Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

The tears came into Mrs Roxburgh’s eyes and she might have given way from seeing the strangers they had been to each other (and for that matter, might remain, till death overtook one of them) had she not realized that Captain Purdew had refilled the pannikin, and was holding the object, black and horrid, under her nose. One of the seamen closest to her had knelt in the bilge, hands raised as though preparing to assist in a ceremony. All were waiting for the lady to drink.

‘Mrs Roxburgh,’ the captain invited in a reverent whisper.

All were watching.

‘No,’ Mrs Roxburgh began, and made a movement to push the stinking vessel away. ‘I hardly think — oh, no !’ she snickered in disgust.

‘Ellen,’ her husband chirruped, ‘you must take a sip at least, out of deference to the captain, and because’, he thought to add, ‘the Almighty has brought us safely to land.’

For one blasphemous instant there arose in her mind the vision of a fish the Almighty was playing, the distended lip in which the hook was caught, her own; then she said, ‘Oh dear! You are all against me,’ and accepted the tin cup as though it had been a silver chalice, and despite her nausea, sank her face.

‘This’, said Austin Roxburgh, winking at the congregation, ‘is the original Cornishwoman!’

That her husband could have betrayed his own creation, granted it was under the influence of rum, made her blush and swallow, and what she experienced was not remission of sins, but a fire spreading. She was amazed and mortified to find she could swallow so much of the stuff — almost to the bottom of the cup.

As she gave back the pannikin she could feel the blood streaming through her veins, into fingertips and sodden toes, though that most vital part of her, her belly, remained curiously cold and untouched.

Her companions sighed on witnessing their lady’s demonstration of good faith, and were free to look about them again.

One of them asked, ‘Where be our blessed land now ?’

‘Still where ’twere, I reckon.’

If not incontrovertible, it seemed to Mrs Roxburgh the only desirable conclusion as she sank back to loll against her husband’s chest.

Night fell at least, and with it her blue-black hair she sensed escaping into sleep and water. We shall wake, she promised herself in leaving her body, and find we have arrived, and begin afresh.

It did happen more or less as she decided it would, with a few deviations from the foreseen.

Mr Pilcher was shouting through another milky dawn. ‘’Tis not the coast. It’s a reef, or cay. Will we beach ’em, sir, if we find somewhere that’ll suit?’

Flattered into thinking he had been consulted, Captain Purdew accepted the suggestion, while Mr Courtney scowled and sulked, and the master of the pinnace grinned back.

His derision, if it were, made Mrs Roxburgh touch her hair, whereupon she discovered her bonnet gone, nor was it anywhere to be found however much she sidled and looked.

‘What is it, Ellen?’ her husband inquired anxiously.

‘Nothing,’ she replied.

She was relieved he did not appear to notice that her hair was hanging in dank disorder; he was still too sticky with sleep and stiff from the unorthodox position in which they were forced to spend their nights. Her impulse was to reach for the dressing-case, to avail herself of her comb and glass, until remembering that they had parted with the case some way back.

Almost every contingency had become by now acceptable. To find herself sitting in water up to her shins did not alarm Mrs Roxburgh. The sea-water inside the boat had risen by inches in recent hours. Bailing was intermittent, either because ineffectual, or because the thoughts of all those who performed the duty were directed at the land. Mrs Roxburgh too, had sat back at last, to feel and enjoy the milky warmth, the texture of tamed sea-water.

The surf by contrast was punishing the reef with such animal ferocity it did not seem as though any respite could be expected, when on rounding a coral neck, the pinnace and its insufficient relative the long-boat were vouchsafed the peace and protection of an elliptical recess rather than a bay, its curve as white as kaolin.

Always in the lead, Mr Pilcher was soon gesticulating from the shore after wading through milder, though to some eyes, still intimidating breakers. A sprinkling of sailors followed his example, leaping, pounding, racing one another when not battling through breast-high foam. Upon reaching land the men began hauling on the boats while cursing the coral which had torn their hitherto-impervious feet.

In emulation of the seamen, Mr Roxburgh jumped, and was junketed around, and nearly fell. She could have done nothing for this frail spillikin no longer her husband as he was whirled away. In any case, she too, no longer functioned by her own will, for that hairy man the boatswain was lifting her over the gunwale regardless of her wishes.

‘Leave me — cusn’t tha?’ one of her selves expostulated as she flailed around in search of some solid object to help her in resisting an exit of which her mother-in-law would surely have disapproved.

She found nothing, and was dragged off, like any caterpillar from a twig.

‘Ho-ya ho-ya! ho- ya !’ the crews encouraged one another as they heaved the boats on to the beach.

Mrs Roxburgh succeeded briefly in escaping out of the boatswain’s arms, to flounder a few steps before stubbing her boots on what must have been a coral hussock. Thereupon she sank, the boatswain resuming possession of her as she rose, more a wet hen than a woman, whose clucking cries remained mercifully unheard by any but her silent rescuer.

Long after the boats were beached, the sailors continued to curse the bleeding coral for lacerating their feet, while Mrs Roxburgh, deposited on land by the gallant efforts of the boatswain, saw that her pretty little boots (glacé leather with cloth uppers) were slashed beyond repair due to her own foolishness.

Still exhilarated by his tumultuous, and at the time alarming, experience in the surf, Mr Roxburgh glowed, and breathed deep. ‘Who would have thought it possible!’ until remembering his wife, he approached and put his arm round her, ‘Ellen, you might have been injured!’ with a sincerity she did not doubt.

‘I am not,’ she assured him, and formally added as she had been taught, ‘thank you, Mr Roxburgh.’

It was at once evident that ‘land’ was too ambitious a word for the reef on which the castaways found themselves, though a beach of pulverized coral would make it possible to repair the long-boat at their leisure provided they could muster the materials. But of vegetation or shade there was little: nothing of that pastoral green Mr Roxburgh had hoped to find, in which to re-live the pleasures of the Georgics. Anything in the way of cover was of a grey, tough, sea-bitten variety: wiry bushes tortured by the wind, scurf of dead-green lichen, and fleshier shoots of a bitter weed which those of the men who were bred along the Bristol Channel and the Norfolk coast compared nostalgically with the samphire their women harvested at low tide from fields of mud.

For the most part level, the coral excrescence tended to rise towards the north-east, in which quarter alone, any who looked forward to solitude might hope to renew themselves. There the brush grew thicker, taller, but cowering before the strong winds to less than an average man’s size, and nowhere concentrated enough to provide an adequate refuge for introspective souls.

Even so, there was an immediate dispersal, for physical as well as spiritual reasons, of those whom the two boats disgorged, everybody consoled, not to say dazed, by a freedom they had undervalued in the past. The men set out in opposite directions, on spidery, needled legs (there were cases where one leg might have been born shorter than the other, or else deformed by grappling the deck of a listing ship) their mouths thinned by desperation or thirst, the eyes of some closed on and off in an attempt to shut out an experience which still visibly flickered in their minds. But with all, the overruling impulse was to get away from one another.