A Fringe of Leaves by Patrick White Page A

wished her to persevere. But her meeting with that husband’s adored brother, a second gentleman whose doubtful honour led her to expect a subtler version of the first, could prove the severest trial of those to which she had so far been subjected.
    In the circumstances, Mrs Roxburgh lingered below settling her very modest bonnet (an old one, as Mr Roxburgh had requested for their voyage), patting the carpet-bag into shape, locking her leather dressing-case (in which she also kept her journal), while Austin Roxburgh went on deck to take part in the joyful, if also unnerving, reunion with his sibling.
    When she could no longer defer the moment of joining them, her confusion at first prevented her assessing ‘Garnet R.’ with any clearness. She was aware only of the blaze from blue sceptical eyes, an intensification of the milder, shallower stare of the child in the miniature, and a hand uncommonly hard, like that of some mechanic, or farmer. By contrast his clothes, without being ostentatious, suggested expense, even fashion. The shirt-cuff was of impeccable linen, as he stooped to retrieve a leather glove he had let fall on the deck.
    Withdrawing her glance from the wrist, she listened to the unnaturally high-pitched inanities in which long separation had forced the brothers to engage each other. After the initial compliments and inquiries on Garnet Roxburgh’s part, the two gentlemen mercifully ignored her.
    ‘… Are you well , Austin? You look well, you old, creaking gate!’
    ‘Inactivity, or the long sea voyage, has put new life in me, dear fellow. Though naturally I must always take care. My heart, as you know, is not of the best.’
    Mr Garnet Roxburgh smiled absently, if it was not incredulously, at the idea that someone might suffer from a heart.
    ‘And you, Mrs Roxburgh—Ellen, isn’t it? if you’ll allow me—have you no ailments—or at any rate, complaints?’ he inquired as he propelled her the short distance along the gang-board on to the quay.
    ‘None,’ she answered while he was still at her back, ‘unless the nervous fidgets I developed from not arriving sooner.’ She was glad to hear grit beneath the soles of her boots, which not only meant she was once more standing on solid land but her first abrasive contact with it might have disintegrated a reply which could have sounded insipid, insincere, or worse to her husband’s ears—indiscreet.
    But the brothers were too busy organizing and explaining to pay attention to shades of meaning.
    ‘The baggage will follow by bullock-wagon,’ their host told them. ‘That is, all but your immediate necessities. Those, we can take with us in the buggy.’
    Except that mud had collected on the wheels and spattered the bodywork, the vehicle wore a gloss of paint which disguised bluntness of form in an elegance matching that of the owner himself.
    During the longueurs of the voyage out Mr Roxburgh had informed his wife, ‘There is no actual reason for pitying Garnet, though our mother, understandably, always lamented losing her favourite son—yes, let us be realistic—to a hard and morally infected country like Van Diemen’s Land. In fact Garnet has done very well for himself. By marrying a considerably older widow of means, his position in the community became assured. If the woman died not long after, in a regrettable accident, at least he inherited her property, from which, I gather, he has a respectable income.’
    ‘How did Mrs Garnet Roxburgh die?’
    ‘In the accident,’ Austin replied, but vaguely, for his mind was occupied with other thoughts.
    Driven by the widower through Hobart Town, Ellen returned, if only by an imagined glimpse, to the accident in which Mrs Garnet Roxburgh died.
    ‘Do you approve?’ she realized her brother-in-law was asking.
    ‘Of what?’
    ‘Of our neat little town.’
    ‘It is that,’ she said. ‘And English. I have difficulty in believing I am being driven through a famous penal colony of the