‘No,’ she lied, ‘why should I be?’ and laughed.
‘Of getting wet,’ it billowed back.
‘No, no, no!’ Against the wind, it sounded a pitiful chatter.
The captain had taken his passenger by an elbow, both to steady her, and to estimate the damage to her clothes. ‘You should wait for fair weather, you know.’
‘I am disappointed’, she screamed, ‘not to have watched the last of the Heads.’
But her words were lost in the mewing of the gulls, although she had delivered her reply with a raucousness she had judged would carry.
‘Your husband will be anxious.’
Perhaps she, too, failed to hear. Their difficulty in communicating caused them to smile at each other with exaggerated candour. Her face, she felt, must be the thinner for screaming, while his had grown more leathery from being subjected to the salt spray. Captain Purdew might have appeared a bleak man had it not been for the spirit of kindness his whiskers allowed to escape.
All around them was the sound of canvas creaking and straining. The sails which had sunk her in despair at Sydney for continuing so long furled and passive were almost frightening now that their bellies were filled and the dæmon of energy possessed them. Human life was made to appear an incidental hazard, especially since the harsh-voiced gulls, at first seemingly attuned to her own earthly experience, had been dismissed by herself and the motion of their wings to another, more sublime level.
Mrs Roxburgh was surprised when Captain Purdew brought his face so close to hers that she felt for an instant a distinct tingling of beard. ‘Were you born at sea, perhaps?’
‘No,’ she shouted manfully. ‘On a moor.’
‘More what?’
Had it not been for the mast and the captain’s ribs she would have been swept by the rolling in the direction of her ineffectual voice.
‘A Cornish heath,’ she tried afresh. ‘Within reach of the land’s end.’
Captain Purdew, had he been less kindly, might have felt irritated by what seemed like his female passenger’s desire to take part in an adventure. His own wife, during the several voyages they shared after marriage, had remained below, embroidering teacosies and hand-towels to give at Chistmas. When she ventured above, she no more than crossed the deck to interfere in the galley. Possibly Mrs Roxburgh was only trying to test her courage in a man’s world, though the captain suspected there was more to it than that. He would not have known how to express it, but in his still centre, round which many more considerable storms at sea had revolved, he sensed that his passenger had an instinct for mysteries which did not concern her.
So they continued smiling at each other, or she looked about her with an unnatural eagerness which would justify her being there. She looked at the land, still faintly visible to larboard, its grey mass founded in the predominating sea. She tried to visualize the interior, to which her presence might have lent reality, but which in her continued absence must remain an imagined country, a tangle of indeterminate scrub burning with the tongues of golden teasel.
Presently she realized Captain Purdew had begun to guide her by a forearm, and in the light refracted by a blow she received at the same moment from a sheet of canvas, she saw the image of her father, another grey, thickset man picking his way amongst rocks and hussocks at dusk to bring her back into the house, where, he said, she was needed by her mother.
It was herself increasingly who guided Pa as Pa took increasingly to spirits; his favourite, rum, announced itself without any telling.
She sometimes wondered whether she had loved Mamma and Pa. If she had in fact, memory had transformed love into pity. But yes, she must have loved them.
After her marriage, her mother-in-law had advised her to keep a journal: it will teach you to express yourself, a journal forms character besides by developing the habit of self-examination. (Old Mrs Roxburgh was too polite ever to refer directly to shortcomings in those whose welfare she had at heart.) Ellen Roxburgh started a journal, but had not kept it day by day, or not above the first three weeks. The journal might have decided whether she had loved Mamma and Pa, had they not been gone before she married. Mamma went first. It was Pa’s death which decided her to accept what some considered Austin Roxburgh’s ‘extraordinarily injudicious’ proposal.
Alone on a derelict farm on the edge of a moor, she would have had to leave in any case, but where to go? Into service? Aunt Triphena would not have had her on account of Will and incestuous marriages between cousins, as Hepzie pointed out in a book. There was, moreover, a smell of poverty at Gluyas’s which appealed to Aunt Tite’s nostrils as little as the midden in the yard. It pained Ellen, who loved their farm after a fashion; it was all she knew. (Then she must surely have loved her parents who, with herself, were inseparable from it, the three of them living at such close quarters you could hear one another’s coughs, groans, dreams almost, anywhere inside the echoing house.)
Aunt Tite Tregaskis, married to substance and early widowed, mindful of herself and money (and of course her darling Will, not so much Hepzie because she was a girl) had despised her sister-in-law for years. The brother who shamed her, Triphena did not even despise. Dick the Hopeless and Clara the Helpless. (And Ellen—whatever will become of Her?) In time Triphena found she could enjoy the luxury of pitying her sister-in-law from another county, another country you might say (Kent, was it?) who followed Lady Ottering when it took her ladyship’s fancy to leave London for Glidgwith. Clara Hubbard was lady’s-maid, delicate-looking, of pale complexion, hands fine enough to fit into her ladyship’s gloves after the powder had been blown in. Clara Hubbard met her husband by accident while visiting a common acquaintance at Penzance.
After she began taking Mamma’s side, Aunt Tite used to say it was the worst accident ever befell anyone: that Miss Hubbard should have been sipping her madeira when Dick Gluyas looked in with an eye to a free glass, and that if Clara was laid in an early grave it would be on account of the pair of ‘roughskins’ she was saddled with.
Aunt Tite was that unjust. Ellen knew that her hands were chapped, but she wasn’t rough. Nobody was gentler with Mamma in what became her last illness. She would carry her down the narrow stair, and sit her by the window to take the sun and enjoy the fuchsias. As for chapped hands and red cheeks, Ellen tried rubbing in milk as soon as she learned she ought to be ashamed. She smeared them with the pulp from cucumbers according to the old receipt Hepzie found in The Lady’s Most Precious Possessions. Ellen’s cheeks stayed red until they toned down, seemingly of their own moving, to look by the best light what might have been considered a golden brown. (Not until herself became a lady was she properly blanched, by sitting in a drawing-room, and driving out in a closed carriage, and keeping such late hours the fits of yawning forced the blood out of her cheeks.)
Ellen Gluyas was a hoyden by some standards. Pa would have liked a boy, an industrious one, to help about the farm and make amends for his own poor husbandry. What he got was a strong girl he did not properly appreciate, who did such jobs as she was asked to perform, and drove him home from Penzance when drunk on market day.
Sober, he was jovial enough, and she could forgive his being an idle muddler. But drunk, he became passionately abusive and unjust. Once he knocked her down in the slush as punishment for a gate himself had left open. While still a boy he jammed a thumb in a cheese-press, and instead of a nail, had a brown horn-thing growing there. It frightened her to catch sight of it.
Captain Purdew was still shouting, ‘… advise you … below,’ as he stooped to initiate her descent by the companion-ladder, ‘… Mr Roxburgh waiting on his breakfast … steward bringing … appetite ….’
Lowering her head she mastered a sudden distaste for the last of the flung spray. Or was it the captain’s damping words? In any event, Mrs Roxburgh returned by stages to the close, and by now sickening, constriction of the cabin, where she found her husband groping for his boots and complaining a great deal.
‘We got what we
wanted at least. From the word go, we are at sea!’ Nor could he find his shoe-horn.
When finally he straightened up, Mr Roxburgh exclaimed, ‘Do you know what a sight you are? You are soaked!’
‘Yes.’ The crude little glass nailed to the wall for their convenience confirmed it. ‘Not soaked, that is. But a sight.’
‘You’ll do well to change at once, and not run the risk of being laid low with rheumatic fever for the rest of the voyage.’
Mr Roxburgh spoke in the voice he used when expressing fears for himself. She recognized it at once, and its tone brought her lower still.
‘I intend to change,’ she assured him without enthusiasm.
But she continued standing, waiting for her husband to finish dressing and remove himself to the saloon.
Then she tore off her scarf and bonnet, which were not so much wet as limp with moisture. So with all her outer garments. Her habitually well-kempt hair, dulled by salt, had strayed across her cheeks in tails. Her skin, mottled by the imperfect glass and watery stare of dazed eyes, brought to mind some anonymous creature stranded at a street corner in a fog of gin and indecision.
But Ellen Roxburgh did not remain for long oppressed: the canvas crowded back around her, together with the sting of spray, both on the deck of Bristol Maid, and farther off, along the black Cornish coast.
On reaching the age of discontent it seemed to her as though her whole life would be led on a stony hillside, amongst the ramshackledom of buildings which gather at the rear of farmhouses, along with midden and cow-byre. Poor as it was, moorland to the north where sheep could find a meagre picking, and a southerly patchwork of cultivable fields as compensation, she admitted to herself on days of minimum discouragement that she loved the place which had only ever, to her knowledge, been referred to as Gluyas’s. She would not have exchanged the furze thickets where a body might curl up on summer days and sheep take shelter in a squall, or the rocks with their rosettes of faded lichen, or cliffs dropping sheer towards the mouths of booming caverns, for any of the fat land to the south, where her Tregaskis cousins lived, and which made Aunt Triphena proud.
Some professed to have heard mermaids singing on the coast above Gluyas’s. Pa told tales of tokens and witches, which he half-believed, and of the accommodating white witch at Plymouth. If Ellen Gluyas wholly believed, it was because she led such a solitary life, apart from visits to the cousins, flagging conversation with an ailing and disappointed mother, and the company of a father not always in possession of himself. She was drawn to nature as she would not have been in different circumstances; she depended on it for sustenance, and legend for hope. (It could not be said that she was initiated into religion till her mother-in-law took her in hand, and then her acceptance was only formal, though old Mrs Roxburgh herself was intimate with God.)
It was Ellen Gluyas’s hope that she might eventually be sent a god. Out of Ireland, according to legend. Promised in marriage to a king, she took her escort as a lover, and the two died of love. Pa confirmed that they had sailed into Tintagel. She had never been as far as Tintagel, but hoped one day to see it. Her mind’s eye watched the ship’s prow entering the narrow cove, in a moment of evening sunlight, through a fuzz of hectic summer green.
She grew languid thinking of it, but would not have mentioned anything so fanciful, not even to Hepzie Tregaskis, her cousin and friend.
Instead she told, with the extra care a lady’s-maid cultivates, ‘Mamma is thinking of taking in a summer lodger. Don’t tell Aunt Tite. She’ll blame it on us.’
That Hepzie told her mother was not surprising (she so seldom had anything worth the telling) and her mother did disapprove, because Aunt Triphena disapproved on principle.
‘Poor Clara! I never thot to see lodgers under any Gluyas roof—like we’m tinners or clayworkers.’ Aunt Tite had forgot that their father had been a travelling hawker.
It was one of Mamma’s bad days. ‘No ordinary lodger,’ she gasped. ‘Acquainted with her ladyship. A gentleman of independent means, but poor health.’ Mamma had to wipe her eyes. ‘A change of air was recommended, and simple, nourishing, farm cooking.’
Aunt Tite laughed. ‘I hope tha’ll knaw, Clara, to take a fair share of the gentleman’s independent means. For sure my brother wun’t knaw.’
Whenever Mamma met with unkindness she did not exactly cry, she trickled.
Aunt Tite would not relent. ‘And who’ll tend to the gentleman’s needs?’
‘I’m still on my feet, Triphena. And Ellen is a strong girl, and willing.’
Aunt Tite smiled her disbelief in a plan she had not conceived herself.
‘The money will help us out,’ Mamma dared suggest. ‘And it will give the girl an interest to have someone else about the place. A gentleman of scholarly tastes, so her ladyship writes. She sent the letter over by the groom.’
Aunt Tite composed her mouth, re-tied her bonnet ribbons, disentangled the three gold chains she wore as a sign of importance and wealth, and drove off in the donkey jingle.
Ellen grew that apprehensive she was all thumbs and blushes in advance. She broke the big serving-dish and had to take it for riveting. She fetched it back only the morning of the day Mr Austin Roxburgh arrived. His luggage impressed those who saw it. Although stained and worn by travel, it still had the smell of leather about it. She stood it in his room, and went from there as quick as she could, leaving him staring out of the window at something he had not bargained for, which might have roused distaste in him. Whatever it was, he looked dejected, as well as fatigued by the journey down.
Mamma too, was nervous, in spite of her experience of gentlefolk. She could not remember whether she had put the towel and soap. Between them they made a rabbit pie, to follow a soup with carrot in it, and, for added nourishment, some scraps of bread.
Ellen might have continued apprehensive had the lodger not been hesitant, if it wasn’t downright timid. His conduct lent her courage; until the books stacked in the parlour given over to him robbed her of her new-found confidence. It returned at sight of the medicine bottles arranged on the sill of the bedroom which had previously been hers. The names of the drugs and instructions for use inscribed on the labels filled her with pity once she had overcome her awe.
Mr Roxburgh hesitated, but finally asked, ‘Are there any interesting walks, Miss Gluyas, in the neighbourhood?’ (No one had ever called her ‘Miss Gluyas’.) ‘I’ve resolved to take up walking—for my health.’
‘There’s walking in all directions.’ (Nobody had ever asked her advice.) ‘There’s the sea to the north—it’s wilder op there. And the church. To the south there’s a whole lot of pretty lanes. And chapel. You could walk to St Ives—or Penzance—if you’re strong enough,’ she thought to add.
But Mr Roxburgh no longer appeared interested, as though he had done his duty by the landlady’s daughter.
Then he became dependent on her, to remind him of time (his medicines), to warn him of changes in the weather, or to take a letter on market days when she drove to Penzance.
‘My mother tends to worry,’ he told her; and on another occasion, ‘She is fretting over my brother, who left, only recently, for Van Diemen’s Land.’
‘Aw?’ she replied with simulated interest.
She was unacquainted with Van Diemen’s Land. She had heard tell of Ireland, America, and France, but had no unwavering conviction that anything existed beyond Land’s End, and in the other direction, what was referred to as Across the River.
The void suddenly appalled her, and she repeated with spontaneous fervour the prayers Mamma and Mr Poynter had taught her it was her duty to recite after undressing.
That night she did not dream, and for some reason, awoke with enthusiasm. As it happened, it was the day on which he lent her his ‘little crib of the Bucolics’. She looked at the cover of his book as though reading were her dearest occupation. ‘But not while there’s daylight,’ she warned.
She was wearing a coarse, country hat, the brim o
f which rose and fell, allowing him glimpses of a burnt face engrossed in country matters.
She told him, ‘There’s two lads should come for hay-making, but can never be trusted to.’
‘May I help?’
‘Well,’ she answered, ‘I suppawse tha could,’ and at once blushed for her thoughtlessness.
Again she was embarrassed when he came upon her pulling the milk out of Cherry.
‘Is this what you do?’
‘Some of it.’ She dragged so hard the cow kicked and grazed the pail.
They were for ever encountering each other at the least desirable moments.
On one occasion she had to halt him and lead him back across the yard. ‘Not that way,’ she advised, her instincts persuading her that Mr Austin Roxburgh needed her protection.
But he looked back, and noticed the calf pinned to the ground, its throat tautened to receive the knife.
‘They’re killing the calf!’
‘Yes,’ she admitted. (Will had come over to help Pa perform the operation.) ‘You dun’t have to watch, Mr Roxburgh.’
Without thinking, she touched his hand, unladylike, to lead him back into the enclosed existence others had ordained and maintained for him, in which death, she only latterly discovered, was a ‘literary conceit’.
Soon after his arrival her own reasoning told her that books held more for Austin Roxburgh than the life around him.
He read aloud to her what he said was the Fourth Eclogue. ‘A pity you’re not able to appreciate the original, but you’ll enjoy, to some extent, the crib I’ve lent you.’
It seemed that poetry was all, and the ‘natural beauty of a country life’.
‘And labour,’ he remembered to add. ‘Over and above practical necessity, labour, you might say, has its sacramental function.’
Yet he retired gladly to nurse his blisters after a morning with the rake, and sniffed and frowned to find pig-dung stuck to the heel of his boot.
The Fringe of Leaves Page 5