Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

Some of the men had taken to the Roxburghs, or else their contempt would not stand the strain of long keeping.

It was a fitful progress, by human as well as nautical standards. From time to time intangible cats’-paws made a play for the improvised sail, which would start to fill, and falter, and subside, along with unwarranted hopes. Manpower was Captain Purdew’s only recourse. The arms of those pulling on the oars bulged and cracked, while teeth bit on oaths the rowers refrained from releasing out of deference to a lady.

If an occasional expletive escaped from between the crew’s overworking lips, it was not that of a dead language, but one she had forgotten on emigrating, as it were, from the country of her birth. Mrs Roxburgh mused on the false impression it seemed her fate in life to give, to rough sailors, refined acquaintances, even her own dear husband — and one she preferred not to remember. Trapped between the walls of a room she might have gone on to torment herself with speculation on the nature of the seed which had been planted in her body, whether it would grow to reveal her better or her worse side, and whose face it would wear. Here on the open sea she was more distressed to observe the superior performance given by the pinnace, and in her disheartenment, found herself resenting Captain Purdew’s unwise choice of a boat for his command.

Towards the close of the morning, when condescension on the part of Mr Pilcher had allowed the distance between the vessels to decrease appreciably, Captain Purdew stood up, and with a hand on the improvised mast for support, signalled with the other to the captain of the pinnace. After much hailing, there took place a discussion laced with such professional detail the passengers could only take it on trust. Mr Roxburgh had his crypto-faith in those who perform feats of manual dexterity and technical miracles which might contribute to his personal welfare, while Ellen had the frivolous mind of which he accused her, and which she had ended by accepting. At least it allowed her to be less affected by the flow of arcane language. During the discussion she was drawn rather, to the boiling and bubbling of the sea, and recalled a glass door-stopper she had acquired with her rank of wife and lady, and which had become a source of innocent pleasure as it lay on the carpet of the morning room at ‘Birdlip House’.

‘You will have to take us in tow,’ Captain Purdew was shouting at his second mate.

Although Mrs Roxburgh could sense that the mate’s attitude to this decision was disrespectful, he was preparing to obey the captain’s order, while she, so delighted by her vision of the green door-stopper, continued rounding it out, partly in her mind, partly in the sea water undulating beyond the gunwale. There was a girl called Matty Somerton, only briefly in her service, who had stumbled over the stopper while carrying a trayload of cordial. It had been something of a speciality with Matty to stumble and fall, tray in hand. She could not help it, she confessed, and on the stairs, always up, but never yet down.

Narrowing her eyes in the sunlight, in this seascape from which she remained detached, Ellen Gluyas knew that she should have felt more sympathy for her maid, from having brought suppers to the lodger on a tin tray, and almost dropped it out of nervousness, in the refined atmosphere of books and medicine bottles. Sucked deeper still into the whorls of memory and water, she was less than a maid: her mother’s drudge and her father’s unpaid hand.

She was dragged back to the surface by seeing that the two boats had been manœuvred to within a short distance of each other, and that Mr Pilcher himself was securing a hawser which one of the long-boat’s crew flung across the gap.

Captain Purdew remained upright and unemployed, holding to the mast, grinning, and trying to suppress a moral anguish he was not yet prepared to admit. Since Pilcher’s head was at an angle which allowed him to concentrate on the hawser, it was impossible to observe the lines, so deep as to be black, which fascinated Austin Roxburgh when he was in a position to examine the second officer’s face. He felt peculiarly drawn to Pilcher, compelled by repulsion rather than inspired by the spark of positive attraction. He would have liked to find favour with this offensive individual, but could not feel that his aspiration would be recognized.

Having knotted the rope, the fellow suggested by the hang of his head and a thin-lipped shamefaced smile, that he was preparing to launch a joke. But humour could only have eluded Pilcher, and he turned to resume command of the pinnace.

They struggled on.

In the hands of others, and without compensating books or needlework, the Roxburghs were left pretty much with their thoughts. The solace of conversation was more or less denied them since both sensed that the foreign language they spoke might cause surprise, or worse, arouse resentment. So they confined themselves to such unexceptionable banalities as, ‘Look, Mr Roxburgh, would you say that is an albatross?’ or, ‘It must be midday, Ellen, don’t you think? by the position of the sun.’

Nobody could accuse them of not trying to comport themselves. It was during the silences that Mrs Roxburgh, to her own knowledge, got out of hand. In silence she was able to indulge, even flaunt, a difference she had been made to feel most forcibly as they helped her over the side, probing with a foot for the rope ladder, in her passage to the long-boat from the familiar deck of Bristol Maid . She was dangling, a bundle of incredible clothes, cruel stays, and spasmodic breathing. She had been softened and made more defenceless, as was to be expected, by the precious child she was carrying, when in normal circumstances, she, if no one else, knew herself to be tough-fibred. So it was also frightening to be suspended in this airy limbo. The strong hands of rough, kindly men had held, only to relinquish her. Swinging and bumping on the rope ladder, she was at the mercy of her own initiative, and that of the wind filling her skirts, making of her a mute bell which would have emitted a pathetic tinkle had it attempted to chime. Other men stood goggling up at her ankles from below. One fellow blushed for her as he passed her on. She was quick to conceal the cause of his shame on feeling solid boards beneath her feet. Until now, she had been proud of her neat glacé button boots, bought a year or two before on a visit to London.

A day later, still set in one of the only two attitudes she found it possible to adopt in the space allotted to them, she only had to work her toes very slightly to feel the water squelching in her boots, a pastime not without its melancholy pleasure. When she was not taking her turn at bailing, a soporific so potent that sight of a trickle of blood from a cut in her hand did not detract from its effect, she sat and watched men exerting themselves, the certain rough elegance of even the thickest wrists alternately compelling and rejecting a boat’s oar. As their movements fused and confused she saw above all her father’s wrist flicking the whip with a movement of its own as they jogged side by side in the cart, or on feast days, the jingle. She stepped forward at last over the legs of the rowers and closed the scaly lids when the eyes were no longer looking at her and folded the hands on the wesket before hurrying up the road for help. Had she been left to mature naturally she had inherited that same chapped skin. Looking at her hands, Mrs Roxburgh noticed that she was returning, and not by slow degrees, to nature.

During the voyage, of circumnavigation as it seemed to have become, the shore so distant, if not mythical, the boy Oswald moved about the boat more freely than most, now taking his turn at bailing, now straining upon an oar, but always with an end in mind: to seat himself at the knees of one who was not so much the lady as a Divine Presence. Thus crouched, he would concentrate on the pair of hands lying in a lap.