Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

From what she had been taught she should have resented his licence, but in the circumstances, was more displeased with herself.

They had lost their inclination to talk. She listened to the cart grinding its way in and out of ruts, and the squeak of a wheel which needed greasing. It was a lopsided vehicle, though gay-painted, the little horse a sturdy bay with hairy fetlocks. She could smell the dew from the fields beyond the hedgerows. She loved to rise early, and go outside their bivouac without her shoes, and feel the dew on the soles of her feet.

She did not think she could stomach the dish of larks. (If pigeon, why not lark?) Nor birds moping and dying in captivity. Some of them huddled tragically from the moment they were snared, and in the jolting cart, pressed together, their plumage filthy with their own dirt.

‘I can imagine’, she said, ‘Mab’s feelings — when you was sentenced.’

He did not answer. It sounded as though he was breaking a stick into little pieces.

‘Is your term a long one?’

‘Life.’

He spoke so flat and matter-of-fact, sympathy was not called for. It shocked her none the less.

‘Her term is no shorter than yours.’ She knew it was herself of whom she was thinking. ‘I can understand her suffering.’

‘Nobody ’as suffered without they bit the dust at Moreton Bay — least of all Mab. Mab, anyways, is dead.’

She lay crying as soft as she could so that her ‘rescuer’ might not hear. Beyond the thatching of twigs and leaves, stars were reeling and melting, to mingle with her tears and blind her. A person, she supposed, might choke on grief if she did not take care.

She was prevented from dwelling on this morbid and precipitate possibility. Jack Chance was touching her arm; he was stroking her wrist, she realized. If she did not withdraw, it was because her body for the moment seemed the least part of her, or because it might never have been touched, not even by her husband Mr Austin Roxburgh, dead these many years.

He continued stroking.

‘Why do you cry, Ellen, when it isn’t no concern of yours?’

‘Oh, it is! But it is! Mine as well as yours and hers.’

When he kissed her thigh through the loops and trailers of vine-leaves she twitched so violently that she rammed her knee against what must have been his face.

He cursed, not necessarily Mrs Roxburgh, or not as she heard it; it was a curse against mankind in general.

‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘did I hurt you?’

‘I reckon nothin’ could hurt me but another taste of the bloody cat.’

Her hand went out to make amends. ‘That will never happen, because I’ll not allow it,’ Mrs Roxburgh said. ‘You can rest assured, Jack.’

Was she so sure of herself? He must have felt her hand trembling on his forearm in a gesture which was meant to comfort him.

For his part, he no longer wavered. He began to handle her as though she had been a wheelbarrow, or black woman, for she had seen the head of her adoptive family take possession of his wives after such a fashion, in silhouette against the entrance to the hut. The breathing, moreover, had grown familiar.

‘No!’ she whinged; was she not after all Mrs Roxburgh?

He dropped her and lay beside her.

After a while he breathed in her ear, ‘If I am to trust you, Ellen, you should trust me. Two bodies that trust can’t do hurt to each other.’

She was not entirely won because, according to her knowledge of herself, she was not entirely trustworthy.

At the same time she longed for a tenderness his hand had begun again to offer as she lay moaning for her own shortcomings.

She allowed him to free her of the girdle of vines, her fringe of shed or withered leaves, which had been until now the only disguise for her nakedness.

‘What’s this?’ he asked her.

‘What?’ Although she knew.

‘This ring.’

‘It’s my wedding-ring.’

He made no comment. He was, as she had always suspected, a decent man at heart.

But suddenly she was taken by a panic. ‘If I lose it I am lost!’ Whereas she knew it was this man on whom she depended to save her.

She began such a lashing and thrashing, her broken nails must be tearing open the wounds which had healed in his back. It was this, doubtless, which decided him to return her aggression.

He could not press her deep enough into the dust. Yet with aroused hunger rather than anger or contempt. It became a shared hunger. She would have swallowed him had she been capable of it.

Then lay weeping, ‘Tchack! Tchack!’ Now it was herself had to find her way back inside a language.

While he asked too blatantly, ‘Can you love me, Ellen?’

They had to protect each other at last from demands with which neither might have been able to comply, encircling, caressing with a feathered tenderness. They must have reached that point where each is equally exalted and equally condemned.

She had lain an instant or an age when she experienced a twinge. ‘Aw, my life! I ricked my neck! Rub on it a little, cusn’t tha?’ But he had dropped off, and where she had been stroked with feathers she was now encased in a sheath of rough, unfeeling bark.

In the course of this encircled night she thought to hear, ‘… both of ’em dabsters … truss th’ pigeon ’sthe pigeon — trussed … never let on … not a word … I wouldn’ of ef she hadn’… is Ellen who’ll … maybe … shave us Lord …’

She was too tired. She was not for saving not even herself only for slipping deeper down let them sentence her for it.

She awoke to a steely light scribbled on the dust and shadow of the hut.

He was kneading her arms. ‘Wake up! Hey! Ellen? It’s later than I reckoned for. If we don’t look sharp they’ll catch us up. There’s not that much distance between us.’ Louder since she had last heard it, his voice was again level, cold, that of a man with a contract to fulfil.

She turned her face, preferring memory to appearances. ‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘we must start.’ But made no move.

‘I’ve warned yer,’ he said. ‘You’re the one with most to lose. If I shycock round the bush for the rest of me life, that’s what I’ve come to expect.’

After that he crawled outside.

In the mood in which she found herself she would have liked to drowse. The alchemy of morning was changing steel into gold. It slid along her skin bringing the flesh back to life. She glanced sleepily along her as far as the armpit. All that she saw belonged to an age of gold in no way connected with a body scarred, withered, and blackened by privation; nor yet the form which luxury had polished and adorned; not even her clumsy, protuberant girlhood. She lay stropping a cheek against an arm, hoping to arrive at layers of experience deeper still, which he alone knew how to induce.

She shuddered for the goose walking over her grave. She sat up. She must dress herself.

The defoliated vine was lying of a heap in the dust beside her, the ring still attached to one of its thongs. Slipping the ring on the finger to which it belonged, she crawled outside as she was. Not yet ready to be seen, she walked some way into the bush before discovering what she needed: she tore at and twisted free several lengths from a vine smothering a shrub, and wound the vine about her waist so that she was once more clothed. The vine was tougher, the leaves furnishing it more leathery than those which had served her thus far. It occurred to her that she might continue wearing her ring since there were no blacks to hide it from; but she ended by threading it again on a runner, and knotting it as before. If asked for a reason, she might not have been able to find one unless — yes, she would have answered, ‘My finger is now so thin and shrunk, a ring would slip off and be lost.’