Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

Having satisfied herself in the glass that she looked to her best advantage, Miss Scrimshaw turned, and Mrs Roxburgh saw that she was to be subjected to interrogation by one whom she had considered an ally.

‘Have you observed’, the inquisitor began, ‘that Mr Jevons takes an uncommon interest in you?’

‘In me? Absurd! Why should Mr Jevons take an interest in one who is in no way interested?’

‘Men’, Miss Scrimshaw seemed to savour the word, ‘are constantly attracted to what is difficult and possibly unattainable.’

‘Oh, but I am appalled!’ Mrs Roxburgh protested. ‘And in any case would not want to trespass on another’s interests.’

‘Oh, my dear!’ At pains to absolve her friend, and to administer extreme unction to any resigned passion of her own, Miss Scrimshaw laughed. ‘To be candid, Mrs Roxburgh, I could not bring myself to share my bed. I do so love stretching out in comfort.’

Mrs Roxburgh suspected that her re-instated friend had verged on what she most deplored — the vulgar.

Miss Scrimshaw saw her slip. ‘Now you will think me immodest. But candour is a natural pitfall — you will surely agree — when pioneering in the bush.’

Mrs Roxburgh loved her.

‘If you will forgive me,’ the spinster pleaded, ‘let us go on deck and take the air together.’

‘Let us!’ Mrs Roxburgh assented.

So the two ladies groped their way to the companion-ladder, and when they had arrived above, and steadied themselves, linked arms and strolled in the dark.

There was a jewellery of stars such as Ellen Roxburgh believed she might be seeing for the last time before a lid closed, and persistent, if in no way malicious, breezes, as well as a creaking of cordage, a straining of canvas, which for an instant halted her in the steps of memory. She might have staggered had it not been for her companion’s arm.

When it was Miss Scrimshaw who did not exactly stagger, but exclaimed most vehemently, ‘How I wish I were an eagle!’

‘An eagle. Why?’ Although she could see for herself the curved beak cutting the semi-obscurity, the fixed eyes glittering by starlight, it would have been impolite of Mrs Roxburgh not to have sounded mildly surprised.

‘To soar!’ Miss Scrimshaw wheezed. ‘To reach the heights! To breathe! Perch on the crags and look down on everything that lies beneath one! Elevated, and at last free!’

Mrs Roxburgh felt dazed by the sudden rush of rhetoric.

Once launched, Miss Scrimshaw was prepared to reveal still more. ‘Have you never noticed that I am a woman only in my form, not in the essential part of me?’

Somewhat to her own surprise, Mrs Roxburgh remained ineluctably earthbound. ‘I was slashed and gashed too often,’ she tried to explain. ‘Oh no, the crags are not for me!’ She might have been left at a loss had not the words of her humbler friend Mrs Oakes found their way into her mouth. ‘A woman, as I see, is more like moss or lichen that takes to some tree or rock as she takes to her husband.’

Had either of the two women parading the deck between the stars and the swell of canvas felt sufficiently moved to fight for her own tenet and convert the other, it was not the moment to proselytize, for a human form had emerged out of the companionway and was bearing down, large and black, ominous but for the voice of Mr Jevons which preceded him by several paces.

‘Mrs Lovell is at the tea-table, and invites you ladies to join her if you are inclined.’

‘How I neglect my duties!’ Miss Scrimshaw cried. ‘The sea has badly gone to my head!’ Detaching herself from Mrs Roxburgh to an accompaniment of onyx cannoning off onyx, the eagle flumped across the deck, reached the companionway, and disappeared.

The merchant was at liberty to offer Mrs Roxburgh his support, and she to accept. ‘Thank you,’ she murmured, taking his arm (what else could she have done?).

As on the other occasions of their meeting he gave an impression of solid worth, a quality she was happy to re-discover at night, at sea, but must remind herself that the solid is not unrelated to the complacent, and that Mr Jevons might assert rights she would not wish to grant, she thought, even had she been free of a past in which honourable allegiances conflicted with her own discreditable passions.

‘According to the omens,’ Mr Jevons informed her, ‘we can look forward to a smooth and uneventful passage to Sydney.’

‘I do not believe in omens,’ Mrs Roxburgh replied, which was scarcely truthful, as she knew.

‘I do,’ said the merchant with a confidence greater than hers.

Did he, imperceptibly, squeeze the arm linked to his? She could not be sure, and must not, in any case, allow herself to feel comforted.

When they entered the saloon Miss Scrimshaw was presiding at the tea-kettle, for one of the younger children had brought up some biscuit-and-milk on his smocking and the mother was engaged in repairing the damage and soothing him.

Kate and her eldest brother were in a tangle at cat’s-cradle.

‘Look, Mrs Roxburgh! We’re stuck. It’s Tom.’

‘It ain’t!’ growled Tom, giving her a kick under cover of a chair. ‘That’s how girls go on when they’ve got themselves into a mess.’

Mrs Roxburgh stooped, and after some slight manipulation transferred the string back to Kate in the shape required for the game’s logical progression. Kate was entranced. She adored Mrs Roxburgh, and did not doubt that her love was returned. The incident of the mutilated fledgeling seemed to have bound them more closely together.

It was Mr Jevons who brought Mrs Roxburgh her tea, together with a slice of cake so moist with fruit it might have been studded with precious stones. Mr Jevons was advancing, all manly authority and calm, when by some incredible mischance he stumbled, whether against child or chair-leg, or over a ruck in the carpet, nobody saw. Or was it by infernal intervention? Whatever the cause of his downfall, Mr Jevons saw the cake flying off its plate, the cup shooting out of its saucer.

On his knees, he watched the tea-stain widening, darkening, in the folds of Mrs Roxburgh’s skirt. Needless to say, the uproar was immense, so much so that Mr Jevons got the shakes. There was no disguising it as he mopped the stain with his ineffectual handkerchief.

Mrs Roxburgh sat looking down at this troubled bull-frog of a man with what almost amounted to languid acceptance of her due, until she made an effort, and returned to the human situation.

Sitting forward, she charged him, ‘Dun’t! ‘Tis nothing.’

‘But I spoiled yer dress!’ the bull-frog croaked wretchedly.

‘’Tisn’t mine, and ’tisn’t spoiled,’ she insisted.

She may have touched his hand an instant, for the trembling was stilled, more by surprise than by command.

‘It is nothing, I do assure you, Mr Jevons,’ she repeated in what passed for her normal voice.

Because their exchange had been spoken so low and only for each other, and because of the children scrummaging after pieces of cake, and Miss Scrimshaw’s squawks as she retrieved the fragments of smashed cup, and sponged the stain, probably nobody heard or noticed strangers sharing a secret.

When calm had re-settled, Mrs Roxburgh accepted another cup, offered by Tom. Her eyes grew moist, her vision blurred, but steam was rising out of the tea, and if she felt breathless, restless, her stays, she told herself, were not yet broken in.

Mr Jevons, again the substantial merchant, was no longer conscious of the stain, worsened though it was by his and Miss Scrimshaw’s attentions. He could not give over contemplating the smouldering figure in garnet silk beside the pregnant mother in her nest of drowsy roly-poly children, a breathing statuary contained within the same ellipse of light.