Needled by her friend’s apparent mission of procuring her, Mrs Roxburgh said, ‘Your pink dress is the one I will always remember.’
‘Which pink?’ Mrs Aspinall snapped.
‘Which you wore at Christmas.’
‘My old pink? That became indeed a rag, and I let the servant have it shortly after you saw it. Why on earth should you remember my pink?’
‘You looked so charming in it. And the bodice so cunningly ornamented with all those little satin bows.’
‘The Town knew that dress by heart. I grew to hate it.’ Recollection had made Mrs Aspinall hoarse.
Almost at the same moment the voices of Mrs Impey and Mr Austin Roxburgh were heard in the hall. ‘If she is, I will not go in,’ Mr Roxburgh whispered loud. ‘I shall lie down and rest till my wife has got it over.’
His wife finally had, and the same evening, after her emotions had subsided, wrote in her journaclass="underline"
However unpleasant it is to detect hypocrisy in another, how much more despicable to discover it in oneself — worse still, to be driven to it by Mrs A. To be reflected in such a very trashy mirror! Yet this is what happened during a call I will try my best to forget. When here I am recording it!
Mrs Roxburgh glanced through what she had written to see whether it looked too explicit on paper, and decided it did not; but knew that she would be haunted by the facets of vice she shared with Mrs Aspinall. She tried to console herself with the explanation that if she had been drawn to a certain person, it was because some demoniac force had overcome her natural repulsion.
She was not consoled, however, and locked her hypocritically innocuous journal away.
On a day when she was at her lowest Mrs Roxburgh tied down her bonnet and ventured into the windy street. To her husband she had said she would take a walk, knowing how impossible it would have been to persuade him to accompany her. In roaming round the Point alone and unprotected, she had no aim, unless the vague one of escaping from her own thoughts. Not only vague but vain, she realized from experience. For it occurred to her that on the day she ordered them to saddle the mare so that she might escape from discontented thoughts and the general constriction of their life at ‘Dulcet’, she had ridden out to substantiate a thought she would have liked to think did not exist, from being buried so deeply in her mind.
In consequence, on this present chilly afternoon, she was strolling somewhat diffidently, buffeted by wind, threatened by a great cumulus of cloud, between the mountain which presided over man’s presumptuous attempt at a town, and the shirred waters of the grey river rushing towards its fate, the sea.
As her landlady had remarked, it was ‘difficult for a woman to acquire the habit of making important decisions’. Ellen Roxburgh wondered as she walked what important decision she had ever made, beyond that of accepting her husband’s proposal, and on another occasion, giving way to her own unconfessed incontinence.
At the point where the street, which had become a lane, petered out in a stony path, Mrs Roxburgh was forced to pause, and grope for the support of a tree. Leaning against it, she held her arms around herself to contain what amounted to a nausea. The rough tree-trunk comforted her to some extent until she was fully returned to her senses, though still with traces of a melancholy which had its origins, it seemed to her, in her failed children; more, she was permeated by this sorrow her husband never allowed himself to mention.
Swept onward by the wind, her skirt blown in a tumult before her, she tried to persuade herself that her husband, like the tree which had offered sanctuary, supported a belief in her own free will. Yet she had been blown as passively against the one as against the other. The tree happened to be standing in her path, just as a crude, bewildered girl, alone and bereaved on a moor, could hardly have rejected Mr Roxburgh’s offer.
So that she was dragged back into the forest clearing, the filtered light, the scents of fungus and rotting leaves, to the only instance when her will had asserted itself, and then with bared, ugly teeth.
Mrs Roxburgh opened her mouth in hollow despair, and the wind, tearing down her throat, all but choked and temporarily deafened her.
She stumbled farther, to what end she wondered, when she could have been seated beside the fire with a book, or occupying herself with sewing, in the speckless dolls’ house at present their home.
Until, at a turn in the path, she noticed what might have been a bundle of cast-off clothes lying amongst the crabbed bushes: old, greenish garments, the sight of which suggested a smell of must and the body to which they had belonged. She would have hurried past this repulsive sight, when the bundle sat up, and showed that the clothes, far from being discarded, still helped partially disguise the nakedness of a living being.
Moreover, the man inside them had started directing at her a gap-toothed smile, out of a freckled, pocked complexion; the eyes, pale and lashless, in no way related to the invitation of the yellow smile, burned with cold hate as they inquired into every aspect of her figure; while a hand, its skin cured to a carapace, patted the form his body had moulded in the grass where he had been lying.
That he was addressing her, she saw, but could not distinguish the words as the wind immediately carried them away.
The man realized, and increased his efforts until some of what he was shouting reached her: ‘… where there’s a hare’s nest …’ again the thread was lost, ‘… wouldn’ be natural for puss to lie alone …’ it was blown back.
She might have returned along the path had it not been a rambling one and the man already on his feet. To follow the path in the direction in which it led might have plunged her in a labyrinth of gorse, so she started up the slope of the hill beyond which she could see the roofs of aligned houses, and where she could hope to find the orderly streets she had abandoned.
Behind her she heard her pursuer progressing from his initial courtship, in which hares couched poetically enough, into the more obscene terms of his desperate human predicament, ‘I url show … what you bitches of leddies … lead us on … all that most of us gets is from watchin’ winders at night …’
Mrs Roxburgh ran or sprang. She felt fingers rake her back, a hand seize on one of her wrists. She was whirled round in her flight. Blackened nails were tearing at a brooch on her bosom. She was looking deep into the pocks and pores of a fiery skin as the blast of rum smote her in the face.
Then she had escaped, and was again running, clambering ungainly amongst and over rocks. If his obscenities had horrified her at least they were also memories of the past; the sound of his breathing frightened her worse.
‘Well, then,’ he suddenly shouted out of a silence, ‘will yer be satisfied when you’ve killed a man? That is what it leads to from the moment we is born!’
For her part, she could not conceive what they were doing, the two of them, scrambling up this hill. It would have been more rational to fall and allow herself to be strangled by orange, callused hands, broken fingernails eating into her throat, had she not looked up, and there ahead was the vestige of a road, some kind of vehicle advancing along it, drawn by a pair of horses, their solid briskets and haunches at variance with the alarm betrayed by ears and nostrils.
As she stumbled, herself by now an animal flattening its exhausted body against the turf, somebody, a gentleman, sprang down from the driver’s seat, and charged towards them, whip-in-hand.
In her distress she did not recognize him until they were but a few yards apart.
With the whip-handle he began belting into her assailant, who needed little persuasion to retreat, frieze rags flying, hat lost, as he jumped rocks and tore through bushes.