Happy Valley (9 page)

Rodney’s been crying, said George.

Run along out and play, said Hilda. Look, it isn’t raining any more.

The fire burnt with the intimate crackle of a wood fire when the heat has almost dried the wood. Oliver did not look at Hilda. He ate. You knew she was keeping something for later on. You ought to be grateful for all these little subterfuges. You were in a way, only, only there was something both irritating and pathetic in a perpetual cosseting that was only so much time squandered in the face of the final issue. Hilda tried not to see this, or would not, was afraid to see. She built herself a raft of superficialities and floated down the stream. She tried to drag him on to her raft, and when he almost upset it she did not complain. I must be nice to Hilda, he said. I am growing morose and introspective. It’s the climate, or age. Those evenings going to Professor Birkett’s and talking over beer, the inner life provided a series of formulas for pleasant solution, and you came away with a mind neatly docketed for future reference. Nothing could jostle a theory, it was cut and dried. Then you lost the labels in time, and you started again, or tried to start, and it was a case of order out of chaos, and you wanted to tip the whole lot overboard, only that was impossible, because Hilda and Rodney and George clung to the fragments, were founded on something that you thought had existed before. And why had Rodney cried? He went on cutting up the mutton, listening to the fire. It was peaceful, and he was glad it was peaceful. His legs ached. He was very tired.

Oh dear, said Hilda suddenly. I’d quite forgotten, Oliver. Miss Browne is waiting in your room.

She can wait a little longer, he said flatly.

Perhaps you ought…She must have been there three-quarters of an hour. She said she had cut her hand.

Oliver put down his knife and fork. He went down the passage towards the room that he used as a combined dispensary and consulting-room. When he went in he was still finishing a mouthful of food.

Good morning, she said, getting up out of the chair. I didn’t want to disturb you at your lunch. I could go away, she said, or, or just as you like.

Because he frowned it put her off, taking away the words. She saw that his eyes were blue, not grey. She saw that he had not shaved. But of course he had been away all night. He looked rather gaunt, like a saint with a beard in that book of saints, or not a saint at all, just tired and unshaven. But she wished she had not come at all, the way he frowned, she blamed the sudden spirit of panic that had made her long for company.

Let’s see, he said. You’ve cut your hand.

She took off the handkerchief.

There’s not much wrong with that, he said. I thought it sounded like six stitches at least.

Oh no. I hope not. I should hate stitches. Don’t they hurt?

He had taken a bottle of iodine and a swab of cotton-wool.

Of course they hurt.

He said it almost between his teeth, she thought, as if…
Then the iodine plunged down into the cut, and suddenly she was hot behind the knees, and she laughed rather stupidly, holding her wrist as hard as she could. She wanted to walk about, and bite her lip, she could feel the breath mount in her throat, pushing to form itself into a moan. Then she looked at him. He was looking at her. He was very detached. She had shrunk to the significance of something pinned to a sheet of paper or writhing underneath a lens. Then he was not looking at her, she saw, it was her imagination, or he had been looking and suddenly withdrew into some world of which she may or may not have been, and probably not, some possible indication. He turned away and brought a bandage and some lint.

That hurt quite enough, she said.

He did not answer. He bound her hand. His fingers were cold. He manipulated her hand as if it were a parcel of bones and tissues, detached from the body, no connection with this. She did not feel there was any necessity to be quite so professional, it reached a point where it became rude, and she found herself thinking of Mrs Stopford-Champernowne, the old lady whose tatting she used to pick up, and whose mind and body had the soft, comfortable texture of an eiderdown. She did not like Dr Halliday, because he did not like her, and she grew ashamed of a whole lot of things, half-formed thoughts connected with Dr Halliday, how she had imagined as she sat alone in the room that she would ask him if he had read this or that, and perhaps he would have thought she was distinguished. Because in her more private moments Alys Browne wanted very badly to be thought distinguished, and that is why
she read Anna Karenina and played Schumann in the late afternoon.

There you are, he said, in a voice that suggested now I can get back to my lunch.

There was nothing more to say. She let him show her out to the door, she ran down the steps, she went on up the street. She felt more sober too, as if she had rid herself of the waste ends of a lot of surplus and superficial emotions. There was that dress for Mrs Belper that she must do. And she tried not to think of Dr Halliday, who thought she was a fool, and it is always uncomfortable to put yourself in a light in which you shine only as a fool.

You’ll have to shoot that poor hen, said Hilda.

She was standing by the dining-room window when he got back. Hilda finding the substance of pity in a hen trailing across the yard, or Hilda herself was pity, he felt, like an allegorical figure he had seen in a French church, the sad Gothic emptiness of the hands, standing in Happy Valley, only it was Hilda, and she was inclined to wear jumpers, blue or grey, that she knitted herself, and she wore her hair in a kind of coil with strands falling, straggling at the side. He put up his hand to his head. That Browne girl pitying herself because she had cut her hand was unreal, or he, or Happy Valley, was unreal, removing itself into a world of allegory, of which the dominating motif was pain. Sitting on the ferry he had wanted to write a play, but he could not find a theme, not like a sculptor who carved Hilda on an altar-piece. You looked through the Browne girl and there was nothing, except a little veil of self-pity. It is half-past two. You stand in the dining-room and pity
yourself, and that is different, but the same, appalling in someone else, inevitable in yourself, but the same.

You haven’t had your pudding, Hilda said.

I don’t want any pudding.

Oliver…

She was looking at him, wanting to say something that wasn’t easy to say, and she rubbed her hands together as if they were cold. Both of them wanting to say something and then it only came in words.

It’s about Rodney, she said. He’ll have to go to another school. He’s beginning to see that he’s different. Different from the others, I mean. They persecute him. We’ll have to send him to Sydney to a proper school.

Yes, I know.

His head ached.

We’ll have to make the effort, she said.

All right. I’ve got to think. It’ll mean expense. You must give me time, Hilda. I can’t manage it all at once.

Here he was defending himself. She looked anxious, anxious for Rodney, or anxious for herself. Hilda coughed in bed at night. She turned about in bed at night and said, I can’t sleep, Oliver. What time is it? I can’t sleep, she said. My mouth’s dry. Perhaps you’d get me a glass of water. Because I can’t sleep. And now he looked at her as she stood there speaking for Rodney, and again there was so much he wanted to say, remembering Dr Bridgeman and how she hid her handkerchief. But there seemed no words in which to express compassion for a human being with whom you were in close relationship. It became even more difficult then.

He went and touched her face with his hand, pushing back a strand of hair.

All right, he said. We’ll see. We’ll all have to get out of this.

He thought she recoiled.

I didn’t mean…I only meant Rodney ought to have a chance.

It hasn’t started again?

I’m all right, she said, lowering her eyes. Only sometimes I don’t feel very well. Only a little cough. It’ll be better when the summer comes.

He held her hand. There ought to be so much that two people could say. He was fond of her. There ought to be so much. But they were like strangers standing on the railway station waiting for the train to go. You were always waiting for something that you did not say, that perhaps after all you could not say. But you felt you ought.

Now look here, he said, sitting on the table edge and starting to be matter-of-fact. There’s a man up in Queensland Birkett knows. He wants to exchange his practice for something in the south. You’ll be better there. And we can leave Rodney in Sydney on the way.

She was very still. But he could feel her relief, the gratitude inside her, because they would go away, Hilda receiving one more chance to put out her hand towards certainty.

I didn’t mean, she mumbled. I only thought that Rodney…

I’ll write to Birkett to-night, he said. Ask him to get in touch with this friend of his.

It would be better in Queensland. It would be warm, said Hilda slowly, slowly beginning to clear away the things.

She was tranquil now. He seemed to have stopped the quivering of some little nerve that whipped her into a ceaseless running to and fro. But she looked tired clearing away the things.

You ought to lie down, said Hilda, because she was like that, she had to transfer her own sensations and emotions to those she came in contact with.

He kissed her on the back of the neck, very lightly conscious of the scent of her neck which he knew so well, the scent and shape, sitting on a seat in the Botanical Gardens, when he thought he knew everything. And now he knew nothing, or at least he did not know Hilda, nothing more than the scent and shape.

He opened his mouth to say—what? Something that he would not say. So he went away along the passage to the dispensary, where he would lie down. He was tired. And later on she would bring him tea. Out in the yard George played with a cartload of stones, and Happy Valley stretched away back in grey sweeps, the child playing in the foreground unconscious of what had been arranged. He would write to Birkett to-night. And Happy Valley stretched away, greyly sweeping, the curve of telephone poles. He was standing in the window at the head of that great unconscious plain, how very grey, putting a hand to his beard, he must shave, he must sleep, he must leave Happy Valley to-night, to-morrow, sleeping for an hour or two on the hair sofa in the dispensary, it would take a month or two at least to drag up the roots and deliver
safely on a towel that red child and she said hurt. He had been rather short. The way she held her wrist. She said Miss Browne. He would go up there in the evening and see, because he had not meant to be rude.

Mrs Furlow tried the door. It was locked.

Sidney, dear! she called. Sid-ney!

Yes?

What are you doing, dear?

Nothing, Mother.

Mrs Furlow stood by the door, one hand raised in perplexity to her mouth.

Hadn’t you better go out and get some air?

I can’t go out in the wet.

It isn’t raining now. You ought to take some exercise.

Silence made Mrs Furlow frown. She bent her head to the door and frowned.

You ought to go for a ride, she said. I’ll tell Charlie to saddle your horse.

Then she went away. She was passably content. She had arranged that Sidney should go for a ride.

Mrs Furlow’s habitual expression was one of puzzlement, because frankly her daughter puzzled her, and her chief preoccupation was her daughter. She used to say, when I was a girl I didn’t do this or that, but it was a statement that did not help matters at all. I do my best, she said, which meant that she made arrangements. She made many arrangements. She had arranged that Sidney should marry a young man called Kemble, an Englishman, who was A.D.C. at Government House. The young man did not know. But Mrs Furlow did, and that was half the battle. Mr Furlow only grunted and left her alone to do her best. Mr Furlow was very equable, and his daughter loved him. Sidney is
passionately
fond of her father, Mrs Furlow said, this without any bitterness, or as if she had resolved to make the best of a galling situation by suggesting that Sidney’s passion was a flower fostered by her own hands. For Mrs Furlow’s consolation was her own capability, whether as a president of charities or as the disposer of other people’s affections.

Sidney puzzled her, but did not otherwise upset her comfortable confidence. Mentally, Mrs Furlow always wore a tiara. She had an actual tiara too, which she kept put away in a velvet case, and wore on state occasions for dinner at Government House or the Lord Mayor’s Ball. And she looked very fine in her tiara, was a fine figure of a woman, in fact, with her head held up and her chin only just beginning to go. When she swept into a room in an excessive number of pearls everyone said,
MY DEAR,
which, if overheard, Mrs Furlow always interpreted to her own advantage. This because she held an innate belief in her
own importance as a public figure. She liked to pick up the Herald and read a description of her dress. She had also a private passion for the Prince of Wales.

But Sidney was difficult, she said, moping away in her room and reading a book. Now when I was a girl. Not that Mrs Furlow didn’t read books herself, she paid a country member’s subscription to Dymock’s library, and received a parcel now and again, Hugh Walpole and travel books, though what she liked best was a travel book with a plot. But Sidney moping in a room. She had not paid for her to go to a finishing school in town just to mope in her room. So that is one reason why she had just been to knock at the door. It would do her good to ride across the flat. It would do her complexion good. One had to think of the dances, and Race Week, and Roger Kemble, the A.D.C.

I’ve told them to saddle Sidney’s horse, said Mrs Furlow, going into the office where her husband sat.

Mr Furlow grunted. He always sat in the office to allow his lunch to digest. And he was reading Saturday’s Herald because Monday’s had not arrived, and because he always had to have a newspaper in his hand. He peered at the fat stock prices, which he had read several times before, but which, to Mr Furlow, appeared inexhaustible.

I don’t know what to do with Sidney, Mrs Furlow said.

Her husband grunted.

She’ll be all right, he said. Leave her alone.

But something ought to be done. She has no interests. Perhaps if I let her arrange the flowers. Yes, that will be something. Sidney shall always arrange the flowers.

Then she went out to write to a Mrs Blandford, not
that she had anything to write, but it was soothing to cover a clean sheet of paper with words. Like Mrs Furlow herself, Mrs Blandford was a Pioneer. That is to say, their people had immigrated at an impressively distant date, not in suspicious circumstances of course, though an obscure relative of Mrs Furlow’s had indeed married a man of convict descent. Mrs Furlow tried to forget this. She did not think that Mrs Blandford knew. Anyway, they were both Pioneers, and that, like a tiara and a close connection with Government House, was a considerable asset.

If only Sidney would be reasonable, said Mrs Furlow. She was pretty, but she was a stick, the way she sat at dances and did not give young men a chance. Now if it had been Mrs Furlow herself. Roger Kemble had a handsome face. It was pink and faintly embarrassed. So very English, Mrs Furlow said, which was almost the highest compliment she could pay. The highest, in point of fact, was: so like the Prince of Wales. But Roger Kemble was not quite like that, though in every respect fitted to marry her daughter. Marriage was the sole, the desirable end. To be able to say: Mrs Roger Kemble, Sidney Furlow that was. Mrs Furlow’s letters to Mrs Blandford were full of such remarks, once she got past the weather and was able to settle down.

It was difficult to settle down. She was very volatile, she told herself. She wondered if Mrs Blandford had heard that the Vinters were getting a divorce. Actually Mrs Blandford had told her, but she had forgotten that.

Mrs Furlow sat at her writing-desk at the window of the drawing-room. Down on the flat the wind was rife, the brood mares huddled with their rumps to the wind,
the cattle clustered in groups for warmth. Such very
trying
weather, wrote Mrs Furlow to Mrs Blandford. The weather had ceased to be a conflict of natural phenomena, it was a state conjured for the spiritual trial of Mrs Furlow. Just as the cattle and the brood mares, the rams that moved gravely, overweighted by their sex, in a paddock across the river, the ewes on the hillside, the maids in the scullery, and the little fox-terrier that was now almost too constipated to walk, were symbols of her material prosperity.

That is the sort of thing which tends to happen when you have lived on a property most of your life, and your family have lived on it most of theirs, it tends to become an institution. This is what had happened to Glen Marsh. The landscape had lost its significance as such, to Mrs Furlow at her writing-table, to Mr Furlow in his office. You lived in an intimate relationship with it, but the land existed because of this, turning itself to good account by the unostentatious changes of its appointed seasons.

Mr Furlow turned to the racing news. There was a gentle rumbling down in the region of his paunch. He would take his time. Besides, the new overseer would arrive during the afternoon. He sighed gently, and tried to study form. Checkmate and Salamander at Warwick Farm, Gaiety Girl at Rose Hill. And Sidney sitting in her bedroom, perhaps he should go and see, or not go and see, it was so much easier to study form in the Herald. Because Mr Furlow’s life was based on a line of least resistance, unconsciously, for he never paused to ask himself if his life was based on anything at all.

Mr Furlow hadn’t a mind, only a mutual understanding
between a number of almost dormant instincts. He was vaguely attached to his property, still more vaguely to his wife, because these were habit, they were there, he accepted them. He also loved his daughter in a fumbling, kindly way. He took her riding on her pony when she was a little girl, or to eat ices at a soda fountain when they were in Sydney, perching her up on a stool, and looking at her proudly as she chose the most expensive ice. He said, there, pet, wipe your mouth. He was happy, he wanted her to be happy, eating an ice or doing whatever she wanted to do. It surprised him to see her grow. It came as a shock. Already she was painting her mouth. But of course she knew best. He liked to feel her hang over his chair, to hear her say, darling, I haven’t a bean, her face on his shoulder. He gave her a five-pound note instead of an ice. He did not worry as Jessie worried, everything would solve itself in time, everything always had, and Sidney grow and paint her mouth, and marry or not, just as she liked. A fly had settled on Mr Furlow’s nose.

He got laboriously out of his chair. He had not measured the rain. He went down the passage towards the verandah, stretching his legs, and trying to control his wind. Outside Sidney’s door he paused a moment. Then he went on with the easy smile of someone who always believes in letting the situation handle itself.

Sidney Furlow was lying on her bed. She had taken off her shoes. She pointed one foot at the ceiling, raising her leg as high as it would go, and watching her instep arch. She drew her suspender taut and let it snap back against her leg. She sighed and her leg dropped back on the bed, Oh dear, she sighed, biting her lip. The pillow was warm underhead,
the kind of warmth that is slightly perverse and misplaced, the warmth of a bed after lunch, as you rub your cheek against the linen and wonder what you can do. It made you cry, having nothing to do, or read a book, or read a book. She looked very pretty when she cried. She did it sometimes in the glass. Or she picked up a book and glanced, between phrases, into the more interesting, if desperate, territory of the mind. Oh dear, she sighed. Je me crois seule. As if she wanted to go riding across the flat in all that wind. And Mother said Charlie must go too, just in case anything happens. But I won’t be followed about by a groom. En ma monotone patrie—et tout, autour de moi, vit dans l’idolâtre d’un miroir. With that stupid face that said, Miss Sidney, I’d better tighten your girth. The hell of a girth and she did not care if she fell, or broke her arm, they would carry her in, and Mother running down the passage to see. Qui reflète en son calme dormant Hérodiade au clair regard de diamant, what did it all mean, o charme dernier, oui! je le sens, je suis seule. Reading French and that old fool of a Madame Jacquet in cotton gloves coming to teach French at Miss Cortine’s, ma petite Sid-ney, and Helen and Angela waiting to be taken to a dance by a couple of naval men, they were pretty lousy anyway. The book dropped to the floor.

Sidney Furlow was nineteen. She had been two years at finishing school in Sydney, at Miss Cortine’s. She had not learnt very much, but it was not part of Miss Cortine’s curriculum to teach. Only to mould my girls, Mrs Furlow, to prepare them for life. Miss Cortine prepared her girls for life with a course of tea-pouring and polite adultery. Consequently most of them were considered a very good match.
They did not sulk, like Sidney, they said pretty things to young men who came to take them to dances, and cuddled up very prettily when they were expected to. Perhaps if you leave her another year, Miss Cortine said.

She was damned if she would stay another year. She wanted to go home. So she went home and it was all a bloody bore, and Sydney was a bloody bore, and reading Mallarmé after lunch. Je me crois seule en ma monotone patrie, Hérodiade au clair regard. Her arms were very brown and thin. She stretched them over her head, catching the bed-rail over her head, and feeling a strange lassitude that crept along under her skin. Her breasts stood up, thin and abrupt under her dress. Her hair spread out over the pillow in little snaky tongues.

Oh hell, she said, jerking herself up. She wanted to cry. O charme dernier. She jumped off the bed and went and sat at the dressing-table, looking at herself fiercely in the glass. He had wanted to touch her at that dance, putting his hand. She stroked her breast sulkily, between her breasts that were warm and firm, it made her smile. And she told him to go to hell, it made her laugh because he looked so surprised, sitting there on that battleship where orders were always obeyed. Only she hadn’t, she had put back her head and laughed. Helen said she had a laugh like a piece of wire, and that thin mouth—well, it was thin, she supposed.

She took up a lipstick from the dressing-table and began to work on her mouth, pressing it down hard on her lips, as hard as she could. Her mouth looked like a wound. She took up the eye-shade and blurred the lids, sitting with her eyes almost closed to watch the effect of that blue blur,
and her mouth, and her dress falling down on to the point of a breast. She laughed, or at least a little contemptuous snort came out of her nose. Oui! je le sens. She was like a whore.

Sidney, called Mrs Furlow from the other side of the door, haven’t you gone for your ride?

Yes, I’ve gone.

There’s no need to be rude, complained Mrs Furlow from her side of the door.

She was going away. You could hear her feet protesting down the passage. She had gone.

And now what, said Sidney, or her breath said now what, as she took up a paper tissue and rubbed the lids of her eyes. She put her head down on the dressing-table and began to cry. She had no control over it. It was like the flicking of a piece of wire.

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.