Happy Valley by Patrick White

distinguished, and that is whyshe read Anna Karenina and played Schumann in the late afternoon.
    There you are, he said, in a voice that suggested now I can get back to my lunch.
    There was nothing more to say. She let him show her out to the door, she ran down the steps, she went on up the street. She felt more sober too, as if she had rid herself of the waste ends of a lot of surplus and superficial emotions. There was that dress for Mrs Belper that she must do. And she tried not to think of Dr Halliday, who thought she was a fool, and it is always uncomfortable to put yourself in a light in which you shine only as a fool.
    You’ll have to shoot that poor hen, said Hilda.
    She was standing by the dining-room window when he got back. Hilda finding the substance of pity in a hen trailing across the yard, or Hilda herself was pity, he felt, like an allegorical figure he had seen in a French church, the sad Gothic emptiness of the hands, standing in Happy Valley, only it was Hilda, and she was inclined to wear jumpers, blue or grey, that she knitted herself, and she wore her hair in a kind of coil with strands falling, straggling at the side. He put up his hand to his head. That Browne girl pitying herself because she had cut her hand was unreal, or he, or Happy Valley, was unreal, removing itself into a world of allegory, of which the dominating motif was pain. Sitting on the ferry he had wanted to write a play, but he could not find a theme, not like a sculptor who carved Hilda on an altar-piece. You looked through the Browne girl and there was nothing, except a little veil of self-pity. It is half-past two. You stand in the dining-room and pityyourself, and that is different, but the same, appalling in someone else, inevitable in yourself, but the same.
    You haven’t had your pudding, Hilda said.
    I don’t want any pudding.
    Oliver…
    She was looking at him, wanting to say something that wasn’t easy to say, and she rubbed her hands together as if they were cold. Both of them wanting to say something and then it only came in words.
    It’s about Rodney, she said. He’ll have to go to another school. He’s beginning to see that he’s different. Different from the others, I mean. They persecute him. We’ll have to send him to Sydney to a proper school.
    Yes, I know.
    His head ached.
    We’ll have to make the effort, she said.
    All right. I’ve got to think. It’ll mean expense. You must give me time, Hilda. I can’t manage it all at once.
    Here he was defending himself. She looked anxious, anxious for Rodney, or anxious for herself. Hilda coughed in bed at night. She turned about in bed at night and said, I can’t sleep, Oliver. What time is it? I can’t sleep, she said. My mouth’s dry. Perhaps you’d get me a glass of water. Because I can’t sleep. And now he looked at her as she stood there speaking for Rodney, and again there was so much he wanted to say, remembering Dr Bridgeman and how she hid her handkerchief. But there seemed no words in which to express compassion for a human being with whom you were in close relationship. It became even more difficult then.
    He went and touched her face with his hand, pushing back a strand of hair.
    All right, he said. We’ll see. We’ll all have to get out of this.
    He thought she recoiled.
    I didn’t mean…I only meant Rodney ought to have a chance.
    It hasn’t started again?
    I’m all right, she said, lowering her eyes. Only sometimes I don’t feel very well. Only a little cough. It’ll be better when the summer comes.
    He held her hand. There ought to be so much that two people could say. He was fond of her. There ought to be so much. But they were like strangers standing on the railway station waiting for the train to go. You were always waiting for something that you did not say, that perhaps after all you could not say. But you felt you ought.
    Now look here, he said, sitting on the table edge and starting to be matter-of-fact. There’s a man up in