Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

From the grumbles and the shuffles, Ted Oakes must have wished they had not been saddled with any of this. It was his wife who appeared the sergeant.

‘It’s our duty,’ she reminded, ‘and now come and give me a ’and to lift ’er on the bed.’

They hoisted Mab to higher than she had been accustomed. She lay squirming amongst the wool and feathers.

‘Do tha want to suffocate me?’ she cried.

But settled after a pat or two.

The boys must have returned home. She heard male bodies fling themselves down on benches, questioning, then groaning and protesting, as they slurped at some kind of pottage. She heard fists slammed against a table, and after an interval, the angry hoof beats of a horse urged too abruptly from a walk into a canter.

Mrs Oakes brought a yellow candle, then another, which did not so much illuminate the darkness as obscure any part of the room which lay beyond their vicinity.

‘What would you like to your supper?’ she asked, as though she might produce any manner of delicacy.

‘I don’t know,’ Mrs Roxburgh replied, fretting her head against the feather pillow. ‘If I can remember, my maid will bring me it on a tray.’

Mrs Oakes did not wait, but went and fetched a bowl of something.

‘There!’

She spooned a mess, soft, sweet, and bland, into the patient’s mouth. It made Ellen cry, even as she masticated and swallowed: she was not equal to the memories it evoked. For that reason she was soon fed, and clamped her jaws together whatever ideas her nurse had.

‘This way we’ll never get you better.’ Mrs Oakes sighed.

She left the room with the tepid bread-and-milk barely touched.

Now that her eyes were more accustomed to the light Mrs Roxburgh took advantage of her nurse’s absence to explore the room from where she lay. It was of an altogether gaunt appearance, its walls of unadorned grey slab. As far as she could distinguish, the few sticks of furniture could never have possessed any but the humblest virtues. What might have passed for embellishment was of such a rudimentary nature it must have been done to occupy the craftsman rather than to beautify a chair or cupboard. Because her own furniture came crowding round her, the whole rout of barley-sugar or fluted legs, explosive silks, chiming crystal, under the brooding swags of cynical brocade, she closed her eyes. (In any event, none of it was hers, less than ever since she had elected to go dredging the sewers.)

When her eyes were again opened she noticed between shutters left ajar a face darker than the night around it.

She might have shrieked had not her nurse been standing by the bed.

‘Have they come for me?’

‘Who?’

‘The blacks!’

Mrs Oakes said, ‘That is Jemmy. I would trust ’im — and all of our natives — if Ted and the boys were gone a month.’

It was innocence on Mrs Oakes’s part. Mrs Roxburgh did not believe she would trust anybody, whatever their colour. She would not trust herself, she thought.

Suddenly she began to shiver. ‘Do you suppose they’ll be gone a month?’

‘Why — no!’

Mrs Oakes latched the shutters after slamming them to.

She felt her patient’s brow and went and brought some bitter-tasting stuff.

When she had extricated herself from the relentless and evilsmelling spoon, Mrs Roxburgh gasped, ‘My husband was an invalid.’

‘Your husband?’

‘Yes.’

Mrs Oakes laid the spoon in a saucer.

‘Delicate though he was, Mr Roxburgh would have made every effort to save me — had not those blacks murdered him.’

‘Tt! Tt!’

‘Poor Jack! My dearest husband!’

‘Don’t fret yourself, pet. I’ll stay ’ere beside you. No one will harm you — unless it be a dream. I can’t prevent dreams, can I? only break up the attack when I see it takin’ place.’

Mrs Oakes was arranging herself on the leather-and-horsechair throne.

Mrs Roxburgh raised herself amongst the feather pillows. ‘They’ve murdered Mr Roxburgh, but will the whites — kill Jack?’

Mrs Oakes decided to doze.

The same limping, waterlogged boat brought them to the shores of morning, Mrs Oakes’s large face misshapen from resting on the leather gunwale, Mrs Roxburgh’s limbs probably for ever rusted, her lips so tightly gummed she could not masticate the air.

Mrs Roxburgh informed her fellow survivor, ‘On most of these islands there’s shellfish aplenty, but see that you don’t tear your hands. And water — can we but sop up the dew with our handkerchiefs.’

Mrs Oakes was putting up her hair by instinct. ‘What I’ll bring you will put more heart into you than any rotten whelks — unless you don’t fancy a fresh egg, an’ cup of milk warm from the cow.’

Mrs Roxburgh did not refuse what she felt she should have denied herself, considering.

By the time Mrs Oakes brought her offerings Mrs Roxburgh had persuaded herself that she was justified in accepting them. ‘With his spear and net, he need never starve , I’m thankful to say. Otherwise, how should I swallow this egg?’

‘I don’t rightly know, dear,’ Mrs Oakes replied; she would have liked to, none the less.

A mouthful of egg revolved on Mrs Roxburgh’s tongue as she ruminated on the sounds which reached her: hens drooling at their morning work, hornets vibrant inside a wall, a calf which must have been deprived of the teat. After the nurse withdrew, the patient dozed, while the hours twittered away. If she opened her eyes, nothing was so insignificant that it failed to amaze. She would stare at the whorl in a worn floor-board, the necklace of wax on an extinct candle, a pool of light lying thick and yellow as the egg-yolk of earlier, until drowsiness possessed her afresh.

From the heaviness surrounding her she judged that it must have been towards noon when she heard the sound of hooves in the yard, and first one, then a second dismounted rider, who proceeded to exchange indistinct remarks.

Whatever was in store for her she hoped she might acquit herself convincingly.

Spurs were soon ajingle in the passage, which shuddered at the same time with what she had come to recognize as her nurse’s approach.

Mrs Oakes’s honest cheeks were glowing with heat and pleasure, as well as relief. ‘This is Lieutenant Cunningham, dear, surgeon to the garrison. Now we can be sure that you will get the best attention this side of Sydney.’

‘Mrs Roxburgh?’ The young lieutenant’s voice rang out in a determined effort to assert his rank and sex.

The gong sounding in her head so bemused her she could not have denied the worst accusation.

The surgeon picked up her wrist which, by that shuttered light, might have been a scroll of sloughed bark. She could feel him slightly trembling. His practical profession’s abstract side allowed him, while taking her pulse, to display a certain mystical detachment and avoid looking at the patient’s face.

For the moment she was free to investigate her visitor. Where her nurse was red, the doctor was pink, not yet cured by the climate she supposed. There was an edging of white where his neck joined the collar of his tunic. From its glimmering in the darkened room, she took this white band to be skin. It added something unprotected and tender to the young man’s general appearance, and this, together with the deferential, slightly tremulous hold on her wrist, led her to suspect that the lieutenant had never yet experienced passion.

At once she grew ashamed of her thought and looked to see whether her nurse had intercepted it, but the room was too dark, and of course, both her attendants too innocent.

It only now occurred to Mrs Roxburgh that self-knowledge might remain a source of embarrassment, even danger.