A Fringe of Leaves (19 page)

‘I am without accomplishments,’ she replied.

Now it was her husband coming to her rescue, or else to deliver the final blow. ‘Garnet, dear boy,’ Austin Roxburgh’s voice began in the key it assumed for affectionate recollections of the past; it made him sound old-womanish, jealous old-womanish at that, ‘I woke in the night, Garnet, and remembered the time your horse threw you—we were both still only boys in our teens—and they carried you home—you were white enough for me to think you dead. I went so cold. I couldn’t imagine how I’d live without you.’

Garnet tried to break the mood by pummelling his brother roughly on the shoulder. ‘And here we are—both alive—and living happily without each other!’

But Austin Roxburgh was not to be denied his ration of sentiment. ‘You remember old Nurse Hayes? She was as alarmed as I. So much so, when you came to, she allowed us a drink of liquorice-water—and accepted a tot herself.’

Garnet Roxburgh was staring at the deck from under his eyelids; his mouth might have formed, and quickly sucked back, a bubble. ‘I remember the liquorice-water. What poison!’

The brothers laughed immoderately as the sun showed from between the ribbons of watery cloud.

Captain Purdew announced that he would soon be forced to put their visitors ashore.

‘And Nurse?’

‘She died, of course. At a great age.’

‘I remember she used to allow us to feel her goitre, as a treat.’

Seeing that it was a moment in which she could have no part, Mrs Roxburgh went below. The landscape which she thought she had begun to hate until on the point of leaving it, was breaking up into brilliant fragments under pressure from the suddenly dominant sun. On the companion-ladder her legs felt weak, her cheeks sticky, which she wiped with the back of a glove; while the voices of the brothers continued rising overhead, wreathing and intertwining as though in the last throes of a rememorative embrace.

Mr Roxburgh stood looking in at his wife. He was holding ajar the door of their crudely improvised cabin, his face paler than normal, for he had not found his sea legs on their first day out from Sydney.

‘Are you not feeling well, Ellen?’ Mr Roxburgh asked without intending it to sound peevish.

‘It’s nothing. The rolling of the ship. It will pass.’

She smiled, but shapelessly she could feel. She roused herself at once and prepared to leave her nest of rumpled sheets. She might have been rising from a greater depth, for the sinews of her throat grew visible and her mouth thin and strained. The awkwardness and effort of the whole operation was making her look ugly.

‘Nothing,’ she hastened to repeat. ‘Now I am going to see to our beds so that Spurgeon will perhaps be less disgusted with me. Do you go back to your books and I’ll join you shortly.’

Mr Roxburgh turned back into the saloon and she realized he had not been looking at her, but inward, into his own thoughts.

Later in the day they decided to take a stroll together since the swell appeared to have abated. Even so, it was difficult to keep up their dignity, and the action of the ship, together with the cluttered nature of the deck, soon forced her to let go of his arm. They were no worse for their independence. The clouds had thinned for a pale disc of sun to appear, fully exposed at its best moments, at others floating in a milky scud. Mrs Roxburgh pushed away the hair from in front of her eyes, and once, while recovering her balance, spat a flying strand out of her mouth. But no one was looking at that moment. Wrapped to the gills, Mr Roxburgh returned from a reconnaissance to lecture her on the virtues of studding sails, of which he had heard but recently.

‘If the wind would veer slightly,’ he said, and teetered, ‘we could set our studsls. Then I should convince you. There is no prettier sight’, he added, ‘than a vessel with its studsls set.’ It rejoiced Mr Roxburgh to accumulate technical terms he would never be required to use in his own sphere of life.

The pale sun was making the sea look glassier. Its long furrows opened on coldly boiling depths into which the swaths of foam fell and were engulfed. Now that they were farther from the shore the gulls sounded less insistent. At a distance the land remained a lead- or slate-colour, when she would have wished to see it again looming in that blue haze of trees.

All the while the seamen were going about their duties, which enabled them to ignore a female: the bosun, his trousers rolled halfway up his calves, bristled with little hackles along the ridges of his great toes; a boy struggled to the side and emptied a kid of potato-peelings and grey fat to the more persistent of the gulls; while a replacement took over the helm from Mr Pilcher the second mate. A wiry fellow, of lined cheeks though not above his early thirties, Pilcher ducked his head in passing. They had not exchanged a word as yet, and perhaps an exchange would never come about. There are the souls who remain anonymous at sea in spite of the names one learns to attach to them.

Mrs Roxburgh staggered and clung alternately. She had adopted an ostentatious manner of breathing as though to demonstrate appreciation, and smiled, if only to herself. She loved listening to the sound of the sails.

She found her husband standing aft, staring at the wake, at the minute particles of foam streaming out behind them. The view of the wake was certainly more consoling than that of the great glassy graves opening to either side in the fields of ocean. Mr Roxburgh might have been trying to discern a design in the path they had made, or again, in his own thoughts.

He was growing noticeably restless, and shouted at her when he saw her watching, ‘I’m going down. We’ll be dining soon.’ He looked bilious, but with an expression which suggested moral rather than physical distress.

‘Aren’t you feeling well?’ it was her turn to ask; she was only too anxious to help: this was the basis on which their love was founded.

His answer was lost on the wind, his form in the companionway, and she was alone until shy Mr Courtney barged past, large and healthy.

‘Mr Roxburgh not of the best?’ It seemed to give him courage to take advantage of someone else’s infirmity.

‘He has simply had enough of idleness. My husband is one whose mind must always be employed at something.’

It was all too mysterious for Mr Courtney, so he went away.

Shortly after, and uneventfully, the Roxburghs dined alone off more of the salt pork, which they were careful to shave close of fat.

In the evening they retired early.

Mrs Roxburgh let down her hair into a sea of silence where men’s voices had ceased shouting. After they had said their prayers, a duty performed simultaneously and with the outward assurance which comes from habit, he embraced her, but absently it felt, which again was pretty usual. Listening to his snores Mrs Roxburgh was soon rolled into sleep in her upper berth.

It was the fifth day out and Austin Roxburgh had remained on deck longer than he would have expected of himself. Gulls hung in the clear air like bubbles in a glass. The sea billowed, a blander blue than at any stage of their course from Sydney. The breeze still favoured them. Veering slightly during the morning it began to blow from the south-east, which enabled Captain Purdew’s crew to set the lower and topmast studding sails. To enjoy this prodigality of canvas was partly the reason why Austin Roxburgh had remained on deck. He could not give attention enough to this excessively beautiful crowd of sail, but stared and smiled with a proprietary expression at the rig he had appropriated as the mark of his initiation into nautical life. He was ignorant of more than the basic function of canvas, but the studding sails carried his hesitant spirit in the direction of poetry. So he strutted back and forth, his twilled overcoat blown open around him, or he would pause and stare, grinning at a blue, sun-blurred void, or alternately, at those who refused to see any connection between a superfluous gentleman and their own professional activities.

Mr Roxburgh was not immediately deterred. Sensitive to a point where he often became intolerable to those who knew him, he wore rhinoceros hide for strangers, particularly those deficient in education or of an inferior class. He would thwack his leg with his stick, baring his long, rather yellow teeth at the unfortunates of whom he disapproved, or who remained indifferent to his worth.

Thus he was tramping the deck, grimacing at the unmindful crew. Fascinated by so much of what he observed in life, whether beautiful or incongruous, he might have made use of it creatively had his perceptive apparatus not been clogged with waste knowledge and moral inhibitions. He would often isolate a form, or tremble with excitement for an idea, as though about to throw upon it a light which would make it indisputably his. Then, instead, he grew resentful, or angry, sometimes even ashamed at his presumption. Once as he watched his wife descending the stairs in a topaz collar which had been his mother’s, he was to such an extent illuminated that he resolved to commission Sir John to paint her portrait and had written away the following morning, but remained disappointed with the result, knowing that this was not the ultimate in revelation, which he himself had experienced as his wife shimmered on the stairs. None the less, everybody else found it a telling likeness, were awed by the gold frame, and paid respectful tribute to this materialization of the husband’s wealth.

Where his wife was now, Mr Roxburgh had no idea. Without interrupting his own pursuits, he glanced around the deck from time to time, partly out of a sense of duty, partly because he was fond of her, but irritation left its heelmark imprinted in hard teak.

In the course of his revolutions he noticed Mr Courtney coming down from the forecastle, pausing briefly to inspect the cringlemaking to which the boatswain had told off some of the younger crew members. From the lee of the pinnace Mr Roxburgh watched the first officer picking his way with expert ease through the animated forest in which he, by contrast, was lost. He was both expectant and apprehensive of Mr Courtney’s arrival. He longed to join the mate in the kind of esoteric conversation the latter would know how to conduct amongst his fellow initiates, a freemasonry to which Mr Roxburgh could never be admitted it seemed, because he had not learnt the sign. In an even more despondent mood he would see himself locked in his solitary confinement cell, while those outside were able to communicate with the fluency, and according to the rights, of human beings.

As Mr Courtney came on, rubbing his hands together, it could have been as protection against rank and knowledge. ‘With such a wind, we’ll berth at Singapore, Mr Roxburgh, before you’ve even found your sea legs.’ Intended to encourage the passenger, it probably consoled the mate.

Mr Roxburgh might have blushed, but a temporarily yellow complexion saved him from making a fool of himself. He remembered how, as boys, his younger and more active brother had learnt to tie a simple reef, and showed him how, and with what grateful pleasure he had received the demonstration. Now on looking at the mate’s perhaps deceptively candid eye he would have liked to ask him to demonstrate the tying of some immensely complicated knot.

Instead Mr Roxburgh asked,’ Have you the time on you, Mr Courtney?’ and realized he had employed an idiom he would not have used in politer cicles.

Without answering, the mate produced a battered silver watch, its face as open if not as large as its owner’s. Mr Roxburgh could not thank him enough, but only after the watch had been returned to a serge pocket did he realize that he had failed to mark the hour.

It was too late to correct his mistake; the mate had removed himself with the exaggerated delicacy practised by men who are large but shy. Mr Roxburgh was relieved to think that his own ineptitude would remain his secret.

The ship was progressing as though born to an ease of motion, and the passenger, restored to solitude, recovered some of his self-importance. His mind glided marvelously when not threatened by the shoals of human intercourse or the bedevilled depths of his own nature.

Moods and any tendency to animal spirits had been discouraged from an early age by nurses, governesses and tutors on orders from the mother, who feared that too much of either might aggravate his delicate health. Books were countenanced if not morbid in sentiment. To surround her children with the solid architecture of life was the mother’s object. ‘You would not wish us to live amongst eccentric, needlessly ornamented furniture—spindly stuff which might collapse at a touch?’ Thus she projected her own disdain to impress her elder boy, who visualized the horror of it. Following up, she pointed out that he must furnish his mind with what is indestructible. Yet she was far from being materialistic. While he was still a child she made him keenly aware of his moral responsibilities, with the result that he had awaited fatherhood with apprehension.

If failure to procreate living issue reduced him to silence on that subject, it shattered an unappeased grandmother: she began to recognize her years. She might have sat grizzling, ‘One expects a different constitution in a Cornish hoyden,’ but had grown to love a daughter-in-law she would not have accepted had it not been her habit to indulge the son she doted on. The elder Mrs Roxburgh was, besides, a good woman. In her old age an evangelical trait drove her to spend much of her time distributing bibles and patronizing orphans. Superfluously, she prayed for the gift of Charity twice a day, thrice on Sundays, excepting when she had a cold. Good works did not prevent her wearing a frisette till the night she died, the little, dangling curls from an exhausted fashion being the only sign of frivolity in her worthy life. She was much respected, but took it hard that certain acquaintances chose to remember how her father-in-law had been in trade.

It was unavoidable that family history should complicate to some extent the relationship between the lady and her son’s wife. She had earmarked a clergyman’s sister for Austin, thinking that something mature but mild would not ‘aggravate’, as she put it. She would not have spoken the word ‘sensual’, except in connection with abstract vice, and where her daughter-in-law was concerned, she translated ‘sensuality’ into ‘health’. If only she had been able to consult with someone close, to lean upon her younger son, but he, alas, had defected earlier, to sensuality and worse, and been packed off as quickly and quietly as possible.

Because Austin was taught as a boy to suppress emotion, and soon preferred it thus, for fear that his preceptor might diagnose feeling as yet another ‘symptom’, none but his wife ever guessed that he must have reacted to his brother’s forced departure as though he had suffered the amputation of a limb. His brother’s skin, after a bath and a brisk towelling in front of the nursery fire, continued flickering on and off before Austin’s eyes. He could remember an occasion when, seated beside the curiously woven brass fender, he had watched Garnet leap the rail, and stand crowing from amongst the coals, clothed in a suit of fiery feathers. He had awoken sweating from his dream; but Garnet had in him something of the quality of fire. Austin himself was not without it, if damped down, concealed by ash. He would not have had it otherwise—oh dear, no! but admired the free play of flames.

As he saw it, his mother and his brother were the opposite poles of his existence. He believed he found them united in his wife, whose sense of duty did not prevent her lips tasting of warm pears. He had never tasted his brother’s lips, or not that he could remember. Garnet smelled of discharged guns and anointed harness, their mother of some dim melancholy, compound of lawyers’ deeds and lemon verbena. She encouraged her elder son to cultivate the garden, which he did, if not literally: it was tended by too many gardeners. The art of horticulture was what attracted him, Latin names, dried specimens—not so far distant from his curtailed legal studies—rather than the flesh of living plants. But as token exercise and tribute to his mother, he would behead a few weeds, and fork at the moist earth, turning up bundles of flesh-coloured earthworms. It sustained him too, against the wrench of his brother’s departure. Their mother had come down the steps and laid a hand on her surviving boy’s shoulder. They were standing under a medlar, treading a rich stench out of the fallen fruit. In this second bereavement Mrs Roxburgh would have liked to talk about her first, the father Austin could scarcely remember, and rarely attempted to.

Free of family responsibilities and ties, if not the ghosts they leave behind, Austin Roxburgh tried to feel exhilarated as he stood alone beneath this other tree on which his life now depended. Anonymous male voices drifted down at him from up there amongst the rope and canvas. He was unable to see the men themselves, but it did not bother him unduly; his wife excepted, he had more confidence in those with whom he was unacquainted. On and off he felt irritated thinking of his wife. Where could Ellen be? So dependable. She had soon learnt to pour tea of a strength soothing to his stomach and replenish the pot from the silver kettle slung above a little spirit-lamp.

The voices of the invisible sailors aloft were floating with the careless, designless ease of gulls’ cries, gulls’ frames.

‘If one of them should fall!’ Mr Roxburgh remarked aloud.

He was staring up. Anyone coming upon him would have caught him with his mouth and his thoughts open. He was not particularly thinking of the men, but instinctively touched his own ribs. His breath rattled in his throat as though he were emerging from out of a heavy blanket of sleep.

‘There was a lad fell from the riggin’ on the voyage out.’ It was Pilcher, the second mate, with whom Mr Roxburgh had exchanged scarce a word all the way from Hobart Town; yet here they were, brought together fortuitously.

‘Yes?’ Mr Roxburgh would not be lured too far too soon.

They had gone across and were standing together at the bulwark. The wind was attempting to lift the passenger’s cap, while the sea turned on its side as though preparing to reveal some hitherto hidden aspect of its realm.

‘Yes?’ Mr Roxburgh repeated so quickly it sounded unnatural.

‘Poor Harry! Apart from his fall, d’you know what happened? Bosun forgot to weight ’is shroud.’

‘He was buried at sea?’

‘Where else? She’s big enough.’

Mr Roxburgh and Mr Pilcher stood looking over the side.

Pilcher laughed. ‘If the sharks don’t get a man, it’s the worms.’

Mr Roxburgh agreed; it seemed the only rational thing to do.

As they were placed, he could not have seen Pilcher without turning, but it would have been unnecessary to look: he knew his companion as that wiry individual of livid complexion and indeterminate age. He did not care for the mouth as he remembered it, thin-lipped, not unlike his own.

Mr Roxburgh shook himelf to free his thoughts of a morbidity in which his mother and Nurse Hayes would not have permitted him to indulge. In search of a more wholesome image, he looked landward and saw that an opalescence had bloomed on the hitherto leaden slab of shore. An invisible sun struck at the land with swords of light, but only for a few moments, before the weapons were again sheathed, the target veiled in cloud and mist.

‘What curious and beautiful tricks the light will play!’ Mr Roxburgh at once regretted his remark, but needlessly; Pilcher appeared to consider it unworthy of his attention.

‘Ever been any way in?’ Austin Roxburgh thought to inquire.

‘In where?’

‘Into the interior.’

‘Nao!’

The mate was of another element. He continued staring at the water, his contemptuous expression dissolving in what entranced him.

‘Not if I was paid,’ Mr Pilcher said. ‘Nothing there.’

On the other hand, he seemed to imply, the sea was peopled with his like.

‘Only dirty blacks,’ he added, ‘and a few poor beggars in stripes who’ve bolted from one hell to another. The criminals they found out about! That’s th’injustice of it. How many of us was never found out?’

Mr Pilcher spat into his element, but the wind carried the thread of spittle, stretching it into the shape of a transparent bow.