Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

As the evening drew together, a shimmer as of pigeons’ feathers was transferred to it. She frowned, however, recalling the dangling heads, the broken necks.

She squatted beside the fire and waited, as he was squatting on the opposite side, thus far respectful of formalities.

‘You must tell me how you trap the birds,’ Mrs Roxburgh encouraged.

She almost expected candles to illuminate her ignorance in the mahogany surface of an endless dinner.

But it was the moment when he reached out to rake the coffins out of the fire. Broken open, they revealed neat pigeon-mummies, for the feathers had come away with the casing of baked mud.

The diners wasted no time before tearing into the flesh. Mrs Roxburgh burned her lips, her fingers; a drizzle of precious gravy was scalding her chin, not to say her breasts. Practice, and hunger more regularly satisfied, had made the convict comparatively adept at dealing with such a situation; they had taught him table-manners, moreover: he ate almost finically, holding his head on one side, and crooking a finger.

Mrs Roxburgh had to forget about him before devouring the more pungent innards, left in the bird by the cook for reasons of practical economy. She was only halted by the skeleton, and a pair of legs and crimped claws from which the coral had departed.

A melancholy descended upon her, increased by the contracting light and a dying fire.

‘What was her name — this woman?’ She ran her tongue between her lips and her teeth to extract the last fragments of pigeon, and knew she would be looking her ugliest.

He laughed. ‘Why would you be interested, I wonder?’ He spat a pigeon bone into the fire. ‘She was called “Mab”, if you wanter know.’

She had hunched herself since the untended fire and night at her back made her conscious of the cold. ‘That is a name I never heard, not in the country I come from. Nor, for that matter, in England, where I lived after I crossed the river — after I was married.’ This latest gap in her knowledge which old Mrs Roxburgh and Mrs Daintrey had omitted to fill might have depressed her further. ‘Mab.’ She spoke it flat, as though testing it for its flavour and texture.

Her companion, for all his attempts at refinement during their meal, did not attempt to restrain the wind escaping from him.

‘It was her name.’ He belched softer than before. ‘I never thought about it.’

‘Tell me’, she ordered, yawning, ‘about the birds.’

By now he appeared only too ready. ‘Well, you see, I was in the trade. There was always a market for cage-birds — linnets, finches, thrushes, but none as popular as the linnet. ’E’s the most cheerfullest songster, longer-lived — tough, you might say—’e’ll adapt ’isself to neglect. Most birds and animals — plants too — is neglected — once the whim to own ’em dies in the owner.’

‘Then why did you carry on, Jack, at what amounts to an immoral trade?’

‘If we considered only what’s moral we’d go ’ungry, wouldn’t we? an’ curl up an’ die. There’s too much thinkin’—an’ not enough. Would men go with women, or women with men, if they started thinkin’ of the trouble — the deceit and treachery they might run into?’

‘Not all men and women are treacherous or deceitful.’ But she scowled at the fire, and dug into the ground with a stick her hand found lying beside it.

‘I’m not saying as you — a lady — is treacherous and deceitful — or would know about any of that. I know, because I’m one who’s ’ad the hard experience.’

Was he innocent enough not to have recognized her true station in spite of the clues she had dropped for him? She might have enlightened him there and then, in plain terms, had it not occurred to her that he could have been subjecting her to cynicism, in which case he would expect the worst of her at any level.

So she confined herself to saying, ‘Whether I am a lady or not, I was deceitful — I believe — but once.’

She was annoyed by what she heard as reply.

‘Why do you laugh?’ she was quick to ask.

‘Oh, no! I’m not accusin’ nobody!’

‘But laughed.’

‘Praps none of us thinks ’ard enough to remember what we done or was.’

Their surroundings had all but disappeared. The black was relieved only by the remnants of their fire. This, and what did amount to accusation, made her feel most desolate.

‘Why dun’t tha stoke ’n op, Jack?’

He said it could give them away if aborigines happened to be camped in the vicinity. Shortly after, he went so far as to tear off a branch and beat any life out of the embers.

She had no choice but to crawl inside the hut. In doing so she wished he might not follow; she had grown to dislike him; she would have preferred to lie alone and think how she would employ her freedom were she ever to reach Moreton Bay.

But he followed her inside, bringing with him, together with the now familiar stench, a warmth which combined with her own as a comfort against the hostile night.

A night-bird whirred over and past, and was wound up. There was only the silence to listen to, and moisture falling to the ground outside, and the sound of her own eyelashes, and Jack Chance clearing his throat.

It alarmed her when he spoke, although in a voice lowered out of respect for the past, ‘When I was in the cage-bird trade as I was tellin’ you, Ellen, I took to goin’ farther afield to meet the demand. I’ad a little place on the river at Putney, on the north bank, and did well enough at ’Ighget at first, but begun to find it more profitable to go into ’Arfordsher, and even as far as Suffolk. Suffolk for linnet. I’d drive there with a ’orse an’ cart. I’d sometimes spend several days, sleepin’ under the cart, and makin’ my catch early an’ late. I kept my birds in the cottage at Putney. I’d drive out daily around the streets, sellin’ to whoever was in need of a song-bird, among who was a good few genuine fanciers.’

‘And Mab, I suppose, stayed to mind the birds at Putney?’

‘Birds was not in Mab’s line. An’ she couldn’t abide the country — bad enough Putney, let alone Suffolk. She come up there with me once. I fixed a bivouac inside a field, in the shelter of a ’edge, an’ cooked ’er a nice supper of larks. It was no go all the way. She ’ad it against the blessed grass for wettin’ ’er feet.’

‘What was Mab’s line?’

‘She were a cress-seller. She lodged with folk in a court off ‘Oborn, to be in good time for Farringdon Market, where she bought ’er cresses off the dealers, early. Then she’d go hawk it door to door, damaged stuff mostly, a girl like ’er in business on ’er own.’

Since recovering his tongue he was anxious to use it, and inclined to prattle. It detracted from his stature, she felt, what she remembered of Ulappi the dancer and Jack Chance the escaped convict. She might not have entrusted herself to a babbler. She came of silent stock; and Mr Roxburgh ever judicious.

Listening to this light-coloured voice telling about his girl, she asked, ‘How did she look? Was she tall? And of what colour? Was Mab pretty?’

Well, it was only right to take an interest in this poor cress-seller, rising early in the court off Holborn (she knew how the girl’s hands must have looked) to hawk her inferior wares from door to door.

‘She was black — like you,’ he began reconstructing carefully. ‘Dark lips. On frosty mornins’ I’d tell ’er she looked like she’d had a feed of cherries — the juicy black uns. She was big-built, too. You’re not more than two parts of Mab, Ellen.’

‘I was never thought small. I’m above medium, wouldn’t you say?’

He might not have been giving it thought, when suddenly he surprised her. ‘Big enough. And pretty.’