Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

Mrs Roxburgh reached the deck. Her intention of returning shortly intensified her expectations. Had they not been cool, her fingers travelling over surfaces with that same hesitant tenderness with which she had touched her husband’s cheek, might have seemed feverish. She emerged with an audible gasp for the swirl of fog, which rushed and entered, choking with fistfuls of white down, and parted, and united, on face or mast. She was not blinded by it, however; her eyes might have been jewels cutting such strands as offered themselves.

For a moment some more powerful influence acted upon the mass of fog. The blanket was torn open to reveal the distant land: hog-backed, of a louring, formal ugliness, it might have dispirited the observer had it not glittered like a chunk of sapphire. Long after the fog had closed on her momentary vision, Ellen Roxburgh continued watching, waiting for a sign, but it did not recur.

She went forward at last, past the helmsman, whom she decided to ignore from guessing at the expression on his face. On the forecastle head the fog was at its most obliterating. She could neither see, nor breathe, and might have retreated if her faculties had not been stimulated by a suggestion of danger.

So she continued weaving through the fog, while clinging to rope or timber for support (despite her daring, she was glad of their honest, reliable textures) and almost stumbled over a form, that of a boy she made out, seated in the shelter of a capstan, dripping moisture, although, it appeared, content enough.

‘Ah,’ she cried, ‘it is you!’ For it was the lad who sometimes served under Spurgeon at dinner.

Less at ease than before, the boy grunted. He was eating one of the wizened but sweet, Sydney apples, which were lasting bravely. For his moral support the boy tore out an extra large mouthful and sat chewing. It sounded more like the champing of a horse.

Mrs Roxburgh may have felt daunted, but ventured, ‘I’m glad I have found you.’

He looked up, his eyes deepening with mistrust, if not horror, for until now he had only received orders from her, or silent glances as he carried out the used dishes.

‘For company,’ she tried to explain.

It made the boy more obviously suspicious.

‘Why?’ he mumbled through his mouthful. ‘Are ye afraid?’ She might have been asking for something he had never been taught to give.

‘No,’ she answered, touching with the toe of her boot a coop in which two wet hens sat huddled against each other. ‘Everyone is occupied except myself. And the fog is so lovely I’d like to watch it with someone else who is unemployed.’

‘Fog’s no more’n fog.’ The boy sniffed, or he must have sniffled, for immediately after, he wiped his nose with the back of the hand which held the apple.

For her part, she was reduced to childhood by the boy’s logic, so that she kneeled beside him at the very moment when his limbs were stirring with an instinct to get to his feet and assert his manhood by leaving her.

Lapsing spontaneously into her first language, she begged, ‘Cusn’t I stay with ’ee?’

It was too strange: a lady who could speak ordinary. The boy sank back against the capstan, cowering perhaps. He reached up with an arm, and twined it round one of the hickory bars, to maintain his balance, or protect himself.

‘I’m not the master,’ he said.

A certain innocence which life had not succeeded in exorcizing from her nature made her long for him to accept her. As a little girl, which she had become again, only briefly no doubt, she might have bribed him with some valued possession. But here she had nothing to offer.

‘What’s tha name?’ she asked respectfully.

‘Oswald Dignam,’ the boy answered and brightened; to own a label seemed to lend him courage.

At the same time Ellen Roxburgh remembered her position and the wisdom and dignity she ought to possess. ‘Why did you come to sea, Oswald?’ she asked, not unkindly, but correctly.

‘Food’s regular.’

‘That it is,’ she agreed. ‘But was there nothing else?’

‘I dunno.’ And then, ‘’Tis a life like any other that takes you up.’

The air had begun filling his hitherto cramped chest; a down of fog was stirring on his upper lip. The movement of the fog, the striving of the isolated ship, the sense of an expanding universe, began to bring them together at last.

Now that the boy had started, he confided, ‘A man can save ’is money at sea.’

‘What will you do with it?’ she asked.

It was most important that she should know.

‘Buy a ferret.’

‘Aw? I dun’t remember whether I ever seed a ferret. Praps once — to Zennor. Iss, some gipsies had ’n.’

She cocked her head. In the cordage above, beads of moisture danced, trembled, and sometimes fell.

The boy grew sullen again; he might have revealed too much of himself. ‘A animal is company.’ He was puffing out his lips in self-defence.

‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘I had a little pug.’

Hard bare feet squelching on the deck threatened to destroy their privacy, but passed.

‘What happened to the pug?’

‘She died.’

The melancholy sea air had at last drenched them. She could feel her hair putting out its saddest tendrils.

He said, ‘I never had a dog.’

‘I’ll give you one when we come home. I’ll buy you the ferret, Oswald.’

She spoke too fast, as though to prevent a doubt widening between herself and her protégé promises, like prayer, can be an attempt at blackmail.

At the same time a fogbound voice began tolling, reaching deeper, always deeper into the void.

‘What is that?’ she asked.

‘The lookout — conning.’

‘Is there danger?’

‘No more’n usual.’ He threw away the sucked apple-core.

She did not try to measure a contempt she must have earned.

‘It is time’, she decided, ‘to return to my husband. If I stay too long, he suspects, I think, that I’ve been swept overboard. His fears make him irritable.’

‘Ah?’ It was only of faint interest to the boy.

Then, when she had got to her feet, he looked up at her, evidently trying to visualize a state which could remain for ever outside his experience.

As she left him, the boy’s face was first blurred, then obliterated by the unconscionable fog. Sometimes toiling uphill, sometimes teetering sideways with little, drunken steps, she held tightly to the points of her elbows inside the pretty, fringed shawl. In this manner she preserved something of her physical self from the general amorphousness in which Oswald Dignam was lost and her own thoughts and hair floated as undirected as seaweeds. Yet, as she prepared to negotiate the companion-ladder, Mrs Roxburgh did make an effort to manage her hair, and wiped from her lips the last scum of drunkenness.

The afternoon passed soberly. The passengers took their customary nap and were prepared to dine when called.

‘We shall grow liverish,’ Mrs Roxburgh predicted.

Her husband did not answer because it was the kind of remark for which answers are not expected, at any rate in a well-regulated marriage. Sitting on the edge of the bunk preparatory to pulling on his boots, he was stuck by the superfluity of words with which the married state is littered.

When suddenly and brutally the sequence of events was wrenched out of his control. There was a ramming. And grinding.

At once a slow but inexorable turmoil of activity began taking place around them. A button hook and a chair fell upon them from a great height, for by this time Mrs Roxburgh, who had been standing before the glass, running the comb through her loosened hair, was thrown upon her husband’s breast, against the cabin wall which formed with the bunk the trough where they found themselves. In their initial alarm they were struggling with each other as much as against a quirk of gravity. Half-fowl half-woman, Mrs Roxburgh was panting in her husband’s ear. Her teeth must have gashed his cheek, he felt, but the shattering of several breakable vessels in the saloon beyond, dispersed any possible resentment he might have harboured against her.