The Fringe of Leaves

by Patrick White

  26 Mar

  Mr R.’s health improves daily. He already speaks of leaving if we can find a berth. We are told we can expect a ship at the end of the month or early next. Will be overjoyed if rumours become fact. Dr A. decided I was looking peeky and prescribed a tonic which I will take to humour him and my husband. I have to confess that my spirits are low, but at a level which no tonic can reach. A wind blows daily off the mountain along streets for the most part empty, in which approaching footsteps often alarm by sounding thunderous. Mercifully G. R. has until now left us in peace, except for the present of a dressed goose and 4 bottles of ‘Dulcet’ wine. Remembering how we ate goose out first night beneath his roof I could not bring myself to touch it. My excuse was that I felt bilious. Mr R. did justice by the goose, and ever since has been chiding himself for ingratitude towards his brother.

  That forenoon, when Mrs Roxburgh returned from a fruitless expedition in search of matching buttons, a hooded vehicle with a livery-stable look was standing at the door of their lodging.

  She was prepared to pass quickly down the hall and into her bed- withdrawing-room when the landlady darted out from the official withdrawing-room, and pounced.

  ‘Ah, Mrs Roxburgh,’ Mrs Impey tittered with more than her customary measure of brightness, ‘our friend Mrs Aspinall has called to see you. In your absence I offered her a glass of Madeira and a dish of my little cornflour cakes. Now you will be able to join her. I feared your being delayed might deprive you of the pleasure of her company.’

  There was no way out; the landlady’s enthusiasm would have scotched the mere thought of one.

  When Mrs Roxburgh entered, she found Mrs Aspinall seated by the window, from where she must have watched her friend’s approach down the hill. It vexed Mrs Roxburgh to know that her unguarded thoughts had been exposed to Mrs Aspinall’s stare; for choice she would have worn an iron mask in the presence of the doctor’s wife.

  Mrs Aspinall had adopted a languid air, or possibly the Madeira had imposed it on her, as she wiped from her lips a crumb or two of cornflour cake. ‘I had almost given you up,’ she said. ‘It is not that I couldn’t wait—Heaven knows there is little else to do—but my doctor has a fit if I run up a bill at the livery-stable. Yet it doesn’t suit his pocket to invest in a carriage for his wife’s use.’

  Their own dependence on the doctor left Mrs Roxburgh at a loss for a reply. ‘May I pour you a second glass of wine?’ she suggested to bridge the gap.

  Mrs Aspinall accepted, since her hostess could not know that it would be her third. ‘Tippling in Hobart Town!’ she said and sighed and giggled all in one. ‘Ah, my dear, you cannot understand! You are of the other world, and pause here only long enough to dip your toe.’

  ‘Here or there, my life is not so very different. To be sure, at home I have an establishment to run, orders to give, Mr Roxburgh’s friends to entertain, but that is no great distraction. Not that I would care to exchange my quiet life for a more hectic one.’

  Mrs Aspinall lowered her eyelids and sipped her wine. ‘Blessed are the docile and easily contented!’

  Mrs Roxburgh blushed. ‘Is it so blameworthy?’

  Mrs Aspinall flashed her eyes open, as though her purpose were to catch someone out. ‘Have you received, perhaps, a visit from Garnet Roxburgh?’

  ‘We’ve not seen him since leaving ‘Dulcet’. He and my husband are in touch by messenger, and Mr Garnet Roxburgh contributes most generously to what would otherwise be a monotonous table.’

  ‘I am surprised,’ Mrs Aspinall said, ‘considering the brothers are so fond of each other. And you, my dear, he praises to the skies!’

  Mrs Roxburgh was aware that her hand shook, and what was worse, that a drop of Madeira lay trembling on her lap. ‘I had the impression I was not at all to my brother-in-law’s liking. We have scarcely one viewpoint in common. I am too quiet. He prefers a more dashing style in women.’ She tried to disguise annoyance at her own ineptitude by diverting attention to the stain on her skirt, which she rubbed hard with her handkerchief.

  ‘You are reserved, my dear, to say the least.’ If Mrs Aspinall’s smile were intended as her most agreeable, her look was purest verjuice. ‘That is where your appeal may lie. Men of Garnet Roxburgh’s temper have a craving for variety.’

  Mrs Roxburgh was so embarrassed she could only offer a cornflour cake, which Mrs Aspinall refused.

  Holding her head to one side, the latter tried out a wooing tone. ‘Can’t I tempt you to accompany us to a rout?’

  ‘My husband does not care for large assemblies.’

  ‘And his health, no doubt, would not allow it if he did. No, it is you, Ellen, I am enticing. Though with the promise of a doctor in attendance, it can hardly be called enticement. Even Mr Roxburgh should approve.’

  ‘I thank you for the kind thought, Mrs Aspinall. But I am hardly equipped for a social life with the clothes Mr Roxburgh decided I should bring on this visit to the antipodes.’

  ‘Oh, clothes!’ Mrs Aspinall might have intended to make it sound as though she herself dispensed with them, but changed her tactics on seeing her error. ‘At least you would have the satisfaction of seeing me in one of my familiar rags, while you, my dear, have I don’t know what—the strength of character, I think it is called, which draws attention to itself even wearing a woollen shawl. That, in any case, is how Garnet Roxburgh sees it.’

  The implications were so painful, Mrs Roxburgh frowned—painfully. ‘If my brother-in-law is to be present at the gathering you offer, I am less than ever inclined to accept.’

  But Mrs Aspinall leaned forward and lightly laid her fingers on a wrist (was she feeling for the patient’s pulse?). ‘You are too sensible, my dearest Ellen! At this rate you will not begin to live.’

  The visitor rose, and fell to arranging her curls in their prescribed clusters. ‘Then I shall go on my own—with my doctor—and in my rags—and regret your absence—though not to the extent that poor Garnet will.’

  Needled by her friend’s apparent mission of procuring her, Mrs Roxburgh said, ‘Your pink dress is the one I will always remember.’

  ‘Which pink?’ Mrs Aspinall snapped.

  ‘Which you wore at Christmas.’

  ‘My old pink? That became indeed a rag, and I let the servant have it shortly after you saw it. Why on earth should you remember my pink?’

  ‘You looked so charming in it. And the bodice so cunningly ornamented with all those little satin bows.’

  ‘The Town knew that dress by heart. I grew to hate it.’ Recollection had made Mrs Aspinall hoarse.

  Almost at the same moment the voices of Mrs Impey and Mr Austin Roxburgh were heard in the hall. ‘If she is, I will not go in,’ Mr Roxburgh whispered loud. ‘I shall lie down and rest till my wife has got it over.’

  His wife finally had, and the same evening, after her emotions had subsided, wrote in her journal:

  However unpleasant it is to detect hypocrisy in another, how much more despicable to discover it in oneself—worse still, to be driven to it by Mrs A. To be reflected in such a very trashy mirror! Yet this is what happened during a call I will try my best to forget. When here I am recording it!

  Mrs Roxburgh glanced through what she had written to see whether it looked too explicit on paper, and decided it did not; but knew that she would be haunted by the facets of vice she shared with Mrs Aspinall. She tried to console herself with the explanation that if she had been drawn to a certain person, it was because some demoniac force had overcome her natural repulsion.

  She was not consoled, however, and locked her hypocritically innocuous journal away.

  On a day when she was at her lowest Mrs Roxburgh tied down her bonnet and ventured into the windy street. To her husband she had said she would take a walk, knowing how impossible it would have been to persuade him to accompany her. In roaming round the Point alone and unprotected, she had no aim, unless the vague one of escaping from her own thoughts. Not only vague but vain, she realized from exp
erience. For it occurred to her that on the day she ordered them to saddle the mare so that she might escape from discontented thoughts and the general constriction of their life at ‘Dulcet’, she had ridden out to substantiate a thought she would have liked to think did not exist, from being buried so deeply in her mind.

  In consequence, on this present chilly afternoon, she was strolling somewhat diffidently, buffeted by wind, threatened by a great cumulus of cloud, between the mountain which presided over man’s presumptuous attempt at a town, and the shirred waters of the grey river rushing towards its fate, the sea.

  As her landlady had remarked, it was ‘difficult for a woman to acquire the habit of making important decisions’. Ellen Roxburgh wondered as she walked what important decision she had ever made, beyond that of accepting her husband’s proposal, and on another occasion, giving way to her own unconfessed incontinence.

  At the point where the street, which had become a lane, petered out in a stony path, Mrs Roxburgh was forced to pause, and grope for the support of a tree. Leaning against it, she held her arms around herself to contain what amounted to a nausea. The rough tree-trunk comforted her to some extent until she was fully returned to her senses, though still with traces of a melancholy which had its origins, it seemed to her, in her failed children; more, she was permeated by this sorrow her husband never allowed himself to mention.

  Swept onward by the wind, her skirt blown in a tumult before her, she tried to persuade herself that her husband, like the tree which had offered sanctuary, supported a belief in her own free will. Yet she had been blown as passively against the one as against the other. The tree happened to be standing in her path, just as a crude, bewildered girl, alone and bereaved on a moor, could hardly have rejected Mr Roxburgh’s offer.

  So that she was dragged back into the forest clearing, the filtered light, the scents of fungus and rotting leaves, to the only instance when her will had asserted itself, and then with bared, ugly teeth.

  Mrs Roxburgh opened her mouth in hollow despair, and the wind, tearing down her throat, all but choked and temporarily deafened her.

  She stumbled farther, to what end she wondered, when she could have been seated beside the fire with a book, or occupying herself with sewing, in the speckless dolls’ house at present their home.

  Until, at a turn in the path, she noticed what might have been a bundle of cast-off clothes lying amongst the crabbed bushes: old, greenish garments, the sight of which suggested a smell of must and the body to which they had belonged. She would have hurried past this repulsive sight, when the bundle sat up, and showed that the clothes, far from being discarded, still helped partially disguise the nakedness of a living being.

  Moreover, the man inside them had started directing at her a gap-toothed smile, out of a freckled, pocked complexion; the eyes, pale and lashless, in no way related to the invitation of the yellow smile, burned with cold hate as they inquired into every aspect of her figure; while a hand, its skin cured to a carapace, patted the form his body had moulded in the grass where he had been lying.

  That he was addressing her, she saw, but could not distinguish the words as the wind immediately carried them away.

  The man realized, and increased his efforts until some of what he was shouting reached her: ‘… where there’s a hare’s nest …’ again the thread was lost, ‘… wouldn’ be natural for puss to lie alone …’ it was blown back.

  She might have returned along the path had it not been a rambling one and the man already on his feet. To follow the path in the direction in which it led might have plunged her in a labyrinth of gorse, so she started up the slope of the hill beyond which she could see the roofs of aligned houses, and where she could hope to find the orderly streets she had abandoned.

  Behind her she heard her pursuer progressing from his initial courtship, in which hares couched poetically enough, into the more obscene terms of his desperate human predicament, ‘I url show … what you bitches of leddies … lead us on … all that most of us gets is from watchin’ winders at night …’

  Mrs Roxburgh ran or sprang. She felt fingers rake her back, a hand seize on one of her wrists. She was whirled round in her flight. Blackened nails were tearing at a brooch on her bosom. She was looking deep into the pocks and pores of a fiery skin as the blast of rum smote her in the face.

  Then she had escaped, and was again running, clambering ungainly amongst and over rocks. If his obscenities had horrified her at least they were also memories of the past; the sound of his breathing frightened her worse.

  ‘Well, then,’ he suddenly shouted out of a silence, ‘will yer be satisfied when you’ve killed a man? That is what it leads to from the moment we is born!’

  For her part, she could not conceive what they were doing, the two of them, scrambling up this hill. It would have been more rational to fall and allow herself to be strangled by orange, callused hands, broken fingernails eating into her throat, had she not looked up, and there ahead was the vestige of a road, some kind of vehicle advancing along it, drawn by a pair of horses, their solid briskets and haunches at variance with the alarm betrayed by ears and nostrils.

  As she stumbled, herself by now an animal flattening its exhausted body against the turf, somebody, a gentleman, sprang down from the driver’s seat, and charged towards them, whip-in-hand.

  In her distress she did not recognize him until they were but a few yards apart.

  With the whip-handle he began belting into her assailant, who needed little persuasion to retreat, frieze rags flying, hat lost, as he jumped rocks and tore through bushes.

  Garnet Roxburgh recovered his breath, and straightened his coat, of a dark-green cloth with fur collar.

  ‘You court disaster, Ellen. Remember this is Van Diemen’s Land. An infernal situation won’t be improved by your blowing on the coals.’

  She was not yet able to speak, which absolved her from answering her brother-in-law. She followed him up the slope towards the buggy and its pair of disturbed horses.

  She patted one of the cobs and let her hand lie briefly on his neck in gratitude.

  Garnet Roxburgh explained that he had been to a sale at Bagdad, when it had occurred to him to pay his respects to his brother—and sister-in-law—on the way home.

  He flipped at the horses’ necks as he spoke, while she sat humbly, exhausted and related, beside him on the leather seat. The whip, she felt, must have less malice in it than his words, for the horses responded jauntily.

  ‘Mr Roxburgh’, she slightly shifted her position, ‘will be glad to see you after all this time.’

  She noticed that they were re-entering the world of substance and respectability. Gentlemen were driving home, accompanied in some instances by wives. Mr Garnet Roxburgh of ‘Dulcet’ shook his whip once or twice as a salute to familiar faces. The ladies returned blank stares on perceiving his unidentified companion.

  ‘I cannot thank you,’ she attempted.

  He winced, and shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t receive thanks, I only accept offers.’

  They drove grating along the street.

  ‘Most of us on this island are infected.’ (She had heard it before, alas, and from her husband.) ‘You, Ellen, though you are here only by chance, have symptoms of the same disease. I should hate my virtuous brother to know. But would love to educate you further in what you have shown yourself adept at learning—on one occasion at least.’

  Because she would have preferred not to understand what she had been told, she sat looking at her meek hands; while the voice continued hammering at her.

  ‘You and I would enter hell the glorious way if you could overcome your prudery.’

  Then she said, ‘I hope to redeem myself through my husband—an honourable man, as even you who love him must admit.’ She paused before adding, ‘I pray he will never have cause to regret our marriage.’

  The horses were by now straining uphill towards the narrow house in which she and Austin Roxburgh temporarily lived. To a
vert the pressure of a contempt she could feel directed at her she inquired after her friend Holly.

  ‘Holly has been returned to the factory, for reasons’, he said, ‘which I shall not go into.’

  Again she thought to hear the cry of that other victim of her brother-in-law’s displeasure, the little mare who, conveniently, had staked herself. Anger and fear conflicted in Ellen Roxburgh, together with relief that herself, the least deserving of the three, was assured of a refuge.

  They had reached the door. Garnet Roxburgh handed her down, but made no move to go inside and pay his respects to his brother.

  Mrs Roxburgh did not urge him to hold to his original intention; nor did she reveal to her husband, as he carved the lamb, the peculiarly distressing circumstances in which she had recently found herself.

  Instead she wrote:

  6 April

  Walked by myself round the Point. Magnificent views of mountain and river seen by an oppressive light—stormy to say the least. An unpleasant incident on which I do not propose to dwell. Only heartening to know that whatever bad I find in myself is of no account beside the positive evil I discover in others. I do not mean the instinctive brutality of the human beast, but the considered evil of a calculating mind. When I say ‘others’ I mean An Other (and no fiend imagined on the moor at dusk in my inexperienced girlhood).