The Fringe of Leaves Read online

  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.’

  ‘Oh, Stafford!’

  ‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say you actively disliked,’ the vexatious man allowed, before his prosecution was interrupted.

  The carter ahead of them had succeeded in bringing round his dray to a point from which his sweating Punches could strain past them down the narrow street, and the carriage surged forward, throwing the guilty females together in a tangle of chains and ribbons and a spray of protest.

  ‘Only that you didn’t take to them. At all,’ their accuser unkindly insisted, himself bobbing like an uncontrolled marionette.

  ‘I will not be persecuted, Stafford—so very horridly!’

  ‘Such a distinguished gentleman and admirable character as Mr Roxburgh appeared to be!’ Mr Merivale’s charge of what amounted to injustice had made Miss Scrimshaw breathless. ‘And such an enjoyable experience. The little brig—the captain—Purdew, was it? An obviously open-hearted fellow.’ The spinster had a weakness for the sea, and suffered a cruel blow as a girl when a lieutenant of the Royal Navy was carried off by a fever at Antigua.

  Now the carriage was settling itself into its regular roll, and the ladies might have recovered their balance had not the relentless Mr Merivale fired a further shot. ‘At least Mrs Roxburgh, I could tell, was not to your taste.’

  Which was tasteless on his part, not to say strange in one so innocent.

  ‘What can possess you, Stafford?’

  Miss Scrimshaw, on the other hand, was silenced for the present.

  ‘And she as pretty as a picture,’ Mr Merivale declared with a courtliness which came naturally.

  ‘Pretty? Oh, well, pretty!’ his wife conceded.

  ‘And elegant besides,’ the gentleman added.

  ‘She was wearing an unusually beautiful shawl.’ Mrs Merivale hankered after material things.

  ‘A pretty woman, yes. But Mrs Roxburgh is not what I would call beautiful,’ Miss Scrimshaw announced after giving the matter deepest thought. ‘Beauty is something grander, nobler,’ here her head was invisibly tossed, ‘and is in no need of a fancy shawl to remind us of its presence.’

  ‘Mrs Roxburgh is a woman, not a marble statue.’

  Mrs Merivale was pretty certain that her husband’s vision was un-draped.

  Miss Scrimshaw must have realized too, for she blushed and quickly added, ‘What I meant to suggest was that true beauty is spiritual. There was nothing spiritual in Mrs Roxburgh.’

  Miss Scrimshaw herself had composed verses when a young girl and wreathed them in watercolour violets and pansies.

  ‘Would you say she is a lady?’ Mrs Merivale ventured.

  ‘I would not care to give an opinion,’ Miss Scrimshaw discreetly answered.

  Mrs Merivale at once recoiled as though it were someone else who had asked such a vulgar question.

  ‘She was a very quiet, well-spoken person. Or so it appeared to me at least.’ Mr Merivale by now hoped to end what he had started.

  ‘Still waters, as they say.’ Launched into philosophy, his wife felt justified in looking languid.

  But Miss Scrimshaw had begun to kindle. ‘For my part,’ she announced, enveloping the others with her air, ‘I would never trust a silent woman.’

  ‘I should have thought it a distinct virtue.’ Mr Merivale’s throat made it sound the drier.

  ‘Mrs Roxburgh holds her silence at moments when people in general would offer candour. There are silences and silences, I mean.’

  Although Mrs Merivale was not at all sure what her friend did mean, she nodded her head in vigorous support.

  ‘Mrs Roxburgh is something of a mystery,’ Miss Scrimshaw added with a sigh.

  ‘If you want my honest opinion,’ Mr Merivale said, ‘the ladies haven’t left her a leg to stand on.’

  Miss Scrimshaw hung her head. ‘It is not possible to practise charity every hour of the twenty-four.’ Then plaiting her gloved fingers, ‘Please don’t think’, she begged, ‘that I exempt myself from criticism of the faults I share with Mrs Roxburgh.’

  It was certainly one of her days. They did not know what to make of her.

  Mr Merivale’s present intention was to drive round by the Brickfields and call at the house of one Delaney who had undertaken to collect a leg of pork from a Toongabbie farmer.

  ‘I do hope I shall not put you to any inconvenience,’ Miss Scrimshaw remarked.

  She had begun to fidget, and arrange herself, and sigh for Church Hill, where she lodged with a widow, a decent soul, though not a lady.

  ‘No inconvenience at all,’ assured the blander Mrs Merivale, who could find little uses for people, and had not finished with Miss Scrimshaw yet. ‘I took it for granted you would dine with us. We have a pigeon pie.’ She had, besides, her mousseline de soie which needed letting out. ‘And spend the evening, agreeably. At cards. Or music.’

  ‘That would, indeed, be agreeable,’ Miss Scrimshaw replied with heartiness enough to suggest that she was unaware of the catch.

  Amongst her extensive acquaintance her needle was in almost as constant demand as her tongue, for which she accepted remuneration, usually in kind, though preferably in envelopes, turning her head the other way.

  This evening, however, it was less Miss Scrimshaw’s needle than her subtlety that Mrs Merivale hoped to encourage. The thought of it started her nervously coughing and rummaging for a pastille, if she had one.

  ‘The window, Stafford!’ she complained, as though a particle of dust might have affected her precious throat; for they had begun to approach the Brickfields in the neighbourhood of which the fellow Delaney had chosen to live.

  This Delaney, an emancipist, had become finally a man of substance from being engaged in the carrying trade and whatever other gainful ploys nobody was altogether certain. In any event, he throve, though his house, neat and substantial enough behind its whitewashed fence, remained complacently countrified rather than pretentious in the urban style. As the carriage approached, a brace of speckled pullets could be seen fossicking at the entrance to a yard, and an old, matted sheepdog lifted his head from out of the dust to hawk up a few rheumy barks.

  Mr Merivale began to grunt and unfold his long legs. Since the raising of the window, the enclosed carriage was more than ever its own world; to leave it amounted to an emigration.

  ‘Will you come in?’ he asked his wife, lowering his head as he trod out backwards.

  The coachman had clambered down, though the master was not of those who accept assistance.

  ‘Oh dear, no!’ Mrs Merivale’s nature made it short rather than emphatic.

  ‘She will be disappointed.’

  ‘She would stuff us with plum-cake. Before our dinner. And get us tipsy on her ginger wine.’ Here Mrs Merivale looked to Miss Scrimshaw, who responded with a wicked pursing of the lips.

  ‘She will be disappointed,’ Mr Merivale reminded fruitlessly.

  Mrs Merivale watched with scorn as her husband strolled towards the rear of the house with that elaborate informality gentlemen in the colonies assumed for their inferiors. At the same time a hand, bunching the holland curtains, disclosed her face at its post, a desperate, mulberry-tinted pudding.

  All this occurred during only a matter of seconds before Mrs Merivale’s ordinarily sluggish mind was sucked back by her intention into the stuffy, confessional gloom of the box in which she and Miss Scrimshaw were seated.

  Now that the moment had arrived, her throat was contracting, bloodless; her heart went fut fut fut inside the layers of fur, merino, caoutchouc, and flesh.

  Mrs Merivale wet her lips for a start. ‘To return, Miss Scrimshaw, to the subject of Mrs Roxburgh.’

  Th
at her companion appeared not to have heard made Mrs Merivale tremble.

  ‘I would be most interested to know,’ she faltered, ‘in what way,’ placing her words as though they had been ivory chess-pieces, ‘this Mrs Roxburgh struck you as being—as you said’, Mrs Merivale became aware of the heat of her own breath, ‘a mystery,’ she heard herself practically hiss.

  Now that it was out, her own inquisitiveness left her feeling distressingly exposed, a situation intensified by Miss Scrimshaw’s continued failure to express either interest or approval. But no professional pythoness can afford to remain indefinitely silent, and turning at last in the direction of the suppliant she trained on her a pair of eyes, normally piercing and lustrous, but now so far shuttered by the lids, they might not be prepared to illuminate more than half a secret.

  ‘I cannot give you an exact account, Mrs Merivale,’ she said, ‘of the impression Mrs Roxburgh made on me. Unless—to put it at its plainest—she reminded me of a clean sheet of paper which might disclose an invisible writing—if breathed upon. Do you understand?’

  Mrs Merivale did not.

  And Miss Scrimshaw said, ‘If I were able to explain away a mystery, then it would no longer be one, would it?’

  Such horrid logic confounded Mrs Merivale. ‘Ah,’ she murmured, and her lips hung open in a manner she herself might have found vulgar in anybody else.

  ‘But’, she pleaded, ‘can you give me no inkling?’ Mrs Merivale’s ‘inkling’ tinkled piteously inside the carriage.

  ‘I will tell you one thing,’ Miss Scrimshaw vouchsafed. ‘Every woman has secret depths with which even she, perhaps, is unacquainted, and which sooner or later must be troubled.’

  Mrs Merivale was terrified, who had never, ever, been ‘troubled’, unless during the journey on a dray into the interior of New South Wales; and would not have dared ask Miss Scrimshaw whether she suspected her too, of having the invisible writing on her.

  ‘But this Mrs Roxburgh!’ she could not suppress what emerged as a wail.

  ‘Ah,’ Miss Scrimshaw replied, ‘who am I to say? I only had the impression that Mrs Roxburgh could feel life has cheated her out of some ultimate in experience. For which she would be prepared to suffer, if need be.’

  Perhaps it occurred to the sibyl that she was unveiling herself along with Mrs Roxburgh, for she hesitated, then hurried on. ‘Of course, as we all know, any of us may suffer, at any moment, worse than we ever bargained for. And will continue to offer ourselves, out of bravado.’

  Mrs Merivale might have remained confused, not to say alarmed, by her friend’s esoteric confidences, had not her husband, in company with the emancipist Delaney, appeared round the corner of the latter’s house. As always when in any way rattled, Mrs Merivale was materially reinstated by the presence of the man she had married, though she would have preferred not to have him carrying the Toongabbie pork, inelegantly, by the ears of the sack in which it had travelled.

  The two men approached. The emancipist, a reddish, freckled individual, might have behaved obsequiously had he not done so well for himself. Bull-shaped, he was none the less got up in cloth of superior quality with a flash of gold across the waistcoat. If the rim of his neckcloth was soiled, as it was soon possible to observe, it went to show that the habit of acting had survived that of giving orders.

  When the two had shared the last of some masculine joke, and put it away, and Delaney had made his last grab at the sack, the weight of which he only half-intended to take, they arrived at the carriage, where the emancipist stuck in his head, and asked somewhat rudely, Mrs Merivale thought, whether the ladies would step inside for a bite of something.

  ‘Oh dear, no,’ she replied, ‘and the girls waiting to dish up our dinner!’

  From her throne she returned the stare of this preposterous subject, too round-eyed and solemn for the size of the favour he was asking. But the emancipist wasn’t Irish for nothing: foreseeing how he would be received, his mouth had shut in a saucy grin as he reached the end of his proposition.

  ‘The ladies are in low spirits,’ the surveyor thought to explain, ‘after taking their leave of friends on a ship homeward bound.’

  ‘Not I! And scarcely friends,’ Mrs Merivale protested. ‘Nor can I waste sympathy on those who needlessly risk their lives.’

  ‘Then, Miss Scrimshaw is sad,’ her husband would not be put off. ‘My wife is more practical than sentimental. But Miss Scrimshaw too, must leave us soon.’

  Delaney, his eyes grown smaller in concentration, examined these two females, the fat, soft, satiny thing, and the stringy, craftier one in brown whose beak was raised to parry what was only a playful blow on the surveyor’s part. They would never admit him to their world, but it amused the emancipist to regard them as being of his.

  ‘Miss Scrimshaw is for the Old Country? Good luck to her then!’ He laughed softly, and let them interpret it how they pleased.

  Mrs Merivale simmered, not because her friend’s sensibility might have been offended by the interest of a rough, common man, but because a convention had been flouted.

  ‘Far from it,’ Miss Scrimshaw answered with a return to that meekness which did not altogether go with her.

  ‘Miss Scrimshaw is leaving us’, Mrs Merivale condescended, ‘on an extended visit to Moreton Bay—to Mrs Lovell, the Commandant’s wife.’

  Invested by her patroness with grandeur, Miss Scrimshaw should have risen to the occasion, had not all Sydney known (or anyway, its politer circles) that the Commandant had engaged a companion for his wife, exhausted by bearing children in quick succession, and isolated from refined society in a remote and brutal settlement.

  In the circumstances, Miss Scrimshaw was not comforted by the probability that this Irishman was unaware.

  The latter at least realized something was amiss, and had not enough control over his natural propensity for cruelty to resist ruffling the feathers of the two foolish birds before him. He began to look cunning, and to wet his lips, and to turn to the surveyor only half in confidence.

  ‘I did not mention’, he lowered his eyelids, and clicked his tongue, ‘that Mr Isbister arrived but recently from Moreton Bay, after calling in on Mr McGillivray of Murrumbopple, where they told him a tale—not unheard before, worse luck, in the country we live in.’

  The ladies sighed, and smoothed themselves, and prepared for endless men’s talk.

  Mr Merivale would have nodded to the coachman to start for home. Instead he smiled, out of politeness, into the sun, which was lowering itself by now in a cloudless winter sky.

  ‘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 lu
rched 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.