Happy Valley by Patrick White

Author:Patrick White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Classic fiction
ISBN: 9781921961175
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2012-07-24T16:00:00+00:00

17

Sidney Furlow walked beneath the plum-trees on her own. He had written to her, she had the letter in her hand, and she knew what it was about, that it would be like the others, so she had not opened it. The plum-trees were thin and black-boughed. They only bore fruit about once every three years. They were very old. But when there was blossom on the boughs you forgot their age, you put up your face against the cool, drooping boughs. She held the letter in her hand, unopened. It might have been a bill, a debt, as if she owed Roger Kemble something that she could not pay. Her face was sullen under the trees. She leant her head against a black trunk and felt the roughness of the bark. How long is this going on, she said, and what good is it going to do, whether I write to him or not, say I meant what I said, or say nothing at all. As if I had the power to make him happy, depending on me, something depending on me. The power. To hold his letter in her hand gave her a sense of power, and tearing them up, and the one she had poked into the incinerator, watching it curl brown, had quickened her pulse a little, though not very much. It was a pretty negative emotion that arose out of being able to control the life of Roger Kemble. She did not want this. People on the whole were pretty negative. The nice people you met at races and dances, whose niceness was about the only reason for their being, and consequently niceness had become an all-time job. But it left a pappy taste in your mouth, like coconut milk, and once you had tried it you didn’t want to again. Only, only a sometimes hankering not to be Sidney Furlow at least, though standing outside would hate perhaps the you discarded, probably discover something as futile as niceness, something just as negative underneath.

She felt the bark against her forehead, scored and rough. She held the letter in her hand, tore it, following no design. The letter fluttered away in little jagged scraps. It lay white on the ground. It was the fourth letter she had destroyed. She did not even feel a sense of power now that she had destroyed the fourth. It had become a habit. Why it had ever been anything else. She laughed. In tearing a letter up. Or burning a letter and feeling that you were responsible, as if the fire. That time in the gully up near Ferndale was what you felt, what you could not express, when the fire ran down the gully from tree to tree and they felled a belt of timber to break the fire, and dug a ditch all night in a fever, all those men working like a lot of marionettes, up and down their arms, their faces black, and beating with branches to turn the course of the fire.

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