Patrick White: The Fringe of Leaves

Her friend Mrs Merivale was rasping with disgust. ‘Tell him to drive on!’ she asked, or more precisely, ordered her husband. ‘Loathsome savages!’ she gasped.

As her husband closed the door behind him, Mrs Merivale was fumbling in her reticule for her little silver vinaigrette.

Delaney waved, not exactly laughing at his disappearing audience.

As the vehicle lurched on its way, Mrs Merivale and Miss Scrimshaw seemed united in what could have been contemplation of a common fate; only Mrs Merivale continued to protest by never quite exhausted spasms, ‘I don’t understand! I don’t understand! Not where human nature is concerned. Such a world as this is not fit for a decent person to live in.’

‘There, there, Alice! Everything has always been against you. Can’t you accept it? Then we shall enjoy the pie waiting for us at home.’

It was a proposition material enough to have appealed to Mrs Merivale had she not chosen to indulge herself in the luxury of hysteria.

When Mr Merivale, for the second time that afternoon, launched an unexpected remark. ‘I wonder’, he said, ‘how Mrs Roxburgh would react to suffering if faced with it?’

Mrs Merivale’s mouth fell open. ‘Mrs Roxburgh?’ she almost hiccuped; then was still.

The occupants of the carriage were rolled on into the deepening afternoon, and finally, like minor actors who have spoken a prologue, took themselves off into the wings.

On waving good-bye to her departing callers Mrs Roxburgh went below. Though much of what she brushed against in her descent felt corroded, and all that she smelled was acrid and stale, she had grown attached on the short voyage from Hobart Town to the texture of worn, sticky timber and the scents of rope and tar in what they must accept as home during the months to come. Arrived between decks, she was now groping through a musty gloom towards the quarters which Captain Purdew’s compliance and her own efforts had made snug and personal. Hands outstretched, she touched the door she knew to be there, and after rallying herself an instant, entered the narrow saloon where her husband had taken refuge even before their guests had moved in the direction of the gangway, his excuse being a hastily contracted sciatica.

Mr Austin Roxburgh was seated with his back to the door, reading the book for which the tedium of a formal visit had soon started him hankering. On top of his other clothes he was wearing a twill overcoat, which the winter air, sharpened by the sound of water lapping against the vessel, made practically obligatory for anyone not exerting himself.

Without looking round, he spoke up on hearing the creaking of the door and the motion of his wife’s skirt. ‘Well, are they safely —sped ?’ he asked while apparently continuing to read.

‘Yes,’ she replied, and laughed. ‘Oh, yes,’ she repeated, more subdued. ‘They are gone.’

‘And did you extract some last-moment grain of wisdom?’

‘They were full of doubts and suspicions, I could tell, but too Christian to come out with them.’

The Roxburghs’ whole exchange was familiarly and pleasantly low in key.

Still at his book, Mr Roxburgh laughed through his nose and said, ‘I don’t believe those two women were in any way satisfied.’

‘Mrs Merivale and Miss Scrimshaw would like to be thought ladies.’

Corrected, Mr Roxburgh began again, ‘The two ladies would have preferred to find us unhappy, in ourselves and our ventures.’

‘I expect, on leaving us, they discovered every reason why we should be feeling desperate,’ Mrs Roxburgh answered, ‘and will entertain each other this evening going over our wretched prospects. It’s their profession, surely, to scent unhappiness in others.’

The voice might have sounded complacent had not its tone also suggested the recital of a set lesson. In any event, Mr Roxburgh must have felt re-assured: he glanced at his wife with an expression verging on gratitude. As the light through the porthole showed it, his face was sallow, fine-featured, a glint in the deep-set eyes implying fever, or fretfulness, or both. If Mr Roxburgh were not recovering from a recent illness, he looked experienced in ill-health, and would always expect to be victimized afresh.

His wife had not thought to return his glance. They appeared a couple whose minds were known to each other and whose conversation would run along well-worn grooves. Instead, Mrs Roxburgh had gone inside the cabin partitioned off from the end of the saloon, and presently reappeared with a shirt she had been mending earlier and put away on the boy’s announcing company.

Mr Roxburgh had erased the expression which confessed a weakness, and was making a show of concentrating on his book.

It did not prevent him murmuring rather irritably, ‘Do you think there is so much wear, Ellen, in that old shirt, that you should keep on fiddling with it?’

‘This is my occupation,’ Ellen Roxburgh replied, ‘and I thought you would have approved of it. To keep you clothed, my dear, during a long voyage.’

Seated the other side of the table, her shawl fastened tighter against the draughts, she resumed her work of accommodating the torn shirt. The attitude she had adopted might have made her seem over-virtuous had she been less amateurish and awkward. At one stage she pricked her finger, and sucked the wound, before approaching her task from another angle. She did not appear to care for the old but still wearable shirt, but would persevere. Perseverance could have been a virtue Mrs Roxburgh had brought with her from another field to press into more finicking service.

She was a woman of medium height, not above thirty years of age, which made her considerably younger than her husband. Without the cap she would have been wearing if discovered at home, the head looked rather larger than suited the proportions of her form, but presented without ornament or undue art, in the last of the winter afternoon, it had the unexpectedness of one of the less easily identified semi-precious stones in an unpretentious setting. She wore her hair parted straight, and encouraged it to hang in the flat sleek loops prescribed by the fashion of the day. In contrast to the dark complexion deplored by others, the eyes of a grey probably bred from blue, were candid or unrewarding according to the temper of those who inquired into them. This no doubt was what had aroused suspicion in the ladies whose visit was just past; or it could have been the mouth, on which circumstances had forced a masculine firmness without destroying a thread of feminine regret or its charm of colour.

Mrs Roxburgh laid aside the mending, which either she had finished, or else could no longer endure. Her mouth grew slacker and any hardness of the eyes dissolved perceptibly in thought. A lonely childhood, followed by marriage with a man twenty years her senior, had inclined her mind to reverie. Perhaps her most luxurious indulgence was a self-conducted tour through the backwaters of experience.

Clasping herself still closer in the unusual though practical woollen shawl which had so enchanted Mrs Merivale that same afternoon, Ellen Roxburgh half-smiled to recall the accents of envy.

‘How I do admire your pretty shawl! It caught my eye before anything,’ Mrs Merivale admitted, and shook the small, perfect ringlets with which the underside of her bonnet was too generously loaded.

The caller was a composite of tremulous feathers, discursive fabrics, and barely controlled greed, her glance travelling from the shoulders of the individual she had condescended to patronize, over the intaglio brooch, the bosom (very discreetly here), eventually arriving at the fringe. Here Mrs Merivale had not been able to refrain from lifting and submitting the goods to close examination, as though on a progress through one of the stores she favoured with her custom.