A Fringe of Leaves (3 page)

‘Yes?’ he felt bound to encourage, though the colour had gone from his voice.

‘It appears’, the emancipist informed them, ‘that two shepherds in a remote corner of the run had fallen foul of the natives. Some matter—excuse me, ladies—of women.’

The ladies pricked their ears, but hoped it had gone unnoticed. Weren’t their eyes so decently lowered?

Delaney cleared his throat; in other company he would have spat.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘to cut a story short and come to the point however tragical, the two men—honest fellers both of ’em—had just been found, their guts laid open (savin’ the ladies presence). Stone cold, they were, an’ the leg missin’ off of one of ’em—a mere lad from Taunton, Somerset.’

Mrs Merivale might have been impaled; Miss Scrimshaw on the other hand, continued distantly watching a scene, each detail of which filled her with a fascinated horror.

She said finally, ‘It is what some—not all of us—have chosen. To live in this country. Suffering is often a matter of choice.’

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.

‘Would you care to try it on?’ Mrs Roxburgh inquired, already preparing to disvest herself.

‘Oh dear, no!’ Mrs Merivale recoiled. ‘Of course not! You must forgive me.’ The shallow eyes flickered in search of someone who might accept blame for a
faux pas
.

Mrs Roxburgh stood arrested, and fell into one of those silences, the gravity or ‘mystery’ of which, the two ladies afterwards discussed. All the while the tones in the shawl had continued fluctuating, from sombre ash, through the living green which leaves flaunt in a wind, the whole slashed with black as far as the heavy woollen fringe. This too, was black, relieved by recurrent threads of green.

Mrs Roxburgh re-arranged her warm shawl. She sank deeper into it; until forcing herself to break her regrettable silence, she remarked, ‘It was hard to decide what to bring—how much for summer, how much for winter—on a voyage to the other hemisphere. My husband was all for restricting us to garments practically ready to be thrown away. But I insisted on bringing my very particular shawl!’ She laughed, and stopped.

Was she affected? frivolous? or did they detect an echo in her voice? The two visiting ladies were puzzled to the point of mild hostility; they turned to the woman’s husband for confirmation of all that is solid and practical in life.

This suited Mrs Roxburgh, for it had been her intention to draw him in.

‘Ellen is notoriously vain,’ he sighed, with a weariness or lack of interest which dismissed the whole situation.

In thus condemning his wife Mr Roxburgh might have gone beyond what the visitors’ sense of propriety allowed. But Mrs Roxburgh accepted her role as one of the several allotted to her; while the two ladies disguised their views behind a rattling social titter.

‘She decided that I was condemning her to rags to mortify her,’ Mr Roxburgh continued with a candour which confused, ‘when it was her intention’, he added in a burst of irony, ‘to make a conquest of my brother on our visit to him in Van Diemen’s Land.’

It stimulated interest at least.

‘Mrs Roxburgh had not made her brother-in-law’s acquaintance’, the brown eagle inquired, ‘before?’ But so discreet.

Mrs Roxburgh replied, ‘Never,’ and lapsed again.

She stood looking down, slightly smiling as she played with the fringe of her shawl. The whole scene might have been pre-arranged, superficial though the details were.

It was only in the darkening saloon that the incident of the afternoon assumed greater consequence. While the images recurred and floated and dissolved, her husband’s material form remained obstinately upright throughout, like a sense of duty, as he sat and read, or attempted to give her that impression. She was not altogether convinced; when he turned a page he did so absently, fraying an edge with a fingernail, making a dog’s-ear of a corner.

On and off, the native flower would blaze and intrude. They had found it the day before on one of their enforced rambles round the water’s edge at Sydney Cove, waiting for the breeze which would carry them home.

There were times when Mr Roxburgh held Captain Purdew responsible for the defected wind; at others he all but accused his wife; he had grown so devilishly irritable.

‘Yet nothing would satisfy you’, she had to remind him, ‘but that we should set out on this voyage across the world.’

‘Yes,’ he gasped, for the rocky slope robbed him of his breath and made him stumble, ‘it was my idea—and a bad one. I’ll go as far as to—admit
—that
!’

Each listened to the ferrule of Mr Roxburgh’s stick striking the adamant colonial stones, in some case scarring them, in others driving them deeper into barren sand, where the activity of ants illustrated in parallel the obtuseness of so much human endeavour.

Back turned to him as she climbed, Mrs Roxburgh’s voice whipped over her shoulder, as did the fringe of her loosely draped, mazy shawl. ‘Is it too much for you? There’s no need to follow, but I’m determined to see whatever lies beyond this knoll.’

An infernal wind blowing from the wrong quarter caused her voice to flicker like the landscape; the latter in no way appealed to him.

‘I am not impotent!’ he protested, his cheeks sunken as he worked at sucking on the air through blenching nostrils.

They struggled on, asunder and in silence, until he stood beside her on the rocky headland it had been her intention to conquer. In their common breathlessness they made a show of peering out at the scene spread before and below them.

‘I’ve not made you ill?’ she asked from between her teeth.

He did not answer, but accepted her fingers in his free hand.

‘A fine prospect’, he remarked, ‘for the future inhabitants of Sydney’ and added, ‘How happy I should be to wake, and find ourselves at home at Cheltenham.’

‘Oh, my dear!’ she exclaimed. ‘We are back where we began! When I thought the sight of this blue water would cure you at least temporarily.’

Disappointment made her withdraw her hand, to pick at the twigs of a bush which drought and wind had not prevented from putting out flowers: golden harsh-coated teasels alongside grey, hairy effigies of their former splendour.

In her distraction, Mrs Roxburgh’s fingers dwelt indiscriminately on the live and the dead. ‘You can’t deny that the visit to your brother made you happy.’

‘And you scarce at all.’

‘My whole concern was not to come between two brothers parted for years, who have a great affection for each other. So I went my own way. I discovered another world. Which will remain with me for life, I expect. Every frond, and shred of bark. My memories are more successful than my sketches. I know your opinion of those, and there I agree with you.’

In her attempt to lighten the situation colour must have flown into her cheeks; she intercepted that expression which suggested he would have drunk up every drop of an elixir he liked to believe might be his salvation.

‘Weren’t you a little jealous?’ he accused.

Her lips swelled with answers, unutterable because immodest. ‘Mr Roxburgh,’ she managed at last, ‘you sometimes ask the unkindest questions.’

There was no trace of archness in her addressing him thus: the austerity of his Christian name, together with the difference in their ages, discouraged her from using it.

‘You were, in fact, more than a little jealous,’ he persisted in baiting her; ‘and your riding off alone amongst tree-ferns and over mountains made it appear more obvious.’

Resisting the moan of protest she could feel rising in her throat, she tore one of the tassel-shaped flowers from a gnarled branch, and directed her attention at it. ‘I wonder what they call this extraordinary thing. We must try to find someone who knows.’

For the moment she was only conscious that his eyes continued looking at or into her; the stab of misery she experienced could not have been sharper.

‘And he went after you. To bring you back.’