The Fringe of Leaves

by Patrick White

She looked up, laboriously, and saw Oswald Dignam staring down at them from an unorthodox angle. His eyes were protruding slightly as he clung to the jamb of the swinging door.

  ‘Captain Purdew, ma’am,’ he called, then swallowed as the door caught his fingers. ‘You must come up quick,’ he recovered himself and shouted, ‘on th’ old man’s orders.’

  Though crisis and the pain from his jammed fingers had temporarily transformed him into a small, girlish boy, his sense of authority would not allow him to feel ashamed.

  ‘We’re stuck fast,’ their messenger informed them, ‘but will try to bring her off.’

  Mrs Roxburgh herself was so dazed by the situation, as well as entranced by the sweet, milky face of what might have been a cherub on the ceiling of some great house, she answered only with an effort, ‘Yes, Oswald. Yes. We shall get ourselves ready. And come on deck.’

  She stretched out a hand to her husband. It felt surprisingly strong and capable despite the years in which she had been discouraged from using it. He was grateful for his wife’s hand, and she for the opportunity to justify herself.

  Oswald Dignam had disappeared under cover of their concentrated activity.

  Mr Roxburgh began the climb towards the hook which held his overcoat, while his wife crawled in the direction of the carpet bag, to find she could not think what to pack. Instead she fumbled with the small leather dressing-case in which she locked her more valuable or intimate possessions such as jewels, journal, false hair, the prescribed smelling salts which she never used, and began stuffing in few random articles as though she were a thief.

  ‘Wrap up as warm as possible,’ she advised needlessly.

  Already in his overcoat and cap, Mr Roxburgh was winding round his neck an interminable woollen muffler she had knitted to his specifications several autumns ago.

  She tied her shawl tighter, the same green one admired by Mrs Merivale at Sydney, and made a grab for her mantle.

  Her breath was coming in desperate grunts, as though she, not her husband, were the invalid.

  ‘Take your time,’ he appealed to her. ‘All this is by way of precaution. I doubt the danger is as great as it appears, or if it is,’ he cleared his throat, ‘she’s not likely to break up at once—not before they’ve launched the boats.’ He would do his best till the end to impose some kind of logic on unreason.

  She finished tying down her bonnet with what she liked to think firmer movements. ‘Well, now?’ Her smile was a wry one, but directed at him personally.

  They began to scale the floor of the listing cabin, clinging with one hand to their sole article of luggage, with the second, clawing at any support offered by furniture or fitments, and after the same fashion, once through the doorway, navigated what had been the saloon. Neither would have admitted to the other that water had penetrated, when there it was lying before their eyes, oozing and lapping, an antithesis of ocean—a black, seeping treacle which the plush table cloth failed to stanch, while a teasel-shaped flower they had brought back on an afternoon at Sydney Cove was too light and withered to have been sucked under as yet.

  Not until they arrived at the companion-ladder did the Roxburghs allow themselves to contemplate fully the dangers with which they might be faced. Up till now, they had been superficially irritated, he understandably more than she, by a rude break in their measured routine, and by having to adjust their physical bearing to the angle of a heeling ship, but now, suddenly, the cold air pouring down from above, was aimed at their defenceless bodies, and struck even deeper. Their souls shrank dreadfully under the onslaught, and would have wrapped themselves together in a soft, mutually protective ball had that been possible. As it was not, the man and woman were left flattening themselves against a wall, bones groaning, almost breaking it seemed, as they wrestled perhaps for the last—and was it also the first time? with a spiritual predicament.

  Ellen Roxburgh then, was pinning her husband against the wall, grinding her cheek into his as she would never have dared. ‘Tell me—this once,’ she commanded, ‘I have not made you unhappy?’

  He fought back with a strength he had never thought he possessed. ‘Ah, Ellen, it is no occasion for foolish questions!’ His voice issued from its deepest source to expire at the surface amongst what sounded like dry reeds.

  In the obscurity at the foot of the ladder he knew her eyes were staring at him, and he stared back: for the moment they were both contained in the same luminous bubble which circumstances threatened to explode.

  It was she who broke. Her tears were streaming.

  He would have started dragging her up the ladder, to protect her from that mortal danger, herself. ‘You mustn’t be afraid,’ he ordered, ‘or not till we know there’s cause for it.’

  ‘I’m not afraid for myself,’ she cried. ‘It’s for you. And my child.’

  ‘Child?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I would not have added this to your cares, but it isn’t possible—any longer—to avoid it.’

  ‘My dearest dearest Ellen!’ He fumbled for her face, to unite her tributary distress with the love he felt flowing out of him. ‘Our child is our best reason for surviving.’

  Only obtuseness and self-absorption could have prevented him seeking a reason for the frequent torpor, the growing softness and whiteness of the form which had supported him in sickness, and for the presence of which he found he craved increasingly. Now his contrition was the more intense and searing for the drought from which it sprang.

  Again it was she who came to her senses, who began to protest, and assume her normal role of protector. ‘We are wasting time! You go first, Mr Roxburgh, and I will follow with the bag. You must take care—more than ever—now that we have an ordeal to face—not to over-tax yourself.’

  As they struggled upward, he issued a reprisal of warnings in lowest key. ‘Ellen! Keep calm! As I told you. And especially since you have other responsibilities. Besides, they’ll see that you’ve been crying if your manner is—noticeably—agitated.’

  So they came out upon the sloping deck. Between them, though by no specific agreement, they were carrying the leather dressing-case. They stood bracing themselves against the list of the marooned vessel, which had brought upon them every distortion of grace, not to say abandon of propriety.

  Never since boarding Bristol Maid had Mr and Mrs Roxburgh looked so awkward, foolish, and superfluous. It was not surprising that those who might be competent to deal with the present situation paid no attention to them as they stamped or slithered about their business. The passengers were made to feel they must pay for their ignorance. Humbly smiling, they prepared to accept their just deserts.

  Mr Courtney, although very much the first officer coping with a crisis, took pity at one stage. His jacket unbuttoned, his mouth loose from shouting, he demonstrated with his large hands how their ship had brought up suddenly on a semi-circle of coral.

  There it was, if they cared to look, a pale, greenish glimmer, on which the lovely lace of foam was being torn to further tatters.

  Mr Courtney was of the opinion that nobody was to blame but the fog; they had been doing a bare five knots. He was so convinced he repeated himself several times over.

  The fog was lifting, as though to expose the full irony of its work. The stranded ship had swung round and was lying broadside on to the sea.

  ‘Close-hauling’, Mr Courtney bellowed at the passengers, ‘could bring her off.’

  The Roxburghs were appreciative if dazed. They intended to maintain hope, but in the face of the mate’s practical knowledge they dared not contribute even the token of an amateur suggestion.

  For his part, Mr Courtney, although a genial, kindly man, felt he had done his duty by the passengers, and was determined to dismiss them from sight at least. ‘I advise you to take shelter, Mrs Roxburgh, in the charthouse or the galley.’

  Presumably included in the invitation, the lady’s husband was left to accompany her down the deck to whichever asylum she happened to choose. Mr Courtney, who had
already limped away, might have stamped in level circumstances. Unusually sensitive to moral criticism from others, Austin Roxburgh wondered whether the mate had been concealing from the beginning a streak of that contempt which members of the lower classes often harbour against their betters, but shelved the theory for further examination at a more appropriate time. At the moment there was nothing for it but to follow his wife.

  They proceeded, tittuping on their land legs, clinging to whatever was offered them by way of support. Over the side, the variable sea, now a milky, liquid jade, poured itself on the snoozing coral, the latter not so passive that it would not rise at times, to snap with a mouthful of teeth, or lash from under with swathed limbs.

  Mrs Roxburgh came to the decision not to look seaward as she made her way forward. If asked to consider why she was choosing the galley in preference to the charthouse, her only reason could have been that she had visited the galley during their progress through a sea which had not yet grown hostile, in a gently breathing ship, which now lay stiff and stubborn beneath them, or grumbled, or shuddered. Aloft, a man was swinging, all sinews, tendons, muscular contortions, grinning at the wind as he fought the canvas. Herself straining along the deck beneath, Mrs Roxburgh felt relieved when this battered Punch was removed from sight, if not from thought; indeed, he might return in her dreams.

  Remembering her husband, she glanced back once or twice to call and encourage. ‘We are practically there,’ she told him, whether her voice would carry or not.

  She caught herself smiling, from habit, and was glad she could not see herself; at this point the only significance her smile could have had was that of an arbitrary, not to say perverse, decoration.

  They reached the galley. Never much more than one of those protuberances with which the deck was capriciously furnished, it now resembled a tilted hutch. They blundered their way inside, into a consoling stuffiness, clean-swept of the utensils one would have expected. In a depression formed between the opposite wall and the steep floor, dented pots were lying, together with the shards of crocks, and the white shambles of what must have been the saloon dinner service. Over all hung the smell of cold ash and fat.

  ‘Here I am going to stay,’ Ellen Roxburgh announced, as though it might still be granted to her to exercise her will.

  There was a fixed table behind which, on a similarly immovable bench, she succeeded in wedging herself, along with the leather dressing-case. (If she had sole control of this during the latter stages of their journey, it was what she considered natural, and would have wished.)

  After perching uneasily beside her on the bench, Austin Roxburgh wondered aloud, ‘… whether I might give them some kind of assistance.’

  Mrs Roxburgh did not answer, for the simple reason that she had withdrawn even out of reach of the husband whose protection was her chosen vocation. She would have liked to pray, but found the vocabulary and the necessary frame of mind for prayer, wrecked inside her. Mentally she was still too exhausted to sort out the wreckage, and recoiled moreover, from a possibility that she might never restore order to a spiritual cupboard which had not been kept as neat as it looked.

  So she sat with her arms round that other responsibility, the child whose presence had been her secret burden over the last five months.

  The sea raked the sides of Bristol Maid with increasing fury. As its spray lashed the deck, in collaboration with more vicious because more substantial whips in the form of snapped cordage, the galley walls strained and vibrated.

  Those sheltering inside did not realize that the captain had appeared at the doorway, until he called. ‘Are we in good heart?’

  Captain Purdew followed it up with a curiously half-hearted laugh. These whom he was looking over through the doorway were officially his passengers, not pet animals to which he had taken a rash fancy and now regretted having acquired. Had they been pouter-pigeons or white mice—or easiest of all, silkworms, he might have disposed of them without a qualm.

  Mr and Mrs Roxburgh assured Captain Purdew that they were in the best of spirits.

  From their perch they sat looking back at the one who had them in his keeping, and who, they hoped, was possessed of benign wisdom and superhuman powers in spite of resembling an old, moulted member of the same species, Adam’s apple wobbling above a dirty collar, blue-red flesh thinly stretched over such bones as were visible, and deposits of salt on drooping lids and in the corners of disillusioned eyes.

  Captain Purdew braved their inspection. ‘We have two stout boats which the men will lower at the first opportunity.’ For more than the first time he glanced over a shoulder, and confirmed in a trailing voice, ‘The sea is too high at present.’

  Then he left them, not to direct further operations, but to avoid, one suspected, those of his subordinates who had automatically taken over. In fact, Captain Purdew was in much the same plight as the inferior beings, or unwanted pets, his passengers, though nobody might have admitted yet to the true state of affairs.

  The Roxburghs languished on their perch, and to give each other courage, asserted from time to time that the storm was surely abating; when Mr Roxburgh made a most distressing discovery.

  ‘My Elzevir! I don’t remember—but could have left it—in the cabin—no, more likely the saloon.’

  ‘Your what?’

  ‘My Virgil.’

  ‘Ohhh?’ Her voice climbed to a point of disbelief which almost revealed an opinion of her own: that in spite of a respect for books instilled by her husband and mother-in-law, they were another kind of furniture, but unlike tables, chairs and so forth, dispensable.

  Fortunately Mr Roxburgh was too distracted to detect in his wife signs of possible apostasy. He had risen, apparently preparing, not so much to show his respect for books, as to demonstrate his adherence to a faith.

  ‘You are not going back?’ Her voice should have had more colour in it, but she was understandably debilitated.

  ‘There is no danger as yet—from what they tell us.’

  ‘Oh, no, no! There’s no need to go back. Not for a book!’ Whatever the eventual outcome, she had said it; in the present, however, the languid tones of female despair did not serve to restrain her husband; it made him, if anything, the more determined to carry out his intention.

  When he had left her, and she had sighed out her formal disapproval, and tidied up some of the physical ravages, Mrs Roxburgh was secretly glad. It was the greatest luxury to be sitting alone, to give up the many-faceted role she had been playing, it now seemed, with mounting intensity in recent months—of loyal wife, tireless nurse, courageous woman, and more unreal than any of the superficial, taken-for-granted components of this character—expectant mother. Yet her body told her that this child was the truest part of her, of such an incontrovertible truth that she had not admitted it to the company of those ‘formed’ thoughts, affectations, and hypocrisies recorded in her journal, just as she had banned from its pages another, more painful truth—herself as compliant adulteress.

  A reality accepted might have left her less detached had she not felt fulfilled, and had she not been reared besides, on the realities: she was still to some extent a lump of a country girl, chapped hands folded in her lap, seated on a rock amongst furze and hussocks in a failing light. In the ordinary sequence of events someone would have come courting the farmer’s daughter, and got her with child and to church, in that order.

  Mrs Roxburgh stirred on her bench. In her thoughts she was torn between reality and actuality. On breaking the sequence of events and spiriting her away, her preceptors had attempted in all good faith to foist what they recognized as a mind on the farmer’s daughter. Had she perhaps expressed herself too explicitly, Mrs Roxburgh wondered, if only by the tone of a phrase, the absence of a word, in her journal? The possibility began to rankle in her, along with her child, and a not entirely renounced lust.

  She unlocked the dressing-case. There was the excuse of passing time, and incidentally, that of pacifying her conscience, while th
e light held. She searched through Mr Roxburgh’s papers, letters, his journal, the fragment of a ‘memoir’ (‘it is thought, not action, Ellen, which makes an eventful life, and for that reason—who knows—I may some day begin harvesting the fruits of thought.’) These she could remember snatching up before she left the cabin. She fumbled with the velvet bag which held the few unimportant jewels she had brought on the voyage, and back through the individual documents without laying hand on the object of her search. As she rummaged, it became of increasing consequence to find, to read, to confirm that she had not written more of the truth than can bear looking at. Her breath rasped. In her mind’s eye she saw the vellum-bound volume floating in the tipsy waters of the wrecked saloon, salvaged by her husband at danger to his balance, and finally her own complete equilibrium—if the prize had not already fallen to a member of the crew, or more likely, Mr Pilcher.

  As the second mate emerged into the foreground of her imagining, it no longer occurred to her that a storm was raging round a shipwreck. It was clear that the elusive Pilcher, of reserved manner, and colourless eyes to conceal the depth of their vision, had shown by his behaviour and appearance that he was designed to be the instrument of her undoing. Armed with such hints and overt disclosures as the journal contained, he would break his silence, the lines on either side of his mouth opening like wounds healed but temporarily.

  In the twilight of the galley she almost warded off an apparition as convincing as it was unreasonable; for there was no reason why her mind should turn to Pilcher, except through the contempt in which she suspected he held her, as well as the suspicion that had they met by a similar light on the Zennor road they might have hailed each other as two beings equally secretive and devious.

  Mrs Roxburgh sat locking her hands, which had grown too soft to resist her thoughts. The strength was drained out of her. She wished, and did not wish for the return of Mr Roxburgh, who might be floating, face down, in bilge water.

  Her thoughts were inflating into monstrous waves. My dearest husband … In the absence of her own regrettable journal, should she open his and pass the time reading from it while there was light enough? She re-opened the dressing-case, which retained something of the original scent of expensive leather with which the English fortify themselves against their travels. Fossicking around inside the bag, her fingers, sliding between the sheets of grained paper, hesitated to advance farther. Would she find herself looking in a glass at a reflection which no amount of inherited cunning and cultivated self-deceit could help her dismiss?