A Fringe of Leaves (20 page)

‘That is certainly an argument,’ Mr Roxburgh said.

‘That is the truth!’ the mate blurted passionately, and looked in the direction of the land. ‘If I was sent out here in irons, for what I done—or what someone else had done, ’cause that can happen too, you know—I’d find a way to join the bolters. I’d learn the country by heart, like any of your books, Mr Roxburgh, and find more to it perhaps.’

The passenger was surprised that one whom he scarcely knew should be acquainted with his tastes.

‘Experience, no doubt, leaves a deeper impression than words.’

‘’Specially when it’s printed on yer back in blood.’

Mr Roxburgh winced, and sucked at his moustache.

‘They wouldn’t hold me, though,’ Mr Pilcher continued. ‘Not for long. No conger was ever slipp’rier’, he laughed, ‘when his liberty was threatened. That’s why I come away to sea. A man is free at sea. He can breathe. But I wouldn’t suffocate there, neither—if I was put to it—in their blisterin’ bush.’

Just then, the canvas tree above them shuddered and rattled to such an extent the mate appeared to remember his duties.

‘Well?’ He smiled, indulgently for him, and slipped away.

Mr Roxburgh was left with an impression of a vertical cut down either side of the man’s mouth. Of course these were no more than lines with which the face had been weathered, but Austin Roxburgh could not avoid connecting them with their somewhat disturbing conversation. The conger was still twisting and glinting at a depth where he feared to follow, while in the element more natural to himself his hands had become unrecognizable as he tore a way through the blistering scrub, his nails as broken and packed with grime as the mate’s own.

It was a relief when the arrival of a messenger rescued him from thoughts over which he had so little control.

‘Mrs Roxburgh sent me, sir, to ask whether summat had detained ’ee.’

He recognized the boy who lent a hand in the galley, amongst his other duties, and helped Spurgeon carry the dishes down to the saloon. Usually blithe and elastic in all he did, his present mission had given him a primly formal, not to say ladylike air, perhaps in imitation of the one who had dispatched him.

‘
Detain?
’ the gentleman spluttered. ‘How? What could detain one on board ship? Where time is of no account it isn’t possible to be
detained
!’ He appeared genuinely angry.

‘She’s worryin’ that ’ee ’s gone so long,’ the boy explained, gloomy now, as if this were one of the moments when lack of understanding in those who should possess it lowered his spirits.

Mr Roxburgh might have continued grumbling had the boy not disengaged himself from the unwelcome situation, skipped expertly beneath the mainsail, and made for the forecastle head.

Stranded thus, the passenger condescended to go between decks. On entering the saloon he found his wife busy with some sewing, an occupation he knew her to dislike. Such strength of mind in one he respected, and even loved, irritated him still further.

He frowned, and grumbled, ‘I wish you wouldn’t strain your eyes sewing by such a wretched light.’

She looked up, smiling too sweetly for his present fancy. ‘Sewing isn’t such a skill that one can’t go along at it by instinct after a while.’

Each knew that in her case it was untrue.

Mr Roxburgh seated himself without taking off his overcoat. It made him look temporarily possessed by a sensation of impermanence. He proceeded to choose something to glare at, which happened to be the teasel-shaped flower, by now faded and wizened enough to justify throwing out.

‘Did you enjoy yourself?’ she asked.

‘Enjoy myself at what?’

‘How am I to know?’

‘How, indeed! Or I!’

So they sat in silence awhile.

Then Mr Roxburgh so far relented as to reveal, ‘I had some conversation with the second mate.’

‘On what subject?’

‘Difficult to say.’ It made him glare at the dead flower.

Mrs Roxburgh sewed.

‘That is,’ he said, ‘I can hardly remember, and if I could, it would be difficult to express in words.’

In fact, the mate’s allusions had disturbed him so deeply he would have preferred to dismiss them from his mind.

Mrs Roxburgh continued sewing with an indifference born of obedience, which at last made itself felt.

‘It was about the country beyond,’ he was forced to admit, ‘beyond the known settlements. Prisoners’, he positively drove himself, ‘will sometimes escape. And wander for years in the interior. Supporting themselves off the land. Suffering terrible hardships. But as a life it is more bearable than the one they have bolted from.’

On passing a hand over his face he found he was perspiring for something he might have experienced himself. He realized, for that matter, he could have continued embroidering almost without end on the few words the mate had uttered.

Mrs Roxburgh’s forehead had creased. She did sincerely sympathize with, and had suffered for, those who had been brought to her notice in Van Diemen’s Land, but still had to bridge the gulf separating life from their own lives, whether stately rituals conducted behind the brocade curtains of their drawing-room at Cheltenham, or a makeshift, but none the less homely existence in a corner of this draughty little ship. Neither of them had felt the cat, only the silken cords of their own devising with which they tormented each other at intervals. Yet, she believed, she would have borne all, and more, were someone to require it of her.

How her mind was wandering! She felt ashamed and at the same time agitated. She got up and started an erratic tidying of their quarters as an excuse for moving about. Had she been her mother-in-law she might have prayed to their Lord Jesus for all those who must suffer the lash. But she herself was so constituted she could not pray with confidence; her prayers had seldom been more than words pitched without expectation into the surrounding dark.

Mrs Roxburgh glanced at her husband to decide whether he had guessed, but Austin Roxburgh was too engrossed in his own thoughts, and perhaps always had been.

Throwing off their mood they spent a pleasant, uneventful evening, dining by insufficient light until the captain called for the candles to be lit. There was not only Captain Purdew; Mr Courtney put in an appearance. Again, seemingly, it was Mr Pilcher’s watch. It occurred to each of the Roxburghs that the second mate had not yet broken bread with them.

The ship’s motion and the few mouthfuls of ale she had drunk made Mrs Roxburgh yawn; or it could have been the captain’s story.

Towards the end of dinner Captain Purdew departed from the sea—for him, a rare occurrence—and was telling a land tale, of a carter and his horse. In celebration of the rare occurrence the worthy seaman heavily emphasized each detail, at times even striking the table with the flat of his hand. Mr Courtney, by contrast, had hunched his shoulders, and was sitting silent, looking at his place. He had spread his coarse, doggy hair with a liberal ration of pomade, perhaps knowing beforehand that, in the captain’s presence, he would not contribute a word to the conversation, and might assert himself in this other way.

Nearing the end of a drive from Scole, Captain Purdew had encountered the subject of his story this side of Norwich, ‘… when the horse began to stagger. I’d been catching up on them for some distance in the trap, and suspected there was something unnatural in the animal’s behaviour—till suddenly—he fell down!’ The captain slapped the table so hard the glasses jumped and tinkled.

Hungry for further mysteries since his talk with Pilcher during the forenoon, Mr Roxburgh was merely frustrated by the plodding tale of the carter’s horse.

‘He fell down between the shafts,’ Captain Purdew continued, ‘and the carter began thrashing the poor beast with the reins.’

Mr Roxburgh might never have encountered a worse bore, while Mr Courtney hunched his shoulders higher and tighter for the superior he was unable to protect against the results of his tediousness.

‘I don’t mind saying I swore at him.’ Captain Purdew turned to Mrs Roxburgh, who showed him the kind of smile which may be worn at any season. ‘For I’d noticed that the dray was braking, and the man was far gone with drink.’

Mrs Roxburgh thought Captain Purdew was possibly in like condition, but held her head graciously when she could have let loose a whole string of the yawns she was suppressing. From feeling them swell inside her throat, she saw them as the continuum of soft, unlaid eggs in the innards of a slaughtered hen.

She glanced at her husband. She would have liked to share with him her vision of soft eggs, but he was likely to disapprove of it as much as he would the sight of hen-dirt on her hands from plunging them into the bird’s gizzard.

‘“The brake, man!” I shouted’ and the captain demonstrated.

It seemed to Mrs Roxburgh that the whole of her uneventful life had been spent listening to men telling stories, and smiling to encourage them. It was a relief to catch sight of the boy, who entered bearing a dish with some of the apples they had taken on board at Sydney, and which were of a wrinkled, though hectic red. The boy’s eyes were absorbed in a silent judgment she was unable to interpret, but this did not prevent her wishing to conspire with him in some innocent way. She wondered whether she would have been able to exchange confidences with her own son had she reared him. It was not then, unnatural, surely, that she should hanker after the trust of this crop-headed lad with the dish of feverish apples?

‘I seated myself on the horse’s head as he lay in the road,’ the captain was explaining to Mr Roxburgh.

The latter nodded, but was looking in his wife’s direction. Her head was the sole reality in this sea of words, or for that matter, life. It flickered at times, then burned steady, like any candle-flame, with the result that her husband was overcome with remorse for his irritable sallies earlier that day, and by a fear that he might not convey his love before one of them was extinguished.

In the circumstances, Mr Roxburgh was maddened by the captain’s story. ‘What
happened
to the deuced horse?’

‘Why, the fellow unharnessed him. After which, I got up. And the horse heaved himself to his feet. He couldn’t stop trembling.’

Mr Roxburgh too, had begun to tremble, with annoyance, and his ineffectual love.

As the ship lurched farther on its voyage, the diners seemed contained by a flickering of light rather than by timber.

Mr Courtney asked to be excused.

By the time the cloth was removed, and the captain as well, Mr Roxburgh doubted he would ever learn to speak to his wife in simple words.

They continued sitting at the table which Spurgeon had concealed under a dull garnet-coloured plush. Mrs Roxburgh induced her husband to join her in a game of piquet. Neither cared for cards, but now they played.

At last Mrs Roxburgh pushed the game away from her. She began to laugh. Her elbows protruded sharply from the sleeves as she clasped her hands behind her head. ‘Were you entertained by the captain?’

Mr Roxburgh grumbled in gathering up the disordered cards.

‘Why’, she asked, ‘do you suppose he told it?’

‘Why do people speak? For the most part to fill in the silences.’

They fell silent after that. As her lips came together he would have devoured them contrary to his habit, but it might have given her too rude a surprise.

The ship was shaking with an odd, self-destructive motion while they prepared themselves for bed.

Mrs Roxburgh thought she would never fall asleep. Had
he
succumbed? She listened. She touched her face and could tell it had grown haggard. She would not sleep that night, but must have dropped off eventually, to be drifting through whichever element it was, hair blown or flowing behind her, while her face tried on credible expressions. Suddenly she was lashed. It was her hair turned to knotted cords. I will, I
must
endure it because this is my only purpose. She kissed his hands. And kissed. And looked down into his facelessness. Just as the beam, inexpertly fixed, perhaps deliberately, by the carpenter at Hobart Town, began slipping. It is piercing my husband’s heart. It is lying embedded in the yellow waxen always unconvincing flesh.
Ohhhhh!
A mouth grows egg-shaped under the influence of despair.

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.