Patrick White: The Fringe of Leaves

‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say you actively disliked ,’ the vexatious man allowed, before his prosecution was interrupted.

The carter ahead of them had succeeded in bringing round his dray to a point from which his sweating Punches could strain past them down the narrow street, and the carriage surged forward, throwing the guilty females together in a tangle of chains and ribbons and a spray of protest.

‘Only that you didn’t take to them. At all,’ their accuser unkindly insisted, himself bobbing like an uncontrolled marionette.

‘I will not be persecuted, Stafford — so very horridly!’

‘Such a distinguished gentleman and admirable character as Mr Roxburgh appeared to be!’ Mr Merivale’s charge of what amounted to injustice had made Miss Scrimshaw breathless. ‘And such an enjoyable experience. The little brig — the captain — Purdew, was it? An obviously open-hearted fellow.’ The spinster had a weakness for the sea, and suffered a cruel blow as a girl when a lieutenant of the Royal Navy was carried off by a fever at Antigua.

Now the carriage was settling itself into its regular roll, and the ladies might have recovered their balance had not the relentless Mr Merivale fired a further shot. ‘At least Mrs Roxburgh, I could tell, was not to your taste.’

Which was tasteless on his part, not to say strange in one so innocent.

‘What can possess you, Stafford?’

Miss Scrimshaw, on the other hand, was silenced for the present.

‘And she as pretty as a picture,’ Mr Merivale declared with a courtliness which came naturally.

‘Pretty? Oh, well, pretty !’ his wife conceded.

‘And elegant besides,’ the gentleman added.

‘She was wearing an unusually beautiful shawl.’ Mrs Merivale hankered after material things.

‘A pretty woman, yes. But Mrs Roxburgh is not what I would call beautiful,’ Miss Scrimshaw announced after giving the matter deepest thought. ‘Beauty is something grander, nobler,’ here her head was invisibly tossed, ‘and is in no need of a fancy shawl to remind us of its presence.’

‘Mrs Roxburgh is a woman, not a marble statue.’

Mrs Merivale was pretty certain that her husband’s vision was un-draped.

Miss Scrimshaw must have realized too, for she blushed and quickly added, ‘What I meant to suggest was that true beauty is spiritual. There was nothing spiritual in Mrs Roxburgh.’

Miss Scrimshaw herself had composed verses when a young girl and wreathed them in watercolour violets and pansies.

‘Would you say she is a lady?’ Mrs Merivale ventured.

‘I would not care to give an opinion,’ Miss Scrimshaw discreetly answered.

Mrs Merivale at once recoiled as though it were someone else who had asked such a vulgar question.

‘She was a very quiet, well-spoken person. Or so it appeared to me at least.’ Mr Merivale by now hoped to end what he had started.

‘Still waters, as they say.’ Launched into philosophy, his wife felt justified in looking languid.

But Miss Scrimshaw had begun to kindle. ‘For my part,’ she announced, enveloping the others with her air, ‘I would never trust a silent woman.’

‘I should have thought it a distinct virtue.’ Mr Merivale’s throat made it sound the drier.

‘Mrs Roxburgh holds her silence at moments when people in general would offer candour. There are silences and silences, I mean.’

Although Mrs Merivale was not at all sure what her friend did mean, she nodded her head in vigorous support.

‘Mrs Roxburgh is something of a mystery,’ Miss Scrimshaw added with a sigh.

‘If you want my honest opinion,’ Mr Merivale said, ‘the ladies haven’t left her a leg to stand on.’

Miss Scrimshaw hung her head. ‘It is not possible to practise charity every hour of the twenty-four.’ Then plaiting her gloved fingers, ‘Please don’t think’, she begged, ‘that I exempt myself from criticism of the faults I share with Mrs Roxburgh.’

It was certainly one of her days. They did not know what to make of her.

Mr Merivale’s present intention was to drive round by the Brickfields and call at the house of one Delaney who had undertaken to collect a leg of pork from a Toongabbie farmer.

‘I do hope I shall not put you to any inconvenience,’ Miss Scrimshaw remarked.

She had begun to fidget, and arrange herself, and sigh for Church Hill, where she lodged with a widow, a decent soul, though not a lady.

‘No inconvenience at all,’ assured the blander Mrs Merivale, who could find little uses for people, and had not finished with Miss Scrimshaw yet. ‘I took it for granted you would dine with us. We have a pigeon pie.’ She had, besides, her mousseline de soie which needed letting out. ‘And spend the evening, agreeably. At cards. Or music.’

‘That would, indeed, be agreeable,’ Miss Scrimshaw replied with heartiness enough to suggest that she was unaware of the catch.

Amongst her extensive acquaintance her needle was in almost as constant demand as her tongue, for which she accepted remuneration, usually in kind, though preferably in envelopes, turning her head the other way.

This evening, however, it was less Miss Scrimshaw’s needle than her subtlety that Mrs Merivale hoped to encourage. The thought of it started her nervously coughing and rummaging for a pastille, if she had one.

‘The window, Stafford!’ she complained, as though a particle of dust might have affected her precious throat; for they had begun to approach the Brickfields in the neighbourhood of which the fellow Delaney had chosen to live.

This Delaney, an emancipist, had become finally a man of substance from being engaged in the carrying trade and whatever other gainful ploys nobody was altogether certain. In any event, he throve, though his house, neat and substantial enough behind its whitewashed fence, remained complacently countrified rather than pretentious in the urban style. As the carriage approached, a brace of speckled pullets could be seen fossicking at the entrance to a yard, and an old, matted sheepdog lifted his head from out of the dust to hawk up a few rheumy barks.

Mr Merivale began to grunt and unfold his long legs. Since the raising of the window, the enclosed carriage was more than ever its own world; to leave it amounted to an emigration.

‘Will you come in?’ he asked his wife, lowering his head as he trod out backwards.

The coachman had clambered down, though the master was not of those who accept assistance.

‘Oh dear, no!’ Mrs Merivale’s nature made it short rather than emphatic.

‘ She will be disappointed.’

‘She would stuff us with plum-cake. Before our dinner. And get us tipsy on her ginger wine.’ Here Mrs Merivale looked to Miss Scrimshaw, who responded with a wicked pursing of the lips.

‘She will be disappointed,’ Mr Merivale reminded fruitlessly.

Mrs Merivale watched with scorn as her husband strolled towards the rear of the house with that elaborate informality gentlemen in the colonies assumed for their inferiors. At the same time a hand, bunching the holland curtains, disclosed her face at its post, a desperate, mulberry-tinted pudding.

All this occurred during only a matter of seconds before Mrs Merivale’s ordinarily sluggish mind was sucked back by her intention into the stuffy, confessional gloom of the box in which she and Miss Scrimshaw were seated.

Now that the moment had arrived, her throat was contracting, bloodless; her heart went fut fut fut inside the layers of fur, merino, caoutchouc, and flesh.

Mrs Merivale wet her lips for a start. ‘To return, Miss Scrimshaw, to the subject of Mrs Roxburgh.’

That her companion appeared not to have heard made Mrs Merivale tremble.