A Fringe of Leaves (4 page)

‘Your brother Garnet could not have been kinder. Everybody was very kind. It was unfortunate—foolish of me—to lose my way—and let myself be thrown. Poor Merle was on other occasions the gentlest creature.’

‘But Garnet found you. And brought you back.’

‘Oh dear, yes! Yes!’

She almost threw away the flower she was twirling between her fingers, for it had grown sharp-toothed and vicious.

‘Won’t you look at me?’ he asked.

She did so, with the result that they were forced simultaneously into a bungling attempt to prove their love for each other, their lips as bitter-tasting as the leaves they had torn from exotic trees on arrival in an unknown country, their cheeks freshly contoured to fingers which might have been exploring them for the first time. She prayed it would remain thus; she was afraid of what she might find were she ever to arrive at the depths of his eyes.

When he had mumbled a few last fragmented words, she who usually took the lead when it came to practical moves suggested, ‘We should go back, don’t you think? Perhaps we shall hear we are to sail. Otherwise I’ll begin to suspect that Captain Purdew and Mr Courtney are in league against us.’

‘Two such honest men,’ he murmured, his conscience still bruised; and followed her.

Conscience for conscience, her own had been stricken to discover she disliked her brother-in-law on sight: his cleft chin, the rather too full, lower lip. In addition to aggressive health and spirits, Mr Garnet Roxburgh paraded the assured insolence of a lapsed gentleman.

‘I hope you will be happy at “Dulcet”, and consider it your home as long as you are here.’ The exertion of opening a jammed window turned admirable sentiments into a command.

As the window shot upward she was again conscious of wrists which had repelled her as he sat holding the reins on the drive from Hobart Town. But she must not continue in this most unreasonable dislike. Beyond the window an orchard, its green fruit glistening amongst leaves transparent in a western light, showed every sign of expert husbandry. Again she experienced a twinge, from contrasting in her mind this opulent scene with another in which damsons racked by winds from across the moor clustered with an ancient, woody pear tree at the side of a cottage, in rough-hewn, weather-blackened stone. Her hands might still have been red and chapped. She hid them before realizing her foolishness, then resolved that in future her heart would have no room for unreasonable dislike and envy.

Until now, far removed from the fat pastures of Van Diemen’s Land, leading her husband over the stony ground of this other, more forbidding landscape, Mrs Roxburgh could only bitterly admit that she had failed in her resolve, and that the moral strength for which she prayed constantly eluded her.

Thus chastened, she continued stubbing her boots against the stones, until able to turn and announce to Mr Roxburgh, ‘See, my dear? There she is! It was not so far after all.’

Since a wind from the right quarter proved as elusive as the moral strength for which Mrs Roxburgh prayed, they resumed their life of waiting in the narrow saloon and the improvised cabin at the farther end, and on the evening after the visit of the surveyor and his two ladies, there was only the native flower to trouble memory, or illuminate human frailty. Mrs Roxburgh was inclined to wonder at herself for keeping the golden teasel, but Spurgeon the lugubrious fellow who acted as their steward had provided an earthenware jar in which she had stubbornly arranged her spoil, and there it stood, as stubbornly, its blunt club throbbing with the last light reflected off the water outside.

When Mr Roxburgh, without interrupting his reading, inquired, ‘Did somebody identify your specimen?’

Although unprepared for this sudden interest she was not altogether taken by surprise: she had grown to accept his intrusion on her thoughts, or those of them which lay closest to the surface.

She replied, ‘I didn’t think to ask,’ while examining with displeasure her rather too broad, if not unshapely hands.

‘Like all the flowers of this country—or the few we’ve seen on our walks—it is more strange than beautiful,’ Mr Roxburgh pronounced.

‘I haven’t made up my mind. Memorable, certainly.’ She wondered whether her voice sounded as hard and dry as she felt it become in her throat. ‘Whether beautiful, or only strange, I doubt I shall ever forget their flowers.’

Yes, her voice sounded ugly, doubtless due to a constriction of the throat, as her locked hands sped their becalmed brig, her thoughts in tow, till she was again seated beside the silver kettle, behind brocade curtains which the servant had drawn, listening for some indication that her husband would join her at the tea-table, or whether she would conduct the silent ritual of taking tea alone.

When Mr Roxburgh spoke again she was not immediately conscious that they were aboard a berthed ship, or that he was reading aloud from the book in his lap.

‘“… felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,

atque metus omnes et inexorabile fatum

subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari …”

Splendid stuff! Did you hear, Ellen?’

‘Yes. I heard. But shall not understand unless you have the goodness to translate. I thought you would have known that.’ Now she merely sounded like a peevish woman.

‘As you are in almost every respect admirable, one tends to forget that you don’t always understand.’

While he gave the lines his renewed consideration, humming to himself from behind his moustache, drumming on the page with his fingertips, she was forced up from her chair to fidget restlessly in the narrow space in which they were confined.

‘Perhaps this will satisfy you,’ he ventured at last, ‘without doing justice to the original verses. “Happy is he” he no more than muttered, ‘ “who has unveiled the cause of things, and who can ignore inexorable Fate and the roar of insatiate Hell.” ’ Mr Roxburgh coughed for his own efforts on concluding them.

Then he said almost immediately, ‘The light which prevails in Virgil makes that black streak seem blacker.’ There followed a sweeping of the page as though to rid it of crumbs. ‘I don’t believe he feared death.’ Again a scratching or a sweeping. ‘For that matter—although I’ve been threatened several times—and am prepared to be gathered in by—our Maker—death has always appeared to me something of a literary conceit.’ His laughter came out as a high neighing, so that her heart, turning to water, lapped against the timbers of the stays in which she was boarded up.

‘I should modify that, I suppose,’ Mr Roxburgh conceded, ‘by adding: in connection with myself.’ Once more the desperate neighing of some gaunt-ribbed gelding.

She had halted close behind his chair, and leant, and put her arms around him, as though attempting to cleave to him as she had sworn. ‘It’s my loss that I can’t share your pleasures in the way you would wish.’ Her hot mouth drove her regret into the crown of his head. ‘It was too late when I started to learn. I shall only ever know what my instinct tells me.’

‘I would not have it otherwise.’

She suffered him to twist the rings on her fingers.

‘There is almost nothing’, she sighed, ‘which cannot be changed for the better.’

But in her own case, a kind of sensual apathy intervened as often as not between the intention and the act. Or, in the beginning, life to be lived.

He had indeed lent her books, first of all the little one he called his ‘crib’ to the
Bucolics
when she brought the tray to the room. She had scarce read it, for it made her nervous to have a gentleman’s book in her keeping, and herself with little enough of education. Her hands were rough besides, from working in the fields, and milking when the wind blew from the north, or driving the cart to market at Penzance.

‘I’ll read ’n,’ she promised rashly, ‘but not while there’s daylight, and the hay not in.’

She went away, proud if fearful of the book he had lent her.

Mr Roxburgh must have felt incommoded by her leaning on him; he started fretting, and shrugging her off. ‘Why then, Ellen, don’t they weigh anchor?’ he asked as though he had never wondered at it before this evening.

‘Because the wind is not from the right quarter,’ she repeated with an equanimity she had cultivated, while settling the collar of the overcoat which her embrace had disarranged.

The flower glowing in its chipped jar had been practically extinguished by the close of day; what sounded like a rat scampered somewhere through the dusk, back to business; water slithering on the vessel’s hull might have created an illusion of motion for any two souls less experienced in listening for it. The Roxburghs’ hearing was so finely tuned they all but jumped at sound of a pair of boots thudding down the companion-ladder, and when a hand rattled the loose door-knob, and a beard blundered through the slit of a doorway, and the face of Mr Courtney the mate became distinguishable, they were no less embarrassed for their shadowy thoughts.

Mr Courtney was so solidly built, anything overwrought or inessential could only expect to be skittled. It was unlikely that the mate’s own mind would ever wander out of bounds, except perhaps during sleep, heaving in those more incalculable waters like one of the whales it delighted him to watch.

Mr Courtney spouted rather than spoke, ‘Captain sends his compliments, but was called away, and you mustn’t wait dinner for him.’ As one accustomed to give orders rather than deliver speeches, the mate drew breath. ‘Other news—wind is veering, and unless we’re out of luck we’ll sail at dawn.’

Cap in hand, Mr Courtney continued standing. The upper, whiter part of his forehead glimmered in the dusk above a leather mask fringed with whiskers, the effect of which might have made him look sinister had it not been for the ingenuous eyes. On discovering that Mr Courtney was the least sinister of men, Mrs Roxburgh had felt free during daylit moments to examine the texture of his weathered skin, for her own secret pleasure and his hardly concealed discomfiture. In spite of the broad wedding band the mate was not at ease with ladies.

But rank compelled him to make the occasional effort. ‘Has the feller forgot to bring candles?’ His Adam’s apple jerked it out painfully.

‘On the contrary,’ Mrs Roxburgh answered, brighter than before, ‘we’ve had them all this while, but preferred to enjoy the evening light and our conversation.’ She patted her husband’s arm, asking him to support her, not so much in a falsehood as out of social expediency.

‘Nothing could have lit our gloom better than the news you’ve brought us,’ the gentleman contributed.

Mr Courtney grunted and laughed together. ‘Hasn’t Sydney found favour with you?’

‘I can neither admire nor dislike what irritation prevents me seeing.’

Her husband’s gravity so abashed the mate, Mrs Roxburgh lit the pair of yellow candles to alleviate a situation.

His skin ablaze, Mr Courtney announced, ‘I’ll leave you, then. There’s things to attend to. And the feller’ll be fetching down your dinner in a jiffy.’ It implied that himself had found good reason why he should not sit down with the gentry.

The instant after, he was gone; his great boots could be heard maltreating the timbers.

Mrs Roxburgh’s spirits soared. She could have sung, and literally, but her music-making had never been admired. Instead her face reflected the joy she hoped to find in her husband, and indeed, the weight had been lifted even from Austin Roxburgh.

So much so, he was moved closer to his wife, laughing without constraint, and pinched her on the chin. She might have been a child, not theirs, certainly (he would have been more guarded in the presence of their own) but a sympathetic substitute who would not grow up to accuse him, however mutely, of the folly of bringing her into the world.

‘I can’t express my feelings adequately,’ Mr Roxburgh blurted.

That was obvious enough as he teetered with a joy and relief to which he was unaccustomed, the long, fastidious hands inspired to gestures equally foreign to them. The husband had never danced with his wife, yet at the moment, she sensed, they almost might have begun. Given more suitable conditions, she would have guided him through a few judicious steps guaranteed not to unbalance his importance or his dignity. Nobody must see him without those.

Instead Mrs Roxburgh made the effort to control her own obstreperous exhilaration. ‘Quietly! Quietly, though!’ she advised. ‘You might bring on one of your attacks.’

‘My attacks!’ he snorted.

At his moments of extravagance he wanted no one to present him with the bill; he was wealthy enough to ignore reason when it suited him.

‘When you are so much improved,’ she remarked perhaps imprudently.

Austin Roxburgh was so far provoked that he pouted. To be coddled was intolerable; on the other hand, to be ignored might have struck him as worse.

‘Do you know where your drops are?’ she persisted in her role of solicitous wife.

‘Of course,’ he snapped, yet was in sufficient doubt to start working a couple of fingers around inside a waistcoat pocket.

Mrs Roxburgh touched him to dispel an anxiety she could see rising. Her own eyes were filling and frowning at the same time; she too may have felt in need of some drug, tenderness rather than digitalis. But whatever the illness from which either suffered, the interior of the wooden ship shimmered an instant with stimulated hopes and tranquillized fears.

When footsteps were again heard, of a flatter, more slithery persuasion than before. The ‘fellow’ who waited on them had taken advantage of the captain’s absence to ease a bunion by leaving off his boots. The horny feet slapping the boards gave out a sound not unlike that of a razor in conjunction with the strop.