The Fringe of Leaves

by Patrick White

  The watcher writhed to such an extent the flame leaped on the candle the screen was shielding, then subsided almost to extinction before recovering itself.

  ‘Jack?’

  Sergeant Oakes cleared his throat. ‘’Tis not Jack. ’Tis nobody.’

  ‘Don’t tell me!’ She did not laugh; it must have been the sheet slithering.

  When inspiration clapped the sergeant on the shoulder, and he lowered his voice into a whisper more determined than desperate. ‘’Tis not nobody, neether. ’Tis Mrs Oakes—your nurse.’

  The patient seemed satisfied awhile, except she was for ever turning and fretting, and at last went into a lengthy, scarcely sensible rigmarole. ‘Poor Pa! I’d knaw your breathin’ anywheres. You always was more silence than words. You never knawed me like I knawed me father. Had time to, all they winters, all they sheep ’n teddy-hoen’. We should ’uv drove the few mile on to Tintagel, day we fetched th’ ’eifer to Borlase. So I never did see—Tintagel. It was Mr Austin Roxburgh who come. The gentlefolk! I was overlaid with pool de swa. I was plaised as puss for a season. Not the swans-down. That were black. An’ later. They nights were so cold we could ’ear our teeth chatterin’ to one another when we kissed. Poor Pa! I loved you too. If you knawed, you wouldn’ be skulkin’ behind th’ old screen.’

  Forced to make water at this point, the watcher stole away, but when he returned to his post she was still at it, though less personal, so to say.

  ‘Gee op, Tiger! If you place. We’re not op the hill to Zennor.’

  And again, ‘My ewes idn’t penned, and rain comin’ as big as cannon-balls by the looks. Shoo! For life’s sake, run!’

  He shivered to feel it rushing past, the rain, the wool; there was one fleece had thorns in it.

  ‘Oh,’ she sighed, ‘you have not filled the scuttle, Mattie, or built me a fire which will warm my thoughts.’

  His head was near to busting with confusion and sleep.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Daintry, do you fancy chocolate? Or will it make us liverish?’

  She would not let him be.

  ‘Mrs Oakes, your husb’n … My hubsand, Mrs Oakes ‘had a mole …’

  Dang me, what will she come at next!

  ‘Ellen can tell a token when she sees one. This one is blacker than any face I ever see’d. The whole world will perish by it. Shut the window, won’t you? Oh, please … Sergeant … fetch your … pist-tol …’

  It was Emily leaning over him. He knew her by the scent of her hair. The candle had fizzled out in the socket leaving a smell of cold wax.

  ‘Did she pass the night peaceful?’

  He could not tear himself quick enough out of the tormented leather. ‘I couldn’ say. She slept, I reckon. We both did. But it was a sort of madness, Emily.’

  He made straight into the morning he knew, and was soon wiping his hands on the rather greasy rag he used when he rinsed the cows’ teats before milking.

  Mrs Oakes sent messages to Moreton Bay by one or other of her three sons: Mrs Roxburgh showed every sign of regaining health and strength, though still in no condition to travel. In any event, Mrs Oakes would have been loth to discharge her patient: they had developed a fondness for each other. Mrs Oakes could not think how she would spend her days if the object of her cosseting were taken from her and herself left with the company of men preoccupied with beasts and weather. She would dearly have loved a girl-child, but since she had not been so fortunate, here was this ailing stranger, not without her childish ways.

  They were happiest sipping mint tea while looking at mementoes of the Old Country. The yellowed letters and locks of wan hair infused the farmer’s wife with a delectable melancholy. ‘Sad, isn’t they?’ She smiled and at the same time wiped an eye.

  ‘Do you regret your life?’ Mrs Roxburgh asked.

  ‘No. Why should I? This is where I belong now. It’s different for a man, perhaps. A woman, as I see, is more like moss or lichen, that takes to some rock or tree as she takes to her husband. An’ that is where we belong.’

  ‘I have no husband—no children. I’m in every respect free.’

  Mrs Oakes made haste to encourage her friend. ‘But that needn’t be the end of the matter!’

  Their discourse might have taken an awkward turn had Tim not arrived at the very moment from the settlement with a parcel of clothes sent by Mrs Lovell: ‘to try like, for size.’

  ‘Why, they’s lovely! Isn’t they, Mrs Roxburgh?’ Mrs Oakes could not give over rummaging amongst the garments. ‘You ’ave to admit people is good.’

  There was everything from stays to petticoats, and two dresses one in black Paramatta out of respect for widowhood, and one less sombre, in garnet silk.

  ‘Now I don’t want to go against your feelin’s, Mrs Roxburgh, but this is the one which will suit your style of beauty.’ Mrs Oakes held up the garnet silk. ‘It’s real lovely, won’t you admit?’

  Mrs Roxburgh laughed low. ‘I don’t know about my “style of beauty”, or what will suit it, except to be clothed, I suppose, now that I am returning to the world.’

  For the present, she made no special effort to return; the clothes she had been sent she accepted out of necessity rather than with enthusiasm. Since finding her feet, she preferred the old homespun shift provided by the farmer’s wife. Clothed in its shapeless drab, she slip-slopped into most corners of this honest house, and was frequently lost in contemplation of a pan of milk or batch of bread, or feeling her way as far as the yard, took stock of whatever it had to offer, a hen for instance, her brood stowed away amongst her feathers, the silly faces of the poddy lambs. Over all, the sun, which she no longer knew whether she should love as the source of life, or hate as the cause and witness of so much suffering and ugliness.

  Her own ugliness, physical at least, had begun receding, so she learned by touch and from the images in a distorting mirror, the only looking glass the Oakes possessed. Its depths reflected fluctuating shapes in which she was at first reluctant, then grateful to admit that she detected traces, scarcely of beauty, but of what is known as ‘looks’.

  On an evening when the light and sounds of life in house and yard were irresistibly benign, Mrs Roxburgh went so far as to drop the old woollen shift and stand fully revealed before the glass. She was at first too amazed to move, but then began to caress herself while uttering little, barely audible, cries of joy and sorrow, not for her own sinuous body, but for those whose embraces had been a shared and loving delight.

  When Mrs Oakes came to call her patient to the evening meal she found Mrs Roxburgh standing dressed in the garnet silk.

  ‘There! You see? What did I tell you?’ The good woman blushed for her own perspicacity.

  Mrs Roxburgh was indeed smouldering and glowing inside the panels of her dress, but at once grew agitated. ‘Leave me, please! It was foolishness on my part.’

  ‘But love, I doan’ un’erstand! Perfect is perfect, as I see it.’

  ‘I should not have done it. Please, go! I am not ready to be stared at.’

  Mrs Oakes could only withdraw, and when Mrs Roxburgh finally appeared she was every bit the widow. The black gave her skin a yellow tinge, and her hair, which had grown long enough by now, she had screwed into an austere knob and fastened at the back of her head.

  ‘Isn’t it cold for the time of year?’ She had locked her hands together, and was carrying them, thus controlled, in front of her.

  ‘If anythin’, I’d say it’s steamy,’ Mrs Oakes replied absently.

  The farmer and his three lads subdued their exchange of information out of respect for the widow’s dignity and feelings, as she sat amongst them on one of the same hard benches, tasting her soup, and frowning either for some thought of her own or an over-large lump of potato.

  She was seated in the shade of a tree, dressed in this same widow’s black, brushing biscuit-crumbs from her front, and finishing the last of a glassful of lime cordial, when Lieutenant Cunningham surprised her. The tree of shiny, dark, all but black foliage a
nd spreading habit, was native by appearance, hence belonging to the catalogue of items the surgeon felt bound to dismiss out of loyalty to his origins, yet the rudiments of æsthetic instinct made him pause, if not to enjoy, to wonder at this picture of black competing with black. What made it oddly satisfying was perhaps the air of tranquillity emanating from tree and woman and the light which spangled both.

  The patient looked startled on becoming aware of her doctor’s presence, as though realizing that a precious convalescence was ended and that the intruder had come only to sentence her to life.

  ‘I was not expecting you,’ she said (when in truth she had been expecting him daily) and put up a hand to add to the protection already afforded by the shady tree. ‘… so long since your last visit I took it for granted you had no intention of renewing our relationship.’

  The tone of voice was flat and practical enough to contain no trace of grievance or of coquetry.

  ‘Precisely,’ the young man replied. ‘Since you are fully recovered, there has been no need for my services.’

  She moistened her rather thin lips.

  ‘I’ve come today’, he continued, ‘simply to convey the Commandant’s regards and tell you what he is arranging for you.’

  ‘I wonder whether I am prepared.’ She averted her face behind the no longer protective hand, which was held so stiff he could not help but notice how it trembled.

  ‘Then you must prepare yourself,’ he advised as gently as his youth and inexperience conceded.

  She looked beyond him to a landscape already blurred by heat for a reassurance she did not expect would be forthcoming.

  ‘You would not understand the wrench of parting from my friends the Oakes.’ She knew as she spoke that she was offering an untenable excuse.

  ‘But you can’t impose on them for ever!’ It had not been his purpose to sound so brutal.

  That she must agree was obvious; to remain silent would suggest a lapse into childishness, but silent she remained.

  It encouraged Lieutenant Cunningham to deliver the message entrusted to him and be done with responsibility. ‘Mrs Lovell, I assure you, will see that you want for nothing during your stay at the settlement.’

  ‘I don’t believe I can bear to face the prisoners.’ Mrs Roxburgh was almost choking on her words.

  ‘As the Commandant’s guest you will hardly need to.’ Out of necessity and his own embarrassment the lieutenant might have lied.

  But it had become increasingly his aim to carry out instructions and escape without delay from this deluded widow and her possibly contagious obsessions; his experience hitherto was of placid wives and fizzing girls.

  ‘On Friday next the Commandant will send a conveyance (I’ve warned you, ma’am, not to expect a sprung carriage) with military escort as promised, and a lady to keep you company.’

  So it would take place, Mrs Roxburgh saw. ‘I shall do my best to behave as I am expected to.’

  The young lieutenant thought it strange, but only momentarily; it was no longer his affair.

  He hurried on. ‘I should have thought, Mrs Roxburgh, you would welcome all these plans for your comfort.’ The surgeon had spurred himself into an excess of cheerfulness. ‘I must also tell you that His Excellency the Governor is looking forward to making your acquaintance and hearing your own account of your adventures when you reach Sydney.’

  ‘His Excellency? At Sydney!’ Mrs Roxburgh’s ineffectual hand fell to her lap; she might not have felt capable of facing this ultimate in trials.

  ‘I understand the Government revenue cutter’, the lieutenant concluded, ‘will be sent for you as soon as it completes another mission.’ It was some consolation to him to be sailing under official colours, for he was again troubled by this woman’s eyes.

  ‘I must try,’ she uttered, low and dry. ‘Yes, you are right. If only on account of my petition. I must not forget I am responsible to someone—to all those who have been rejected.’

  Lieutenant Cunningham’s sang-froid was only restored as he urged his horse along the homeward track regardless of branches whipping and tearing. On rubbing his cheek he realized it must be bleeding from a cut. He laughed with relief and exhilaration, and thrashed his horse to further effort with a switch stripped fom a bush in passing.

  On Friday next the farmer’s wife roused her friend earlier than necessary. So little of what is portentous occurred in Mrs Oakes’s life that an event in any way out of the common became something of an emotional disruption. The men would not have admitted to it, but made themselves scarce at daybreak in order to avoid farewells. Sergeant Oakes would never wholly forgive Mrs Roxburgh for the night he had kept watch by her sickbed. As for the sons, language did not convey, except when they grunted, private like, at one another. Still, they would remember her as a phenomenon which had appeared after lambing, in between sowing and reaping, before courtship and marriage. She would remain their glimpse of a never quite ponderable mystery, something more than a woman who had crawled naked out of the scrub into their regular, real lives: Mrs Roxburgh of Bristol Maid, the myth their children, sniggering and incredulous, would finally dismiss for being too familiar, yet incomplete.

  ‘There you are, Mrs Roxburgh, dear,’ Mrs Oakes announced on the Friday morning, ‘I have put up your things.’

  They had been made into a clumsy parcel, not that they were her belongings any more than anything ever had been.

  The two women sat together awhile on the veranda. They were so attached to each other, and trusting, it was natural that they should hold hands, Mrs Oakes’s dry, spongy palm, and Mrs Roxburgh’s, which fate had worked upon to the extent that the original plan was long since lost and the future become indecipherable.

  It did not occur to the farmer’s wife to speculate over any of this; to her the hand was simply precious; so she squeezed it, and in some degree to avoid the unavoidable, confided, ‘I do declare I forgot to boil up the chickens’ mash.’

  ‘Then let us go together’, suggested Mrs Roxburgh, equally unpurposed, ‘to do what you forgot.’

  But they remained sitting. The morning had become too drowsy. For two pins, this daughter would have laid her head upon the mother’s bosomy apron, drawn by its smell of laundering and flour. Mamma had never smelt thus, but of lavender water and violet cachous, and the chalk she continued puffing into the fingers of gloves she did not use after leaving Lady Ottering’s service.

  Such fragile excuses and delicately scented delusions could hardly hope to survive: the women were startled out of their thoughts by the sudden jingle and champing of metal, grinding of wheels, and soon after, piecemeal voices.

  Mrs Oakes grew raucous. ‘’Tis the carriage, Ellen!’ as though it could have been other than what they both feared.

  The good woman pounded at such a bat towards the yard the veranda threatened to become disjointed.

  Mrs Roxburgh sat forward, hunched against whatever was prepared for her. For the moment this was wrapped in silence and the stench of leather and horses’ sweat. Mrs Oakes seemed to have withdrawn from her life; there was nobody to offer guidance to one whom Mrs Roxburgh herself had long accepted as a lost soul.

  Somebody was at last approaching, by way of a frail bridge it sounded, suspended over the chasm of silence. The footsteps were not those of her friend. Truly Mrs Oakes had been persuaded to abandon her. Mrs Roxburgh folded her hands in her lap, in one of those attitudes she had learnt and then forgot. If she could but remember her lessons, together with some of the more helpful tags of common prayer.

  The stranger’s feet were treating the boards not so much with actual disdain as an amused, gliding irony. It was the step of one who might always express disbelief at finding herself where she happened to be.

  A not unpleasing, genteel contralto was aimed at the target. ‘Mrs Roxburgh? I’ve come to keep you company on the drive down to the settlement. You may not remember,’ the woman, or rather, the indisputable lady reminded, ‘we have met before—which makes the occasio
n—for me at least—a most agreeable coincidence.’

  So Mrs Roxburgh could no longer postpone investigating this individual, acquaintance as well as harbinger, and was faced with a figure dressed in brown, finical from the toes of her boots to the bridge of her noticeably cutting nose.

  ‘Do you not recall’, she asked more gently, abashed perhaps by tales she had heard as well as her reception at this humble farm, ‘how we met, the day our mutual friends the Merivales paid you the visit, on board ship? Surely you must?’ She was reduced to begging.

  Out of the turmoil of emotions, of storm and shipwreck, of death and despair, of trust and betrayal, Mrs Roxburgh did begin to recollect the brown woman’s accusing nose.

  ‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘I do, of course—Miss …?’ The lady could hardly have lost her maidenhead for frightening off the men or tearing out the entrails of those unwise enough to approach.

  ‘Scrimshaw,’ the beak slightly squawked to fill the gap in a deficient memory.

  The eyes, dark enough to daunt the casual opponent, were piercing as deep as Mrs Roxburgh’s own. Finally the women seemed to understand each other.

  Miss Scrimshaw extended a hand firmly encased in brown kid. ‘Mrs Roxburgh,’ she advised, ‘I do not wish to push you unduly, but suggest that for practical reasons we start without delay, to arrive before nightfall. In these parts, as I know from several months residence, one cannot leave too much to chance.’

  ‘I leave it to you,’ Mrs Roxburgh murmured, who had spent her whole life in other people’s hands.

  Miss Scrimshaw hurried on. ‘Look!’ she exclaimed with such vehemence that the spray flew out of her mouth. ‘Mrs Lovell, who is kindness itself, has sent you this.’ The emissary began disentangling the string from a cardboard box she carried suspended from her second hand. ‘She realized that you were not provided with a bonnet, and did not wish you to travel bareheaded.’

  With a conjurer’s flourish Miss Scrimshaw whisked out of the box what must have been a woman’s last fling at girlhood, a gauzy, but somewhat squashed affair from which the nodding pansies, daisies, or whatever, had been thoughtfully stripped, and replaced by a broad band of crape, the pretty ribbons by crape streamers, and over all a veil, likewise crape.