Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

The horses were heading for feed and water down a lane to one side, but he pulled on their mouths and brought them to a stand-still beside a white-painted wicket-gate set in a hedge and guarded by two cypresses. The hedge was of thickset clipped box; the cypresses had been trimmed too, as well as decapitated, which gave the precincts a military, if not a penal air. Faced with such rigid discipline almost any new arrival must have been deterred from judging the house itself at first glance, though it seemed pleasing enough, built for comfort rather than for show, even if drastically improved by those who had ‘succeeded’ in it. The general impression was of a low, widespreading structure behind a shallow veranda, the body of the house extended to considerable depth through subsidiary rooms and offices. Windows let into a shingle roof betrayed a cramped upper storey, probably for the use of servants.

Mrs Roxburgh felt she might have grown to love ‘Dulcet’, had fate planted her in it and her brother-in-law not been there.

Or perhaps she was being unjust. Perhaps he had a genuine love for the place, if for nothing and no one else; to have had them trim the hedge and the cypresses with such precision, and to have called for the painting of the wicket and the woodwork in general. For that matter, he may have loved the widow he married, who died in the unexplained accident.

‘Aren’t we coming down?’ he was shouting to passengers deaf or numbed.

The light glinted on his teeth; his arms were open to receive his sister-in-law.

But Mrs Roxburgh waited for her husband to descend and turn in her direction, after which she accepted a hand she would have chafed, had she been given a less public opportunity.

Barking dogs were silenced by their interest as they started smelling her skirt between gulps of disapproval; while two men with disenchanted Irish faces and amorphous garments fumbled for the baggage stowed in the tray beneath the buggy seat.

On the veranda steps two women of nicer appearance than the pair of rustics attending to the luggage waited to greet the visitors.

‘This is my housekeeper — Mrs Brennan,’ Mr Garnet indicated the older of the women in a would-be jovial, though offhand manner.

In her middle age, the housekeeper seemingly suffered from nerves. Her lips trembled halfway towards a smile when guided by Mrs Roxburgh’s example. The hair straggling from beneath a clean, though somewhat crushed cap, added to her air of distraction. Mrs Roxburgh had but a blurred impression of Mrs Brennan, much as though catching sight of the moon through tatters of grey-white, wind-wracked cloud.

‘And Holly, her helper.’ Garnet Roxburgh grew ever more offhand in his introductions.

While Mrs Brennan might have been handsome in her youth, the young girl was emphatically pretty at the present day, and in spite of a shapeless, grey dress and slovenly cap. Probably bold by nature, she was now intimidated almost to the point of tears by the arrival of strangers, perhaps also by her master’s brusqueness, as well as the hubbub of dogs barking and wheels grating as the horses strained to be gone to their provender, the Irish cursing them to hold hard.

The visitors would have retired willingly to their own quarters and given way to their exhaustion, had it not been required of them to listen, admire, recount, and feast until well into the evening. They excused themselves from supper. At last they might have comforted each other, but Mr Roxburgh became convinced that the sheets on their great bed were damp. It was only the cold, she tried to persuade him. Damp was damp, he insisted; his sense of touch never deceived him. After wrapping himself in his coat and a couple of travelling rugs he announced that he would spend the night on the sofa. It was beyond her powers to reassure or comfort him, nor could she feel comforted herself, lying alone between the suspect sheets.

Not until morning was Mrs Roxburgh able to review her first impressions in tranquillity and what she believed to be detachment, and to record some of them in her journal after a late breakfast in their room. Settling herself in the loose muslin which sunlight and birdsong warranted, she prepared to indulge her blandest vice.

4 Nov 1835

Only now begin to feel revived after yesterday’s journey and arrival. To catch sight of the bullock-wagon straining down the lane with our heavier trunks (and what our host describes as a few of the ‘unnecessary though indispensable luxuries’ purchased by him in Hobart Town) has refreshed me more than anything. Mr R. will be the happier for laying hands on his books, myself simply from having my own belongings around me. To make my home in the wilderness!

There is no reason why I shld sound so ungrateful when Garnet R. is kindness itself. He is now gone about the business of the farm, and again I will sound ungrateful if I say I am just as glad. There is no reason for this. My dislike is quite un reasonable. I can tell that my Mr R. does not intend to take an active part in the life at ‘Dulcet’ (not through any lack of affection for his brother). He has already informed me in private that sheep and cows were all very well when he was courting the farmer’s daughter, but in normal circumstances (outside of the pages of Virgil) they can only be counted among the bores. So it will be my duty to take an interest. There is no reason why I shld not. The country is both pretty and wild, the property evidently prosperous, the house spacious and filled with unexpected comforts, altogether unlike our own poor hugermuger farm at Z.

By all accounts the late Mrs Garnet Roxburgh’s means was inherited from her first husband. In the dining-room hang portraits of Mrs Garnet and her Dormer spouse. After a glass or two of wine Mr R. remarked to his brother that he would have removed the likenesses instead of keeping them there as reminders. G. R. points out that they are valued as property in these parts — the frames alone. To be sure these are elaborately carved and heavy gilded, but what is within them does not please. Mrs (Dormer) Roxburgh has a long, an ob -long face, very pallid and shiny, not unlike lard. The lips are shown unnatural red, though perhaps the artist has attempted to give her a liveliness her flesh lacked. A dull but shrewd woman, I wld say, and attracted evidently to gentlemen of high complexion. If G. R. is ruddy-skinned, the late Dormer’s cheeks were inflamed, and I recognize too well the look of his rather watery eye. Garnet too, enjoys his wine, from grapes grown on the place, the vines planted by Mr Dormer in the beginning. At dinner my usually abstemious husband was led on by his brother and caused me some embarrassment by proposing a toast which would have gladdened my heart in private, but not in the presence of G. R. I was too tired to more than pick at the fat goose they had killed by way of celebration, and cld not touch the pudding at all. I got away as soon as decency allowed and left the brothers to their childhood and youth.

Till Mr R. shld tear himself away I decided to make some effort at friendship with the housekeeper, who I found in the great stone kitchen scraping dishes, the girl helping. Mrs B. is a decent soul but suffers from a troubled mind I wld say. Several times I was told that she and her husband were ‘free settlers’. When the husband (a glazier) died she was forced to look for a situation and came out from Hobart as cook to Mr and Mrs Dormer, who were good to her she says. She wld like to find good in everybody, unlike myself who more often sees the bad. Must take Mrs B. as an example, though it cld be with her as with so many others, more in her talk than in her thoughts. For instance I do not believe she sees all that good in her present master though she wld die rather than admit her secret view. While the girl Holly was gone outside to throw the scrapings to the dogs Mrs B. again informed me that she was a free settler, but that the girl had been deported from the Old Country for theft, and had done a term before being assigned. The twenty-odd men employed by my brother-in-law are all assigned servants. At dinner he referred to them as his ‘miscreants’, which I expect they are.