Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

But he had got down, and was beating on her skull with his fists. ‘Come on, fuck yez!’ he was shouting. ‘Wotcherthinkwereerefor? Ter die ?’

She could not summon breath enough to answer before he had dragged her up and along. They had returned into the timeless frieze, of burning earth, and ghosts, and ghostlier living figures.

That evening he made no attempt to build a shelter or hunt for food. It was he who lay as though dead.

‘My love? My darling?’ She gathered in her arms this detached object, or rare fruit, his head. ‘Jack?’ For the moment she was their only strength.

Then they lay apart, as brittle as any other sticks. Had anybody trodden on them, their bones must have snapped, at once and audibly.

The sun was well launched in the sky by the time they awoke. For once neither of them nagged that they ought to press on. Each could have been grateful. There was little positive movement on either side, except when she stretched out the arm nearest him, and he shoved his fingers between hers, but inert and stiff as the cold toast in a rack.

They lay thus, in passive communion, and snoozed, and throbbed, and groaned, and tossed (he yelped once) under a sifting of trees, and ants crawling over their all-but-unfeeling flesh.

The bird-calls must have roused him in the end by playing on submerged memory. The birds themselves rarely became visible, or if they did, were more shadow than creature, their wings a flirt of what might have been leaves instead of feathers. But their voices could not deny their presence, and might even have been celebrating a joy in living.

About noon, after however many days, he sat up, listening awhile, hands hung between gaunt knees, then took the spear on which they depended, and left the place which she supposed they regarded as their camp, roofless and fireless though it was. She noticed him stagger once before she lost sight of him, and experienced a qualm: what if she lost him altogether? If that were possible of one whose will must be stronger than his body. Just as her own will had been so finely tempered by adversity, adversity itself must capitulate in any physical encounter. Or so she was persuaded.

She passed the time coaxing a fire, as she remembered seeing the black women, using sticks and fibre; and waited for him. As she sat beside her fire, and he had not come, the tears ran trickling over her sharp knee-caps and down her filthy shanks. In some degree, the tears were solace for his absence, as well as an expression of the tenderness she felt for him: his wasted arms, cratered cheeks — more than any part of him, the broken teeth which had roused her disgust.

When he reappeared he was carrying what she saw at first as an armful of speckled feathers, until a neck dangling as far as his shins, like the broken spring of a jack-in-the-box, and a pair of claws curled in death, showed her that he had speared one of the giant birds of wooden gait and human demeanour. So a feast was promised.

Preparing for it they did not speak, but communicated by grunts and sniffs; if their hands touched, it was doubtless only accidental. She thought she could detect moral censure directed by the convict at himself for having murdered the human bird, and incidental disapproval of the manner in which she was laying out the corpse. Hunger, she knew, was making her slapdash. While plucking the bird she did more than once tear away strips of bluish skin, the feathers still rooted in them.

Once she was unable to resist draping such a strip around her neck. ‘Look, Jack! My feather boa!’

Her own whim made her laugh, then on seeing his mystification she was at once glad that he could not grasp the extent of her frivolity.

Again, while chewing at the tough, though fortunately glutinous, half-roasted meat, she began asking without thought for the consequences, ‘When you were with the blacks, did you ever taste—?’ but stopped before she had compromised herself.

‘Did I ever what?’

‘Once,’ she mumbled, ‘they killed a dugong. It tasted of hog.’

‘Nothing unusual about dugong.’

She threw away the bone she had been cleaning. She feared she might be boring him. It was a relief at least to have averted the dangers surrounding her experience of tasting human flesh on a morning the stillness and pearliness of which seemed to set it apart. But with the passing of time she would not have known how to exculpate herself, or convey to the convict the sacramental aspect of what could only appear a repellent and inhuman act. He would not have understood, any more than he had recognized the semblance of a feather boa she had hung frivolously around her neck.

Strengthened by food, he set to work hacking off branches, and built them a shelter according to routine, and they lay inside it as on every night of their life together. But tonight he neither spoke nor touched, and she wondered, if only in a brief, melancholy flash, whether she could sense disgust, either at her behaviour, or even her unspoken thoughts.

The morning which followed was so gently perfect, compounded of birdsong, shifting leaves, and speckled light, she hoped he would not in any way attempt to destroy it; in fact she went so far as to pray that the next stage of the journey to which they were committed might be postponed.

She looked at him to see whether he had intercepted her prayer as sometimes he happened upon her thoughts.

Far from meddling with her thoughts and prayers, he was looking so remote that she more than likely did not exist in the world to which he had withdrawn. It was a state of affairs which her present limpid frame of mind found altogether agreeable. She liked to believe that rest and their feast of emu meat had restored to him what she remembered as authority and strength, and was even persuaded that she saw a nobility transcending the convict’s origins and fall from grace, to contradict Garnet Roxburgh’s opinion of ‘these miscreants, the sweepings of the London streets’. She realized with resentment that in the eyes of her brother-in-law she must stand equally condemned, since unrestricted association with the convict made her his accomplice.

Oh, but the injustice, Mrs Roxburgh might have pleaded in her own defence, in such brutal circumstances.

And she had loved this man, even if she also pitied and needed him. She did still love him.

‘Love’, the old thing reminded in a more than usually tremulous voice, ‘love’ is selfless, never sensual. Ellen was unable to contribute to a conversation the subject of which was so vast that it could not be understood except by the instincts.

She raised her arms. It was love, whether selfless or sensual, which had restored the youthful skin to her breasts, the hollow in a smooth, leaf-patterned flank; the tendrils of hair singed off ritually by her black mentors were again stirring in the armpits.

Her face she was unable to see, unless when she turned it towards him, and it became reflected in his.

Illusions of beauty and suspended time increased as the day declined. Birds balanced on trapezes slung between trees grew accustomed to the presence of intruders and descended seemingly by ropes of light. Still in mid-air, some of them were catapulted skywards by anxiety, others landed, flitting and flickering, themselves like brown leaves as they foraged over mould and in the crevices of shed bark.

Growing restless in the later afternoon, she got up and wandered off on her own, without any explicit aim, and burst through the thicket upon a sheet of water strewn with lilies. In this instance the beauty of the flowers conflicted with knowledge acquired during her enslavement by the blacks, but without giving further thought to it, she plunged in, and began diving, groping for the roots as she had seen the native women. However clumsy and inexpert, she was determined to make a contribution by bringing him a meal of lily-roots.