Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

It made sense to everyone: geography was anybody’s guess; the chart might have been torn up and instruments tossed into the surf before they embarked on this erratic voyage.

Which in the days, or weeks, or months that followed, concerned Ellen Roxburgh more than anyone. On her the waters in the doomed boat reached higher, almost to her waist it seemed, clambering, lapping, sipping the blood out of her flaccid body.

That was the least part of her. Herself sank. The fringe of her green shawl trailed through depths in which it was often indistinguishable from beaded weed or the veils and streamers of fish drifting and catching on coral hummocks then dissolving free for the simple reason that the whole universe was watered down.

Somebody, a man, was holding a stinking vessel to her lips, ‘Here Mrs Roxburgh is a drop of rum only a nip the dregs but will put new life into ’ee.’

She allowed it to happen, more than anything to pacify whoever it was that prescribed the cure, not because she feared life might be leaving her; everyone else, but not herself, she was so convinced, or egotistical.

And again was lowered into twilit depths where only a brown throbbing distinguished what she was experiencing now from anything she had experienced before. Grave schooners were sailing beside her brushing her ribs eyeing her through isinglass portholes. It must have been the rum causing the red-brown throbbing of her thoughts. As for the creature which had begun to persecute her its increasingly remonstrative form undulating out of time with her own somewhere in the folds of her petticoats bunting nibbling at her numb legs this slippery fish was pushing in the direction of a freedom to which she had never yet attained.

Whether forced to it by mental anguish or physical stress, Mrs Roxburgh raised herself from the position in which her husband had been supporting her in the waterlogged boat.

‘Ohhh!’ she moaned, or lowed rather, through thick lips, her face offered flat to the sky. ‘Aw, my Gore!’

It was a still evening, comparatively benign. In the circumstances, the sounds he had just heard uttered struck Mr Roxburgh as positively bestial. His sensibility would have shut them out had it been at all possible.

As it was not, he voiced the precept taught in youth, ‘We must keep our heads, Ellen,’ while going through the motions of soothing a delirious wife.

Who cried, ‘There’s no question — it’s lost — however I tried — nobody can blame me, Austin — can they?’

Although startled by her unwonted use of his Christian name, he tried to assure her, ‘Nobody intends to add to your sufferings by accusations,’ and drew his fingers along the wet, blubbery cheek of one by whom he thought he had done his duty in every sense.

But she began clutching at his hand, whimpering and muttering childishly, in an attempt to draw him down to her level.

‘Then what is it?’ he hissed, as desperate as he was irritated.

On grasping the full enormity of the situation there was nothing he could do but accept. ‘It is unfortunate, but neither of us will die of it,’ he predicted.

All his life he might have been on equal terms with reality.

After delivering his wife of their stillborn child, and somebody had produced what must have been Oswald’s glory-bag, he emptied the bag of its contents, the buttons, twine, a pencil-stub, a keepsake or two, a martyred prayerbook. In the absence of a conventional shroud the bag provided a substitute to accommodate this other, more portentous object.

Again Mr Roxburgh was satisfied he had done his duty; his hands only fumbled as he tightened the draw-string at the canvas neck, and out of his throat came a hideous sound as of tearing.

Weak from hunger and from marinating in brine, Captain Purdew dragged himself aft like an attenuated black cormorant. He seized upon Oswald Dignam’s book, and began performing an office to which life at sea had accustomed him.

Mrs Roxburgh closed her eyes. The words she but half-overheard did not impress themselves on her mind; they seemed rather, to break upon her eyelids, to be turned away as a flickering of light.

‘… man that is born …

… forasmuch as it pleases …

… thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts …’

She stirred where she lay and ripples were sent through the water in the boat, to be answered by this faint plash beyond the gunwale.

‘… our vile body …

… His glorious body …

… to subdue all things to Himself.

Amennn .’

Captain Purdew concluded with a twang, after which there was a re-settling of caps to an accompaniment of barely audible agreement or reservation.

If tears struggled out of the captain’s eyes, it was because, as everybody knew, his wits were leaving him, and though some of the men were shaken by what had occurred, it was also for remembering wives and sweethearts, or even a favourite dog. By comparison the Roxburghs appeared untouched in the halcyon evening prepared for their child’s burial. Beneath a peacock sky her face, reduced by suffering to a drained pudding-colour, wore an expression of assent bordering on tranquillity, while her husband, upright beside her, might have been enjoying congratulations for his performance in a classic role.

When Mrs Roxburgh remembered to ask, ‘Did you perhaps notice a likeness to any of us? Children take after grandparents more often than a father or mother,’ Mr Roxburgh laughed a high laugh, and uncharacteristically squeezed her.

‘I shouldn’t say … No! It was too soon, Ellen — and too brief a glimpse.’ After that, he briefly sighed, for the pity of it, as it could not have been out of contentment. ‘Since you’ve asked, however, I believe I did detect in him a touch of what might have developed into a likeness to myself.’

Then he kissed her on the mouth in full view of those who were watching, more in their dreams than through their eyes.

‘I am so glad,’ she replied, ‘and that it was a boy, as you would have wanted.’ The twitch of a smile, and she settled back into acceptance of wherever the future might float them.

Once in the days, weeks, years which followed, she did rouse herself sufficiently to ask, ‘You are not going to leave me, are you?

‘How could I?’ he answered. ‘Even if I wanted to.’

Such an indisputable reason and barely modified rebuke might have hurt if strength were not returning to her sodden limbs, not through divine forbearance, as some might have seen it, but because, she realized, she was born a Gluyas. The rain had stopped; life is to be lived. She would have got to her feet like any other beast of nature, steadying herself in the mud and trampled grass, had it been a field and not a waterlogged boat.

In present circumstances, on a morning when the weather noticeably favoured them, she threw out the last of the thoughts which had been flickering all this time in her skull like phosphorescent fish. Her hands, she saw, were the same inherited extremities of rude but practical shape. If they had lost their native tan, it was not through a course in ladycraft, but by the action of sea-water. So she was still equipped for bailing, an occupation some of the strongest members of the crew by now tended to renounce.

Her work removed her, if not physically, from her husband Mr Austin Roxburgh, who remained huddled at her side. Although occasionally he gave a hand, it was but an apathetic gesture; he was not of course so hardened by monotony as she. Once on looking at him she surprised an expression, not quite despair and not quite disgust, but which might have been caused by the slow poison of apprehension. At all events she was wounded by it, and set about bridging the distance between them.

‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘An attack is not coming on you again? Or are you grieving?’ She put out her coarsened hand as though to shore him up with her recovered strength.