Patrick White - Happy Valley

Sidney, he said.

Oh, you needn’t make me promise you things. In the end one doesn’t do it.

But I wanted to ask.

Look, she said, I’ll race you down to the bend.

Because only by this you could feel the wind, in the heat soothing as the barrel of a gun, the horse stretched and breathing under your legs. He was going to ask, well, what Mother for the last week had been wanting him to ask, as if this were the price of a week at Glen Marsh. The Furlows of Glen Marsh. The Glen Marsh stud. I am a Furlow and object of deference, because God knows why, why the Furlows, if only you could strip off and become some, something, something, anything, or even naked. And he was going to ask me about England, Sidney Furlow, change the initials on my dressing case, because married to Roger Kemble is only an exchange of labels, would not be essentially different, going up to bed and sleeping together would not change all that. She pressed her legs into the sides of the horse, feeling the weal of the stirrup leathers pressed in to her legs. Hurting Roger Kemble if she said no, hurting him more if she accepted, he did not realize what it implied, that she wanted more than deference, even if she did not altogether know what it was she wanted yet, if definitely not an English accent and a fair moustache. Though it would have been so easy. It would have been such an easy way out. Of course I shall marry, Helen said at Miss Cortine’s. Helen was not a virgin. There was that little naval man, very smooth, looked as if he must have been shaved all over. Oh well, that, said Helen, that won’t make any difference, and you can’t be a prude if they want. Lying in bed and wondering if Helen and that man, it made you stuff the sheet in your mouth, though Helen said. The horse cantered towards the bend. She drew him in, her hands whitened by the straining of the reins. But if I married Roger it would be different, would not touch unless. She jerked at the horse’s mouth.

Come up! she shouted. Come up, damn you!

This old post of a chestnut gelding that they gave her to ride, as if she were a child and couldn’t manage, or didn’t want to manage, even if your hands hurt or breath beat out of your body, or hoofs trampled blood upon your mouth. Her lips were white as she reined in the horse.

Roger came up behind her. She looked at the tension of his face, working up, working up to say…

Look, she said, there’s Hagan over there with the men.

Then watched his face slacken as the moment slipped and they rode closer to the group of men.

They were working on the fence, pulling out the rotten posts and twitching up the wire. The two men turned to look. They wiped sweat from their faces and watched the horses approach. Hagan, his back turned, tamped the earth round the butt of a new post, and the tamp rose and fell through his hands like a piston-rod. He stood with his legs apart, slowly tamping. His arms were a burnt red.

Afternoon, Miss Sidney, one of the men said.

Both of them touched their hats. Hagan turned.

Good afternoon, Hagan, she said.

She looked down at him, at his face shiny with sweat, and screwed up as he looked through the glare. He nodded at her and smiled. The way that gold flashed in the sun. Did not take off his hat. She frowned at him as she passed close, looking down. He could have put out his hand. She saw the reddish hair on his arms. Hated him ever since that day when, running down the hill and glancing back from the shed door, she had seen him standing insolently up in the yard, owning the place, and watching her make a fool of herself. He always felt she was a fool, looked at her like this. Our Mr Hagan, she said. And now he watched them as they rode by, standing propped upon the iron tamp, looking through her body and making her conscious of its movement, its curve and sway, even though her back was turned she felt that he stood there looking with his eyes screwed up. His hands were hard. She had touched them that night at supper, handing the salad, and the skin was cracked, the broken nails. She had looked up into his eyes and they were hard too above the salad-bowl.

Let’s go back, she said to Roger. We can go up that gully and round. I don’t know why we’re trailing about like lunatics in this heat.

After all, it’s the last time.

She looked at him.

If you say that again I’ll scream. No, I don’t mean that. I’m sorry, Roger. Only I wish we had gone another way.

She had let fall upon him a cool word that another time would have been exquisite, now only a reminder of things still undone. He took out his handkerchief and slowly wiped his face.

She looked back over her shoulder. Hagan was tamping the earth. She turned again and frowned. As if there was something in the denial of a supposition that galled. She hated him because he had stared, she hated him more because he had not.

Sidney, said Roger, and it all came rather quickly, as if there was not much time, and turning the shoulder of a hill she might canter out of his vicinity. Sidney, I want to ask you something. Something I’ve wanted to ask you for a long time. I wonder if you’d marry me, he said.

Oh Lord, she groaned mentally, now it was all coming, and why was a proposal so just like what you had expected, coming from Roger anyway it was. If only it could stay like that, but you had to say something in reply.

Well, she said, do you feel any better now that you’ve got that off your chest?

No, not a bit.

I’m sorry.

You’ve rather left me in the air.

You don’t think I could marry you?

I don’t see why you couldn’t.

His voice was stripped rather painfully of its reserve. There was always something rather painful, she thought, about a voice that had lost its insulation.

Think a bit, she said, and you’ll see.

Which was what he had done already, denying the rational conclusion, because Sidney was like that, because he wanted her, because he could not understand her, which made no difference, for somehow the unattainable puts a stronger accent on desire.

I don’t see why you couldn’t, he said again.

Like a schoolboy, he felt, his voice, a schoolboy who produced a lamentable defence, clung to a shielding phrase, in the face of the inevitable.

She began to hum.

What do you want? he said. What do you really want?

I don’t know, she said.

Her cheeks looked hollow as she turned.

But I don’t want to talk about this. See? It’s all over.

Her voice flipped out. Then they rode on silently.

He had done it. It was over. He felt he had been whipped all over. He would write to his mother and say, dear Mother, say…Nothing at all. Because there was no need, sitting on the lawn, to explain that Sidney was a kind of paradox, still in fact, though non-existent as far as Wiltshire was concerned. But he did not want her any the less, his words flung back, and that look, when he fell down a cliff-face in Dorset his hands on shale, he looked up the sky white and sheer as silence.

I suppose you’ll come up for the races, he said, in the kind of voice with which he made conversation at garden parties, and which made old ladies murmur, Roger Kemble, so attentive, so kind.

I don’t expect so, she said.

Damn these grasshoppers!

Yes. There’s a plague.

Australia, the land of plagues.

She looked at him, twisting up her mouth. The lids of her eyes hung low against the glare.

A second Egypt, she said. Only not so full of allegory.

The voice was heavy in her mouth. What you said in this heat was somehow immaterial. About allegory. I am dying, Egypt. Those silkworms, shrivelled up and made a smell and you ran away out of the room because the smell of putrefying silkworms was too much. Sidney, dear, said Mother, we must throw the poor little silkworms out, you won’t mind, darling, Daddy will get some more. More and more and more. We must feed them on mulberry leaves to keep them fresh and fat and smooth. Then they lifted him up into the tower and it must have been hard work, though of course there would have been someone underneath to push, and that woman slobbering, it was a monument, with his mouth on Egypt. Roger Kemble with his mouth tight pressed. Helen said you opened your mouth. Tamping that post hole and he got a sunstroke, it would take him down a peg, or would go away and then. It was too hot, too fly, and the house like a red wound on a burnt face with a tank that flashed, not gold, that was too hot, hot.