Patrick White - Happy Valley

It was difficult to settle down. She was very volatile, she told herself. She wondered if Mrs Blandford had heard that the Vinters were getting a divorce. Actually Mrs Blandford had told her, but she had forgotten that.

Mrs Furlow sat at her writing-desk at the window of the drawing-room. Down on the flat the wind was rife, the brood mares huddled with their rumps to the wind, the cattle clustered in groups for warmth. Such very trying weather, wrote Mrs Furlow to Mrs Blandford. The weather had ceased to be a conflict of natural phenomena, it was a state conjured for the spiritual trial of Mrs Furlow. Just as the cattle and the brood mares, the rams that moved gravely, overweighted by their sex, in a paddock across the river, the ewes on the hillside, the maids in the scullery, and the little fox-terrier that was now almost too constipated to walk, were symbols of her material prosperity.

That is the sort of thing which tends to happen when you have lived on a property most of your life, and your family have lived on it most of theirs, it tends to become an institution. This is what had happened to Glen Marsh. The landscape had lost its significance as such, to Mrs Furlow at her writing-table, to Mr Furlow in his office. You lived in an intimate relationship with it, but the land existed because of this, turning itself to good account by the unostentatious changes of its appointed seasons.

Mr Furlow turned to the racing news. There was a gentle rumbling down in the region of his paunch. He would take his time. Besides, the new overseer would arrive during the afternoon. He sighed gently, and tried to study form. Checkmate and Salamander at Warwick Farm, Gaiety Girl at Rose Hill. And Sidney sitting in her bedroom, perhaps he should go and see, or not go and see, it was so much easier to study form in the Herald. Because Mr Furlow’s life was based on a line of least resistance, unconsciously, for he never paused to ask himself if his life was based on anything at all.

Mr Furlow hadn’t a mind, only a mutual understanding between a number of almost dormant instincts. He was vaguely attached to his property, still more vaguely to his wife, because these were habit, they were there, he accepted them. He also loved his daughter in a fumbling, kindly way. He took her riding on her pony when she was a little girl, or to eat ices at a soda fountain when they were in Sydney, perching her up on a stool, and looking at her proudly as she chose the most expensive ice. He said, there, pet, wipe your mouth. He was happy, he wanted her to be happy, eating an ice or doing whatever she wanted to do. It surprised him to see her grow. It came as a shock. Already she was painting her mouth. But of course she knew best. He liked to feel her hang over his chair, to hear her say, darling, I haven’t a bean, her face on his shoulder. He gave her a five-pound note instead of an ice. He did not worry as Jessie worried, everything would solve itself in time, everything always had, and Sidney grow and paint her mouth, and marry or not, just as she liked. A fly had settled on Mr Furlow’s nose.

He got laboriously out of his chair. He had not measured the rain. He went down the passage towards the verandah, stretching his legs, and trying to control his wind. Outside Sidney’s door he paused a moment. Then he went on with the easy smile of someone who always believes in letting the situation handle itself.

Sidney Furlow was lying on her bed. She had taken off her shoes. She pointed one foot at the ceiling, raising her leg as high as it would go, and watching her instep arch. She drew her suspender taut and let it snap back against her leg. She sighed and her leg dropped back on the bed, Oh dear, she sighed, biting her lip. The pillow was warm underhead, the kind of warmth that is slightly perverse and misplaced, the warmth of a bed after lunch, as you rub your cheek against the linen and wonder what you can do. It made you cry, having nothing to do, or read a book, or read a book. She looked very pretty when she cried. She did it sometimes in the glass. Or she picked up a book and glanced, between phrases, into the more interesting, if desperate, territory of the mind. Oh dear, she sighed. Je me crois seule. As if she wanted to go riding across the flat in all that wind. And Mother said Charlie must go too, just in case anything happens. But I won’t be followed about by a groom. En ma monotone patrie — et tout, autour de moi, vit dans l’idolâtre d’un miroir. With that stupid face that said, Miss Sidney, I’d better tighten your girth. The hell of a girth and she did not care if she fell, or broke her arm, they would carry her in, and Mother running down the passage to see. Qui reflète en son calme dormant Hérodiade au clair regard de diamant, what did it all mean, o charme dernier, oui! je le sens, je suis seule. Reading French and that old fool of a Madame Jacquet in cotton gloves coming to teach French at Miss Cortine’s, ma petite Sid-ney, and Helen and Angela waiting to be taken to a dance by a couple of naval men, they were pretty lousy anyway. The book dropped to the floor.

Sidney Furlow was nineteen. She had been two years at finishing school in Sydney, at Miss Cortine’s. She had not learnt very much, but it was not part of Miss Cortine’s curriculum to teach. Only to mould my girls, Mrs Furlow, to prepare them for life. Miss Cortine prepared her girls for life with a course of tea-pouring and polite adultery. Consequently most of them were considered a very good match. They did not sulk, like Sidney, they said pretty things to young men who came to take them to dances, and cuddled up very prettily when they were expected to. Perhaps if you leave her another year, Miss Cortine said.

She was damned if she would stay another year. She wanted to go home. So she went home and it was all a bloody bore, and Sydney was a bloody bore, and reading Mallarmé after lunch. Je me crois seule en ma monotone patrie, Hérodiade au clair regard. Her arms were very brown and thin. She stretched them over her head, catching the bed-rail over her head, and feeling a strange lassitude that crept along under her skin. Her breasts stood up, thin and abrupt under her dress. Her hair spread out over the pillow in little snaky tongues.

Oh hell, she said, jerking herself up. She wanted to cry. O charme dernier. She jumped off the bed and went and sat at the dressing-table, looking at herself fiercely in the glass. He had wanted to touch her at that dance, putting his hand. She stroked her breast sulkily, between her breasts that were warm and firm, it made her smile. And she told him to go to hell, it made her laugh because he looked so surprised, sitting there on that battleship where orders were always obeyed. Only she hadn’t, she had put back her head and laughed. Helen said she had a laugh like a piece of wire, and that thin mouth — well, it was thin, she supposed.

She took up a lipstick from the dressing-table and began to work on her mouth, pressing it down hard on her lips, as hard as she could. Her mouth looked like a wound. She took up the eye-shade and blurred the lids, sitting with her eyes almost closed to watch the effect of that blue blur, and her mouth, and her dress falling down on to the point of a breast. She laughed, or at least a little contemptuous snort came out of her nose. Oui! je le sens. She was like a whore.

Sidney, called Mrs Furlow from the other side of the door, haven’t you gone for your ride?

Yes, I’ve gone.

There’s no need to be rude, complained Mrs Furlow from her side of the door.

She was going away. You could hear her feet protesting down the passage. She had gone.

And now what, said Sidney, or her breath said now what, as she took up a paper tissue and rubbed the lids of her eyes. She put her head down on the dressing-table and began to cry. She had no control over it. It was like the flicking of a piece of wire.