The Fringe of Leaves

by Patrick White

  That spring, a late one after an unusually bitter winter, he asked her to accompany him as far as Tremayne, needing her help with a heifer which Mr Borlase had shown some inclination to buy. Pa was driving the sprung cart, dressed in his best pepper-and-salt, while she knelt at the back attached to the unwilling heifer by a rope. It was raining a cold drizzle; a slush of dirty snow had almost thawed out in the ditches. Distress at leaving home had given the poor beast the scours. Her betrayer’s hands were soon a mackerel colour from holding to the rope, at which Beat would jerk each time she threw up her head to bellow. The jolting of the cart, familiar whiffs of the animal she had reared from a calf, and glimpses of grey sea above stone walls or through the gaps in thorn hedges, increased the misery with which, it seemed, Ellen Gluyas might remain permanently infected.

  At Tremayne, Pa got down and took over the heifer. His hands were trembling. She wrapped a sack about her shoulders and said she would stay behind. He cursed her for behaving unsociably, or for being an imbecile, or both, before plodding with their pretty Beat into the not-far-distant yard.

  She rocked herself back and forth on the bare board on which she was seated, to generate a warmth her old drab kersey didn’t provide, and as a substitute for company. Had she been able to invent journeys, like Pa, and had her belief in magic promised to sustain her, she might have gathered up the reins, and driven the rest of the distance to Tintagel, or farther still, wheels grating over pebbles before entering those grey waves.

  Presently the sun showed, and she felt guilty for her wicked thoughts, as well as for misleading Mr Roxburgh into putting his trust in one who was unworthy of it.

  When Pa returned it was without the heifer. As he had reckoned, Mr Borlase was unable to resist such a well-shaped beast. Pa had grown heartier, for the cash in his pocket and for having quenched his thirst at the buyer’s expense. He had made so sure of this she wasted no time in taking the reins from his hands. Thus released from responsibilities, his body slithered back and lay on the floor of the cart, his legs, in their shiny black leggings, propped and twitching on the seat beside her.

  Had he but slept; instead he started shouting, ‘What’s taken the girl? I can see by they shoulders you’re op to yer old game. Well, you ent goin’ to make me suffer. I had too much, Ellen.’

  ‘Gee op, Tiger!’ She slapped the horse’s rump with the ends of the reins.

  They rattled home at a fair pace, but the day was drawing in as she penned the ewes; it was dark before she finished milking.

  She fried him a teddy-cake, which he pushed away. He sat pouring for his own consumption. Sometimes his elbow would fall short of the table.

  He said, ‘You’ll always hate me. I bet tha’s stuck pins in me and throwed me to the fire.’

  She messed the potato with her fork. ‘Why would I hate you?’

  ‘For bein’ your father.’

  She had no answer.

  ‘If you dun’t hate me, you dun’t love me.’

  Again she had no answer.

  ‘You’ve no cause to. An’ every cause. To love a father.’

  She felt she might retch if she stayed, so she got up, and went outside, and started trapesing up and down through the drizzle which had begun again.

  Once she looked his way, and he was sitting in the lamplit kitchen, amongst the unscraped dishes, sucking by now on his bottle.

  She was too tired to postpone her return, whatever accusations might be preparing. Instead he stared at her, and asked in a distant, frightened voice unlike his own, ‘Nelly’ (he had never addressed her thus) ‘was it you knocked to the door? Or was it a token?’

  He might have been coming to her, but stumbled, and fell against the dresser, and was gone before she could take him in her arms.

  Whether it was grief she felt or terror at finding herself alone in a silent, no longer familiar house, with a stranger’s dead weight threatening to drag her under, she could not have told.

  Captain Purdew was devouring prodigious quantities of pork, accompanied by gulps of green tea to assuage a thirst brought on by the saltness of the meat.

  ‘I wouldn’t exchange this sturdy little vessel, Mr Roxburgh, for any of your fast-sailing modern packets.’

  ‘May I pour you another cup, Captain?’ Mrs Roxburgh was still contemplating what might have been the skin of her own father’s hand.

  She shivered. The gale had discovered cracks in the ‘sturdy little vessel’, the sea too, it appeared: a thin trickle of water was advancing across the saloon carpet.

  Of a sudden Captain Purdew seemed to grow embarrassed for his hands, those great cracked flippers, coarsened by hard use and weather, stiffened and knobbed by the rheumatics.

  ‘As a boy’, Mr Roxburgh was leaning forward with an earnestness his wife recognized as the mode he adopted when indulging in confidences, ‘I experienced none of the rougher pleasures of life for being handicapped by poor health. The damp winters affected my chest. From early childhood I was dressed in the thickest wool and practically suffocated by well-meant precautions.’

  If his wife had at first subscribed to the theory of prevention by suffocation, it was to win over her mother-in-law. Old Mrs Roxburgh was persuaded to see virtues in one who patently observed the tradition of Austin’s delicate health; humble origins and rude manners might be overlooked, to some extent, or anyway temporarily, in one who showed such dedication.

  As a bride the young woman developed the habit of bringing her husband drinks of scalded milk from which she had been careful to take the skin according to instructions. The skin was the nourishing part, she protested without insisting, but he confessed he only had to catch sight of wrinkled skin on a tumbler of milk to feel queasy. On another occasion, on asking her to close a window, he made it known that open windows were a source of anxiety ever since he had developed pneumonia after an evening at whist in a friend’s over-ventilated house. But on a mild evening like this, she coaxed, the air can but warm the room. Instead of obeying, she forced the sash higher by several inches, on such a meadowful of placid light and sounds of rooks settling themselves in elm-castles, he must have decided to waive his objection.

  ‘… so I was sent abroad,’ Mr Roxburgh continued explaining, and leaned farther forward as his narrative took him into foreign parts, ‘first to Switzerland, then Italy, in the company of a tutor, a fool of a fellow, who at least left me to my books and my own devices while he pursued the ladies. So much so, we had to forgo the Levant after he was challenged to a duel at Palermo.’

  No doubt remembering his duties now that his hunger was satisfield, the captain had grown fidgety. He resumed sitting on the hands which, he suspected, offended a lady’s sensibility, while he waited to seize the appropriate moment for breaking free.

  Mrs Roxburgh yawned, and forgot that she ought to disguise it.

  ‘I was sent abroad,’ Mr Roxburgh repeated, ‘but was cured at last, cheaply, and at home.’

  If he glanced half-amused half-regretful at his wife, it was because she remained unconscious of the reference; nor could she share his momentary vision of greenish-yellow light with the sound of wasps stealing upon them as she put up a hand to test the degree of ripeness her pears had reached inside their muslin bags. One forgets, Ellen, how much you know. And her reply, How much? how little is surely nearer the mark! He might have insisted in contradicting had modesty not suited her so well, and also because a wife’s modesty suits a husband.

  His passengers’ visible withdrawal gave Captain Purdew his chance. ‘If you’ll excuse me, ma’am, I’ll return to duty—refreshed and encouraged, I needn’t say.’

  While the passengers made no attempt to restrain one who must continue foreshortened in the light of their own lives and thoughts, the captain was glad to escape for no reason that he could properly explain.

  After the steward had cleared the table Mr Austin Roxburgh fetched his writing-case, extracted his journal (Morocco-bound) selected a pen which, even so, he might not have cared for,
and settled down to write.

  15 May 1836

  he inscribed it with perhaps too reckless a flourish,

  Resumed our voyage in Bristol Maid. A wretched vessel if ever there was. Rolling horribly since dawn. Prudent enough to rise late and find my feet, but E. must venture early on deck, with the result that she returned soaked.

  From the little we have seen of this Colony after the comparatively fertile expanses of Van Diemen’s Land, there was never an emptier, more hostile country (E. not altogether in agreement because of the fanciful, or ‘romantic’, streak in her nature).

  Mr Roxburgh paused, and would have examined his wife’s face, half-expecting her to have read his mounting thoughts, but she had gone from the saloon into the cabin, from which, as she moved about the other side of the partition, came the sounds of tidying. She liked to pass the morning thus, even making up the bunks, as a favour to the steward, or, her husband rather suspected, in repentance for the sin of defecting from the lower class.

  Complete isolation persuaded Mr Roxburgh to let himself go. He swallowed the bitterness in his mouth, and clenched his teeth as his nib slashed the surface of the page.

  Oh the blackness in which it is never possible to distinguish the outline of a beloved form, or know the wife of one’s own choosing! No wonder that a state of doubt, anguish, even terror, should exist, to explore which might prove disastrous. I am from time to time the original Abyss, into which I must restrain my rational self from plunging for fear of the consequences. Happy, indeed, is he who can ignore the too substantial shadows of long afternoons at sea. The mornings can be filled with domestic details, and recall of life as we have experienced it, but not the reflecting glass of endless afternoon and evening …

  Here Mr Roxburgh’s guilt or fears got the better of him. He hesitated, then began most carefully to obliterate under an opaque hatching of India ink most of what he had written since breakfast, but could not be absolutely sure that he had done the job with thoroughness. The page was at last as good as damaged. Only then, and after glancing over a shoulder, did he reach for his Virgil.

  What should have been silence was in competition with a creaking of planks, a dashing of waves, a distant, confused thunder. In the cabin adjoining the saloon Mrs Roxburgh had performed the tasks with which she had learnt to occupy herself during the mornings of a voyage. If she had neglected the bunks, she would see to them later. In the meantime she was prepared to indulge herself a little. Seated at the chest sideways because there was no accommodation for knees, she took out the journal she had kept up sporadically since her late mother-in-law advised her to form the habit.

  At sea

  she wrote in her improved, but never altogether approved, hand (at least my dear no one would deny it has its individual character).

  Just now remembered overhearing conversation between Mr Daintrey and Mr Roxburgh discussing his brother Garnet R. Mr Daintrey deciding that G. R., in spite of his looks, spirit, and prospects, showed himself a ‘lost soul’ from birth. Did not fully understand, but felt alarmed lest somebody accuse me behind my back of being ‘lost’. Mr Roxburgh, his mother, Mrs Daintrey, have all professed to find me agreeable and assured me of their approval and love. That wld not have prevented them recognizing what myself has always half suspected from my worst days at Z. It has stuck in my mind like a furze thorn in the thumb. (Had she known, Mrs Roxburgh wld have accused me of morbid thoughts!)

  Went on deck early and was intocksicated by a sense of freedom, of pure joy. Gulls approaching, then swooning off. At moments I felt dizzy with the air I swallowed, but sad to think I will never explore this vast land seen at a distance through spray and fog. Captain Purdew bore down wanting to protect me. We smiled at each other more than necessary, because it was almost impossible to be heard, and for want, I suppose, of anything to say. Good, kind, tedjus men make me feel guilty. Perhaps it is Pa’s blood in my veins. I am given to fits of drunkenness without having indulged. Unlike many others, Mr Roxburgh does not bore me I think. I am sure I do not write this out of gratitude. A husband can become one of his wife’s most pleasing habits …

  She put it away. The airless cabin had given her a head. Soon she must make up the beds, but would rest a little in the lower berth, overcome by a faintness, or languor, to which the motion of the ship contributed.

  Mrs Roxburgh lay, not uncomfortably, except for a slight nausea, in the hollow her husband’s form had impressed on the palliasse, and was encouraged to re-enter her maze.

  ‘Whenever in doubt, ask, and I shall advise you, my dear, to the best of my ability,’ old Mrs Roxburgh promised after her ‘unlikely’ daughter-in-law had won her respect and affection.

  She had a soft, perished neck, and rumbled gently after drinking tea, which she took in immoderate quantitites from forgetting the number of cups she had poured.

  Her mother-in-law’s rumbles had calmed Ellen’s initial fright and roused in her a tenderness for the defenceless old thing.

  The elder Mrs Roxburgh had not appeared at the wedding, which, conveniently, was ‘far too far’ a pity considering Aunt Triphena had insisted on standing by her niece to show that the girl came of a respectable, not to say substantial, family. The embarrassing question of whether to produce the father had been tactfully settled by nature when Dick was carried off by the drink. In fact, by giving Ellen a fright, it was more than anything Dick’s death which ensured that the ceremony would take place. Mr Roxburgh had caught her on the bounce, so to speak, after a renewal of their correspondence.

  Aunt Tite had not been able to resist hinting at the bitter truth. Ellen, in her confusion, was ready to admit it, while none the less grateful to her pale, thin-legged stranger-lover descending from the coach, together with a second gentleman, his solicitor and friend, Mr Aubrey Daintrey. Mr Daintrey was the only member of the Roxburgh faction to attend the wedding and take stock of the background Mrs Tregaskis had provided. If he appreciated what he saw, he gave scarcely a formal sign. Mr Daintrey could not have been colder, steelier (steel with the slight tremor caused by inordinate tension) had he been acting as Mr Roxburgh’s second at a duel.

  Aunt Tite, whose charity was only ever skin-deep, showed her generosity by choosing white satin and lace, with satin slippers and kid gloves, for her pauper niece. Hepzibah Tregaskis, as bridesmaid, wore rosebud pink which went with her pretty complexion. The bride, who had spent too much time in the fields, looked the swarthier for her white.

  But Mr Roxburgh appeared enchanted. and Mr Daintrey the best man raised a few fairly unrestrained smiles.

  Ellen hoped she would not cry. She would love her husband in accordance with what she was promising, and not only out of gratitude.

  It was decided by Mr Roxburgh and his mother to defer the honeymoon, that the bride might be initiated without delay into the customs she was expected to adopt. So, from living isolated on a poor Cornish farm, Ellen Gluyas entered into temporary purdah in a Gloucestershire mansion, the family having moved from their original Winchester in the hopes that Mr Austin’s health might benefit by the mild climate and polite society at Cheltenham.

  At least she rarely found herself alone: there was her gently admonishing mother-in-law; there were the servants. Most terrifying for Ellen Roxburgh was the maid who attended on her rising and her setting.

  ‘You should put yourself in her hands,’ old Mrs Roxburgh advised, with no more than an oblique glance at her newly acquired daughter-in-law. ‘Vetch will brush your hair, and help you to dress—and un-dress.’

  ‘But it is not what I’m used to,’ the younger Mrs Roxburgh protested. ‘And what shall I call her? Vetch?’

  ‘If that is her name, what else?’

  ‘But nothing more?’

  The old woman preferred to ignore a question which embarrassed her by betraying ignorance of worldly manners in her son’s wife, or else a regrettable perversity, for old Mrs Roxburgh was not unaware that the girl’s mother had been Lady Ottering’s maid.

 
Vetch was a trim, sour, elderly person who performed her duties according to rule, perfectly no doubt, but with a coldness which disdained one who was imperfection itself.

  Ellen Roxburgh learned to lean back and enjoy the hair-brushing; she allowed herself to be dressed and undressed; but on the first occasion when Vetch knelt to peel the stockings from her legs, she put out a hand to stay her.

  ‘Why, ma’am, I’m accustomed to do what any lady expects.’

  ‘But I do not expect it. I was never so inactive. And cannot bear anyone to touch my feet. They’re ticklish.’

  Though she laughed to encourage her maid, Vetch failed to kindle; a lifetime of service seemed to have damped her responses to life.

  Yes, her servants despised her, the young Mrs Roxburgh could tell; they suspected her of wanting them to re-admit her to a society she had forsworn without sufficient thought for the secrets she was taking with her.

  Old Mrs Roxburgh, on the other hand, was convinced that this honest and appealing girl could never be admitted to hers except in theory, and her heart began to bleed for her. In an effort to make amends, the old woman relinquished a ruby necklace and a topaz collar. ‘Why should you not have and enjoy what will be yours eventually?’

  These were the sweets; the gall was in the copybook, because the mother-in-law was of the opinion it were best to start at the beginning, ‘… considering that your hand is not what one would call cultivated.’

  So she was put to forming pothooks and hangers, until coming upon her pupil without her knowledge, the old woman sensed from the tilt of the head and a hunched shoulder the indignity the girl was warding off. Accordingly, they skipped pothooks. She was promoted to simple copying, and invited to compile inventories of linen, plate, and furniture, in spite of the fact that there was no immediate call for such records.