Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

They were brought to a halt by a revival of Captain Purdew’s sense of his own authority. He proceeded to deliver something of an oration to emphasize that they had beached out of necessity, not for pleasure, and that once they were rested and refreshed, their prime concern was the repairing of the boats.

The seamen listened for the simple reason they could see no avenue of escape.

‘And re-victualling — if foodstuff of any kind is offering,’ the captain’s voice persisted, high, dry, vibrating like sail with a wind in it. ‘In that event’, he warned, ‘remember we are a community, whose duty it is to pool our resources.’

Listening to this upright old man made Mrs Roxburgh melancholy. She suspected that those who are honourable must suffer and break more often than the others, which did not absolve the honourable from continuing to offer themselves for suffering and breakage. It started her looking for her husband, who must already have gone in search of the privacy his temperament craved.

After enjoying the luxury of a postponed, ungainly, and not unexpectedly, painful stool, Austin Roxburgh was wandering with little regard for purpose or direction, kicking at the solid though harsh ground for the simple pleasure of renewing acquaintance with primordial substance. Still walking, he unbuttoned his steaming overcoat to let in the sun and wind, then removed the garment and hung it on his arm. On or off, his overcoat seemed as incongruous as most human needs; human behaviour in its niceties must only excite derision on this desert island. Thus warned against acts of feckless self-assertion he resisted the urge to bare the leaves of his saturated Elzevir in the hope that the sun’s blaze might dry them, and continued strolling through a park from which the statues had been removed.

At the island’s southernmost tip, which had been whittled down to a narrow spine of razor-edged coral, opposing currents raised their hackles in what was probably a state of permanent collision. Much as he had grown to hate the sea, Austin Roxburgh felt drawn to this desolate promontory by something solitary and arid, akin to his own nature (if he would admit it, as he sometimes did). Overhead, the voices of invisible sea-birds sounded hollower, more ominous, in calling through infinity; the waves assumed ever more vicious shapes for their assaults on the coral; something — a sea-urchin must have died; and a white light threatened to expose the more protected corners of human personality. Mr Roxburgh was fully exposed. In advancing towards this land’s end, he felt the trappings of wealth and station, the pride in ethical and intellectual aspirations, stripped from him with a ruthlessness reserved for those who accept their importance or who have remained unaware of their pretentiousness. Now he even suspected, not without a horrid qualm, that his devoted wife was dispensable, and their unborn child no more than a footnote on nonentity.

So the solitary explorer gritted his teeth, sucked on the boisterous air with caution, and visibly sweated. He might have been suffering from a toothache rather than the moment when self-esteem is confronted with what may be pure being — or nothingness.

Arrived at his destination, the dwindling headland on which he might have erected a moral altar for the final stages of his martyrdom, Mr Roxburgh discovered that he had taken too much for granted. Stretched on the ground as though consigning his meagre flesh to decomposition by the sea air, lay Spurgeon the steward. It could not have been an unpleasanter surprise.

‘Ha, Spurgeon!’ he managed to address the fellow. ‘You have forestalled me!’

The steward did not attempt to move, but ejaculated, ‘Eh?’ from out of his emaciated, putty-coloured face and sparse tufts of beard.

‘I mean,’ the intruder continued, ‘I hardly expected a human being here where the land has almost become sea again. Are you so attracted to what we have just escaped?’

‘How about yerself?’ Spurgeon answered.

It did seem to place them in the same category, but Mr Roxburgh rejected that.

‘Ah, no!’ Slowly Spurgeon rubbed his head against the crushed coral which for its next phase would be converted into sand. ‘Not a “’uman being”. No one can accuse me of that — where there isn’t no more ’n skin an’ bone, and a fart or two. I won’t inconvenience you, sir, much longer.’

‘Are you sick, then?’ it was Mr Roxburgh’s duty to ask.

Holding his precious book, he had seated himself on a stone beside this thoroughly repulsive object.

‘Not sick,’ the steward replied. ‘The way I see it I’m simply fizzlin’ out.’

He sat up, and proceeded slowly to turn his neck, which his companion quite expected to creak.

‘’Ere,’ he said, parting the hair to exhibit a place above the nape, ‘I’ll be blowed if I’m not startin’ a boil. And that’s the worst sign of any. The sea-boils. See it?’

Mr Roxburgh would not let himself.

‘Feel then,’ Spurgeon invited.

Mr Roxburgh decided against it.

Spurgeon continued rubbing the nape of his neck. ‘I knewed this mornin’ early that I’ll never come out of this. There’s nothin’ like the sea-boils for makin’ a man fall apart quick.’

Faced with this human derelict, Austin Roxburgh realized afresh that his experience of life, like his attitude to death, had been of a predominantly literary nature; in spite of which, it was required of him to exert himself as a member of the ruling class, for so he must still appear to others in spite of his recent enlightenment.

‘Cheer up, old chap!’ he encouraged, and his voice echoed the accents of some forgotten tutor. ‘Don’t you feel — I mean — that you owe it to your wife?’

This initial piece of advice only made the steward glummer. ‘If I ’ad one,’ he mumbled.

‘Never?’ his companion asked.

‘No,’ said Spurgeon. ‘Or not long enough to notice. But wot’s the odds? A man sleeps the tighter without. There were never room for that many toe-nails in the same bed.’

The ridge of Mr Roxburgh’s distinguished cheekbones coloured very lightly. ‘Marriage’, he suggested, ‘is not entirely physical. I should hate, at least, to think it was.’

‘If it wasn’t, a man could settle for a dawg. I did too,’ Spurgeon remembered, ‘after a while.’

‘Of which breed?’ Although by no means doggy himself, Mr Roxburgh welcomed an opportunity for leading their conversation down a safer path.

‘Don’t know as she was any partickler breed. A sort of dawg. That’s about all. She’d sit an’ look at me — and I’d look back. There was nothin’ between us that wasn’t above board.’

‘The affection of a faithful animal is most gratifying,’ Mr Roxburgh conceded; he found himself stuttering for what must have been the first time, ‘but — mmmorally there is no comparison with the love of a devoted woman.’

‘Don’t know about that,’ the steward replied. ‘I weren’t born into the moral classes.’

If Mr Roxburgh did not hear, it was on account of a sense of guilt he was nursing, for the many occasions on which he had abandoned someone else to drowning by clambering aboard the raft of his own negative abstractions. Her hair floated out behind her as though on the surface of actual water instead of in the depths of his thoughts.

He recovered himself and informed his friend, ‘Salt water has medicinal properties. Or so they tell us.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Have you tried rubbing it with salt water?’

‘Rubbin’ what?’

‘The boil, of course!’ Elated by his own inspiration Mr Roxburgh resolved to overlook obtuseness in another.

‘There’s no way out if you’re for it.’ Spurgeon snorted so contemptuously he might have attained social status without his companion’s realizing.