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.