Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

In the course of his revolutions he noticed Mr Courtney coming down from the forecastle, pausing briefly to inspect the cringlemaking to which the boatswain had told off some of the younger crew members. From the lee of the pinnace Mr Roxburgh watched the first officer picking his way with expert ease through the animated forest in which he, by contrast, was lost. He was both expectant and apprehensive of Mr Courtney’s arrival. He longed to join the mate in the kind of esoteric conversation the latter would know how to conduct amongst his fellow initiates, a freemasonry to which Mr Roxburgh could never be admitted it seemed, because he had not learnt the sign. In an even more despondent mood he would see himself locked in his solitary confinement cell, while those outside were able to communicate with the fluency, and according to the rights, of human beings.

As Mr Courtney came on, rubbing his hands together, it could have been as protection against rank and knowledge. ‘With such a wind, we’ll berth at Singapore, Mr Roxburgh, before you’ve even found your sea legs.’ Intended to encourage the passenger, it probably consoled the mate.

Mr Roxburgh might have blushed, but a temporarily yellow complexion saved him from making a fool of himself. He remembered how, as boys, his younger and more active brother had learnt to tie a simple reef, and showed him how, and with what grateful pleasure he had received the demonstration. Now on looking at the mate’s perhaps deceptively candid eye he would have liked to ask him to demonstrate the tying of some immensely complicated knot.

Instead Mr Roxburgh asked,’ Have you the time on you, Mr Courtney?’ and realized he had employed an idiom he would not have used in politer cicles.

Without answering, the mate produced a battered silver watch, its face as open if not as large as its owner’s. Mr Roxburgh could not thank him enough, but only after the watch had been returned to a serge pocket did he realize that he had failed to mark the hour.

It was too late to correct his mistake; the mate had removed himself with the exaggerated delicacy practised by men who are large but shy. Mr Roxburgh was relieved to think that his own ineptitude would remain his secret.

The ship was progressing as though born to an ease of motion, and the passenger, restored to solitude, recovered some of his self-importance. His mind glided marvelously when not threatened by the shoals of human intercourse or the bedevilled depths of his own nature.

Moods and any tendency to animal spirits had been discouraged from an early age by nurses, governesses and tutors on orders from the mother, who feared that too much of either might aggravate his delicate health. Books were countenanced if not morbid in sentiment. To surround her children with the solid architecture of life was the mother’s object. ‘You would not wish us to live amongst eccentric, needlessly ornamented furniture — spindly stuff which might collapse at a touch?’ Thus she projected her own disdain to impress her elder boy, who visualized the horror of it. Following up, she pointed out that he must furnish his mind with what is indestructible. Yet she was far from being materialistic. While he was still a child she made him keenly aware of his moral responsibilities, with the result that he had awaited fatherhood with apprehension.

If failure to procreate living issue reduced him to silence on that subject, it shattered an unappeased grandmother: she began to recognize her years. She might have sat grizzling, ‘One expects a different constitution in a Cornish hoyden,’ but had grown to love a daughter-in-law she would not have accepted had it not been her habit to indulge the son she doted on. The elder Mrs Roxburgh was, besides, a good woman. In her old age an evangelical trait drove her to spend much of her time distributing bibles and patronizing orphans. Superfluously, she prayed for the gift of Charity twice a day, thrice on Sundays, excepting when she had a cold. Good works did not prevent her wearing a frisette till the night she died, the little, dangling curls from an exhausted fashion being the only sign of frivolity in her worthy life. She was much respected, but took it hard that certain acquaintances chose to remember how her father-in-law had been in trade.

It was unavoidable that family history should complicate to some extent the relationship between the lady and her son’s wife. She had earmarked a clergyman’s sister for Austin, thinking that something mature but mild would not ‘aggravate’, as she put it. She would not have spoken the word ‘sensual’, except in connection with abstract vice, and where her daughter-in-law was concerned, she translated ‘sensuality’ into ‘health’. If only she had been able to consult with someone close, to lean upon her younger son, but he, alas, had defected earlier, to sensuality and worse, and been packed off as quickly and quietly as possible.

Because Austin was taught as a boy to suppress emotion, and soon preferred it thus, for fear that his preceptor might diagnose feeling as yet another ‘symptom’, none but his wife ever guessed that he must have reacted to his brother’s forced departure as though he had suffered the amputation of a limb. His brother’s skin, after a bath and a brisk towelling in front of the nursery fire, continued flickering on and off before Austin’s eyes. He could remember an occasion when, seated beside the curiously woven brass fender, he had watched Garnet leap the rail, and stand crowing from amongst the coals, clothed in a suit of fiery feathers. He had awoken sweating from his dream; but Garnet had in him something of the quality of fire. Austin himself was not without it, if damped down, concealed by ash. He would not have had it otherwise — oh dear, no! but admired the free play of flames.

As he saw it, his mother and his brother were the opposite poles of his existence. He believed he found them united in his wife, whose sense of duty did not prevent her lips tasting of warm pears. He had never tasted his brother’s lips, or not that he could remember. Garnet smelled of discharged guns and anointed harness, their mother of some dim melancholy, compound of lawyers’ deeds and lemon verbena. She encouraged her elder son to cultivate the garden, which he did, if not literally: it was tended by too many gardeners. The art of horticulture was what attracted him, Latin names, dried specimens — not so far distant from his curtailed legal studies — rather than the flesh of living plants. But as token exercise and tribute to his mother, he would behead a few weeds, and fork at the moist earth, turning up bundles of flesh-coloured earthworms. It sustained him too, against the wrench of his brother’s departure. Their mother had come down the steps and laid a hand on her surviving boy’s shoulder. They were standing under a medlar, treading a rich stench out of the fallen fruit. In this second bereavement Mrs Roxburgh would have liked to talk about her first, the father Austin could scarcely remember, and rarely attempted to.

Free of family responsibilities and ties, if not the ghosts they leave behind, Austin Roxburgh tried to feel exhilarated as he stood alone beneath this other tree on which his life now depended. Anonymous male voices drifted down at him from up there amongst the rope and canvas. He was unable to see the men themselves, but it did not bother him unduly; his wife excepted, he had more confidence in those with whom he was unacquainted. On and off he felt irritated thinking of his wife. Where could Ellen be? So dependable. She had soon learnt to pour tea of a strength soothing to his stomach and replenish the pot from the silver kettle slung above a little spirit-lamp.

The voices of the invisible sailors aloft were floating with the careless, designless ease of gulls’ cries, gulls’ frames.