Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

‘What an unambitious ambition! Tintagel is practically on your doorstep.’

‘I cannot explain, Mr Roxburgh. Some of us are born unambitious, I suppawse’ when their conversation inspired her to soar amongst the black clouds swollen to bursting above them.

They walked on, heads lowered against the wind, the rooted furze streaming towards them.

Mr Roxburgh remarked that they were behaving most imprudently, but in the circumstances, could not disguise a certain tone of self-approval.

‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘and will come out of it with nothing better than a soaking.’

Her improvidence did not prevent her feeling much older, wiser, than this slanted stick of a gentleman. If the storm did burst upon them, she was strong and jubilant enough to steady the reeling earth, while he, poor man, would most probably break, scattering a dust of dictionary words and useless knowledge.

It was the storm which broke, at that very moment. As the rain lashed out, they gulped down draughts of cold wet air.

Mr Roxburgh stumbled. ‘How very foolishly’, he protested, ‘a rational human being can behave!’ His skin, she thought, had turned from pink to mauve; his features had grown pinched and transparent.

‘Are you ill?’ she called. ‘Mr Roxburgh?’

Though he did not answer, she felt at liberty to ease her shoulder under his, the better to support and lead him.

‘A little,’ she thought she heard. ‘I have these turns, but they pass.’

Providentially, her strength seemed to increase and cope with a condition akin to that of drunken staggers, as she brought him round on a curve, the wind now driving at their backs, sending her hair ahead of them, together with the tails of Mr Roxburgh’s comforter.

On the lee side of a collapsed wall, originally built of the flat stones disgorged by a field, she settled her charge, and gave him the additional protection of her own body. She would have wondered at herself if, from being a man, her companion had not become a mission. His hands felt dead inside the knitted gloves. The cap had slipped askew over one fragile temple, carrying a gentleman’s dignity with it.

She re-settled the cap, and fought to wrest encouragement out of her throat. ‘You must take heart, Mr Roxburgh. You can rely on me to bring you back,’ she almost ejaculated ‘to life’ before recovering herself, ‘ home ’ she substituted; ‘we’ll get the fire lit, and have you a warm meal — in no time’ lame in the end.

They continued huddling, stacked against each other and the wall, and gradually the rain was pelting less; the wind might have used itself up, or gone on to aim at more distant targets. It was no longer a strain to catch the gist of spoken words.

‘At least you have seen me at my worst,’ he said.

‘You can’t be answerable for your health, as I knaw from my own mother.’ Thus she tried comforting him, when it was no comfort to herself; she would have liked to see him hale and perfect, leaping from the ship as the prow beached in the cove at sunset. (She was that foolish, or ‘romantic’.)

Mr Roxburgh said, ‘There are those who are able to rise, at any rate morally, above their physical condition.’

He was nothing if not moral, she felt. It did not console her.

‘Couldn’t you get on your feet?’ she asked, ‘If I give a hand?’

He obeyed as though she had been the mother to whom he so frequently referred, and whom she would not have cared to meet; better Lady Ottering giving advice through a carriage window, or passing judgment on geums or phlox as she trod the garden path on visits of patronage to her former maid.

In the silence the storm had left behind, Mr Roxburgh remarked as they crossed the road dividing farm from moor, ‘I admire your strength of character.’

‘Dear life!’ She was so embarrassed she almost choked. ‘ Strength— yes! That’s about all I’ve got to my name. And must depend on it.’

Presently they saw the roof, and then the slope gave up the house, the ramshackle outhouses, and the scraggy pear and damson trees. There was mud on their boots. She scraped it off her own at the back door and indicated that he should do the same before entering.

Dr Hicks prescribed nothing more drastic for his patient’s ‘turn’ than the tincture of digitalis he was already taking. Mr Roxburgh lay abed, and she persuaded Mamma to wait on him. Because Mamma had experienced less of their lodger’s condition and mind, she would be less likely to expect him to break in her hands.

And as soon as he was restored, Mr Roxburgh decided, ‘It’s time I went home. My mother will be wondering.’

Ellen Gluyas was relieved, though she would not have admitted it to Pa or Will. She would not have admitted that the smells of medicines lingered (if they did) in the room where he had slept (it was again hers) or that she could still detect in the parlour a distinct smell of ancient books. He had left behind a bottle of ink which she appropriated, for what purpose she could not think. The smell of ink was real enough when she uncorked the bottle. Between Mr Roxburgh’s visit and her attendance at the dame’s school where she got such learning as she could boast, the smell of ink had scarce crossed her nostrils. Now whenever she sniffed at the bottle of which she had possessed herself, she experienced a sensation as of slight drunkenness mingled with that of sober despair.

Bristol Maid ’s sides were shuddering as she laboured, and Mr Roxburgh called to his wife from the saloon that the fellow had brought their breakfast, which she should come and eat if she had any intention of doing so. Restored to balance, Mrs Roxburgh did as she was told.

Mr Roxburgh was sipping tea with evident repugnance. ‘The same old musty stuff,’ he warned, ‘but hot.’

It was, as she knew, little more than a brew of sticks, yet she preferred to ignore the salt pork (more fat than lean, more conducive to nausea) and join her husband in drinking the travesty of tea.

She sipped at it, and her eyes were moistened and enlarged. Except that their surroundings were so very different, they might have been seated together at Birdlip House, Cheltenham. At least the silences they kept were the same, and the moments when he emerged from his, to complain, or else it seemed, to take stock of her.

This morning Mr Roxburgh said, ‘You are looking uncommonly nice, Ellen.’ This she had learnt to interpret as a compliment from one brought up to abstain from vulgar enthusiasm.

It required no answer, but she murmured, ‘All of it old and familiar,’ and looked down, and touched her skirt.

‘I was right in advising you to wear green.’

‘My aunt used to say that green made a woman look trumpery.’

‘Your aunt, I noticed, didn’t care for you to look your best.’

Mr Roxburgh continued examining his wife, less pointedly perhaps, more thoughtfully. As a youth he had written poetry, but even to himself, his verses had sounded well-intentioned rather than inspired. By the time Garnet was riding to hounds with the young Stafford Merivale, Austin had attempted a novel, but already by Chapter III, it was clear that his characters were rejecting him. Laying his manuscript on the fire, he watched it catch, not so much with regret as relief; it allowed him to return to the classics. Yet Austin Roxburgh, whatever appearances suggested, was not all bookish: in him there stirred with vague though persistent uneasiness an impulse which might have been creative.

He was unable to draw, or he would have sketched the farmer’s daughter in her country hat, or returning from the moor, driving her ewes ahead of her to pen them for the night. Remembering her thus, after he had left for home, started him wondering whether he might also be in love. If his passion had been stronger, the obvious course would have been to make her his mistress. It was inconceivable that she should ever become his wife; and yet he continued thinking of her, standing in a light reflected off fuchsias punching a basinful of dough on a scoured table, or again, arms folded against a starched apron-bib as she crossed the yard on some undefined errand. He certainly needed someone. Perhaps he did love her. He remembered her strength and kindness when overtaken by an autumn squall which brought on one of his attacks.