Patrick White - Happy Valley

Stan, dear! Stan! Where are you? called Mrs Furlow.

Then she reached the verandah and saw him with a beaker in his hand measuring the rain that had fallen into the gauge during the night. Oh, there you are, she said. The new man’s come. You’d better go into the office and see him. I told him to wait in there.

Mr Furlow held up the beaker, half closing his eyes to read the number of points.

He’s a very large man, said Mrs Furlow rather pensively, but without any accent of approval, for she thought he was rather uncouth, in fact definitely common, though she did not know why she had expected the overseer to be anything else. He would probably be a good worker, she felt, which meant he knew about sheep, which meant in the long run that Mrs Furlow would take many delightful trips to Sydney, on the strength of the overseer’s knowledge of sheep. This had always been Mrs Furlow’s attitude to overseers. They were a race of golden geese that you encouraged enough to ensure a profitable return, but avoided killing by an overdose of attention.

You’d better go in and see him, she said. You must have measured that drop of rain.

Mr Furlow had measured the rain, although he was staring still at the scale of points. It was a gesture of postponement. He stood holding the beaker between himself and the necessity of going to interview the new man. Actually, he would say he had to think things out, he was now expected to say impressive things as the owner of Glen Marsh, but Mr Furlow never thought, he relied on a process of slow filtration and trusted to providence to give the mechanism a jog. The process of filtration was still in a state of doubtful progress when, mastering an incipient belch, he went into the office and found Hagan sitting there.

Good day, said Mr Furlow, cautiously closing the door.

He tried to look solemn and businesslike as he sat down in his chair. He tried to find something to say.

You’ve been having a drop of rain, said Hagan.

Yes. A nice drop of rain.

Hagan sat there holding his hat. He had sobered up.

Nice mob of ewes up on the hill, he said.

Yes. A nice mob of ewes.

Merinoes?

Eh? said Mr Furlow. Oh, yes. Merinoes.

He sighed and folded his hands on his paunch.

I’m trying a Lincoln cross, he said.

He felt he had made a contribution to the conversation. He was satisfied.

Mutton? asked Hagan.

Yes.

A dopey old fool, you could see that, and the money rolling into his pocket, it beat you the way it happened, just for sitting there, it made you feel sore, working for a soft old bladder and trying your luck at a ballot and never doing any good, you hadn’t any luck, it seemed to be fixed in a ballot who was to draw the land, but you were as good as any of them if it came down to brass tacks, only you hadn’t a chance. Hagan shifted in his chair. The silence was getting him down. He beat a tune with his fingers on a typewriter lid. Then he realized what he was doing and stopped.

Mr Furlow cleared his throat.

Well, he said, that’s about all I’ve got to say. If you go on round to the back the groom’ll show you where to go. We can talk things over to-morrow. We can take a ride round the place. I hope you’ll be comfortable, he said.

Then he opened the door.

I’ll be all right, Hagan said.

Out in the passage there was a woman, it was Mrs Furlow, beating against a door.

Sidney, I insist! she called. I insist that you go out!

She stood there in the passage, her voice pretty high with anger, knocking away on the door. Hagan went along the passage towards the back. She did not seem to notice him. She was too busy banging on the door, hitting it with her rings. You could see well enough who ran the place, not that old coot talking about his Lincoln cross. She was making the devil of a row on that door.

Oh, for God’s sake, cried another voice, and it was harsh, it sounded as if it would tear. You treat me like a blasted child!

A great scurrying then, and he was at the back door, and someone was coming, he wanted to look back, but he had to open the door, and he couldn’t very well look back even if…He opened the door on to the back verandah. And somebody was coming, coming slap up against him, almost jamming him in the door. A girl ran out on to the verandah. She was a white blur, her dress, as it pushed past him, and the feel of her arm on the back of his hand. She looked back a moment angrily, taking her anger from the woman and fixing it on him, he felt. She looked a bit of a bitch, with that sharp, red, painted mouth. Her breath had come past him with a rush. But she did not stand there looking at him, or say anything, say she was sorry, she ran on.

What’s been happening now? asked Mr Furlow fretfully.

She, she…, wailed Mrs Furlow.

Hagan did not hear what She had done. She was running down the hill in the mud, in a pair of high-heeled shoes that went over as she ran, and the mud splashed up on her dress. She was thin, there wasn’t much of her, not his type at all. Anyway, he couldn’t stand on the verandah all the afternoon. He would have to find that groom. He went down the step and across the yard. The girl had reached the bottom of the hill, had pulled open the door of a shed and gone inside, slamming the door after her. She had some guts the way she ran, even if that little behind, he’d never had anyone thin, not like that woman in the jacket, you couldn’t see her running down the hill. He went on across the yard. His hat was tilted over his eyes, he walked with his elbows slightly bent, stiffly in his suit of best clothes. He whistled a tune that he had heard somewhere on the gramophone. In front of the stable door a red cock was treading a hen.

When Margaret Quong had finished dinner she helped her mother wash up the plates. She stood with a towel waiting to receive the rinsed plates. And she was at once both deft and absent, wiping, staring out of the window, and digging with her tongue into a hole in one of her back teeth. She began to hum. She had eaten a bit too much. It was still too early to go back to school. In fact, she had just that feeling of detachment and suspended time which makes your eyes expand, or at least it seems like that, and it is difficult to think of much, or thought has no connecting thread, and reaching back with your tongue to a hole in a back tooth is a gesture of well-being, comfortable, almost voluptuous.

Anyone’d think, said her mother, that this was a hotel.

Margaret did not answer. She seldom answered her mother. Words beat on the border of her mind, but did not penetrate. If she selected a remark from out of the habitual wash of words it was one that needed a reply, one of those remarks that form the structure of an inevitable relationship. So now she hummed, and let her mother look at the clock, and frown, and say:

Coming in at any hour for meals. Just like a hotel.

Mrs Quong flicked the water from her fingers. It fell back into the sink. It spattered with a little hiss, like the voice of Mrs Quong. Then she drew down her sleeves.

Ethel Quong was sour and thin, her whole aspect was a little virulent, so that people avoided her, and she said she had no friends at all because she was married to a Chinaman. And why had she married Walter Quong, they said. Well, it had happened like this. Ethel had a friend called Mabel Still who lived at Clovelly and was married to a man who travelled in Ford parts. Still took in a number of the towns in the south of the state, like Tumut, and Batlow, and Moorang, and he went to Happy Valley too, not that there was much business there, only a Chinaman called Walter Quong, Mabel said. He kept a garage. He was ever such a good chap, they said, and you had to be broadminded, and what was a Chinaman, they said. At this time Ethel was a housemaid at Government House. She used to visit Mabel Still, go out to tea on her afternoon off, or in the evening to a movie. Yes, she said, you ought to have a broad mind. She agreed with Mabel over that. Mabel lent her books on sex. She felt very proud of her broad mind. You had to move with the times. She went a lot to the Stills, and there she met Mr Quong, he was up in Sydney, on business, he said, and Harry Still had asked him along. Mabel said, couldn’t you see Walter Quong was a good chap? Ethel had to agree. She didn’t really like the idea of hobnobbing with a Chinaman, but if you had a broad mind, and anyway you called him a Chinese, and he was only half. They had a game of cards after supper. Walter asked if he could take her home. She let him drive her some of the way.