A Fringe of Leaves (38 page)

It alarmed her when he spoke, although in a voice lowered out of respect for the past, ‘When I was in the cage-bird trade as I was tellin’ you, Ellen, I took to goin’ farther afield to meet the demand. I’ad a little place on the river at Putney, on the north bank, and did well enough at ’Ighget at first, but begun to find it more profitable to go into ’Arfordsher, and even as far as Suffolk. Suffolk for linnet. I’d drive there with a ’orse an’ cart. I’d sometimes spend several days, sleepin’ under the cart, and makin’ my catch early an’ late. I kept my birds in the cottage at Putney. I’d drive out daily around the streets, sellin’ to whoever was in need of a song-bird, among who was a good few genuine fanciers.’

‘And Mab, I suppose, stayed to mind the birds at Putney?’

‘Birds was not in Mab’s line. An’ she couldn’t abide the country—bad enough Putney, let alone Suffolk. She come up there with me once. I fixed a bivouac inside a field, in the shelter of a ’edge, an’ cooked ’er a nice supper of larks. It was no go all the way. She ’ad it against the blessed grass for wettin’ ’er feet.’

‘What was Mab’s line?’

‘She were a cress-seller. She lodged with folk in a court off ‘Oborn, to be in good time for Farringdon Market, where she bought ’er cresses off the dealers, early. Then she’d go hawk it door to door, damaged stuff mostly, a girl like ’er in business on ’er own.’

Since recovering his tongue he was anxious to use it, and inclined to prattle. It detracted from his stature, she felt, what she remembered of Ulappi the dancer and Jack Chance the escaped convict. She might not have entrusted herself to a babbler. She came of silent stock; and Mr Roxburgh ever judicious.

Listening to this light-coloured voice telling about his girl, she asked, ‘How did she look? Was she tall? And of what colour? Was Mab pretty?’

Well, it was only right to take an interest in this poor cress-seller, rising early in the court off Holborn (she knew how the girl’s hands must have looked) to hawk her inferior wares from door to door.

‘She was black—like you,’ he began reconstructing carefully. ‘Dark lips. On frosty mornins’ I’d tell ’er she looked like she’d had a feed of cherries—the juicy black uns. She was big-built, too. You’re not more than two parts of Mab, Ellen.’

‘I was never thought small. I’m above medium, wouldn’t you say?’

He might not have been giving it thought, when suddenly he surprised her. ‘Big enough. And pretty.’

From what she had been taught she should have resented his licence, but in the circumstances, was more displeased with herself.

They had lost their inclination to talk. She listened to the cart grinding its way in and out of ruts, and the squeak of a wheel which needed greasing. It was a lopsided vehicle, though gay-painted, the little horse a sturdy bay with hairy fetlocks. She could smell the dew from the fields beyond the hedgerows. She loved to rise early, and go outside their bivouac without her shoes, and feel the dew on the soles of her feet.

She did not think she could stomach the dish of larks. (If pigeon, why not lark?) Nor birds moping and dying in captivity. Some of them huddled tragically from the moment they were snared, and in the jolting cart, pressed together, their plumage filthy with their own dirt.

‘I can imagine’, she said, ‘Mab’s feelings—when you was sentenced.’

He did not answer. It sounded as though he was breaking a stick into little pieces.

‘Is your term a long one?’

‘Life.’

He spoke so flat and matter-of-fact, sympathy was not called for. It shocked her none the less.

‘Her term is no shorter than yours.’ She knew it was herself of whom she was thinking. ‘I can understand her suffering.’

‘Nobody ’as suffered without they bit the dust at Moreton Bay—least of all Mab. Mab, anyways, is dead.’

She lay crying as soft as she could so that her ‘rescuer’ might not hear. Beyond the thatching of twigs and leaves, stars were reeling and melting, to mingle with her tears and blind her. A person, she supposed, might choke on grief if she did not take care.

She was prevented from dwelling on this morbid and precipitate possibility. Jack Chance was touching her arm; he was stroking her wrist, she realized. If she did not withdraw, it was because her body for the moment seemed the least part of her, or because it might never have been touched, not even by her husband Mr Austin Roxburgh, dead these many years.

He continued stroking.

‘Why do you cry, Ellen, when it isn’t no concern of yours?’

‘Oh, it is! But it is! Mine as well as yours and hers.’

When he kissed her thigh through the loops and trailers of vine-leaves she twitched so violently that she rammed her knee against what must have been his face.

He cursed, not necessarily Mrs Roxburgh, or not as she heard it; it was a curse against mankind in general.

‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘did I hurt you?’

‘I reckon nothin’ could hurt me but another taste of the bloody cat.’

Her hand went out to make amends. ‘That will never happen, because I’ll not allow it,’ Mrs Roxburgh said. ‘You can rest assured, Jack.’

Was she so sure of herself? He must have felt her hand trembling on his forearm in a gesture which was meant to comfort him.

For his part, he no longer wavered. He began to handle her as though she had been a wheelbarrow, or black woman, for she had seen the head of her adoptive family take possession of his wives after such a fashion, in silhouette against the entrance to the hut. The breathing, moreover, had grown familiar.

‘No!’ she whinged; was she not after all Mrs Roxburgh?

He dropped her and lay beside her.

After a while he breathed in her ear, ‘If I am to trust you, Ellen, you should trust me. Two bodies that trust can’t do hurt to each other.’

She was not entirely won because, according to her knowledge of herself, she was not entirely trustworthy.

At the same time she longed for a tenderness his hand had begun again to offer as she lay moaning for her own shortcomings.

She allowed him to free her of the girdle of vines, her fringe of shed or withered leaves, which had been until now the only disguise for her nakedness.

‘What’s this?’ he asked her.

‘What?’ Although she knew.

‘This ring.’

‘It’s my wedding-ring.’

He made no comment. He was, as she had always suspected, a decent man at heart.

But suddenly she was taken by a panic. ‘If I lose it I am lost!’ Whereas she knew it was this man on whom she depended to save her.

She began such a lashing and thrashing, her broken nails must be tearing open the wounds which had healed in his back. It was this, doubtless, which decided him to return her aggression.

He could not press her deep enough into the dust. Yet with aroused hunger rather than anger or contempt. It became a shared hunger. She would have swallowed him had she been capable of it.

Then lay weeping, ‘Tchack! Tchack!’ Now it was herself had to find her way back inside a language.

While he asked too blatantly, ‘Can you love me, Ellen?’

They had to protect each other at last from demands with which neither might have been able to comply, encircling, caressing with a feathered tenderness. They must have reached that point where each is equally exalted and equally condemned.

She had lain an instant or an age when she experienced a twinge. ‘Aw, my life! I ricked my neck! Rub on it a little, cusn’t tha?’ But he had dropped off, and where she had been stroked with feathers she was now encased in a sheath of rough, unfeeling bark.

In the course of this encircled night she thought to hear, ‘… both of ’em dabsters … truss th’ pigeon ’sthe pigeon—trussed … never let on … not a word … I wouldn’ of ef she hadn’… is Ellen who’ll … maybe … shave us Lord …’

She was too tired. She was not for saving not even herself only for slipping deeper down let them sentence her for it.

She awoke to a steely light scribbled on the dust and shadow of the hut.

He was kneading her arms. ‘Wake up! Hey! Ellen? It’s later than I reckoned for. If we don’t look sharp they’ll catch us up. There’s not that much distance between us.’ Louder since she had last heard it, his voice was again level, cold, that of a man with a contract to fulfil.

She turned her face, preferring memory to appearances. ‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘we must start.’ But made no move.

‘I’ve warned yer,’ he said. ‘You’re the one with most to lose. If I shycock round the bush for the rest of me life, that’s what I’ve come to expect.’

After that he crawled outside.

In the mood in which she found herself she would have liked to drowse. The alchemy of morning was changing steel into gold. It slid along her skin bringing the flesh back to life. She glanced sleepily along her as far as the armpit. All that she saw belonged to an age of gold in no way connected with a body scarred, withered, and blackened by privation; nor yet the form which luxury had polished and adorned; not even her clumsy, protuberant girlhood. She lay stropping a cheek against an arm, hoping to arrive at layers of experience deeper still, which he alone knew how to induce.

She shuddered for the goose walking over her grave. She sat up. She must dress herself.

The defoliated vine was lying of a heap in the dust beside her, the ring still attached to one of its thongs. Slipping the ring on the finger to which it belonged, she crawled outside as she was. Not yet ready to be seen, she walked some way into the bush before discovering what she needed: she tore at and twisted free several lengths from a vine smothering a shrub, and wound the vine about her waist so that she was once more clothed. The vine was tougher, the leaves furnishing it more leathery than those which had served her thus far. It occurred to her that she might continue wearing her ring since there were no blacks to hide it from; but she ended by threading it again on a runner, and knotting it as before. If asked for a reason, she might not have been able to find one unless—yes, she would have answered, ‘My finger is now so thin and shrunk, a ring would slip off and be lost.’

She felt elated by this explanation, as well as physically relieved after squatting to defecate.

On returning to camp she found that he had demolished their hut. He had raked the ashes and strewn them with brush. He was ready waiting for her.

Noticing his sullen glance at her renewed girdle she said as nicely as she knew how, ‘You must not be angry. I had to make some preparations. And did not keep you waiting long.’

‘I’ll not be the loser,’ he mumbled, and they moved off.

It was a glum start to a journey, she thought as she followed, springy at first, though she soon found that her ankles ached and that her feet had not recovered from the first stage of their flight.

He was carrying the spear and waddy, and the cumbrous net retained from his life with the aborigines, which it would have been improvident to abandon. He had made no attempt to cover his nakedness in any way since losing the strip of bark cloth. His sole article of clothing was the belt from which hung that relic of a white past, the salvaged hatchet.

This morning she was not disturbed by the scars in the convict’s back, not even by those which her nails must have re-opened and where flies were scavenging for dried blood.

He strode, yet primly, his buttocks spare and austere. It surprised her at first that she should be looking at the buttocks at all, and in such detachment. Or perhaps it was not surprising. Their nakedness notwithstanding he might have been leading her on a polite, if over-brisk walk through a wild garden.

When compassion stirred in her again, it was for the buttocks rather than the scarified back: that the naked buttocks of a grudging, powerful man should make him look so peculiarly dependent on her mercy. She felt moved to stroke them, to make amends, if this would not have lowered a noble creature to the station of a horse or dog. But she did genuinely pity the convict, and would have liked to heal those innermost wounds of which she had received glimpses. Could she love him? She believed she could; she had never fully realized how much she had desired to love without reserve and for her love to be unconditionally accepted. But would this man of lean, disdainful buttocks, love her in return?

By daylight she could hardly think what manner of pact they had made during the hours of darkness. Had love been offered truthfully by either party? Or were they but clinging to a raft in the sea of their common misery? She could remember her panic, a sensual joy (not lust as Garnet Roxburgh had aroused) as well as gratitude for her fellow survivor’s presence, kindness, and strength. She also remembered, if she dared admit, that which was engraved upon her mind in illuminated letters:
Can you love me Ellen?
Did he truly wish for love? Or had he made use of her body as part payment of a debt?

She was shocked by her own thoughts, as well as physically shocked when Jack Chance stopped without warning, and she, in her thoughtfulness, collided with him.

‘What’, she panted, ‘is it, Jack?’

He did not answer, perhaps considering her too foolish by half. No doubt his stopping short signified an enemy, or the alternative, an animal to eat. So she did not press for an answer to her question, while withdrawing from their forced contact, not so far that they did not remain united by the warmth of their interrupted exertions.

While she waited she picked a flower not unlike a jasmine, white, but scentless. Smelling the flower made her feel trivial and superfluous. Drops of her sweat fell upon the immaculate petals.

Presently he moved on and she followed. Neither spoke. Perhaps he hated as well as despised one who was little more to him than a doxy met by accident.

On her side, the expedition had become something of a plodding match. As the sun rose it beat them about the head and shoulders with weapons of bronze. She bowed her head; the convict did not appear to turn a hair.

They climbed, or alternately, descended, ridges of quartz and granite which tore feet already torn, past obtrusive branches which whipped and slashed, felted drumsticks which thumped upon her breasts, and more ignominiously, buttocks protected only by her fringe of leaves, while more vindictive low-growing bushes harrowed and pricked arms, thighs, the entire human façade.