The Fringe of Leaves

by Patrick White

  Only when she withdrew her hand he began to look anxious, and complained, ‘Why must you leave me, Ellen?’

  ‘To change from my habit.’

  Accepting the tiresome reason, he said, ‘I look forward to the long, uninterrupted evening we shall spend together.’

  It seemed as though his release from pain, and no doubt fear, had made him determined to invest their marriage of years with the tender glow of courtship.

  She turned to disguise her unhappiness, if not her limp.

  ‘What have you done to yourself?’ Mr Roxburgh was quick to ask.

  ‘My horse shied at a hedgehog. I twisted my ankle in falling.’

  ‘Ah!’ His breath was sharp, but he made no further comment beyond, ‘Otherwise you are whole, I take it.’

  She was relieved for the refuge of the dressing-room, and to change into a loose gown which declared her intention of not leaving their quarters that evening.

  Mrs Roxburgh sat at the bedside, while her husband made dis-jointed conversation, or dozed, and she nursed her numbness, or provided such answers as would satisfy him. For the first time in her life she had reached that point where the guilt-ridden wish the past completely razed in consequence of a single lapse, so that they may start afresh somewhere in the mists of abstract, and possibly unattainable, bliss.

  On Mr Roxburgh’s announcing that he felt like taking a little soup provided there was nothing fat in it, Mrs Brennan brought him a plateful. The master presented his compliments, she said, and would pay his brother a visit after everyone had dined. ‘I have laid a place in the dining-room, ma’am, if you care to prepare yourself for dinner.’

  Mrs Roxburgh confessed she had no appetite, and did not wish to leave her husband, but in the end was persuaded to toy with a breast of chicken on a tray. It would have suited her if she too, might have claimed to be an invalid, but could only enlist her insufficiently injured ankle.

  When Garnet Roxburgh knocked on the door he must have heard the things rattle on the tray as she made her escape into the dressing-room beyond. Of the conversation between the brothers she heard not a word, what with the closed door and her deaf ears, but was attracted repeatedly to her own reflections in the looking-glass.

  The long wait for Dr Aspinall after Garnet withdrew might have become intolerable had the invalid not been inspired by fits of unexpected gaiety.

  When she had read to him awhile from Sir Thomas Browne, he stopped her by saying, ‘An admirably modulated voice, Ellen. Who would have thought that a crude Cornish girl could be made over to become a beautiful and accomplished woman!’

  Mrs Roxburgh was embarrassed more by the compliment than the slight. ‘Crude I may have been, accomplished I am not.’

  ‘When I used the word “crude” I did not mean to disparage you, my dear. It was to your advantage. The crude lends itself all the better to moulding.’ He was caressing her cheek with the back of his hand. ‘In a woman, at any rate. I do not think it applies to a man. Men are too rigid. There is more of wax in a woman. She is easily impressed!’ He pinched her cheek, laughing for his own wit, and might have drawn her to him had they not heard voices approaching.

  It was Dr Aspinall at last, bleary from the long drive and an aftermath of brandy supped before leaving, and perhaps also en route. After hearing details of Mr Roxburgh’s attack and making a fairly disinterested examination, the doctor prescribed tincture of digitalis, which he had with him in his bag, and predicted that the patient had years of life ahead of him. Dr Aspinall was of that school of physicians which believes in making the patient happy by encouraging him to ignore his ailment and save his strength for payment of the fee.

  Business concluded, the doctor accepted a further brandy and water (at which Mr Roxburgh joined him) and complimented Mrs Roxburgh on her looks.

  ‘My wife, by the by, sends you her affectionate remembrances and continues hoping you will pay her the promised visit.’

  ‘Perhaps sooner than she expects,’ Mrs Roxburgh answered with a warmth she might not have expended on Mrs Aspinall previously.

  In fact her mind was leaping with the hope which springs from a sudden idea, or inspiration.

  Although it was understood that the doctor should spend the night with them to rest his horses, Mrs Roxburgh followed him out into the passage so as to waste no time in broaching her idea.

  ‘When I said “sooner than she expects”, doctor, it was because it is my opinion that we should leave “Dulcet” as soon as we can find lodgings at Hobart. I am afraid’, Mrs Roxburgh said, and did look most distracted and appealing, ‘that my husband—in his delicate state of health—might suddenly be taken ill again—the next time perhaps fatally. In town he will have the benefit of your immediate attention. I would feel desperate if anything happened—and helpless—here at “Dulcet”.’

  Dr Aspinall squeezed her hand and smiled a benevolent, brandy smile.

  ‘The simplest lodgings, provided they are clean,’ she hurried on, ‘where Mr Roxburgh can regain his strength before the voyage home.’

  ‘You can depend on me, my dear Mrs Roxburgh,’ the doctor promised, ‘but Garnet will be keenly disappointed.’

  ‘No doubt,’ she admitted. ‘But I’m sure he is fond enough of his brother not to wish to sacrifice him to his own pleasure.’

  The doctor agreed.

  After attending to the night-light and performing the ritual of kissing her husband on the brow (when, surprisingly, his lips were raised in search of hers) Mrs Roxburgh retired to the dressing-room, where Holly had made up a bed of sorts on the sofa. She was so weary she accepted thankfully this unyielding compromise, but not weary enough to neglect her duty to the one her mother-in-law had commended: the Divine Being, in old Mrs Roxburgh’s parlance.

  Young Mrs Roxburgh kneeled beside the improvised bed, but her knees were too pointed, it seemed, or the carpet might have been strewn with glass, or in worst moments, upholstered like a mattress of rotting leaves.

  ‘Ellen?’ Mr Roxburgh called from the bedroom. ‘Are you praying?’

  She replied yes, but so low he might not have heard.

  She locked her hands faster, and screwed her eyes deeper into her skull. She longed to catch sight of old Mrs Roxburgh’s Divine Being, if only as a blaze of departing glory. Perhaps it was her origins which made her believe more intently in the Devil than in the Deity. So tonight her prayers were but vaguely directed, and the shudders took possession of her limbs.

  Again Mr Roxburgh called to her. ‘I am in no mood for prayer. I am too tired—too fidgety. I could not succeed in concentrating.’ His voice trailed off in a string of yawns.

  Mrs Roxburgh arranged herself upon the sofa, but was unable to sleep. Although she was careful to close her mind to any image which might suggest her fall from grace, such thoughts as she had, trickled out as tears; the wet pillow heightened the fever of her sleeplessness.

  Time must have passed, for the pillow-case had dried out, when Mr Roxburgh called, ‘Are you awake, Ellen? I find it impossible to sleep. Come here, would you? I’d like to feel you lying beside me in this desert of a bed.’

  She could only obey her sick husband’s whim. ‘But you will be less likely to sleep,’ she warned. ‘We shall disturb each other by our tossing and turning.’

  ‘I would like to comfort you,’ he said, ‘for all you have had to put up with—married to such a creaking fellow.’

  Her body ached, less than her spirit however, as Mr Roxburgh began to demonstrate his love. Perhaps the shock he had sustained that day had melted a tenderness inside him commensurate with the love he had known in theory he ought to feel, and only now saw his way to offering a semblance of it.

  Mrs Roxburgh was racked: gratitude was the most she was able to conjure in exchange, and that can quickly turn to the gravel of remorse.

  ‘Oh, no!’ she protested. ‘Please! I am afraid,’ she moaned as she moved her head from side to side. ‘You may have a relapse.’

  But Mr Roxburgh rema
ined gently obdurate: he could not impress his love too deeply on her now that he had been prompted to do so.

  Mrs Roxburgh, finally, could only lie, holding her husband’s frail body to hers, and accept his miraculous gift.

  After a night which, in retrospect, was less tormented than either of them had anticipated, she wondered whether to share with him the plan she had conceived for removing from ‘Dulcet’ to Hobart Town; when she found herself telling it.

  Surprisingly, Mr Roxburgh replied, ‘Yes. I am in full agreement. I expect Garnet’s feelings will be hurt, but it cannot be helped. I’ve taken a dislike to this house. I swear it is still full of Dormers. I’ve heard them moving about overhead, as you claimed to hear, I remember, at the beginning.’

  Mrs Roxburgh preferred not to embark on the subject of ghosts, and more practically suggested, ‘Do you think you should tell your brother that we plan to leave?’

  ‘I could—yes,’ Mr Roxburgh pondered, ‘unless you might do it more delicately. He could hold it against his brother for ever, whereas he can hardly blame a sensible wife for worrying about her husband’s health.’ His decision filled him with all the gravity of self-approval.

  But Mrs Roxburgh grew hesitant. ‘Let us at least wait’, she said, ‘till the doctor has found us lodgings.’

  While her husband kept to his bed it was easy enough to avoid her brother-in-law, but Austin Roxburgh at last tired of pampering; he took to rising in the morning and tentatively pottering about the house, but still retired in the afternoon; their dinner was brought to them, as usual since his illness, in their room.

  Until Mr Roxburgh decided, ‘You should go in, Ellen, and dine with him. Otherwise he may take offence, and find your dedication to a husband ostentatious.’

  ‘If you wish it,’ she said.

  The leaves falling in the orchard made for melancholy. If the twitter of little questing birds provoked tremors of pleasure in her, the cold cawing of transient crows sank her spirits immediately. On the morning of the day when her husband gave his order she heard shots from across the paddock, and a desperate cry, whether from man or beast she was unable to decide. Her closing the window, she realized later, had been an ineffectual response which shut out neither the echo nor her own disquiet.

  The evening was cold for her return to the ritual of the dining-room. A white light was gathering above the decapitated cypresses and thick wall or hedge of box. In the fireplace two or three tree-roots snapped and crackled cheerfully enough. Even so, she was glad of her fringed shawl with the leaf-pattern; she drew it tight across her bosom, then thought better, and draped it loosely. As she waited for Garnet Roxburgh she could not determine whether the expression in Mrs Dormer-Roxburgh’s eyes was that of malevolence or sympathy.

  Her host arrived as she had expected, casually, disinterested, and cold. His features, his lips, seemed to have coarsened since last she saw him, but the transformation could have been occasioned by surliness.

  ‘You have become a stranger, Ellen,’ he said, and bore down to commandeer the hearth.

  His voice sounded thick, as though he had drunk a glass of wine to fortify himself against their meeting.

  ‘My husband’, she replied, ‘is a demanding invalid.’

  ‘Of course I would not begrudge my brother the attentions of a devoted wife.’

  Then Holly produced the tureen, which should have dispelled any awkwardness. The girl went to stand it at the head of the table so that the master might serve from it.

  ‘Mrs Roxburgh will serve the soup,’ he decided.

  Mrs Roxburgh did as she was told; the steam made her eyes water. Holly too, was red about the eyes and had lost something of her original gloss. Under the shapeless grey gown, Mrs Roxburgh thought she could detect an ampler figure. The material ghosts of ‘Dulcet’ were running the gauntlet of Mrs Dormer’s scorn. So Mrs Roxburgh lowered her eyes.

  The circlets of fat on the surface of the soup would surely have displeased her husband. ‘Is there ever,’ she began, but gave up on scalding her palate and the back of her throat. ‘Escaped prisoners,’ she tried it out afresh, ‘do they ever survive to enjoy their freedom?’

  ‘Not for long,’ replied Garnet Roxburgh with evident approval. ‘They are either shot in escaping, or brought back soon after for appropriate punishment and another term. A few of the bolters turn bushranger for a while, but are usually caught, and strung up beside the highroad as a warning.’

  It was much as she had imagined while hoping to be told that freedom sometimes exchanges abstraction for reality.

  Holly had removed the soup-tureen and brought an exceptionally fine fish, which Mr Roxburgh served as though not doing so.

  His guest choked on a bone, but asked, ‘What is it, Mr Roxburgh?’

  ‘What? Oh, the fish. A trumpeter, I think. Yes, trumpeter.’

  He sighed and ate, and ate and sighed. Holly fetched candles.

  ‘This morning’, Mrs Roxburgh ventured, ‘I heard gunfire—and such a cry, I can hear it still. Would it have been one of these wretches, delivered—whether mercifully or not—out of his misery?’

  Garnet Roxburgh’s jaws worked; his lips ejected a fragment of fish-skin. ‘It was the mare—Merle—who staked herself so badly it would not have been practical to keep her. We can’t afford to carry cripples.’ His forehead seemed to swell as his jaws set motionless; his hands, which she so much loathed, and for one obsessed instant, had desired, threatened to send his knife and fork skittering across the plate.

  Her own cutlery she laid together before extricating herself from her chair.

  ‘Well?’ he all but shouted. ‘Who is to blame—but us all? Eh, Ellen?’ He had jumped up after she had risen, and come round the table to thrust himself at her. ‘I’m told you are planning to leave us to our festering!’

  He was grasping, not so much at her hand, as for some immaterial support he had no hope of finding.

  In refusing him her hand, she uttered, ‘I can’t make excuses for my own weakness—or ignorance. I still have not learnt enough to help myself, let alone others.’

  She did not look at him again, but left the room.

  Mr Austin Roxburgh was most disturbed on noticing his wife’s pallor. ‘It is you who are ill, Ellen!’

  She was in fact a shambles of disgust, anger, and despair, both for the slaughter of the little horse, which she could only interpret as an act of deliberate cruelty, and for the human souls condemned to the torments of this island on which they too, had the misfortune to find themselves.

  ‘These wretched creatures for whom there is so little hope!’ She could not bring herself to mention the mare, for whose end she held herself responsible.

  Austin Roxburgh might have moralized to console his wife had it not meant going against what he saw as retribution and justice.

  Instead, in the morning, he devised an outing which he hoped would restore her spirits. The day was so clear and sunny he asked for a horse to be harnessed to the gig, and proposed that they should drive out together.

  Austin Roxburgh drove like the upright man he was. It was unusual for him to take the reins, but he appeared to derive such pleasure from their innocent jaunt she could not demand that they change places.

  They took the road along the riverside, where the grass was already strewn with the gold coin of poplar leaves. Fish leaped from time to time, or like thoughts rising, mouthed the surface of the stippled water.

  ‘We must do this more often, Ellen,’ Mr Roxburgh decided, ‘when we are at home again—at Cheltenham.’

  His desire to atone for the minor lapses, and ignorance of the major ones, made the morning glitter more perilously. She could only sit as upright as himself, when in less tenuous circumstances her body might have adopted some of the attitudes of self-indulgence.

  Mrs Roxburgh was delivered to some extent from the nagging of her conscience on reaching the house and being handed a note which a messenger had brought from Dr Aspinall. Standing on the veranda steps the
Roxburghs read the letter together; here at last was a guilt they could share.

  A Mrs Impey, a widow in reduced circumstances, the doctor informed them, was prepared to put three of her rooms at his friends’ disposal. Her establishment, a modest one he was careful to add, was situated nevertheless in a most respectable locality.

  Mrs Roxburgh was overjoyed, though her husband at once showed signs of anxiety, if not downright alarm. ‘Now we shall have to tell him,’ he said. ‘Will you?’

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘He knows!’ She then began to laugh in a manner which might have struck him as ‘hysterical’ in another woman.

  ‘Who could have told him?’

  ‘I have no inkling,’ it was not entirely true, ‘and since it is done, I shall make no inquiries.’ Despite a disapproval she could sense mounting, she continued laughing; she took herself in hand only after they had gone inside.

  Mrs Roxburgh, who had lost the inclination for writing in her journal, recovered it:

  24 March

  Hobart Town

  … the house so small, the rooms so narrow, we might feel restricted had we not grown accustomed to ship-conditions on the voyage out. I shld also say, if it was not for relief at escaping from the gloom of ‘Dulcet’! So I am prepared to love our little house at Battery Point, and Mr R. is for similar reasons willing to overlook its limitations. We have the use of two front rooms. One is a dining-room, the other a parlour, or what our landlady likes to refer to as the withdrawing-room. Off this is our bedroom, most fortunately placed, because this will be my withdrawing-room in the event of unwanted callers. Mrs Impey is a small, bright person full of the best intentions. She is the widow of a former officer of the garrison at Port Arthur where she spent some years with her husband. When questioned about Port A. she held forth on its magnificent situation. As for the penal settlement, she says many of the stories are grossly exagerated by those who look for the sensational in life. Mrs Impey, I suspect, is too bright to admit any shadows into her scheme. Asked her whether she had not felt moved to return home after burying her husband. Here she did look a little downcast for one so bright, and said it was difficult for a woman to acquire the habit of making important decisions. Then she cheered up again, said that she enjoyed the society of Hobart Town, and so as not to lead a wholly frivolous life, gave lessons in needlework to selected young ladies of the better class.