Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

That forenoon, when Mrs Roxburgh returned from a fruitless expedition in search of matching buttons, a hooded vehicle with a livery-stable look was standing at the door of their lodging.

She was prepared to pass quickly down the hall and into her bed- withdrawing-room when the landlady darted out from the official withdrawing-room, and pounced.

‘Ah, Mrs Roxburgh,’ Mrs Impey tittered with more than her customary measure of brightness, ‘our friend Mrs Aspinall has called to see you. In your absence I offered her a glass of Madeira and a dish of my little cornflour cakes. Now you will be able to join her. I feared your being delayed might deprive you of the pleasure of her company.’

There was no way out; the landlady’s enthusiasm would have scotched the mere thought of one.

When Mrs Roxburgh entered, she found Mrs Aspinall seated by the window, from where she must have watched her friend’s approach down the hill. It vexed Mrs Roxburgh to know that her unguarded thoughts had been exposed to Mrs Aspinall’s stare; for choice she would have worn an iron mask in the presence of the doctor’s wife.

Mrs Aspinall had adopted a languid air, or possibly the Madeira had imposed it on her, as she wiped from her lips a crumb or two of cornflour cake. ‘I had almost given you up,’ she said. ‘It is not that I couldn’t wait — Heaven knows there is little else to do — but my doctor has a fit if I run up a bill at the livery-stable. Yet it doesn’t suit his pocket to invest in a carriage for his wife’s use.’

Their own dependence on the doctor left Mrs Roxburgh at a loss for a reply. ‘May I pour you a second glass of wine?’ she suggested to bridge the gap.

Mrs Aspinall accepted, since her hostess could not know that it would be her third. ‘Tippling in Hobart Town!’ she said and sighed and giggled all in one. ‘Ah, my dear, you cannot understand! You are of the other world, and pause here only long enough to dip your toe.’

‘Here or there, my life is not so very different. To be sure, at home I have an establishment to run, orders to give, Mr Roxburgh’s friends to entertain, but that is no great distraction. Not that I would care to exchange my quiet life for a more hectic one.’

Mrs Aspinall lowered her eyelids and sipped her wine. ‘Blessed are the docile and easily contented!’

Mrs Roxburgh blushed. ‘Is it so blameworthy?’

Mrs Aspinall flashed her eyes open, as though her purpose were to catch someone out. ‘Have you received, perhaps, a visit from Garnet Roxburgh?’

‘We’ve not seen him since leaving ‘Dulcet’. He and my husband are in touch by messenger, and Mr Garnet Roxburgh contributes most generously to what would otherwise be a monotonous table.’

‘I am surprised,’ Mrs Aspinall said, ‘considering the brothers are so fond of each other. And you, my dear, he praises to the skies!’

Mrs Roxburgh was aware that her hand shook, and what was worse, that a drop of Madeira lay trembling on her lap. ‘I had the impression I was not at all to my brother-in-law’s liking. We have scarcely one viewpoint in common. I am too quiet. He prefers a more dashing style in women.’ She tried to disguise annoyance at her own ineptitude by diverting attention to the stain on her skirt, which she rubbed hard with her handkerchief.

‘You are reserved, my dear, to say the least.’ If Mrs Aspinall’s smile were intended as her most agreeable, her look was purest verjuice. ‘That is where your appeal may lie. Men of Garnet Roxburgh’s temper have a craving for variety.’

Mrs Roxburgh was so embarrassed she could only offer a cornflour cake, which Mrs Aspinall refused.

Holding her head to one side, the latter tried out a wooing tone. ‘Can’t I tempt you to accompany us to a rout?’

‘My husband does not care for large assemblies.’

‘And his health, no doubt, would not allow it if he did. No, it is you, Ellen , I am enticing. Though with the promise of a doctor in attendance, it can hardly be called enticement. Even Mr Roxburgh should approve.’

‘I thank you for the kind thought, Mrs Aspinall. But I am hardly equipped for a social life with the clothes Mr Roxburgh decided I should bring on this visit to the antipodes.’

‘Oh, clothes !’ Mrs Aspinall might have intended to make it sound as though she herself dispensed with them, but changed her tactics on seeing her error. ‘At least you would have the satisfaction of seeing me in one of my familiar rags, while you, my dear, have I don’t know what — the strength of character, I think it is called, which draws attention to itself even wearing a woollen shawl. That, in any case, is how Garnet Roxburgh sees it.’

The implications were so painful, Mrs Roxburgh frowned — painfully. ‘If my brother-in-law is to be present at the gathering you offer, I am less than ever inclined to accept.’

But Mrs Aspinall leaned forward and lightly laid her fingers on a wrist (was she feeling for the patient’s pulse?). ‘You are too sensible, my dearest Ellen! At this rate you will not begin to live.’

The visitor rose, and fell to arranging her curls in their prescribed clusters. ‘Then I shall go on my own — with my doctor — and in my rags — and regret your absence — though not to the extent that poor Garnet will.’

Needled by her friend’s apparent mission of procuring her, Mrs Roxburgh said, ‘Your pink dress is the one I will always remember.’

‘Which pink?’ Mrs Aspinall snapped.

‘Which you wore at Christmas.’

‘My old pink? That became indeed a rag, and I let the servant have it shortly after you saw it. Why on earth should you remember my pink?’

‘You looked so charming in it. And the bodice so cunningly ornamented with all those little satin bows.’

‘The Town knew that dress by heart. I grew to hate it.’ Recollection had made Mrs Aspinall hoarse.

Almost at the same moment the voices of Mrs Impey and Mr Austin Roxburgh were heard in the hall. ‘If she is, I will not go in,’ Mr Roxburgh whispered loud. ‘I shall lie down and rest till my wife has got it over.’

His wife finally had, and the same evening, after her emotions had subsided, wrote in her journal:

However unpleasant it is to detect hypocrisy in another, how much more despicable to discover it in oneself — worse still, to be driven to it by Mrs A. To be reflected in such a very trashy mirror! Yet this is what happened during a call I will try my best to forget. When here I am recording it!

Mrs Roxburgh glanced through what she had written to see whether it looked too explicit on paper, and decided it did not; but knew that she would be haunted by the facets of vice she shared with Mrs Aspinall. She tried to console herself with the explanation that if she had been drawn to a certain person, it was because some demoniac force had overcome her natural repulsion.

She was not consoled, however, and locked her hypocritically innocuous journal away.

On a day when she was at her lowest Mrs Roxburgh tied down her bonnet and ventured into the windy street. To her husband she had said she would take a walk, knowing how impossible it would have been to persuade him to accompany her. In roaming round the Point alone and unprotected, she had no aim, unless the vague one of escaping from her own thoughts. Not only vague but vain, she realized from experience. For it occurred to her that on the day she ordered them to saddle the mare so that she might escape from discontented thoughts and the general constriction of their life at ‘Dulcet’, she had ridden out to substantiate a thought she would have liked to think did not exist, from being buried so deeply in her mind.

In consequence, on this present chilly afternoon, she was strolling somewhat diffidently, buffeted by wind, threatened by a great cumulus of cloud, between the mountain which presided over man’s presumptuous attempt at a town, and the shirred waters of the grey river rushing towards its fate, the sea.