A Fringe of Leaves (5 page)

Spurgeon the steward (cook too, Mrs Roxburgh fancied) was a somehow disappointed character whose reactions were on the mournful side. His attempts at cleanliness failed to deceive, yet in spite of it all, they had grown attached to him, and it amused Mr Roxburgh, if not Spurgeon, to tease the fellow out of himself.

‘Well, Spurgeon, we’re about to embark on the next stage of our Odyssey,’ the gentleman launched his evening joke. ‘When we reach the island I trust you’ll find your Penelope has waited for you.’

Spurgeon had long since given up expecting sense from any member of the educated classes, so did not bother to rack his brains, but grumbled in undertone to satisfy the superiors he was unable to avoid. The cloth he flung billowed an instant from his fingertips before settling miraculously on the table, its chart spread for further inspection. Many an imaginary voyage had Mrs Roxburgh traced round the continents and archipelagos of the saloon table-cloth.

Sight of the familiar, grubby cloth inspired her to fresh attempts at winning their steward’s approval. ‘Look, Spurgeon, my flower is still alive’ she indicated the teasel in its jar as though it were the symbol of some conspiracy between them.

‘I wouldn’ know that,’ he replied without deigning to look. ‘There’s a lot in this part of the world that looks alive when it’s dead, and vicey versy.’

He continued absorbed by a problem of cutlery until somebody stuck his head through the doorway.

‘Hey, Mr Spurgeon,’ a boy called in what he might have hoped a voice the passengers would not hear, ‘the chook’s all but fell apart.’

Spurgeon left to perform more esoteric duties with a stateliness sometimes achieved by thin people of painful bones.

By the time Mrs Roxburgh had washed her hands and smoothed her hair, and added a pair of ear-rings to match the intaglio brooch, the steward re-appeared with a tureen.

‘The captain’s compliments,’ he said, ‘there’ll be sweetbreads atop of this, and a fowl. Better make the most of ’em, because the salt tack is all you can expect from now on.’

As the passengers sat restraining with their spoons the circles of grease which eddied on the surface of the soup, Mr Roxburgh noticed his wife’s ear-rings. ‘I believe you would dress yourself up, Ellen, for a breakfast of yams and opossum with savages in the bush.’

‘I would dress myself up for my husband,’ she replied, ‘if he was there.’

Downcast eyes did not prevent a certain fierceness of expression, and it pleased him to think he had dominion over a divinity, even one whose beauty was wrapped in nothing more mystical than a cloud rising out of a dish of greasy soup.

As the evening progressed the sweetbreads proved to have disintegrated; the fowl had not done likewise because held together by antipodean muscle; and excessive sugar in the bread pudding soothed the palate at least, after the bitter ale in which the diners had drowned the worst of their revulsion.

Too familiar to each other, they sat and crumbled untidy fragments of conversation.

‘The brown woman—that eagle—or
vulture
, would peck out a man’s liver for tuppence.’

‘You are unkind to ladies on principle, but depend on them more than most men.’

‘Do you think there are rats on board? I could swear I felt one run across me in my sleep.’

‘In your sleep! Since we left home, I’ve experienced worse awake. A dream rat is nothing, Mr Roxburgh!.’

‘A sea voyage is recuperative.’

‘Did you like the man? I liked the man better than the women.’

‘He was somebody to whom I had nothing to say.’

‘Tisn’t always necessary. There are simple, honest men who put us to shame. We ought to be silent with those.’

Silence fell on the remains of the valedictory meal.

‘That is the kind of man your Mr Merivale is,’ she broke in with uncharacteristic harshness. ‘He has got wisdom in a hard country. He was always, I think, a countryman at heart, and most country folk are not for sellin’ what they know, or else,’ she raised her chin to recover her balance and her husband’s good opinion, ‘they dun’t want to be thought soft.’

But Mr Roxburgh had neither heard nor seen, it appeared, as he rolled little pellets of grey bread. ‘Merivale was Garnet’s friend. They racketed over the county on horses. It’s a wonder they didn’t break their necks.’

In spite of the pellets he continued rolling Mr Roxburgh was far removed from his physical activity.

‘Garnet has thickened. It’s surprising he didn’t re-marry. They say he’s attractive to women, and that there are several who would accept an offer.’

‘There are those who have his interests at heart. So I gathered.’

‘And were you surprised?’

‘Who am I to pass judgment on a man I only slightly know?’

‘But surely you formed an opinion?’

‘My opinion is that your brother is noticeably attached to his brother.’

‘We were always fond of each other. That is natural—something, Ellen, I should have thought you might accept.’

‘Oh, but I do! Indeed I do!’

He heard the exasperated swish of petticoat as she came round the table and knelt beside him. In her agitation Mrs Roxburgh had dragged the cloth askew, threatening the remnants of their bread pudding.

‘I can accept anything’, she said, ‘for the sake of peace—in this frightening world’ and held her head for him to stroke.

Upon realizing, he obliged.

‘Listen to the silence!’ Ellen Roxburgh shivered. ‘To the water!’

From the moored vessel, each sounded immeasurable.

‘I’ll listen gladly’, he told her, ‘when I hear it flowing against our sides.’

‘Flowing and flowing. For months and months.’

Although their ship remained stationary, the cosmos revolved about them as he caressed her head with the short circular motions he had cultivated as a sickly boy, when a cat he owned would spring and curl up on his lap. It sometimes occurred to him on remembering Tabby that he had not been on better terms with any living being.

Possibly due to excitement over their promised departure, or the recurring taste of bread pudding, Mrs Roxburgh felt slightly sick.

Falling asleep she had resolved to wake at dawn, to watch their passage through Sydney Heads, and perhaps contribute something of her own strength of will to their setting out. But when she awoke the light had matured, and was flowing dappled over the timbers, like water itself. She lay a few moments to watch the light and allow wakefulness to seep back into filleted limbs and a stuffy mind. Then she realized the air too, was flowing, that the vessel was plunging and groaning, in different directions it seemed at first, and that her slippers had slithered from the place where she had stood them in a neat pair the night before.

Bristol Maid
was already at sea.

So Mrs Roxburgh screwed up her eyes, and bit her lips, though not to the extent of experiencing pain. She put out her arms to embrace the cold future, for no voyage fails to provoke a sensual shudder in the beginning. Then she clambered carefully down. It had angered her husband to find the carpenter had fitted their cabin with bunks one above the other instead of side by side. But Mrs Roxburgh pointed out that such an arrangement would have left no room, and calmed him by offering to take the upper berth. It was out of the question that he, in his precarious state of health, should scramble up and down during a voyage of months, and she had soon grown adept at reaching and leaving her shelf without disturbing him in any way.

Now, while unbuttoning and divesting in the chill morning, she observed her husband. Mr Roxburgh lay stretched asleep. Always when laid to rest behind his features, they appeared the finer for it, and this, together with an exaggerated pallor on the morning of
Bristol Maid
’s departure, might have given her cause for alarm had the gravity of her own thoughts not been relieved by the expression on his face. Mr Roxburgh’s chin had receded under the influence of sleep. He was blowing through his mouth with an intensity verging on desperation, sucking in, from beneath a jutting lip, the draughts of air vouchsafed him. It was comical as well as touching. She might have laughed had she not toppled and bruised her thigh against one of the many corners with which their small cabin was furnished.

When she had regained her balance and taken off her nightgown, her skin appeared already to have darkened in warning of the bruise to come. It made her body look too white, too full, too softly defenceless, though in normal circumstances her figure would not have been considered noticeably ample.

She finished dressing at a speed which did not dispel a mood of faint melancholy nourished by tenderness and resignation. At such moments she was consoled to think she understood their marriage.

In the same state of conviction or delusion she climbed the companion-ladder.
Bristol Maid
was labouring by now. What had seemed a morning of limpid light in the cabin below was in fact tatters of increasing grey. The wind blowing from the south had begun fetching up fog as well; great clouts of dirty fog caught in the rigging before tearing free. The sea rolled, still revealing glints of a glaucous underbelly, but its surfaces were grey where not churned into a lather of white. She was reminded of a pail she had withdrawn too quickly from a cow’s threatening heels and how the ordinarily mild milk had run as hot as the despair she felt for her clumsiness. So a shrieking of gulls in the present came closer to sounding human. Mrs Roxburgh kept up her spirits by watching the more unearthly rise and fall of their immaculate wings.

At the same time she was carried staggering across the deck, clinging, with an alarm she could not quite laugh off, to any object which offered itself. Whatever she touched, ratline or bulwark, or her own person, was drenched with salt moisture. She had battened down her bonnet with a scarf, and swathed her shawl closer to her form, and would advance of her own volition whenever it became possible, arms rigid against her sides, hands stiff as butter-pats, till reaching the mainmast and comparative security.

Here she was sighted by Captain Purdew, who immediately left a group composed of Mr Pilcher the second mate, a couple of seamen, and one she presumed was the boatswain from the authority he exercised and the quantities of hair which overgrew him. Even the captain, for all his professional experience, seemed to make only human headway against the careening deck, thrusting himself into the wind, hands clutching fortuitously at holds of rope.

He reached a point where she caught sight of his teeth; then his voice arrived, but coldly. ‘Are you afraid,’ he called, ‘Mrs Roxburgh?’

‘No,’ she lied, ‘why should I be?’ and laughed.

‘Of getting wet,’ it billowed back.

‘No, no, no!’ Against the wind, it sounded a pitiful chatter.

The captain had taken his passenger by an elbow, both to steady her, and to estimate the damage to her clothes. ‘You should wait for fair weather, you know.’

‘I am disappointed’, she screamed, ‘not to have watched the last of the Heads.’

But her words were lost in the mewing of the gulls, although she had delivered her reply with a raucousness she had judged would carry.

‘Your husband will be anxious.’

Perhaps she, too, failed to hear. Their difficulty in communicating caused them to smile at each other with exaggerated candour. Her face, she felt, must be the thinner for screaming, while his had grown more leathery from being subjected to the salt spray. Captain Purdew might have appeared a bleak man had it not been for the spirit of kindness his whiskers allowed to escape.

All around them was the sound of canvas creaking and straining. The sails which had sunk her in despair at Sydney for continuing so long furled and passive were almost frightening now that their bellies were filled and the dæmon of energy possessed them. Human life was made to appear an incidental hazard, especially since the harsh-voiced gulls, at first seemingly attuned to her own earthly experience, had been dismissed by herself and the motion of their wings to another, more sublime level.

Mrs Roxburgh was surprised when Captain Purdew brought his face so close to hers that she felt for an instant a distinct tingling of beard. ‘Were you born at sea, perhaps?’

‘No,’ she shouted manfully. ‘On a moor.’

‘More what?’

Had it not been for the mast and the captain’s ribs she would have been swept by the rolling in the direction of her ineffectual voice.

‘A Cornish heath,’ she tried afresh. ‘Within reach of the land’s end.’

Captain Purdew, had he been less kindly, might have felt irritated by what seemed like his female passenger’s desire to take part in an adventure. His own wife, during the several voyages they shared after marriage, had remained below, embroidering teacosies and hand-towels to give at Chistmas. When she ventured above, she no more than crossed the deck to interfere in the galley. Possibly Mrs Roxburgh was only trying to test her courage in a man’s world, though the captain suspected there was more to it than that. He would not have known how to express it, but in his still centre, round which many more considerable storms at sea had revolved, he sensed that his passenger had an instinct for mysteries which did not concern her.

So they continued smiling at each other, or she looked about her with an unnatural eagerness which would justify her being there. She looked at the land, still faintly visible to larboard, its grey mass founded in the predominating sea. She tried to visualize the interior, to which her presence might have lent reality, but which in her continued absence must remain an imagined country, a tangle of indeterminate scrub burning with the tongues of golden teasel.

Presently she realized Captain Purdew had begun to guide her by a forearm, and in the light refracted by a blow she received at the same moment from a sheet of canvas, she saw the image of her father, another grey, thickset man picking his way amongst rocks and hussocks at dusk to bring her back into the house, where, he said, she was needed by her mother.

It was herself increasingly who guided Pa as Pa took increasingly to spirits; his favourite, rum, announced itself without any telling.

She sometimes wondered whether she had loved Mamma and Pa. If she had in fact, memory had transformed love into pity. But yes, she must have loved them.

After her marriage, her mother-in-law had advised her to keep a journal:
it will teach you to express yourself, a journal forms character besides by developing the habit of self-examination
. (Old Mrs Roxburgh was too polite ever to refer directly to shortcomings in those whose welfare she had at heart.) Ellen Roxburgh started a journal, but had not kept it day by day, or not above the first three weeks. The journal might have decided whether she had loved Mamma and Pa, had they not been gone before she married. Mamma went first. It was Pa’s death which decided her to accept what some considered Austin Roxburgh’s ‘extraordinarily injudicious’ proposal.

Alone on a derelict farm on the edge of a moor, she would have had to leave in any case, but where to go? Into service? Aunt Triphena would not have had her on account of Will and
incestuous marriages between cousins
, as Hepzie pointed out in a book. There was, moreover, a smell of poverty at Gluyas’s which appealed to Aunt Tite’s nostrils as little as the midden in the yard. It pained Ellen, who loved their farm after a fashion; it was all she knew. (Then she must surely have loved her parents who, with herself, were inseparable from it, the three of them living at such close quarters you could hear one another’s coughs, groans, dreams almost, anywhere inside the echoing house.)

Aunt Tite Tregaskis, married to substance and early widowed, mindful of herself and money (and of course her darling Will, not so much Hepzie because she was a girl) had despised her sister-in-law for years. The brother who shamed her, Triphena did not even despise. Dick the Hopeless and Clara the Helpless. (And Ellen
—whatever will become of Her?
) In time Triphena found she could enjoy the luxury of pitying her sister-in-law from another county, another country you might say (Kent, was it?) who followed Lady Ottering when it took her ladyship’s fancy to leave London for Glidgwith. Clara Hubbard was lady’s-maid, delicate-looking, of pale complexion, hands fine enough to fit into her ladyship’s gloves after the powder had been blown in. Clara Hubbard met her husband by accident while visiting a common acquaintance at Penzance.

After she began taking Mamma’s side, Aunt Tite used to say it was the worst accident ever befell anyone: that Miss Hubbard should have been sipping her madeira when Dick Gluyas looked in with an eye to a free glass, and that if Clara was laid in an early grave it would be on account of the pair of ‘roughskins’ she was saddled with.

Aunt Tite was that unjust. Ellen knew that her hands were chapped, but she wasn’t
rough
. Nobody was gentler with Mamma in what became her last illness. She would carry her down the narrow stair, and sit her by the window to take the sun and enjoy the fuchsias. As for chapped hands and red cheeks, Ellen tried rubbing in milk as soon as she learned she ought to be ashamed. She smeared them with the pulp from cucumbers according to the old receipt Hepzie found in
The Lady’s Most Precious Possessions
. Ellen’s cheeks stayed red until they toned down, seemingly of their own moving, to look by the best light what might have been considered a golden brown. (Not until herself became a lady was she properly blanched, by sitting in a drawing-room, and driving out in a closed carriage, and keeping such late hours the fits of yawning forced the blood out of her cheeks.)

Ellen Gluyas was a hoyden by some standards. Pa would have liked a boy, an industrious one, to help about the farm and make amends for his own poor husbandry. What he got was a strong girl he did not properly appreciate, who did such jobs as she was asked to perform, and drove him home from Penzance when drunk on market day.

Sober, he was jovial enough, and she could forgive his being an idle muddler. But drunk, he became passionately abusive and unjust. Once he knocked her down in the slush as punishment for a gate himself had left open. While still a boy he jammed a thumb in a cheese-press, and instead of a nail, had a brown horn-thing growing there. It frightened her to catch sight of it.

Captain Purdew was still shouting, ‘… advise you … below,’ as he stooped to initiate her descent by the companion-ladder, ‘… Mr Roxburgh waiting on his breakfast … steward bringing … appetite ….’

Lowering her head she mastered a sudden distaste for the last of the flung spray. Or was it the captain’s damping words? In any event, Mrs Roxburgh returned by stages to the close, and by now sickening, constriction of the cabin, where she found her husband groping for his boots and complaining a great deal.

‘We got what we wanted at least. From the word go, we are at sea!’ Nor could he find his shoe-horn.

When finally he straightened up, Mr Roxburgh exclaimed, ‘Do you know what a sight you are? You are soaked!’

‘Yes.’ The crude little glass nailed to the wall for their convenience confirmed it. ‘Not soaked, that is. But a sight.’

‘You’ll do well to change at once, and not run the risk of being laid low with rheumatic fever for the rest of the voyage.’