The Fringe of Leaves

by Patrick White

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of our neat little town.’

  ‘It is that,’ she said. ‘And English. I have difficulty in believing I am being driven through a famous penal colony of the antipodes.’

  He laughed. ‘You will soon believe, but need not fear, or feel embarrassed if, like Austin, you are given to embarrassment. The authorities keep the wretches suitably employed, and on the whole, subdued.’

  Overhearing himself accused, Austin began to protest that he never experienced embarrassment—well, almost never—and the two brothers were soon engaged in banter and laughter and reminiscence.

  Excluded from this, Mrs Roxburgh was able to enjoy her view of the unassuming, while often charming houses, their general effect of modest substance sometimes spoilt by the intrusion of an over-opulent façade. Hens were allowed the freedom of the streets, and an ambling cow almost grazed a wheel of the buggy with her ribs. The scent of the cow’s breath, the thudding of her hooves, and the plop of falling dung, filled Ellen with an immeasurable homesickness. Had it not been for the uncommunicative stares of respectable burgesses and the open scowls of those who must be their slaves, she might have been driving Gluyas’s cart to market.

  When they had left the town and were headed for the interior, the two brothers fell silent. Austin had exhausted himself by a detailed description of the monument in the classic style he had personally designed for erection over their mother’s grave. Garnet sighed; a gloom descended on him, less from melancholy regrets than from boredom, Ellen felt; or perhaps it was the prospect of a long visit by members of his family.

  In any case he seemed to have grown oblivious of a sister-in-law he had shown no signs of taking seriously. Not that she would have welcomed his serious attentions. She thought she would dislike him even more than she had anticipated. He had about him something which she, the farmer’s daughter and spurious lady, recognized as coarse and sensual. Perhaps this was what she resented, and that a Roxburgh should both embody and remind her of it. As he held the reins in his hands during what had become this monotonous drive, she noticed his thick wrists and the hairs visible on them in the space between glove and cuff. She turned away her head. She more than disliked, she was repelled, not only by the man, but by her own thoughts, which her husband and her late mother-in-law would not have suspected her of harbouring.

  To escape from her inner self she looked out across the country, when her attention was caught by a party of men who could only have been some of the ‘wretches’ to whom Garnet Roxburgh had referred. The prisoners were divided into two squads, each engaged in pushing a hand-cart loaded with freshly quarried stone. Armed guards were shouting orders, unintelligible at that distance. The party had but recently emerged from a dip between two slopes. From dragging their carts to the crest of the second, the men were now proceeding to brake, those in front by digging their heels into the hillside, their bodies inclined back against the carts, those behind straining with their whole weight to resist a too-rapid descent. Every face was raised to the sun, teeth bared in sobbing mouths when the lips were not tightly clenched, skin streaming with light and sweat. In contrast to the tanned cheeks and furiously mobile faces, the closed eyes and white eyelids gave the prisoners that expression of unnatural serenity seen in the blind, and which makes them appear all but removed from the life around them.

  Mrs Roxburgh was immediately glad of the lowered eyelids, and that the men most probably would not catch sight of her before the buggy rounded a shoulder of the hill ahead. She felt a pang of commiseration through the hardships and indignities suffered during girlhood, but was more intent on avoiding the prisoners’ undoubted resentment of the physical ease and peace of mind they must imagine if they were to open their eyes.

  So she clenched her gloved hands, and willed the horses to increase their speed. From brooding, and from biting on her lips, these felt thick and sullen. At least her companions had started a desultory conversation and were too engrossed in the past to notice the work-party of convicts before those unfortunate human beasts were lost to sight.

  The landscape through which the travellers were driving was by turns cultivated and wild. An occasional stone cottage or hut built of wattle-and-daub looked the meaner for the tiered forests towering above them. The roads were consistently execrable. The two stout horses lumbered onward, darkened with sweat except where a lather had broken out from the friction of crupper and trace against their coats. Ruts frequently threw the passengers together with a violence which seemed almost personal in its intent.

  However she held herself Mrs Roxburgh could not avoid unpleasant contact with her brother-in-law’s nearside shoulder; when suddenly he turned to her. ‘We shall arrive, God willing, for dinner. By which time’, he added, laughing, ‘we should be fairly well acquainted with each other, whether we like it or not.’ It was practically as though her husband his brother had not been there.

  If she did not reply in words, she could not very well withhold the semblance of a smile from one in whose glance she recognized the provocative candour of the boy in the miniature. Not to have smiled would have made her appear sour, she thought, or offended by neglect.

  Soon afterwards a drizzle started blowing in their faces. Her husband coughed and felt his coat. It was cold for the time of year. Trees in cottage gardens were heavy with unripened fruit.

  Garnet Roxburgh apologized that their vehicle lacked a hood. ‘Does the rain inconvenience you?’ he asked her, instead of his obviously fretting brother.

  ‘Not at all,’ she replied. ‘I am used to it.’

  Again, in memory, she was Ellen Gluyas driving her cart to market at Penzance. Had they noticed her smile the Roxburghs might have found irony there.

  But they remained unaware, and she was moved to take her husband’s hand. She squeezed it and he looked surprised, wondering at the reason for her gesture.

  They toiled on. The drizzle was blown past and behind them. Above an uneven crop of oats, through a gap in darkling trees, hung the faintest smudge of rainbow. She could feel her cheeks glowing, not only from the chill, but from the veiled surprises the country had to offer at every turn. Nor would she let a brother-in-law she must continue to dislike detract from her enjoyment.

  ‘Here we are,’ Mr Garnet Roxburgh was able at last to announce, ‘at “Dulcet”—if not for dinner, then not long after.’

  The horses were heading for feed and water down a lane to one side, but he pulled on their mouths and brought them to a stand-still beside a white-painted wicket-gate set in a hedge and guarded by two cypresses. The hedge was of thickset clipped box; the cypresses had been trimmed too, as well as decapitated, which gave the precincts a military, if not a penal air. Faced with such rigid discipline almost any new arrival must have been deterred from judging the house itself at first glance, though it seemed pleasing enough, built for comfort rather than for show, even if drastically improved by those who had ‘succeeded’ in it. The general impression was of a low, widespreading structure behind a shallow veranda, the body of the house extended to considerable depth through subsidiary rooms and offices. Windows let into a shingle roof betrayed a cramped upper storey, probably for the use of servants.

  Mrs Roxburgh felt she might have grown to love ‘Dulcet’, had fate planted her in it and her brother-in-law not been there.

  Or perhaps she was being unjust. Perhaps he had a genuine love for the place, if for nothing and no one else; to have had them trim the hedge and the cypresses with such precision, and to have called for the painting of the wicket and the woodwork in general. For that matter, he may have loved the widow he married, who died in the unexplained accident.

  ‘Aren’t we coming down?’ he was shouting to passengers deaf or numbed.

  The light glinted on his teeth; his arms were open to receive his sister-in-law.

  But Mrs Roxburgh waited for her husband to descend and turn in her direction, after which she accepted a hand she would have chafed, had she been given a
less public opportunity.

  Barking dogs were silenced by their interest as they started smelling her skirt between gulps of disapproval; while two men with disenchanted Irish faces and amorphous garments fumbled for the baggage stowed in the tray beneath the buggy seat.

  On the veranda steps two women of nicer appearance than the pair of rustics attending to the luggage waited to greet the visitors.

  ‘This is my housekeeper—Mrs Brennan,’ Mr Garnet indicated the older of the women in a would-be jovial, though offhand manner.

  In her middle age, the housekeeper seemingly suffered from nerves. Her lips trembled halfway towards a smile when guided by Mrs Roxburgh’s example. The hair straggling from beneath a clean, though somewhat crushed cap, added to her air of distraction. Mrs Roxburgh had but a blurred impression of Mrs Brennan, much as though catching sight of the moon through tatters of grey-white, wind-wracked cloud.

  ‘And Holly, her helper.’ Garnet Roxburgh grew ever more offhand in his introductions.

  While Mrs Brennan might have been handsome in her youth, the young girl was emphatically pretty at the present day, and in spite of a shapeless, grey dress and slovenly cap. Probably bold by nature, she was now intimidated almost to the point of tears by the arrival of strangers, perhaps also by her master’s brusqueness, as well as the hubbub of dogs barking and wheels grating as the horses strained to be gone to their provender, the Irish cursing them to hold hard.

  The visitors would have retired willingly to their own quarters and given way to their exhaustion, had it not been required of them to listen, admire, recount, and feast until well into the evening. They excused themselves from supper. At last they might have comforted each other, but Mr Roxburgh became convinced that the sheets on their great bed were damp. It was only the cold, she tried to persuade him. Damp was damp, he insisted; his sense of touch never deceived him. After wrapping himself in his coat and a couple of travelling rugs he announced that he would spend the night on the sofa. It was beyond her powers to reassure or comfort him, nor could she feel comforted herself, lying alone between the suspect sheets.

  Not until morning was Mrs Roxburgh able to review her first impressions in tranquillity and what she believed to be detachment, and to record some of them in her journal after a late breakfast in their room. Settling herself in the loose muslin which sunlight and birdsong warranted, she prepared to indulge her blandest vice.

  4 Nov 1835

  Only now begin to feel revived after yesterday’s journey and arrival. To catch sight of the bullock-wagon straining down the lane with our heavier trunks (and what our host describes as a few of the ‘unnecessary though indispensable luxuries’ purchased by him in Hobart Town) has refreshed me more than anything. Mr R. will be the happier for laying hands on his books, myself simply from having my own belongings around me. To make my home in the wilderness!

  There is no reason why I shld sound so ungrateful when Garnet R. is kindness itself. He is now gone about the business of the farm, and again I will sound ungrateful if I say I am just as glad. There is no reason for this. My dislike is quite unreasonable. I can tell that my Mr R. does not intend to take an active part in the life at ‘Dulcet’ (not through any lack of affection for his brother). He has already informed me in private that sheep and cows were all very well when he was courting the farmer’s daughter, but in normal circumstances (outside of the pages of Virgil) they can only be counted among the bores. So it will be my duty to take an interest. There is no reason why I shld not. The country is both pretty and wild, the property evidently prosperous, the house spacious and filled with unexpected comforts, altogether unlike our own poor hugermuger farm at Z.

  By all accounts the late Mrs Garnet Roxburgh’s means was inherited from her first husband. In the dining-room hang portraits of Mrs Garnet and her Dormer spouse. After a glass or two of wine Mr R. remarked to his brother that he would have removed the likenesses instead of keeping them there as reminders. G. R. points out that they are valued as property in these parts—the frames alone. To be sure these are elaborately carved and heavy gilded, but what is within them does not please. Mrs (Dormer) Roxburgh has a long, an ob-long face, very pallid and shiny, not unlike lard. The lips are shown unnatural red, though perhaps the artist has attempted to give her a liveliness her flesh lacked. A dull but shrewd woman, I wld say, and attracted evidently to gentlemen of high complexion. If G. R. is ruddy-skinned, the late Dormer’s cheeks were inflamed, and I recognize too well the look of his rather watery eye. Garnet too, enjoys his wine, from grapes grown on the place, the vines planted by Mr Dormer in the beginning. At dinner my usually abstemious husband was led on by his brother and caused me some embarrassment by proposing a toast which would have gladdened my heart in private, but not in the presence of G. R. I was too tired to more than pick at the fat goose they had killed by way of celebration, and cld not touch the pudding at all. I got away as soon as decency allowed and left the brothers to their childhood and youth.

  Till Mr R. shld tear himself away I decided to make some effort at friendship with the housekeeper, who I found in the great stone kitchen scraping dishes, the girl helping. Mrs B. is a decent soul but suffers from a troubled mind I wld say. Several times I was told that she and her husband were ‘free settlers’. When the husband (a glazier) died she was forced to look for a situation and came out from Hobart as cook to Mr and Mrs Dormer, who were good to her she says. She wld like to find good in everybody, unlike myself who more often sees the bad. Must take Mrs B. as an example, though it cld be with her as with so many others, more in her talk than in her thoughts. For instance I do not believe she sees all that good in her present master though she wld die rather than admit her secret view. While the girl Holly was gone outside to throw the scrapings to the dogs Mrs B. again informed me that she was a free settler, but that the girl had been deported from the Old Country for theft, and had done a term before being assigned. The twenty-odd men employed by my brother-in-law are all assigned servants. At dinner he referred to them as his ‘miscreants’, which I expect they are.

  How much of the miscreant, I wonder, is in Garnet R.? Or in myself for that matter? I know that I have lied when necessary and am at times what the truly virtuous call ‘hypocritical’. If I am not all good (only my dearest husband is that) I am not excessively bad. How far is it to the point where one oversteps the bounds? I wld like to talk to these miscreants, to satisfy myself, but do not expect I ever will.

  While Holly was still absent in the yard I inquired of Mrs Brennan the nature of her mistress’s accident. She became most disturbed, kept repeating that what is past is best forgot. Then it all came out as if she had only been waiting to tell—how the master while taking his wife for a drive along the mountain road had overturned the gig. Her neck was broke!

  Later

  I will concentrate on things other than the above—on the fine room in which we are installed, off it a little dressing-room where I am at present writing, while Mr R. is gone into the library, but only to read the books he has with him, some of which he has already unpacked (Virgil often makes me jealous!). The day is warm, if threatening. Outside my window an orchard: apricots and plums, as far as I can see, the crop only now colouring, and to one side a kitchen garden with raspberry canes as a separating hedge. Bees are on their way across the orchard to more rewarding pastures. Of all the birds I can hear, one (a goldfinch?) perched on a hawthorn outside my window reminds me with his thread of song that the line which divides contentment from melancholy is but a narrow one …

  When she had dressed herself, Mrs Roxburgh fancied taking a walk before dinner, but first went in search of her husband to ask whether he would consider keeping her company.

  ‘Do you suppose I should be more profitably occupied?’ He sounded and looked grumpy from behind his gold spectacles.

  Then, when he had collected his outer wits, the skin gathered at the corners of his eyes, as he knew he must forgive her for her interruption. ‘Thank you, no, dear
Ellen,’ he said, and they were re-united.

  Leaving the library she passed through the house and realized too late that she had made for the kitchen offices (how her origins caught up with her!) where she found Holly in a store-room transferring, or rather, hurling potatoes from a sack into a wooden box. It was obvious the girl resented a task which had become unbearably tedious. Some of the potatoes fell wide of the box and bounced across the flags. A fine red dust from unwashed potatoes hung in the air.

  The intruder sneezed, and the girl’s nose was swollen, either from sneezing, or she could have been crying.

  ‘What has made you unhappy, Holly?’ Mrs Roxburgh ventured.

  The girl snivelled, then broke into outright blubbering through swelling, plum-skin lips. ‘Nothing!’ she sobbed.

  Realizing that Holly’s nothing was equivalent to everything, the older woman regretted her misguided inquiry and tried to make amends. ‘You must not upset yourself,’ she advised; and unwiser still, ‘Sooner or later you will find happiness in marriage with some honest man.’

  ‘Marriage is not for me!’ the girl positively howled, ‘or if it is, it’ll be old pertaters—or worse!’ as she hurled a many-eyed monster across the floor.

  Holly was in no mind to accept reason as the antidote to despair, so Mrs Roxburgh left her. Preparing to cross the yard, she stood an instant balanced on the edge of the step. The girl’s fate might have been her own, that of a scullery-maid becoming a drudge-wife, had a rich man’s caprice not saved her from it. Hardly caprice when Austin Roxburgh had loved her according to the rules of honour and reason. The years gave proof.

  The sunlight which filled the yard, pandering to basking hens and a trio of white-frilled turkeys, should have dismissed any trace of an unreasonable sense of guilt. But sight of a pair of assigned men lazing on their axehandles instead of splitting a pile of logs caused her to move awkwardly. One touched his pudding-basin hat, the second ignored her. Their murmurs pursued her across the yard increasing her embarrassment. Yet their comments, if they were, remained unintelligible, and were overlaid besides, by a drooling of hens and the pink-pink of turkey poults. There was nothing to explain why she should feel ashamed; certainly not her clothes: a modest bonnet and her oldest walking-dress.