Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

She felt elated by this explanation, as well as physically relieved after squatting to defecate.

On returning to camp she found that he had demolished their hut. He had raked the ashes and strewn them with brush. He was ready waiting for her.

Noticing his sullen glance at her renewed girdle she said as nicely as she knew how, ‘You must not be angry. I had to make some preparations. And did not keep you waiting long.’

‘I’ll not be the loser,’ he mumbled, and they moved off.

It was a glum start to a journey, she thought as she followed, springy at first, though she soon found that her ankles ached and that her feet had not recovered from the first stage of their flight.

He was carrying the spear and waddy, and the cumbrous net retained from his life with the aborigines, which it would have been improvident to abandon. He had made no attempt to cover his nakedness in any way since losing the strip of bark cloth. His sole article of clothing was the belt from which hung that relic of a white past, the salvaged hatchet.

This morning she was not disturbed by the scars in the convict’s back, not even by those which her nails must have re-opened and where flies were scavenging for dried blood.

He strode, yet primly, his buttocks spare and austere. It surprised her at first that she should be looking at the buttocks at all, and in such detachment. Or perhaps it was not surprising. Their nakedness notwithstanding he might have been leading her on a polite, if over-brisk walk through a wild garden.

When compassion stirred in her again, it was for the buttocks rather than the scarified back: that the naked buttocks of a grudging, powerful man should make him look so peculiarly dependent on her mercy. She felt moved to stroke them, to make amends, if this would not have lowered a noble creature to the station of a horse or dog. But she did genuinely pity the convict, and would have liked to heal those innermost wounds of which she had received glimpses. Could she love him? She believed she could; she had never fully realized how much she had desired to love without reserve and for her love to be unconditionally accepted. But would this man of lean, disdainful buttocks, love her in return?

By daylight she could hardly think what manner of pact they had made during the hours of darkness. Had love been offered truthfully by either party? Or were they but clinging to a raft in the sea of their common misery? She could remember her panic, a sensual joy (not lust as Garnet Roxburgh had aroused) as well as gratitude for her fellow survivor’s presence, kindness, and strength. She also remembered, if she dared admit, that which was engraved upon her mind in illuminated letters: Can you love me Ellen? Did he truly wish for love? Or had he made use of her body as part payment of a debt?

She was shocked by her own thoughts, as well as physically shocked when Jack Chance stopped without warning, and she, in her thoughtfulness, collided with him.

‘What’, she panted, ‘is it, Jack?’

He did not answer, perhaps considering her too foolish by half. No doubt his stopping short signified an enemy, or the alternative, an animal to eat. So she did not press for an answer to her question, while withdrawing from their forced contact, not so far that they did not remain united by the warmth of their interrupted exertions.

While she waited she picked a flower not unlike a jasmine, white, but scentless. Smelling the flower made her feel trivial and superfluous. Drops of her sweat fell upon the immaculate petals.

Presently he moved on and she followed. Neither spoke. Perhaps he hated as well as despised one who was little more to him than a doxy met by accident.

On her side, the expedition had become something of a plodding match. As the sun rose it beat them about the head and shoulders with weapons of bronze. She bowed her head; the convict did not appear to turn a hair.

They climbed, or alternately, descended, ridges of quartz and granite which tore feet already torn, past obtrusive branches which whipped and slashed, felted drumsticks which thumped upon her breasts, and more ignominiously, buttocks protected only by her fringe of leaves, while more vindictive low-growing bushes harrowed and pricked arms, thighs, the entire human façade.

At one point she could have sat down and started crying, but looked ahead and saw the convict laid open and bleeding from hacking a path for them. On catching up, she noticed that some of the thorns had remained embedded, and that the blood they had drawn still oozed to the extent that it hung tear-shaped from the wounds.

Thinking she was some way back, he shouted, ‘I reckon ye must be tired, eh?’

She answered with a colourless, ‘No,’ and snuffled back the mucus threatening to fall.

She was so grateful for his inquiry she seriously wondered whether she dared ask him if he loved her, then controlled this foolishness. He might have told her what he believed she would wish to hear, or not have answered. In any case, there would be occasion enough to ascertain during the years spent together in this expedition to Moreton Bay.

Farther on he began laughing, and called back, ‘Do you sing, Ellen?’

‘I was never musically inclined.’

Even so, she tried to remember, again out of gratitude, some song which might entertain him, and did come across the words of a ballad she and her mother-in-law had practised on a wet and empty afternoon. (Old Mrs Roxburgh enjoyed dabbling her fingers in the keyboard, and derived an almost unbridled pleasure from crossing her wrists.)

Ellen Roxburgh sang for her deliverer,

When first I met thee, warm and young,

There shone such truth about thee,

And on thy lips such promise hung,

I did not dare to doubt thee.

I saw thee change, yet still relied,

Still clung with hope the fonder,

And thought, though false to all beside,

From me thou couldst not wander.

But go, deceiver! go—

The heart, whose hopes could make it

Trust one so false, so low,

Deserves that thou shouldst break it …

Her guide showed no sign of appreciating her attempt at amusing him. He went so far as to spit into a bush they were passing. (Mother Roxburgh had a particular aversion for those of the lower orders who spat.)

When Ellen remembered from farther back,

Wee Willie Winkie

Run through the town,

Opstairs and downstairs

In ’is nightgown;

Tappin’ at the window,

Peepin’ through the lock,

‘Time all children’s in the bed,

Past eight o’clock …’

She had sung it in a low, shamed, because unmusical voice, but it must have pleased him, for he shouted back, ‘Go on! Wotcher stop for?’

She giggled. ‘I dun’t remember no more — if there was ever more to it.’

They trudged.

To break the monotony and silence, she called, ‘It’s your turn, Jack.’

He grunted. ‘Can’t remember. Nothun fit for a lady’s ears.’

Again she might have reminded him that she was a lady only by adoption but was either too breathless from the present climb, or perhaps her companion had influenced her in favour of caution.

At the conclusion of their next descent they were received into a straggle of trees which proved to be the outskirts of a thick forest. By contrast with the sun’s fire, the dark cool felt downright liquid; moist leaves soothed flesh suffering from martyrdom by thorns as a plaister might have; feet gratefully sank into carpets of humus and hussocks of moss.

It prompted the convict to confess, over the shoulder which carried the net, ‘Mab had a sweet voice, but songs was never much in my line.’ After a pause of a few yards in the name of delicacy, he brought himself to the point of admitting, ‘I could always imitate the bird-calls. That’s what led me to take up catchin’ as a profession.’