A Fringe of Leaves (52 page)

The Commandant could not help but notice the pulse beating in the throat of this woman who moved and disturbed him more perhaps than domesticity and his official position warranted.

Soon after, the company was summoned to what Miss Scrimhaw described as a
déjeuner à la fourchette
, which they gladly demolished, and Captain Lovell took leave of his tearful wife and excited children.

But as he stood in the moored skiff his attention may have been concentrated rather, on the woman in black.

Mrs Roxburgh was standing alone at the bulwark, staring it seemed, at the foreshore of grey mangroves, at their oily reflections in muddy water, for the sun had gone in and the sky removed the last of its blue twitching streamers from the brown surface of the river. So the Commandant observed, so too, Mr Jevons, so Miss Scrimshaw, more closely than any. She would always remember what sounded like a sudden cry of pain, as quickly suppressed as it was briefly uttered.

She went forward to offer sympathy and support, but Mrs Roxburgh had veiled herself; her step was firm, her voice dry and steady. ‘Let us go below,’ she decided. ‘We have said goodbye. I have done my duty, I hope, by everybody.’

During the afternoon the two ladies rested in the cabin allotted to them. Mrs Roxburgh, in the end, must have fallen into a heavy sleep. When she awoke, her companion had removed herself, no doubt to attend to the duties for which she had been engaged.

In the diminishing light the narrow cabin was yet so neat, so admirably accoutred in teak and brass, the sound of water on the vessel’s timbers so unrelated to the terrors which the more demoniac side of the ocean’s nature can rouse in the voyager, she should have had fewer qualms for her re-entry into the rational world of civilized beings. If misgivings persisted, they were occasioned more than anything by her friend’s capricious behaviour of earlier that day. What seemed like Miss Scrimshaw’s renunciation of the kindly, but rather boring merchant, together with the spinster’s uncharacteristically indiscreet treatment, if not actual patronage, Mrs Roxburgh ventured, of herself, was something which frankly puzzled her.

But she continued only vaguely puzzling as she rose in the dusk, and soothed by the sea sounds, the rattling of brass handles, the voices of the crew muffled by distance, refreshed her face and hands with eau de Cologne, and changed her dress. Not until then did she light a candle, the better to attend to her still fairly scanty hair, and was seated at the glass coaxing a ringlet or two when her companion returned.

‘Not in the dark, but almost!’ Miss Scrimshaw accused. ‘Oh,’ she exclaimed, ‘you are wearing the gown I always thought would suit you!’

‘I put it on,’ Mrs Roxburgh replied, ‘because it is my only change of clothes.’

‘It sets you off, if I may say so.’

Mrs Roxburgh did look unwillingly resplendent in the garnet silk. As for Miss Scrimshaw, if she had changed her dress during Mrs Roxburgh’s nap, it was for yet another brown, to which she now added as finishing touch a string of onyx recklessly dashed over her head.

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.

He did not see that Kate kicked Tom, and that Tom retaliated with a punch; they were in a different orbit. Nor did Miss Scrimshaw attempt to enforce the discipline she advocated: she was too engrossed, her onyx going click click, shooting down possible doubts; for however much crypto-eagles aspire to soar, and do in fact, through thoughtscape and dream, their human nature cannot but grasp at any circumstantial straw which may indicate an ordered universe.

Patrick White

T
HE
A
UNT’S
S
TORY

With the death of her mother, middle-aged Theodora Goodman contemplates the desert of her life. Freed from the trammels of convention she leaves Australia for a European tour and becomes involved with the residents of a small French hotel. But creating other people’s lives, even in love and pity, can lead to madness. Her ability to reconcile joy and sorrow is an unbearable torture to her. On the journey home, Theodora finds there is little to choose between the reality of illusion and the illusion of reality. She looks for peace, even if it is beyond the borders of insanity …

‘Patrick White makes us care about human beings of all kinds who have themselves failed to learn to care, failed to break through the barriers of class and money and egotism and bitterness and playacting, who have never ceased to feel lost and alone. And he makes us care about them without ever sparing their frailties and follies a single lash of his supple, witty, forked tongue’
Angus Wilson,
Observer

‘A
tour de force
of the most unexpecting kind’
Daily Telegraph

Patrick White

T
HE
E
YE OF THE
S
TORM

In the Sydney suburb of Centennial Park, three nurses, a housekeeper and a solicitor attend to Elizabeth Hunter as her son and daughter convene at her deathbed. But, in death as in life, Elizabeth remains a destructive force on those who surround her.

The Eye of the Storm
is a savage exploration of family relationships--and the sharp undercurrents of love and hate, comedy and tragedy, which define them.

‘One seeks among debased superlatives for words that would convey the grandeur of
The Eye of the Storm …
its high intellect, its fidelity to our victories and confusions, its beauty and heroic maturity … every passage merits attention and gives satisfaction’
New York Times Book Review

‘In his major post-war novels, the pain and earnestness of the individual’s quest for ‘meaning and design’ can be felt more intensely than perhaps anywhere else in con temporary Western prose’
Sunday Times