The Fringe of Leaves

by Patrick White

  ‘Oh,’ she cried on sighting her renegade friend, ‘you should never venture out unaccompanied at Moreton Bay. If you wish to take the air Mrs Lovell will have them harness the horses to the carriage, provided the hour is a reasonable one.’

  ‘As you must see, Miss Scrimshaw,’ Mrs Roxburgh pointed out, ‘I have come to no harm.’

  Appropriating her friend’s arm the spinster may have remained uncertain. Probably no part of Mrs Roxburgh was actually broken, but Miss Scrimshaw herself had sustained many a spiritual bruise in spite of the toughness of seasoned leather.

  ‘In any case,’ she said, on guiding Mrs Roxburgh into the safety of the grounds, ‘I am glad you have come. I have good news for you. Your acquaintance is bound to be here this evening. Whatever made him postpone his visit the Commandant will see to it that Mr Pilcher pays his respects.’

  Then she looked at Mrs Roxburgh, to receive approval, or to see her suspicions justified by the latter’s reactions. But Mrs Roxburgh did not utter, while her expression remained so withdrawn the face might have been sheltering behind the widow’s veil, which, Miss Scrimshaw noticed, her friend had omitted to wear.

  After the profuse dinner customary at the residence the Commandant approached their guest, smiling as though for a secret between them, ‘The individual of whom we spoke will be here by half-past five, I’d say,’ he opened his repeater and frowned at it, ‘or six at the latest.’ He closed the watch, and smiled again, gratuitously it seemed to Mrs Roxburgh. ‘He’ll not shirk his duty on this occasion.’

  One of the smaller girls inquired, ‘Is Mrs Roxbry goin’ to whip Mr Pilcher?’

  ‘What a thing to imagine!’ The mother blushed for her child’s supposition.

  ‘Then why does he have to be forced?’ wondered Totty.

  ‘But they’re old friends. There’s no question of his being forced!’

  Mrs Lovell was so embarrassed she lowered her voice to inform Mrs Roxburgh, ‘You shall receive him, my dear, in the little parlour.’ Although intended as a kindness, it made the situation darker and stimulated curiosity. ‘There you will be both comfortable and—private. Unless you would care for Miss Scrimshaw to be present.’

  Mrs Roxburgh politely implied that she would rather dispense with Miss Scrimshaw’s presence.

  She might have wondered how to pass the time before the visit had she not realized the distasteful event must soon take place. So she arranged herself in the little parlour, and hoped that Miss Scrimshaw would not come offering advice beforehand.

  The discreet lady had taken her cue, however: when the time came she simply announced, ‘Here is your visitor’ and left them to it.

  Mrs Roxburgh had decided not to rise as her caller entered, but did so at once when the moment occurred, for she could hardly condemn an individual whose past was not more dubious than her own.

  So here she was, every bit like a gentlewoman afflicted by some nervous disorder, wetting her lips and dabbing at them spasmodically with one of the handkerchiefs provided for her. ‘Won’t you sit down, Mr Pilcher?’ the uneasy gentlewoman invited. ‘I am so glad you have been able to come. This is perhaps the most comfortable chair. Or do you prefer something more upright?’

  She winced for the rheumatics in her shoulder, which had not bothered her since her recovery from the inordinate journey, and which no doubt were the result of sleeping naked on damp ground. Of ‘all that’, Mr Pilcher could not have known, although on the other hand he might. There was no knowing what her eyes might have given away.

  But the mate did not seem aware of any imposture. His own condition was more important, the inner life he must be living; and then he more than likely saw her as one who would become his accuser.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said when they were at last painfully seated opposite each other.

  Pilcher had aged, to put it kindly. It made her touch her hair, and look for a glass which did not immediately offer itself. He was so thin as to look transparent in places, and even more deeply lined than before. She was not sure, but he might have suffered a seizure.

  ‘At least one can see’, she said in a tone adopted from some patroness or a mother-in-law, ‘you’re in excellent health, Mr Pilcher. I am so glad—so very glad.’

  He hung his head, the hair cropped short, like a convict’s, down to a pepper-and-salt stubble.

  He admitted formally, ‘I can’t complain,’ his voice without any of the venom she remembered.

  ‘I would like to offer you something, but am myself no more than a guest of the house.’ Thus absolved, the great lady dangled a wrist over the arm of her chair.

  ‘There is nothing,’ he assured her, ‘nothing I need.’

  Now that both had done their duty by society, and established their bona fides as far as is humanly possible, Mrs Roxburgh looked at her caller and made the decidedly brutal request, ‘You must tell me all that has happened to you since last we met.’

  She meant to encourage her visitor, or anyway, in some measure, but on hearing her own voice was reminded of the black swans encountered while living with her adoptive tribe. It was the same hissing as when the birds arched their necks, and extended their bills, spatulate and crimson, making ready to protect themselves against the intruder.

  Although Mrs Roxburgh felt, and must have looked, pale in her black, she wondered how Mr Pilcher found her, but could not tell since he had launched into a narrative.

  ‘You’ll remember after we put out from the cay—after our attempt at caulking—the storm got up and separated our two boats.’

  Mrs Roxburgh realized he did not intend her to answer, but she did. ‘Yes,’ she said gravely, ‘I could not easily forget.’

  Like a good navigator, Mr Pilcher would not allow himself to be distracted. ‘Well,’ he continued, ‘we was blown south at such a bat I’d not of been surprised had we landed up on a second reef. Particularly with the crew I’d got—all the rawest from Bristol Maid.’

  Mrs Roxburgh remembered the hairs bristling on the humps of the bosun’s great toes, but decided against resurrecting the bosun. She saw that Mr Pilcher chose to manipulate the details and the persons in his life, at least since the parting from the sluggish long-boat. She rather envied the mate for having become his own guiding spirit. The details of her life had been chosen for her by whoever it is that decides.

  ‘Without charts and in such a gale, it wasn’t possible to navigate. I can only say’, Mr Pilcher said, ‘we must of been favoured by Providence.’

  Becoming conscious of her stare, he lashed his hands round one of his emaciated knees.

  ‘We were lucky enough to find ourselves, when the storm abated, off a part of the coast where the pinnace could be easily beached. And glad I was to be rid of ’er. The sea, too. Never no more will I go to sea.’

  He coughed, and hid the result in a handkerchief. He could not have been sure whether his audience was frowning at his decision to renounce a vocation, or simply disapproving of a dirty habit.

  His voice grated and wavered. ‘From then on, we lived off the land so to say, and times was less lean, though often we went short. You get to hate one another when you’re hungry.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed, while thinking that only a man could be so self-absorbed and boring.

  But because her mother-in-law had taught her that a lady’s role in life is to listen, she leaned sideways and propped her chin on a receptive hand.

  ‘Some was for droring lots, to decide which of ’em ’twould be, but I wouldn’t have no part in that.’

  ‘And what about your companions? Did they favour eating one another?’

  Mr Pilcher swallowed. ‘Some of ’em was eaten.’

  Mrs Roxburgh might have been thinking the mate had never looked so loathsome.

  He told her confidentially. ‘The blacks consider the hands are the greatest delicacy.’

  ‘Did you try?’ Mrs Roxburgh asked.

  Mr Pilcher became so agitated he rose from his chair and began patrolling the room. �
��I ask you,’ he said at last, ‘Mrs Roxburgh—would you?’

  ‘I don’t know. It would depend, I expect.’

  Since she was caught in her own net, and Mr Pilcher had subsided again, she found herself struggling to her feet. Pain in one leg, or the root of an invisible tree, all but tripped her.

  Looking up from the vantage of an easy chair the mate ventured to suggest, ‘I bet you had a tough time yourself, Mrs Roxburgh—before the rescue.’

  She answered, ‘Yes.’ As though the rescue ever takes place!

  ‘They say you lived among the blacks.’

  ‘That is so—and learned a great deal, of which I should otherwise remain ignorant.’

  She was standing with her back to him after finding the looking-glass she had known must exist in Mrs Lovell’s lesser parlour. Thus stationed, she could watch Pilcher while hidden from him, seated as he was at a lower level. Yet in the end the disadvantage was hers: she was faced with her own over-watchful reflection.

  ‘And was brought to the settlement by some bushranger, or bolted convict, I am told.’

  ‘I was so fortunate.’

  ‘Who bolted again, just when he might have expected justice.’

  ‘He became frightened. That—I hope—was his only reason for running away. Though the truth is often many-sided, and difficult to see from every angle. You will appreciate that, Mr Pilcher, having experienced the storm which separated the pinnace from the long-boat.’

  She would have expected a wave of malice to rise in the man she remembered aboard Bristol Maid, and again, the evening on the cay, but he only murmured, ‘That is true,’ looking old and ravaged.

  ‘So,’ she said, after she had turned, ‘I hope we can accept each other’s shortcomings, since none of us always dares to speak the truth. Then we might remain friends.’

  His eyes, watery from the moment when he entered the room, had started running.

  ‘Friendship is all I have left since my husband was speared to death on the island. I forget, if I ever knew, whether you have a wife, Mr Pilcher?’

  From snivelling, he hardened, as though frozen by a vision of the past. ‘Yes, he said, ‘I had. But did not love her as I undertook. I was ashamed, I suppose, by what I must have thought a weakness. That is how she died, I can see.’

  He sat rocking in recollection.

  ‘Love was weakness. Strength of will—wholeness, as I saw it—is what I was determined to cultivate. That is why I admired you, Mrs Roxburgh—the cold lady, the untouchable.’

  ‘I believed you hated me—and for what I never was.’

  ‘So I did—your gentleman husband too—and was glad at the time to see you both brought down to the same level as the rest of us. And stole your ring.’

  ‘I gave it to you.’

  ‘Look,’ he said, feeling in a waistcoat pocket, ‘I’ve brought it back, the ring I took.’

  There it was, glittering in the half-light, the nest of all but black garnets.

  ‘Keep it,’ she said. ‘I have no use for it.’

  ‘Nor me neether,’ the man insisted, as though the ring disgusted him.

  So she took it from between his tremulous fingers and, going to the window, threw it into the nasturtiums below, where the broad leaves closed over it. ‘A child will find it,’ she said, ‘and value it as a plaything. Or it could be of service to some gardener—after his release.’

  She laughed to ease the situation. ‘Thank you, Mr Pilcher, for coming to see me. I hope we shall meet again before I sail from Moreton Bay.’

  But she did not believe either of them truly wished it.

  In the absence of prisoners, guards, witnesses, and inquisitors, early morning was an extenuating benison, especially when the young Lovells broke in, climbed upon the bed, snuggled against her, and insisted on tales of the black children she had known. Innocence prevailed in the light from the garden, and for the most part in her recollections; black was interchangeable with white. Surely in the company of children she might expect to be healed?

  ‘Were they good?’ asked a Lovell boy.

  ‘Well, yes—not always perhaps, but at heart.’ Was it not the truth behind the scratches and pinches they administered in accordance with their parents’ orders? She remembered the eyes of the black children.

  Their Lovell counterpart rippled in the bed with what might have been suppressed giggles. ‘We’re not good,’ said Kate.

  ‘Miss Scrim thinks we’re abominable,’ young Tom confirmed.

  ‘Praps we are!’ Totty giggled some more on her own.

  ‘Nobody is good all the time,’ Mrs Roxburgh allowed. ‘I am not. But hope to learn.’

  It sounded so curious, they looked at her, and left soon after.

  Almost every morning they materialized in her room. She was perhaps mad, but a harmless diversion, and unlike their parents and Miss Scrimshaw, undemanding. They would stroke her arms, her shoulders, her cheeks, the skin of which, although superficially soft, concealed a rough grain. Had their parents known, they might not have appreciated rituals of such a subtle order that the children themselves would have been at a loss to explain; the pleasures they enjoyed early in Mrs Roxburgh’s bed possibly remained a secret.

  The morning after Pilcher’s visit they did not appear. She wondered at it no more than casually while yawning her way into her clothes in the correct order, as she did by now instinctively. She was wearing her muslin with the heart’s-ease pattern, the gift of an officer’s wife who constantly attempted to express her admiration of one whose moral courage and powers of endurance had helped her survive what amounted to infernal trials. Mrs Roxburgh, on the other hand, was made to feel light, frivolous, implausible, when dressed in the earnest young woman’s gift.

  As on practically every morning, she took her walk in the garden, the light twirling round her with appropriate frivolity. I am unworthy, it recurred to her, of anybody’s faith, least of all the trust of the children who confide in me.

  She looked to see whether somebody might have discovered her secret, and there was the barefoot Kate, her hair and gown transformed by light, walking entranced it appeared, her gaze concentrated on whatever she was holding in her hands.

  ‘Kate?’ Mrs Roxburgh called, the exquisite child’s purity rousing in her the sense of guilt which was only too ready to plague her.

  Kate might have taken fright; in any case her trance was broken.

  Upon reaching her Mrs Roxburgh asked, ‘What is it you’re holding?’

  ‘Nothing!’

  The child was carrying the corpse of a fluffy chick, the head lolling at the end of a no longer effectual neck, the extinct eyes reduced to crimson cavities.

  ‘Nothing!’ Kate screamed again, and flung the thing away from her.

  And ran.

  It seemed to Mrs Roxburgh that this bend in the brown river, with its steamy citrus plantation, garden beds too primly embroidered with marigold and phlox, and beyond a hedge, cucurbits of giant proportions writhing on mattresses of silt, was designed for revelations of evil, as was the low-built, rambling, deceptively hospitable official residence presided over by the fecund Mrs Lovell and her authoritarian spouse.

  Or was she attributing to her surroundings emanations for which her own presence was responsible?

  Her speculations made her shiver uncontrollably.

  Since the children were started on their lessons, Miss Scrimshaw had come out, and could not help but notice.

  She began feeling the guest’s hands. ‘How cold you are, Mrs Roxburgh!’ She fetched a shawl. ‘Do you not feel well? I imagine you could have contracted a fever, exposed as you were to an intemperate climate, and are not fully recovered.’

  ‘No,’ Mrs Roxburgh answered, ‘I am well. But oh God, I must escape from here!’

  ‘So you shall. Though it is not a matter of escape. His Excellency is sending the Government cutter, which should arrive any day to take you to Sydney.’

  ‘I don’t know why I should be pardoned before ot
hers who are more deserving.’

  ‘I would advise you to forget.’ Miss Scrimshaw spoke scarce above a whisper, as though it were an issue which affected only themselves.

  She seated her patient in a cane chair, there on the veranda, before leaving for the kitchen offices to order beef tea with sippets; not that Miss Scrimshaw was simple enough to believe in any kind of panacea, but had a respect for conventions which are believed to console others.

  While she was gone, Kate Lovell slipped out of the schoolroom, and she and Mrs Roxburgh clung together for a short space.

  ‘Yes,’ Mrs Roxburgh whispered, ‘yes. I understand. And so will you.’

  Kate had run back and Mrs Roxburgh composed herself by the time Miss Scrimshaw returned tasting the bouillon for temperature and seasoning.

  Mrs Roxburgh refused her dinner (three o’clock by the Commandant’s repeater) to the distress of Mrs Lovell, who came out to coax and fuss, and draw the cocoon of shawl closer still about her friend’s shoulders.

  Surprising in one so innocent, Mrs Lovell suggested, ‘You must not be so merciless, my dear, towards yourself. Whatever is past, you have so much to look forward to. A woman can look to the future, don’t you see? However unimportant we are, it is only in unimportant ways. They will always depend on us because we are the source of renewal.’

  Mrs Lovell’s faded looks were illuminated, her harassed manner dispelled by her moment of inspiration. She was so surprised at herself, as well as pleased, that Mrs Roxburgh might have shared her pleasure had she not observed the Commandant emerging from the dining-room.

  Captain Lovell was noticeably suspicious of whatever secret his wife and her confederate were enjoying. Over and above the natural jealousy at work in him, he was made impatient by a shred of mutton stuck between his teeth, and yet another duty to discharge.

  He informed Mrs Roxburgh, ‘I’ve asked the chaplain to pay you a visit this afternoon. Nourishing food is not everything, is it? Let no one accuse us of not giving thought to your spiritual welfare! You’ll find, in any event, that Cottle is not a bad fellow.’