Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

‘But who’s to know, my dear fellow, unless we try? The ability to correct wrong was vested in us for practical use.’

Mr Roxburgh would have been hard put to it to explain how he had come by a precept which was as reasonable as it sounded arcane; while Spurgeon looked the glummer for his own native ignorance.

The steward sat watching this ninny of a gentleman whose good intentions were driving him down the coral ramp towards the sea. After receiving a bash in the face from a mounting wave, Mr Roxburgh stooped to plunge his cupped hands.

There was little enough water in the cup by the time the physician reached the patient’s side.

‘Open up! Quick! The place!’ Mr Roxburgh cried; faith, once lit, was blazing in him.

Of a damper humour, Spurgeon failed to kindle, but submitted his neck to the virtues of salt water.

Mr Roxburgh who originally had no intention of touching the boil was now faced with doing so, or the meagre drop of water would escape. So he set to, gingerly at first, grimacing with a disgust his patient was fortunately unable to see, and rubbed with stiffened, bony fingers, till the activity itself began to soothe, not the patient necessarily, but without a doubt the physician.

For the first time since landing on this desert island Austin Roxburgh was conscious that the blood was flowing through his veins. To an almost reprehensible extent, he throbbed and surged with gratitude. He was grateful not only to this unsavoury catalyst the steward, but to his absent wife, and the miracle of their unborn child.

He went so far as to take a good look at the inflamed lump which the steward had predicted would become a boil.

‘Am I hurting, Spurgeon?’

‘Yes.’

It was reason enough for discontinuing the treatment, after which they rested awhile, side by side, when Mr Roxburgh became for the second time inspired.

‘Do you know what? Soap!’

‘Soap? What?’

‘If we could but lay our hands on some.’

‘There’s soap they brought along in case of caulkin’ the bloody long-boat.’

‘But sugar as well.’

‘I got a bit of sugar — if ’tisn’t melted — for sweetin’ up me rum ration.’

‘Soap and sugar, Spurgeon, have well-known drawing powers.’

The steward might have grown less inclined to humour an eccentric gentleman’s whims, but time hung half as heavy in a mate’s company, however undesirable the mate in the eyes of ordinary men. Either anticipation of their disapproval, or friction by salt water, or the prospect of a soap-and-sugar poultice, or the tingling of an inadmissible affection, had brought the gooseflesh out on Spurgeon.

While Austin Roxburgh tingled with his inspiration; in fact he was indebted to old Nurse Hayes for a method she had used in drawing the pus out of Garnet after his brother had scratched his arm on a rusty nail.

When she had satisfied her own needs, and failed to set eyes on her husband, Mrs Roxburgh went in search of him. At the same time she could not have denied that she experienced a delicious pleasure in being alone, even in her clinging, sodden garments, her slashed boots, and hair by now too wild and too matted to be dealt with by any means at her command. She must have looked a slattern stalking through the scrub. Her elegant boots, she suspected, might always have been what Aunt Triphena would have called ‘trumpery’. But the sun flattered her as she strolled, and the wind, although gusty, was less vindictive than while they were at sea. Each warmed and dried, and in performing its act of charity, enclosed her in an envelope of evaporating moisture, so that she might have been walking through one of the balmy mornings she remembered on her native heath, except that furze and hussock had been replaced by thickets which tore more savagely, and starved creepers set gins for unwary ankles, and lizards were more closely related to stone.

She was content, however — and hopeful at last for her child: that he would survive, not only the physical rigours of what was no longer a doomed voyage, but also the moral judgment of those who might ferret over his features. She did pray that, whatever her shortcomings, the child would be theirs and no one else’s.

A comparatively steep rise in the ground had reduced her gait to a dull and breathless plodding, when a change in the climate told her that she was emerging on the island’s weather side. She was blasted by a gale. It took her hair and tossed it aloft, and filled her clothes, and spun her round amongst the quaking, but more inured bushes. She would have turned at once and made her way back had it not been for a bird’s call becoming human voice. She looked down to where the land shelved towards the sea, and saw a figure, arms thrashing to attract attention. Again the cries were directed at her: it was Oswald Dignam’s voice she heard. Holding herself stiffly and sideways in the vain hope of evading the gale, she began climbing down to meet him, her stumbling once or twice caused either by spasms of fear, or waves of pleasure at thought of a companionship so undemanding it could but add a benison to solitude.

The wind behind him, Oswald quickly reached her, together with a lash of driven spray, and opened a clenched hand to offer an amorphous mass of some kind of shellfish he must have battered from their anchorage.

‘They’s for you, Mrs Roxburgh,’ his almost girlish voice gasped.

‘Oh, but we must all share what we find, the captain tells us,’ she replied sententiously.

‘Who’s to know?’ the boy asked. ‘If you ’adn’t come I’d ’uv ate them meself — like anybody else.’

His natural, milky skin grown fiery on the voyage made him look the more indignant for what she had only half-intended as an accusation.

‘Yes,’ she sighed, ‘we are all weak, I expect,’ but did not add, ‘and myself the weakest,’ because he was only a boy.

Overcoming an initial nausea, she took the still quivering mess of mutilated shellfish from the palm on which it lay, and swallowed it at one gulp. To her consternation, some of the shell went down with the flesh; other fragments she arrested with her tongue, and spat them out. She could feel that some of her saliva was dribbled on her chin.

It was Oswald Dignam’s turn to smile his pleasure and approval.

He was again in love, she saw from the trembling and wincing of the face which observed her, and she would have gathered up his fiery head, as she had been tempted to caress its milder counterpart on a foggy afternoon at sea.

Instead she murmured with the kind of stiff formality he might have expected of her, ‘Thank you, Oswald, you are indeed my friend, and I hope will always remain so.’ As she spoke she felt the child inside her move as though in response to a relationship.

Oswald was deeper enslaved; beads of salt encrusting his eyebrows were visibly translated into drops of water; she watched them fall upon his cheeks.

‘There’s more, Mrs Roxburgh,’ he managed despite a tongue which had swollen at its root. ‘If you wait I’ll fetch ’em for ye.’

He ran back towards the edge of the reef while she waited for this further tribute; probably no one, not even her husband, would have thought her worthy of it. So she could not help but smile, whether from appeased vanity or tender fulfilment it was not the moment to consider.

On reaching the water’s edge, Oswald began bashing at the coral with a stone. The sight of his small, crouching figure made her clutch her own more tightly. Had he really been her child instead of a diminutive lover, she would have called him back. In the circumstances she continued watching, lips parted between pleasure and anxiety. When the sea rose, and with a logic which had only been suspended, it seemed to her now, swept him off the ledge on which he had been precariously perched.