Well, he said, Poppet, I’ll be seeing you.
She looked at him.
When?
She did not care.
Some time, he said.
Lay there and weeks and weeks was an awful thought of Happy Valley like before and if this happened again and you heard that ticking mahogany clock and it got right inside you was sharp and said you did not care but you did you did and that was the awful part.
Clem, love, she said, you’ll make it soon?
Clem Hagan looked down. Well, it was one way of passing the time, and you’d go off your rocker out at Glen Marsh if it wasn’t for coming into town.
Yes, he said. Pretty soon.
In leaving you could promise anything. He tapped her on the shoulder and left.
Vic Moriarty lay on the bed, slackened, and tried to think and not to think, because if she thought, she thought of Ernest, or the things Clem said to hurt, or perhaps just said. She lay with her eyes closed. Her breasts moved stolidly with her breath. Now and again the distance clucked as reality became a hen, was no longer words spoken in halfsleep, I’m crazy about you, Clem, she said, that the room took up and gave back into her ears, making her smile, making her say it again. Vic Moriarty lay there smiling,
heaped in a dopey lump of female flesh that has abandoned its reserve and now enjoys the advantages of flesh that is really in no way partial to constraint. She smiled to herself with all the abandon of people indulging their intimate thoughts, the sort of moment that wears an expression of ultimate foolishness for all but the responsible, and these are mercifully unaware.
She lay there well on into the afternoon. She dozed. Then she began to feel cold. She woke, and there was goose-flesh on her arms. She shuddered back under the eiderdown. But she felt cold. I’m a fool, she said, lying here and someone might come in, or Ernest back from school, but if only you could lie here always, forget those plates in the scullery that Gertie didn’t wash, and that it is going to be winter soon, he will come again, you don’t mind how often come, even though sometimes he makes you want to cry, if only he come again, because if he doesn’t he doesn’t and he doesn’t come he…Vic Moriarty clambered out of bed and put on a dressing-gown. It had big black poppies on a purple field. Ernest said, put on that dressing-gown, I like you in that dressing-gown, he said. Ernest would come home. Here am I lolling about, she said. Friday, Saturday, Sunday perhaps, or wouldn’t come. She went into the sitting-room to get a cigarette. Her lips were tight on the cigarette. The smoke made her cough. I’m thinking like a tart, she said, but what’s a tart anyway, and I do all he wants, darn those pants that I haven’t finished yet, long pants on a man if you please, and there’s always that stink of asthma powder in the place, what I don’t endure.
But I’m fond of Ernest, she said, I’m fond of Ernest,
with the air of a woman defending herself against contradiction that did not exist. The cyclamen sprawled widely in the lustre bowl. She shrugged her shoulders and turned her back. Friday didn’t exist, Sunday perhaps, turned his back and she could not see the way that hair ended suddenly on his chest, as if it was all over and he did not hear. Her breasts drooped against a purple field.
They had sent the car to meet him at the station. It was waiting outside surrounded by small boys, limpid with admiration before a large Packard car. Furlows’ car. There was old Furlow now, he had been to Sydney, coming out of the station and going to get into the car. The spectators parted in two sections waiting to see Furlow pass.
Mr Furlow got into the car. He settled down. He was glad to be back. Moorang swirled past, the pubs and the dago’s shop with the paper decorations behind the glass, the rolls of material at the draper’s, the two kelpies, their ribs in relief, misbehaving themselves in the middle of the street. Mr Furlow took off his hat. There was a mark on his forehead where the leather had eaten in, and his hair was plastered down. He sighed. He began to feel his confidence return, a confidence founded on familiar things, the street at Moorang, the road out to Happy Valley, the gates the
chauffeur would get down to open from there out to Glen Marsh. These were understandable and safe, the landmarks of discovered territory. So he was at his ease. Not as in the train when that commercial traveller, who shouted him a drink while they stopped in Goulburn, asked him his opinion of the European situation, as if Mr Furlow had opinions, as if there were a European situation. Though Mr Furlow had been to England. He had been taken over a brewery at Slough. It had impressed him very much, like the Lord Mayor’s Show and the number of bowler hats.
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.
Sidney Furlow sat with the bracelet in her lap, touched with her hand the cool fire qui reflète encore calme dormant Hérodiade au clair regard de diamant, and would sit there without purpose, because there was no purpose in doing what in another room, seule, the evening coming home across the paddock a figure that made the blind fall on ma monotone patrie.
Hilda went about nowadays quietly, indomitably, nursing her certainty. She coughed, but she was not conscious of her cough. They would go away. He had written. They would go away. In Hilda’s mind the remaining weeks were mentally ticked off. She lived exterior to these, or disregarded them as so many dead leaves, the bundle of an old calendar waiting to be torn off. The shortening of the autumn days, the first frosts, the ritual of the household, were part of an incidental mechanical process that scarcely touched Hilda Halliday.
Oliver watched Hilda. He could not feel any bitterness, she was more a stranger than anything else, who had no part in his life and who must be allowed to pursue the rhythm of her own. She had never been anything else.
Looking back, he said, Hilda has been nothing more than a sort of inevitable presence, appearing at the necessary moments in my life, and neither of us thought that this was wrong, neither of us imagined that we had anything else to expect, until something quite casual threw the emptiness into relief, and now we have not even the benefit of illusion, must recognize all the waste of emptiness. The children, Hilda says, there are the children, content to ignore the fact that they have sprung from an illusion. Hilda says this, it is part of her religion to say it, the religion of the world, of Happy Valley with its eyes closed to the possibilities of truth. Perhaps it is better like this. Perhaps Hilda is wiser. Only you regretted the sudden illumination in a face that was not altogether confined to a face, that overflowed and pointed out significant contours in the darkness. This was Alys. And on reflection you knew that this was right, morally, if not conventionally, was not a sort of moral disintegration as you tried to think in your thoughts, this was the world thinking, and you could not forget the world. Hilda would not let you forget, nor Happy Valley, that old woman virulent above a dead geranium in a window-box, no sap but the dead flapping of a conventional tongue that said, mind you, Mrs Ansell, was an eye glassy with hate, because afraid, because you are afraid to see other people give rein to those desires that you have never dared loosen yourself. So you let loose a wind of hate that flapped in the dead geranium leaves. Alys was untouched by this, did not seem to realize. That was the odd thing about Alys Browne, as if her consciousness of outer activity had become numbed by her intentness on an inner change. It was in her face. He
loved her face. He had only to contemplate this, or no more than the recollection of it, to feel the conventional realities dissolve into a state in which the trivial and hard wore an aspect that was pitiable. I have learnt this, he felt, that it is pitiable, this Happy Valley, even in its violence that at first you thought deliberately destructive and cruel there is a human core that makes you overflow with pity for it. And this is not the pity of Hilda, which is founded on fear, a pity for man in his hopeless struggle against an ultimately triumphant force, not this that I have learned from Alys, is not Alys, compassion is not fear.
All this was taking place in Happy Valley the same autumn, which was superficially the same as any other autumn, as far as its natural details were concerned. But as I have said before, one of the most noticeable features of Happy Valley was its apparent remoteness from the human element, or perhaps an ironical half-recognition, laying a trap in the shape of its own activities and then letting things slide. Autumn was a season of preliminary cold and suppressed winds. Nothing much appeared to happen besides, though a lot was really happening all the time. Because it was at this moment that Amy Quong felt those dormant and really frightening passions begin to stir, that Clem Hagan was coming into town of an afternoon and going to Moriarty’s house, that Moriarty felt things closing in, all those eyes and faces at the school, and that Sidney Furlow was trying to suppress the realization of her own desires. They each had their own problem, and nobody else had theirs, which is only natural perhaps, it is usually like that. And all the time Happy Valley was preparing for
winter, and those that were afraid of winter had begun to be afraid, which those who have not experienced Happy Valley in winter-time will certainly not understand. If you have you will know, you will realize the extreme brutality to which man can be subjected, whatever you may have experienced of this, of brutality I mean, in winter at Happy Valley it seems to be epitomized.
Oliver Halliday did not think of this. Before midwinter, said Hilda, we shall go away, we shall go to Queensland, we shall escape. So he could not but feel that time was arrested for the moment, that he would not participate in the coming phase. Nor did Alys think about winter much, because she had ceased to be afraid, come or not she did not very much care. That is the worst of arrested consciousness, because inevitably you must get jerked back. It was still autumn, not very long before the races, that Oliver went up to do it. He did not know exactly what he would do, or say, it was too painful to think about.
So he did not think. He went up the hill one evening to where Alys lived. I am going to break something now, he felt, all the best in me, not that that matters very much, only there is someone else involved. He walked up the hill. He felt rather old and out of breath, in a way that he had not noticed before. But, after all, it is only natural, he said.
Alys was on the verandah darning stockings when he came up to the gate. She glanced up, and down again, like someone catching sight of a person who comes a lot to the house, so often that you make no special stir or preparation, hardly move in fact, because this person has become a part of your life and this you accept as a matter of course.
Pull up that chair, she said. No. That one has a nail.
Has it? he said vaguely, watching the passage of her needle through the silk, with the smooth rhythm of silk. Her face, bent, did not notice him, only the inflections of her voice told him she was conscious of his presence. Sometimes he closed his eyes and listened to her voice.
Funny, she said. All these years, and I haven’t banged in that nail.
All those years when I was waiting, felt Alys Browne, when it was so much waste time, and, looking back, really most of it has been waste, that convent in Sydney and living up here, which was also as good as a convent, not so much physically as mentally, accepting what I was taught to accept, but waiting as waiting is not so much waste time if it is part of a design. She drew the stockings through her hands. The air was getting sharp.
We’ll have to go in, she said.
No, he said, don’t go in.
He sat with his back against one of the verandah posts.
What have you got to tell me? she asked.
Nothing, he said.
Got to tell like a child that said nothing she made him feel when Aunt Jane and those apples feeling sick was reversed he said this Alys a child or a girl out of a convent got to tell was reversed and she put out a hand to help that she held up with blood and there was something to tell.
It’ll come in time, I expect, she said.
He did not speak. She put her hand in a stocking and held it up to the light.
Alys, he said, Hilda and I have got to go away.
She held the stocking with an effort against the light, or it stayed there, she did not know, look, and it was getting dark, and the light, and Schmidts’ cows lined across the hill dragging a rope of shadow, like words out of the mouth that would not come, or a numb thought. She felt isolated in a small patch of light. She had been jerked out of the succession of events, that had happened, that were passing on, but she had become stationary.
Yes, she said. Hilda.
Was an abstract idea, his wife, the woman that opened the door and said he was up at Kambala, without ever achieving much more personality than this, somehow she did not think of Hilda, and why, was more than a cipher.
I’m doing it for Hilda, he said. And there’s the children. This is nothing to do with you. It isn’t much to do with me. But we’re going away. We’re going to Queensland, he said, feeling the triteness of explanation in his voice, but perhaps it was less painful like this, details, like looking up trains. I’m exchanging practices with a man called Garthwaite, he said. Hilda can’t stand the climate here. We’ll leave Rodney in Sydney on the way. He’s got to go to school.
The slowness of cows across the hill, cow-words as meaningful. But soon it would be dark. She waited for the darkness. Perhaps it would be easier then, or more difficult, because they said you said things anaesthetized.
We haven’t spoken much about Hilda, she said.
We haven’t had much time.
All time this woman was his wife until you woke up and saw, saw yourself and the callousness of women in love.
Why doesn’t one think about these things? she said. Is
it that one’s deliberately brutal, that one doesn’t let oneself, or is one made to isolate oneself from what one doesn’t want to think?
He put out his hand and touched her in the dark. She had hoped he would not touch her. It was easier to live in the intellect, in a sort of clarity of mental perception, almost not yourself. But he was touching her, bringing her back into the muffled region of emotional pain.
But I couldn’t think, she said. I knew vaguely. But I just couldn’t think. You see, when you know it’s going to be something important, perhaps nothing so important will ever happen to you again, you can’t throw it away. You can’t, she said. You can’t.
And now? he said.
Yes, she said. Now.
One word can make a silence silenter, he felt, her Now falling like a bead of lead through the darkness, right to the bottom of what, now what. He did not know. He pressed her hand and waited.
It’ll still be that important thing, she said.
If you feel that.
Well, what?
That’s what I’ve had to tell myself, Alys. If two people feel like that it can’t be altogether negative.
They sat still, intimate, because it was all said. She hoped he would not speak again, would leave it like this, or perhaps to the fugitive comfort of touch that was so much more considerate than words. He would go away, with Hilda and the children, those three strange people, she could never think of them as being anything but strange, or
as having a greater reality than herself. They would go to Queensland. She followed her mind down the vague avenue of the future, only a little way, she preferred to stop, because it seemed meaningless and nothing would take shape, no definite image of Alys Browne either here or elsewhere, as if she had been discarded from the pattern of time. But I have meant something, she said, it is not altogether wasted if I have meant something, as he said, he said, this was my purpose, and it is something to have a purpose, to know it, above all that, to realize. She stroked his hand back and forth.
Alys? he said.
Yes, dear.
She put her hand on his mouth. She closed his mouth, her mind, in a little circle of the present that resisted the intrusion of time.