A Fringe of Leaves (26 page)

Her companions sighed on witnessing their lady’s demonstration of good faith, and were free to look about them again.

One of them asked, ‘Where be our blessed land
now
?’

‘Still where ’twere, I reckon.’

If not incontrovertible, it seemed to Mrs Roxburgh the only desirable conclusion as she sank back to loll against her husband’s chest.

Night fell at least, and with it her blue-black hair she sensed escaping into sleep and water. We shall wake, she promised herself in leaving her body, and find we have arrived, and begin afresh.

It did happen more or less as she decided it would, with a few deviations from the foreseen.

Mr Pilcher was shouting through another milky dawn. ‘’Tis not the coast. It’s a reef, or cay. Will we beach ’em, sir, if we find somewhere that’ll suit?’

Flattered into thinking he had been consulted, Captain Purdew accepted the suggestion, while Mr Courtney scowled and sulked, and the master of the pinnace grinned back.

His derision, if it were, made Mrs Roxburgh touch her hair, whereupon she discovered her bonnet gone, nor was it anywhere to be found however much she sidled and looked.

‘What is it, Ellen?’ her husband inquired anxiously.

‘Nothing,’ she replied.

She was relieved he did not appear to notice that her hair was hanging in dank disorder; he was still too sticky with sleep and stiff from the unorthodox position in which they were forced to spend their nights. Her impulse was to reach for the dressing-case, to avail herself of her comb and glass, until remembering that they had parted with the case some way back.

Almost every contingency had become by now acceptable. To find herself sitting in water up to her shins did not alarm Mrs Roxburgh. The sea-water inside the boat had risen by inches in recent hours. Bailing was intermittent, either because ineffectual, or because the thoughts of all those who performed the duty were directed at the land. Mrs Roxburgh too, had sat back at last, to feel and enjoy the milky warmth, the texture of tamed sea-water.

The surf by contrast was punishing the reef with such animal ferocity it did not seem as though any respite could be expected, when on rounding a coral neck, the pinnace and its insufficient relative the long-boat were vouchsafed the peace and protection of an elliptical recess rather than a bay, its curve as white as kaolin.

Always in the lead, Mr Pilcher was soon gesticulating from the shore after wading through milder, though to some eyes, still intimidating breakers. A sprinkling of sailors followed his example, leaping, pounding, racing one another when not battling through breast-high foam. Upon reaching land the men began hauling on the boats while cursing the coral which had torn their hitherto-impervious feet.

In emulation of the seamen, Mr Roxburgh jumped, and was junketed around, and nearly fell. She could have done nothing for this frail spillikin no longer her husband as he was whirled away. In any case, she too, no longer functioned by her own will, for that hairy man the boatswain was lifting her over the gunwale regardless of her wishes.

‘Leave me—cusn’t tha?’ one of her selves expostulated as she flailed around in search of some solid object to help her in resisting an exit of which her mother-in-law would surely have disapproved.

She found nothing, and was dragged off, like any caterpillar from a twig.

‘Ho-ya ho-ya! ho-
ya
!’ the crews encouraged one another as they heaved the boats on to the beach.

Mrs Roxburgh succeeded briefly in escaping out of the boatswain’s arms, to flounder a few steps before stubbing her boots on what must have been a coral hussock. Thereupon she sank, the boatswain resuming possession of her as she rose, more a wet hen than a woman, whose clucking cries remained mercifully unheard by any but her silent rescuer.

Long after the boats were beached, the sailors continued to curse the bleeding coral for lacerating their feet, while Mrs Roxburgh, deposited on land by the gallant efforts of the boatswain, saw that her pretty little boots (glacé leather with cloth uppers) were slashed beyond repair due to her own foolishness.

Still exhilarated by his tumultuous, and at the time alarming, experience in the surf, Mr Roxburgh glowed, and breathed deep. ‘Who would have thought it possible!’ until remembering his wife, he approached and put his arm round her, ‘Ellen, you might have been injured!’ with a sincerity she did not doubt.

‘I am not,’ she assured him, and formally added as she had been taught, ‘thank you, Mr Roxburgh.’

It was at once evident that ‘land’ was too ambitious a word for the reef on which the castaways found themselves, though a beach of pulverized coral would make it possible to repair the long-boat at their leisure provided they could muster the materials. But of vegetation or shade there was little: nothing of that pastoral green Mr Roxburgh had hoped to find, in which to re-live the pleasures of the Georgics. Anything in the way of cover was of a grey, tough, sea-bitten variety: wiry bushes tortured by the wind, scurf of dead-green lichen, and fleshier shoots of a bitter weed which those of the men who were bred along the Bristol Channel and the Norfolk coast compared nostalgically with the samphire their women harvested at low tide from fields of mud.

For the most part level, the coral excrescence tended to rise towards the north-east, in which quarter alone, any who looked forward to solitude might hope to renew themselves. There the brush grew thicker, taller, but cowering before the strong winds to less than an average man’s size, and nowhere concentrated enough to provide an adequate refuge for introspective souls.

Even so, there was an immediate dispersal, for physical as well as spiritual reasons, of those whom the two boats disgorged, everybody consoled, not to say dazed, by a freedom they had undervalued in the past. The men set out in opposite directions, on spidery, needled legs (there were cases where one leg might have been born shorter than the other, or else deformed by grappling the deck of a listing ship) their mouths thinned by desperation or thirst, the eyes of some closed on and off in an attempt to shut out an experience which still visibly flickered in their minds. But with all, the overruling impulse was to get away from one another.

They were brought to a halt by a revival of Captain Purdew’s sense of his own authority. He proceeded to deliver something of an oration to emphasize that they had beached out of necessity, not for pleasure, and that once they were rested and refreshed, their prime concern was the repairing of the boats.

The seamen listened for the simple reason they could see no avenue of escape.

‘And re-victualling—if foodstuff of any kind is offering,’ the captain’s voice persisted, high, dry, vibrating like sail with a wind in it. ‘In that event’, he warned, ‘remember we are a community, whose duty it is to pool our resources.’

Listening to this upright old man made Mrs Roxburgh melancholy. She suspected that those who are honourable must suffer and break more often than the others, which did not absolve the honourable from continuing to offer themselves for suffering and breakage. It started her looking for her husband, who must already have gone in search of the privacy his temperament craved.

After enjoying the luxury of a postponed, ungainly, and not unexpectedly, painful stool, Austin Roxburgh was wandering with little regard for purpose or direction, kicking at the solid though harsh ground for the simple pleasure of renewing acquaintance with primordial substance. Still walking, he unbuttoned his steaming overcoat to let in the sun and wind, then removed the garment and hung it on his arm. On or off, his overcoat seemed as incongruous as most human needs; human behaviour in its niceties must only excite derision on this desert island. Thus warned against acts of feckless self-assertion he resisted the urge to bare the leaves of his saturated Elzevir in the hope that the sun’s blaze might dry them, and continued strolling through a park from which the statues had been removed.

At the island’s southernmost tip, which had been whittled down to a narrow spine of razor-edged coral, opposing currents raised their hackles in what was probably a state of permanent collision. Much as he had grown to hate the sea, Austin Roxburgh felt drawn to this desolate promontory by something solitary and arid, akin to his own nature (if he would admit it, as he sometimes did). Overhead, the voices of invisible sea-birds sounded hollower, more ominous, in calling through infinity; the waves assumed ever more vicious shapes for their assaults on the coral; something—a sea-urchin must have died; and a white light threatened to expose the more protected corners of human personality. Mr Roxburgh was fully exposed. In advancing towards this land’s end, he felt the trappings of wealth and station, the pride in ethical and intellectual aspirations, stripped from him with a ruthlessness reserved for those who accept their importance or who have remained unaware of their pretentiousness. Now he even suspected, not without a horrid qualm, that his devoted wife was dispensable, and their unborn child no more than a footnote on nonentity.

So the solitary explorer gritted his teeth, sucked on the boisterous air with caution, and visibly sweated. He might have been suffering from a toothache rather than the moment when self-esteem is confronted with what may be pure being—or nothingness.

Arrived at his destination, the dwindling headland on which he might have erected a moral altar for the final stages of his martyrdom, Mr Roxburgh discovered that he had taken too much for granted. Stretched on the ground as though consigning his meagre flesh to decomposition by the sea air, lay Spurgeon the steward. It could not have been an unpleasanter surprise.

‘Ha, Spurgeon!’ he managed to address the fellow. ‘You have forestalled me!’

The steward did not attempt to move, but ejaculated, ‘Eh?’ from out of his emaciated, putty-coloured face and sparse tufts of beard.

‘I mean,’ the intruder continued, ‘I hardly expected a human being here where the land has almost become sea again. Are you so attracted to what we have just escaped?’

‘How about yerself?’ Spurgeon answered.

It did seem to place them in the same category, but Mr Roxburgh rejected that.

‘Ah, no!’ Slowly Spurgeon rubbed his head against the crushed coral which for its next phase would be converted into sand. ‘Not a “’uman being”. No one can accuse me of that—where there isn’t no more ’n skin an’ bone, and a fart or two. I won’t inconvenience you, sir, much longer.’

‘Are you sick, then?’ it was Mr Roxburgh’s duty to ask.

Holding his precious book, he had seated himself on a stone beside this thoroughly repulsive object.

‘Not sick,’ the steward replied. ‘The way I see it I’m simply fizzlin’ out.’

He sat up, and proceeded slowly to turn his neck, which his companion quite expected to creak.

‘’Ere,’ he said, parting the hair to exhibit a place above the nape, ‘I’ll be blowed if I’m not startin’ a boil. And that’s the worst sign of any. The sea-boils. See it?’

Mr Roxburgh would not let himself.

‘Feel then,’ Spurgeon invited.

Mr Roxburgh decided against it.

Spurgeon continued rubbing the nape of his neck. ‘I knewed this mornin’ early that I’ll never come out of this. There’s nothin’ like the sea-boils for makin’ a man fall apart quick.’

Faced with this human derelict, Austin Roxburgh realized afresh that his experience of life, like his attitude to death, had been of a predominantly literary nature; in spite of which, it was required of him to exert himself as a member of the ruling class, for so he must still appear to others in spite of his recent enlightenment.

‘Cheer up, old chap!’ he encouraged, and his voice echoed the accents of some forgotten tutor. ‘Don’t you feel—I mean—that you owe it to your wife?’

This initial piece of advice only made the steward glummer. ‘If I ’ad one,’ he mumbled.

‘Never?’ his companion asked.

‘No,’ said Spurgeon. ‘Or not long enough to notice. But wot’s the odds? A man sleeps the tighter without. There were never room for that many toe-nails in the same bed.’

The ridge of Mr Roxburgh’s distinguished cheekbones coloured very lightly. ‘Marriage’, he suggested, ‘is not entirely physical. I should hate, at least, to think it was.’

‘If it wasn’t, a man could settle for a dawg. I did too,’ Spurgeon remembered, ‘after a while.’

‘Of which breed?’ Although by no means doggy himself, Mr Roxburgh welcomed an opportunity for leading their conversation down a safer path.

‘Don’t know as she was any partickler breed. A sort of dawg. That’s about all. She’d sit an’ look at me—and I’d look back. There was nothin’ between us that wasn’t above board.’

‘The affection of a faithful animal is most gratifying,’ Mr Roxburgh conceded; he found himself stuttering for what must have been the first time, ‘but—mmmorally there is no comparison with the love of a devoted woman.’

‘Don’t know about that,’ the steward replied. ‘I weren’t born into the moral classes.’

If Mr Roxburgh did not hear, it was on account of a sense of guilt he was nursing, for the many occasions on which he had abandoned someone else to drowning by clambering aboard the raft of his own negative abstractions. Her hair floated out behind her as though on the surface of actual water instead of in the depths of his thoughts.

He recovered himself and informed his friend, ‘Salt water has medicinal properties. Or so they tell us.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Have you tried rubbing it with salt water?’

‘Rubbin’ what?’

‘The boil, of course!’ Elated by his own inspiration Mr Roxburgh resolved to overlook obtuseness in another.

‘There’s no way out if you’re for it.’ Spurgeon snorted so contemptuously he might have attained social status without his companion’s realizing.

‘But who’s to know, my dear fellow, unless we try? The ability to correct wrong was vested in us for practical use.’

Mr Roxburgh would have been hard put to it to explain how he had come by a precept which was as reasonable as it sounded arcane; while Spurgeon looked the glummer for his own native ignorance.

The steward sat watching this ninny of a gentleman whose good intentions were driving him down the coral ramp towards the sea. After receiving a bash in the face from a mounting wave, Mr Roxburgh stooped to plunge his cupped hands.