House. HowEthel married Walter Quong will keep till later on. It is sufficient to know that she is bitter about it, and that when she looked at Margaret she often said, your sins will always find you out. Only she did not think it was fair that she should pay for her sins on her own, she always insisted that Margaret should share the debt.
    And that is why Margaret had acquired the habit of looking down and closing her ears to unpleasantness. She did not hear what Emily and Gladys sang. She would go back to dinner at home, and she did not care, and Father would come in from the garage wearing overalls and make a lot of pleasant jokes. She found it difficult to connect Father in overalls with the things you did not think about and which made Mother bitter, because she had married a Chinaman, Walter Quong. It was too much to unravel, all this. And on the whole she was happy, helping Aunt Amy at the store, or going for a music lesson at Miss Browne’s. Only sometimes, walking home, she felt unhappy. There was a lot inside her that got churned up.
    There was a dull, mysterious moan in the telephone wires.
    Rodney Halliday no longer ran. He had passed the road that led to Andy Everett’s and Willy Schmidt’s. He felt larger now. He began to whistle. Stooping down, he pulled up his socks and glanced back down the road to see the others straggle along in little groups, preceded by Margaret Quong. He liked being alone. Only sometimes he didn’t, and then he thought about it a bit, and then he preferred to be alone.
    He looked from side to side of the road. The air wasvery sharp. In one of the paddocks a bull was serving a cow. He looked, and he looked away. He remembered the time— he was a good bit younger—when the dogs came into the yard, and his mother went red and shooed them away, and he had cried because she would not let them play. Mother said, later you’ll understand. And later he did. And it made you look sideways at the bull out of the corner of your eye. But of course you understood. A bull and a cow. He stopped at the side of the road and had a proper look. He would have liked to stay there by the fence and see it happen again. He jingled some pennies in his trouser pocket, and a shell he always carried about. But somebody was coming and perhaps they had seen him look. It was Margaret Quong, walking along the side of the road. If Margaret Quong had seen, as she must, then he felt ashamed. But she looked down at the ground.
    They both continued to walk along.
    He took a look at Margaret, at that funny black hair like a doll’s, and the eyes. He saw that she was almost crying, and that made him embarrassed too, because he didn’t know what to do, or say, or if he should do nothing, or what. But Margaret did not speak. It made him uncomfortable to see her cry.
    Margaret, he said.
    Yes?
    She did not look over from her side of the road.
    Look, he said.
    What?
    She turned her head, biting her cheek inside. She was like that picture in the encyclopaedia.
    I’ll give you that, he said.
    What is it?
    It’s a shell.
    They began to walk in the centre of the road. He held the shell in the palm of his hand. It was pink, of curious shape, folding like the bud of a flower with brown spots on the underneath. Margaret put out her finger and touched the shell.
    It’s pretty, she said.
    When we lived in Sydney, he said, there was a French woman used to come to teach me French. She gave me the shell. She said it came from the bottom of the sea.
    Really? said Margaret. How did she know?
    I don’t know. That’s what she said.
    It’s pretty all the same.
    Rodney put it into her hand. Then they walked along a bit. The mud splashed up on Margaret’s stockings. She began to wipe her nose.
    Her name was Madame Jacquet,