Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

Mr Roxburgh stood looking in at his wife. He was holding ajar the door of their crudely improvised cabin, his face paler than normal, for he had not found his sea legs on their first day out from Sydney.

‘Are you not feeling well, Ellen?’ Mr Roxburgh asked without intending it to sound peevish.

‘It’s nothing. The rolling of the ship. It will pass.’

She smiled, but shapelessly she could feel. She roused herself at once and prepared to leave her nest of rumpled sheets. She might have been rising from a greater depth, for the sinews of her throat grew visible and her mouth thin and strained. The awkwardness and effort of the whole operation was making her look ugly.

‘Nothing,’ she hastened to repeat. ‘Now I am going to see to our beds so that Spurgeon will perhaps be less disgusted with me. Do you go back to your books and I’ll join you shortly.’

Mr Roxburgh turned back into the saloon and she realized he had not been looking at her, but inward, into his own thoughts.

Later in the day they decided to take a stroll together since the swell appeared to have abated. Even so, it was difficult to keep up their dignity, and the action of the ship, together with the cluttered nature of the deck, soon forced her to let go of his arm. They were no worse for their independence. The clouds had thinned for a pale disc of sun to appear, fully exposed at its best moments, at others floating in a milky scud. Mrs Roxburgh pushed away the hair from in front of her eyes, and once, while recovering her balance, spat a flying strand out of her mouth. But no one was looking at that moment. Wrapped to the gills, Mr Roxburgh returned from a reconnaissance to lecture her on the virtues of studding sails, of which he had heard but recently.

‘If the wind would veer slightly,’ he said, and teetered, ‘we could set our studsls. Then I should convince you. There is no prettier sight’, he added, ‘than a vessel with its studsls set.’ It rejoiced Mr Roxburgh to accumulate technical terms he would never be required to use in his own sphere of life.

The pale sun was making the sea look glassier. Its long furrows opened on coldly boiling depths into which the swaths of foam fell and were engulfed. Now that they were farther from the shore the gulls sounded less insistent. At a distance the land remained a lead- or slate-colour, when she would have wished to see it again looming in that blue haze of trees.

All the while the seamen were going about their duties, which enabled them to ignore a female: the bosun, his trousers rolled halfway up his calves, bristled with little hackles along the ridges of his great toes; a boy struggled to the side and emptied a kid of potato-peelings and grey fat to the more persistent of the gulls; while a replacement took over the helm from Mr Pilcher the second mate. A wiry fellow, of lined cheeks though not above his early thirties, Pilcher ducked his head in passing. They had not exchanged a word as yet, and perhaps an exchange would never come about. There are the souls who remain anonymous at sea in spite of the names one learns to attach to them.

Mrs Roxburgh staggered and clung alternately. She had adopted an ostentatious manner of breathing as though to demonstrate appreciation, and smiled, if only to herself. She loved listening to the sound of the sails.

She found her husband standing aft, staring at the wake, at the minute particles of foam streaming out behind them. The view of the wake was certainly more consoling than that of the great glassy graves opening to either side in the fields of ocean. Mr Roxburgh might have been trying to discern a design in the path they had made, or again, in his own thoughts.

He was growing noticeably restless, and shouted at her when he saw her watching, ‘I’m going down. We’ll be dining soon.’ He looked bilious, but with an expression which suggested moral rather than physical distress.

‘Aren’t you feeling well?’ it was her turn to ask; she was only too anxious to help: this was the basis on which their love was founded.

His answer was lost on the wind, his form in the companionway, and she was alone until shy Mr Courtney barged past, large and healthy.

‘Mr Roxburgh not of the best?’ It seemed to give him courage to take advantage of someone else’s infirmity.

‘He has simply had enough of idleness. My husband is one whose mind must always be employed at something.’

It was all too mysterious for Mr Courtney, so he went away.

Shortly after, and uneventfully, the Roxburghs dined alone off more of the salt pork, which they were careful to shave close of fat.

In the evening they retired early.

Mrs Roxburgh let down her hair into a sea of silence where men’s voices had ceased shouting. After they had said their prayers, a duty performed simultaneously and with the outward assurance which comes from habit, he embraced her, but absently it felt, which again was pretty usual. Listening to his snores Mrs Roxburgh was soon rolled into sleep in her upper berth.

It was the fifth day out and Austin Roxburgh had remained on deck longer than he would have expected of himself. Gulls hung in the clear air like bubbles in a glass. The sea billowed, a blander blue than at any stage of their course from Sydney. The breeze still favoured them. Veering slightly during the morning it began to blow from the south-east, which enabled Captain Purdew’s crew to set the lower and topmast studding sails. To enjoy this prodigality of canvas was partly the reason why Austin Roxburgh had remained on deck. He could not give attention enough to this excessively beautiful crowd of sail, but stared and smiled with a proprietary expression at the rig he had appropriated as the mark of his initiation into nautical life. He was ignorant of more than the basic function of canvas, but the studding sails carried his hesitant spirit in the direction of poetry. So he strutted back and forth, his twilled overcoat blown open around him, or he would pause and stare, grinning at a blue, sun-blurred void, or alternately, at those who refused to see any connection between a superfluous gentleman and their own professional activities.

Mr Roxburgh was not immediately deterred. Sensitive to a point where he often became intolerable to those who knew him, he wore rhinoceros hide for strangers, particularly those deficient in education or of an inferior class. He would thwack his leg with his stick, baring his long, rather yellow teeth at the unfortunates of whom he disapproved, or who remained indifferent to his worth.

Thus he was tramping the deck, grimacing at the unmindful crew. Fascinated by so much of what he observed in life, whether beautiful or incongruous, he might have made use of it creatively had his perceptive apparatus not been clogged with waste knowledge and moral inhibitions. He would often isolate a form, or tremble with excitement for an idea, as though about to throw upon it a light which would make it indisputably his. Then, instead, he grew resentful, or angry, sometimes even ashamed at his presumption. Once as he watched his wife descending the stairs in a topaz collar which had been his mother’s, he was to such an extent illuminated that he resolved to commission Sir John to paint her portrait and had written away the following morning, but remained disappointed with the result, knowing that this was not the ultimate in revelation, which he himself had experienced as his wife shimmered on the stairs. None the less, everybody else found it a telling likeness, were awed by the gold frame, and paid respectful tribute to this materialization of the husband’s wealth.

Where his wife was now, Mr Roxburgh had no idea. Without interrupting his own pursuits, he glanced around the deck from time to time, partly out of a sense of duty, partly because he was fond of her, but irritation left its heelmark imprinted in hard teak.