The Fringe of Leaves

by Patrick White

  ‘Oh, but I am appalled!’ Mrs Roxburgh protested. ‘And in any case would not want to trespass on another’s interests.’

  ‘Oh, my dear!’ At pains to absolve her friend, and to administer extreme unction to any resigned passion of her own, Miss Scrimshaw laughed. ‘To be candid, Mrs Roxburgh, I could not bring myself to share my bed. I do so love stretching out in comfort.’

  Mrs Roxburgh suspected that her re-instated friend had verged on what she most deplored—the vulgar.

  Miss Scrimshaw saw her slip. ‘Now you will think me immodest. But candour is a natural pitfall—you will surely agree—when pioneering in the bush.’

  Mrs Roxburgh loved her.

  ‘If you will forgive me,’ the spinster pleaded, ‘let us go on deck and take the air together.’

  ‘Let us!’ Mrs Roxburgh assented.

  So the two ladies groped their way to the companion-ladder, and when they had arrived above, and steadied themselves, linked arms and strolled in the dark.

  There was a jewellery of stars such as Ellen Roxburgh believed she might be seeing for the last time before a lid closed, and persistent, if in no way malicious, breezes, as well as a creaking of cordage, a straining of canvas, which for an instant halted her in the steps of memory. She might have staggered had it not been for her companion’s arm.

  When it was Miss Scrimshaw who did not exactly stagger, but exclaimed most vehemently, ‘How I wish I were an eagle!’

  ‘An eagle. Why?’ Although she could see for herself the curved beak cutting the semi-obscurity, the fixed eyes glittering by starlight, it would have been impolite of Mrs Roxburgh not to have sounded mildly surprised.

  ‘To soar!’ Miss Scrimshaw wheezed. ‘To reach the heights! To breathe! Perch on the crags and look down on everything that lies beneath one! Elevated, and at last free!’

  Mrs Roxburgh felt dazed by the sudden rush of rhetoric.

  Once launched, Miss Scrimshaw was prepared to reveal still more. ‘Have you never noticed that I am a woman only in my form, not in the essential part of me?’

  Somewhat to her own surprise, Mrs Roxburgh remained ineluctably earthbound. ‘I was slashed and gashed too often,’ she tried to explain. ‘Oh no, the crags are not for me!’ She might have been left at a loss had not the words of her humbler friend Mrs Oakes found their way into her mouth. ‘A woman, as I see, is more like moss or lichen that takes to some tree or rock as she takes to her husband.’

  Had either of the two women parading the deck between the stars and the swell of canvas felt sufficiently moved to fight for her own tenet and convert the other, it was not the moment to proselytize, for a human form had emerged out of the companionway and was bearing down, large and black, ominous but for the voice of Mr Jevons which preceded him by several paces.

  ‘Mrs Lovell is at the tea-table, and invites you ladies to join her if you are inclined.’

  ‘How I neglect my duties!’ Miss Scrimshaw cried. ‘The sea has badly gone to my head!’ Detaching herself from Mrs Roxburgh to an accompaniment of onyx cannoning off onyx, the eagle flumped across the deck, reached the companionway, and disappeared.

  The merchant was at liberty to offer Mrs Roxburgh his support, and she to accept. ‘Thank you,’ she murmured, taking his arm (what else could she have done?).

  As on the other occasions of their meeting he gave an impression of solid worth, a quality she was happy to re-discover at night, at sea, but must remind herself that the solid is not unrelated to the complacent, and that Mr Jevons might assert rights she would not wish to grant, she thought, even had she been free of a past in which honourable allegiances conflicted with her own discreditable passions.

  ‘According to the omens,’ Mr Jevons informed her, ‘we can look forward to a smooth and uneventful passage to Sydney.’

  ‘I do not believe in omens,’ Mrs Roxburgh replied, which was scarcely truthful, as she knew.

  ‘I do,’ said the merchant with a confidence greater than hers.

  Did he, imperceptibly, squeeze the arm linked to his? She could not be sure, and must not, in any case, allow herself to feel comforted.

  When they entered the saloon Miss Scrimshaw was presiding at the tea-kettle, for one of the younger children had brought up some biscuit-and-milk on his smocking and the mother was engaged in repairing the damage and soothing him.

  Kate and her eldest brother were in a tangle at cat’s-cradle.

  ‘Look, Mrs Roxburgh! We’re stuck. It’s Tom.’

  ‘It ain’t!’ growled Tom, giving her a kick under cover of a chair. ‘That’s how girls go on when they’ve got themselves into a mess.’

  Mrs Roxburgh stooped, and after some slight manipulation transferred the string back to Kate in the shape required for the game’s logical progression. Kate was entranced. She adored Mrs Roxburgh, and did not doubt that her love was returned. The incident of the mutilated fledgeling seemed to have bound them more closely together.

  It was Mr Jevons who brought Mrs Roxburgh her tea, together with a slice of cake so moist with fruit it might have been studded with precious stones. Mr Jevons was advancing, all manly authority and calm, when by some incredible mischance he stumbled, whether against child or chair-leg, or over a ruck in the carpet, nobody saw. Or was it by infernal intervention? Whatever the cause of his downfall, Mr Jevons saw the cake flying off its plate, the cup shooting out of its saucer.

  On his knees, he watched the tea-stain widening, darkening, in the folds of Mrs Roxburgh’s skirt. Needless to say, the uproar was immense, so much so that Mr Jevons got the shakes. There was no disguising it as he mopped the stain with his ineffectual handkerchief.

  Mrs Roxburgh sat looking down at this troubled bull-frog of a man with what almost amounted to languid acceptance of her due, until she made an effort, and returned to the human situation.

  Sitting forward, she charged him, ‘Dun’t! ‘Tis nothing.’

  ‘But I spoiled yer dress!’ the bull-frog croaked wretchedly.

  ‘’Tisn’t mine, and ’tisn’t spoiled,’ she insisted.

  She may have touched his hand an instant, for the trembling was stilled, more by surprise than by command.

  ‘It is nothing, I do assure you, Mr Jevons,’ she repeated in what passed for her normal voice.

  Because their exchange had been spoken so low and only for each other, and because of the children scrummaging after pieces of cake, and Miss Scrimshaw’s squawks as she retrieved the fragments of smashed cup, and sponged the stain, probably nobody heard or noticed strangers sharing a secret.

  When calm had re-settled, Mrs Roxburgh accepted another cup, offered by Tom. Her eyes grew moist, her vision blurred, but steam was rising out of the tea, and if she felt breathless, restless, her stays, she told herself, were not yet broken in.

  Mr Jevons, again the substantial merchant, was no longer conscious of the stain, worsened though it was by his and Miss Scrimshaw’s attentions. He could not give over contemplating the smouldering figure in garnet silk beside the pregnant mother in her nest of drowsy roly-poly children, a breathing statuary contained within the same ellipse of light.

  He did not see that Kate kicked Tom, and that Tom retaliated with a punch; they were in a different orbit. Nor did Miss Scrimshaw attempt to enforce the discipline she advocated: she was too engrossed, her onyx going click click, shooting down possible doubts; for however much crypto-eagles aspire to soar, and do in fact, through thoughtscape and dream, their human nature cannot but grasp at any circumstantial straw which may indicate an ordered universe.

  Patrick White

  THE AUNT’S STORY

  With the death of her mother, middle-aged Theodora Goodman contemplates the desert of her life. Freed from the trammels of convention she leaves Australia for a European tour and becomes involved with the residents of a small French hotel. But creating other people’s lives, even in love and pity, can lead to madness. Her ability to reconcile joy and sorrow is an unbearable torture to her. On the journey home, Theodora fi
nds there is little to choose between the reality of illusion and the illusion of reality. She looks for peace, even if it is beyond the borders of insanity …

  ‘Patrick White makes us care about human beings of all kinds who have themselves failed to learn to care, failed to break through the barriers of class and money and egotism and bitterness and playacting, who have never ceased to feel lost and alone. And he makes us care about them without ever sparing their frailties and follies a single lash of his supple, witty, forked tongue’

  Angus Wilson, Observer

  ‘A tour de force of the most unexpecting kind’

  Daily Telegraph

  Patrick White

  THE EYE OF THE STORM

  In the Sydney suburb of Centennial Park, three nurses, a housekeeper and a solicitor attend to Elizabeth Hunter as her son and daughter convene at her deathbed. But, in death as in life, Elizabeth remains a destructive force on those who surround her.

  The Eye of the Storm is a savage exploration of family relationships--and the sharp undercurrents of love and hate, comedy and tragedy, which define them.

  ‘One seeks among debased superlatives for words that would convey the grandeur of The Eye of the Storm … its high intellect, its fidelity to our victories and confusions, its beauty and heroic maturity … every passage merits attention and gives satisfaction’

  New York Times Book Review

  ‘In his major post-war novels, the pain and earnestness of the individual’s quest for ‘meaning and design’ can be felt more intensely than perhaps anywhere else in con temporary Western prose’

  Sunday Times

  Patrick White

  THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

  Set in thirties London, The Living and the Dead portrays the complex ebb and flow of relationships within the Standish family. Mrs Standish, ageing but still beautiful, is drawn into secret liaisons, while her daughter Eden experiments openly with left-wing politics and love affairs. Only the son, Elyot, remains an aloof and scholarly observer--until dramatic developments shock him into sudden self-knowledge.

  ‘Scene after scene is worked out with exactness and subtlety which no second-string novelist can scent, far less nail to paper’

  Daily Telegraph

  ‘An unmistakably major writer who commands a scope, power and sheer technical skill which put other more ambitious novelists into the shade’

  A. Alvarez

  ‘Brilliant and masterful’

  Nation

  Patrick White

  RIDERS IN THE CHARIOT

  Through the crumbling ruins of the once splendid Xanadu Miss Hare wanders, half-mad, yet seeming less alien among the encroaching wildlife than among the inhabitants of Sarsaparilla. In this wilderness she stumbles firstly upon a half-cast aborigine and then upon a Jewish refugee. They each place themselves in the care of a local washerwoman. Existing in a world of pervasive evil, all four have been independently damaged and discarded. Now in one shared vision they find themselves bound together, understanding the possibilities of redemption.

  ‘Stands out among contemporary novels like a cathedral surrounded by booths. Its forms, its impulse and its dedication to what is eternal all excite a comparison with religious architecture’

  Sunday Times

  ‘This is a book which really defies review; for its analysable qualities are overwhelmed by those imponderables which make a work “great” in the untouchable sense. It must be read because, like Everest, “it is there” ’

  Guardian

  Patrick White

  THE SOLID MANDALA

  In The Solid Mandala Patrick White draws a telling and touching portrait of twin brothers. Waldo is the competent man of reason, he sees himself as the superior intellect. Arthur, accepted as a half-wit, is the innocent, God’s fool, loving and outgoing in a blundering way. As they compete with and care for each other through half a century, their lives are inextricably intertwined--the two sides of man’s nature forming a totality.

  ‘He is more like Dostoevsky than Thomas Mann: his novels are maelstroms of the soul whose power resides in the nightmare detail which assails their protagonists. They testify to the beauty and contortion of the spirit as few others this century have done’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘His most finished and powerful work’

  Sunday Times

  ‘Wonderfully fresh and human … full of exhilarating energy and wit’

  Saturday Review

  Patrick White

  THE TREE OF MAN

  Stan Parker, with only a horse and a dog for company, journeys to a remote scrubby patch of land that he has inherited in the Australian hills. When the land is cleared enough for a rudimentary house to be built, Stan brings to the wilderness his new wife Amy. Together they struggle to establish a home for themselves and their growing family. And together but essentially apart, they face everything from the domestic upheavals of birth and death to natural disasters. In this chronicle of simple lives in joy and sorrow Patrick White creates an evoca tive monument to human endurance.

  ‘His greatest novel, The Tree of Man is a tragic pastoral about the penitential struggle with nature in a grim Australian Eden’

  Observer

  ‘The novel has unforgettable scenes, marvellous characters, wide ranges of mood, strikingly fresh imagery--all those ingredients which make a novel … become a permanent part of our memory’

  Washington Post

  Patrick White

  THE TWYBORN AFFAIR

  Eddie Twyborn is bisexual and beautiful, the son of a judge and a drunken mother. With this androgynous hero--Eudoxia/Eddie/Eadith Twyborn--and through his search for identity, Patrick White takes us on a journey into the ambiguous landscapes, sexual, psychological and spiritual, of the human condition.

  ‘It challenges comparison with some of the world’s most bizarre masterpieces’

  Isobel Murray, Financial Times

  ‘To read Patrick White … is to touch a source of power, to move through areas made new and fresh, to see men and women with a sharpened gaze’

  Daily Telegraph

  ‘The one novelist at present at work in the English language who is indisputably possessed of genius’

  Sunday Telegraph

  Patrick White

  THE VIVISECTOR

  Hurtle Duffield is incapable of loving anything except when he paints. The men and women who court him during his long life are, above all, the victims of his art. He is the vivisector, dissecting their weaknesses with cruel precision: his sister’s deformity, a grocer’s moonlight indiscretion and the passionate illusions of his mistress, Hero Pavloussi. Only the egocentric adolescent he sees as his spiritual child elicits from him a deeper, more treacherous emotion.

  ‘Probably his finest book … makes almost all other novels dealing with the life of an artist look trivial’

  Sunday Times

  ‘Patrick White is, in the finest sense, a world novelist. His themes are catholic and complex and he pursues them with a single-minded energy and vision’

  Robert Nye, Guardian

  ‘One of the great magicians of fiction … White’s scope is vast and his invention endless’

  Angus Wilson, Observer

  Patrick White

  VOSS

  Set in nineteenth-century Australia, Voss is the story of the passion between an explorer and a naïve young woman. Although they have met only a few times, Voss and Laura are joined by overwhelming, obsessive feelings for each other. Voss sets out to cross the continent. As hardships, mutiny and betrayal whittle away his power to endure and to lead, his attachment to Laura gradually increases. Laura, waiting in Sydney, moves through the months of separation as if they were a dream and Voss the only reality.

  From the careful delineation of Victorian society to the sensitive rendering of hidden love to the stark narrative of adventure in the Australian desert, Patrick White’s novel is a work of extraordinary power and virtuosity.

  ‘A work of genius
… Voss has an epic quality, the ageless sense of power and pride of a man battling with his condition’

  Observer

  ‘By far the most impressive novel I have read this year’

  Walter Allen, New Statesman