Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

‘What is it, my dear?’ Alarm made her voice sound raucous.

She was already climbing down, ungainly in her haste, her hair impeding a strained progress.

‘It’s the pain, Ellen! Oh God, the most awful pain yet!’

At once she rummaged for the little flask containing the tincture of digitalis and administered the drops in a finger of water. She kneeled at his feet, chafing his knees. At least she could now do something which would prevent anyone accusing her. She would infuse him with her own excessive health and powers of resistance. As she kneeled, she willed him to accept what she had to offer.

‘I’ll not have you suffer,’ she was mouthing; ‘you can depend on me, my dearest.’

‘Oh, I’m not going to die !’ Mr Roxburgh ground it out from between his teeth, and laughed without mirth, for the vise was still squeezing him.

Yet he was soothed by his wife’s touch. He closed his eyes, and thought to hear his mother’s voice, her commands for his welfare, as she proceeded to allay one of his coughing fits.

Now the world had shrunk to its core, or to the small circle of light in the middle of the ocean, in which two human souls were momentarily united, their joint fears fusing them into a force against evil.

As soon as she could safely leave her husband Mrs Roxburgh put on her mantle and resolved to see whether it were possible to procure some milk. She had eased him back upon the pillows, from where his expression and the regular rise and fall of his chest suggested that he might be dozing, or at least enjoying the relief which comes from exhaustion.

She herself was exhausted, she realized as she scrambled out upon the deck, but her condition added to the splendour of the night: the breathing of canvas overhead sounded the stronger and deeper for her almost drunken reeling through the forest of her hair, while short bursts of light from a recurring moon transformed the ship, despite its heaving, into solid sculpture.

Mrs Roxburgh made her way towards the galley, and was guided in her final steps by snores rasping in discord against the integrated sounds of sea and sail. It was Spurgeon the steward-cook, who had spread his blanket on the floor of his official sanctum.

‘My husband’, she explained, ‘is sick,’ before begging a little of the milk they had taken on at Sydney.

Spurgeon was confused by the light he made after a fumbling with lucifers. ‘You may be lucky,’ he growled. ‘If ’twas tomorrow evenin’ I doubt there’d be enough to wet a baby’s whistle. Milk will be off. If ’tisn’t that already.’ He stuck his nose inside a blackened can.

She waited patiently, determined there should be milk enough for her invalid, while Spurgeon, who seemed to have discarded the conventions to suit the hour and the circumstances, repeated mumbling, ‘Sick, eh? With gentlefolk, I thought it was mal de mur .’

Too tired to compose an answer, Mrs Roxburgh pretended not to hear; while he warmed the milk on a reluctant fire in an atmosphere stuffy with sleep and charcoal.

When the milk was ready she was so grateful Spurgeon grew quite pleased with himself. He smiled along his nose at the favour he had done her, and glanced down at her wedding ring, or so it appeared.

‘That’s the lot,’ he announced, ‘ ma’am! ’ and laughed, and added, ‘I wouldn’ do the same for any other lady.’

Mrs Roxburgh was undecided whether she liked or disliked Spurgeon, but was free to hurry away. Slopping the milk slightly in her haste, warming her hands on the greasy vessel, she was panting with achievement; she would allow neither the steward’s ambiguous behaviour nor the swaying of the night to confuse her.

When she returned to the cabin, the candle had burnt low, but Mr Roxburgh opened his eyes and looked as though prepared to check an inventory of her every feature.

‘I’ve brought you some warm milk,’ she said.

Tranquillity perhaps made him forget to remind her of his loathing for the skin of boiled milk.

She helped him into an upright position, and supported him in it with an arm, after first pouring into a cracked cup the greater part of the milk ration.

‘There!’ she coaxed.

As he sank his mouth she greedily watched, until she saw the string of milk hanging and swinging from his lower lip. Well, she thought, he has forgot about that at least. She recalled her father supping at a cup of hot milk in the kitchen after lambing. Pa liked to soak his bread. He was greedy as herself for food, in the days when she had to make the most of a little.

But the beard of milk was trembling on Mr Roxburgh’s lip. She almost wiped it for him, when she saw him suck the milk-skin into his mouth.

While the two of them rocked and swayed together on the bosom of the sea, and she explored with her eyes the cracks and knots in their roughly constructed berths, she thought how she would have loved to taste a door-step of fresh-baked bread, dripping with warm, sweetish milk such as he used to offer her when she was still a little girl, his hands in which the cracks never seemed to close, and the thumb with the horn-thing which always repelled, and sometimes frightened her.

She must have dozed, for she had allowed her husband to slip lower and the cup she was holding to tilt.

Austin Roxburgh appeared restored to an acceptable level of reality. He was gently sleeping. Once or twice he groaned, not in pain, rather for the dryness of an open mouth. Which he closed to moisten. Opening and closing, to suck at the air, and alternately, dredge for moisture. She was surprised to find how calmly she could contemplate his cheek fretting against one of her breasts. The breast had escaped from its covering, at its centre the teat on which his struggling mouth once or twice threatened to fasten.

She lay awhile longer, at peace. Then, ashamed of her opulence, she covered herself, and climbed to her own berth.

Since settling down to their life at sea, lulled by air and motion and the mystical permutations of canvas, there was little to convince the passengers that the days had not been created by men for their own convenience. Time, and its fellow conspirator space, subtler for its present watery guise, were never in more perfect accord, and when on the seventh day the ship nosed gently into fog, the impression of limitless unity was increased, if not for all the voyagers, for Mrs Roxburgh unquestionably.

Her husband had remained resting in his berth the whole of the day following his distressing attack, and the morning after that, still seemed indisposed to rise.

‘There’s a fog come up,’ she announced as she looked in the glass and wrapped herself against the weather. ‘Thick. Oh, thick!’

Her low, muffled voice made it sound the most desirable condition. Mr Roxburgh closed his eyes. He enjoyed being cosseted. In the absence of medical attention, Captain Purdew paid him frequent visits, sat on the edge of the bunk, and racked his memory for advice. But it was Ellen who knew. Her voice dulled anxieties, wrapped him in a fog of contentment where no equivocal shapes were likely to rise and endanger him.

Now as she stood looking in the glass at a blurred image which suggested that strands of mist had strayed down the companionway and through the hatches, its imperfection made her the more mysterious in his eyes.

‘I shall go up on deck,’ she announced, ‘and take the air. But only for a little,’ she added as a comfort.

Possibly she intended to embrace him, but on second thought, laid fingers briefly against his cheek. In his present state of mind the quickly withdrawn contact thrilled him more deeply than any overt demonstration. (Besides, he had once jokingly confessed, kisses tend to be glutinous.)