Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

She could hear him inside the hut, sighing, yawning, hawking, returning unwillingly to life. She regretted kicking him and wondered how she might make amends. He would hardly believe that her anger had not been intended for him when, at the time, herself had not understood.

He joined her at last in the shiversome morning, and she simply said, ‘I am sorry.’

‘For what?’ Such simplicity on his part made it more difficult for her; yet he was not simple, as his life and his survival showed.

‘Let’s start at once’, she said, ‘on this important day.’

At the same time she took his hand and they walked thus for quite a distance. He did not exactly hang back, but today it was she who was leading him, and the hand she held was unresponsive.

‘Why sorry?’

He had returned to what she had decided to ignore, hopeful that his simpler side, which did at times predominate, would persuade him to drop the matter. Instead it appeared that his cunning would prevail.

‘You was not tryin’, Ellen, was you? to excuse yerself for what we been to each other?’

‘How can you ask such a thing? Sometimes you’re hardly delicate, Jack!’ Her neck might have showed the blushes she could feel, had it not been for the accumulation of dirt and a skin become almost as rough as bark; worse than her physical condition was the knowledge that her blushes had been whipped up by a recurrence of anger against herself.

‘Oh, I’m no gentleman. I don’t allus use the right word. And act as I feel. I would of thought you knowed that by now.’

‘Yes indeed, I do!’ she answered tight and dry, and with an added effort, or extra tightening, ‘I should have thought you must know that my affection for you will always make me overlook your faults.’

Because in the course of her embarrassment she had dropped the hand she had been carrying she was now able to force the pace.

And what would others know? she wondered when the distance between them allowed her to indulge in more private thoughts. Even if the pardoned convict respected the laws of decency, would society think to see her reflected in his eyes, or worse still, the convict in hers?

She was marching, or stumbling, into the sun, blinded by it. She could hear him following heavily, more like an animal than a man.

Once she panted over her shoulder, ‘Are you sure we are going in the right direction?’

‘If we aren’t, we’re not far out,’ he mumbled seemingly at the ground.

She was pretty certain her instincts and her desperation would have taken her in a straight line to the farm they had sighted the evening before, but the strain had begun telling on her.

So she paused and waited for him. ‘Are you tired?’ she asked, her solicitude mingled with expectancy.

‘I’m not by no means fresh.’

The rims were sagging under the bloodshot eyes. How would those who had not known him as a man, leave alone returned his embraces, receive this shambling human scarecrow?

Constant preoccupation with the inevitable made her twitter. ‘Do I look a fright, Jack? My awful hair!’ It worried her more than her nakedness, for hair is a curtain one may hide behind in an emergency.

‘I reckon there’d be those who wouldn’ know you.’

He wiped her mouth, and kissed her on it. It would have seemed no more unnatural than on the other occasions had she not been about to re-enter what is commonly referred to as civilization almost as naked as a newborn child.

It was here that Mrs Roxburgh looked down and saw that she had lost the vine she had been wearing as a gesture to propriety; worse by far was the loss of the wedding-ring threaded upon her fringe of leaves.

She began to cry and teeter. ‘We must go back! D’you suppawse I left ’n at the waterhole? Or hut?’ She could not remember. ‘Could only be one place or t’other. My ring!’ she moaned.

‘You are carryin’ on like a imbecile,’ he told her.

If she were, she was also too tired, battered, ugly before her time, frivolous even at her best moments, or perhaps but the one against whom circumstance bears a grudge.

So she said, ‘You ent ever goin’ to understand. My weddingring!’ and started turning in her tracks.

‘What’s in a ring that’ll bring back yer husband?’

She was already walking away from him; she hated this convicted murderer.

‘And ringless didn’t prevent you an’ me becomin’ what we are to each other.’

The truth in his insolence did not make her admit defeat; he had to run after her and start hitting her about the head with his open hand. ‘If you wanter be taken by the blacks, then go, and good luck an’ riddance to yer!’

She fell down, and he sat beside her, waiting for her to recover her wits.

‘You’re very often right, Jack. I wish I could always appreciate it.’

He was looking at her with an exhausted helplessness in which she shared.

But roused herself.

‘It can’t be much farther on,’ she said, although the distance they had covered since escaping might prove to be the least part of the journey; she almost hoped it would.

When they were again on their feet she limped forward, taking the lead, as she sensed he expected of her. She must have looked a sight: her lacerated feet were causing her the greatest pain; the damp and cold of the night before were at work in her bones; the sun, as always towards the middle of the day, was becoming their chief torturer. The fluctuations of the landscape before her suggested that she might be launched upon the early stages of a fever.

Soon after, she slowed up, and when he came level, grinned at him with what must have looked ferocious insistence. ‘We must help each other, mustn’t we? whatever the outcome.’

He answered, ‘Yes’ with a detachment which hardly reciprocated the sentiments she had intended; nor did his stare, from behind the curtain of sweat, suggest that she was part of his vision.

Yet a little distance farther they put their arms round each other, as of one accord, hobbling, staggering, on.

She told him, ‘Even in mid-summer you could draw a bucket of water from the well under the sycamore that would take the breath out of you. Pa found the well. He had diviner’s hands. The twig would bend for me too, but not regular.’ She sighed. ‘It was the coldest water.’

When here they were, walking over these blazing stones. The bird laughing.

‘Did I ever tell you, Jack, how I walked all the way to St Hya’s and let meself down into the pool? In they days people went to the saint for all kind of sickness. What I went there for I dun’t remember not at this distance. Or if I were cured. I dun’t believe a person is ever really cured of what they was born with. Anyway, that is what I think today.’

In fact she was thinking of the engraving in the book she had found in Mr Roxburgh’s library, in which the inhabitants were shown escaping from the Cities of the Plain. Whatever had happened the couples were holding to each other as desperately as she and the convict, and every bit as naked. Because of the nakedness she had not asked her husband to explain the situation.

Now, as they escaped from one hell into what might prove a worse, however fulsome their reception at Moreton Bay, this man was leaning on her so heavily she hoped she was not a similar drag. She no longer believed in physical strength; it was the will that counted.

‘Do you think you will undertake the voyage Home after we have reached civilization?’ Her teeth were clicking like pebbles inside her mouth. ‘Or perhaps you would find the associations too painful.’ If her grip loosened, her arms slithered papery up and down his ribs. ‘Sydney, we are told, is going ahead. I am inclined to advise Sydney. Set yourself up in some safe business with the reward they’ll give you. My husband will contribute to it handsomely — of that you may be sure.’