Patrick White - Happy Valley

A penny for them, said Mrs Furlow skittishly.

I was wondering about the ultimate effect of a Mediterranean climate on an Anglo-Saxon race.

Oh, she said. Yes. Yes.

Then Sidney came out of her room. Mrs Furlow recoiled with relief out of range of the Anglo-Saxon race.

Come on, said Sidney briskly. We’ve got to get this ride over. There’s no use hanging about.

Sidney! protested Mrs Furlow.

Well, we know it’s a bore, don’t we, Roger? Going out in all this heat.

Mrs Furlow persuaded herself that he blushed.

It’s hot enough, he said. But, after all, it’s the last time.

No, she said, it’s the prelude to lots and lots. Mother will ask you again.

She looked at him with a smile. It was almost a straight line, her lips very thin and red, cleft by the sudden imposing of a smile, and then suddenly still again. He felt a long way off from her, that in spite of the smile there was no contact at all. He felt at once both excited and uncomfortable.

She’s going to be difficult, her mother sighed, clenching her rings, and said:

Shouldn’t you have worn a hat with a larger brim?

Sidney opened the fIy-proof door with a bang.

Or a pith-helmet? she asked.

You know that time you got sunstroke.

Yes, she said. It was bloody.

Sidney, dear !

A red, lean kelpie met them on the verandah and began to jump up to Sidney’s thighs. She held it by the paws a moment, her thin brown hands on its thin red paws. There is something here completely foreign to anything I know, felt Roger Kemble, those hands that touch a different substance, and despising what I touch. Then the bottom fell out of the afternoon. He did not want to go for the ride. He knew he would have to, but it was like going up to your homemaster’s study during prep, you knew what it meant.

Mrs Furlow took root on the verandah step.

Good luck, she said.

Then she was immediately horrified, in case they might interpret, though it was a thing people said, young people, she had heard them say it, and perhaps Sidney and Roger would only think. She had only said it because she liked to imagine she was one of them. For Mrs Furlow was one of those parents who, in an effort to keep in touch with contemporary slang, are determinedly B.O.P.

They left Mrs Furlow on the verandah step. They went across the yard to where the horses hung their heads, or flicked with a warning of steel in the thin shade. There was an odour of sleep from the stables and the sound of sleep in the throat of a red cock, prowling on no apparent errand, but with the conviction of his kind. His colour burnt across the yard, was harsh to the eyes. Then they got on their horses, Roger and Sidney, and rode down towards the flat. It was yellow and burnt up. The hills were burnt brown, and scabrous, quite bare in the heat, in the shimmering of heat that was liquid and apparent, the whole landscape melting and fused into an indeterminate shape beyond the margin of the eyes. You wanted to close your eyes as you rode along, to shield them from the light and the crusting of black flies.

But perhaps he is getting something out of it, Sidney felt, the way men do in their peculiar way, just from a presence, though by this a prelude to touch is generally implied. His boot touching. Sitting at dinner, the dessert came and he began to tell us, what was it, about Toc H and lighting torches, and peeling an apple his voice meant no more than this, an unwinding of surface skin. There was something decidedly pathetic about earnest, worthy men. So little defence and you wanted to see just how far you could penetrate without hurting, or perhaps hurting a little, to see. Like kicking a dog. As if he were a dog, something with wire hair. She jabbed the spurs into her horse. It gave a little whinge and sidled along.

This time to-morrow, he was saying.

This time to-morrow, she said quickly, and with no attempt at succour, you’ll be going in to Moorang to the train. It’ll probably be just as hot as this. You’ll be awfully sorry and we’ll be awfully sorry. And then you’ll write a bread-and-butter letter and say how awfully good. N’est-ce pas?

He bit his lip. It was just what he had expected. Going up to the study step by step, and knowing as you got to the top step that you were in for something unavoidable and unpleasant. She rocked along on that chestnut horse, part of the volatile, heat-tinctured landscape that was like something unfolding in dream dimensions, because unreal, you could not say that the present moment was real.

Roger Kemble sat and held hot leather in his hands. His hands were hot. He used to stutter when a boy, and they laughed at him at school, and it was pretty beastly till he got over it, but there was always something of the stutter remained, in his manner if not in his diction. Women liked him for it. So that it might have been an asset, if he had been conscious of assets of that particular kind. But he was the sort of Englishman whose women are not material for barter and exchange, creatures rather seen through the distance of a speech-day cricket match or a May Week haze upon the Cam. You employed a different vocabulary for their benefit, almost a different tone of voice. They were, in fact, Women, an abstract concept, which did not altogether gainsay the possibility of a concrete example to be welcomed with all due deference as a wife. He had hoped that Sidney would become that concrete example, would have written home to say that of course she is unconventional when judged by ordinary standards, but that is only the effect of environment, and their standard of values is different from ours. Roger Kemble clung doggedly to the idea of environment. It was the nucleus of all his favourite clichés, it made him feel intellectually safe, just as a politician erecting a safety barrage of party catchwords, and Roger Kemble would probably succumb to politics later on, standing for somewhere in Wiltshire and thought a lot of by farmer Conservatives. It was the inevitable conclusion, not Sidney Furlow, and vaguely he knew this, that Sidney Furlow would not fit in. His mother sat on the lawn and poured out tea. Girls came and sat beside her, resting from tennis in white frocks, nice girls who behaved towards Sidney Furlow with a not altogether effortless attention, because of the Dominions, those pink daubs on a map and subject of the King’s broadcast speech. Sidney Furlow a Wiltshire lawn, was not this, in a white frock, was a brown sterile spur that you saw in a heat-haze, a long way off. That was the difference.

You can’t think what a vast difference there is, he said, between what you’re used to out here, and what we’ve got at home.

Are we so inferior?

I didn’t mean that.

He blushed red in the sun.

I mean, he said, it’s so different. The landscape, for instance. Environment must eventually be responsible for a lot.

Saying this when he meant to ask her if she would like to see England, if she would like him to show it to her. His skin prickled with futility.

Yes, she yawned, I suppose it must. Thank God I shan’t be here to see it.

He tightened his hand on the bunch of reins.

Why all this discontent? he said.

Am I?

Well, yes. I should have thought. Something must be responsible. Perhaps if you got away.

She pursed up her lips.

You know, Roger, you make me laugh.

Why?

Oh, I dunno.

They rode on a bit. The silence was jerky with the flicker of grasshoppers, the air yellow with their wings. On the horses’ necks the veins stood sculptured through the sweat.

I often think, said Sidney, it’d be rather fun to blow out one’s brains. Only one mightn’t be able to watch the reactions of one’s friends. And that of course would be the whole point. There’s something so cool and soothing about the barrel of a gun. To feel it up against one’s forehead.