Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

Early morning, once the source of innocent joy, had become for her a breeding ground of dread. The children no longer came to her since the fright they got on finding her lying, as they thought, dead, a deception which could not be soon or easily forgiven. But she continued to waken as the first tinge of grey was filtered through the darkness surrounding her, the hour when she felt most isolated, and consequently, induced to explore the labyrinth of conscience. As the light grew more substantial she appeared abandoned even by her shadow, and however ecstatic the choir of birds, silences were inevitably appended, through which she would find herself tramping rather than walking in bush featureless and listless enough to have been a reflection of her hopes.

On such a morning, thrusting her way through scrub grown denser, the going rougher, still within sight of the brown, sluggish river, though well beyond the confines of the settlement, she was arrested by a glimpse of something which at first suggested floating, flickering light rather than any solid form: it was such a refractive white, and her thoughts had withdrawn far from her surroundings into the obscure recesses of her mind.

Then she saw that here among the dusty casuarinas she had come upon a small rustic building in crudely quarried, but whitewashed stone, and realized that this must be Pilcher’s folly, the unconsecrated chapel the ordained minister had mentioned. Her heart was beating uncomfortably, her breathing strained, as she trod carefully, lifting her skirt to avoid stumbling over rocks and breaking sticks in her cautious approach to the open doorway. What she feared was that Pilcher himself might be inside and catch her in the act of trespassing, for trespass it could only be, from her experience of the architect’s mind — not unlike certain pockets in her own.

So that to set foot upon the whitewashed threshold was in some sense for Mrs Roxburgh a regrettable action. Ellurnnnn , she heard her name tolled, not by one, but several voices. Yet nobody barred her entry into the primitive chapel. The interior was bare, except for a log bench and a rough attempt at what in an orthodox church would have been the communion table, on it none of the conventional ornaments or trappings, but an empty bird’s-nest which may or may not have reached there by accident. Above the altar a sky-blue riband painted on the wall provided a background to the legend GOD IS LOVE, in the wretchedest lettering, in dribbled ochre. Nothing more, but the doorless doorway through which she had entered, and two narrow, unglazed windows piercing the side walls of the chapel.

Mrs Roxburgh felt so weak at the knees she plumped down on the uneven bench, so helpless in herself that the tears were running down her cheeks, her own name again mumbled, or rather, tolled, through her numbed ears.

All this by bright sunlight in the white chapel. Birds flew, first one, then a second, in at a window and out the opposite. There was little to obstruct, whether flight, thought, or vision. If she could have stayed her tears, but over those she had no control, as she sat re-living the betrayal of her earthly loves, while the Roxburghs’ LORD GOD OF HOSTS continued charging in apparent triumph, trampling the words she was contemplating.

At last she must have cried herself out: she could not have seen more clearly, down to the cracks in the wooden bench, the bird-droppings on the rudimentary altar. She did not attempt to interpret a peace of mind which had descended on her (she would not have been able to attribute it to prayer or reason) but let the silence enclose her like a beatitude. Then, when she had blown her nose, and re-arranged her veil, she went outside, to return to the settlement in which it seemed at times she might remain permanently imprisoned.

She looked back once in the direction of the chapel in spite of a warning by her better judgment against wilfully revoking perfection. There she saw a figure which became that of the lapsed seaman and dedicated architect. Although she restrained herself from acknowledging his presence, he started scrambling up the slope, causing saplings in his path to shudder, dislodging minor rocks, one of which bounded to within inches of the intruder’s feet.

She hastened away, and upon reaching the settlement, sensed at once that something out of the ordinary had happened to dispel apathy and relieve tension.

One of the assigned servants ran out of the house and announced from the edge of the veranda, ‘Oh, ma’am, the cutter is in the river. They’ve sighted ’er from up the mill.’ The woman was so elated by an occurrence which could not ease her own lot, but which she regarded none the less as an event, that Mrs Roxburgh experienced a pang of remorse.

‘And when will they sail?’ she dared inquire.

‘Who knows?’ the woman answered. ‘’Tisn’t for me to decide, is it?’ and was brought down to reality and the leaden soles of her boots.

Mrs Roxburgh would have liked to restore the woman’s spirits, but in the absence of inspiration, could but murmur, ‘Thank you, Mary,’ and bow her head, and go inside.

The morning was full of coming and going, slammed doors, voices raised but never enough, laughing and scuttling through the passages (lessons were evidently waived). Mrs Roxburgh’s cell seemed the only corner of the house to remain untouched by the cutter’s arrival.

Of course she should have gone out and joined in the excited confusion. If she hesitated to celebrate her longed-for release becoming actual fact, it was because she could not ignore a future fraught with undefined contingencies. Had the walls but opened at a certain moment, she might even have turned and run back into the bush, choosing the known perils, and nakedness rather than an alternative of shame disguised.

It was close on dinner-time when Miss Scrimshaw burst into the room in a state of high importance. ‘You will have heard the news,’ she began somewhat breathily, ‘but perhaps not every detail of it, because I myself have been kept in the dark until almost the last moment. Mrs Lovell is so fatigued the Commandant, in the kindness of his heart, is sending her to Sydney for a change of air. The children, who are most of them too small to be left behind, will accompany her. And I shall go to enforce a little necessary discipline!’ The governess actually performed a stately step or two. ‘We shall sail the day after tomorrow depending on a favourable wind.’

Then Miss Scrimshaw, remembering, turned a deep maroon, which mounted by way of her scrawny neck into her brown, downy cheeks. ‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘how I run on, when it is you who have most cause for rejoicing at the cutter’s arrival!’

‘I hardly know,’ Mrs Roxburgh blurted back. ‘Yes, I am glad, of course, but shall be the happier for your company — for my return to the world. I have been so long out of it, I may not easily learn to adapt myself to its ways.’

Dissolving in the emotions of the moment the two women were carried away to the extent of embracing. ‘I expect we shall make our blunders,’ Miss Scrimshaw predicted, ‘but would you not say that life is a series of blunders rather than any clear design, from which we may come out whole if we are lucky?’

Then she laughed, and detached herself, and adjusted her fichu, and sternly resorted to practical matters. ‘If we are to be ready, we must start at once to systematize . The children alone! Poor Mrs Lovell is too distracted, and then, you may not know, she is expecting.’

With some diffidence Mrs Roxburgh offered Miss Scrimshaw her services.

But the spinster remembered she had not included in her recitative a detail not at first sight related to the practical. ‘We shall have with us on board a passenger not of our party, a Mr Jevons from London, who has taken advantage of the cutter’s mission to Moreton Bay to look up his connections, the young Cunninghams.’