A Fringe of Leaves (27 page)

There was little enough water in the cup by the time the physician reached the patient’s side.

‘Open up! Quick! The place!’ Mr Roxburgh cried; faith, once lit, was blazing in him.

Of a damper humour, Spurgeon failed to kindle, but submitted his neck to the virtues of salt water.

Mr Roxburgh who originally had no intention of touching the boil was now faced with doing so, or the meagre drop of water would escape. So he set to, gingerly at first, grimacing with a disgust his patient was fortunately unable to see, and rubbed with stiffened, bony fingers, till the activity itself began to soothe, not the patient necessarily, but without a doubt the physician.

For the first time since landing on this desert island Austin Roxburgh was conscious that the blood was flowing through his veins. To an almost reprehensible extent, he throbbed and surged with gratitude. He was grateful not only to this unsavoury catalyst the steward, but to his absent wife, and the miracle of their unborn child.

He went so far as to take a good look at the inflamed lump which the steward had predicted would become a boil.

‘Am I hurting, Spurgeon?’

‘Yes.’

It was reason enough for discontinuing the treatment, after which they rested awhile, side by side, when Mr Roxburgh became for the second time inspired.

‘Do you know what? Soap!’

‘Soap? What?’

‘If we could but lay our hands on some.’

‘There’s soap they brought along in case of caulkin’ the bloody long-boat.’

‘But sugar as well.’

‘I got a bit of sugar—if ’tisn’t melted—for sweetin’ up me rum ration.’

‘Soap and sugar, Spurgeon, have well-known drawing powers.’

The steward might have grown less inclined to humour an eccentric gentleman’s whims, but time hung half as heavy in a mate’s company, however undesirable the mate in the eyes of ordinary men. Either anticipation of their disapproval, or friction by salt water, or the prospect of a soap-and-sugar poultice, or the tingling of an inadmissible affection, had brought the gooseflesh out on Spurgeon.

While Austin Roxburgh tingled with his inspiration; in fact he was indebted to old Nurse Hayes for a method she had used in drawing the pus out of Garnet after his brother had scratched his arm on a rusty nail.

When she had satisfied her own needs, and failed to set eyes on her husband, Mrs Roxburgh went in search of him. At the same time she could not have denied that she experienced a delicious pleasure in being alone, even in her clinging, sodden garments, her slashed boots, and hair by now too wild and too matted to be dealt with by any means at her command. She must have looked a slattern stalking through the scrub. Her elegant boots, she suspected, might always have been what Aunt Triphena would have called ‘trumpery’. But the sun flattered her as she strolled, and the wind, although gusty, was less vindictive than while they were at sea. Each warmed and dried, and in performing its act of charity, enclosed her in an envelope of evaporating moisture, so that she might have been walking through one of the balmy mornings she remembered on her native heath, except that furze and hussock had been replaced by thickets which tore more savagely, and starved creepers set gins for unwary ankles, and lizards were more closely related to stone.

She was content, however—and hopeful at last for her child: that he would survive, not only the physical rigours of what was no longer a doomed voyage, but also the moral judgment of those who might ferret over his features. She did pray that, whatever her shortcomings, the child would be theirs and no one else’s.

A comparatively steep rise in the ground had reduced her gait to a dull and breathless plodding, when a change in the climate told her that she was emerging on the island’s weather side. She was blasted by a gale. It took her hair and tossed it aloft, and filled her clothes, and spun her round amongst the quaking, but more inured bushes. She would have turned at once and made her way back had it not been for a bird’s call becoming human voice. She looked down to where the land shelved towards the sea, and saw a figure, arms thrashing to attract attention. Again the cries were directed at her: it was Oswald Dignam’s voice she heard. Holding herself stiffly and sideways in the vain hope of evading the gale, she began climbing down to meet him, her stumbling once or twice caused either by spasms of fear, or waves of pleasure at thought of a companionship so undemanding it could but add a benison to solitude.

The wind behind him, Oswald quickly reached her, together with a lash of driven spray, and opened a clenched hand to offer an amorphous mass of some kind of shellfish he must have battered from their anchorage.

‘They’s for you, Mrs Roxburgh,’ his almost girlish voice gasped.

‘Oh, but we must all share what we find, the captain tells us,’ she replied sententiously.

‘Who’s to know?’ the boy asked. ‘If you ’adn’t come I’d ’uv ate them meself—like anybody else.’

His natural, milky skin grown fiery on the voyage made him look the more indignant for what she had only half-intended as an accusation.

‘Yes,’ she sighed, ‘we are all weak, I expect,’ but did not add, ‘and myself the weakest,’ because he was only a boy.

Overcoming an initial nausea, she took the still quivering mess of mutilated shellfish from the palm on which it lay, and swallowed it at one gulp. To her consternation, some of the shell went down with the flesh; other fragments she arrested with her tongue, and spat them out. She could feel that some of her saliva was dribbled on her chin.

It was Oswald Dignam’s turn to smile his pleasure and approval.

He was again in love, she saw from the trembling and wincing of the face which observed her, and she would have gathered up his fiery head, as she had been tempted to caress its milder counterpart on a foggy afternoon at sea.

Instead she murmured with the kind of stiff formality he might have expected of her, ‘Thank you, Oswald, you are indeed my friend, and I hope will always remain so.’ As she spoke she felt the child inside her move as though in response to a relationship.

Oswald was deeper enslaved; beads of salt encrusting his eyebrows were visibly translated into drops of water; she watched them fall upon his cheeks.

‘There’s more, Mrs Roxburgh,’ he managed despite a tongue which had swollen at its root. ‘If you wait I’ll fetch ’em for ye.’

He ran back towards the edge of the reef while she waited for this further tribute; probably no one, not even her husband, would have thought her worthy of it. So she could not help but smile, whether from appeased vanity or tender fulfilment it was not the moment to consider.

On reaching the water’s edge, Oswald began bashing at the coral with a stone. The sight of his small, crouching figure made her clutch her own more tightly. Had he really been her child instead of a diminutive lover, she would have called him back. In the circumstances she continued watching, lips parted between pleasure and anxiety. When the sea rose, and with a logic which had only been suspended, it seemed to her now, swept him off the ledge on which he had been precariously perched.

Oswald Dignam was carried out, at best a human sacrifice, at worst an object for which there was no further use. Alternately sucked under and bobbing on the surface, he continued resisting his fate. His arms were raised several times, fists clenched, lips protesting against the mystery of divine prerogative, before the sea put a glassy stopper in his mouth. Although he was still being tossed and turned by surf boiling in and out of submerged potholes, she knew she would never see him again, unless as a wraith to be coerced out of her already over-haunted memory.

The victim of her clothes, her body, and the formless hazards, Ellen Gluyas ran down bellowing towards the water, where a rising wave warned her off. She stood an instant mewing ineffectually, before stuffing a knuckle in her mouth. More forcibly than ever, she was made to feel there was nothing she could do but submit.

But in accordance with the convention human beings are bound to obey even when their rational minds tell them the odds are against them, she was already starting back for help, running, scrambling by uncertain footholds and handfuls of grass, lumbering on, stumbling and falling, limping the last stretch, down to where the crew were methodically repairing the boats.

Her cries elicited only dazed attention from the men who were caulking the long-boat with a mixture of soap, fat, and grass. Three or four appeared to realize what had occurred, but of these only two followed Mr Courtney in response to Mrs Roxburgh’s pleading. The others did not want to hear or know; Oswald Dignam the individual had slipped from the common consciousness as a result of what they had endured and what they might still have to undergo.

Arrived on the crest of the ridge above the scene of the boy’s disappearance, the rescuers slouched back and forth, mumbling, as they searched the open sea with half-closed eyes. Only Mrs Roxburgh knew that it had happened, but could not convince these bemused, if not disbelieving, sailors, let alone spur them on to doing she knew not what.

She was desolated. She felt ill, and only too glad to spend the forenoon resting under a shelter some of the crew improvised for her out of a sail. The smell of crude canvas, of ants, and the attentions of flies made little impression on her. She must have dozed, in company with her swollen belly and the ghosts of her lost children, nor did she remember that she had not set eyes on her husband these several hours.

The caulking of the long-boat was proceeding parallel to, although not in accordance with the first officer’s unsolicited directions, and more intermittently, Captain Purdew’s transcendental hopes, when Mr Roxburgh and Spurgeon came tittuping down towards the work-party. Sharing a secret gave them the expression of guilty drunkards arriving home under a transparent veil of bravado. They were ignored by those more importantly employed, nor did anyone think to inform them of Oswald Dignam’s death, although he had been the steward’s nipper and the cause of Mrs Roxburgh’s inordinate distress. The sailors held their noses closer to their work, while Mr Courtney redoubled his efforts to impose his superfluous authority. As for Captain Purdew, his mind was wafted afresh in search of a salvation which might not be vouchsafed.

‘Had I gone down with her at least. But the Lord won’t overlook my record. Or will He?’ The poor old man stood scanning the unresponsive seascape, his eyes those of a stale mullet.

Mr Roxburgh and Spurgeon continued smiling for their secret mission. Under cover of the general preoccupation it was easy enough to secure a handful of precious soap, while Spurgeon got possession of his hoard of sugar. They then retired to their own more esoteric rites at safe distance from the camp.

Moulding the amalgam of soap and sugar into a pliable ball, Austin Roxburgh grew so rapt he might have been casting a spell into the grubby, sweating mess.

Spurgeon was positively awed. ‘’Ow will we keep ’er in place on me neck?’

‘Wait!’

When the medicament had been reduced to a sufficiently disgusting consistency the physician put it in the patient’s hands, and fishing out the tail of his own good linen shirt, tore a resounding strip from it. The steward’s disbelief in a gentleman’s behaviour expressed itself in open-mouthed breathing which might have sounded like overt snores to anyone breaking in upon them. But nobody intruded on their privacy, and Mr Roxburgh applied the poultice to the inflamed swelling on the steward’s neck, and bound it up, round and round, with the strip of shirt, sighing as he did so; he had come to love Spurgeon’s boil for giving him occasion to discover in himself, if not an occult gift, at least a congratulable virtue.

They sat for a moment looking and not looking at each other, until the patient lowered his eyes to hide a gratitude which was threatening to spill over, and the physician roused himself from the trance in which his will had already induced a show of pus.

‘Well, we shall see, old fellow!’ he said in the brisk cheerful voice of one who had returned to his normal spiritual level and social station.

At the same time Mr Roxburgh realized how tired he was; he yawned like a horse, showing his gums and longish teeth. He felt he had all but dislocated a jaw. One might, he imagined, by too vigorous a yawn. It made him scramble to his feet and remember the wife who had been several hours’ absent from his thoughts.

On reaching camp, Spurgeon a respectful distance behind him, he was directed to the improvised tent, where, he was told, Mrs Roxburgh was resting.

She was more, she was fast asleep it seemed when he lifted the loose canvas flap, prepared to share the tale of the boil and the part he had played—though not its deepest significance; gnostic delicacy would have prevented him revealing the secret of his occult powers. But she continued sleeping, and he lay down somewhat sulkily beside her.

When Mrs Roxburgh started up, and called out, ‘’Twas me! He wudn’ a gone otherwise.’ Eyes still closed, she struck her husband across the mouth with an outflung arm.

Mr Roxburgh winced for the numbing pain; he sneezed too, because his nose had shared the blow. ‘Please, Ellen!’ he protested. ‘Obviously you have been through a nightmare, but I don’t see why I should suffer for it.’

‘No.’ She sat trembling in her returning consciousness. ‘I was not in control of myself.’

The loss of this cabin-boy, which the colours of her dream had transformed into a major bereavement, unloosed in her a need for affinity, a longing to be loved. She was prompted to pour out the tragic story on the one person close enough to respond to her distress; if the current sucked them under, they must rise from the depths revived and strengthened by their love for each other.

So she would have liked it had she not seen that Mr Roxburgh would not. Although recovered from the undignified blow she had dealt him, he had retired, it seemed, to the remotest corner of their relationship, where he lay just perceptibly smiling for what she could not tell. At all events it was not the moment to break the news of Oswald’s death.

Instead, she leaned over him, and drew her mouth across his parted lips, and breathed between them, ‘You know I would not willingly hurt you,’ and he put his arms round her, and she rocked him and cherished him, which appeared to be what he expected, and her distress at the boy’s death was temporarily assuaged.