She spoke too fast, as though to prevent a doubt widening between herself and her protégé promises, like prayer, can be an attempt at blackmail.
At the same time a fogbound voice began tolling, reaching deeper, always deeper into the void.
‘What is that?’ she asked.
‘The lookout — conning.’
‘Is there danger?’
‘No more’n usual.’ He threw away the sucked apple-core.
She did not try to measure a contempt she must have earned.
‘It is time’, she decided, ‘to return to my husband. If I stay too long, he suspects, I think, that I’ve been swept overboard. His fears make him irritable.’
‘Ah?’ It was only of faint interest to the boy.
Then, when she had got to her feet, he looked up at her, evidently trying to visualize a state which could remain for ever outside his experience.
As she left him, the boy’s face was first blurred, then obliterated by the unconscionable fog. Sometimes toiling uphill, sometimes teetering sideways with little, drunken steps, she held tightly to the points of her elbows inside the pretty, fringed shawl. In this manner she preserved something of her physical self from the general amorphousness in which Oswald Dignam was lost and her own thoughts and hair floated as undirected as seaweeds. Yet, as she prepared to negotiate the companion-ladder, Mrs Roxburgh did make an effort to manage her hair, and wiped from her lips the last scum of drunkenness.
The afternoon passed soberly. The passengers took their customary nap and were prepared to dine when called.
‘We shall grow liverish,’ Mrs Roxburgh predicted.
Her husband did not answer because it was the kind of remark for which answers are not expected, at any rate in a well-regulated marriage. Sitting on the edge of the bunk preparatory to pulling on his boots, he was stuck by the superfluity of words with which the married state is littered.
When suddenly and brutally the sequence of events was wrenched out of his control. There was a ramming. And grinding.
At once a slow but inexorable turmoil of activity began taking place around them. A button hook and a chair fell upon them from a great height, for by this time Mrs Roxburgh, who had been standing before the glass, running the comb through her loosened hair, was thrown upon her husband’s breast, against the cabin wall which formed with the bunk the trough where they found themselves. In their initial alarm they were struggling with each other as much as against a quirk of gravity. Half-fowl half-woman, Mrs Roxburgh was panting in her husband’s ear. Her teeth must have gashed his cheek, he felt, but the shattering of several breakable vessels in the saloon beyond, dispersed any possible resentment he might have harboured against her.
Then there was the slither and trample of feet overhead.
‘Mr Courtney, sir! Mr Court-ney?’
‘Good God,’ a second voice moaned obliquely through the fog, ‘can’t you see we’ve struck? A reef! Plain as your nose, man!’
‘We’re keel-ing!’
‘… need to tell me …’
So the gull-voices of men called faintly in the outer air.
Mr Roxburgh observed his pins protruding from beneath his wife’s skirts. His chest was protesting at her weight.
‘Do you hear, Ellen?’ asked his old man’s voice. ‘We’ve struck a reef!’
‘Oh, my dear! I was thrown off my balance. Have I hurt you?’
He ignored that. ‘We must stay calm and keep our wits about us.’
He was determined that they should not give way to emotion, but could not help being aware how ineffectual his voice sounded, as on all occasions when he gave orders. Yet others never appeared to notice.
‘Yes,’ she agreed, and succeeded in withdrawing her harsh breath from his ear, her disarrayed feathers from off his person, though they were still bundled together in the trough made by the bunk and the wall.
‘We must make our way — somehow — on deck,’ Mr Roxburgh decided.
‘… that I haven’t hurt you,’ she persisted, and took his cold hand in her warmer ones.
He found it unnecessary. ‘It’s no time, Ellen, for delicacy of sentiment.’
It was she, however, who grew practical, initiating the series of grotesque movements necessary for their escape from the cabin.
‘Ma’am? Mrs Roxburgh?’
She looked up, laboriously, and saw Oswald Dignam staring down at them from an unorthodox angle. His eyes were protruding slightly as he clung to the jamb of the swinging door.
‘Captain Purdew, ma’am,’ he called, then swallowed as the door caught his fingers. ‘You must come up quick,’ he recovered himself and shouted, ‘on th’ old man’s orders.’
Though crisis and the pain from his jammed fingers had temporarily transformed him into a small, girlish boy, his sense of authority would not allow him to feel ashamed.
‘We’re stuck fast,’ their messenger informed them, ‘but will try to bring her off.’
Mrs Roxburgh herself was so dazed by the situation, as well as entranced by the sweet, milky face of what might have been a cherub on the ceiling of some great house, she answered only with an effort, ‘Yes, Oswald. Yes. We shall get ourselves ready. And come on deck.’
She stretched out a hand to her husband. It felt surprisingly strong and capable despite the years in which she had been discouraged from using it. He was grateful for his wife’s hand, and she for the opportunity to justify herself.
Oswald Dignam had disappeared under cover of their concentrated activity.
Mr Roxburgh began the climb towards the hook which held his overcoat, while his wife crawled in the direction of the carpet bag, to find she could not think what to pack. Instead she fumbled with the small leather dressing-case in which she locked her more valuable or intimate possessions such as jewels, journal, false hair, the prescribed smelling salts which she never used, and began stuffing in few random articles as though she were a thief.
‘Wrap up as warm as possible,’ she advised needlessly.
Already in his overcoat and cap, Mr Roxburgh was winding round his neck an interminable woollen muffler she had knitted to his specifications several autumns ago.
She tied her shawl tighter, the same green one admired by Mrs Merivale at Sydney, and made a grab for her mantle.
Her breath was coming in desperate grunts, as though she, not her husband, were the invalid.
‘Take your time,’ he appealed to her. ‘All this is by way of precaution. I doubt the danger is as great as it appears, or if it is,’ he cleared his throat, ‘she’s not likely to break up at once — not before they’ve launched the boats.’ He would do his best till the end to impose some kind of logic on unreason.
She finished tying down her bonnet with what she liked to think firmer movements. ‘Well, now?’ Her smile was a wry one, but directed at him personally.
They began to scale the floor of the listing cabin, clinging with one hand to their sole article of luggage, with the second, clawing at any support offered by furniture or fitments, and after the same fashion, once through the doorway, navigated what had been the saloon. Neither would have admitted to the other that water had penetrated, when there it was lying before their eyes, oozing and lapping, an antithesis of ocean — a black, seeping treacle which the plush table cloth failed to stanch, while a teasel-shaped flower they had brought back on an afternoon at Sydney Cove was too light and withered to have been sucked under as yet.
Not until they arrived at the companion-ladder did the Roxburghs allow themselves to contemplate fully the dangers with which they might be faced. Up till now, they had been superficially irritated, he understandably more than she, by a rude break in their measured routine, and by having to adjust their physical bearing to the angle of a heeling ship, but now, suddenly, the cold air pouring down from above, was aimed at their defenceless bodies, and struck even deeper. Their souls shrank dreadfully under the onslaught, and would have wrapped themselves together in a soft, mutually protective ball had that been possible. As it was not, the man and woman were left flattening themselves against a wall, bones groaning, almost breaking it seemed, as they wrestled perhaps for the last — and was it also the first time? with a spiritual predicament.