A Fringe of Leaves
A F
RINGE OF
L
EAVES
Patrick White was born in England in 1912. He was taken to Australia (where his father owned a sheep farm) when he was six months old, but educated in England, at Cheltenham College and King’s College, Cambridge. He settled in London, where he wrote several unpublished novels, then served in the RAF during the war; he returned after the war to Australia.
He became the most considerable figure in modern Australian literature, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The great poet of Australian landscape, he has turned its vast empty spaces into great mythic landscapes of the soul. His position as man of letters was controversial, provoked by his acerbic, unpredictable public statements and his belief that it is eccentric individuals who offer the only hope of salvation. Technically brilliant, he is one modern novelist to whom the oft-abused epithet ‘visionary’ can safely be applied. He died in September 1990.
BY PATRICK WHITE
Fiction
Happy Valley
The Living And The Dead
The Aunt’s Story
The Tree Of Man
Voss
Riders In The Chariot
The Burnt Ones
The Solid Mandala
The Vivisector
The Eye Of The Storm
The Cockatoos
A Fringe Of Leaves
The Twyborn Affair
Three Uneasy Pieces
Memoirs Of Many In One
(Editor)
Autobiography
Flaws In The Glass
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Copyright Act 1968
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A Fringe of Leaves
ePub ISBN 9781742743707
Kindle ISBN 9781742743714
Published by Vintage 1997
8 10 9 7
Copyright © Patrick White 1976
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in Great Britain by
Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1976
Vintage
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Australia
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Random House UK Limited Reg. No. 954009
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 86471 148 6
CONTENTS
TO DESMOND DIGBY
A perfect Woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command.
William Wordsworth
RAT-WIFE
Humbly begging pardon—are your worships troubled with any gnawing things in the house?
ALMERS
Here? No, I don’t think so.
RAT-WIFE
If you had, it would be such a pleasure to rid your worships’ house of them.
RITA
Yes, yes, we understand. But we have nothing of the sort here.
Henrik Ibsen
If there is some true good in a man, it can only be unknown to himself.
Simone Weil
Love is your last chance. There is really nothing else on earth to keep you there.
Louis Aragon
As the carriage drew away from the Circular Wharf Mr Stafford Merivale tapped the back of his wife’s hand and remarked that they had done their duty.
‘No one’, Mrs Merivale replied, ‘can accuse me of neglecting duty.’ She might have pouted if inherent indolence had not prevailed, and a suspicion that those acquainted with her must know that her claim was not strictly true.
So she smoothed the kid into which her hands had been stuffed, and added, ‘At least we were, I think, agreeably entertained. And that is always compensation for any kind of inconvenience. Miss Scrimshaw,’ she asked, looking not quite at her friend, ‘weren’t we entertained?’
‘Oh yes,
most
agreeably,’ the latter answered in a rush, which transposed what must have been a deep voice into a higher, unnatural key. ‘Living at such a distance nobody can fail to be refreshed by visitors from Home. The pity is when their visits are so brief.’
Mrs Merivale decided to appear satisfied, while Miss Scrimshaw, obviously, was not. An atmosphere of unconfessed presentiment was intensified by the slight creaking of woodwork and friction of leather in the comfortably upholstered carriage. Rocked together and apart by the uneven surface of the street the occupants were at the mercy of the land as seaborne passengers are threatened by the waves.
‘Short visits make no demands,’ Mrs Merivale consoled herself. ‘Don’t you agree?’ Mr Merivale being a man, there was no question but that her remark was intended for Miss Scrimshaw.
‘Oh yes,’ she answered as expected, ‘there is that about short visits.’
In all the large circle of her acquaintance it was Miss Scrimshaw’s duty to agree, which was why her voice sounded only on some occasions her own. In exceptional circumstances, however, she would express an opinion, and it was this, together with her strong nose, long teeth, and Exalted Connection, which caused the Mrs Merivales of Sydney to glance not quite at their companion and hope they were accepted.
‘Who can guess,’ Mrs Merivale ventured to pursue the subject, ‘from exchanging a few friendly words, with strangers, on a ship’s deck, what demands a longer visit might entail.’
At that point the carriage lurched.
‘Oh no, people can be frightful!’ Miss Scrimshaw asserted, rather flat, but surprisingly loud. ‘I do not believe one will ever arrive at the end of people’s frightfulness.’
This was an exceptional circumstance, and it made Mrs Merivale quail inside her fur palatine.
‘I don’t know,’ her husband began, who had been content until now to leave it to the ladies, and to sit staring in transparent pleasure at whatever object presented itself the other side of the carriage window; ‘I don’t believe I’ve ever come across a fellow in whom I didn’t find a fair measure of good.’
There was so much that his sex and nature must always prevent him understanding, the two ladies were at once reduced to a collusive silence.
Mrs Merivale looked in some detachment at her husband’s hand as it rested against the window-jamb, the skin altered inexorably by those first years in a harsh land into something almost part of it. Mrs Merivale shuddered to remember a lizard which had once stared at her, through bleached grass, from a scorched earth.
Mr Stafford Merivale was of that stamp of English gentleman, not so gentle as not to be firm, not too positive, yet not altogether negative, who will transplant reliably from his native soil to the most unpromising pockets of the globe. Engaged by the Crown as a surveyor, he had already investigated vast tracts of the colony of New South Wales, and on one occasion pushed as far as the more recent settlement at Moreton Bay. His strength lay in his capacity for enduring boredom, his wife suspected, quite overlooking the possibility of a relationship with a landscape, an unprepossessing one at that. By now Mr Merivale was as tanned as leather, as chapped as canvas, practically a fitting of his customary saddle. Mrs Merivale traced a seam, enjoying the texture of her newly imported merino gown. For a brief, unhappy period after joining her husband in the country of his fate or choice, she had been persuaded to follow him into its surprising hinterland. She had jolted sulkily behind him on a dray, and made a somewhat unwilling effort at bivouacking. There had been the episode of the lizard, and many others too awful to remember. Mrs Merivale was an adept at closing her mind to awfulness. Divine mercy, besides, had blessed her very soon with a delicate state of health, so that she was able to retire to a villa at the Glebe, and have the girl draw its curtains almost as at Winchester. As for Mr Merivale, he was too absorbed in his man’s world of levels and distances, of soil and water, to notice her absence overmuch, but when released from official duties, would make his way to the villa at the Glebe to fulfil those other duties of a husband. His wife submitted, while the washstand-set unpleasantly rattled, and a foreign skin caught in her satin coverlet.
Now as Mrs Merivale sat tracing her seam, she tried to think of the answer she would make to the man she had elected to marry.
‘Miss Scrimshaw did not mean,’ she explained with ever such patience, ‘she did not mean that
all
people are
wholly
frightful.’
But for some reason, for the moment, her friend refused to collaborate.
‘Almost all!’ Miss Scrimshaw persisted.
Mrs Merivale was taken with a laughter, which would heave itself up at times, in wheezy, but fairly refined bursts, out of the depths of her stays, shocking in anyone normally so placid. ‘Oh, my dear,’ she cried, ‘it is the north-easter! It has given you a liver!’ But at once she wondered how she had dared, remembering Miss Scrimshaw’s Connection: the Honourable Mrs Chetwynd of Saffron Walden.
‘When I proposed this little expedition to
Bristol Maid
, to speed the Roxburghs on their way, I didn’t expect we should be plunged in gloom,’ Mr Merivale remarked, his own good humour protecting him from becoming more than superficially involved.
‘How you misunderstand, Stafford!’ his wife protested and frowned.
It was her favourite expression for use upon her husband, although if asked to elaborate, her own understanding might not have stood the strain.
As for Miss Scrimshaw, she fell to contemplating her lap, and answered with recovered meekness, ‘Almost everybody, I imagine, is subject to their fits of gloom.’
She was dressed entirely in brown, with an aureole of brown moiré roses parcelled into the scuttle of her bonnet. It made her complexion, if not livery, browner than it should have been.
Mrs Merivale thought she recognized, below the hem of her friend’s mantle, a skirt she herself had discarded, and was at once rewarded by this glimpse of her own generosity.
‘Miss Scrimshaw, like myself, probably felt most deeply for those poor souls in their wretched little tub, and all the miles of tedium and danger between them and what they love.’ Mrs Merivale in her enclosed and comfortable carriage allowed herself the luxury of pity. ‘Much as I dislike my present surroundings I would not undertake the voyage home except in some fast-sailing barque equipped to accommodate passengers. I cannot endure discomfort, as you know.’
She might have been accusing her husband, but was in fact frowning through the window at a carter who, in the effort to turn, had jammed his dray across the street, threatening to bar their passage.
Mr Merivale cleared his throat. ‘
Bristol Maid
reached Hobart Town in passable time—I have it from Captain Purdew—and without undue incident. With the same good seamanship, there is no reason to believe she’ll come to grief on the return voyage.’
Nobody spoke at first.
Then Mrs Merivale reiterated, ‘Had it been myself, I should have waited for a passage in some fast-sailing barque.’ Her head swayed tragically, not so much for the fate of her new-found acquaintances as for the tactics of the offending carter struggling to manœuvre his dray.
‘It must have been the brother,’ Miss Scrimshaw decided. ‘It is embarrassing—as I know—to depend indefinitely on the good will of a blood relation.’
Mr Merivale laughed. ‘Austin Roxburgh and his brother Garnet have always been devoted to each other. That is why Austin, in spite of failing health, decided to make the voyage out to Van Diemen’s Land—to enjoy the pleasure of seeing his brother—I don’t like to say it, but must be candid—for what could be the last time.’
‘With such an affection for his brother it is all the more extraordinary that an ailing man should hasten to sail in a brig the size of
Bristol Maid
.’ Miss Scrimshaw was ferreting after something. ‘Perhaps,’ she hesitated, ‘it was
Mrs
Roxburgh who made the decision.’
It was enough for Mrs Merivale to lose interest in the carter and his dray. ‘Why ever now should Mrs Roxburgh?’ She looked to Miss Scrimshaw for some revelation of a stunning nature.
‘Mrs Roxburgh may not have been so affectionately disposed towards her husband’s brother.’ Miss Scrimshaw’s voice slurred, and she blushed for what was more sibylline inspiration than solidly founded reasoning.
Mrs Merivale rounded on her. ‘There was no hint today that Mrs Roxburgh and her brother-in-law had fallen out.’
‘That may be,’ Miss Scrimshaw confessed, staring, and not, into the street. ‘No,’ she ejaculated, as though about to disparage her own instinct. ‘Nor do I wish to cast aspersions of any kind on any of your acquaintances.
You
must realize, Mr Merivale, it was a mere theory, regrettably flimsy, which formed itself in the course of conversation.’
Mrs Merivale was all admiration for her friend’s agility in extricating herself from possible blame; her own lips moved like those of a ventriloquist in time with his knowing doll’s pronouncement.
While Mr Merivale might have withdrawn behind a curtain of the past: when he spoke, his speech had slowed. ‘I can’t say I was close to Austin. His wife I never met until today. The brother, Garnet, was my friend.’
For a moment it seemed as though this honourable and uncomplicated man had grown disgruntled too, for the way fate had dealt with him. If his mouth had tightened, his ordinarily gaunt, erect head lolled softly on his shoulders, the eyes half-closed on a deeper than antipodean shade, his memory apparently dwelling on images more convincing than any the present had to offer. Each of the ladies was conscious of a change of climate, although neither received the same sting of wet oak-leaves on parted lips.
‘Garnet and I rode together over half Hampshire when we were boys,’ Stafford Merivale recollected. ‘First, on shaggy ponies. Later to hounds. Often when we were grown, we would hack just for the fun of it, over the downs, and along the Roman road. I can remember Garnet putting his horse at a hedge as wide as a hay-wain, somewhere this side of Stockbridge. One moment, there he was, beside me on the sunken road. The next, I heard him laughing the other side of a thorn wall.’
‘And you?’ Miss Scrimshaw inquired. ‘Did you follow him?’
‘I was always a plodder,’ Mr Merivale replied.
Nor was the spinster’s respect diminished.
‘Austin now, was of another temperament—a different strain, one might say,’ the surveyor continued. ‘Always had his nose in a book. I scarcely saw him, excepting when he would come outside, poking about in the garden. Not
working
at it. He was delicate, you see. At one stage he was thought to be sick of a consumption. Then, his heart was bad. And the strange part was, it seemed to draw him closer to his very unlikely brother. As though he hoped to borrow some of Garnet’s health and strength. I think I was jealous of Austin.’ Stafford Merivale smiled, and paused. ‘He studied law. But did not practise. His health would not have permitted. And married this devoted young woman we have just met.’
‘Mrs Austin Roxburgh,’ Miss Scrimshaw gravely asked, ‘was she also Hampshire born?’
‘I never heard of her’, Mr Merivale replied, ‘anywhere round Winchester.’
‘I understood Mrs Roxburgh to be from Cornwall.’ Mrs Merivale never missed reminding her husband of anything he happened to forget.
‘A
remote
county!’ Miss Scrimshaw was perhaps reinforcing her ‘theory’. ‘Of dark people. I cannot remember ever having been on intimate terms with any individual of Cornish blood. All my own family’, she added, ‘were fair. Both brothers and sisters. Especially the daughters of cousins. With faint tea-rose complexions. I was the only brown one.’
Mrs Merivale might have felt chilled had she not realized at once that Miss Scrimshaw’s mind had strayed to her Connection, the tilted lady of Saffron Walden. In the circumstances, Mrs Merivale warmed to poor Miss Scrimshaw, youngest of a clergyman’s protracted family. None had heard tell how she had reached New South Wales, nor taken her deep enough into their hearts to call her by her first name. (Whether out of wariness or cruelty her parents had in fact christened their tenth Decima.)
Miss Scrimshaw, her inward eye fixed on fair estates, might have elaborated on the darker side of Cornwall had not Mr Merivale chosen the moment to propound something most unexpected.
He sat forward, hands clasped between his knees, the better to accuse, it would have seemed. ‘I don’t believe you ladies formed a high opinion of the Roxburghs.’