Free Happy Valley by Patrick White Page B

don’t want to complain, she said, only I’m fond of you, only it’s for your own good. He wrote and nothing happened. He showed her the letters before he sealed them up. And nobody came to mend the roof. It made him feel bad, in spite of those new powders, and at night he could hardly breathe. So he could not very well do more than write. Poor, pretty, pink Vic. It made him proud to possess her, not physically, that is, because that always made him wheeze, but to know that she was there, like the three-cornered Cape of Good Hope blue and the surcharged German New Guinea. He arranged R. Dormer’s exercise book on the pile. It was very neat, a perfect square of exercise books with a rubber on the top. There were four pencils and a pen in a little wooden tray in front of the ink.
    I’ve finished that one, Archie Braithwaite said.
    Then he cringed back on the desk. Andy Everett had given him a kick.
    Turn to page ninety-four. Example number thirty-six.
    The Cow resumed her laborious Relationship with Man.
    The Yellow Sea and the Red Sea, and the Blue Pool near Moorang, where you went for picnics in the summer, if it was a good summer, if there was no drought, but if there was a drought. Arthur Ball had blood on his face. The way your knuckle stung as it landed on Arthur’s teeth.
    Emily Schmidt smelt her handkerchief, passed it to Gladys Rudd to smell. Her lips spelt Parma Violets behindher hand. Emily Schmidt smiled in a vastly superior way and played about with her ring.
    It was dull, because this was school, because the feverish chant of the younger children burst in a thin unison through the wooden wall, intensifying the monotony with a twiceoneatwo, twicetwoafour, twicethreeasix, seeming to paralyse the progress of the clock. And there is no monotony so desperate as the activities of A, B, and C, nothing so definitely guaranteed to work havoc with the nails or to make you groan inwardly at the endlessness of time. Until, with the ultimate gesture of a formal hand, the clock points beyond these deserts to a luxuriance of sound and motion and sensation suddenly revived.
    Conversation became intricate at twelve o’clock. Somebody banged the door. Somebody dropped a book. Somebody bounced a ball. Then they were going out. Their voices distributed themselves in the open air as they started to walk home, or ran. Rodney Halliday ran very lightly up the road as hard as he could go. He drew his legs up under him and jumped a ditch. He ran on past the wire fence, under the telephone wires, under the truculent murmur that telephone wires have, and a knotting of small birds.
    Emily Schmidt walked with Gladys Rudd, letting her smell the handkerchief.
    Are you coming up this evening, Emily? asked Margaret Quong.
    No, said Emily.
    Why ever not?
    Because.
    Emily Schmidt compressed her lips. She had a face thatwas small and pale and concentratedly vicious under her pale slender curls.
    My Mumma said I’m not to go to Quongs’.
    So did mine, agreed Gladys Rudd.
    All right, said Margaret.
    Her voice was very resigned. She began to walk on ahead, looking down at her feet. Behind her Gladys and Emily began to giggle. They began to sing high up in voices nasally intense, and remarkably alike:
My Mumma said I never should
Play with the gypsies in the wood.
If I did she said she would…
    Margaret walked on quickly bending her head. She did not listen. She tried to avoid unpleasantness. She did not ask for reasons, because reasons were unpleasant, and she knew already, vaguely underneath, that it was Father that made Emily giggle and compress her lips. It was that time about the Everett girl, and Mrs Everett going to court, and Mother had gone to court, and there was that time in at Moorang when they ran Father in for doing something you did not think about.
    She hung her head and walked along. She was thin and straight, with her hair cut straight in a fringe over the eyes that were more oblique than Amy’s even, or Arthur’s, or