Happy Valley by Patrick White Page A

Rodney said.
    Margaret looked down at Madame Jacquet’s shell.
    When I’m twelve I’m going to go to a proper school, said Rodney. Father says I shall be a boarder. I’ll only come home for the holidays. But now I’m only nine. I’ll have to learn Latin as well as French. Because I’m going to be a doctor. You have to know Latin for the prescriptions, I suppose.
    It was good to talk to Margaret Quong, and there was a lot he wanted to tell her, about what he liked and what he didn’t. He wanted her to know. But now they had come to the turn, and she stood waiting to say good-bye.
    Thank you for the shell, said Margaret Quong.
    That’s all right, he said. It wasn’t much use to me.
    She began to walk on, uncertainly, up in the direction of her father’s garage, where a truck had stopped for a fill at the pump. Her black woollen stockings were dotted with yellow mud. He would have to go in to lunch.
    Rodney! called Margaret Quong. You can come one evening and see our litter of pups. Only if you want to, she said.
    Then she went on up the hill clutching Madame Jacquet’s shell.

7
    Somebody leaves you alone in a strange room, in a house you have scarcely been in before, and this is the surest way of feeling detached from all possible sequence of events. You are no longer part of the whole, to which in your saner moments you like to think you belong. You wait in the strange room and this is another life. You try to reconstruct this other life from the objects you see in the room, and it is all on another plane, a little monstrous, and you even think in an undertone in case it should be heard.
    Well, Alys Browne was feeling something like this as she waited alone in the doctor’s room. There was no fire, and this intensified the feeling of detachment, making the objects sharper in outline, distinctly part of a life that was not her own. She sat for a bit in a leather chair holding her cut hand in her lap, feeling cold and forgotten, especially the hand, and the chair, there is nothing so calculated tomake you feel forgotten as somebody else’s leather chair in a fireless room. Then she got tired of sitting. She walked about. The woman who helped was sorting out linen in the wash-house across the yard. Alys could see her from the window, and a toy cart filled with stones lying in the middle of the yard. But there was not much to see from the window other than this.
    So she went and sat in the chair again. It was still a little warm from her body the time before. The air perhaps was a little bit warmer too. And on the mantelpiece there were photographs of two little boys, one of them sitting on the floor with some bricks, looking very absorbed, and the other a few years older, standing with his ears sticking out. The elder boy was Rodney; she knew him by sight, they said good morning or good afternoon whenever they passed in the street, and she liked the way his ears stuck out. Only he was rather pale out of a photograph. And there was Mrs Halliday too, sitting on the doctor’s desk with an air of having only a moment to spare, she must jump up, the photographer mustn’t mind.
    She remembered when the Hallidays came, about a year ago. She supposed that she ought to call, but she didn’t call, and she said she would call later on, and then the intention lapsed. Mrs Belper called. She said that the scones were stale, and Mrs Halliday—well, there was no atmosphere in the Hallidays’ home, and Mrs Halliday such a stick, though you could see the poor woman was ill, but you must have atmosphere in a home. By atmosphere Mrs Belper meant dogs, and pokerwork candlesticks, and people dropping in and out.
    Mrs Halliday sat nervously in her frame. Alys felt sorry for the doctor’s wife. She began to be more at home crossing her legs in the leather chair, for even a railway waiting-room will slowly fit itself into your scheme if you are forced to stay in it long enough. She looked at the black rug with the hole that something