The Fringe of Leaves

by Patrick White

  When Will came over, as for the slaughter of the calf, he would stay on and have a bite of something with them in the evening. It was a custom which did not meet with his mother’s approval. She was for ever searching her son’s face for bad news, and her niece’s for worse. As children they enjoyed a rough-and-tumble, with Hepzie joining in, till Aunt Tite found they had outgrown childish games. They exchanged kisses only in the presence of relatives at Christmas and New Year; nobody could have objected to that. Birthdays, marking the advance towards maturity, were more questionable. On her fifteenth birthday Will had been unable to disguise the pleasure her company gave him; he fumbled at her outside the dairy. Whether she had enjoyed it, Ellen was afraid to consider, for Aunt Triphena’s becoming a too sudden witness.

  ‘I’ll get vex with you, Will, if you act disrespectful to Ellen. She’s as close as your own sister, remember.’

  Will grew moody, took to kicking at the flagstones, and would no longer look her way. Nor kiss at Christmas. Until, on an unofficial occasion, he gave her a cuddle which flooded her with a delight that surprised her.

  It was not repeated. With the advent of Mr Roxburgh she acquired responsibilities. She must look serious and neat. Her head was full of dainty puddings.

  Will inquired on the day they killed the calf, ‘What’s th’ old codger op to—on ’is own—i’ the parlour?’ And chewed off a crust in such a fashion that his naturally handsome face looked ugly.

  ‘He idn’ old,’ Ellen Gluyas reminded her cousin. ‘An’s a scholar an’ a gentleman.’ She was so enraged.

  Pa laughed, and winked at Will. ‘An’ ’as got the girl stickin’ ’er nawse where’t never was before—in books!’

  Ellen went to fetch Mr Roxburgh’s tray from the parlour.

  He seemed to be waiting for her; he looked anxious, and was walking up and down. ‘Ellen,’ he said (he had never called her ‘Ellen’ before) ‘I’ve mislaid the pills which normally stand on the bedside commode.’

  ‘Aw,’ she answered, flushing, ‘they was there this mornin’, Mr Roxburgh.’

  He looked at her so quick and startled he might have forgot the pills. ‘They were, were they?’ He continued gravely looking at her.

  Did he think she had taken something she valued so little? except that he set store by them.

  In the bedroom she moved the heavy marble-topped commode, and found the bottle which had fallen down against the wainscot.

  ‘There!’ she said. ‘I knawed they couldn’ uv gone far.’

  His gratitude forgave her any possible lapse.

  When she took the tray out to the kichen Pa and Will were looking at their plates, the two of them moody by now it seemed.

  The guest outstayed his welcome. The hay was made and stacked. The leaves began to turn, as a warning against early cold.

  Mamma always grew tearful at the approach of winter. ‘And to clean an extra grate! And fetch in wood!’

  But Mr Roxburgh’s cheeks became pink-tinged. He was taking longer walks, in a tweed cap, and a comforter which his mother, he said, had knitted for him. He had even walked as far as St Ives, but hired a fly to bring him back.

  On an occasion when the days were drawing in, the girl remarked, ‘By now you must have seen everything,’ and realized that she dreaded the reply.

  ‘Yes,’ he confirmed, ‘I have, but would like to be better acquainted with what I know superficially.’

  It made her sorry for him: that his life should be so empty, and at the same time, complicated.

  He was setting out on one of his walks. Without intending to encumber him, and in no sense prepared (she was wearing her apron, not even a cap, let alone a bonnet) she found herself bearing him company. The going was rough, for they were headed into the black north, the bushes catching at their clothes with twigs on which sheep had left their wool.

  ‘There’s a storm coming our way out of Wales.’ It was not a rare enough event for her voice to lose its equanimity.

  After drawing the comforter tighter at his throat, it occurred to Mr Roxburgh, ‘Do you think you’re suitably dressed—that is to say, warmly enough?’ His ordinarily mild eyes looked almost fierce in consideration of her welfare, or was it, again, only his own?

  ‘Aw, yes!’ She laughed, her arms hugging each other against the apron. ‘We’re used to our own weather.’

  They crossed the road and stumbled on, into the gale, when it had not been her intention to accompany him farther than a stone’s throw from the yard.

  As they were walking recklessly, so they had begun reckless talk.

  ‘This is nothing’, Mr Roxburgh shouted, ‘to anyone who has crossed over by the Swiss passes into Italy—or even the English Channel into France.’

  ‘I was never in Italy’ she would not bother to confess that she had not crossed the English Channel. ‘I was never farther than Land’s End. And Plymouth to the other side.’ She hesitated. ‘It is my ambition to see Tintagel.’

  ‘What an unambitious ambition! Tintagel is practically on your doorstep.’

  ‘I cannot explain, Mr Roxburgh. Some of us are born unambitious, I suppawse’ when their conversation inspired her to soar amongst the black clouds swollen to bursting above them.

  They walked on, heads lowered against the wind, the rooted furze streaming towards them.

  Mr Roxburgh remarked that they were behaving most imprudently, but in the circumstances, could not disguise a certain tone of self-approval.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘and will come out of it with nothing better than a soaking.’

  Her improvidence did not prevent her feeling much older, wiser, than this slanted stick of a gentleman. If the storm did burst upon them, she was strong and jubilant enough to steady the reeling earth, while he, poor man, would most probably break, scattering a dust of dictionary words and useless knowledge.

  It was the storm which broke, at that very moment. As the rain lashed out, they gulped down draughts of cold wet air.

  Mr Roxburgh stumbled. ‘How very foolishly’, he protested, ‘a rational human being can behave!’ His skin, she thought, had turned from pink to mauve; his features had grown pinched and transparent.

  ‘Are you ill?’ she called. ‘Mr Roxburgh?’

  Though he did not answer, she felt at liberty to ease her shoulder under his, the better to support and lead him.

  ‘A little,’ she thought she heard. ‘I have these turns, but they pass.’

  Providentially, her strength seemed to increase and cope with a condition akin to that of drunken staggers, as she brought him round on a curve, the wind now driving at their backs, sending her hair ahead of them, together with the tails of Mr Roxburgh’s comforter.

  On the lee side of a collapsed wall, originally built of the flat stones disgorged by a field, she settled her charge, and gave him the additional protection of her own body. She would have wondered at herself if, from being a man, her companion had not become a mission. His hands felt dead inside the knitted gloves. The cap had slipped askew over one fragile temple, carrying a gentleman’s dignity with it.

  She re-settled the cap, and fought to wrest encouragement out of her throat. ‘You must take heart, Mr Roxburgh. You can rely on me to bring you back,’ she almost ejaculated ‘to life’ before recovering herself, ‘home’ she substituted; ‘we’ll get the fire lit, and have you a warm meal—in no time’ lame in the end.

  They continued huddling, stacked against each other and the wall, and gradually the rain was pelting less; the wind might have used itself up, or gone on to aim at more distant targets. It was no longer a strain to catch the gist of spoken words.

  ‘At least you have seen me at my worst,’ he said.

  ‘You can’t be answerable for your health, as I knaw from my own mother.’ Thus she tried comforting him, when it was no comfort to herself; she would have liked to see him hale and perfect, leaping from the ship as the prow beached in the cove at sunset. (She was that foolish, or ‘romantic’.)

  Mr Rox
burgh said, ‘There are those who are able to rise, at any rate morally, above their physical condition.’

  He was nothing if not moral, she felt. It did not console her.

  ‘Couldn’t you get on your feet?’ she asked, ‘If I give a hand?’

  He obeyed as though she had been the mother to whom he so frequently referred, and whom she would not have cared to meet; better Lady Ottering giving advice through a carriage window, or passing judgment on geums or phlox as she trod the garden path on visits of patronage to her former maid.

  In the silence the storm had left behind, Mr Roxburgh remarked as they crossed the road dividing farm from moor, ‘I admire your strength of character.’

  ‘Dear life!’ She was so embarrassed she almost choked. ‘Strength—yes! That’s about all I’ve got to my name. And must depend on it.’

  Presently they saw the roof, and then the slope gave up the house, the ramshackle outhouses, and the scraggy pear and damson trees. There was mud on their boots. She scraped it off her own at the back door and indicated that he should do the same before entering.

  Dr Hicks prescribed nothing more drastic for his patient’s ‘turn’ than the tincture of digitalis he was already taking. Mr Roxburgh lay abed, and she persuaded Mamma to wait on him. Because Mamma had experienced less of their lodger’s condition and mind, she would be less likely to expect him to break in her hands.

  And as soon as he was restored, Mr Roxburgh decided, ‘It’s time I went home. My mother will be wondering.’

  Ellen Gluyas was relieved, though she would not have admitted it to Pa or Will. She would not have admitted that the smells of medicines lingered (if they did) in the room where he had slept (it was again hers) or that she could still detect in the parlour a distinct smell of ancient books. He had left behind a bottle of ink which she appropriated, for what purpose she could not think. The smell of ink was real enough when she uncorked the bottle. Between Mr Roxburgh’s visit and her attendance at the dame’s school where she got such learning as she could boast, the smell of ink had scarce crossed her nostrils. Now whenever she sniffed at the bottle of which she had possessed herself, she experienced a sensation as of slight drunkenness mingled with that of sober despair.

  Bristol Maid’s sides were shuddering as she laboured, and Mr Roxburgh called to his wife from the saloon that the fellow had brought their breakfast, which she should come and eat if she had any intention of doing so. Restored to balance, Mrs Roxburgh did as she was told.

  Mr Roxburgh was sipping tea with evident repugnance. ‘The same old musty stuff,’ he warned, ‘but hot.’

  It was, as she knew, little more than a brew of sticks, yet she preferred to ignore the salt pork (more fat than lean, more conducive to nausea) and join her husband in drinking the travesty of tea.

  She sipped at it, and her eyes were moistened and enlarged. Except that their surroundings were so very different, they might have been seated together at Birdlip House, Cheltenham. At least the silences they kept were the same, and the moments when he emerged from his, to complain, or else it seemed, to take stock of her.

  This morning Mr Roxburgh said, ‘You are looking uncommonly nice, Ellen.’ This she had learnt to interpret as a compliment from one brought up to abstain from vulgar enthusiasm.

  It required no answer, but she murmured, ‘All of it old and familiar,’ and looked down, and touched her skirt.

  ‘I was right in advising you to wear green.’

  ‘My aunt used to say that green made a woman look trumpery.’

  ‘Your aunt, I noticed, didn’t care for you to look your best.’

  Mr Roxburgh continued examining his wife, less pointedly perhaps, more thoughtfully. As a youth he had written poetry, but even to himself, his verses had sounded well-intentioned rather than inspired. By the time Garnet was riding to hounds with the young Stafford Merivale, Austin had attempted a novel, but already by Chapter III, it was clear that his characters were rejecting him. Laying his manuscript on the fire, he watched it catch, not so much with regret as relief; it allowed him to return to the classics. Yet Austin Roxburgh, whatever appearances suggested, was not all bookish: in him there stirred with vague though persistent uneasiness an impulse which might have been creative.

  He was unable to draw, or he would have sketched the farmer’s daughter in her country hat, or returning from the moor, driving her ewes ahead of her to pen them for the night. Remembering her thus, after he had left for home, started him wondering whether he might also be in love. If his passion had been stronger, the obvious course would have been to make her his mistress. It was inconceivable that she should ever become his wife; and yet he continued thinking of her, standing in a light reflected off fuchsias punching a basinful of dough on a scoured table, or again, arms folded against a starched apron-bib as she crossed the yard on some undefined errand. He certainly needed someone. Perhaps he did love her. He remembered her strength and kindness when overtaken by an autumn squall which brought on one of his attacks.

  That he might marry Ellen Gluyas became after all a tenuous possibility on seeing her not only as his wife, but also as his work of art. This could be the project which might ease the frustration gnawing at him: to create a beautiful, charming, not necessarily intellectual, but socially acceptable companion out of what was only superficially unpromising material. There were remedies for chapped hands and indifferent grammar; nothing can be effected without the cornerstone of moral worth.

  Austin Roxburgh felt so inspired he could not wait for his mother to leave him to his studies as she did each night at ten o’clock. When at last she kissed him and he could hear her groping her way upstairs, and finally trundling overhead, he sat and wrote, though with a caution to which his initial inspiration had been reduced:

  Dear Mrs Gluyas,

  Remembering with pleasure the weeks I spent beneath your roof last summer, it occurred to me that it would be most agreeable to repeat the experience, shall we say, from the beginning of June? if those same rooms are not already promised to somebody more fortunate than I.

  My regards to Mr Gluyas, and my best wishes to your daughter, whose concern for my welfare touched me deeply on my previous visit.

  Hoping to hear from you in good time so that I may complete my plans …

  Mr Roxburgh did in fact receive a reply in good time, if not at all favourable:

  Dear Mr Roxburgh,

  I am sorry to inform you my mother passed on this Janury and my father does not feel we shld let rooms for not being able to do the best by a lodger, least of all one so particler as yourself.

  I hope your health has improved since autumn last, and thank you for thinking kindly of us.

  Yrs ever respectfully, E. GLUYAS

  Mr Roxburgh was so put out by this setback to what he visualized that his feelings immediately became suffused with genuine tenderness, if not actual passion (he might never be capable of that). He wondered at the time what he could do, beyond compose the correct reply, just as he was still pondering over his relationship with the woman he had made his wife.

  ‘Yes,’ he repeated as the saloon was battered out of perspective, then allowed to settle back into its original shape, ‘green is the colour I advised you to wear, because unlike so many women you have nothing vapid about you. That is why you appealed to me.’

  He had evidently satisfied himself; whereas Mrs Roxburgh, indolently lolling in a somewhat primitive saloon chair, dangling one hand as ladies are apt to do, was relieved to hear a rattling of the door-knob.

  It was Captain Purdew to announce that, if they gave permission, he would breakfast with them.

  The captain was rubbing his hands together so briskly they produced a grating sound, and in Mr Roxburgh, a corresponding heartiness. ‘I must congratulate you, Captain, on enjoying such health.’

  Captain Purdew retaliated in similar vein. ‘Your lady, sir, is the one we should congratulate—for presiding so charmingly at a breakfast of salt pork.’ The captain crooked a f
inger in preparation for further gallantry and his tea-cup.

  Mrs Roxburgh received the compliment with an air of disbelief inherited from her mother-in-law. If she was not carried over into downright boredom as she poured the captain’s tea, it was because an elderly, grizzled man is entitled to pay compliments and because a certain ingratiating, cumbrousness reminded her of her late father on his less bearish days.

  Jovially for him, Mr Roxburgh had begun questioning Captain Purdew on the technicalities of his calling, the state of the weather, and their general prospects for the voyage, in none of which could his wife join with anything like conviction. Instead she fell to caressing her throat, as a hand which both fascinated and repelled her attacked those slabs of refractory, not to say rubbery, pork.

  While she was still a little girl, he used to stroke her cheeks as though to learn the secrets of her skin. She would feel the horn-thing on his crushed thumb scraping her.

  On one occasion, unable to bear it any longer, she cried out, ‘Cusn’t tha see I dun’t want to be touched?’ and threw him off.

  He brooded and sulked a fair while, but it had been necessary; shame told her she was as much excited as disgusted; she grew more thoughtful as a result, and melancholy on wet afternoons.

  Poor Mamma was too preoccupied to pay attention, but after her death, the two survivors were less distressed by her absence than by each other’s company.

  At the same time Pa grew increasingly dependent on herself to conduct the day-to-day routine, and on the blessed grog to release him, not so much from grief as the despondency which had always been eating him. He would rise in the dark and fuddle through the morning at little unnecessary jobs, but sit all afternoon at the kitchen table, if he was not gone on a journey. He would invent journeys which ought to be made, only, it seemed, for the sake of motion.