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.
20
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.