The Fringe of Leaves

by Patrick White

  It was unavoidable that family history should complicate to some extent the relationship between the lady and her son’s wife. She had earmarked a clergyman’s sister for Austin, thinking that something mature but mild would not ‘aggravate’, as she put it. She would not have spoken the word ‘sensual’, except in connection with abstract vice, and where her daughter-in-law was concerned, she translated ‘sensuality’ into ‘health’. If only she had been able to consult with someone close, to lean upon her younger son, but he, alas, had defected earlier, to sensuality and worse, and been packed off as quickly and quietly as possible.

  Because Austin was taught as a boy to suppress emotion, and soon preferred it thus, for fear that his preceptor might diagnose feeling as yet another ‘symptom’, none but his wife ever guessed that he must have reacted to his brother’s forced departure as though he had suffered the amputation of a limb. His brother’s skin, after a bath and a brisk towelling in front of the nursery fire, continued flickering on and off before Austin’s eyes. He could remember an occasion when, seated beside the curiously woven brass fender, he had watched Garnet leap the rail, and stand crowing from amongst the coals, clothed in a suit of fiery feathers. He had awoken sweating from his dream; but Garnet had in him something of the quality of fire. Austin himself was not without it, if damped down, concealed by ash. He would not have had it otherwise—oh dear, no! but admired the free play of flames.

  As he saw it, his mother and his brother were the opposite poles of his existence. He believed he found them united in his wife, whose sense of duty did not prevent her lips tasting of warm pears. He had never tasted his brother’s lips, or not that he could remember. Garnet smelled of discharged guns and anointed harness, their mother of some dim melancholy, compound of lawyers’ deeds and lemon verbena. She encouraged her elder son to cultivate the garden, which he did, if not literally: it was tended by too many gardeners. The art of horticulture was what attracted him, Latin names, dried specimens—not so far distant from his curtailed legal studies—rather than the flesh of living plants. But as token exercise and tribute to his mother, he would behead a few weeds, and fork at the moist earth, turning up bundles of flesh-coloured earthworms. It sustained him too, against the wrench of his brother’s departure. Their mother had come down the steps and laid a hand on her surviving boy’s shoulder. They were standing under a medlar, treading a rich stench out of the fallen fruit. In this second bereavement Mrs Roxburgh would have liked to talk about her first, the father Austin could scarcely remember, and rarely attempted to.

  Free of family responsibilities and ties, if not the ghosts they leave behind, Austin Roxburgh tried to feel exhilarated as he stood alone beneath this other tree on which his life now depended. Anonymous male voices drifted down at him from up there amongst the rope and canvas. He was unable to see the men themselves, but it did not bother him unduly; his wife excepted, he had more confidence in those with whom he was unacquainted. On and off he felt irritated thinking of his wife. Where could Ellen be? So dependable. She had soon learnt to pour tea of a strength soothing to his stomach and replenish the pot from the silver kettle slung above a little spirit-lamp.

  The voices of the invisible sailors aloft were floating with the careless, designless ease of gulls’ cries, gulls’ frames.

  ‘If one of them should fall!’ Mr Roxburgh remarked aloud.

  He was staring up. Anyone coming upon him would have caught him with his mouth and his thoughts open. He was not particularly thinking of the men, but instinctively touched his own ribs. His breath rattled in his throat as though he were emerging from out of a heavy blanket of sleep.

  ‘There was a lad fell from the riggin’ on the voyage out.’ It was Pilcher, the second mate, with whom Mr Roxburgh had exchanged scarce a word all the way from Hobart Town; yet here they were, brought together fortuitously.

  ‘Yes?’ Mr Roxburgh would not be lured too far too soon.

  They had gone across and were standing together at the bulwark. The wind was attempting to lift the passenger’s cap, while the sea turned on its side as though preparing to reveal some hitherto hidden aspect of its realm.

  ‘Yes?’ Mr Roxburgh repeated so quickly it sounded unnatural.

  ‘Poor Harry! Apart from his fall, d’you know what happened? Bosun forgot to weight ’is shroud.’

  ‘He was buried at sea?’

  ‘Where else? She’s big enough.’

  Mr Roxburgh and Mr Pilcher stood looking over the side.

  Pilcher laughed. ‘If the sharks don’t get a man, it’s the worms.’

  Mr Roxburgh agreed; it seemed the only rational thing to do.

  As they were placed, he could not have seen Pilcher without turning, but it would have been unnecessary to look: he knew his companion as that wiry individual of livid complexion and indeterminate age. He did not care for the mouth as he remembered it, thin-lipped, not unlike his own.

  Mr Roxburgh shook himelf to free his thoughts of a morbidity in which his mother and Nurse Hayes would not have permitted him to indulge. In search of a more wholesome image, he looked landward and saw that an opalescence had bloomed on the hitherto leaden slab of shore. An invisible sun struck at the land with swords of light, but only for a few moments, before the weapons were again sheathed, the target veiled in cloud and mist.

  ‘What curious and beautiful tricks the light will play!’ Mr Roxburgh at once regretted his remark, but needlessly; Pilcher appeared to consider it unworthy of his attention.

  ‘Ever been any way in?’ Austin Roxburgh thought to inquire.

  ‘In where?’

  ‘Into the interior.’

  ‘Nao!’

  The mate was of another element. He continued staring at the water, his contemptuous expression dissolving in what entranced him.

  ‘Not if I was paid,’ Mr Pilcher said. ‘Nothing there.’

  On the other hand, he seemed to imply, the sea was peopled with his like.

  ‘Only dirty blacks,’ he added, ‘and a few poor beggars in stripes who’ve bolted from one hell to another. The criminals they found out about! That’s th’injustice of it. How many of us was never found out?’

  Mr Pilcher spat into his element, but the wind carried the thread of spittle, stretching it into the shape of a transparent bow.

  ‘That is certainly an argument,’ Mr Roxburgh said.

  ‘That is the truth!’ the mate blurted passionately, and looked in the direction of the land. ‘If I was sent out here in irons, for what I done—or what someone else had done, ’cause that can happen too, you know—I’d find a way to join the bolters. I’d learn the country by heart, like any of your books, Mr Roxburgh, and find more to it perhaps.’

  The passenger was surprised that one whom he scarcely knew should be acquainted with his tastes.

  ‘Experience, no doubt, leaves a deeper impression than words.’

  ‘’Specially when it’s printed on yer back in blood.’

  Mr Roxburgh winced, and sucked at his moustache.

  ‘They wouldn’t hold me, though,’ Mr Pilcher continued. ‘Not for long. No conger was ever slipp’rier’, he laughed, ‘when his liberty was threatened. That’s why I come away to sea. A man is free at sea. He can breathe. But I wouldn’t suffocate there, neither—if I was put to it—in their blisterin’ bush.’

  Just then, the canvas tree above them shuddered and rattled to such an extent the mate appeared to remember his duties.

  ‘Well?’ He smiled, indulgently for him, and slipped away.

  Mr Roxburgh was left with an impression of a vertical cut down either side of the man’s mouth. Of course these were no more than lines with which the face had been weathered, but Austin Roxburgh could not avoid connecting them with their somewhat disturbing conversation. The conger was still twisting and glinting at a depth where he feared to follow, while in the element more natural to himself his hands had become unrecognizable as he tore a way through the blistering scrub, his nails as broken and packed with grim
e as the mate’s own.

  It was a relief when the arrival of a messenger rescued him from thoughts over which he had so little control.

  ‘Mrs Roxburgh sent me, sir, to ask whether summat had detained ’ee.’

  He recognized the boy who lent a hand in the galley, amongst his other duties, and helped Spurgeon carry the dishes down to the saloon. Usually blithe and elastic in all he did, his present mission had given him a primly formal, not to say ladylike air, perhaps in imitation of the one who had dispatched him.

  ‘Detain?’ the gentleman spluttered. ‘How? What could detain one on board ship? Where time is of no account it isn’t possible to be detained!’ He appeared genuinely angry.

  ‘She’s worryin’ that ’ee ’s gone so long,’ the boy explained, gloomy now, as if this were one of the moments when lack of understanding in those who should possess it lowered his spirits.

  Mr Roxburgh might have continued grumbling had the boy not disengaged himself from the unwelcome situation, skipped expertly beneath the mainsail, and made for the forecastle head.

  Stranded thus, the passenger condescended to go between decks. On entering the saloon he found his wife busy with some sewing, an occupation he knew her to dislike. Such strength of mind in one he respected, and even loved, irritated him still further.

  He frowned, and grumbled, ‘I wish you wouldn’t strain your eyes sewing by such a wretched light.’

  She looked up, smiling too sweetly for his present fancy. ‘Sewing isn’t such a skill that one can’t go along at it by instinct after a while.’

  Each knew that in her case it was untrue.

  Mr Roxburgh seated himself without taking off his overcoat. It made him look temporarily possessed by a sensation of impermanence. He proceeded to choose something to glare at, which happened to be the teasel-shaped flower, by now faded and wizened enough to justify throwing out.

  ‘Did you enjoy yourself?’ she asked.

  ‘Enjoy myself at what?’

  ‘How am I to know?’

  ‘How, indeed! Or I!’

  So they sat in silence awhile.

  Then Mr Roxburgh so far relented as to reveal, ‘I had some conversation with the second mate.’

  ‘On what subject?’

  ‘Difficult to say.’ It made him glare at the dead flower.

  Mrs Roxburgh sewed.

  ‘That is,’ he said, ‘I can hardly remember, and if I could, it would be difficult to express in words.’

  In fact, the mate’s allusions had disturbed him so deeply he would have preferred to dismiss them from his mind.

  Mrs Roxburgh continued sewing with an indifference born of obedience, which at last made itself felt.

  ‘It was about the country beyond,’ he was forced to admit, ‘beyond the known settlements. Prisoners’, he positively drove himself, ‘will sometimes escape. And wander for years in the interior. Supporting themselves off the land. Suffering terrible hardships. But as a life it is more bearable than the one they have bolted from.’

  On passing a hand over his face he found he was perspiring for something he might have experienced himself. He realized, for that matter, he could have continued embroidering almost without end on the few words the mate had uttered.

  Mrs Roxburgh’s forehead had creased. She did sincerely sympathize with, and had suffered for, those who had been brought to her notice in Van Diemen’s Land, but still had to bridge the gulf separating life from their own lives, whether stately rituals conducted behind the brocade curtains of their drawing-room at Cheltenham, or a makeshift, but none the less homely existence in a corner of this draughty little ship. Neither of them had felt the cat, only the silken cords of their own devising with which they tormented each other at intervals. Yet, she believed, she would have borne all, and more, were someone to require it of her.

  How her mind was wandering! She felt ashamed and at the same time agitated. She got up and started an erratic tidying of their quarters as an excuse for moving about. Had she been her mother-in-law she might have prayed to their Lord Jesus for all those who must suffer the lash. But she herself was so constituted she could not pray with confidence; her prayers had seldom been more than words pitched without expectation into the surrounding dark.

  Mrs Roxburgh glanced at her husband to decide whether he had guessed, but Austin Roxburgh was too engrossed in his own thoughts, and perhaps always had been.

  Throwing off their mood they spent a pleasant, uneventful evening, dining by insufficient light until the captain called for the candles to be lit. There was not only Captain Purdew; Mr Courtney put in an appearance. Again, seemingly, it was Mr Pilcher’s watch. It occurred to each of the Roxburghs that the second mate had not yet broken bread with them.

  The ship’s motion and the few mouthfuls of ale she had drunk made Mrs Roxburgh yawn; or it could have been the captain’s story.

  Towards the end of dinner Captain Purdew departed from the sea—for him, a rare occurrence—and was telling a land tale, of a carter and his horse. In celebration of the rare occurrence the worthy seaman heavily emphasized each detail, at times even striking the table with the flat of his hand. Mr Courtney, by contrast, had hunched his shoulders, and was sitting silent, looking at his place. He had spread his coarse, doggy hair with a liberal ration of pomade, perhaps knowing beforehand that, in the captain’s presence, he would not contribute a word to the conversation, and might assert himself in this other way.

  Nearing the end of a drive from Scole, Captain Purdew had encountered the subject of his story this side of Norwich, ‘… when the horse began to stagger. I’d been catching up on them for some distance in the trap, and suspected there was something unnatural in the animal’s behaviour—till suddenly—he fell down!’ The captain slapped the table so hard the glasses jumped and tinkled.

  Hungry for further mysteries since his talk with Pilcher during the forenoon, Mr Roxburgh was merely frustrated by the plodding tale of the carter’s horse.

  ‘He fell down between the shafts,’ Captain Purdew continued, ‘and the carter began thrashing the poor beast with the reins.’

  Mr Roxburgh might never have encountered a worse bore, while Mr Courtney hunched his shoulders higher and tighter for the superior he was unable to protect against the results of his tediousness.

  ‘I don’t mind saying I swore at him.’ Captain Purdew turned to Mrs Roxburgh, who showed him the kind of smile which may be worn at any season. ‘For I’d noticed that the dray was braking, and the man was far gone with drink.’

  Mrs Roxburgh thought Captain Purdew was possibly in like condition, but held her head graciously when she could have let loose a whole string of the yawns she was suppressing. From feeling them swell inside her throat, she saw them as the continuum of soft, unlaid eggs in the innards of a slaughtered hen.

  She glanced at her husband. She would have liked to share with him her vision of soft eggs, but he was likely to disapprove of it as much as he would the sight of hen-dirt on her hands from plunging them into the bird’s gizzard.

  ‘“The brake, man!” I shouted’ and the captain demonstrated.

  It seemed to Mrs Roxburgh that the whole of her uneventful life had been spent listening to men telling stories, and smiling to encourage them. It was a relief to catch sight of the boy, who entered bearing a dish with some of the apples they had taken on board at Sydney, and which were of a wrinkled, though hectic red. The boy’s eyes were absorbed in a silent judgment she was unable to interpret, but this did not prevent her wishing to conspire with him in some innocent way. She wondered whether she would have been able to exchange confidences with her own son had she reared him. It was not then, unnatural, surely, that she should hanker after the trust of this crop-headed lad with the dish of feverish apples?

  ‘I seated myself on the horse’s head as he lay in the road,’ the captain was explaining to Mr Roxburgh.

  The latter nodded, but was looking in his wife’s direction. Her head was the sole reality in this sea of w
ords, or for that matter, life. It flickered at times, then burned steady, like any candle-flame, with the result that her husband was overcome with remorse for his irritable sallies earlier that day, and by a fear that he might not convey his love before one of them was extinguished.

  In the circumstances, Mr Roxburgh was maddened by the captain’s story. ‘What happened to the deuced horse?’

  ‘Why, the fellow unharnessed him. After which, I got up. And the horse heaved himself to his feet. He couldn’t stop trembling.’

  Mr Roxburgh too, had begun to tremble, with annoyance, and his ineffectual love.

  As the ship lurched farther on its voyage, the diners seemed contained by a flickering of light rather than by timber.

  Mr Courtney asked to be excused.

  By the time the cloth was removed, and the captain as well, Mr Roxburgh doubted he would ever learn to speak to his wife in simple words.

  They continued sitting at the table which Spurgeon had concealed under a dull garnet-coloured plush. Mrs Roxburgh induced her husband to join her in a game of piquet. Neither cared for cards, but now they played.

  At last Mrs Roxburgh pushed the game away from her. She began to laugh. Her elbows protruded sharply from the sleeves as she clasped her hands behind her head. ‘Were you entertained by the captain?’

  Mr Roxburgh grumbled in gathering up the disordered cards.

  ‘Why’, she asked, ‘do you suppose he told it?’

  ‘Why do people speak? For the most part to fill in the silences.’

  They fell silent after that. As her lips came together he would have devoured them contrary to his habit, but it might have given her too rude a surprise.

  The ship was shaking with an odd, self-destructive motion while they prepared themselves for bed.

  Mrs Roxburgh thought she would never fall asleep. Had he succumbed? She listened. She touched her face and could tell it had grown haggard. She would not sleep that night, but must have dropped off eventually, to be drifting through whichever element it was, hair blown or flowing behind her, while her face tried on credible expressions. Suddenly she was lashed. It was her hair turned to knotted cords. I will, I must endure it because this is my only purpose. She kissed his hands. And kissed. And looked down into his facelessness. Just as the beam, inexpertly fixed, perhaps deliberately, by the carpenter at Hobart Town, began slipping. It is piercing my husband’s heart. It is lying embedded in the yellow waxen always unconvincing flesh. Ohhhhh! A mouth grows egg-shaped under the influence of despair.