Without looking round, he spoke up on hearing the creaking of the door and the motion of his wife’s skirt. ‘Well, are they safely—sped?’ he asked while apparently continuing to read.
‘Yes,’ she replied, and laughed. ‘Oh, yes,’ she repeated, more subdued. ‘They are gone.’
‘And did you extract some last-moment grain of wisdom?’
‘They were full of doubts and suspicions, I could tell, but too Christian to come out with them.’
The Roxburghs’ whole exchange was familiarly and pleasantly low in key.
Still at his book, Mr Roxburgh laughed through his nose and said, ‘I don’t believe those two women were in any way satisfied.’
‘Mrs Merivale and Miss Scrimshaw would like to be thought ladies.’
Corrected, Mr Roxburgh began again, ‘The two ladies would have preferred to find us unhappy, in ourselves and our ventures.’
‘I expect, on leaving us, they discovered every reason why we should be feeling desperate,’ Mrs Roxburgh answered, ‘and will entertain each other this evening going over our wretched prospects. It’s their profession, surely, to scent unhappiness in others.’
The voice might have sounded complacent had not its tone also suggested the recital of a set lesson. In any event, Mr Roxburgh must have felt re-assured: he glanced at his wife with an expression verging on gratitude. As the light through the porthole showed it, his face was sallow, fine-featured, a glint in the deep-set eyes implying fever, or fretfulness, or both. If Mr Roxburgh were not recovering from a recent illness, he looked experienced in ill-health, and would always expect to be victimized afresh.
His wife had not thought to return his glance. They appeared a couple whose minds were known to each other and whose conversation would run along well-worn grooves. Instead, Mrs Roxburgh had gone inside the cabin partitioned off from the end of the saloon, and presently reappeared with a shirt she had been mending earlier and put away on the boy’s announcing company.
Mr Roxburgh had erased the expression which confessed a weakness, and was making a show of concentrating on his book.
It did not prevent him murmuring rather irritably, ‘Do you think there is so much wear, Ellen, in that old shirt, that you should keep on fiddling with it?’
‘This is my occupation,’ Ellen Roxburgh replied, ‘and I thought you would have approved of it. To keep you clothed, my dear, during a long voyage.’
Seated the other side of the table, her shawl fastened tighter against the draughts, she resumed her work of accommodating the torn shirt. The attitude she had adopted might have made her seem over-virtuous had she been less amateurish and awkward. At one stage she pricked her finger, and sucked the wound, before approaching her task from another angle. She did not appear to care for the old but still wearable shirt, but would persevere. Perseverance could have been a virtue Mrs Roxburgh had brought with her from another field to press into more finicking service.
She was a woman of medium height, not above thirty years of age, which made her considerably younger than her husband. Without the cap she would have been wearing if discovered at home, the head looked rather larger than suited the proportions of her form, but presented without ornament or undue art, in the last of the winter afternoon, it had the unexpectedness of one of the less easily identified semi-precious stones in an unpretentious setting. She wore her hair parted straight, and encouraged it to hang in the flat sleek loops prescribed by the fashion of the day. In contrast to the dark complexion deplored by others, the eyes of a grey probably bred from blue, were candid or unrewarding according to the temper of those who inquired into them. This no doubt was what had aroused suspicion in the ladies whose visit was just past; or it could have been the mouth, on which circumstances had forced a masculine firmness without destroying a thread of feminine regret or its charm of colour.
Mrs Roxburgh laid aside the mending, which either she had finished, or else could no longer endure. Her mouth grew slacker and any hardness of the eyes dissolved perceptibly in thought. A lonely childhood, followed by marriage with a man twenty years her senior, had inclined her mind to reverie. Perhaps her most luxurious indulgence was a self-conducted tour through the backwaters of experience.
Clasping herself still closer in the unusual though practical woollen shawl which had so enchanted Mrs Merivale that same afternoon, Ellen Roxburgh half-smiled to recall the accents of envy.
‘How I do admire your pretty shawl! It caught my eye before anything,’ Mrs Merivale admitted, and shook the small, perfect ringlets with which the underside of her bonnet was too generously loaded.
The caller was a composite of tremulous feathers, discursive fabrics, and barely controlled greed, her glance travelling from the shoulders of the individual she had condescended to patronize, over the intaglio brooch, the bosom (very discreetly here), eventually arriving at the fringe. Here Mrs Merivale had not been able to refrain from lifting and submitting the goods to close examination, as though on a progress through one of the stores she favoured with her custom.
‘Would you care to try it on?’ Mrs Roxburgh inquired, already preparing to disvest herself.
‘Oh dear, no!’ Mrs Merivale recoiled. ‘Of course not! You must forgive me.’ The shallow eyes flickered in search of someone who might accept blame for a faux pas.
Mrs Roxburgh stood arrested, and fell into one of those silences, the gravity or ‘mystery’ of which, the two ladies afterwards discussed. All the while the tones in the shawl had continued fluctuating, from sombre ash, through the living green which leaves flaunt in a wind, the whole slashed with black as far as the heavy woollen fringe. This too, was black, relieved by recurrent threads of green.
Mrs Roxburgh re-arranged her warm shawl. She sank deeper into it; until forcing herself to break her regrettable silence, she remarked, ‘It was hard to decide what to bring—how much for summer, how much for winter—on a voyage to the other hemisphere. My husband was all for restricting us to garments practically ready to be thrown away. But I insisted on bringing my very particular shawl!’ She laughed, and stopped.
Was she affected? frivolous? or did they detect an echo in her voice? The two visiting ladies were puzzled to the point of mild hostility; they turned to the woman’s husband for confirmation of all that is solid and practical in life.
This suited Mrs Roxburgh, for it had been her intention to draw him in.
‘Ellen is notoriously vain,’ he sighed, with a weariness or lack of interest which dismissed the whole situation.
In thus condemning his wife Mr Roxburgh might have gone beyond what the visitors’ sense of propriety allowed. But Mrs Roxburgh accepted her role as one of the several allotted to her; while the two ladies disguised their views behind a rattling social titter.
‘She decided that I was condemning her to rags to mortify her,’ Mr Roxburgh continued with a candour which confused, ‘when it was her intention’, he added in a burst of irony, ‘to make a conquest of my brother on our visit to him in Van Diemen’s Land.’
It stimulated interest at least.
‘Mrs Roxburgh had not made her brother-in-law’s acquaintance’, the brown eagle inquired, ‘before?’ But so discreet.
Mrs Roxburgh replied, ‘Never,’ and lapsed again.
She stood looking down, slightly smiling as she played with the fringe of her shawl. The whole scene might have been pre-arranged, superficial though the details were.
It was only in the darkening saloon that the incident of the afternoon assumed greater consequence. While the images recurred and floated and dissolved, her husband’s material form remained obstinately upright throughout, like a sense of duty, as he sat and read, or attempted to give her that impression. She was not altogether convinced; when he turned a page he did so absently, fraying an edge with a fingernail, making a dog’s-ear of a corner.
On and off, the native flower would blaze and intrude. They had found it the day before on one of their enforced rambles round the water’s edge at Sydney C
ove, waiting for the breeze which would carry them home.
There were times when Mr Roxburgh held Captain Purdew responsible for the defected wind; at others he all but accused his wife; he had grown so devilishly irritable.
‘Yet nothing would satisfy you’, she had to remind him, ‘but that we should set out on this voyage across the world.’
‘Yes,’ he gasped, for the rocky slope robbed him of his breath and made him stumble, ‘it was my idea—and a bad one. I’ll go as far as to—admit—that!’
Each listened to the ferrule of Mr Roxburgh’s stick striking the adamant colonial stones, in some case scarring them, in others driving them deeper into barren sand, where the activity of ants illustrated in parallel the obtuseness of so much human endeavour.
Back turned to him as she climbed, Mrs Roxburgh’s voice whipped over her shoulder, as did the fringe of her loosely draped, mazy shawl. ‘Is it too much for you? There’s no need to follow, but I’m determined to see whatever lies beyond this knoll.’
An infernal wind blowing from the wrong quarter caused her voice to flicker like the landscape; the latter in no way appealed to him.
‘I am not impotent!’ he protested, his cheeks sunken as he worked at sucking on the air through blenching nostrils.
They struggled on, asunder and in silence, until he stood beside her on the rocky headland it had been her intention to conquer. In their common breathlessness they made a show of peering out at the scene spread before and below them.
‘I’ve not made you ill?’ she asked from between her teeth.
He did not answer, but accepted her fingers in his free hand.
‘A fine prospect’, he remarked, ‘for the future inhabitants of Sydney’ and added, ‘How happy I should be to wake, and find ourselves at home at Cheltenham.’
‘Oh, my dear!’ she exclaimed. ‘We are back where we began! When I thought the sight of this blue water would cure you at least temporarily.’
Disappointment made her withdraw her hand, to pick at the twigs of a bush which drought and wind had not prevented from putting out flowers: golden harsh-coated teasels alongside grey, hairy effigies of their former splendour.
In her distraction, Mrs Roxburgh’s fingers dwelt indiscriminately on the live and the dead. ‘You can’t deny that the visit to your brother made you happy.’
‘And you scarce at all.’
‘My whole concern was not to come between two brothers parted for years, who have a great affection for each other. So I went my own way. I discovered another world. Which will remain with me for life, I expect. Every frond, and shred of bark. My memories are more successful than my sketches. I know your opinion of those, and there I agree with you.’
In her attempt to lighten the situation colour must have flown into her cheeks; she intercepted that expression which suggested he would have drunk up every drop of an elixir he liked to believe might be his salvation.
‘Weren’t you a little jealous?’ he accused.
Her lips swelled with answers, unutterable because immodest. ‘Mr Roxburgh,’ she managed at last, ‘you sometimes ask the unkindest questions.’
There was no trace of archness in her addressing him thus: the austerity of his Christian name, together with the difference in their ages, discouraged her from using it.
‘You were, in fact, more than a little jealous,’ he persisted in baiting her; ‘and your riding off alone amongst tree-ferns and over mountains made it appear more obvious.’
Resisting the moan of protest she could feel rising in her throat, she tore one of the tassel-shaped flowers from a gnarled branch, and directed her attention at it. ‘I wonder what they call this extraordinary thing. We must try to find someone who knows.’
For the moment she was only conscious that his eyes continued looking at or into her; the stab of misery she experienced could not have been sharper.
‘And he went after you. To bring you back.’
‘Your brother Garnet could not have been kinder. Everybody was very kind. It was unfortunate—foolish of me—to lose my way—and let myself be thrown. Poor Merle was on other occasions the gentlest creature.’
‘But Garnet found you. And brought you back.’
‘Oh dear, yes! Yes!’
She almost threw away the flower she was twirling between her fingers, for it had grown sharp-toothed and vicious.
‘Won’t you look at me?’ he asked.
She did so, with the result that they were forced simultaneously into a bungling attempt to prove their love for each other, their lips as bitter-tasting as the leaves they had torn from exotic trees on arrival in an unknown country, their cheeks freshly contoured to fingers which might have been exploring them for the first time. She prayed it would remain thus; she was afraid of what she might find were she ever to arrive at the depths of his eyes.
When he had mumbled a few last fragmented words, she who usually took the lead when it came to practical moves suggested, ‘We should go back, don’t you think? Perhaps we shall hear we are to sail. Otherwise I’ll begin to suspect that Captain Purdew and Mr Courtney are in league against us.’
‘Two such honest men,’ he murmured, his conscience still bruised; and followed her.
Conscience for conscience, her own had been stricken to discover she disliked her brother-in-law on sight: his cleft chin, the rather too full, lower lip. In addition to aggressive health and spirits, Mr Garnet Roxburgh paraded the assured insolence of a lapsed gentleman.
‘I hope you will be happy at “Dulcet”, and consider it your home as long as you are here.’ The exertion of opening a jammed window turned admirable sentiments into a command.
As the window shot upward she was again conscious of wrists which had repelled her as he sat holding the reins on the drive from Hobart Town. But she must not continue in this most unreasonable dislike. Beyond the window an orchard, its green fruit glistening amongst leaves transparent in a western light, showed every sign of expert husbandry. Again she experienced a twinge, from contrasting in her mind this opulent scene with another in which damsons racked by winds from across the moor clustered with an ancient, woody pear tree at the side of a cottage, in rough-hewn, weather-blackened stone. Her hands might still have been red and chapped. She hid them before realizing her foolishness, then resolved that in future her heart would have no room for unreasonable dislike and envy.
Until now, far removed from the fat pastures of Van Diemen’s Land, leading her husband over the stony ground of this other, more forbidding landscape, Mrs Roxburgh could only bitterly admit that she had failed in her resolve, and that the moral strength for which she prayed constantly eluded her.
Thus chastened, she continued stubbing her boots against the stones, until able to turn and announce to Mr Roxburgh, ‘See, my dear? There she is! It was not so far after all.’
Since a wind from the right quarter proved as elusive as the moral strength for which Mrs Roxburgh prayed, they resumed their life of waiting in the narrow saloon and the improvised cabin at the farther end, and on the evening after the visit of the surveyor and his two ladies, there was only the native flower to trouble memory, or illuminate human frailty. Mrs Roxburgh was inclined to wonder at herself for keeping the golden teasel, but Spurgeon the lugubrious fellow who acted as their steward had provided an earthenware jar in which she had stubbornly arranged her spoil, and there it stood, as stubbornly, its blunt club throbbing with the last light reflected off the water outside.
When Mr Roxburgh, without interrupting his reading, inquired, ‘Did somebody identify your specimen?’
Although unprepared for this sudden interest she was not altogether taken by surprise: she had grown to accept his intrusion on her thoughts, or those of them which lay closest to the surface.
She replied, ‘I didn’t think to ask,’ while examining with displeasure her rather too broad, if not unshapely hands.
‘Like all the flowers of this country—or the few we’ve seen on our walks—it is more stra
nge than beautiful,’ Mr Roxburgh pronounced.
‘I haven’t made up my mind. Memorable, certainly.’ She wondered whether her voice sounded as hard and dry as she felt it become in her throat. ‘Whether beautiful, or only strange, I doubt I shall ever forget their flowers.’
Yes, her voice sounded ugly, doubtless due to a constriction of the throat, as her locked hands sped their becalmed brig, her thoughts in tow, till she was again seated beside the silver kettle, behind brocade curtains which the servant had drawn, listening for some indication that her husband would join her at the tea-table, or whether she would conduct the silent ritual of taking tea alone.
When Mr Roxburgh spoke again she was not immediately conscious that they were aboard a berthed ship, or that he was reading aloud from the book in his lap.
‘“… felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,
atque metus omnes et inexorabile fatum
subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari …”
Splendid stuff! Did you hear, Ellen?’
‘Yes. I heard. But shall not understand unless you have the goodness to translate. I thought you would have known that.’ Now she merely sounded like a peevish woman.
‘As you are in almost every respect admirable, one tends to forget that you don’t always understand.’
While he gave the lines his renewed consideration, humming to himself from behind his moustache, drumming on the page with his fingertips, she was forced up from her chair to fidget restlessly in the narrow space in which they were confined.
‘Perhaps this will satisfy you,’ he ventured at last, ‘without doing justice to the original verses. “Happy is he” he no more than muttered, ‘ “who has unveiled the cause of things, and who can ignore inexorable Fate and the roar of insatiate Hell.” ’ Mr Roxburgh coughed for his own efforts on concluding them.
Then he said almost immediately, ‘The light which prevails in Virgil makes that black streak seem blacker.’ There followed a sweeping of the page as though to rid it of crumbs. ‘I don’t believe he feared death.’ Again a scratching or a sweeping. ‘For that matter—although I’ve been threatened several times—and am prepared to be gathered in by—our Maker—death has always appeared to me something of a literary conceit.’ His laughter came out as a high neighing, so that her heart, turning to water, lapped against the timbers of the stays in which she was boarded up.
The Fringe of Leaves Page 3