A Fringe of Leaves (17 page)

In refusing him her hand, she uttered, ‘I can’t make excuses for my own weakness—or ignorance. I still have not learnt enough to help myself, let alone others.’

She did not look at him again, but left the room.

Mr Austin Roxburgh was most disturbed on noticing his wife’s pallor. ‘It is you who are ill, Ellen!’

She was in fact a shambles of disgust, anger, and despair, both for the slaughter of the little horse, which she could only interpret as an act of deliberate cruelty, and for the human souls condemned to the torments of this island on which they too, had the misfortune to find themselves.

‘These wretched creatures for whom there is so little hope!’ She could not bring herself to mention the mare, for whose end she held herself responsible.

Austin Roxburgh might have moralized to console his wife had it not meant going against what he saw as retribution and justice.

Instead, in the morning, he devised an outing which he hoped would restore her spirits. The day was so clear and sunny he asked for a horse to be harnessed to the gig, and proposed that they should drive out together.

Austin Roxburgh drove like the upright man he was. It was unusual for him to take the reins, but he appeared to derive such pleasure from their innocent jaunt she could not demand that they change places.

They took the road along the riverside, where the grass was already strewn with the gold coin of poplar leaves. Fish leaped from time to time, or like thoughts rising, mouthed the surface of the stippled water.

‘We must do this more often, Ellen,’ Mr Roxburgh decided, ‘when we are at home again—at Cheltenham.’

His desire to atone for the minor lapses, and ignorance of the major ones, made the morning glitter more perilously. She could only sit as upright as himself, when in less tenuous circumstances her body might have adopted some of the attitudes of self-indulgence.

Mrs Roxburgh was delivered to some extent from the nagging of her conscience on reaching the house and being handed a note which a messenger had brought from Dr Aspinall. Standing on the veranda steps the Roxburghs read the letter together; here at last was a guilt they could share.

A Mrs Impey, a widow in reduced circumstances, the doctor informed them, was prepared to put three of her rooms at his friends’ disposal. Her establishment, a modest one he was careful to add, was situated nevertheless in a most respectable locality.

Mrs Roxburgh was overjoyed, though her husband at once showed signs of anxiety, if not downright alarm. ‘Now we shall have to tell him,’ he said. ‘Will you?’

‘No,’ she replied. ‘He knows!’ She then began to laugh in a manner which might have struck him as ‘hysterical’ in another woman.

‘Who could have told him?’

‘I have no inkling,’ it was not entirely true, ‘and since it is done, I shall make no inquiries.’ Despite a disapproval she could sense mounting, she continued laughing; she took herself in hand only after they had gone inside.

Mrs Roxburgh, who had lost the inclination for writing in her journal, recovered it:

24 March

Hobart Town

… the house so small, the rooms so narrow, we might feel restricted had we not grown accustomed to ship-conditions on the voyage out. I shld also say, if it was not for
relief
at escaping from the
gloom
of ‘
Dulcet
’! So I am prepared to love our little house at Battery Point, and Mr R. is for similar reasons willing to overlook its limitations. We have the use of two front rooms. One is a dining-room, the other a parlour, or what our landlady likes to refer to as the
withdrawing
-room. Off this is our bedroom, most fortunately placed, because this will be my withdrawing-room in the event of unwanted callers. Mrs Impey is a small, bright person full of the best intentions. She is the widow of a former officer of the garrison at Port Arthur where she spent some years with her husband. When questioned about Port A. she held forth on its magnificent situation. As for the penal settlement, she says many of the stories are grossly exagerated by those who look for the sensational in life. Mrs Impey, I suspect, is too bright to admit any shadows into her scheme. Asked her whether she had not felt moved to return home after burying her husband. Here she did look a little downcast for one so bright, and said it was difficult for a woman to acquire the habit of making important decisions. Then she cheered up again, said that she enjoyed the society of Hobart Town, and so as not to lead a wholly frivolous life, gave lessons in needlework to selected young ladies of the better class.

26 Mar

Mr R.’s health improves daily. He already speaks of leaving if we can find a berth. We are told we can expect a ship at the end of the month or early next. Will be overjoyed if rumours become fact. Dr A. decided I was looking
peeky
and prescribed a tonic which I will take to humour him and my husband. I have to confess that my spirits are low, but at a level which no tonic can reach. A wind blows daily off the mountain along streets for the most part empty, in which approaching footsteps often alarm by sounding thunderous. Mercifully G. R. has until now left us in peace, except for the present of a dressed goose and 4 bottles of ‘Dulcet’ wine. Remembering how we ate goose out first night beneath his roof I could not bring myself to touch it. My excuse was that I felt bilious. Mr R. did justice by the goose, and ever since has been chiding himself for ingratitude towards his brother.

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.

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.