The Fringe of Leaves by Patrick White

Author:Patrick White
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House Australia
Published: 1976-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

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been walking through one of the balmy mornings she remembered on her native heath, except that furze and hussock had been replaced by thickets which tore more savagely, and starved creepers set gins for unwary ankles, and lizards were more closely related to stone.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.

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