Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

What she was thinking, doing, saying, she did not know — perhaps dying on her feet, had a breath of cool not come at them through a gap in the scrub ahead.

When they emerged from the trees, there was a field with rows of methodically hilled plants, and but a short distance beyond, the house, and the more imposing barn, each built of roughly hewn timber slabs.

‘There, you see? Just as we planned!’

In speaking, she turned towards him, but did not recognize Jack Chance the convict: some demon had taken possession of him.

‘Ah, Ellen, I can hear ’em settin’ up the triangles — in the gateway to the barracks! They’ll be waitin’ for me!’

Immediately after, he turned, and went loping back into the bush, the strength restored to his skeleton.

Her torn hands were left clawing at the air. ‘JACK! Don’t leave me! I’d never survive! I’ll not cross this field — let alone face the faces.’

But she did. She plodded gravely across the rows of tended plants as though they had been put there, cool and sappy, for the comfort of her feet.

‘They are — teddies?’ She sighed unnatural loud before reaching a track which wound down along a hillside towards the barn. Ruts and hoof-prints had set like iron. She fell among the cow-pats and crawled farther, a lopsided action dictated by the ruts, until halted by the barn and a pair of man’s boots, the latter serviceable in the extreme, as grey and wrinkled as the earth in which they were planted.

Mrs Roxburgh could not have explained the reason for her being there, or whether she had served a purpose, ever.

‘ Naked? ’ The voice was just discernible; it was a woman’s, and of a tone she had not thought to hear again.

She heard shoes approaching, spattering over bare boards, then retreating as soon as a door squealed.

She lay with her head in the dirt because she could not raise it; the flies were busy settling, partly on blood, partly on the moist cow dung with which her arms were smeared.

Then the shoes were returning, the door squealed a second time, and she was enveloped in what could have been a cloak, or simply a coarse blanket.

Mrs Roxburgh was most grateful for whatever it was, even more for the woman’s voice. ‘There, dear! You are here. Nobody will want to know what ’appened till you’re ready to tell.’

Swaddled in the voluminous garment or harsh blanket, as well as what sounded like the woman’s genuine concern, she thought she might never want to ‘tell’ (you cannot tell about fortitude, or death, or love, still less about your own inconstancy).

Mrs Roxburgh said, when she had sufficient control over teeth jaws, limbs, to be able to risk her voice, ‘I will only want to sleep and forget,’ when she knew from experience that she was aspiring to the impossible.

‘That you shall,’ the vast woman answered, gathering up her new child.

After which the child was dragged, if solicitously (the owner of the wrinkled boots might have been adding his support; she could not be sure) on this latest stage of her journey.

‘We must all help one another,’ Mrs Roxburgh giggled as her toes came in agonizing contact with a splintered step, ‘mustn’t we?’ Then she was hoisted over the threshold.

‘Yairs, yairs,’ the woman agreed; heat and hardship may have flattened the voice but without destroying conviction and kindness.

Mrs Roxburgh bowed her head beneath a weight; in all memory a house had never seemed so stuffy or so dark. With the remote hope of catching a glimpse of sky between twigs she would have glanced upward, but the operation defeated her. Perhaps she would remain for ever downcast, and those who like to think the best might mistake an affliction for humility.

This woman would, who remained all around at the same time as she was giving orders in the distance. ‘No, no, Ted! I can bring the tub meself — but not carry the full kettle — and not the bucket of cold neither. We mustn’t scald the poor soul.’

They had sat her to wait upon what her fingers slowly discovered in the dark to be a leather throne, its woodwork carved, but very roughly, with a leaf-pattern. Was she worthy of her throne? Horsehair pricking through her coarse robe suggested she might never be.

Mortified, she hung her head lower still.

The tub had been dragged towards her, or so it sounded, across the boards. Water hissed furiously on being poured into tin. Over and above her heavy woollen robe, the pains she was suffering, her shame, the love and gratitude she had never adequately expressed to anybody, she was now enveloped in a cloud of steam.

‘I do not — think I can —bear it !’ she cried.

The male boots were retreating as though in fright.

‘I’ll water it down,’ the woman promised. ‘You’ve nothing to fear now, love.’

She would have liked to think so; she would have liked to find the woman’s hand and kiss it for a promise made in the face of human experience.

Only the woman, since they were alone together, was too busy disrobing her patient. However silent her nurse’s unbelief in what she saw, Mrs Roxburgh heard it.

There began a great soaping, she could smell it, and then a flannelling, which made her suddenly leap, and withdraw unsociably into a corner of her pricking throne.

‘There, there! Gently!’ said the woman, and modified her actions in accordance. ‘What is your name, love?’ she asked.

‘Ellen.’

‘Ellen what?’

There was the slip-slop of dreamy water, the passage of a sweating, soaped flannel.

The woman did not press for an answer. ‘I am Mrs Oakes,’ she informed instead. ‘And my husband — Ted Oakes — was a sergeant in his day. We come here with the first contingent. We was Wilshur folk. Ted received a grant for ’is services, and that is ’ow we is farmin’ beyond Brisbane River.

‘It’s a good life,’ she added, in case her patient might not believe.

Ellen Gluyas was only too ready. She sat whimpering in the dark house, moved by all that her senses recalled, through creaking boards and warm flannel, somewhere the smells of milk and smoked bacon, and was it — yes, it was raw wool. Outside, cows’ hooves were thudding homeward down a hard path. She thought that she might not be able to endure this onslaught by the present on accumulated memory.

‘Will we sit you right in the bath, Ellen?’ Mrs Oakes inquired.

Ellen shook her head. She was afraid that, if she spoke, a bubble might shoot out of her mouth instead of words.

‘Well, not yet perhaps,’ Mrs Oakes agreed. ‘Everythin’ gradual like.’

She would have been at a loss after that had her patient not informed her, ‘I lost my wedding-ring, which I brought almost here, threaded on a vine, carrying it all the way from the wreck.’

Mrs Oakes was at once suspended. ‘You’re a survivor’, she asked, ‘from the wreck we’ve ’eard tell about? From the Bristol Maid ?’

It had become too terrible to answer.

‘Are you Mrs Roxburgh?’ the woman asked.

The patient shook her head. ‘You won’t persecute me? And string me up to the triangles? No one will believe, but a person is not always guilty of the crimes they’s committed.’

‘Come, love, you mustn’t work yourself into a state. Nobody’s goin’ to persecute you.’

‘Not when I’m guilty? Not wholly — but part.’

In the silence which followed, except for the stirring of water and the squeezing of a flannel, she ventured to add, ‘I am not Mrs Roxburgh, whatever you may think. I am Mab, but can’t tell you her other name.’

Mrs Oakes must have stolen away, for Ellen overheard soon after, ‘When the boys come in, John must take a fresh horse, Ted, and ride to the settlement, and tell as we have a survivor, and ask what we should do. ’Tis the one they call Mrs Roxburgh, an’ the poor thing deleerious.’