Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

Mr Pilcher swallowed. ‘Some of ’em was eaten.’

Mrs Roxburgh might have been thinking the mate had never looked so loathsome.

He told her confidentially. ‘The blacks consider the hands are the greatest delicacy.’

‘Did you try?’ Mrs Roxburgh asked.

Mr Pilcher became so agitated he rose from his chair and began patrolling the room. ‘I ask you,’ he said at last, ‘Mrs Roxburgh — would you?’

‘I don’t know. It would depend, I expect.’

Since she was caught in her own net, and Mr Pilcher had subsided again, she found herself struggling to her feet. Pain in one leg, or the root of an invisible tree, all but tripped her.

Looking up from the vantage of an easy chair the mate ventured to suggest, ‘I bet you had a tough time yourself, Mrs Roxburgh — before the rescue.’

She answered, ‘Yes.’ As though the rescue ever takes place!

‘They say you lived among the blacks.’

‘That is so — and learned a great deal, of which I should otherwise remain ignorant.’

She was standing with her back to him after finding the looking-glass she had known must exist in Mrs Lovell’s lesser parlour. Thus stationed, she could watch Pilcher while hidden from him, seated as he was at a lower level. Yet in the end the disadvantage was hers: she was faced with her own over-watchful reflection.

‘And was brought to the settlement by some bushranger, or bolted convict, I am told.’

‘I was so fortunate.’

‘Who bolted again, just when he might have expected justice.’

‘He became frightened. That — I hope — was his only reason for running away. Though the truth is often many-sided, and difficult to see from every angle. You will appreciate that, Mr Pilcher, having experienced the storm which separated the pinnace from the long-boat.’

She would have expected a wave of malice to rise in the man she remembered aboard Bristol Maid , and again, the evening on the cay, but he only murmured, ‘That is true,’ looking old and ravaged.

‘So,’ she said, after she had turned, ‘I hope we can accept each other’s shortcomings, since none of us always dares to speak the truth. Then we might remain friends.’

His eyes, watery from the moment when he entered the room, had started running.

‘Friendship is all I have left since my husband was speared to death on the island. I forget, if I ever knew, whether you have a wife, Mr Pilcher?’

From snivelling, he hardened, as though frozen by a vision of the past. ‘Yes, he said, ‘I had. But did not love her as I undertook. I was ashamed, I suppose, by what I must have thought a weakness. That is how she died, I can see.’

He sat rocking in recollection.

‘Love was weakness. Strength of will —wholeness , as I saw it — is what I was determined to cultivate. That is why I admired you, Mrs Roxburgh — the cold lady, the untouchable.’

‘I believed you hated me — and for what I never was.’

‘So I did — your gentleman husband too — and was glad at the time to see you both brought down to the same level as the rest of us. And stole your ring.’

‘I gave it to you.’

‘Look,’ he said, feeling in a waistcoat pocket, ‘I’ve brought it back, the ring I took.’

There it was, glittering in the half-light, the nest of all but black garnets.

‘Keep it,’ she said. ‘I have no use for it.’

‘Nor me neether,’ the man insisted, as though the ring disgusted him.

So she took it from between his tremulous fingers and, going to the window, threw it into the nasturtiums below, where the broad leaves closed over it. ‘A child will find it,’ she said, ‘and value it as a plaything. Or it could be of service to some gardener — after his release.’

She laughed to ease the situation. ‘Thank you, Mr Pilcher, for coming to see me. I hope we shall meet again before I sail from Moreton Bay.’

But she did not believe either of them truly wished it.

In the absence of prisoners, guards, witnesses, and inquisitors, early morning was an extenuating benison, especially when the young Lovells broke in, climbed upon the bed, snuggled against her, and insisted on tales of the black children she had known. Innocence prevailed in the light from the garden, and for the most part in her recollections; black was interchangeable with white. Surely in the company of children she might expect to be healed?

‘Were they good?’ asked a Lovell boy.

‘Well, yes — not always perhaps, but at heart.’ Was it not the truth behind the scratches and pinches they administered in accordance with their parents’ orders? She remembered the eyes of the black children.

Their Lovell counterpart rippled in the bed with what might have been suppressed giggles. ‘We’re not good,’ said Kate.

‘Miss Scrim thinks we’re abominable,’ young Tom confirmed.

‘Praps we are!’ Totty giggled some more on her own.

‘Nobody is good all the time,’ Mrs Roxburgh allowed. ‘I am not. But hope to learn.’

It sounded so curious, they looked at her, and left soon after.

Almost every morning they materialized in her room. She was perhaps mad, but a harmless diversion, and unlike their parents and Miss Scrimshaw, undemanding. They would stroke her arms, her shoulders, her cheeks, the skin of which, although superficially soft, concealed a rough grain. Had their parents known, they might not have appreciated rituals of such a subtle order that the children themselves would have been at a loss to explain; the pleasures they enjoyed early in Mrs Roxburgh’s bed possibly remained a secret.

The morning after Pilcher’s visit they did not appear. She wondered at it no more than casually while yawning her way into her clothes in the correct order, as she did by now instinctively. She was wearing her muslin with the heart’s-ease pattern, the gift of an officer’s wife who constantly attempted to express her admiration of one whose moral courage and powers of endurance had helped her survive what amounted to infernal trials. Mrs Roxburgh, on the other hand, was made to feel light, frivolous, implausible, when dressed in the earnest young woman’s gift.

As on practically every morning, she took her walk in the garden, the light twirling round her with appropriate frivolity. I am unworthy, it recurred to her, of anybody’s faith, least of all the trust of the children who confide in me.

She looked to see whether somebody might have discovered her secret, and there was the barefoot Kate, her hair and gown transformed by light, walking entranced it appeared, her gaze concentrated on whatever she was holding in her hands.

‘Kate?’ Mrs Roxburgh called, the exquisite child’s purity rousing in her the sense of guilt which was only too ready to plague her.

Kate might have taken fright; in any case her trance was broken.

Upon reaching her Mrs Roxburgh asked, ‘What is it you’re holding?’

‘Nothing!’

The child was carrying the corpse of a fluffy chick, the head lolling at the end of a no longer effectual neck, the extinct eyes reduced to crimson cavities.

‘ Nothing! ’ Kate screamed again, and flung the thing away from her.

And ran.

It seemed to Mrs Roxburgh that this bend in the brown river, with its steamy citrus plantation, garden beds too primly embroidered with marigold and phlox, and beyond a hedge, cucurbits of giant proportions writhing on mattresses of silt, was designed for revelations of evil, as was the low-built, rambling, deceptively hospitable official residence presided over by the fecund Mrs Lovell and her authoritarian spouse.

Or was she attributing to her surroundings emanations for which her own presence was responsible?

Her speculations made her shiver uncontrollably.