Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

That he might marry Ellen Gluyas became after all a tenuous possibility on seeing her not only as his wife, but also as his work of art. This could be the project which might ease the frustration gnawing at him: to create a beautiful, charming, not necessarily intellectual, but socially acceptable companion out of what was only superficially unpromising material. There were remedies for chapped hands and indifferent grammar; nothing can be effected without the cornerstone of moral worth.

Austin Roxburgh felt so inspired he could not wait for his mother to leave him to his studies as she did each night at ten o’clock. When at last she kissed him and he could hear her groping her way upstairs, and finally trundling overhead, he sat and wrote, though with a caution to which his initial inspiration had been reduced:

Dear Mrs Gluyas,

Remembering with pleasure the weeks I spent beneath your roof last summer, it occurred to me that it would be most agreeable to repeat the experience, shall we say, from the beginning of June? if those same rooms are not already promised to somebody more fortunate than I.

My regards to Mr Gluyas, and my best wishes to your daughter, whose concern for my welfare touched me deeply on my previous visit.

Hoping to hear from you in good time so that I may complete my plans …

Mr Roxburgh did in fact receive a reply in good time, if not at all favourable:

Dear Mr Roxburgh,

I am sorry to inform you my mother passed on this Janury and my father does not feel we shld let rooms for not being able to do the best by a lodger, least of all one so particler as yourself.

I hope your health has improved since autumn last, and thank you for thinking kindly of us.

Yrs ever respectfully, E. GLUYAS

Mr Roxburgh was so put out by this setback to what he visualized that his feelings immediately became suffused with genuine tenderness, if not actual passion (he might never be capable of that). He wondered at the time what he could do, beyond compose the correct reply, just as he was still pondering over his relationship with the woman he had made his wife.

‘Yes,’ he repeated as the saloon was battered out of perspective, then allowed to settle back into its original shape, ‘green is the colour I advised you to wear, because unlike so many women you have nothing vapid about you. That is why you appealed to me.’

He had evidently satisfied himself; whereas Mrs Roxburgh, indolently lolling in a somewhat primitive saloon chair, dangling one hand as ladies are apt to do, was relieved to hear a rattling of the door-knob.

It was Captain Purdew to announce that, if they gave permission, he would breakfast with them.

The captain was rubbing his hands together so briskly they produced a grating sound, and in Mr Roxburgh, a corresponding heartiness. ‘I must congratulate you, Captain, on enjoying such health.’

Captain Purdew retaliated in similar vein. ‘Your lady, sir, is the one we should congratulate — for presiding so charmingly at a breakfast of salt pork.’ The captain crooked a finger in preparation for further gallantry and his tea-cup.

Mrs Roxburgh received the compliment with an air of disbelief inherited from her mother-in-law. If she was not carried over into downright boredom as she poured the captain’s tea, it was because an elderly, grizzled man is entitled to pay compliments and because a certain ingratiating, cumbrousness reminded her of her late father on his less bearish days.

Jovially for him, Mr Roxburgh had begun questioning Captain Purdew on the technicalities of his calling, the state of the weather, and their general prospects for the voyage, in none of which could his wife join with anything like conviction. Instead she fell to caressing her throat, as a hand which both fascinated and repelled her attacked those slabs of refractory, not to say rubbery, pork.

While she was still a little girl, he used to stroke her cheeks as though to learn the secrets of her skin. She would feel the horn-thing on his crushed thumb scraping her.

On one occasion, unable to bear it any longer, she cried out, ‘Cusn’t tha see I dun’t want to be touched?’ and threw him off.

He brooded and sulked a fair while, but it had been necessary; shame told her she was as much excited as disgusted; she grew more thoughtful as a result, and melancholy on wet afternoons.

Poor Mamma was too preoccupied to pay attention, but after her death, the two survivors were less distressed by her absence than by each other’s company.

At the same time Pa grew increasingly dependent on herself to conduct the day-to-day routine, and on the blessed grog to release him, not so much from grief as the despondency which had always been eating him. He would rise in the dark and fuddle through the morning at little unnecessary jobs, but sit all afternoon at the kitchen table, if he was not gone on a journey. He would invent journeys which ought to be made, only, it seemed, for the sake of motion.

That spring, a late one after an unusually bitter winter, he asked her to accompany him as far as Tremayne, needing her help with a heifer which Mr Borlase had shown some inclination to buy. Pa was driving the sprung cart, dressed in his best pepper-and-salt, while she knelt at the back attached to the unwilling heifer by a rope. It was raining a cold drizzle; a slush of dirty snow had almost thawed out in the ditches. Distress at leaving home had given the poor beast the scours. Her betrayer’s hands were soon a mackerel colour from holding to the rope, at which Beat would jerk each time she threw up her head to bellow. The jolting of the cart, familiar whiffs of the animal she had reared from a calf, and glimpses of grey sea above stone walls or through the gaps in thorn hedges, increased the misery with which, it seemed, Ellen Gluyas might remain permanently infected.

At Tremayne, Pa got down and took over the heifer. His hands were trembling. She wrapped a sack about her shoulders and said she would stay behind. He cursed her for behaving unsociably, or for being an imbecile, or both, before plodding with their pretty Beat into the not-far-distant yard.

She rocked herself back and forth on the bare board on which she was seated, to generate a warmth her old drab kersey didn’t provide, and as a substitute for company. Had she been able to invent journeys, like Pa, and had her belief in magic promised to sustain her, she might have gathered up the reins, and driven the rest of the distance to Tintagel, or farther still, wheels grating over pebbles before entering those grey waves.

Presently the sun showed, and she felt guilty for her wicked thoughts, as well as for misleading Mr Roxburgh into putting his trust in one who was unworthy of it.

When Pa returned it was without the heifer. As he had reckoned, Mr Borlase was unable to resist such a well-shaped beast. Pa had grown heartier, for the cash in his pocket and for having quenched his thirst at the buyer’s expense. He had made so sure of this she wasted no time in taking the reins from his hands. Thus released from responsibilities, his body slithered back and lay on the floor of the cart, his legs, in their shiny black leggings, propped and twitching on the seat beside her.

Had he but slept; instead he started shouting, ‘What’s taken the girl? I can see by they shoulders you’re op to yer old game. Well, you ent goin’ to make me suffer. I had too much, Ellen.’

‘Gee op, Tiger!’ She slapped the horse’s rump with the ends of the reins.

They rattled home at a fair pace, but the day was drawing in as she penned the ewes; it was dark before she finished milking.

She fried him a teddy-cake, which he pushed away. He sat pouring for his own consumption. Sometimes his elbow would fall short of the table.

He said, ‘You’ll always hate me. I bet tha’s stuck pins in me and throwed me to the fire.’