Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

She did not doubt but that her companion would know what to do next. In the circumstances she could not afford to be distrustful. Beyond her numbed physical condition, her blurred vision, and mere tatters of thought, he was chopping at branches with the hatchet he carried in his belt, driving stakes into the ground, building a shelter of sorts, low and shapeless, scarcely distinguishable from the living bushes. She saw that the bark cloth he had worn across one shoulder and through the belt, had been torn off during their flight through the scrub. That he was stark naked apart from the belt and a few remnants of feathers in his hair, did not, or rather, must not, disturb her. In her own case she had the satisfaction of knowing that the swathes of vine about her waist were to some extent intact, and her wedding-ring still where she had knotted it.

Comforted by what amounted to a major dispensation of grace, she dozed off.

She awoke only under compulsion. He was prodding at her with horny toes. ‘… if you want to get inside. We’ll be safer, anyways, for not showin’ ourselves.’

She should have thanked or smiled at him, but her face and voice had lost the power to do so. Yet she must summon up the strength to reach the hut since he made no attempt at assisting her. Mrs Roxburgh might have felt put out by evidence of what she knew to be uncouthness, but Ellen Gluyas crawled gratefully enough into the luxurious privacy offered by this shelter.

She lay aching, smiling after a directionless fashion, even when the entrance was darkened by her companion’s figure stooping and following her in.

Without any further communication, he lay down, turned his back, and was still.

She slept, and woke, and slept, and woke. The sun must have climbed high. She was conscious of a criss-cross of bird-song imposed on light and silence. Fingers of sunlight intruding through the green thatch stroked her body and that of the man stretched beside her. The incongruous had no part in the world of limitless peace to which her senses had been admitted, perhaps by divine compunction, until some invisible bird derided human simplicity with an outburst of ribald mockery.

Returned to a rational state of mind she was at once aware of her companion’s snores. The hut, moreover, was filled with a stench which might have become intolerable had she not remembered kneeling in her pinafore beside a fox’s earth. She too, would be smelling pretty foxy were she able to smell herself. She sighed, and snorted, and thought how foolish she must look, naked and filthy, beside the naked filthy man.

When he started a broken yelping, his body twitching, his free shoulder warding off whichever the danger pursuing him.

He sounded in such obvious distress she put out a hand and touched his back to break the nightmare.

‘It’s a dream,’ she tried to persuade him. ‘Jack!’ she raised her voice in a command.

But neither her voice nor her hand was able to restrain his desperate twitching, and she realized she was touching the scars she had noticed on his first appearing at the blacks’ camp, when their apparently motiveless welter distinguished them from the formal incisions in native backs.

He let out a single yelp more bloodcurdling than any of those preceding it, and she snatched back her hand and put it for safety between her breasts. She felt perturbed for having touched on an area of suffering he might have wished to keep from her.

Nor was she reassured by his calling out soon after, ‘… lay off, can’t yer? — ‘Twasn’t me! — I only give’er what she asked for—’ He fell to drivelling and sobbing; anything further was meaningless.

Then he wrenched himself round. He lay on his back, waking, she could see from the lashes risen on the lids, before the face turned and he was staring at her out of pale eyes, as remote as those of the dead.

‘It was a nightmare, Jack,’ she explained feebly, ‘which I tried to free you from.’

‘It was no dream. I could feel it. They’d strung me up to the triangle, and started layin’ inter me. I was in for a good ’undred stripes. Treadmill after.’

She began counting on herself as he spoke, but only got as far as two: it was her nipples.

‘Are you afraid’, she asked, ‘that I’ll not keep my word if you take me to Moreton Bay?’

His answer to that was but a snuffling as he ground his head back and forth against the earth floor of their refuge.

He is an animal, she decided, but for all that, tractable.

She put out her hand and touched him on the wrist. ‘You must trust me,’ she said.

He neither stirred nor answered.

Thought of her own husband’s not wholly justified trust made her avert her face so that her rescuer might not see it swelling.

‘If you have a wife,’ she found herself exploring, ‘you will surely understand.’

‘She was not what you would call my wife, but as good as one, in the Old Country.’

‘How she must have suffered losing you!’ He showed no sign of being moved; it was she who suffered for the woman separated from her convict lover.

Had it not been for his detachment, she might have re-lived against her will the last moments of what represented her real life. As it was, she only re-enacted them, brightly lit as for a troupe of actors on a stage seen from the depths of a darkened theatre, a woman stepping forward to drag a spear from out of the throat of a man lying wounded upon the sand.

Was she becoming callous? Surely not, when the moment before she could have cried for the woman who lost her convict lover.

She heard a renewed cackle from the bird of ribald voice.

She felt anger creeping on her. She was angry at the behaviour of this unmoved and unmoving, this crude man, whom she should, she knew, accept and understand for what he was, considering her own crude origins.

She hoped he had not been aware of her anger; she needed his sympathy and understanding. ‘Did you know, Jack, that I lost my husband — that he was cruelly murdered — along with the members of the crew?’

‘I heard tell’, he said, ‘among the blacks. They was provoked though, by whites.’

So she did not know where she stood.

‘No one is ever,’ she heard herself managing the words as though they had been pebbles, ‘is ever wholly to blame.’ She added as an afterthought, ‘Except Mr Roxburgh — he was innocent.’

In the long, expiring, golden afternoon, she drowsed again, and sank. When she returned to the surface, rudely pulled, or so it seemed, she realized that nothing more violent than a breaking of sticks was responsible for disturbing her rest.

She dragged her bones outside the hut. Jack Chance was coaxing a fire. A heap of bronze feathers was glinting in a spangled evening. As Ellen Gluyas she would have busied herself plucking and gutting a brace of pigeons, but Mrs Roxburgh had her aches to cosset, nor could she resist the luxury of being waited on.

She might have rewarded her servant with a smile had he shown himself conscious of her presence. He carried the dangling birds to the creek, and returned with them encased in mud coffins which he buried in the depths of the fire.

She heard her languid, tutored voice. ‘It was clever of you, Jack, to catch the birds. You learned it from the blacks, I suppose.’

The voice from the past made her wonder whether her friend Mrs Daintrey would find cause to reproach her for neglecting to write.

‘It was my business,’ he said, ‘long before I would of guessed that blacks could know about it.’

‘Oh?’ She would have liked her assigned slave to entertain her, but he had fallen silent, and would not be lured out she saw, so she went to the creek and washed herself; she cleaned her teeth with a finger: it was the first time she had attended to them since — when? she could not remember.