Alys was on the verandah darning stockings when he came up to the gate. She glanced up, and down again, like someone catching sight of a person who comes a lot to the house, so often that you make no special stir or preparation, hardly move in fact, because this person has become a part of your life and this you accept as a matter of course.
Pull up that chair, she said. No. That one has a nail.
Has it? he said vaguely, watching the passage of her needle through the silk, with the smooth rhythm of silk. Her face, bent, did not notice him, only the inflections of her voice told him she was conscious of his presence. Sometimes he closed his eyes and listened to her voice.
Funny, she said. All these years, and I haven’t banged in that nail.
All those years when I was waiting, felt Alys Browne, when it was so much waste time, and, looking back, really most of it has been waste, that convent in Sydney and living up here, which was also as good as a convent, not so much physically as mentally, accepting what I was taught to accept, but waiting as waiting is not so much waste time if it is part of a design. She drew the stockings through her hands. The air was getting sharp.
We’ll have to go in, she said.
No, he said, don’t go in.
He sat with his back against one of the verandah posts.
What have you got to tell me? she asked.
Nothing, he said.
Got to tell like a child that said nothing she made him feel when Aunt Jane and those apples feeling sick was reversed he said this Alys a child or a girl out of a convent got to tell was reversed and she put out a hand to help that she held up with blood and there was something to tell.
It’ll come in time, I expect, she said.
He did not speak. She put her hand in a stocking and held it up to the light.
Alys, he said, Hilda and I have got to go away.
She held the stocking with an effort against the light, or it stayed there, she did not know, look, and it was getting dark, and the light, and Schmidts’ cows lined across the hill dragging a rope of shadow, like words out of the mouth that would not come, or a numb thought. She felt isolated in a small patch of light. She had been jerked out of the succession of events, that had happened, that were passing on, but she had become stationary.
Yes, she said. Hilda.
Was an abstract idea, his wife, the woman that opened the door and said he was up at Kambala, without ever achieving much more personality than this, somehow she did not think of Hilda, and why, was more than a cipher.
I’m doing it for Hilda, he said. And there’s the children. This is nothing to do with you. It isn’t much to do with me. But we’re going away. We’re going to Queensland, he said, feeling the triteness of explanation in his voice, but perhaps it was less painful like this, details, like looking up trains. I’m exchanging practices with a man called Garthwaite, he said. Hilda can’t stand the climate here. We’ll leave Rodney in Sydney on the way. He’s got to go to school.
The slowness of cows across the hill, cow-words as meaningful. But soon it would be dark. She waited for the darkness. Perhaps it would be easier then, or more difficult, because they said you said things anaesthetized.
We haven’t spoken much about Hilda, she said.
We haven’t had much time.
All time this woman was his wife until you woke up and saw, saw yourself and the callousness of women in love.
Why doesn’t one think about these things? she said. Is it that one’s deliberately brutal, that one doesn’t let oneself, or is one made to isolate oneself from what one doesn’t want to think?
He put out his hand and touched her in the dark. She had hoped he would not touch her. It was easier to live in the intellect, in a sort of clarity of mental perception, almost not yourself. But he was touching her, bringing her back into the muffled region of emotional pain.
But I couldn’t think, she said. I knew vaguely. But I just couldn’t think. You see, when you know it’s going to be something important, perhaps nothing so important will ever happen to you again, you can’t throw it away. You can’t, she said. You can’t.
And now? he said.
Yes, she said. Now.
One word can make a silence silenter, he felt, her Now falling like a bead of lead through the darkness, right to the bottom of what, now what. He did not know. He pressed her hand and waited.
It’ll still be that important thing, she said.
If you feel that.
Well, what?
That’s what I’ve had to tell myself, Alys. If two people feel like that it can’t be altogether negative.
They sat still, intimate, because it was all said. She hoped he would not speak again, would leave it like this, or perhaps to the fugitive comfort of touch that was so much more considerate than words. He would go away, with Hilda and the children, those three strange people, she could never think of them as being anything but strange, or as having a greater reality than herself. They would go to Queensland. She followed her mind down the vague avenue of the future, only a little way, she preferred to stop, because it seemed meaningless and nothing would take shape, no definite image of Alys Browne either here or elsewhere, as if she had been discarded from the pattern of time. But I have meant something, she said, it is not altogether wasted if I have meant something, as he said, he said, this was my purpose, and it is something to have a purpose, to know it, above all that, to realize. She stroked his hand back and forth.
Alys? he said.
Yes, dear.
She put her hand on his mouth. She closed his mouth, her mind, in a little circle of the present that resisted the intrusion of time.
22
Happy Valley flickers up into excitement when the autumn race meeting comes round, kindled by a sort of self-importance and craving for display that you feel a week or two before the arrival of these two days, the Friday and the Saturday, not to mention Friday night when they hold the dance at the School of Arts, or as the bills have it, the Grand Race Week Ball. The posters are yellow, done by the local press, you see them cracked on a paling fence, or the smaller ones at Quongs’ and in Hills’ Tea Shop window, a rendezvous for flies, and washed paler by a yellow autumn sun. It makes you feel good to stand and look at the posters and think of the excitement of which they are the advance publicity. You can feel a hum blowing up in the wires between Moorang and Kambala, and Happy Valley and Glen Marsh, but centring in Happy Valley, you can also feel that. Stung to activity by the tingling of the wires, this is no longer so detached, as the press stutters at the office of the Happy Valley Star, as the girls sew the buttons on their gloves or a different flower on last year’s dress, as the horses arrive in floats from Moorang in their yellow bandages and rugs, and the tempo is brisker in the main street.
By Friday they are all in town, and you can’t get a room at the pub or scarcely lean an elbow on the bar for all the people that have come, the cockie farmers, the Kambala Chows, that little man with the broken nails and the cap, or broken-voiced bookies and their clerks, and the vaguer faces without purpose that peer from a corner over a dark glass of stout. In the smoke the remarks drift, on form, on the rainfall, on the wool clip, and somebody says that somebody said that Winapot was a cert. Dogs bristle in the street, a yellow bitch with her lip drawn under the dusty wing of a car. Somebody says it’ll rain, or it won’t, Saturday at least, because every third year it rains, and in 1928 Mitchell the bookmaker skidded on the Moorang road and they found his body under the car, you couldn’t recognize his face. Looks in the glass and wonders if the green organdie, the pursed mouth censorious, if anyone can remember the year before, which a press would make as good as new, if only, if only. Dab a little here for certainty. Vic Moriarty examines her perm. Gertie Ansell squeezes a spot. And thought toys with a possibility of the fabulous, all the things you have put away for the best part of a year, twenty more pounds towards the mortgage, or that boy from the baker’s in at Moorang, or the less specifically defined hopes that spring up out of the unconscious and flutter through the fever of two significant days.