The Fringe of Leaves

by Patrick White

  Mrs Roxburgh awoke and looked down at the lower berth. Her husband was seated on the edge, head bowed, legs dangling. She recognized the whorl in the crown of dark hair which would have served as an identification mark in the most horrible circumstances.

  ‘What is it, my dear?’ Alarm made her voice sound raucous.

  She was already climbing down, ungainly in her haste, her hair impeding a strained progress.

  ‘It’s the pain, Ellen! Oh God, the most awful pain yet!’

  At once she rummaged for the little flask containing the tincture of digitalis and administered the drops in a finger of water. She kneeled at his feet, chafing his knees. At least she could now do something which would prevent anyone accusing her. She would infuse him with her own excessive health and powers of resistance. As she kneeled, she willed him to accept what she had to offer.

  ‘I’ll not have you suffer,’ she was mouthing; ‘you can depend on me, my dearest.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not going to die!’ Mr Roxburgh ground it out from between his teeth, and laughed without mirth, for the vise was still squeezing him.

  Yet he was soothed by his wife’s touch. He closed his eyes, and thought to hear his mother’s voice, her commands for his welfare, as she proceeded to allay one of his coughing fits.

  Now the world had shrunk to its core, or to the small circle of light in the middle of the ocean, in which two human souls were momentarily united, their joint fears fusing them into a force against evil.

  As soon as she could safely leave her husband Mrs Roxburgh put on her mantle and resolved to see whether it were possible to procure some milk. She had eased him back upon the pillows, from where his expression and the regular rise and fall of his chest suggested that he might be dozing, or at least enjoying the relief which comes from exhaustion.

  She herself was exhausted, she realized as she scrambled out upon the deck, but her condition added to the splendour of the night: the breathing of canvas overhead sounded the stronger and deeper for her almost drunken reeling through the forest of her hair, while short bursts of light from a recurring moon transformed the ship, despite its heaving, into solid sculpture.

  Mrs Roxburgh made her way towards the galley, and was guided in her final steps by snores rasping in discord against the integrated sounds of sea and sail. It was Spurgeon the steward-cook, who had spread his blanket on the floor of his official sanctum.

  ‘My husband’, she explained, ‘is sick,’ before begging a little of the milk they had taken on at Sydney.

  Spurgeon was confused by the light he made after a fumbling with lucifers. ‘You may be lucky,’ he growled. ‘If ’twas tomorrow evenin’ I doubt there’d be enough to wet a baby’s whistle. Milk will be off. If ’tisn’t that already.’ He stuck his nose inside a blackened can.

  She waited patiently, determined there should be milk enough for her invalid, while Spurgeon, who seemed to have discarded the conventions to suit the hour and the circumstances, repeated mumbling, ‘Sick, eh? With gentlefolk, I thought it was mal de mur.’

  Too tired to compose an answer, Mrs Roxburgh pretended not to hear; while he warmed the milk on a reluctant fire in an atmosphere stuffy with sleep and charcoal.

  When the milk was ready she was so grateful Spurgeon grew quite pleased with himself. He smiled along his nose at the favour he had done her, and glanced down at her wedding ring, or so it appeared.

  ‘That’s the lot,’ he announced, ‘ma’am!’ and laughed, and added, ‘I wouldn’ do the same for any other lady.’

  Mrs Roxburgh was undecided whether she liked or disliked Spurgeon, but was free to hurry away. Slopping the milk slightly in her haste, warming her hands on the greasy vessel, she was panting with achievement; she would allow neither the steward’s ambiguous behaviour nor the swaying of the night to confuse her.

  When she returned to the cabin, the candle had burnt low, but Mr Roxburgh opened his eyes and looked as though prepared to check an inventory of her every feature.

  ‘I’ve brought you some warm milk,’ she said.

  Tranquillity perhaps made him forget to remind her of his loathing for the skin of boiled milk.

  She helped him into an upright position, and supported him in it with an arm, after first pouring into a cracked cup the greater part of the milk ration.

  ‘There!’ she coaxed.

  As he sank his mouth she greedily watched, until she saw the string of milk hanging and swinging from his lower lip. Well, she thought, he has forgot about that at least. She recalled her father supping at a cup of hot milk in the kitchen after lambing. Pa liked to soak his bread. He was greedy as herself for food, in the days when she had to make the most of a little.

  But the beard of milk was trembling on Mr Roxburgh’s lip. She almost wiped it for him, when she saw him suck the milk-skin into his mouth.

  While the two of them rocked and swayed together on the bosom of the sea, and she explored with her eyes the cracks and knots in their roughly constructed berths, she thought how she would have loved to taste a door-step of fresh-baked bread, dripping with warm, sweetish milk such as he used to offer her when she was still a little girl, his hands in which the cracks never seemed to close, and the thumb with the horn-thing which always repelled, and sometimes frightened her.

  She must have dozed, for she had allowed her husband to slip lower and the cup she was holding to tilt.

  Austin Roxburgh appeared restored to an acceptable level of reality. He was gently sleeping. Once or twice he groaned, not in pain, rather for the dryness of an open mouth. Which he closed to moisten. Opening and closing, to suck at the air, and alternately, dredge for moisture. She was surprised to find how calmly she could contemplate his cheek fretting against one of her breasts. The breast had escaped from its covering, at its centre the teat on which his struggling mouth once or twice threatened to fasten.

  She lay awhile longer, at peace. Then, ashamed of her opulence, she covered herself, and climbed to her own berth.

  Since settling down to their life at sea, lulled by air and motion and the mystical permutations of canvas, there was little to convince the passengers that the days had not been created by men for their own convenience. Time, and its fellow conspirator space, subtler for its present watery guise, were never in more perfect accord, and when on the seventh day the ship nosed gently into fog, the impression of limitless unity was increased, if not for all the voyagers, for Mrs Roxburgh unquestionably.

  Her husband had remained resting in his berth the whole of the day following his distressing attack, and the morning after that, still seemed indisposed to rise.

  ‘There’s a fog come up,’ she announced as she looked in the glass and wrapped herself against the weather. ‘Thick. Oh, thick!’

  Her low, muffled voice made it sound the most desirable condition. Mr Roxburgh closed his eyes. He enjoyed being cosseted. In the absence of medical attention, Captain Purdew paid him frequent visits, sat on the edge of the bunk, and racked his memory for advice. But it was Ellen who knew. Her voice dulled anxieties, wrapped him in a fog of contentment where no equivocal shapes were likely to rise and endanger him.

  Now as she stood looking in the glass at a blurred image which suggested that strands of mist had strayed down the companionway and through the hatches, its imperfection made her the more mysterious in his eyes.

  ‘I shall go up on deck,’ she announced, ‘and take the air. But only for a little,’ she added as a comfort.

  Possibly she intended to embrace him, but on second thought, laid fingers briefly against his cheek. In his present state of mind the quickly withdrawn contact thrilled him more deeply than any overt demonstration. (Besides, he had once jokingly confessed, kisses tend to be glutinous.)

  Mrs Roxburgh reached the deck. Her intention of returning shortly intensified her expectations. Had they not been cool, her fingers travelling over surfaces with that same hesitant tenderness with which she had touched her husband’s cheek, might have seemed feverish. She emerg
ed with an audible gasp for the swirl of fog, which rushed and entered, choking with fistfuls of white down, and parted, and united, on face or mast. She was not blinded by it, however; her eyes might have been jewels cutting such strands as offered themselves.

  For a moment some more powerful influence acted upon the mass of fog. The blanket was torn open to reveal the distant land: hog-backed, of a louring, formal ugliness, it might have dispirited the observer had it not glittered like a chunk of sapphire. Long after the fog had closed on her momentary vision, Ellen Roxburgh continued watching, waiting for a sign, but it did not recur.

  She went forward at last, past the helmsman, whom she decided to ignore from guessing at the expression on his face. On the forecastle head the fog was at its most obliterating. She could neither see, nor breathe, and might have retreated if her faculties had not been stimulated by a suggestion of danger.

  So she continued weaving through the fog, while clinging to rope or timber for support (despite her daring, she was glad of their honest, reliable textures) and almost stumbled over a form, that of a boy she made out, seated in the shelter of a capstan, dripping moisture, although, it appeared, content enough.

  ‘Ah,’ she cried, ‘it is you!’ For it was the lad who sometimes served under Spurgeon at dinner.

  Less at ease than before, the boy grunted. He was eating one of the wizened but sweet, Sydney apples, which were lasting bravely. For his moral support the boy tore out an extra large mouthful and sat chewing. It sounded more like the champing of a horse.

  Mrs Roxburgh may have felt daunted, but ventured, ‘I’m glad I have found you.’

  He looked up, his eyes deepening with mistrust, if not horror, for until now he had only received orders from her, or silent glances as he carried out the used dishes.

  ‘For company,’ she tried to explain.

  It made the boy more obviously suspicious.

  ‘Why?’ he mumbled through his mouthful. ‘Are ye afraid?’ She might have been asking for something he had never been taught to give.

  ‘No,’ she answered, touching with the toe of her boot a coop in which two wet hens sat huddled against each other. ‘Everyone is occupied except myself. And the fog is so lovely I’d like to watch it with someone else who is unemployed.’

  ‘Fog’s no more’n fog.’ The boy sniffed, or he must have sniffled, for immediately after, he wiped his nose with the back of the hand which held the apple.

  For her part, she was reduced to childhood by the boy’s logic, so that she kneeled beside him at the very moment when his limbs were stirring with an instinct to get to his feet and assert his manhood by leaving her.

  Lapsing spontaneously into her first language, she begged, ‘Cusn’t I stay with ’ee?’

  It was too strange: a lady who could speak ordinary. The boy sank back against the capstan, cowering perhaps. He reached up with an arm, and twined it round one of the hickory bars, to maintain his balance, or protect himself.

  ‘I’m not the master,’ he said.

  A certain innocence which life had not succeeded in exorcizing from her nature made her long for him to accept her. As a little girl, which she had become again, only briefly no doubt, she might have bribed him with some valued possession. But here she had nothing to offer.

  ‘What’s tha name?’ she asked respectfully.

  ‘Oswald Dignam,’ the boy answered and brightened; to own a label seemed to lend him courage.

  At the same time Ellen Roxburgh remembered her position and the wisdom and dignity she ought to possess. ‘Why did you come to sea, Oswald?’ she asked, not unkindly, but correctly.

  ‘Food’s regular.’

  ‘That it is,’ she agreed. ‘But was there nothing else?’

  ‘I dunno.’ And then, ‘’Tis a life like any other that takes you up.’

  The air had begun filling his hitherto cramped chest; a down of fog was stirring on his upper lip. The movement of the fog, the striving of the isolated ship, the sense of an expanding universe, began to bring them together at last.

  Now that the boy had started, he confided, ‘A man can save ’is money at sea.’

  ‘What will you do with it?’ she asked.

  It was most important that she should know.

  ‘Buy a ferret.’

  ‘Aw? I dun’t remember whether I ever seed a ferret. Praps once—to Zennor. Iss, some gipsies had ’n.’

  She cocked her head. In the cordage above, beads of moisture danced, trembled, and sometimes fell.

  The boy grew sullen again; he might have revealed too much of himself. ‘A animal is company.’ He was puffing out his lips in self-defence.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘I had a little pug.’

  Hard bare feet squelching on the deck threatened to destroy their privacy, but passed.

  ‘What happened to the pug?’

  ‘She died.’

  The melancholy sea air had at last drenched them. She could feel her hair putting out its saddest tendrils.

  He said, ‘I never had a dog.’

  ‘I’ll give you one when we come home. I’ll buy you the ferret, Oswald.’

  She spoke too fast, as though to prevent a doubt widening between herself and her protégé promises, like prayer, can be an attempt at blackmail.

  At the same time a fogbound voice began tolling, reaching deeper, always deeper into the void.

  ‘What is that?’ she asked.

  ‘The lookout—conning.’

  ‘Is there danger?’

  ‘No more’n usual.’ He threw away the sucked apple-core.

  She did not try to measure a contempt she must have earned.

  ‘It is time’, she decided, ‘to return to my husband. If I stay too long, he suspects, I think, that I’ve been swept overboard. His fears make him irritable.’

  ‘Ah?’ It was only of faint interest to the boy.

  Then, when she had got to her feet, he looked up at her, evidently trying to visualize a state which could remain for ever outside his experience.

  As she left him, the boy’s face was first blurred, then obliterated by the unconscionable fog. Sometimes toiling uphill, sometimes teetering sideways with little, drunken steps, she held tightly to the points of her elbows inside the pretty, fringed shawl. In this manner she preserved something of her physical self from the general amorphousness in which Oswald Dignam was lost and her own thoughts and hair floated as undirected as seaweeds. Yet, as she prepared to negotiate the companion-ladder, Mrs Roxburgh did make an effort to manage her hair, and wiped from her lips the last scum of drunkenness.

  The afternoon passed soberly. The passengers took their customary nap and were prepared to dine when called.

  ‘We shall grow liverish,’ Mrs Roxburgh predicted.

  Her husband did not answer because it was the kind of remark for which answers are not expected, at any rate in a well-regulated marriage. Sitting on the edge of the bunk preparatory to pulling on his boots, he was stuck by the superfluity of words with which the married state is littered.

  When suddenly and brutally the sequence of events was wrenched out of his control. There was a ramming. And grinding.

  At once a slow but inexorable turmoil of activity began taking place around them. A button hook and a chair fell upon them from a great height, for by this time Mrs Roxburgh, who had been standing before the glass, running the comb through her loosened hair, was thrown upon her husband’s breast, against the cabin wall which formed with the bunk the trough where they found themselves. In their initial alarm they were struggling with each other as much as against a quirk of gravity. Half-fowl half-woman, Mrs Roxburgh was panting in her husband’s ear. Her teeth must have gashed his cheek, he felt, but the shattering of several breakable vessels in the saloon beyond, dispersed any possible resentment he might have harboured against her.

  Then there was the slither and trample of feet overhead.

  ‘Mr Courtney, sir! Mr Court-ney?’

  ‘Good God,’ a second voice moaned
obliquely through the fog, ‘can’t you see we’ve struck? A reef! Plain as your nose, man!’

  ‘We’re keel-ing!’

  ‘… need to tell me …’

  So the gull-voices of men called faintly in the outer air.

  Mr Roxburgh observed his pins protruding from beneath his wife’s skirts. His chest was protesting at her weight.

  ‘Do you hear, Ellen?’ asked his old man’s voice. ‘We’ve struck a reef!’

  ‘Oh, my dear! I was thrown off my balance. Have I hurt you?’

  He ignored that. ‘We must stay calm and keep our wits about us.’

  He was determined that they should not give way to emotion, but could not help being aware how ineffectual his voice sounded, as on all occasions when he gave orders. Yet others never appeared to notice.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed, and succeeded in withdrawing her harsh breath from his ear, her disarrayed feathers from off his person, though they were still bundled together in the trough made by the bunk and the wall.

  ‘We must make our way—somehow—on deck,’ Mr Roxburgh decided.

  ‘… that I haven’t hurt you,’ she persisted, and took his cold hand in her warmer ones.

  He found it unnecessary. ‘It’s no time, Ellen, for delicacy of sentiment.’

  It was she, however, who grew practical, initiating the series of grotesque movements necessary for their escape from the cabin.

  ‘Ma’am? Mrs Roxburgh?’