The Fringe of Leaves

by Patrick White

  Then there was the journal favoured by old Mrs Roxburgh as a source of self-knowledge and an instrument for self-correction.

  20 Aug 1821

  I will make a start today at writing in this clean book which I hope not to spoil because I owe it to Them. My life has become all starts in every quarter—and sometimes fits as well if I wld give way to them. I must not complane, I have evrything—a house excepting it is Theirs, his Mother lives in one wing but eats with us, she is very kind. I have cloathes aplenty, servants not all of them necessary or desirable, who do not speak unless spoken to and then not always. I have a Spanish jennet. Mr R. has presented me besides with a pair of finches in a cage, and my little pug Tip, she is merry as a cricket. I ride out in my green habit though not far, Mr R. will not allow it, or I drive my own pony car, or we are driven out Mrs R. and me in the carridge, or chaise if the weather is fair. Freinds greet us, most of Mrs R.’s age. We sometimes call at some grave house and are invited to take a glass of wine or dish of tay. Unless I am spoke to in strange houses I keep quiet for fear of what may jump out of my mouth. But will learn no doubt. They have give me books to read—Bishop Taylor’s Sermons and Miss Edgeworth, and the crib to the Latin poet that Mr R. most loves. Not being able to make much of any of it yet, I sit with my books more often than I read, and look at the toe of my shoe, or watch the wasps trying to get at the pears through the muslin bags, or my little pug to catch her tail. I wish I would dare go inside the kitchen to make some jam, I may yet, and read a book without my eyes ache …

  She had been encouraged early to tell the truth, but found that truth did not always match what she was taught by precept or in church: it was both simpler and more complicated.

  Her parents in the past, and now her husband and mother-in-law, expected more of her than they themselves were prepared or knew how to demonstrate. It had pained and puzzled her as a child, until as a girl she too began accepting that there are conventions in truth as in anything else. As a young wife and ‘lady’ she saw this as an expedient she must convert into permanence, and former critics were soon applauding her for observing the conventions they were accustomed to obey.

  Moral approval is all very well. Ellen Roxburgh would have liked to shine, but in the circumstances, did so only fitfully. Once or twice on coming downstairs in ruby necklace or topaz collar, her hand accepting but languid guidance from the rail, she had sensed unwilling admiration in an apathetic, if not coolly hostile, servant. A housemaid dazzled out of her thoughts abandoned the scuttle she had brought to a neglected grate and fled behind the baize door. On another, more equivocal occasion, the butler looked up with what might have been interpreted as an expression of shock.

  ‘Did I startle you, Perkins?’ she asked with that mild indifference she had copied from those who knew how to use it better.

  ‘Not at all, ma’am. It struck me you were looking exceptionally well.’

  Although triumphs of a kind, they were hardly salve for her worst wounds. A fashionable rout could become the scene of grievous torture where the truth was aimed when her back was turned. She was sometimes all but felled by what she overheard through an open doorway or under cover of an urn or column.

  ‘Mr Roxburgh is of excellent family, I am told.’ The lady visiting at Cheltenham might not have appeared to be fishing had her eyes not grown a glaze and the tips of her marabout plumes trembled in anticipation.

  Mrs Daintrey the solicitor’s wife confirmed that Mr Roxburgh was ‘of an established and respected family’.

  A gentleman had started making preparatory noises in his throat.

  The visitor flicked her marabout afresh. ‘Mrs Roxburgh, I understand, is of quite humble origins.’

  Mrs Daintrey moaned a little. ‘But is doing very nicely,’ she conceded out of friendship for her husband’s client.

  ‘In any case,’ the gentleman who had been preparing seized the opportunity, ‘the Roxburghs themselves were in trade a couple of generations ago.’

  Stouter than ever in friendship, Mrs Daintrey cried, ‘But never behind the counter!’

  ‘And the brother?’

  ‘Ah, I cannot vouch for him.’ Mrs Daintrey sighed. ‘Very little is known—to me, at any rate—about Mr Garnet Roxburgh. Should we, perhaps, sample the ices?’

  Mrs Roxburgh wrote in the journal which from being a virtue was becoming a vice:

  … I would like to see my husband as perfect. I will not have him hurt. I am better able to endure wounds, and wld take them upon myself instead. Women on the whole are stronger because more knowing than men, for all the knowledge men lay claim to. We also learn to numb ourselves against suffering, whether of the body, or the mind …

  To please and protect became Ellen Roxburgh’s constant aim; to be accepted by her husband’s friends and thus earn his approbation; to show the Roxburghs her gratitude in undemonstrative and undemeaning ways, because anything else embarrassed them. What she would not admit, or only half, was her desire to love her husband in a manner acceptable to them both.

  Just as she was to learn that death was for Mr Roxburgh a ‘literary conceit’, so she found that his approach to passion had its formal limits. For her part, she longed to, but had never dared, storm those limits and carry him off instead of submitting to his hesitant though loving rectitude. ‘Tup’ was a word she remembered out of a past she had all but forgotten, in which her own passive ewes submitted, while bees flitted wilfully from thyme to furze, the curlew whistled at dusk, and night was filled with the badger’s chattered messages. She herself had only once responded with a natural ardour, but discovered on her husband’s face an expression of having tasted something bitter, or of looking too deep. So she replaced the mask which evidently she was expected to wear, and because he was an honourable as well as a pitiable man, she would refrain in future from tearing it off.

  In the second year of their marriage she conceived.

  … I am of course very happy and Mr R. is overjoyed. His brother Garnet has not got a child, and it is right that himself the elder brother shld pass on the name through a son and heir. (Provided it is this and not a disappointing girl!) The child will also give a filip, he says, to our conversation. I did not know we were in need of a go-between. But so it is!

  Mrs Roxburgh miscarried after a fall from her Spanish jennet, and was forbidden to ride Dapple again; she must content herself with being driven. Even to those aware of the train of events, young Mrs Roxburgh did not look less handsome, if a trifle pale, in her violet silk, with the black, fringed pelerine. From carriage or chaise she returned her acquaintances’ greetings with no more than the degree of pleasure her situation called for; the plumes only slightly rippled in her great hat.

  On days when she took little walks through the grounds her mother-in-law might accompany her. Grown infirm since the tragedy, old Mrs Roxburgh hung on her arm, trembled, and tottered. ‘I find it chilly, Ellen,’ she murmured. ‘Should we not go in?’

  Alone, the younger woman sometimes roamed the house, discovering attics and cupboards hitherto unexplored, and which she doubted would ever be hers; she was to that extent bereft and restless. One evening as the light on the elms started to wane, she found herself scratching on an attic window with a diamond, as she had heard told it was possible to write. She printed on the glass TINTAGEL in bold, if irregular letters, and then was ashamed, or even afraid, for what she had done, though neither her husband nor her mother-in-law was likely to climb so high, and those who did would not connect the name with their mistress’s thoughts or any part of the real world.

  Two years later Mrs Roxburgh again conceived, and this time bore a child, a perfect little boy, but who was with them so short a while, she did not even record his passing in her journal. By unexpressed agreement Mrs Roxburgh and her husband decided not to mention the incident again.

  Nor did the grandmother dwell on it, unless obliquely. ‘Austin was the sickly child. Garnet was such a sturdy little fellow. I can see him in the firelight, s
itting in front of that brass fender after Nurse had given him his bath. Brimful of life and health! Austin so pale. He developed a cough. I would not allow myself to think, because if I did, I would have believed he must die.’

  On the table beside the old woman’s carved chair stood a miniature framed in a garland of gold leaves and pear-shaped pearls. ‘There, you see,’ she would invite her callers to admire more than once in the course of the same visit, ‘my two boys!’

  Enhanced by Austin’s sallow face and expression of anxiety, Garnet made a charming impression: his frock so cut as to reveal the shoulders, his lips as glossy as washed cherries, his chestnut hair arranged by an admiring nurse with a studied casualness which left the forehead engagingly exposed.

  ‘Though Providence has dealt me several blows,’ the old lady would maunder on, ‘I should not complain. Austin was spared, and Austin has been a comfort to me. Well, we shall all soon be dead. Not you, my dear, you are far too healthy.’ Here a soft white hand would fumble after a firmer one. ‘Garnet is as good as dead. What use is a boy to his mother, or anybody else, living down there in Van Dieman’s Land?’

  Once Ellen had taken a deep enough breath to ask, ‘What decided Mr Garnet Roxburgh to emigrate to Van Diemen’s Land?’

  The mother was so far caught off her guard that she launched herself immediately. ‘He didn’t decide—it was decided for him by Austin, Mr Daintrey, and several others who had his interests at heart. It was not his fault. He was headstrong and unwise, and fell amongst bad company.’ Here it must have occurred to the narrator that it might be imprudent to cast more light on an incident best consigned to obscurity, for she gasped, and sniffed, and dabbed a little before concluding, ‘They say there are compensations for living in Van Diemen’s Land—some very quaint marsupials. Garnet himself told me about them in a letter.’

  Not long after, old Mrs Roxburgh died. Her son Austin was deeply affected by her death, as might have been foreseen, and all but his wife decided to avoid his company during the prolonged period of mourning. As for the old woman’s daughter (so Ellen considered herself and was considered by then) she wept as the earth was shovelled in unfeeling clods down upon the coffin. Her husband would have preferred her to restrain her grief, at least till later, because a red face smeared with tears reminded him in public of the farmer’s daughter he had married, when he had begun to congratulate himself on her being buried deeper than his mother. (Stricken by his private sentiments, Mr Roxburgh wrote off to London, ordering a dozen pair of gloves of the size he had noted at the back of his journal the year he married ‘Ellen Gluyas’.)

  Persuaded to rest awhile in her husband’s bunk Mrs Roxburgh regretted her lethargy. Within the motion of the heaving ship and the rustle of the straw-filled palliasse she remained a core of inertia. She yawned uncontrollably. Oh for her down pillows and feather-bed at Cheltenham! Wishes did not prevent her ploughing her cheek deeper into the coarse slip upon which it was resting and where her husband’s cheek lingered: around her there was still the scent of sleep; she was pervaded and soothed by it. Soon, she promised herself, she would make up the beds, like any under-housemaid, but until then, she resigned herself to the undulations of her feathered thoughts. If she shuddered once or twice, and chafed the gooseflesh out of her arms, it was because she knew she would be led deeper than she would have chosen, and inevitably trapped in what she most loathed.

  ‘Why?’ he pondered in high anguish.

  They were seated on deck in a warm corner on the lee side of the barque Kestrel. If the breeze held, they were but a day out of Hobart Town.

  The warmth, the prospect, must have gulled Mr Roxburgh into meeting his wife’s disagreeable question with an uncharacteristically direct reply. ‘My brother was accused of forging a signature. Oh, nothing was proved! The accusation was based on suspicion rather than evidence, and knowing my brother I am confident that he was not guilty.’ Mr Roxburgh thrust his hands back to back between his bony knees; sunken cheeks and clenched jaws contributed to the impression that he had suddenly aged. ‘Poor Garnet, he was never bad! Rash, admittedly, and too personable. He had the fatal gift of attracting almost everyone he met. The wrong people led him astray.’

  ‘When the wrong people led him astray, surely it was your brother who must have felt attracted?’ For her husband’s sake she would not have liked to think it.

  Practically shouting, Mr Roxburgh repeated in his brother’s defence, ‘He is not bad! It was never proved!’

  Presently they gathered up their books, their rugs, and went below, where Mrs Roxburgh occupied herself writing in her journal until it should be dinner-time.

  … asked the imprudent question and received the painful answer. Mr R. most distressed. But I had to know. If I cld only rid myself of my dislike for Garnet R. so as not to go against my husband. But I continue seeing the little boy with glossy lips, and shallow eyes determined to dazzle as he stares out of the likeness his mother loved to show visitors. I can imagine the ‘personable’ man grown out of this little boy—the mocking lips, the blue eyes hardened by conceit and—I shld not allow myself to write it—unproved dishonesty. I believe I have always detested Garnet R. for outshining his brother. I must not allow myself to think such thoughts when it wld pain my dearest husband, only that I must protect him from his innocent faith in one who I am sure was never worthy of it …

  By the time they went in to dinner Mrs Roxburgh was entrenched in her own virtuous resolves, and wore a glow to which her husband could not but respond admiringly.

  Berthed alongside the quay at Hobart Town the following morning, a shrouded mountain looming over all, Ellen Roxburgh was less confident of her armoury. She remembered she was the farmer’s daughter who had married an honourable gentleman, and corrected her speech, and learned to obey certain accepted moral precepts and social rules, most of them as incongruous to her nature as her counterfeit of the Italian hand and her comments on the books with which her husband wished her to persevere. But her meeting with that husband’s adored brother, a second gentleman whose doubtful honour led her to expect a subtler version of the first, could prove the severest trial of those to which she had so far been subjected.

  In the circumstances, Mrs Roxburgh lingered below settling her very modest bonnet (an old one, as Mr Roxburgh had requested for their voyage), patting the carpet-bag into shape, locking her leather dressing-case (in which she also kept her journal), while Austin Roxburgh went on deck to take part in the joyful, if also unnerving, reunion with his sibling.

  When she could no longer defer the moment of joining them, her confusion at first prevented her assessing ‘Garnet R.’ with any clearness. She was aware only of the blaze from blue sceptical eyes, an intensification of the milder, shallower stare of the child in the miniature, and a hand uncommonly hard, like that of some mechanic, or farmer. By contrast his clothes, without being ostentatious, suggested expense, even fashion. The shirt-cuff was of impeccable linen, as he stooped to retrieve a leather glove he had let fall on the deck.

  Withdrawing her glance from the wrist, she listened to the unnaturally high-pitched inanities in which long separation had forced the brothers to engage each other. After the initial compliments and inquiries on Garnet Roxburgh’s part, the two gentlemen mercifully ignored her.

  ‘… Are you well, Austin? You look well, you old, creaking gate!’

  ‘Inactivity, or the long sea voyage, has put new life in me, dear fellow. Though naturally I must always take care. My heart, as you know, is not of the best.’

  Mr Garnet Roxburgh smiled absently, if it was not incredulously, at the idea that someone might suffer from a heart.

  ‘And you, Mrs Roxburgh—Ellen, isn’t it? if you’ll allow me—have you no ailments—or at any rate, complaints?’ he inquired as he propelled her the short distance along the gang-board on to the quay.

  ‘None,’ she answered while he was still at her back, ‘unless the nervous fidgets I developed from not arriving sooner.’ She was
glad to hear grit beneath the soles of her boots, which not only meant she was once more standing on solid land but her first abrasive contact with it might have disintegrated a reply which could have sounded insipid, insincere, or worse to her husband’s ears—indiscreet.

  But the brothers were too busy organizing and explaining to pay attention to shades of meaning.

  ‘The baggage will follow by bullock-wagon,’ their host told them. ‘That is, all but your immediate necessities. Those, we can take with us in the buggy.’

  Except that mud had collected on the wheels and spattered the bodywork, the vehicle wore a gloss of paint which disguised bluntness of form in an elegance matching that of the owner himself.

  During the longueurs of the voyage out Mr Roxburgh had informed his wife, ‘There is no actual reason for pitying Garnet, though our mother, understandably, always lamented losing her favourite son—yes, let us be realistic—to a hard and morally infected country like Van Diemen’s Land. In fact Garnet has done very well for himself. By marrying a considerably older widow of means, his position in the community became assured. If the woman died not long after, in a regrettable accident, at least he inherited her property, from which, I gather, he has a respectable income.’

  ‘How did Mrs Garnet Roxburgh die?’

  ‘In the accident,’ Austin replied, but vaguely, for his mind was occupied with other thoughts.

  Driven by the widower through Hobart Town, Ellen returned, if only by an imagined glimpse, to the accident in which Mrs Garnet Roxburgh died.

  ‘Do you approve?’ she realized her brother-in-law was asking.