Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

In the twilight before dawn the Roxburghs were awakened by voices and a sound of canvas, to find that their shelter was being dismantled. The men at work were not unkindly disposed towards them, and one went so far as to apologize to the tenants for the inconvenience they were causing them.

‘Bosun’ll bawl at us,’ he explained, ‘if we’re not stowed afore the captain finishes ’is prayers.’

Mr Roxburgh laughed rather too heartily at the sailor’s joke, then made a mental note to commend them all to their Maker when a more suitable moment offered itself. Since the greatest need for it arose, he had lost the habit of prayer, he was ashamed to realize, but his wife no doubt included him in her own petitions. Prayer, he had always suspected, came more easily to women through their cultivating a more intimate, emotional relationship with God. Or was that so? Could one be certain of anything?

His reflections ended by making him grumpy. ‘If you don’t get up, Ellen, you’ll put them against us. They’ll be in a bad enough temper as it is.’

‘Yes,’ she murmured drowsily, but could not yet bestir herself in the delicious grey which stretches between sleep and waking, not even if her sloth caused the Lord God of Hosts to abandon them at full gallop. ‘Yes,’ she repeated sharper, and sat up too quick, wondering how she should dress for the day ahead, before realizing there was no choice.

She might at least have inquired after Mr Roxburgh’s health had not her own heavy mind, and perhaps Mr Pilcher’s scorn, been against it. More than anything her pregnancy outweighed her solicitude for others.

‘Shall I give you a hand?’ Mr Roxburgh offered magnanimously.

She was grateful to be pulled to her feet, and now that they were facing each other, she kissed him; it was still dark, though possibly not dark enough to satisfy Mr Roxburgh. Because she could feel a quivering in his rigid fingers she was careful to avoid the mouth.

After the launching of the boats, which developed into a turmoil of emotion, oaths, torn skin, bruised vanity, and barely suppressed hatred, they were able to set course for the mainland thanks to a wind the captain and his first officer had been hoping to catch. But still the long-boat limped. Mr Courtney was disconcerted to the extent that he decided on hailing the pinnace. An excess of shouting drew their attention, and when the distance between the two boats had sufficiently diminished, Mr Pilcher flung an unwilling hawser. Mr Courtney himself seized upon it with what appeared to Mr Roxburgh the air of a man taking up a gage. He made it fast. No doubt it would have gone against the grain to admit, even from between his clenched teeth, that the long-boat was once more dependent on the good graces of the pinnace.

Mr Roxburgh recalled his resolution to say prayers, but again the moment was not propitious; his heart was still padding irregularly he felt, as the result of his recent exertions, and someone had jobbed him in the eye with an elbow during the general mellay of clambering aboard in a stiff surf.

Remembering his wife’s condition he deflected his thoughts ever so slightly in her direction, and was prompted to remark for her moral sustenance, ‘We can thank God, my dear, for bringing us a few yards closer to civilization.’

He spoke at an instant when the wind veered, giving every indication of wanting to hustle them away from the coast and out to sea. As in so many of nature’s manifestations, the squall seemed only to some degree capricious, beyond which it was driven by an almost personal rage or malice. Mrs Roxburgh dared wonder whether the Deity Himself were not taking revenge on them for their human shortcomings.

In the circumstances she was not sustained by her husband’s untimely remark. Physically she was at her lowest. She had the greatest difficulty in preventing her head from being dragged by its unnatural weight down upon her slack breasts, above her swollen belly, and was only alerted by overhearing a colloquy hurled back and forth between the long-boat and the pinnace. Mr Courtney had resumed command of the former in the absence of the captain’s faculties, and was upbraiding his subordinate Pilcher for making no move to adapt his rig to meet the sudden emergency.

Mrs Roxburgh’s dull eyes and woman’s ears did not adjust themselves to a situation as technical as it was masculine, until forced out of her apathy by the untoward emotion of the contestants and the sight of Pilcher taking an axe and hacking at the hawser on which they depended.

It was soon done: the long-boat was free to flounder on her chosen course, to the best of her poor ability, and if Providence liked to favour her.

In the beginning, none of those aboard dared give expression to his thoughts. Glad of the occupation, some of the crew took of their own accord to bailing, for the water had started seeping through the martyred timbers in spite of the attentions received while beached on the cay. Mr Roxburgh joined them willingly. So did his wife when the tin abandoned by other hands floated towards her.

During a pause from his work it occurred to Mr Roxburgh to ask, ‘What has become of the boy, Ellen? He didn’t surely abscond to the pinnace?’

Because death promised to become an everyday occurrence in which tuberose sentiments and even sincere grief might sound superfluous, she answered in the flattest voice, ‘No, he was drowned yesterday evening, gathering shellfish from the reef.’

Several steps behind in his acceptance of the situation, Mr Roxburgh was appalled by his wife’s unexpected callousness. ‘Why on earth didn’t you tell me?’

‘I forgot,’ she answered. ‘There were other things on my mind.’

It was not wholly true, but then, he would have recoiled from being told while horror at the death still possessed her, and later of course she had been shaken by the blows Pilcher dealt her in making his unjust accusations.

Just then Spurgeon, enjoying an invalid’s privileges within earshot of his benefactor, was roused by what he overheard. ‘What — the nipper gone ? Oswald was a fine lad. But crikey, you can’t blame the lady. Singin’ out won’t call back the dead.’

Although displeased that his wife should have found an ally in one he considered his personal conquest, Mr Roxburgh welcomed the double assurance that formal mourning was not expected.

A sigh or two, a click of the tongue, and he had done his duty. ‘You are the one I’m sorry for, Ellen. The boy was so devoted to you.’

‘I loved him,’ she said simply, but again so dull of voice that Austin Roxburgh need not experience the slightest twinge, either of remorse or jealousy.

In any event, the distance which the recalcitrant pinnace had already put between herself and the long-boat increased the unreality of most human relationships. Faith in integrity persisted while the rope held, but with the severing of the hawser and gradual disappearance of the master boat, the horizon had become clouded with doubts.

Mr Roxburgh wished he was still in possession of his journal, to discuss his mood in rational terms, and thus restore a moral balance.

Now it was sea and wind holding the balance, or maliciously maintaining a lack of it as they were buffeted day and night, in which direction Mr Courtney, if questioned, professed to know.

‘I’d say — by my calculations — we’re a hundred and fifty mile to the east of Percy Island’ or ‘At this rate we’re headed back for the Cumberlands’ or again, ‘With any luck, we might make landfall tomorrow evening at Bustard Bay.’

His clear but rather stupid eyes had never looked farther and seen less; his jaws beneath their doggy whiskers were cracking with responsibility.

While Captain Purdew, an old child huddled near his guardian’s ankles, laughed low. ‘Yarmouth, or Barnstaple, it’s all the same — as God knows.’