Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

She had been encouraged early to tell the truth, but found that truth did not always match what she was taught by precept or in church: it was both simpler and more complicated.

Her parents in the past, and now her husband and mother-in-law, expected more of her than they themselves were prepared or knew how to demonstrate. It had pained and puzzled her as a child, until as a girl she too began accepting that there are conventions in truth as in anything else. As a young wife and ‘lady’ she saw this as an expedient she must convert into permanence, and former critics were soon applauding her for observing the conventions they were accustomed to obey.

Moral approval is all very well. Ellen Roxburgh would have liked to shine, but in the circumstances, did so only fitfully. Once or twice on coming downstairs in ruby necklace or topaz collar, her hand accepting but languid guidance from the rail, she had sensed unwilling admiration in an apathetic, if not coolly hostile, servant. A housemaid dazzled out of her thoughts abandoned the scuttle she had brought to a neglected grate and fled behind the baize door. On another, more equivocal occasion, the butler looked up with what might have been interpreted as an expression of shock.

‘Did I startle you, Perkins?’ she asked with that mild indifference she had copied from those who knew how to use it better.

‘Not at all, ma’am. It struck me you were looking exceptionally well.’

Although triumphs of a kind, they were hardly salve for her worst wounds. A fashionable rout could become the scene of grievous torture where the truth was aimed when her back was turned. She was sometimes all but felled by what she overheard through an open doorway or under cover of an urn or column.

‘Mr Roxburgh is of excellent family, I am told.’ The lady visiting at Cheltenham might not have appeared to be fishing had her eyes not grown a glaze and the tips of her marabout plumes trembled in anticipation.

Mrs Daintrey the solicitor’s wife confirmed that Mr Roxburgh was ‘of an established and respected family’.

A gentleman had started making preparatory noises in his throat.

The visitor flicked her marabout afresh. ‘ Mrs Roxburgh, I understand, is of quite humble origins.’

Mrs Daintrey moaned a little. ‘But is doing very nicely,’ she conceded out of friendship for her husband’s client.

‘In any case,’ the gentleman who had been preparing seized the opportunity, ‘the Roxburghs themselves were in trade a couple of generations ago.’

Stouter than ever in friendship, Mrs Daintrey cried, ‘But never behind the counter!’

‘And the brother?’

‘Ah, I cannot vouch for him.’ Mrs Daintrey sighed. ‘Very little is known — to me, at any rate — about Mr Garnet Roxburgh. Should we, perhaps, sample the ices?’

Mrs Roxburgh wrote in the journal which from being a virtue was becoming a vice:

… I would like to see my husband as perfect. I will not have him hurt. I am better able to endure wounds, and wld take them upon myself instead. Women on the whole are stronger because more knowing than men, for all the knowledge men lay claim to. We also learn to numb ourselves against suffering, whether of the body, or the mind …

To please and protect became Ellen Roxburgh’s constant aim; to be accepted by her husband’s friends and thus earn his approbation; to show the Roxburghs her gratitude in undemonstrative and undemeaning ways, because anything else embarrassed them. What she would not admit, or only half, was her desire to love her husband in a manner acceptable to them both.

Just as she was to learn that death was for Mr Roxburgh a ‘literary conceit’, so she found that his approach to passion had its formal limits. For her part, she longed to, but had never dared, storm those limits and carry him off instead of submitting to his hesitant though loving rectitude. ‘Tup’ was a word she remembered out of a past she had all but forgotten, in which her own passive ewes submitted, while bees flitted wilfully from thyme to furze, the curlew whistled at dusk, and night was filled with the badger’s chattered messages. She herself had only once responded with a natural ardour, but discovered on her husband’s face an expression of having tasted something bitter, or of looking too deep. So she replaced the mask which evidently she was expected to wear, and because he was an honourable as well as a pitiable man, she would refrain in future from tearing it off.

In the second year of their marriage she conceived.

… I am of course very happy and Mr R. is overjoyed. His brother Garnet has not got a child, and it is right that himself the elder brother shld pass on the name through a son and heir. (Provided it is this and not a disappointing girl !) The child will also give a filip , he says, to our conversation . I did not know we were in need of a go-between. But so it is!

Mrs Roxburgh miscarried after a fall from her Spanish jennet, and was forbidden to ride Dapple again; she must content herself with being driven. Even to those aware of the train of events, young Mrs Roxburgh did not look less handsome, if a trifle pale, in her violet silk, with the black, fringed pelerine. From carriage or chaise she returned her acquaintances’ greetings with no more than the degree of pleasure her situation called for; the plumes only slightly rippled in her great hat.

On days when she took little walks through the grounds her mother-in-law might accompany her. Grown infirm since the tragedy, old Mrs Roxburgh hung on her arm, trembled, and tottered. ‘I find it chilly, Ellen,’ she murmured. ‘Should we not go in?’

Alone, the younger woman sometimes roamed the house, discovering attics and cupboards hitherto unexplored, and which she doubted would ever be hers; she was to that extent bereft and restless. One evening as the light on the elms started to wane, she found herself scratching on an attic window with a diamond, as she had heard told it was possible to write. She printed on the glass TINTAGEL in bold, if irregular letters, and then was ashamed, or even afraid, for what she had done, though neither her husband nor her mother-in-law was likely to climb so high, and those who did would not connect the name with their mistress’s thoughts or any part of the real world.

Two years later Mrs Roxburgh again conceived, and this time bore a child, a perfect little boy, but who was with them so short a while, she did not even record his passing in her journal. By unexpressed agreement Mrs Roxburgh and her husband decided not to mention the incident again.

Nor did the grandmother dwell on it, unless obliquely. ‘Austin was the sickly child. Garnet was such a sturdy little fellow. I can see him in the firelight, sitting in front of that brass fender after Nurse had given him his bath. Brimful of life and health! Austin so pale. He developed a cough. I would not allow myself to think, because if I did, I would have believed he must die.’

On the table beside the old woman’s carved chair stood a miniature framed in a garland of gold leaves and pear-shaped pearls. ‘There, you see,’ she would invite her callers to admire more than once in the course of the same visit, ‘my two boys!’

Enhanced by Austin’s sallow face and expression of anxiety, Garnet made a charming impression: his frock so cut as to reveal the shoulders, his lips as glossy as washed cherries, his chestnut hair arranged by an admiring nurse with a studied casualness which left the forehead engagingly exposed.

‘Though Providence has dealt me several blows,’ the old lady would maunder on, ‘I should not complain. Austin was spared, and Austin has been a comfort to me. Well, we shall all soon be dead. Not you, my dear, you are far too healthy.’ Here a soft white hand would fumble after a firmer one. ‘Garnet is as good as dead. What use is a boy to his mother, or anybody else, living down there in Van Dieman’s Land?’