Patrick White - Happy Valley

They rode back again into the yard. It was hot and foetid as they left it, a smell of dung, of ammonia from the stables, and no shadow anywhere. The red cock was a flame licking up the dust near the pantry window, quite solitary beside the dead house. They led their horses into the stable. They walked across the yard. Each step was of consequence, only so many necessary steps, the rest dispensable.

Mrs Furlow had taken off her shoes and her dress. She had lain down to rest. I shan’t sleep, she said to her husband, who was dozing in the office beneath an ark of newspapers constructed to protect him from a possible fly. Mr Furlow did not even grunt. He was asleep. So Mrs Furlow lay down on her bed, in need of sympathy, thought she would like to pray, if that were not blasphemy, was it, she wondered, and one always prayed for rain, not that it did any good. Mrs Furlow lay on her bed and sighed, tried not to accuse the Almighty of perversity. That was till she heard Sidney come. She heard the bang of the fly-proof door, their feet in the passage going to their rooms. Mrs Furlow’s heart banged. She sat on the edge of the bed. Then she got up slowly, put on her dressing-gown, and went down the passage to Sidney’s room.

Sidney, she said.

She looked over her daughter’s shoulder, at her daughter’s face in the mirror, sitting there at the dressing-table, quite still. It was the stillness that perturbed Mrs Furlow.

You’ve got back very soon, she said.

Yes. It was a bore riding about in the heat.

Sidney took up the powder-puff. She dabbed at her face with the soft puff. She looked at her mother in the mirror, standing there in her stockings, on soft, puffed feet, soft, very soft, looking ludicrous with her head stuck forward, waiting. It made you want to hurt something, take it in your hand, not a flabby insipid puff. She threw down the powder-puff. It made a faint protesting cloud as it hit the dressing-table’s glass top.

And Roger? said Mrs Furlow. Roger wanted to go for a ride.

He’s in his room. You’d better ask him if he enjoyed it.

Sidney, you didn’t quarrel?

Why should I quarrel with Roger?

No. I wondered. I wondered if he…

Sidney got up. She was trembling. She couldn’t control her mouth, no longer pressed into a line, but forced open by the breath, that was hot, that was rasping on her lips. She quivered like a wire.

No, she screamed. No. He didn’t. Or he did, if you like. Only I didn’t. Now get out. For God’s sake. Go! Go!

Mrs Furlow retreated on her stockinged feet. Her face was a quaking mass of afternoon despair. She began to cry.

For God’s sake, go! For God’s sake, get out!

Like a wire struck and still vibrating, Sidney Furlow had that zinging in the ears. Her hands fumbled at the lock, and with less directed purpose on her own face. Back to the door, she trembled in the glass. There were two lines of red down her left cheek, fresh from the passage of her nails.

Mrs Furlow stood outside in her stockings, whimpered desolate against the door.

Clem Hagan had finished work. He stood in the wash-house at the back of the cottage where he lived. The light was frail outside, the landscape gentler, the cows in acquiescent groups. Hagan looked out of the window, though not at the landscape, not conscious of this or the activities of natural phenomena, except as a source of economic advancement, and now that work was over he did not even think of this. There was a smell of yellow soap in the wash-house and of boiling water in a kerosene tin. He stood at the basin, bare to the waist, and the water ran down his shoulders, down the channel of his spine and the valley between his breasts. There was a foam of soap at his neck. The water glistened in the hollows of his neck. When he had washed he took the razor, and with the same inevitable rhythm, he began to shave his face. You heard the tottering scrape of the razor, the seeping sound of the lathered brush. You saw him, half-shaved, eye himself in the glass with the satisfaction of one who has confidence in his body, both as a physical structure of muscle and bone, and as a source of endless possibility. He smiled at the glass, not exactly at himself, but at an array of achievements for which he had been responsible. Then he continued to shave himself.

Clem Hagan riding into town for the evening and risking a new pair of pants on the saddle. Clem Hagan whistling and testing his spurs on the horse’s side. Clem Hagan mounting the hill and letting the horse go in the almost darkness, opening her out along the road, so that the trees flew and the letter-box at Ferndale, and then just the hissing of the darkness, as it got dark, and there was nothing but darkness to fly past. This was an apotheosis. A shave and a wash made you feel like new, and the sound of metal as the horse galloped along. You were a new man. You bent forward along the horse’s neck and the wind was in your teeth. Your teeth bared to the wind. Clem Hagan going into town.

Would go and try his luck, there was every sign, and that Saturday in the store brushing up against him as if there was no room, and apologizing, and a tin of dog biscuits falling on to the floor. Oh, Miss Quong, she said, aren’t I clumsy, she said, but it’s dark, my eyes aren’t used to the light, though she could see like a cat rubbing up against him, you must come round, she said, my husband and I will only be too glad to see you, because one never sees a soul in Happy Valley, does you, not like in Sydney where Daisy, Daisy’s my sister, you know, they have a business at Marrickville, she said, I used to live there before I met Ernest, that’s my husband, that she slipped in for luck when she asked anyone to come round, that little runt of a schoolmaster. He said he’d come round perhaps Saturday night. She said she’d be ever so pleased. It was a pity they didn’t see more of each other, wasn’t it? He must be lonely out there at Glen Marsh. They might have a game of cards, if he liked cards, she didn’t much. Then she went out of the store, pneumatically down the steps, and he could see the ridge of the corset on her behind.

Hagan whistled between his teeth. It was a tune he had heard somewhere on a gramophone, long enough ago to forget the circumstances, though he could have made a pretty good guess. He yawned. It was all pretty much the same, a different gramophone to the same tune, and sometimes you wondered if it was worth turning the handle, wondered that is, until you thought you’d give it another try, see if you still had the knack, and then the bloody tune was the same. He stopped whistling. He could have done with a drink. Perhaps she would give him a drink, or perhaps that little blue-faced slate-pencil of a Moriarty was T.T., looked as if he might be anything, or a Baptist, or anything. Take her to the pictures perhaps. Only there was Moriarty. Might take her to the pictures and get her in the middle with Moriarty the other side, kid Moriarty there was nothing up while working on his wife, which would make an easy job a little bit difficult. It was all so easy, all so much the same, turning the handle for the same tune. He could do with a Scotch. Working on those fence-posts it made you dry, and drinking out of a canvas bag the water soft and warm, that you spat out of your mouth, wiped sweat from your eyes as she came past, and good afternoon Hagan she said, with that pink-faced pommy chap that they said was going to marry her — well, he had a tough job there, the poor bastard, like getting your crowbar into the rock, and she thought she was doing you a favour as she rode past to say, or up at supper that Sunday evening with doyleys on the table and passing you the salad-bowl. He began to whistle in thoughtful scraps. The wind flirted past his face as they went down Tozer’s Hollow where the water-hole was now bone-dry. Passing the salad-bowl and jumping as if she was shot, made you think a bit as you looked at her, saw she was hard as a nail, and not for you if you wanted, even if you wanted what you didn’t want, not a virgin anyway, it was too much like hard work, and holding you responsible, as if you wasn’t doing them a good turn. Sidney Furlow could keep herself.