The Fringe of Leaves

by Patrick White

  Anticipation of her husband’s portrait of her, whether it proved to be true or ideal, made her whimper softly. She did not think she could bring herself to unveil it—but might before Mr Roxburgh’s return, because the fateful light, her uncomfortable posture, and skewed clothes, were encouraging her to know the worst.

  Austin Roxburgh had set out on his journey back to the saloon aware of the foolishness of his desire to retrieve a book even though an Elzevir. It was not a matter of obstinacy, however; he had to prove himself, in the eyes of his wife, the officers and crew. As he left the galley he saw that some of the latter were manning pumps, unsuccessfully he judged from the oaths. They blamed it on the listing of the ship, not on a situation so diabolically contrived that men were becoming as powerless as stone gargoyles.

  Then something amazing occurred, the more improbable because, as always, Austin Roxburgh’s vision was not that of a participant. The mizzen mast with all its attachments began to give way before his eyes. It fell, broken, bumping, lanyards torn out by the roots. The canvas leaves of the great tree were carried away, to boil like dirty washing in the surf.

  Several of the crew pushed the passenger out of their way as they hurtled to repair what could not be repaired, or to hack off rubbish which might serve as a further hindrance.

  Austin Roxburgh considered whether, on returning, he should report to his wife on the incident he had just witnessed. He decided against it, out of respect for her sensibility, and not because his secret already made him feel larger, braver, more important. Thus re-inforced, he continued on his dubious mission.

  The day was darkening. Black clouds threatened to release a first volley of the pellets with which they were loaded. A deepening sea gargled hatred at its prospective victims. Somewhere land, that recurring promise, was doubtless hidden, awaiting re-discovery, but Mr Roxburgh did not glance once in the direction of what could only be several degrees less distasteful than vindictive ocean.

  By the time he reached the companion-hatch he was crawling on all fours, not entirely out of cowardice; it was dictated also by sense: the waves which were breaking aft lashed him across mouth and eyes. When he had regurgitated most of what he had gulped, and was again looking out on a streaming world, he felt for a foothold on a ladder which was no longer familiar to him.

  In the partial dark of what had been their stuffy but acceptable home, water had continued accumulating. All around, inside the fury of the storm, the sound of contained water could be heard, ominously slithery when more passive, or chopping and splattered as the little ship was swung grating on her stranded keel.

  Mr Roxburgh peered through the gloom in his efforts to distinguish the object of his search amongst the general débris, when suddenly ‘My Virgill!’ floated into focus on the bilge undulating at his feet. He bent down, and with admirable stealth, as though tickling for an illicit fish, scooped up the book, then almost lost his slippery catch, but snatched it back out of the air, and finally secured it. The sodden book reminded him of another he had once examined, the victim of innocuous local flooding. Mr Roxburgh promised himself the luxury of heroic reminiscence beside a wellstoked fire when restored with his Virgil to the library at Cheltenham.

  On deck after his return from the depths he again observed the weckage of the mizzen mast, and was strengthend in his resolve not to mention the matter to his wife. His book he hid inside the bosom of his overcoat, away from the eyes of those who might not have appreciated the purpose of his exploit.

  But nobody noticed Mr Roxburgh.

  More conscious of her husband’s existence in his absence than by his presence, Mrs Roxburgh sat with her fingers plunged like bookmarks between the pages of his journal, and wondered whether she could summon up the courage to open and read while she had the opportunity. She longed to be told of his love for her, but did not think she had the strength to face his doubts were she to come across any.

  She was saved at last by seeing that the light would not have allowed her to discover the worst had she wanted to, so she stood up in groggy gratitude, inclining towards the slope as she had learnt. Desire to read of her husband’s undamaged love was replaced by longing for the sight of land, and there it was, an iron horseshoe, not so far distant, but indifferent to human sentiments as well as the attentions of what appeared from the deck of the stricken ship an ingratiating, white tide.

  Mrs Roxburgh struggled as far as the bulwark and clung to it, staring, open-mouthed, seemingly as insensitive and greedy as any gull scavenging offal from a ship’s wake. She actually screeched once, and bowed her head, and retched into the black waves ramming at the sides of Bristol Maid.

  She was at least delivered from a physical disgust and hopelessness, but the tears began to pour for the image of a husband to whose love she had renounced the right, if not to his knowledge, according to her own conscience. It was her conscience too, which heard his voice calling feebly above the lisp of bilge-water in the darkening, and by now probably submerged, saloon.

  In spite of her inner predicament Mrs Roxburgh did notice, if vaguely, the demolished mizzen mast, and vaguely decided not to discuss it with her husband—should he return. As, indeed, he was now returning. He had not yet caught sight of her for the wreckage of mast and rigging. Relief brought with it anti-climax rather than stimulated guilt as she wedged herself into her place between the galley wall and the protective table. As he had left her, so he should find her, beside the closed dressing-case.

  Mr Roxburgh was much elated by the recovery of his Elzevir Virgil. (More than anything he looked forward to a re-reading of the Georgies at the first opportunity which offered.) Perched on the knife-edged bench he held the book against his stomach for safety. This sodden, and to any other eyes, repulsive trophy had the feel of a familiar and beloved object which assured him of his own reality.

  Seated beside him as he nursed his book Mrs Roxburgh was reminded of a doll she had been given. She had swaddled it in clean handkerchiefs. It was her child. She loved it, and cried bitterly when its head was ground to china splinters by a cartwheel.

  So they prepared themselves uneasily for night and dreams, when shortly before the descent of darkness a horrendous cracking, a wooden thunder, the downward sweep of impetuous wings flung terror over the passengers’ faces. They did not address each other, but rose simultaneously, and staggered out on deck, into an aftermath of silence. Through the rain which was stinging their eyelids the Roxburghs observed that the mainmast together with its press of canvas had been carried away over the larboard quarter. The crew were dealing after a fashion with a tangle of dangling yards and cordage. The jib-boom hung like a broken pencil.

  Not knowing to what extent they were at the mercy of chaos the Roxburghs stood supporting each other, and accepted that the rain should drench them. Down it drove, through the last convulsions of twilight, while the ship, although stationary, appeared to be sucked into an inky mangrove estuary, if not the jaws of night.

  Captain Purdew’s figure looming at the moment of extinction might have made a darker impression had his voice and attitude not suggested he was putting in a purely gratuitous appearance.

  ‘Well, she is gone,’ he announced so softly that his statement might have been for himself rather than an audience.

  He yawned and the tension left the sea-eroded skin; the once impressive frame gangled and creaked freely inside the clothes covering it. An experience he had half-expected all his life had just relinquished him it seemed, to his immense relief.

  There remained, notwithstanding, a duty towards his passengers. ‘Pilcher has made an attempt at launching the pinnace,’ he told in words carefully chosen for polite ears, ‘but the sea is too—’ his voice was lost till he recovered it, ‘heavy,’ they heard.

  The Roxburghs submitted to his opinion, after which Captain Purdew explained with extreme patience and a degree of natural courtliness, ‘We’re as high and dry on board as a nestful of gulls’ eggs.’ He gently pushed them back into the shelter
of the galley, his enormous hands resigned to their own ineptitude. ‘At dawn’, the last of his face soothed them with the information, ‘we’ll try again—and no doubt have better luck.’

  Dawn, the palest concept, hung before their eyes during the hours of darkness. The Roxburghs could not sleep, but dozed, perhaps a little, against each other, on the sharp edge of the tilted bench. Their stomachs compressed by irregularity and fright had ceased to be part of their anatomy, so there was no question of their feeling hungry. They were hungrier for the dreams which eluded them soon after leaving their skulls.

  Once Mrs Roxburgh all but succeeded in spelling out the evasive word, ‘G—A—R—N—u—r—d?’ Her lips were struggling with it, but failed at the cliff’s edge.

  At one stage he took her in his arms, and they lay along each other, lapping and folding, opening and closing with the ease of silk, fully enfolded if the coral teeth had not gnashed, they were sinking, sunk.

  Mr Roxburgh awoke from some desirable unpleasantness to find his wife steadying him. He was on the verge of losing his balance.

  ‘Are you well?’ Mrs Roxburgh asked.

  There was so little opportunity for being otherwise, her question sounded absurd.

  So they dozed.

  Captain Purdew’s dawn entered the galley without their noticing. It smudged their faces with grubby shadow and drew from the corners of darkness the cold grey smell of ash parted from the original coals.

  When the Roxburghs finally awoke it was to a splashing of voices and water outside. Expectation and sleep had renewed a physiognomy ravaged by dusk, and dismissed the more palpable fears. She sat biting her lips, pale eyes straining to make use of returning vision, while he had recovered something of the languor of his youth, eyelids hung too heavy, too dark, features refined by sickness to an unnatural perfection which almost precluded life. They jumped up, however, with gasps. Scrambling. Uttering.

  In the small hours the gale had considerably abated, but the vicinity of the stranded ship remained lathered with a restless foam. Gulls were circling overhead, shrieking, but coldly.

  Into this world of cold white light and water, beneath the blue-white of unearthly gulls, stepped Mrs Roxburgh, her skirt lifted to the level at which boot and ankle meet as she scaled the raised threshold of the galley doorway. Her husband followed. Despite an untended moustache and beard, he was still wearing that mask of youthful perfection which sleep had returned to him. If they had been vouchsafed an audience, its hoariest members might have trembled for what amounted, over and above the flaws, to the Roxburghs’ spiritual innocence. But the attention of everybody, of whatever degree of understanding, was engaged elsewhere.

  Launched at first light it seemed, the long-boat was bounding and thrashing on the water, still attached by its tackle to the parent ship.

  Human voices could be heard shouting, one in particular rising above the others.

  ‘You’ll stave ’ur in,’ Mr Pilcher accused whoever was responsible, ‘and half of us ’ull be as good as sunk!’

  The criticism was evidently aimed at the first mate, for at the heart of the general, though more subdued, vociferousness stood Mr Courtney, frozen into a frowning silence.

  ‘If we’re put to it, who will care to draw lots?’ Disregarding his own subordinate rank, Mr Pilcher continued flaying the air as a substitute for his superior officer. ‘I’ll not be left behind, waving goodbye to them born with better luck!’ Perhaps inspired by the motions of the long-boat dancing in frenzy at the end of its tether, Mr Pilcher blazed and twitched with passion.

  Other advice was being offered in minor keys; normally muscular hands were united in knots which, this morning, did not hold.

  When Captain Purdew was seen approaching from out of the wreckage of the charthouse, buttoning his jacket, hair flying, such of it as was left to him. If at nightfall the captain seemed to the Roxburghs to have relinquished his command, habit was driving him back to assume responsibility for a predicament which might prove fatal. So he shambled on, like a sleepwalker advancing into the heart of a nightmare, and arriving there, gave orders in a level, aged, but disciplinary voice, for the boat to be raised from the waters. As though that were possible. But it had to be. Himself lent a hand to perform the miracle expected of him.

  The miracle almost occurred. The bows of the absurd cockle lifted, its whole length was raised into space, when it plopped back. The splash rose and hit them in their sweating faces. Then for an instant a lip curled on the greeny-white face of the sea and coral teeth snapped at the long-boat; whereupon human desperation helped raise her a second time. There she hung, dangling at the ends of the knotted arms, the blenched fingers, of convulsed bodies. They might have been prepared if necessary to secure the long boat with their own entrails.

  But after an age of capricious resistance on the boat’s part, and of muscles threatening to tear, and lungs to burst inside the racked ribs of her wooers, she allowed herself to be jerked higher than any of them would have hoped, then after a further pause, in which her dead weight seemed to condemn half the souls among them to hell, she was swayed in their direction, practically sailing through the air, clearing the bulwark with little more than a graze, before ploughing the shuddering deck.

  When the operation was over, several of the men made no attempt to disguise the trembling of their limbs and faces as they chattered together, and one fellow of powerful build went and sat apart on the deck, holding his head in his hands, his feet splayed like great yellow talons supporting his weight against the list.

  But the long-boat was reclaimed.

  All that morning and into the forenoon, hands were busy repairing its fallible shell, while the work of victualling went ahead under supervision of the boatswain. Mr Roxburgh joined a chain of lads engaged in bringing up from below casks of salt beef and pork, loaves of bread already mouldering, and demijohns of water, to provision the pinnace and supplement the long-boat’s stores, which the haste and enthusiasm of her premature launching had left somewhat skimpy; or rather, Mr Roxburgh went through the motions of helping as his mind ran with the tide. Below deck the perpetual lapping, only a tone above silence, recalled the many silent houses in which he had lain as a youth, by nightlight and sleepless, his feverish senses experiencing all the terrors of shipwreck long before he was confronted with them.

  Mr Roxburgh appeared, and did in fact, feel calm enough, since the unaccustomed physical activity had purged him of his more obsessive humours. By contrast, some of the brawniest seamen around him shivered for what they were about to encounter, while trying to laugh it off. He could see the gooseflesh prickling on those bull-necks.

  Towards the middle of the day he rejoined his wife where she was half-standing half-leaning against the bulwark, shading her stare with a firm hand. She glanced up at him, and he was surprised to notice how little wrinkles of age and weather had seized upon the corners of her eyes and mouth.

  ‘You must find a place and sit down,’ he ordered. ‘All this turmoil will wear you out.’

  Was he trying to be rid of her?

  But she looked at him, and both knew he would only leave her if forced.

  She put out a hand and touched his sleeve in confessing, ‘I no longer believe we are the ones who will decide.’

  They had both, perhaps, weathered, or matured, and deeper than their skins. Their thoughts revealed themselves more obliquely under the salt which an uncertain sunlight had dried on their faces. A grime of salt and powdered ash encrusted Mrs Roxburgh’s hands, most noticeably her rings, which she was wearing for their safety. They were not many (she had not set much store by precious stones after the first flush of her marriage) but now these few glittered most unnaturally.

  ‘Should you be wearing them?’ he asked.

  ‘What else? Shall I throw them into the sea?’

  Then at least they laughed together. They were temporarily possessed by an almost sensual indifference to their fate. Mrs Roxburgh’s stance against the bulwark wa
s not far removed from the slatternly; the scuttle of her bonnet had lost its symmetry, and the hem of her skirt several inches of its stitching, with the result that it hung in a dangerous loop. If Austin Roxburgh was more correct in appearance, he took advantage of their laughter to press himself briefly but deliciously against her side, as though they were alone, or in the dark.

  She sighed at last, and petulantly. ‘Do you think we shall ever get away?’ Remissness on the part of a coachman might have delayed them in starting for the picnic she had organized.

  ‘They will manage it!’ Though cynicism and convention would have prevented him admitting it even now, Austin Roxburgh had the greatest faith in the working class.

  Never more dismal than when handing food, Spurgeon came and offered them some, together with a word of warning. ‘Here is something to chew on,’ he muttered.

  Mr Roxburgh remarked that he had scarcely any appetite, while accepting a hard biscuit and one or two shreds of beef fringed with beads of greyish fat.

  Out of another convention, Mrs Roxburgh might have been preparing to charm Spurgeon into their saloon relationship of mistress and man, but the steward chose not to understand, and went away.

  Some of the crew were stuffing their mouths with the haste which comes of sharpened hunger and fear that soon they must go short. Others choked and swallowed as they worked at repairing the long-boat. Even those who stood watching would offer a tool before the necessity arose, or take a turn at stirring with exaggerated care the pot of tar which played a major part in the caulking; while one or two, smiling and heavy-lidded, appeared drugged by the fumes they were inhaling or mesmerized by the rolling of a pitch-black eye into indifference towards the future.