Happy Valley Read Online Free

antidotal faiths. His skis made a long slurring noise on the snow. A handful of snow rattled from off a tree, falling down out of the interstices of twigs. The arches of the trees were white with snow, almost Gothic in structure. Like a cathedral, he felt. Miserere of the crows. A plump black crow peering out of the window of a briar like a priest from his confessional.
    There was still some use for the Holy Roman Church. It taught you to turn pain and the fear of it to some spiritual use. But you weren’t a Catholic, and pain only made you bitter, or made you ashamed because you were bitter and afraid. He said his prayers every evening on the troopship, quietly to himself in his bunk. He lay there feeling afraid,getting closer, and closer, and then the War stopped. Of course it had to stop. He was sorry in a way, because a gesture like enlisting when you were sixteen, and afraid, wasn’t as big when you couldn’t carry it through to the logical conclusion and give everyone the impression you were brave, even though bravery was something forced on you whether you liked it or not. But he went to London. He had two weeks in Paris, where everyone was very tired, and old, spiritually, and nobody took any notice of him at all. He felt far younger than he had ever felt copying Great Thoughts into a notebook at home, but it was a fresh sensation, he appreciated it, walking about the streets in Paris and everyone else preoccupied. But he was worried because everyone was old and when he went out of the city into the country, to Saint Germain or the forest at Fontainebleau, the country was young. That was the strange part. It was stranger because at home everything was reversed. The people were young, adolescent, almost embryonic. When he got back from Europe he looked at them and there was nothing there. Life was a toy, you rattled it. But the country was old, older than the forest at Fontainebleau, there was an underlying bitterness that had been scored deep and deep by time, with a furrow here and there and pockmarks in the face of black stone. Over everything there was a hot air of dormant passion, of inner war, that nobody seemed to be conscious of. In Sydney you went to parties. In Happy Valley you fornicated or drank. You swung the rattle for all you were worth. You did not know you were sitting on a volcano that might not be extinct. It puzzled him at first.
    And he wanted to get away again. Even when he was married he wanted to get away. And Hilda said, you’re restless, dear, you’re tired, if only you could take a week or two we might drive down to Wollongong. He married Hilda when he was twenty-four. That was eight years. But waiting was Hilda’s strong suit, for more than eight years. Rodney was nine and George four. And he was still only sixteen, which was something that Hilda did not know though she knew pretty well everything else. It was far better to be like Hilda, complete in superficialities, complete in your own conception of completeness. He had only once felt complete. It was an accident, he felt, and being in Paris, it was somewhere round about the Luxembourg, and he had gone into a church, he did not know why, it was an ordinary church, but perhaps there was a cold wind, anyway he went inside. The organ was playing. He could remember that his feet were cold and there was a smell of varnish. The organ was playing a Bach fugue. He knew it was Bach because he had picked out bits of Bach on the piano at home. And then he was at home again, but not at home, it was in the church in the neighbourhood of the Luxembourg, it was in France, with old German Bach streaming out of the organ loft, and the War had stopped, and he was losing his breath, he was losing…Then he sat very still. He supposed he was breathing. He did not know. But he knew he was crying. He did not care if he cried; there was nothing wrong with this sort of crying and nobody would see. The music came rushing out of the loft, unfurling banners of