A Fringe of Leaves (30 page)

He was several yards from the dying man when Mrs Roxburgh became aware of a terrible whooshing, like the beating of giant wings, infernal in that they were bearing down upon her more than any other being. Indeed, nothing more personal had happened to her in the whole of her life. For a spear, she saw, had struck her husband; it was hanging from his neck, long and black, giving him a lopsided look.

‘Awwwh!’ Ellen Gluyas cried out from what was again an ignorant and helpless girlhood.

Austin Roxburgh was keeling over. On reaching the sand his body would have re-asserted itself, but the attempt petered out in the parody of a landed shrimp.

‘Oh, no! No, no!’ It was the little skipping motion, of defeat in the attempt, which freed her; it was too piteous, as though all the children she had failed to rear were gesticulating for her help.

When she reached his side his eyes were closed, pulses could be seen palpitating beneath the skin, while the long black spear led a malignant life of its own.

At least there was no sign of blood.

‘Oh, my husband—my darling!’ She was blubbering, bellowing, herself the calf with the knife at its throat.

He opened his eyes. ‘Ellen, you are different. The light … or the brim of that … huge … country
… hat
. Raise it, please … so that I can see …

In her desperation she seized the spear and dragged at it, and it came away through the gristle in his neck. At once blood gushed out of the wound, as well as from the nostrils and mouth.

She fell on her knees.

‘I forgot,’ he said, rising for a moment above the tide in which he was drowning. ‘Pray for me, Ellen.’

She could not, would never pray again. ‘Oh, no, Lord! Why are we born, then?’

The blood was running warm and sticky over her hands. Round the mouth, and on one smeared temple, more transparent than she had ever seen it, flies were crowding in black clots, greedy for the least speck of crimson before the sun dried the virtue out of it.

Huddled on the sand beside a husband with whom the surviving link was his dried blood, Mrs Roxburgh had taken refuge inside the tent of matted hair which, hanging down, could be used to protect her face from the flies, as well as screen her to some extent from what might provoke a further wrench of anguish.

Had she been a free agent she would have chosen just then to succumb to the heat, the weight of her clothes, and numbness of mind, but heard a shot followed by an outburst of laughter, and raised the curtain enough to discover the reason why the second incongruous explosion should follow so closely upon the first.

The men, it appeared, had begun digging a trench in the sand in which to bury their late captain, scratching with their hands alone in a frenzy of application to create the illusion that they were occupied positively, while hoping that the officer who had joined them at their work might come up with some plan to reduce their plight. During it all, a youth named Bob Adams who had a record as a sawney, started digging with the butt of one of the impotent muskets. Which went off. Mr Courtney’s ally, Frank Runcie, cursed fearfully, and the officer himself used every word of a vocabulary to which his blunted authority entitled him.

It was a relief for the others to laugh. ‘At any rate, nobody stopped it!’ one fellow guffawed, and some of the others persisted in labouring the joke.

When Mrs Roxburgh glanced again, the sailors and officer had finished their game of sandcastles: Captain Purdew was decently disposed of, his tomb decorated with a pattern of the hand-prints of those who had shared his last trials. It did, however, face them with the problem of how to deal with the passenger whose wife sat mourning over him. Not one of them would have cared to intrude on the lady’s grief, least of all Mr Courtney, whose duty it was to take the lead and offer some form of condolence.

Mrs Roxburgh made no attempt to help, simply because she could not have been helped.

A solution was provided by the blacks’ return, the more dignified among them striding directly towards their objective, others capering and play-acting. The party of ineffectual whites was soon surrounded by the troop of blacks, all sinew, stench, and exultant in their mastery. One of them ripped the shirt off Mr Courtney, another the belt from Runcie’s waist.

Mrs Roxburgh might have felt more alarmed had any of their play concerned herself, but the natives seemed intent on ignoring a mere woman seated by her husband’s corpse. In the circumstances, she no longer felt constrained to turn her head or hide behind her hair. To the spectator, what was happening now was far less incredible or terrifying than the events leading up to it.

The blacks had begun stripping their captives garment by garment. One fellow’s skin was such a glaring white, the tuft of hair below his belly flared up like a burning bush. Mr Courtney’s testicles were long, slender, pathetic in their defencelessness. Because she had never been faced with a naked man, Mrs Roxburgh at this point looked away, and instead caught sight of her husband’s naked feet.

She hung her head, and wept for the one she had failed in the end to protect.

After much laughter and caracoling as they bore away their spoils into the scrub, the blacks returned and started driving their white herd, by thwacks and prodding, into the dense hinterland.

Watching her companions disappearing from sight, Mrs Roxburgh wondered what she could expect—probably very little, at best the luxury of lying down to putrefy beside her dead husband.

While the sun sank lower the landscape was subjected to a tyrannical beauty of deeper blue, slashed green, and flamingo feathers. She who had been reared among watercolours whimpered at this sudden opulence, the saliva running down her chin. There was almost nothing she might risk looking at, least of all her husband’s feet, austerely pointed at the luxuriant sky.

When again she heard voices and saw that some black women were approaching. A high chatter interspersed with laughter suggested a kind of game: the words tossed by the women into the cooling air could have been substitutes for a ball. This, Ellen Roxburgh sensed, was the beginning of her martyrdom.

The females advanced, six or seven of them, from hags to nubile girls. On arriving within a few yards of the stranger, one of the girls bent down, picked up a handful of sand, and flung it in the white woman’s face.

Mrs Roxburgh barely flinched, not because sustained by strength of will, but because the spirit had gone out of her. She was perhaps fortunate, in that a passive object can endure more than a human being.

Her tormentors were convulsed by their companion’s inspiration, and several others followed suit throwing sand, until one more audacious member of their set darted forward and dragged the prisoner to her feet.

Ellen Gluyas had not encountered a more unlikely situation since forced as a bride to face the drawing-rooms of Cheltenham. The difference in the present was that she had grown numb to hurt, and that those she had loved and wished to please could no longer be offended by her lapses in behaviour or her scarecrow person.

The party of women strolled round her in amazement at the spectacle; one or two were moved to pull her hair, unlike their own which had been hacked off within a few inches of the roots; the large woman with heavy jowls who had yanked her to her feet, caught sight of and started fingering her rings, their stones not entirely dulled by grime.

‘Take them if you want,’ Mrs Roxburgh insisted, and with no thought for whether she might be understood. ‘They no longer have any value for me. Do, please, take them. Only leave me my wedding ring.’

The natives glowered and cowered on hearing for the first time the voice of one who might have been a supernatural creature, so that the prisoner herself worked the rings off her swollen fingers and offered them on the palm of an outstretched hand.

The monkey-women snatched. An almost suppressed murmuring arose as they examined the jewels they had been given, but their possessive lust was quickly appeased, or else their minds had flitted on in search of further stimulus.

A young girl came up behind her and was tearing at her bedraggled gown. It required no special effort to remove the tatters. Petticoats provoked greater joy in the despoilers, but short-lived: the stuff was whipped off as lightly as a swirl of sea drift, leaving the captive standing in the next and more substantial layer, her stays.

Glancing down her front Ellen Gluyas recalled a certain vase on the mantelpiece of the room where old Mrs Roxburgh spent her days after her son’s bride was installed. Now that she was stranded under the most barbarous conditions on a glaring beach, the image of the slender-waisted vase, its opaque ribs alternating with transparent depressions, brought the tears to her eyes, if it was, indeed, the vase, and not its gentle owner, her hands of softest, whitest kid upholstered beneath with pads of crumpled pink.

So the daughter-in-law indulged herself to the extent of weeping a little; the little might have turned to more had not the black women whirled her about as they tore at her corset. She came to their assistance at last, to escape the quicker from nails lacerating her flesh.

She was finally unhooked.

Then the shift, and she was entirely liberated.

They ran from her trailing the ultimate shreds of her modesty, as well as the clattering armature, their laughter gurgling till lost in their throats or the undergrowth to which they had retreated.

Thus isolated and naked, Mrs Roxburgh considered what to do next. While still undecided, she stepped or tottered a pace or two backward and trod upon something both brittle and resistant. She glanced down the length of her white calf and noticed the hand with signet ring, of the one for whom she could do nothing more. She was propelled, logically it seemed, in the opposite direction, up the slope, and found herself amongst those burning mattresses of dry sand laced with runners of convolvulus such as she had noticed farther back along the beach.

She bent down and began tearing at the vines, in her present state less from reason than by instinct, and wound the strands about her waist, until the consequent fringe hanging from the vine allowed her to feel to some extent clothed.

Her only other immediate concern was how to preserve her wedding ring. Not by any lucid flash, but working her way towards a solution, she strung the ring on one of the runners straggling from her convolvulus girdle, and looped the cord, and knotted it, hoping the gold would not give itself away by glistening from behind the fringe of leaves.

It was her first positive achievement since the event of which she must never again allow herself to think. She might have felt consoled had she not caught sight of the aboriginal women returning.

They bore down, less mirthful, of firmer purpose than before. Their captive went with them willingly enough (what else could reason have suggested?) into the forest, which was at least dark and cool. If she sustained physical wounds from swooping branches, and half-rotted stumps or broken roots concealed in the humus underfoot, she neither whinged nor limped: the self which had withdrawn was scarcely conscious of them. What she did feel was the wedding ring bumping against her as she walked, a continual source of modest reassurance.

After but a short march the party of women reached an open space in which the other members of the tribe were encamped. Children left off skipping and playing at ball to examine what at first appeared to them a fearful apparition, until one by one they found the courage to touch, to pinch, some of them to jab with vicious sticks. The men on the other hand paid little attention to what they must have decided on the beach was no more than a woman of an unprepossessing colour. As males they lounged about the camp, conversing, mending weapons, and scratching themselves.

Nowhere was there any sign of the long-boat crew or their officer. Mrs Roxburgh felt she could not hope to see them again. As for her own future, she was not so much afraid as resigned to whatever might be in store for her. What could she fear when already she was as good as destroyed? So she awaited her captors’ pleasure.

Those who had brought her to the camp led her to a hut built of bark and leaves, at the door of which a woman, seemingly of greater importance than the others, was seated on the ground with a child of three or four years in her lap. Not anticipating favours, the prisoner passively resigned herself to inspection, but thought she detected a sympathetic tremor, as though the personage recognized one who had suffered a tragedy.

Whether it was no more than what Mrs Roxburgh would have wished, or whether harmony was in fact established, it but lasted until she noticed the child’s snouted face and tumid body covered with pustular sores. From time to time the little girl moaned fretfully, wriggling, and showing the whites of her eyes.

The women held a conference, as an outcome of which the oldest and skinniest among them approached Mrs Roxburgh and without ceremony squeezed her breasts. These were hanging slack, shapeless, fuller than was normal in preparation for her own child, which she should by rights have been feeding. Relieved of the necessity for making milk by the dead baby’s premature birth, she was pretty sure her breasts were dry; nor was the hag satisfied by her investigations.