A Fringe of Leaves Read Free Page A

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.’
    That 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