Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

He did not see them in their present shape, as scratched and filthy as a man’s, but as he remembered them, like a pair of smooth, dazzling fish, only hidden to be re-discovered, while playing together in a white sea of fog. He had even experienced their touch, and shivered again at the approach of jewels, in particular the ring with a curious nest of stones which glittered like dark, clotting blood. The memory of this ring, rather than its counterfeit on a grimy finger, seared his already burning cheek.

‘You are contributing as much, Oswald, as any of the men.’ Mrs Roxburgh spoke with the dutiful kindness of the dull woman she felt herself to be.

So lethargic, she could scarcely raise a hand to remove a hair from her lips, or brush away the crumbs which tumbled down her front when she ate her ration of mouldy bread. If she glanced disinterestedly, it did not seem unnatural that the grey, and in some cases, green crumbs should be lying on the shelf her bosom provided. Agreeable enough in itself, her lassitude gave her a plausible excuse for neglecting her person, as well as an argument for not resisting, morally at least, the stares of the rowers and the boy at her feet.

It could have been lassitude again which was developing her faith, not in God, in whose service she had never been punctilious, nor in the more compelling gods of the countryside into which she had been born, but in the umbilical rope joining the long-boat to the pinnace. No, it was more than the ebb of her mental and physical powers, it was life itself dictating her faith in this insubstantial cord.

‘You will bring us to land,’ she said to the boy because he was so conveniently placed, ‘and we shall find water — and limpets — winkles. Oh yes, I’m certain of it!’

She dismissed the painful probability of cutting her hands in the struggle to open shellfish, and could already feel the slither of fat oysters down her throat.

As they progressed, if they did, the smoother passages under sail, but more often jerked forward by manpower, she learned the least tic, the faintest convulsion, the essential ugliness of men’s straining faces, if also their relaxed beauty while they rested sweaty and thoughtless after exertion.

Only at such moments, when she was most absorbed in her lesson, did Oswald dare cone her face. Then he would try to delve beneath the salt scales and ruins of the original skin, to reconstruct a beauty, true as well as legendary, which he had discovered for the first time on a foggy afternoon, and never again experienced a perfection he knew to exist, if only in a dream, or fog.

Mrs Roxburgh was driven to exclaim, ‘How you love to ferret into a person’s thoughts! What do you expect to find?’ then regretted her indiscretion because the boy grew ashamed to the point of colouring up.

A seaman who had overheard increased his distress by invading what should have remained a private world. ‘That lad ’ud stare out the clock’s face, and not ’ave nothun to show for’t.’

Full of good-natured insensitivity, the man kicked out at the boy, now thoroughly sullen from betrayal by the one he most respected. He sat clutching the canvas bag which held his possessions, unable to escape from his betrayer for the press of knees and hairy calves.

The afternoon dissolved into rain, which reduced every face, especially Mrs Roxburgh’s, to the state of first innocence. What would she not have given for innocence enough to lean forward and stroke the rounded cheek of this boy who might otherwise remain closed against her.

Taking advantage of a burst of thunder which she hoped might prevent her remark carrying to other ears, she tried to re-instate herself. ‘I was put in mind of the ferret, Oswald, we spoke of the other day. You remember?’

He did not appear to, or else would not let himself, and she was left with her image of small red eyes ferreting through Cornish furze and hussock after rabbits of ill-omen.

So she sat back and allowed the rain to drench her. It seemed a natural occurrence that the black rain should be rushing at them. She gave herself up to it inside her clothes.

Mr Roxburgh had been holding himself exceptionally erect ever since deciding that the inevitable could not be overcome. Seated on his wife’s starboard side he was protecting her, whether necessary or not, with an arm numbed by duty. Mr Roxburgh’s long thin fingers would have shown up blenched as they gripped the gunwale for support, had they not been blackened by sun and grime.

‘Comfortable, Ellen?’ he had formed the habit of inquiring, as though that too, were necessary.

For Austin Roxburgh the real necessity was the rather inconvenient volume buttoned inside his bosom. Its weight and angles had become his only solace. Would it be possible on a desert island to find sufficient shade in which to enjoy the pleasures of Virgil?

This was Mr Roxburgh’s secret longing. Indifferent health, the irritability which comes of chronic constipation, even jealousy, no longer tormented him. He could not very well become jealous of a boy however secretive, so he told himself. For Austin Roxburgh had guessed the boy’s secret after his wife had disappeared over the side, swinging and plunging on the rope ladder. Awaiting his turn, Oswald Dignam stood frowning away his emotions, nervously fiddling with the draw-neck of a glory-bag he was holding behind him. The most feminine member of the crew, he did not intend to be parted from whatever odds and ends he carried in the canvas bag with its sinnet-work in crimson twine, and did at last smuggle it past the boatswain’s notice, to Mr Roxburgh’s satisfaction. His own contraband made him approve of this bagful of secrets, and accept those less tangible which rose to the surface of the boy’s face as his divinity sank.

Beneath the black sky, against the flap flap of a flagging sail and an increased grumbling of rowlocks, somebody spat over the side. It hit, and seemed to hiss before being swallowed. Their thoughts removed to an incalculable distance inside their skulls, the rowers’ faces could have been turning in their sleep.

Austin Roxburgh had fallen to contemplating as far as he dared the mystery of virility as embodied in his brother Garnet. Risen from the hip-bath which Nurse Hayes had stood on the floor against the fender, the white flesh took on its worth in gold from firelight weaving out of the grate. If ever Austin were unwise enough in after life to let himself become intoxicated with strong drink, this same vision would materialize. At such moments he was all but choked by the ripple of his own throat. Now in an open boat Mr Roxburgh had perhaps grown a little drunk on rain, for he visibly gulped.

Of course he had always resisted any inclination to assess desire in more than aesthetic terms. So he made himself concentrate on the pins and needles in the arm protecting his wife, whose value had been increased by this child of theirs hidden inside her. He loved her, he felt, as he had never been capable of loving any other human being, excepting, perhaps, the imagined brother of his childhood. Plastered together in their drenched condition, they were truly ‘one flesh’, an expression he had been inclined to reject as in bad taste, until the senseless caprices of nature invested it with a reality which had become his mainstay.

The Roxburghs gently rocked against each other, and she compiled a tender inventory of what their life together had been: instead of cabinets stuffed with Wedgwood (she positively hated the black) or Chippendale surfaces reflecting an arrangement of snuff boxes and vinaigrettes, or her own glossy portrait by Sir John, she listed flurries of pear blossom, and wasps burrowing in ripe pears, and a child’s grave, and an invalid’s narrow feet returning to life after she had slid the warming-pan between the sheets.