Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

How much of the miscreant, I wonder, is in Garnet R.? Or in myself for that matter? I know that I have lied when necessary and am at times what the truly virtuous call ‘hypocritical’. If I am not all good (only my dearest husband is that) I am not excessively bad. How far is it to the point where one oversteps the bounds? I wld like to talk to these miscreants, to satisfy myself, but do not expect I ever will.

While Holly was still absent in the yard I inquired of Mrs Brennan the nature of her mistress’s accident. She became most disturbed, kept repeating that what is past is best forgot. Then it all came out as if she had only been waiting to tell — how the master while taking his wife for a drive along the mountain road had overturned the gig. Her neck was broke!

Later

I will concentrate on things other than the above — on the fine room in which we are installed, off it a little dressing-room where I am at present writing, while Mr R. is gone into the library, but only to read the books he has with him, some of which he has already unpacked (Virgil often makes me jealous!). The day is warm, if threatening. Outside my window an orchard: apricots and plums, as far as I can see, the crop only now colouring, and to one side a kitchen garden with raspberry canes as a separating hedge. Bees are on their way across the orchard to more rewarding pastures. Of all the birds I can hear, one (a goldfinch?) perched on a hawthorn outside my window reminds me with his thread of song that the line which divides contentment from melancholy is but a narrow one …

When she had dressed herself, Mrs Roxburgh fancied taking a walk before dinner, but first went in search of her husband to ask whether he would consider keeping her company.

‘Do you suppose I should be more profitably occupied?’ He sounded and looked grumpy from behind his gold spectacles.

Then, when he had collected his outer wits, the skin gathered at the corners of his eyes, as he knew he must forgive her for her interruption. ‘Thank you, no, dear Ellen,’ he said, and they were re-united.

Leaving the library she passed through the house and realized too late that she had made for the kitchen offices (how her origins caught up with her!) where she found Holly in a store-room transferring, or rather, hurling potatoes from a sack into a wooden box. It was obvious the girl resented a task which had become unbearably tedious. Some of the potatoes fell wide of the box and bounced across the flags. A fine red dust from unwashed potatoes hung in the air.

The intruder sneezed, and the girl’s nose was swollen, either from sneezing, or she could have been crying.

‘What has made you unhappy, Holly?’ Mrs Roxburgh ventured.

The girl snivelled, then broke into outright blubbering through swelling, plum-skin lips. ‘Nothing!’ she sobbed.

Realizing that Holly’s nothing was equivalent to everything, the older woman regretted her misguided inquiry and tried to make amends. ‘You must not upset yourself,’ she advised; and unwiser still, ‘Sooner or later you will find happiness in marriage with some honest man.’

‘Marriage is not for me!’ the girl positively howled, ‘or if it is, it’ll be old pertaters — or worse!’ as she hurled a many-eyed monster across the floor.

Holly was in no mind to accept reason as the antidote to despair, so Mrs Roxburgh left her. Preparing to cross the yard, she stood an instant balanced on the edge of the step. The girl’s fate might have been her own, that of a scullery-maid becoming a drudge-wife, had a rich man’s caprice not saved her from it. Hardly caprice when Austin Roxburgh had loved her according to the rules of honour and reason. The years gave proof.

The sunlight which filled the yard, pandering to basking hens and a trio of white-frilled turkeys, should have dismissed any trace of an unreasonable sense of guilt. But sight of a pair of assigned men lazing on their axehandles instead of splitting a pile of logs caused her to move awkwardly. One touched his pudding-basin hat, the second ignored her. Their murmurs pursued her across the yard increasing her embarrassment. Yet their comments, if they were, remained unintelligible, and were overlaid besides, by a drooling of hens and the pink-pink of turkey poults. There was nothing to explain why she should feel ashamed; certainly not her clothes: a modest bonnet and her oldest walking-dress.

She was only at ease when received into the countryside. On the one hand lay fields divided by timber roughly piled to form barriers rather than fences and divide crops from herds and flocks; on the other, forest which neither invited nor repelled those who might feel tempted to investigate a passive mystery. She thought she might be tempted, but for the present yielded herself to the glare from emerald pastures and delight in the rounded flanks of grazing lambs.

Presently the road forked and she chose the lesser, its ribbon threaded through the trees fringing a mountainside. It was not long before she was enveloped by sombre forest; the road grew rougher, the light whiter, keener, at such moments when it succeeded in slashing its way through foliage. She became breathless in the course of her climb and undid her bonnet-strings, and shed the intolerable pelisse, and regretted that the soles of her boots offered so little protection from stones.

At one point a path, or more precisely, a tunnel, invited her to enter. She was walking for the most part over moss, breathing the air of another climate, amongst trees the butts of which were in some cases spongy as cork, in others hard as armour. Clumps of low-growing shrubs were draped with parasite flowers as white and lacy as bridal veils. Fronds of giant ferns caressed her, and she in turn caressed the brown fur which clothed their formal crooks.

She was so entranced she sat down in a small clearing intending to enjoy her surroundings while resting, in a dappled shade, on the compost of decaying leaves and bark, regardless of any possibility of damp and spiders. Removing the superfluous bonnet and loosening her matted hair, she felt only remotely related to Ellen Roxburgh, or even Ellen Gluyas; she was probably closer to the being her glass could not reveal, nor her powers of perception grasp, but whom she suspected must exist none the less.

The delicious cool, the only half-repellent smell of rotting vegetation, perhaps some deeper prepossession of her own, all were combining to drug her, at first with mild insidiousness, then with overwhelming insistence. She could have been drifting at the bottom of the sea, in the cove which had awaited the ship’s prow, carved and festive. Then he was bending over her. She put up her hand to touch the incipient stubble on a ruddy cheek. Their plumskin mouths, perfectly matched, received each other, flowing, over-flowing, withdrawing. When she noticed a flaw: his lower lip had a dint in its too pronounced upholstery. Repulsion drowned the attraction she had felt. Tears were falling, warm and sticky, which she realized were not hers. The girl Holly was holding a knife in grief or anger. You cannot frighten me Holly I am not the one you intend to kill . The girl mumbling she will not serve another term it is the potato-eyes she is preparing to nick.

Mrs Roxburgh awoke all but choked by her dream, her boots protruding foolishly from under the hem of her skirt. The spangled net of sunlight had been raised from the clearing in which she lay, leaving her surrounded by a black and hostile undergrowth. Seizing her bonnet by the strings, and without thinking to brush herself clean of twigs and leaves, she hurried down the tunnel to regain the road. Here too, the sun had withdrawn. Uncontrolled impetus carried her downhill, her ankles twisting on the stones she dislodged, her breath sounding exasperated rather than distressed.