Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

As her landlady had remarked, it was ‘difficult for a woman to acquire the habit of making important decisions’. Ellen Roxburgh wondered as she walked what important decision she had ever made, beyond that of accepting her husband’s proposal, and on another occasion, giving way to her own unconfessed incontinence.

At the point where the street, which had become a lane, petered out in a stony path, Mrs Roxburgh was forced to pause, and grope for the support of a tree. Leaning against it, she held her arms around herself to contain what amounted to a nausea. The rough tree-trunk comforted her to some extent until she was fully returned to her senses, though still with traces of a melancholy which had its origins, it seemed to her, in her failed children; more, she was permeated by this sorrow her husband never allowed himself to mention.

Swept onward by the wind, her skirt blown in a tumult before her, she tried to persuade herself that her husband, like the tree which had offered sanctuary, supported a belief in her own free will. Yet she had been blown as passively against the one as against the other. The tree happened to be standing in her path, just as a crude, bewildered girl, alone and bereaved on a moor, could hardly have rejected Mr Roxburgh’s offer.

So that she was dragged back into the forest clearing, the filtered light, the scents of fungus and rotting leaves, to the only instance when her will had asserted itself, and then with bared, ugly teeth.

Mrs Roxburgh opened her mouth in hollow despair, and the wind, tearing down her throat, all but choked and temporarily deafened her.

She stumbled farther, to what end she wondered, when she could have been seated beside the fire with a book, or occupying herself with sewing, in the speckless dolls’ house at present their home.

Until, at a turn in the path, she noticed what might have been a bundle of cast-off clothes lying amongst the crabbed bushes: old, greenish garments, the sight of which suggested a smell of must and the body to which they had belonged. She would have hurried past this repulsive sight, when the bundle sat up, and showed that the clothes, far from being discarded, still helped partially disguise the nakedness of a living being.

Moreover, the man inside them had started directing at her a gap-toothed smile, out of a freckled, pocked complexion; the eyes, pale and lashless, in no way related to the invitation of the yellow smile, burned with cold hate as they inquired into every aspect of her figure; while a hand, its skin cured to a carapace, patted the form his body had moulded in the grass where he had been lying.

That he was addressing her, she saw, but could not distinguish the words as the wind immediately carried them away.

The man realized, and increased his efforts until some of what he was shouting reached her: ‘… where there’s a hare’s nest …’ again the thread was lost, ‘… wouldn’ be natural for puss to lie alone …’ it was blown back.

She might have returned along the path had it not been a rambling one and the man already on his feet. To follow the path in the direction in which it led might have plunged her in a labyrinth of gorse, so she started up the slope of the hill beyond which she could see the roofs of aligned houses, and where she could hope to find the orderly streets she had abandoned.

Behind her she heard her pursuer progressing from his initial courtship, in which hares couched poetically enough, into the more obscene terms of his desperate human predicament, ‘I url show … what you bitches of leddies … lead us on … all that most of us gets is from watchin’ winders at night …’

Mrs Roxburgh ran or sprang. She felt fingers rake her back, a hand seize on one of her wrists. She was whirled round in her flight. Blackened nails were tearing at a brooch on her bosom. She was looking deep into the pocks and pores of a fiery skin as the blast of rum smote her in the face.

Then she had escaped, and was again running, clambering ungainly amongst and over rocks. If his obscenities had horrified her at least they were also memories of the past; the sound of his breathing frightened her worse.

‘Well, then,’ he suddenly shouted out of a silence, ‘will yer be satisfied when you’ve killed a man? That is what it leads to from the moment we is born!’

For her part, she could not conceive what they were doing, the two of them, scrambling up this hill. It would have been more rational to fall and allow herself to be strangled by orange, callused hands, broken fingernails eating into her throat, had she not looked up, and there ahead was the vestige of a road, some kind of vehicle advancing along it, drawn by a pair of horses, their solid briskets and haunches at variance with the alarm betrayed by ears and nostrils.

As she stumbled, herself by now an animal flattening its exhausted body against the turf, somebody, a gentleman, sprang down from the driver’s seat, and charged towards them, whip-in-hand.

In her distress she did not recognize him until they were but a few yards apart.

With the whip-handle he began belting into her assailant, who needed little persuasion to retreat, frieze rags flying, hat lost, as he jumped rocks and tore through bushes.

Garnet Roxburgh recovered his breath, and straightened his coat, of a dark-green cloth with fur collar.

‘You court disaster, Ellen. Remember this is Van Diemen’s Land. An infernal situation won’t be improved by your blowing on the coals.’

She was not yet able to speak, which absolved her from answering her brother-in-law. She followed him up the slope towards the buggy and its pair of disturbed horses.

She patted one of the cobs and let her hand lie briefly on his neck in gratitude.

Garnet Roxburgh explained that he had been to a sale at Bagdad, when it had occurred to him to pay his respects to his brother — and sister-in-law — on the way home.

He flipped at the horses’ necks as he spoke, while she sat humbly, exhausted and related, beside him on the leather seat. The whip, she felt, must have less malice in it than his words, for the horses responded jauntily.

‘Mr Roxburgh’, she slightly shifted her position, ‘will be glad to see you after all this time.’

She noticed that they were re-entering the world of substance and respectability. Gentlemen were driving home, accompanied in some instances by wives. Mr Garnet Roxburgh of ‘Dulcet’ shook his whip once or twice as a salute to familiar faces. The ladies returned blank stares on perceiving his unidentified companion.

‘I cannot thank you,’ she attempted.

He winced, and shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t receive thanks, I only accept offers.’

They drove grating along the street.

‘Most of us on this island are infected.’ (She had heard it before, alas, and from her husband.) ‘You, Ellen, though you are here only by chance, have symptoms of the same disease. I should hate my virtuous brother to know. But would love to educate you further in what you have shown yourself adept at learning — on one occasion at least.’

Because she would have preferred not to understand what she had been told, she sat looking at her meek hands; while the voice continued hammering at her.

‘You and I would enter hell the glorious way if you could overcome your prudery.’

Then she said, ‘I hope to redeem myself through my husband — an honourable man, as even you who love him must admit.’ She paused before adding, ‘I pray he will never have cause to regret our marriage.’

The horses were by now straining uphill towards the narrow house in which she and Austin Roxburgh temporarily lived. To avert the pressure of a contempt she could feel directed at her she inquired after her friend Holly.

‘Holly has been returned to the factory, for reasons’, he said, ‘which I shall not go into.’