The Fringe of Leaves

by Patrick White

‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘did I hurt you?’

  ‘I reckon nothin’ could hurt me but another taste of the bloody cat.’

  Her hand went out to make amends. ‘That will never happen, because I’ll not allow it,’ Mrs Roxburgh said. ‘You can rest assured, Jack.’

  Was she so sure of herself? He must have felt her hand trembling on his forearm in a gesture which was meant to comfort him.

  For his part, he no longer wavered. He began to handle her as though she had been a wheelbarrow, or black woman, for she had seen the head of her adoptive family take possession of his wives after such a fashion, in silhouette against the entrance to the hut. The breathing, moreover, had grown familiar.

  ‘No!’ she whinged; was she not after all Mrs Roxburgh?

  He dropped her and lay beside her.

  After a while he breathed in her ear, ‘If I am to trust you, Ellen, you should trust me. Two bodies that trust can’t do hurt to each other.’

  She was not entirely won because, according to her knowledge of herself, she was not entirely trustworthy.

  At the same time she longed for a tenderness his hand had begun again to offer as she lay moaning for her own shortcomings.

  She allowed him to free her of the girdle of vines, her fringe of shed or withered leaves, which had been until now the only disguise for her nakedness.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked her.

  ‘What?’ Although she knew.

  ‘This ring.’

  ‘It’s my wedding-ring.’

  He made no comment. He was, as she had always suspected, a decent man at heart.

  But suddenly she was taken by a panic. ‘If I lose it I am lost!’ Whereas she knew it was this man on whom she depended to save her.

  She began such a lashing and thrashing, her broken nails must be tearing open the wounds which had healed in his back. It was this, doubtless, which decided him to return her aggression.

  He could not press her deep enough into the dust. Yet with aroused hunger rather than anger or contempt. It became a shared hunger. She would have swallowed him had she been capable of it.

  Then lay weeping, ‘Tchack! Tchack!’ Now it was herself had to find her way back inside a language.

  While he asked too blatantly, ‘Can you love me, Ellen?’

  They had to protect each other at last from demands with which neither might have been able to comply, encircling, caressing with a feathered tenderness. They must have reached that point where each is equally exalted and equally condemned.

  She had lain an instant or an age when she experienced a twinge. ‘Aw, my life! I ricked my neck! Rub on it a little, cusn’t tha?’ But he had dropped off, and where she had been stroked with feathers she was now encased in a sheath of rough, unfeeling bark.

  In the course of this encircled night she thought to hear, ‘… both of ’em dabsters … truss th’ pigeon ’sthe pigeon—trussed … never let on … not a word … I wouldn’ of ef she hadn’… is Ellen who’ll … maybe … shave us Lord …’

  She was too tired. She was not for saving not even herself only for slipping deeper down let them sentence her for it.

  She awoke to a steely light scribbled on the dust and shadow of the hut.

  He was kneading her arms. ‘Wake up! Hey! Ellen? It’s later than I reckoned for. If we don’t look sharp they’ll catch us up. There’s not that much distance between us.’ Louder since she had last heard it, his voice was again level, cold, that of a man with a contract to fulfil.

  She turned her face, preferring memory to appearances. ‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘we must start.’ But made no move.

  ‘I’ve warned yer,’ he said. ‘You’re the one with most to lose. If I shycock round the bush for the rest of me life, that’s what I’ve come to expect.’

  After that he crawled outside.

  In the mood in which she found herself she would have liked to drowse. The alchemy of morning was changing steel into gold. It slid along her skin bringing the flesh back to life. She glanced sleepily along her as far as the armpit. All that she saw belonged to an age of gold in no way connected with a body scarred, withered, and blackened by privation; nor yet the form which luxury had polished and adorned; not even her clumsy, protuberant girlhood. She lay stropping a cheek against an arm, hoping to arrive at layers of experience deeper still, which he alone knew how to induce.

  She shuddered for the goose walking over her grave. She sat up. She must dress herself.

  The defoliated vine was lying of a heap in the dust beside her, the ring still attached to one of its thongs. Slipping the ring on the finger to which it belonged, she crawled outside as she was. Not yet ready to be seen, she walked some way into the bush before discovering what she needed: she tore at and twisted free several lengths from a vine smothering a shrub, and wound the vine about her waist so that she was once more clothed. The vine was tougher, the leaves furnishing it more leathery than those which had served her thus far. It occurred to her that she might continue wearing her ring since there were no blacks to hide it from; but she ended by threading it again on a runner, and knotting it as before. If asked for a reason, she might not have been able to find one unless—yes, she would have answered, ‘My finger is now so thin and shrunk, a ring would slip off and be lost.’

  She felt elated by this explanation, as well as physically relieved after squatting to defecate.

  On returning to camp she found that he had demolished their hut. He had raked the ashes and strewn them with brush. He was ready waiting for her.

  Noticing his sullen glance at her renewed girdle she said as nicely as she knew how, ‘You must not be angry. I had to make some preparations. And did not keep you waiting long.’

  ‘I’ll not be the loser,’ he mumbled, and they moved off.

  It was a glum start to a journey, she thought as she followed, springy at first, though she soon found that her ankles ached and that her feet had not recovered from the first stage of their flight.

  He was carrying the spear and waddy, and the cumbrous net retained from his life with the aborigines, which it would have been improvident to abandon. He had made no attempt to cover his nakedness in any way since losing the strip of bark cloth. His sole article of clothing was the belt from which hung that relic of a white past, the salvaged hatchet.

  This morning she was not disturbed by the scars in the convict’s back, not even by those which her nails must have re-opened and where flies were scavenging for dried blood.

  He strode, yet primly, his buttocks spare and austere. It surprised her at first that she should be looking at the buttocks at all, and in such detachment. Or perhaps it was not surprising. Their nakedness notwithstanding he might have been leading her on a polite, if over-brisk walk through a wild garden.

  When compassion stirred in her again, it was for the buttocks rather than the scarified back: that the naked buttocks of a grudging, powerful man should make him look so peculiarly dependent on her mercy. She felt moved to stroke them, to make amends, if this would not have lowered a noble creature to the station of a horse or dog. But she did genuinely pity the convict, and would have liked to heal those innermost wounds of which she had received glimpses. Could she love him? She believed she could; she had never fully realized how much she had desired to love without reserve and for her love to be unconditionally accepted. But would this man of lean, disdainful buttocks, love her in return?

  By daylight she could hardly think what manner of pact they had made during the hours of darkness. Had love been offered truthfully by either party? Or were they but clinging to a raft in the sea of their common misery? She could remember her panic, a sensual joy (not lust as Garnet Roxburgh had aroused) as well as gratitude for her fellow survivor’s presence, kindness, and strength. She also remembered, if she dared admit, that which was engraved upon her mind in illuminated letters: Can you love me Ellen? Did he truly wish for love? Or had he made use of her body as part payment of a debt?

  She was shocked by her own t
houghts, as well as physically shocked when Jack Chance stopped without warning, and she, in her thoughtfulness, collided with him.

  ‘What’, she panted, ‘is it, Jack?’

  He did not answer, perhaps considering her too foolish by half. No doubt his stopping short signified an enemy, or the alternative, an animal to eat. So she did not press for an answer to her question, while withdrawing from their forced contact, not so far that they did not remain united by the warmth of their interrupted exertions.

  While she waited she picked a flower not unlike a jasmine, white, but scentless. Smelling the flower made her feel trivial and superfluous. Drops of her sweat fell upon the immaculate petals.

  Presently he moved on and she followed. Neither spoke. Perhaps he hated as well as despised one who was little more to him than a doxy met by accident.

  On her side, the expedition had become something of a plodding match. As the sun rose it beat them about the head and shoulders with weapons of bronze. She bowed her head; the convict did not appear to turn a hair.

  They climbed, or alternately, descended, ridges of quartz and granite which tore feet already torn, past obtrusive branches which whipped and slashed, felted drumsticks which thumped upon her breasts, and more ignominiously, buttocks protected only by her fringe of leaves, while more vindictive low-growing bushes harrowed and pricked arms, thighs, the entire human façade.

  At one point she could have sat down and started crying, but looked ahead and saw the convict laid open and bleeding from hacking a path for them. On catching up, she noticed that some of the thorns had remained embedded, and that the blood they had drawn still oozed to the extent that it hung tear-shaped from the wounds.

  Thinking she was some way back, he shouted, ‘I reckon ye must be tired, eh?’

  She answered with a colourless, ‘No,’ and snuffled back the mucus threatening to fall.

  She was so grateful for his inquiry she seriously wondered whether she dared ask him if he loved her, then controlled this foolishness. He might have told her what he believed she would wish to hear, or not have answered. In any case, there would be occasion enough to ascertain during the years spent together in this expedition to Moreton Bay.

  Farther on he began laughing, and called back, ‘Do you sing, Ellen?’

  ‘I was never musically inclined.’

  Even so, she tried to remember, again out of gratitude, some song which might entertain him, and did come across the words of a ballad she and her mother-in-law had practised on a wet and empty afternoon. (Old Mrs Roxburgh enjoyed dabbling her fingers in the keyboard, and derived an almost unbridled pleasure from crossing her wrists.)

  Ellen Roxburgh sang for her deliverer,

  When first I met thee, warm and young,

  There shone such truth about thee,

  And on thy lips such promise hung,

  I did not dare to doubt thee.

  I saw thee change, yet still relied,

  Still clung with hope the fonder,

  And thought, though false to all beside,

  From me thou couldst not wander.

  But go, deceiver! go—

  The heart, whose hopes could make it

  Trust one so false, so low,

  Deserves that thou shouldst break it …

  Her guide showed no sign of appreciating her attempt at amusing him. He went so far as to spit into a bush they were passing. (Mother Roxburgh had a particular aversion for those of the lower orders who spat.)

  When Ellen remembered from farther back,

  Wee Willie Winkie

  Run through the town,

  Opstairs and downstairs

  In ’is nightgown;

  Tappin’ at the window,

  Peepin’ through the lock,

  ‘Time all children’s in the bed,

  Past eight o’clock …’

  She had sung it in a low, shamed, because unmusical voice, but it must have pleased him, for he shouted back, ‘Go on! Wotcher stop for?’

  She giggled. ‘I dun’t remember no more—if there was ever more to it.’

  They trudged.

  To break the monotony and silence, she called, ‘It’s your turn, Jack.’

  He grunted. ‘Can’t remember. Nothun fit for a lady’s ears.’

  Again she might have reminded him that she was a lady only by adoption but was either too breathless from the present climb, or perhaps her companion had influenced her in favour of caution.

  At the conclusion of their next descent they were received into a straggle of trees which proved to be the outskirts of a thick forest. By contrast with the sun’s fire, the dark cool felt downright liquid; moist leaves soothed flesh suffering from martyrdom by thorns as a plaister might have; feet gratefully sank into carpets of humus and hussocks of moss.

  It prompted the convict to confess, over the shoulder which carried the net, ‘Mab had a sweet voice, but songs was never much in my line.’ After a pause of a few yards in the name of delicacy, he brought himself to the point of admitting, ‘I could always imitate the bird-calls. That’s what led me to take up catchin’ as a profession.’

  Nothing would have induced her to behave so unprofessionally as to break the silence with a comment. If her mere physical presence might disturb him, the leaf-mould would surely help make it less obtrusive.

  Presently he began to demonstrate his talent. From out of the trills, the suspended notes, the lush warbling when bird-vanity seemed to disguise itself as innocent rejoicing, she thought to recognize the thrush.

  ‘I’ad a little bird-organ I’d carry with me, but didn’t use it overmuch. I’d say me voice served me better.’

  A while farther, in darkest forest, he launched into a prolonged jugging: the sound spilled and glowed around them and would have illuminated worse shades than those through which they were passing. In spite of her exhausted blood and torn feet, everything in fact which might have disposed her to melancholy, she was throbbing with a silent cheerfulness; until, from somewhere in the distant sunlight, an actual bird announced his presence in a dry, cynical crackle such as she associated with the country to which she and the convict were condemned.

  Soon after, they came out into the blaze she had learnt to accept as their normal condition in life.

  They marched, and she never dared ask to be informed on the progress they were making, but assumed that her guide was possessed of knowledge he did not wish to share. Seduced by the mystery of timelessness, she might have chosen to prolong the journey rather than face those who would quiz them upon their unorthodox arrival.

  That, she preferred not to think about, since the settlement at Moreton Bay had begun to exist for her in brick and stone, in dust and glare, in iron and torment, as though she too, had escaped from it only yesterday.

  He told her one night as they sat warming themselves at the fire after a dinner of roasted goanna, ‘I was never out of hobbles the years I spent at the settlement. They kept all us lifers in chains. I forgot what it was to move like a free man, but I noticed more for bein’ slowed up. I reckon I got to know every stone, every stump, on the tracks round Moreton Bay—the hairs in another ganger’s nose, the corns on the next feet at the treadmill. That heavy light you been floggin’ against all of summer. None of it you can forget, Ellen.’

  She would not.

  He said, ‘We didn’t go without our little luxuries and pleasures. Some of the coves at the lumber yard—that is where the “better class”, mostly short-sentence men—is put to work at makin’ various articles—nails and bolts like, boots, soap and so on—some of these beggars might bake a pumpkin and pertater loaf, and smuggle a lump to our mob if we was in good with ’em. It was lovely, I can tell yer. And terbaccer. There was one elderly customer whose sentence was just on finishin’, who they put to shoo away the crows from the corn down around the point. This codger—a gentleman by all accounts—used to grow a fair crop of the weed. ‘E’d hide a wad of it under a stone for we gangers to come across. We’d pass round
a pipe and enjoy a coupla puffs while the overseer was away.’

  His usually lifeless eyes shone. ‘By Ghost, I could do with a pipe of terbaccer! Or cud to chew.’ Deprived of it, he spat in the fire, and ran his tongue over craving lips.

  She had noticed before how the more perfect among his teeth were stained brown, as though still influenced by tobacco; the worst of them were rotted stumps.

  Now he put his hand on her knee. ‘What we’ve got, Ellen, is often better than what we haven’t.’

  She did not exactly shudder.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s cold by this time of evening.’ She hoped to have hidden the truth of the matter.

  He appeared convinced to the extent of drawing her close; when for days he had not touched her, seeming to have taken a dislike to physical contact, or perhaps remembering his dead mistress.

  So she must make amends to him for her passing revulsion. ‘Shan’t we go inside? We’ll find it warmer.’

  He said, ‘If that is what you want,’ and laughed, but gently.

  Because it was what she most desired, again she shuddered, and hoped he would interpret it as shivering.

  She wanted to be loved. She longed for the vast emptiness of darkness to be filled as she encouraged him to enter her body and pressed her mouth into his, against what she only momentarily remembered as a grille of broken, stained teeth.

  What she offered was in some measure, surely, a requital of all he had suffered, as well as remission of her own sins? Of deceit, and lust, and faithlessness. She hoped that if they could prolong their journey to Moreton Bay, if not lose themselves in it for ever, she might, for all her shortcomings, persuade him to believe in true love.