Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

He spoke with a warmth and intensity she had not heard in his voice before, and what he told her, she suspected, he was telling for for the first time.

‘I stayed on in ’er room, regardless. I couldn’t think, only of Mab. It was a poor sort of lodging by most standards. Little enough furnitures. A big dresser, which the family what let the place didn’t know what to do with. Mab kept ’er things in the dresser. Apart from that, there wasn’t much — a wash-basin, on the floor, for want of a stand — a piss-pot she’d empty out the winder — a chair with its bottom all but gone. I knowed the ’ardness of the bed, but ’adn’t always noticed it. That night I learnt every corner of the room by ’eart. And Mab, Ellen. I was never worse in love and she never give ’erself so trustful as on the last night I spent with ’er.’

But it was Ellen’s throat he was kissing with renewed passion, and for all the fear, horror, cunning, which had been fluctuating in her since dark, she found herself responding to it. She must keep in mind that tomorrow she would again become Mr Austin Roxburgh’s widow, and must plead, not for a murderer, but a man to whom she owed her life.

‘That is more of my record, Ellen, than anybody knows. And no doubt you’ll hold it against me.’

Mrs Roxburgh could not altogether lie, nor altogether speak the truth. ‘I shall remember’, she told him, ‘only those parts you wish me to’ since her own hunger for love had returned.

Some while later she heard, ‘I come to me senses at last. I knewed I mustn’t stay till mornun.’

She had been startled out of a doze, and did not realize at first that the morning to which he referred was none of hers.

‘I remembered ’ow a friend of Mab’s would come afore daybreak and the two girls start for the market to stock up their baskets with the cresses they sold. I got away easy enough from the ’ouse, and began makin’ me way to Putney, till I thought better on it. I bought meself a hoe an’ a bull’s-eye lantern, and joined the longshoremen. I lost meself in the sewers. Picked up a pretty decent livin’ too, from retrievin’ articles of value. It’s wonderful what goes down the sewers. It’s a good life once you get accustomed to the air. An’ rats. Rats is worst. They’ll set on a man if ’e don’t watch out. Their bite goes deeper, and is dirtier, than the bloody cat at Moreton Bay.’

He laughed, and by now she too was able to see it as something of a sombre joke. She was committed to following him through whatever subterranean darknesss he led, however foul the unchanging air, however daunting the rustle and splashing of rats. She could not have borne to be bitten, though. She could accustom herself to slime, and would grope through it up to the elbow in search of ‘valuable articles’, hopefully a sovereign, at least a silver spoon. She only prayed that she might be preserved from ever touching a drowned cat.

‘I used to take me haul to a Jew at Stepney who’d give me not above ’alf its worth. But I was in no position to complain. The important thing was to fill me belly and lay low — and keep a little ready cash for greasin’ a palm that might turn nasty. There’s ale ’ouses at Stepney an’ Wappin’ where I’d ’ang around — never too long — there was allus the odd face to put you in mind of a peeler on the loose. I’d down me plate of ’ot meat — dumplin’s if I was real ’ungry — and shoot the moon. I used to doss in one of the ’ouses along the river which was all that was open to the likes o’ me. A regular free for all inside when everyone was laid end to end. Nobody was choosy, least of all the bugs. I’ll not mention the women.’

He would not have had to. He could not guess at the extent to which she was taking part. Out of shame, or in hopes of forgiveness, she pressed closer against her innocent protector.

‘My downfall’, he said, ‘was this cottage at Putney — the prettiest little place you could imagine. And those birds of mine. ’Course I knew it must of been all up with the birds. But was proud of me place. I wanted to take a look at it again. So I walked down one evenin’ after dark, and moved in quiet like, with me bull’s-eye lantern. The place smelled — well, it smelled dead — of birdshit, and dead birds. They was no more ’n feathered skeletons lyin’ on the floors of the cages. All my linnets and finches. I ’ad a pair o’ nightingales. Well — in spite of my quiet movements and the bull’s-eye lantern, a woman ’oo lives at the corner come an’ said she done what she could for the birds till the outlay got too much for ’er. I think she was honest. It was ’er old man I reckon, ’oo blew the gaff. Never liked the look of ’is physog. One o’ the long yeller ones. Anyway, the peelers come for me first thing next mornun. Found me settin’ in the arbor beside the river. I couldn’t get that stink of birds’ corpses outer me nostrils. And the river allus appealed to me — right from when I was a boy down from Arfordsheer. There’s times when the river gets to be the colour of pigeons — both sky an’ water. I love that river. Well, they come. It was time, I reckon. What else could I of done?’

He yawned, it sounded with relief for having told it, and must have fallen asleep soon after.

Her vision would not be shaken off. There was the husk of a bird still lying on its back, its claws crisped, amongst the scattered seed, the grit and droppings. The incised eyelids were the last detail to fade. They had detached themselves and were floating, mauve-grey, beneath the arbor, above the pigeon-coloured water.

As she lay batting her eyelids, the magic slide of her dream was replaced by the interior of this leaf hut. It must have been very early, for the light was at its steeliest. During the night the damp had been to some extent dried out by the heat of their bodies. There remained the familiar, if anything stronger, stench of foxes.

Mrs Roxburgh rose as far as the low-pitched roof allowed. She was hunched and aching, but would have felt no less cramped and crippled in more luxurious surroundings. She might have expected to awake to a sense of joy on such a day, or to be carried away by a tumult of excitement, but overall she knew that she was angry with someone, about something.

She began kicking his thigh. ‘Wake up!’ she shouted. ‘At this rate the sun will be up before we’re started.’

Anybody must have agreed that the situation called for sternness on Mrs Roxburgh’s part, so she kicked again, and hurt a toe. ‘Jack? Aw, my Gore!’ She could have cried, less for the pain than her failed attempt at dignity and authority. ‘The blacks are sure to come’, she persisted at her loudest, ‘after being warned by that old man. It will be all up with me— if not you, perhaps.’

She administered a last, moderating kick before withdrawing outside.

Still hunched and aching, as though the roof had not left off pressing her head into her shoulders, she knew that her anger was directed at herself. Her greatest strengths were perhaps her cunning and her stubbornness, one of which was possibly provoked only by a man’s presence, the other also dependent on him: although she had the will to survive, doubtless she would have succumbed had the convict not dragged her along. Of course he had the strength, the physical strength, until at this late stage in their journey he seemed to be making demands on her for that moral strength she had rashly promised in the beginning.

Now while she stood in the grey morning, chafing her arms and shoulders, it was not the convict she despised; it was her wobbling, moral self, upon which he so much depended. Alarm mingled with exhilaration to cause the shivers, as she contemplated the landscape and the power given to an individual soul to exercise over another.