Free A Fringe of Leaves by Patrick White Page A

announce that, if they gave permission, he would breakfast with them.
    The captain was rubbing his hands together so briskly they produced a grating sound, and in Mr Roxburgh, a corresponding heartiness. ‘I must congratulate you, Captain, on enjoying such health.’
    Captain Purdew retaliated in similar vein. ‘Your lady, sir, is the one we should congratulate—for presiding so charmingly at a breakfast of salt pork.’ The captain crooked a finger in preparation for further gallantry and his tea-cup.
    Mrs Roxburgh received the compliment with an air of disbelief inherited from her mother-in-law. If she was not carried over into downright boredom as she poured the captain’s tea, it was because an elderly, grizzled man is entitled to pay compliments and because a certain ingratiating, cumbrousness reminded her of her late father on his less bearish days.
    Jovially for him, Mr Roxburgh had begun questioning Captain Purdew on the technicalities of his calling, the state of the weather, and their general prospects for the voyage, in none of which could his wife join with anything like conviction. Instead she fell to caressing her throat, as a hand which both fascinated and repelled her attacked those slabs of refractory, not to say rubbery, pork.

    While she was still a little girl, he used to stroke her cheeks as though to learn the secrets of her skin. She would feel the horn-thing on his crushed thumb scraping her.
    On one occasion, unable to bear it any longer, she cried out, ‘Cusn’t tha see I dun’t want to be touched?’ and threw him off.
    He brooded and sulked a fair while, but it had been necessary; shame told her she was as much excited as disgusted; she grew more thoughtful as a result, and melancholy on wet afternoons.
    Poor Mamma was too preoccupied to pay attention, but after her death, the two survivors were less distressed by her absence than by each other’s company.
    At the same time Pa grew increasingly dependent on herself to conduct the day-to-day routine, and on the blessed grog to release him, not so much from grief as the despondency which had always been eating him. He would rise in the dark and fuddle through the morning at little unnecessary jobs, but sit all afternoon at the kitchen table, if he was not gone on a journey. He would invent journeys which ought to be made, only, it seemed, for the sake of motion.
    That spring, a late one after an unusually bitter winter, he asked her to accompany him as far as Tremayne, needing her help with a heifer which Mr Borlase had shown some inclination to buy. Pa was driving the sprung cart, dressed in his best pepper-and-salt, while she knelt at the back attached to the unwilling heifer by a rope. It was raining a cold drizzle; a slush of dirty snow had almost thawed out in the ditches. Distress at leaving home had given the poor beast the scours. Her betrayer’s hands were soon a mackerel colour from holding to the rope, at which Beat would jerk each time she threw up her head to bellow. The jolting of the cart, familiar whiffs of the animal she had reared from a calf, and glimpses of grey sea above stone walls or through the gaps in thorn hedges, increased the misery with which, it seemed, Ellen Gluyas might remain permanently infected.
    At Tremayne, Pa got down and took over the heifer. His hands were trembling. She wrapped a sack about her shoulders and said she would stay behind. He cursed her for behaving unsociably, or for being an imbecile, or both, before plodding with their pretty Beat into the not-far-distant yard.
    She rocked herself back and forth on the bare board on which she was seated, to generate a warmth her old drab kersey didn’t provide, and as a substitute for company. Had she been able to invent journeys, like Pa, and had her belief in magic promised to sustain her, she might have gathered up the reins, and driven the rest of the distance to Tintagel, or farther still, wheels grating over pebbles before entering those grey