Free A Fringe of Leaves by Patrick White Page B

waves.
    Presently the sun showed, and she felt guilty for her wicked thoughts, as well as for misleading Mr Roxburgh into putting his trust in one who was unworthy of it.
    When Pa returned it was without the heifer. As he had reckoned, Mr Borlase was unable to resist such a well-shaped beast. Pa had grown heartier, for the cash in his pocket and for having quenched his thirst at the buyer’s expense. He had made so sure of this she wasted no time in taking the reins from his hands. Thus released from responsibilities, his body slithered back and lay on the floor of the cart, his legs, in their shiny black leggings, propped and twitching on the seat beside her.
    Had he but slept; instead he started shouting, ‘What’s taken the girl? I can see by they shoulders you’re op to yer old game. Well, you ent goin’ to make me suffer. I had too much, Ellen.’
    ‘Gee op, Tiger!’ She slapped the horse’s rump with the ends of the reins.
    They rattled home at a fair pace, but the day was drawing in as she penned the ewes; it was dark before she finished milking.
    She fried him a teddy-cake, which he pushed away. He sat pouring for his own consumption. Sometimes his elbow would fall short of the table.
    He said, ‘You’ll always hate me. I bet tha’s stuck pins in me and throwed me to the fire.’
    She messed the potato with her fork. ‘Why would I hate you?’
    ‘For bein’ your father.’
    She had no answer.
    ‘If you dun’t hate me, you dun’t love me.’
    Again she had no answer.
    ‘You’ve no cause to. An’ every cause. To love a father.’
    She felt she might retch if she stayed, so she got up, and went outside, and started trapesing up and down through the drizzle which had begun again.
    Once she looked his way, and he was sitting in the lamplit kitchen, amongst the unscraped dishes, sucking by now on his bottle.
    She was too tired to postpone her return, whatever accusations might be preparing. Instead he stared at her, and asked in a distant, frightened voice unlike his own, ‘Nelly’ (he had never addressed her thus) ‘was it you knocked to the door? Or was it a token?’
    He might have been coming to her, but stumbled, and fell against the dresser, and was gone before she could take him in her arms.
    Whether it was grief she felt or terror at finding herself alone in a silent, no longer familiar house, with a stranger’s dead weight threatening to drag her under, she could not have told.

    Captain Purdew was devouring prodigious quantities of pork, accompanied by gulps of green tea to assuage a thirst brought on by the saltness of the meat.
    ‘I wouldn’t exchange this sturdy little vessel, Mr Roxburgh, for any of your fast-sailing modern packets.’
    ‘May I pour you another cup, Captain?’ Mrs Roxburgh was still contemplating what might have been the skin of her own father’s hand.
    She shivered. The gale had discovered cracks in the ‘sturdy little vessel’, the sea too, it appeared: a thin trickle of water was advancing across the saloon carpet.
    Of a sudden Captain Purdew seemed to grow embarrassed for his hands, those great cracked flippers, coarsened by hard use and weather, stiffened and knobbed by the rheumatics.
    ‘As a boy’, Mr Roxburgh was leaning forward with an earnestness his wife recognized as the mode he adopted when indulging in confidences, ‘I experienced none of the rougher pleasures of life for being handicapped by poor health. The damp winters affected my chest. From early childhood I was dressed in the thickest wool and practically suffocated by well-meant precautions.’
    If his wife had at first subscribed to the theory of prevention by suffocation, it was to win over her mother-in-law. Old Mrs Roxburgh was persuaded to see virtues in one who patently observed the tradition of Austin’s delicate health; humble origins and rude manners might be overlooked, to some extent, or anyway temporarily, in one who showed such dedication.
    As a bride the young woman developed