The Fringe of Leaves

by Patrick White

  He spoke at an instant when the wind veered, giving every indication of wanting to hustle them away from the coast and out to sea. As in so many of nature’s manifestations, the squall seemed only to some degree capricious, beyond which it was driven by an almost personal rage or malice. Mrs Roxburgh dared wonder whether the Deity Himself were not taking revenge on them for their human shortcomings.

  In the circumstances she was not sustained by her husband’s untimely remark. Physically she was at her lowest. She had the greatest difficulty in preventing her head from being dragged by its unnatural weight down upon her slack breasts, above her swollen belly, and was only alerted by overhearing a colloquy hurled back and forth between the long-boat and the pinnace. Mr Courtney had resumed command of the former in the absence of the captain’s faculties, and was upbraiding his subordinate Pilcher for making no move to adapt his rig to meet the sudden emergency.

  Mrs Roxburgh’s dull eyes and woman’s ears did not adjust themselves to a situation as technical as it was masculine, until forced out of her apathy by the untoward emotion of the contestants and the sight of Pilcher taking an axe and hacking at the hawser on which they depended.

  It was soon done: the long-boat was free to flounder on her chosen course, to the best of her poor ability, and if Providence liked to favour her.

  In the beginning, none of those aboard dared give expression to his thoughts. Glad of the occupation, some of the crew took of their own accord to bailing, for the water had started seeping through the martyred timbers in spite of the attentions received while beached on the cay. Mr Roxburgh joined them willingly. So did his wife when the tin abandoned by other hands floated towards her.

  During a pause from his work it occurred to Mr Roxburgh to ask, ‘What has become of the boy, Ellen? He didn’t surely abscond to the pinnace?’

  Because death promised to become an everyday occurrence in which tuberose sentiments and even sincere grief might sound superfluous, she answered in the flattest voice, ‘No, he was drowned yesterday evening, gathering shellfish from the reef.’

  Several steps behind in his acceptance of the situation, Mr Roxburgh was appalled by his wife’s unexpected callousness. ‘Why on earth didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I forgot,’ she answered. ‘There were other things on my mind.’

  It was not wholly true, but then, he would have recoiled from being told while horror at the death still possessed her, and later of course she had been shaken by the blows Pilcher dealt her in making his unjust accusations.

  Just then Spurgeon, enjoying an invalid’s privileges within earshot of his benefactor, was roused by what he overheard. ‘What—the nipper gone? Oswald was a fine lad. But crikey, you can’t blame the lady. Singin’ out won’t call back the dead.’

  Although displeased that his wife should have found an ally in one he considered his personal conquest, Mr Roxburgh welcomed the double assurance that formal mourning was not expected.

  A sigh or two, a click of the tongue, and he had done his duty. ‘You are the one I’m sorry for, Ellen. The boy was so devoted to you.’

  ‘I loved him,’ she said simply, but again so dull of voice that Austin Roxburgh need not experience the slightest twinge, either of remorse or jealousy.

  In any event, the distance which the recalcitrant pinnace had already put between herself and the long-boat increased the unreality of most human relationships. Faith in integrity persisted while the rope held, but with the severing of the hawser and gradual disappearance of the master boat, the horizon had become clouded with doubts.

  Mr Roxburgh wished he was still in possession of his journal, to discuss his mood in rational terms, and thus restore a moral balance.

  Now it was sea and wind holding the balance, or maliciously maintaining a lack of it as they were buffeted day and night, in which direction Mr Courtney, if questioned, professed to know.

  ‘I’d say—by my calculations—we’re a hundred and fifty mile to the east of Percy Island’ or ‘At this rate we’re headed back for the Cumberlands’ or again, ‘With any luck, we might make landfall tomorrow evening at Bustard Bay.’

  His clear but rather stupid eyes had never looked farther and seen less; his jaws beneath their doggy whiskers were cracking with responsibility.

  While Captain Purdew, an old child huddled near his guardian’s ankles, laughed low. ‘Yarmouth, or Barnstaple, it’s all the same—as God knows.’

  It made sense to everyone: geography was anybody’s guess; the chart might have been torn up and instruments tossed into the surf before they embarked on this erratic voyage.

  Which in the days, or weeks, or months that followed, concerned Ellen Roxburgh more than anyone. On her the waters in the doomed boat reached higher, almost to her waist it seemed, clambering, lapping, sipping the blood out of her flaccid body.

  That was the least part of her. Herself sank. The fringe of her green shawl trailed through depths in which it was often indistinguishable from beaded weed or the veils and streamers of fish drifting and catching on coral hummocks then dissolving free for the simple reason that the whole universe was watered down.

  Somebody, a man, was holding a stinking vessel to her lips, ‘Here Mrs Roxburgh is a drop of rum only a nip the dregs but will put new life into ’ee.’

  She allowed it to happen, more than anything to pacify whoever it was that prescribed the cure, not because she feared life might be leaving her; everyone else, but not herself, she was so convinced, or egotistical.

  And again was lowered into twilit depths where only a brown throbbing distinguished what she was experiencing now from anything she had experienced before. Grave schooners were sailing beside her brushing her ribs eyeing her through isinglass portholes. It must have been the rum causing the red-brown throbbing of her thoughts. As for the creature which had begun to persecute her its increasingly remonstrative form undulating out of time with her own somewhere in the folds of her petticoats bunting nibbling at her numb legs this slippery fish was pushing in the direction of a freedom to which she had never yet attained.

  Whether forced to it by mental anguish or physical stress, Mrs Roxburgh raised herself from the position in which her husband had been supporting her in the waterlogged boat.

  ‘Ohhh!’ she moaned, or lowed rather, through thick lips, her face offered flat to the sky. ‘Aw, my Gore!’

  It was a still evening, comparatively benign. In the circumstances, the sounds he had just heard uttered struck Mr Roxburgh as positively bestial. His sensibility would have shut them out had it been at all possible.

  As it was not, he voiced the precept taught in youth, ‘We must keep our heads, Ellen,’ while going through the motions of soothing a delirious wife.

  Who cried, ‘There’s no question—it’s lost—however I tried—nobody can blame me, Austin—can they?’

  Although startled by her unwonted use of his Christian name, he tried to assure her, ‘Nobody intends to add to your sufferings by accusations,’ and drew his fingers along the wet, blubbery cheek of one by whom he thought he had done his duty in every sense.

  But she began clutching at his hand, whimpering and muttering childishly, in an attempt to draw him down to her level.

  ‘Then what is it?’ he hissed, as desperate as he was irritated.

  On grasping the full enormity of the situation there was nothing he could do but accept. ‘It is unfortunate, but neither of us will die of it,’ he predicted.

  All his life he might have been on equal terms with reality.

  After delivering his wife of their stillborn child, and somebody had produced what must have been Oswald’s glory-bag, he emptied the bag of its contents, the buttons, twine, a pencil-stub, a keepsake or two, a martyred prayerbook. In the absence of a conventional shroud the bag provided a substitute to accommodate this other, more portentous object.

  Again Mr Roxburgh was satisfied he had done his duty; his hands only fumbled as he tightened the draw-string at the canvas neck, and out of
his throat came a hideous sound as of tearing.

  Weak from hunger and from marinating in brine, Captain Purdew dragged himself aft like an attenuated black cormorant. He seized upon Oswald Dignam’s book, and began performing an office to which life at sea had accustomed him.

  Mrs Roxburgh closed her eyes. The words she but half-overheard did not impress themselves on her mind; they seemed rather, to break upon her eyelids, to be turned away as a flickering of light.

  ‘… man that is born …

  … forasmuch as it pleases …

  … thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts …’

  She stirred where she lay and ripples were sent through the water in the boat, to be answered by this faint plash beyond the gunwale.

  ‘… our vile body …

  … His glorious body …

  … to subdue all things to Himself.

  Amennn.’

  Captain Purdew concluded with a twang, after which there was a re-settling of caps to an accompaniment of barely audible agreement or reservation.

  If tears struggled out of the captain’s eyes, it was because, as everybody knew, his wits were leaving him, and though some of the men were shaken by what had occurred, it was also for remembering wives and sweethearts, or even a favourite dog. By comparison the Roxburghs appeared untouched in the halcyon evening prepared for their child’s burial. Beneath a peacock sky her face, reduced by suffering to a drained pudding-colour, wore an expression of assent bordering on tranquillity, while her husband, upright beside her, might have been enjoying congratulations for his performance in a classic role.

  When Mrs Roxburgh remembered to ask, ‘Did you perhaps notice a likeness to any of us? Children take after grandparents more often than a father or mother,’ Mr Roxburgh laughed a high laugh, and uncharacteristically squeezed her.

  ‘I shouldn’t say … No! It was too soon, Ellen—and too brief a glimpse.’ After that, he briefly sighed, for the pity of it, as it could not have been out of contentment. ‘Since you’ve asked, however, I believe I did detect in him a touch of what might have developed into a likeness to myself.’

  Then he kissed her on the mouth in full view of those who were watching, more in their dreams than through their eyes.

  ‘I am so glad,’ she replied, ‘and that it was a boy, as you would have wanted.’ The twitch of a smile, and she settled back into acceptance of wherever the future might float them.

  Once in the days, weeks, years which followed, she did rouse herself sufficiently to ask, ‘You are not going to leave me, are you?

  ‘How could I?’ he answered. ‘Even if I wanted to.’

  Such an indisputable reason and barely modified rebuke might have hurt if strength were not returning to her sodden limbs, not through divine forbearance, as some might have seen it, but because, she realized, she was born a Gluyas. The rain had stopped; life is to be lived. She would have got to her feet like any other beast of nature, steadying herself in the mud and trampled grass, had it been a field and not a waterlogged boat.

  In present circumstances, on a morning when the weather noticeably favoured them, she threw out the last of the thoughts which had been flickering all this time in her skull like phosphorescent fish. Her hands, she saw, were the same inherited extremities of rude but practical shape. If they had lost their native tan, it was not through a course in ladycraft, but by the action of sea-water. So she was still equipped for bailing, an occupation some of the strongest members of the crew by now tended to renounce.

  Her work removed her, if not physically, from her husband Mr Austin Roxburgh, who remained huddled at her side. Although occasionally he gave a hand, it was but an apathetic gesture; he was not of course so hardened by monotony as she. Once on looking at him she surprised an expression, not quite despair and not quite disgust, but which might have been caused by the slow poison of apprehension. At all events she was wounded by it, and set about bridging the distance between them.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘An attack is not coming on you again? Or are you grieving?’ She put out her coarsened hand as though to shore him up with her recovered strength.

  He appeared at first resentful of her kindness, like some pampered child preparing to take revenge for neglect.

  ‘You know that my thoughts are always only for you, Mr Roxburgh,’ she added without consideration for the truthfulness of what she was saying.

  Thus his servant hoped to reassure him.

  But he sank his chin against her shoulder. ‘It is Spurgeon, Ellen. I think he must have died.’

  For the moment only the Roxburghs were aware of what had happened; nor had the company noticed the tears shed by Mr Roxburgh for his recently acquired, unsavoury friend. Weakened morally as well as physically, he would not have attempted to conceal those tears, unless from his wife, and Ellen, he trusted, would mistake his grief for a natural process of crystallized moisture dissolving back into its original state of water.

  Spurgeon the steward, already stiff, was pitched overboard by his crew-mates without benefit of canvas or lead. In this instance Captain Purdew did not read the burial service, perhaps because he did not realize anything had happened, or else he had mislaid Oswald Dignam’s book. Spurgeon, some of those present suspected, is the corpse the sharks get. But who cares, finally?

  That Mr Roxburgh cared, nobody but his wife guessed, and she must steel herself that her husband might survive.

  As one who had hungered all his life after friendships which eluded him, Austin Roxburgh did luxuriate on losing a solitary allegiance. It stimulated his actual hunger until now dormant, and he fell to thinking how the steward, had he not been such an unappetizing morsel, might have contributed appreciably to an exhausted larder. At once Mr Roxburgh’s self-disgust knew no bounds. He was glad that night had fallen and that everyone around him was sleeping. Yet his thoughts were only cut to a traditional pattern, as Captain Purdew must have recognized, who now came stepping between the heads of the sleepers, to bend and whisper, This is the body of Spurgeon which I have reserved for thee, take eat, and give thanks for a boil which was spiritual matter … Austin Roxburgh was not only ravenous for the living flesh, but found himself anxiously licking the corners of his mouth to prevent any overflow of precious blood.

  Upon suddenly waking, Mr Roxburgh discovered his mouth wide open. He would have set about ejecting anything inside it, from his stomach too, had they not been equally empty. Emptiness, however, did not protect him from a fit of sweating shivers, which persisted after he had looked around him and seen that all, including Captain Purdew, were fast asleep.

  So much for night and dreams. Glances exchanged by daylight promised worse, until in the course of the morning Mr Courtney stood up in the bows and drew attention to what first appeared a slate-pencil miraculously laid along the edge of the slate. Whether island or mainland, he personally was not prepared to speculate, but wind, sea, and general conditions being in the long-boat’s favour, he ventured to affirm that they would make landfall before many hours.

  The Roxburghs avoided looking at each other. Instead she clasped his hand, the rather delicate, attenuated bones and the boss made by his signet ring.

  All trace of cloud was gone from the sky as they approached the shore. Faces bleared by rain and suffering offered themselves instead to an onslaught by ceremonial sunlight, which was grinding an already dazzling stretch of sand into an ever-intensifying white. Some of the castaways would not have been surprised had the Almighty ordered His trumpets to sound their arrival on the fringe of paradise itself.

  They advanced lumbering through the turquoise-to-nacre of a still sea, which shaded into a ruffle of surf, scarce enough to wet the ankles. The long-boat practically beached herself, in the silence and amazement of those aboard. One or two jumped, but more of them tumbled out, to crawl like maimed crabs through the shallows.

  Not unnaturally the passengers were again forgotten. It was Mrs Roxburgh who offered her husband a helping hand to clear th
e gunwale, as though he had returned to playing the role of dedicated invalid.

  ‘Is it too much to hope, Ellen,’ he whispered through bleeding lips, ‘that we shall be left in peace awhile, to recover our strength—if not our normal, rational thoughts?’

  ‘I expect so,’ she murmured to comfort him.

  The crew ahead of them were already either lying, elbows in the air, or cheek to the sand, while one soul more suspicious than the rest wandered in a circle, apparently attempting to sight the invisible insect, or malicious spirit, which was bound to start tormenting him.

  Whether from extreme debility or devotion to duty, Captain Purdew was the last to leave the boat. Staggering ashore he fell on his knees where the sand still glistened with bubbles left by the retiring wave, and proceeded to give thanks to their Maker in what passed for an official voice, ‘Almighty Lord, I pray that we may prove ourselves worthy of this unexpected blessing … that we may be strengthened for the trials to come from having experienced your loving mercy …’ but went into a more private mumble, ‘and fill our empty bellies, Lord … and slake our unbearable thirst … not with pebbles, nor lead sinkers. My dear, it wasn’t me who would have abandoned Bristol Maid, if others hadn’t been in favour …’

  At this point overcome by emotion, the old man fell on his face and united his bubbles with those of the receding tide.

  As for Austin Roxburgh, he resolved to follow the captain’s example, and give thanks, but privately, to God (more private still to his more convincing ipse Pater) at some later date. The present was not auspicious: he felt stunned by a silence of the earth as opposed to the thundering silence of the sea; his ears were left ticking and protesting.