A Fringe of Leaves (25 page)

For Austin Roxburgh the real necessity was the rather inconvenient volume buttoned inside his bosom. Its weight and angles had become his only solace. Would it be possible on a desert island to find sufficient shade in which to enjoy the pleasures of Virgil?

This was Mr Roxburgh’s secret longing. Indifferent health, the irritability which comes of chronic constipation, even jealousy, no longer tormented him. He could not very well become jealous of a boy however secretive, so he told himself. For Austin Roxburgh had guessed the boy’s secret after his wife had disappeared over the side, swinging and plunging on the rope ladder. Awaiting his turn, Oswald Dignam stood frowning away his emotions, nervously fiddling with the draw-neck of a glory-bag he was holding behind him. The most feminine member of the crew, he did not intend to be parted from whatever odds and ends he carried in the canvas bag with its sinnet-work in crimson twine, and did at last smuggle it past the boatswain’s notice, to Mr Roxburgh’s satisfaction. His own contraband made him approve of this bagful of secrets, and accept those less tangible which rose to the surface of the boy’s face as his divinity sank.

Beneath the black sky, against the flap flap of a flagging sail and an increased grumbling of rowlocks, somebody spat over the side. It hit, and seemed to hiss before being swallowed. Their thoughts removed to an incalculable distance inside their skulls, the rowers’ faces could have been turning in their sleep.

Austin Roxburgh had fallen to contemplating as far as he dared the mystery of virility as embodied in his brother Garnet. Risen from the hip-bath which Nurse Hayes had stood on the floor against the fender, the white flesh took on its worth in gold from firelight weaving out of the grate. If ever Austin were unwise enough in after life to let himself become intoxicated with strong drink, this same vision would materialize. At such moments he was all but choked by the ripple of his own throat. Now in an open boat Mr Roxburgh had perhaps grown a little drunk on rain, for he visibly gulped.

Of course he had always resisted any inclination to assess desire in more than aesthetic terms. So he made himself concentrate on the pins and needles in the arm protecting his wife, whose value had been increased by this child of theirs hidden inside her. He loved her, he felt, as he had never been capable of loving any other human being, excepting, perhaps, the imagined brother of his childhood. Plastered together in their drenched condition, they were truly ‘one flesh’, an expression he had been inclined to reject as in bad taste, until the senseless caprices of nature invested it with a reality which had become his mainstay.

The Roxburghs gently rocked against each other, and she compiled a tender inventory of what their life together had been: instead of cabinets stuffed with Wedgwood (she positively hated the black) or Chippendale surfaces reflecting an arrangement of snuff boxes and vinaigrettes, or her own glossy portrait by Sir John, she listed flurries of pear blossom, and wasps burrowing in ripe pears, and a child’s grave, and an invalid’s narrow feet returning to life after she had slid the warming-pan between the sheets.

Sluiced by rain, Mrs Roxburgh would loll, and doze at intervals against her husband to an accompaniment of water on the move, but generally her protector remained upright, vigilant, watching the rowers in action or, when a cat’s-paw caught at the sail, drawing in their oars, picking at the calluses on hard hands to allay inaction, occasionally spitting over the side an impoverished stream of tobacco juice.

That tedium was inevitable goes without saying. A sailor would suddenly lash an inactive leg over his other knee in far from characteristic pose, except that it was true to exasperation. Mrs Roxburgh yawned without bothering to put up a hand. Her husband no longer had reliable control of his wind. But each might have felt relieved that nothing was happening for the moment.

In his vigilance Austin Roxburgh seemed to remember all that he had never begun, or left unfinished: broken phrases dangling from his lips at moments when he had most needed to express himself, the resolution to follow an ascetic rule, to love all humankind, to give thanks to the Supreme Being, to round out his miserable fragment of a memoir, to undertake Sanskrit, Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, while there was yet time.

As for Mrs Roxburgh, she could not be certain that any of it had happened to her, but everything might still conspire to club her down and trample on her.

More than anybody, Captain Purdew had his preoccupations, and appeared to have been considerably aged by them. ‘The only time, ever,’ he was heard to remark. ‘It would ’uv been better had she gone down. Not to pull away and leave her sitting high and dry. Had she foundered first, no one need ’uv had it on their conscience.’

The vision of his stranded ship which so worked upon the captain’s mind seemed also to affect those parts of his body most susceptible to suffering: his finger-joints, for instance, the knobs of which he was for ever testing, and a back which caused him to wince and mutter, and change position as far as that was possible.

‘Ah dear,’ he sighed, ‘we got our boots mended at least’ and after running a furred tongue round lips encrusted with salt deposit, ‘Along with its other purposes, a lead sinker in the mouth will keep thirst at bay—in-definitely.’

Since the wreck and his failing powers had reduced him to a dubious courtesy rank he had to content himself with making speeches of encouragement to the crew, who either ignored or humoured him as though they were saddled with a senile parent or simple child.

‘I told ee not to fret thaself,’ one of them advised. ‘Frettin’ only ever led to sour-crop.’

If somebody sniggered, it was out of abstract benevolence rather than ill-nature, and the captain either did not hear, or was buoyed up by instant prophecy, moral precept, and a flotsam of religious faith to which he would cling when all else failed.

‘Mark what I’ve already predicted,’ tribulation had increased his tendency to repeat himself, ‘with wind in the jury-sail and Providence behind us, we can’t but make landfall this evening.’

‘It’ull take more’n wind, all right,’ one fellow grumbled. ‘Wind ’as left for other parts, like as it’s gone from my empty belly.’

Captain Purdew frowned. ‘There’s a lady present,’ he reminded.

If they had forgot, it was because she had an equal share in their predicament.

The sailor’s remark at least put the captain in mind of an important duty on which it was his habit to exercise the limping remains of his authority: he liked to attend to the rationing of victuals.

‘Mrs Roxburgh’, he called, ‘is ready for her share of mouldy bread and salt camel.’ His decree was the less acceptable for his bleeding gums and staring eyes, and when he approached personally, creeping creaking between the rowers, almost toppling as his stiff legs negotiated planks on which the crew were seated, slopping through a bilge which defeated bailers, to lay his tribute in her jewelled hands.

‘And a mouthful of water for Mrs Roxburgh. But swill it round well, my dear. Round and round. To satisfy the mouth. And hold it for a while. That way you’ll make the stuff go further.’

Mr Courtney, now virtually commander of the long-boat, glowered and gloomed, and could not take his eyes off the master of the pinnace. Every man had, in fact, begun to find his neighbour to some degree odious. Without appetite, Mrs Roxburgh stuffed her mouth with mouldy bread for fear that she should find herself screaming into the face of a pitiable old man, and still might scream, in muted syllables of bread. The captain for his part suspected that he had always found women ugly; ships alone were for beauty and for solace; his own wife had never more than submitted to him with comparatively wooden gracelessness.

On the evening of the fourth day Mrs Roxburgh started out of a reverie thinking to have heard cries, which those of her companions within earshot soon translated into words. The pinnace without a doubt had sighted land. There it was, a fine-drawn thread of shore. Dusk was upon them, and only morning would reveal the extent of their fortune, but Captain Purdew called for a ration of rum from a small supply they carried with them in a demijohn.

At the sound of the tin pannikin striking against the stone lip Mrs Roxburgh resolved to refuse her tot if the rum should not give out before it reached her. As a gust of evening breeze wafted the stench her way, Pa’s breath was too much for her; she was hard put to it not to vomit up the little she had in her queasy stomach. But every man was rejoiced by the fumes before consummation by taste; the mere theory of spirits was inspiration. Awaiting their turn some of them began humming, or muttering snatches of words, and one young fellow broke into whole verses of a song, in that high, yearning tone peculiar to his class when a prey to bitter-sweet thoughts in deserts and upon the high seas:

‘Oh that I was gatherin’ roses at Yeovil,

Gatherin’ the red red roses

To put in-to my true love’s hand.

Oh that my girl would speak

Or silent let me touch her cheek,

Then I would gladly die,

On beds of red red ro-ho-zez …’

His passion was quenched at last in a spluttering of rum.

The plangent tone of the young man’s voice, together with the potent sentiments expressed by his song, had combined with the scent of spirits to make Mrs Roxburgh drunk in advance, against her will. She was determined not to risk any further indiscretion, when instead of offering her the pannikin, her husband seized it for himself, and without hesitating, downed the contents.

‘Haaah!’ he ejaculated in half a laugh and half a cough. ‘Overproof!’ Some of it was seen to shoot out from under his moustache.

At that, most of the sailors laughed, not in malice, rather from kindred feelings. Instead it was the woman who had become the alien amongst them for not revealing whether she approved her husband’s newly ratified alliance.

But Mr Roxburgh was off on another unexpected tack, telling of an evening as a young man at Douarnenez, ‘… when I fell flat on my face after an injudicious quantity of rum, to which a rowdy crew of Breton fishermen had introduced me for the first time.’

Several of the present company admitted to having warmed up on a drop from across the water, many a night at St Mary’s, Polperro, Dawlish, or wherever.

Mr Roxburgh’s eyes were shining with rum and reminiscence, the more intoxicating for being shared.

His wife had surprised a trait which she might have caused him to suppress by coddling him too assiduously in order to curry favour with his mother; while he, no doubt, saw his wife as the brittle work of art he was creating, the glaze of which might crack were she to become aware of her creator’s flaws and transgressions.

The tears came into Mrs Roxburgh’s eyes and she might have given way from seeing the strangers they had been to each other (and for that matter, might remain, till death overtook one of them) had she not realized that Captain Purdew had refilled the pannikin, and was holding the object, black and horrid, under her nose. One of the seamen closest to her had knelt in the bilge, hands raised as though preparing to assist in a ceremony. All were waiting for the lady to drink.

‘Mrs Roxburgh,’ the captain invited in a reverent whisper.

All were watching.

‘No,’ Mrs Roxburgh began, and made a movement to push the stinking vessel away. ‘I hardly think—oh,
no
!’ she snickered in disgust.

‘Ellen,’ her husband chirruped, ‘you must take a sip at least, out of deference to the captain, and because’, he thought to add, ‘the Almighty has brought us safely to land.’

For one blasphemous instant there arose in her mind the vision of a fish the Almighty was playing, the distended lip in which the hook was caught, her own; then she said, ‘Oh dear! You are all against me,’ and accepted the tin cup as though it had been a silver chalice, and despite her nausea, sank her face.

‘This’, said Austin Roxburgh, winking at the congregation, ‘is the original Cornishwoman!’

That her husband could have betrayed his own creation, granted it was under the influence of rum, made her blush and swallow, and what she experienced was not remission of sins, but a fire spreading. She was amazed and mortified to find she could swallow so much of the stuff—almost to the bottom of the cup.

As she gave back the pannikin she could feel the blood streaming through her veins, into fingertips and sodden toes, though that most vital part of her, her belly, remained curiously cold and untouched.