Patrick White - Happy Valley

I’m a simple man, Mr Furlow used to say. He used it as a defence, as much as to say, don’t touch me now that you know the truth. Because he liked to be left alone. He liked to say, this is good enough for me. It absolved him from exertion, from opinions, from anything but a gentle meandering through a field of objective images. And that man bawling in the bar at Goulburn had upset his equilibrium. Now what about Mussolini? he said, and Mr Furlow did not know, he went cold down the spine, wondered what he ought to say, remembered that someone at the Club had said, ought to castrate the bastard before the trouble spreads. The Goulburn station bar was an isolated patch of discomfort in Mr Furlow’s usually comfortable mind.

Had a nice drop of rain since you left, said the chauffeur.

Mr Furlow switched off, he was good at switching off, and returned to the immediate landscape between Happy Valley and Glen Marsh, to a mob of wethers in the hollow, to the fence that straggled out towards Ferndale, to all this, the comprehensible. His paunch stirred with the motion of the car, his mind with pleasurable anticipation of dogs running out from the house and Sidney perhaps standing on the steps. When she was younger she would run out too, with the dogs, and climb on the running-board of the car, and ask what he had brought. Her lips on his cheek were more inquisitive than affectionate, but the analysis of motive was not in Mr Furlow’s line, and Sidney’s mouth was still a kiss. He smiled. The bracelet in his pocket dragged down one side of his coat. The way she put her hand in his pocket was coming home, was Sidney’s hand, was contact with the comprehensible detail of Glen Marsh, of Mr Furlow himself.

Not that he connected his daughter in any but an objective way, her face, her voice, with what he might, but didn’t, term the comprehensible. The face, the voice, this brittle glass, he loved because they were familiar and time had made their contact mutual. But to penetrate the distant regions of his daughter’s mind was something it did not occur to Mr Furlow to do. This remained a mystery from which occasionally there issued an indication of some conflict that, for her father, was more inexplicable than the activities of Mussolini or the European situation. He did not know. He did not want to know. He was a little afraid of something so remote and intangible. He would pick up his paper and go off into another room, forsaking an expression or a cadence that had caused him any discomfiture.

Driving up to the house, he put his hand in his pocket again, touched the bracelet that lay there in its leather jeweller’s case. He liked to buy her diamonds. They showed very white and clear against her thin, brown arm. You spoil her, dear, Mrs Furlow said. That only added to his complaisance, in the way that certain rebukes do, and in fact are only meant to encourage the gestures they rebuke. Mrs Furlow’s voice was moulded to this manner of rebuke, the mingled tones of martyrdom and delight, signifying, I don’t count poor me, but won’t Mrs Blandford be impressed when I write and tell her what you have done. Diamonds, for Mrs Furlow, glittered with the brightest social prestige.

Glen Marsh was so many years of prestige as the car advanced along the road. The house reclined, a little too perfect, among the trees, with its lap of green lawn outspread and an embroidering of round chrysanthemum beds. Soon the dogs would rush out, the servants peep from the side wing, the groom stop cleaning the harness at the back and come round to the drive. There was great satisfaction attached to such an approach to Glen Marsh. Mr Furlow sighed. He was heavy with the riches of the earth and a diamond bracelet that he would take right in and put on Sidney’s arm.

Well, dear, said Mrs Furlow, kissing him formally on the cheek, I hope you haven’t got a cold. You know the train gives you colds.

She spoke with the slight asperity of someone who has been left at home, for even a home such as Glen Marsh is less attractive as a constant reality than as an abstract idea. She did not like to be left at home.

Mr Furlow put down his hat.

Where’s Sidney? he said.

She’s in the drawing-room, I expect.

Anything wrong?

No. Nothing unusual, that is.

Mrs Furlow’s face assumed the expression of martyred punishment that came to it always when her daughter was on the mat.

I can’t understand her, she said, as if this at least were an unusual remark. She’s been sulking for days.

He went into the drawing-room, prepared to encounter the incomprehensible, the slightly frightening aspect of his daughter, that made him go almost on tiptoe, accentuating his unwieldiness. The doors were open. It was cold. Of course, it was autumn, he said, of course it would be cold.

Sidney, he said. Hello, Sidney.

Back turned, she leant against the door, was looking down in the direction of the orchard, where the boughs of the plum-trees were a net of patternless black. Her dress was tight to her thigh. She looked very thin, remote, her face remote that turned from its preoccupation and touched him with a glance.

Hello, she said. You’re back — in an accent that was without surprise, as if there were no more room for surprise, and why should anyone expect it.

Sidney is passionately fond of her father, Mrs Furlow always said, inaccurately gauging, like most parents, their children’s emotional capacities. Now he stood there, a little uncertain. She looked at him as he hesitated, not only part of the moment, but of so many former occasions, some of them distinct, some fused in the general pattern, in which he stood or ran, picked her up that day she fell off Rose and the gravel was embedded in her cheek, talked embarrassed to Miss Cortine, or just his presence, or again his presence, linked to no particular incident. He is a succession of incidents, she felt, and going bald, and rather fat, the day the girls met him in the hall at Miss Cortine’s, came in laughing because, said Helen, they had seen such a funny old fat man in the hall, so the cheeks burned, and going downstairs to find him looking tired, looked now.

Have you had any lunch? she said.

No. But I’ll wait till tea.

All right. Just as you like.

Like lead the voice, but I am glad, I suppose, go put my hand on his arm or kiss, because I am fond, like the familiar bits of you, the nursery chairs or books, and tell him, tell him, that you did not tell, as you watched the moment pass, and it would be so easy to watch a trunk going down the drive, and he would know he had no more power than a whipped snake lying cool in the palm of the hand. She put up her cheek to her father. She felt languid. She felt the familiar texture of his cheek, the slight roughness. It was different pressed up against, and if only you had hit harder or with the handle, which was bone, perhaps to draw blood.

What’s the matter, pet? said Father.

Nothing, she said.

She went and sat down on the sofa. She had begun to tremble. She would not think, isolate her body in a kind of envelope of passive indifference. Because why should I care, she said, that big brute, only it was dirty, rubbing your face in the stable in dung was cleaner than this, only why should I think about it at all.

Anything worrying you, darling? he said.

No. I said nothing — her voice rasping a little, as she looked up and would have said, Father, send that swine away, that inevitably was not said.

Here, he said. I’ve brought you something.

She held the case in her lap, the lid opened on diamonds, on a sullen purity of diamonds that lay there waiting to be touched by her hands.

Thank you, she said. They’re lovely. Thank you.

That’s all right, pet, he said.

Then he went out, almost on tiptoe, half thankful for release from a situation that he did not understand. Her cheek burnt as he touched. Mr Furlow closed the door. It was disconcerting to brush against other people’s emotions when they were not the same as his own. He drew in his breath. He did not want to penetrate any farther. So he went down the passage towards the office encased in the satisfaction of having done just what he wanted to do.