Mr Belper drew a fanfare from his nose.
The crux of the matter is we’re stony broke.
Which was at least a relief, to realize in words what had stuck for the past few weeks, with the collar tight like a halter round your neck. Now Mr Belper felt deflated, waiting on his wife’s silence, what Cissie would say, because Mr Belper, although refusing to admit any positive quality in woman, other than a prowess in the house, or more specifically in bed, secretly respected the oracular talents of his wife. Those talks they had at night, muffled by the pillow and proximity, were tinged for Mr Belper with an admittedly Delphic significance, even if he might cut them short with a shut up, Cissie, how you jaw, under the dictatorship of love or sleep.
But now all Mrs Belper could say was:
Oh dear, Joe. Oh dear, oh dear; and make a sucking noise with her plate.
Under the frill of a chair a fox-terrier snuffled heavily. The room with its garnishing of pokerwork, those silhouette shades that Mrs Belper had worked herself, the pouf in morocco leather, and the blue suite, all those attributes of a hitherto well-upholstered life could not disguise the frailty of walls or of the aspirations these contained.
Oh dear, Joe, Mrs Belper said. You shouldn’t’ve been so rash.
The miraculous behaviour of stocks and shares, if still no less miraculous, disturbed Mrs Belper’s confidence. She remembered how once, she was sixteen, it was at her aunt’s, she dropped a wedgwood sugar-bowl and watched the fragments scatter on the floor.
It’s the Crisis, her husband said.
Because often in the past platitude had helped him out of a conversational hole, was something to cling to at home or at the club, where the Crisis was answerable for much, it gave you a feeling of being not altogether to blame. He even ventured to glance at his wife. As Mrs Belper’s confidence ebbed Mr Belper felt his own return. You shouldn’t’ve been so rash, she said. Mr Belper, wiping his forehead, found some comfort in picturing himself as a rather impetuous male.
We’ll pull through somehow, Cissie, he said.
And who’d have thought that coal. Why, everyone burns coal.
But in a time of crisis, said Mr Belper, the courage that comes from words thrust his hands into his pockets and sent him stamping about the room, in a time of crisis, he said, even a commodity like coal.
How a commodity like coal behaved Mrs Belper did
not hear, did not stop to ask herself what a commodity could be, like those terms he sometimes used and of which you made a mental note to look up after in the dictionary. Joe was clever, Mrs Belper said, intent on labelling all her possessions with some sort of satisfactory excuse. He talked about things being at par, he read a leader in the Herald, and told you what was happening to the franc. Even Mrs Furlow was impressed. But this is just why Mrs Belper quailed.
It’s only a matter of time, Mr Belper said, and as he assumed the upper hand the candlesticks joggled on the mantelpiece. Australia’s the country of the future. Australia’s bound to come out on top. Look at the interior, he said. I ask you. What a chance for development.
For even if his confidence returned Mr Belper felt it wiser to avoid his personal predicament. So he plunged inland. He clung for assurance to the tail of words. Mrs Belper’s corsets groaned.
And what about the Salvage Bay? she said.
Which was irritating to return. It made Mr Belper cough.
The Salvage Bay has gone into liquidation, he said.
He tried to jingle the money in his pocket, discovered only a two-shilling piece. Like a key dropped down your spine, for hiccoughs, she said. He felt the rim of this solitary coin, encountered its mute reminder, that nuzzled there in his pocket making him stick out his lip.
Always a chancy business, pearls.
Mrs Belper recollected a different story, told in bed if she remembered, or was it sleep, when pearls cannoned heavily
in the corners of the room. She looked at her husband, at his red face, at poor Joe. With Mrs Belper superiority turned to compassion. A man was a fool perhaps, but—well, you couldn’t let him flounder, even a fool.
That was only a flutter, I expect.
Yes, agreed Mr Belper, grasping at the opportunity and closing his mind to the rest. We must have our little fling, Cissie. I ask you. After all.
Mrs Belper began to laugh. Because Joe looked such a fool, and as if she didn’t know, and he knew that she knew, and it was all so damn silly, even if Mary had to go, she could make a very good scone herself, they could live on potatoes if it came to that, and the way he talked about a corner in jute, all that mumbo jumbo that you swallowed as if…That was why Mrs Belper laughed.
Her husband looked offended and said:
I don’t think this is a time to laugh.
No, screamed Mrs Belper. No. Only it is so funny, Joe. You and me, and—come here, Trixie, on to Mother’s lap. What shall we do about Father? Eh?
Mr Belper traced the rim of his solitary two-shilling piece, a little shocked by the facile explosion of so many weeks of suspense.
Well, he said, if you can laugh…
Of course I can, heaved Mrs Belper. No one’s going to do me out of that. And what about a cup of tea? she said. I’m just as dry as dry.
It was on this particular morning that Alys Browne came down to see Mr Belper at the bank.
Well, Alys, you’re a stranger, Mrs Belper said. We were
just going to have some tea. Weren’t we, Joe? Now what’s the matter? I thought we’d got it all off our chests. You aren’t proposing to mope?
No, said her husband quickly. No.
Then pull up a chair for Alys. The girl isn’t a ghost.
Alys Browne had put on her hat and gloves, because this was something in the nature of a formal visit, because at last she had come to the decision, she would go to California. Oliver loves me, she said, heard it in the house, her voice, walking up and down these past days, because she had to walk up and down. This is not chaos yet, she said. But outside the hills were grey, and the plain, they pressed in, just pressing quietly with a gentle, slow pressure, until her hands clenched, and she longed almost for some form of eruption rather than this grey, still pressure of the hills. Oliver loves me, she said, to reassure herself. Then there was a storm of rain, at night, beating on the iron roof, with the wind, a black chaos. I am alone in this house, she said. It was a statement almost without emotion, either self-pity or fear, that she heard come back in the beat of the rain. She watched the furniture, the passive droop of the tablecloth, she could feel herself watching for some move, that was not made, there was a final cessation of motion in the house, cowed by the beating of the rain.
She knew she must resist the inertia of this house. She wanted to protest. It surged up inside her with a slow beat, from room to room as she walked about. She looked down at her waist and saw her hands clenched. So I shall go to California, she said, the wave beat, was a wave, the turning of wheels, slipped oily in the night through the
shrill steam and the halt with cold voices calling the time, but the wheels must move, the wave, the little islands, those pointers towards release as the water flowed. And now she could listen to the rain, its small significance. She would go to California. It burst out in a strong, glistening theme that she could grasp, like a leit-motif returned from out of the beating of the drums, that she had heard first in the drawing-room at Mrs Stopford-Champernowne’s, wondered, then as it became submerged forgot, until walking in this still house she caught on to it again.
Her face returned an expression in the glass that was triumph and something else, it made her turn away. In the drawing-room at Mrs Stopford-Champernowne’s a young man sat with chocolates, from a bank, would she come to Vaucluse Sunday or the pictures Saturday night? There was wistaria at Vaucluse. She yawned, because this was unimportant, though her face grave, as a girl it was almost always grave, and expectant, though without much faith in expectancy, as if nothing would happen, eating a chocolate or reading pamphlets from a shipping office, even if she went across the sea, because what was this. A Java sparrow in its cage was cracking seed, discarding, and the intention slipped, there was no need, not now, for California, this little frail theme like the cracking of seed. This was not her face in the drawing-room, now in the glass, or was, and the returned theme, was larger, this glistening cable that she touched, gathering importance and momentum as it rushed out, she must seize it, this was its purpose, she felt, looking in the glass.
So in the morning she put on her hat and her gloves.
She would go to the Belpers’. She heard the cool morning sounds, smoothed her gloves, experienced the round tranquillity that sometimes follows a decision made. Because now it was settled. The house lay behind her on the hill, like a shell discarded overnight, walking up and down in the dark she had cast it off.
Mr Belper, I’ve come to talk business, she said. I want to ask you about my shares.
Mr Belper, looking down, wondered how deep a teacup, how red the rose. Mrs Belper’s stomach rumbled danger. Well, she thought, and Alys too, this is not so good, because Mrs Belper, inside her casing of corset and superfluous flesh, was fundamentally a Good Sort. Even Mrs Furlow had granted her that.
That’s funny, said Mrs Belper. We were just talking about shares.
Yes, said Mr Belper. Yes.
Clinked his spoon and looked to his wife for some telepathic miracle. The way you reach out, straining to catch it in its flight, catch at nothing and coil back. Mr Belper returned to a state of deflation after his moment or two of grace as that rather impetuous male.
Because I want to sell, said Alys. I want to go to America.
America! Mr Belper said. A fine country, Alys, to be sure. A country of opportunity.
Not without a glance of, you see, Cissie, where I am, and this is all you can expect, this is what I am, but what now?
Mrs Belper poured tea in a fine, compassionate stream.
It was gratifying to sense your power, though not to know you were powerless at the same time. Mr Belper stirred his cup. The veins were swollen on the back of his hand.
Alys, she said, do you mind very much?
What, Mrs Belper? Mind what?
As if now, sitting with your hands in your lap, you would mind what Mrs Belper was trying to suggest. As if all emotion had drained away leaving a dry receptacle. There were cherries in the cake.
Because Joe has some bad news. Tell her, Joe.
Mr Belper’s eyes clung to his wife’s wavering glance.
Yes, Alys, he said, it’s bad. The Salvage Bay is bust.
Alys Browne sat in the Belpers’ sitting-room, the Belper faces faintly red, heard this without moving her hands. She did not feel the need to move, or say, or say…Because this exchange of environment, he said, is only an exchange, or California, it is like this.
Oh, she said. I only thought, thought I might go. It wasn’t very important, she said.
She had wanted to feel the ship move, to move with it, into distance, away. This was wrong perhaps, only an exchange of environment, this would make no difference, was what Oliver’s letter had said.
We’re all in the same boat, murmured Mrs Belper, you heard the murmur of her voice borrowing her husband’s phrase. We were going to Manly for the summer, she said. Joe’s sister has a cottage there. That’s Fran. And the children, it’s nice for the children to be by the sea. Because Sydney’s very trying in the heat. Fran’s just had her appendix out.
Mrs Belper’s voice pursued its stream of narrative.
When anyone died Mrs Belper always believed in not keeping to the point. She was not really insensitive. She just believed in sweeping you on, no matter where, but on, pointing to the incidents that swirled past, till you were out of the danger zone. She pinned her faith to narrative. In fact, Mrs Belper’s own life was an endless stream of narrative, of more or less connected fact. Alys Browne, listening to her talk, thought that she understood Mrs Belper better than before, saw her pitching on this stream that she had wanted for herself, going to California, making her life narrative. But to furnish your life with incident was no ultimate escape, except for a Mrs Belper perhaps. She had never moved in the current of Mrs Belper’s stream, a pool rather, and you looked down, aware of the reflected images, frightening sometimes, but never distorted by the slurring of a stream. It was better like this, the truth of the undistorted images. There is nothing to fear, she said, even in contemplation of the depths.
Mr Belper was talking about time, and the way things picked up, all of which was irrelevant.
Well, said Alys Browne, and she laughed drily, I’m sorry for us all.
Because it was the sort of thing you said.
Poor Alys, said Mrs Belper.
Going home, Alys Browne felt calm and detached. She trod on a frozen puddle and heard it crack. I wanted to escape, she said, this, after all, is California, its true significance. Understanding, you felt no pain in your body, that ice did not touch, in your mind that was a fortress against pain, and Happy Valley, and because of this you lived. She
began to think about Oliver, who was a moment in the past, but also present and future. I shall not live altogether in the past, she said. This is still alive. This is interminable. This is what I wanted to deny in taking the boat. She saw nettles powdered with frost. They stood up sharp and fragile beside the road. People were going about their work, the faces that she passed, the faces hurrying, as she walked slowly home. I shall not hurry, she said, I shall shape time with what I have already got.
Packing up and going away, that box in the passage, the overcoat that won’t go in, the rime of newspaper on the edge of the hall, the echo of voices calling from room to room, whether in tears, or just the even stream of an officiating voice, is not without its nostalgia and regrets. Oliver Halliday straightened up. You felt them, these last moments that were without a clock, only the dusty shadow of a clock projected on to the wallpaper. In spite of yourself you felt this, and it made you smile, not without bitterness, at this instance of the fox his hole. The sun was watery on the floor. It sifted over the boards and the bough of a tree that waved in substance in the yard. In the empty house sound was swollen out of all proportion to its significance: the maundering of George perched on his island of luggage in the hall, the rasp of Rodney’s knife as he carved his initials on the kitchen door. R.H. wavering to commemorate,
though without the date, because this was too difficult, and you had to take care, falter on the H as you looked round to see, Mother said it was vulgar to carve initials on trees.
To commemorate what we have experienced here there is now nothing, Oliver felt, as he leant against the windows in the dispensary, unless you can impregnate a place with all you have suffered and enjoyed, leaving these as a heritage for the tenants who come next. Altogether he did not envy Garthwaite his lease, if this were in fact possible. And feeling your chin that you had shaved so badly this morning, Oliver, said Hilda from the bedroom, we must try to get away in good time because the children must not stay up late, you wondered what was left of the confusion of emotions beneath the tissues and the bone, you thought perhaps that these after all had been imparted to the house or, if not to this, floated volatile in the Happy Valley air. Because in a way you were swept clean, the bare boards with the bough of a substanceless tree stencilled on the winter light.
Oliver, Hilda said, as she came into the room, have you brought round the car?
Yes, he said. When you’re ready we’ll go. I don’t think there’s anything we’ve got to do.
No, she said. The sooner we—I mean, the boys will be getting out of hand.
Hilda’s voice penetrated with more purpose than you expected, it did not waver now, it was a core of reality in the shadows of this room. Like Hilda, a voice that said, it was night, Oliver, with an effort in a voice, I want to talk, it’s the last night, and we’ve never talked about this, there’s very little we’ve talked about. Whether on an iron
seat in the Botanical Gardens in a heavy summer light or lying beside Hilda in bed, in the dark, all those years you had not talked about much, penetrated the surface word, though after all very few people achieve this, but Hilda was making an effort in the dark, you felt it in her hand, the fingers with the ring that time had loosened, touching you with more than Hilda’s hand. He looked at Hilda now. He looked at the face that had been this voice, when he had been glad of darkness and the touch of Hilda’s hand. Because I know, Oliver, how you feel, it came to him from a great distance, then closer, it was very close, you mustn’t think I don’t understand or that I’m saying this because it’s all over. She was speaking of Alys, not by tentative allusion, but making a direct approach. It was an undiscovered quality in Hilda, that she had just discovered for herself, you could still sense it in her voice, the note of discovery groping towards confidence. And because it was strange, he wanted at first to resist, because it was touching on something they had never mentioned, more than touching, it suffused a whole experience. Hilda could now identify herself with this, joined to Alys by a link of pain. Lying on your back, you did not resist after the first moment, this intimacy with Hilda that you had often tried to achieve and in which you had failed, it was Hilda who had accomplished it, speaking in the dark and opening with courage an old wound. But Hilda was always fortitude, an abstract virtue, you wondered what else until, feeling her voice, her hand in the dark, you knew. It will be hard, she said, as if she spoke to Rodney, there’ll be lots of nicer little boys, so Rodney, dear, but not Rodney, it will be hard, though when we go away we’ll try, we’ll both try, Oliver. Feeling in the
darkness when your head touched, you were not Rodney, it was Hilda, it was not Alys, or all these welded together by Hilda’s hand. I love Alys, Hilda, you said, or Hilda, or Alys, it was immaterial, to darkness or a hand. You would sleep. You felt Hilda’s lips falter in a kiss that was sleep, that you wanted to say, Hilda, this is all over for better or worse, some purpose perhaps that we can’t discern, because it is dark, it is anywhere, not Happy Valley, it is anywhere.
Now they were standing in the dispensary.
We’ll start, shall we? Hilda said.
Mother! screamed George. Rodney won’t give me his knife. I want to have Rodney’s knife. Rodney’s cut his name on the door.
No, George, Hilda called, you mustn’t have Rodney’s knife. Father’s ready. We’re going now.
Rodney sat in the car. They were going away.
Where’s the thermos? Hilda said. George, you sit with Rodney in the back. And don’t lean out of the car. You must promise Mother not to do that.
Dr Oliver Halliday got into the car. They had taken the plate off the fence, stripped off this label that would be stuck on somewhere else. Dr Henry Garthwaite would arrive the following day. The house waited to receive a life, or stood giving up a ghost, whichever way you liked. The car drew away down the hill.
We’re going! We’re going to Queensland! shouted George.
Rodney felt his skin prick. He looked down the street, that was now almost another street, its sole importance withdrawn. The plum-tree by Mrs Heffernan’s fence stood
in another morning. The letter-box at Perrys’ was blue, blue, not green that you thought. It was another street with Perrys’ blue letter-box marking the transition from the known. He always thought it was green. Come here, Green-face, they said, that you skipped, you smiled to see the fence roll past, hitched to something beyond the town. It made you wonder if your breath, tumbled in your chest, was coming or not, and that sick sick, ticking away in your stomach, made you press with your hands against your belt. In Sydney there were trams, at the Circular Quay the peanut man. You swam down through the water, opened your eyes, it was morning there, yellow against the sand. Rodney Halliday’s eyes, fixed beyond the present, were the eyes of the swimmer under water opening on another world.
Oliver made the turn.
Slipping away the ghost gives the live part of the body purged if it were possible to accept this the wind alive on the face on Oliver Halliday on Hilda Halliday his wife on George and Rodney Halliday that are baptized afresh by wind that points down the valley beyond the post the so many miles that are just so many miles into the future that is Rodney and George may I be an explorer Rodney said if there is anything left to explore that woman’s face with the dead child you looked down and saw a chart which did not indicate much more than pain and its possibilities but not the life until Moriarty relaxed and you saw the hinterland indicated in the flesh was more than plunging a needle was Alys shading her eyes Oliver look I can’t offer you much only my life that is also the life of all these people the Moriartys the Everetts the Schmidts
moving beneath the lens the house front the geranium.
There are Quongs, Rodney said.
They stood on the store verandah, Amy, Arthur, and Margaret Quong, a little consolidated group. Margaret waved. Sometimes you thought that the Quongs were exotic, foreign to Happy Valley, but not as they stood outside the store, this first and last evidence of life. You never got beneath the Quongs, the brown, aloof faces, the silent glance. The road down the valley was a brown curve, distinct and aloof like Amy Quong. In spring the hillside flickered up, in winter died to a dull grey, there was not much more evidence of any emotional quantity. Amy Quong lay on her bed, Sunday afternoons, watched the smoke from incense dwindle in a lustre bowl. She had bought it for five shillings at the sale, it was now hers, the only tangible sign of any inner confusion that may have been. The bowl reflected nothing of the past, that other face, and the rain that morning on the window-pane. Possessions are tragically adaptable. Amy Quong saw her room suspended in the lustre bowl, her life rounded and intensified. To touch the bowl was to touch not conscience, but achievement, but the moment, because the dead woman was hardly this, or the letter, the pen hesitant before a word, that was only anonymous after all, that was only means to an end. Amy linked her arm through Margaret’s. Looking back through the window of the car, you saw the Quongs recede.
Hilda held her hand to her chest, less as a safeguard than from habit.
I hope the plates will be safe, she said. I packed them in plenty of straw.
Oliver saw the road move, heard Hilda say the things that she always said, because this was Hilda, also a voice speaking in the dark, Oliver, I understand. Hilda has found something that I have yet to find, though perhaps I am closer, moving along this line of wires, you can hear their hum, the almost disclosed secret of telephone wires, the rock with its meaning hidden, the harsh contour of the hills. Rodney, George, and I, together, are for Hilda a defence against uncertainty, at the same time wrapped against breakage in the straw of her solicitude. Oliver looked at Hilda. He saw her smile, heard her voice say, we shall try, no longer expressed in words, but a glance. He looked back through the windscreen at the road. Trees moved in the gathering rain. A flux of moving things, like experience, fused, and Alys Browne, he felt, is part of me for all time, this is not altogether lost, it is still an intimate relationship that no violence can mortify. This is the part of man, to withstand through his relationships the ebb and flow of the seasons, the sullen hostility of rock, the anaesthesia of snow, all those passions that sweep down through negligence or design to consume and desolate, for through Hilda and Alys he can withstand, he is immune from all but the ultimate destruction of the inessential outer shell.
We shall be at Moorang in no time, said Hilda.
Yes, said Oliver. Quite soon.
Hilda, brushing against his shoulder, took her hand away from her chest.
The car furrowed the road, lapsed into distance and the moving rain.