There remained, notwithstanding, a duty towards his passengers. ‘Pilcher has made an attempt at launching the pinnace,’ he told in words carefully chosen for polite ears, ‘but the sea is too—’ his voice was lost till he recovered it, ‘heavy,’ they heard.
The Roxburghs submitted to his opinion, after which Captain Purdew explained with extreme patience and a degree of natural courtliness, ‘We’re as high and dry on board as a nestful of gulls’ eggs.’ He gently pushed them back into the shelter of the galley, his enormous hands resigned to their own ineptitude. ‘At dawn’, the last of his face soothed them with the information, ‘we’ll try again — and no doubt have better luck.’
Dawn, the palest concept, hung before their eyes during the hours of darkness. The Roxburghs could not sleep, but dozed, perhaps a little, against each other, on the sharp edge of the tilted bench. Their stomachs compressed by irregularity and fright had ceased to be part of their anatomy, so there was no question of their feeling hungry. They were hungrier for the dreams which eluded them soon after leaving their skulls.
Once Mrs Roxburgh all but succeeded in spelling out the evasive word, ‘G — A—R — N—u — r—d?’ Her lips were struggling with it, but failed at the cliff’s edge.
At one stage he took her in his arms, and they lay along each other, lapping and folding, opening and closing with the ease of silk, fully enfolded if the coral teeth had not gnashed, they were sinking, sunk.
Mr Roxburgh awoke from some desirable unpleasantness to find his wife steadying him. He was on the verge of losing his balance.
‘Are you well?’ Mrs Roxburgh asked.
There was so little opportunity for being otherwise, her question sounded absurd.
So they dozed.
Captain Purdew’s dawn entered the galley without their noticing. It smudged their faces with grubby shadow and drew from the corners of darkness the cold grey smell of ash parted from the original coals.
When the Roxburghs finally awoke it was to a splashing of voices and water outside. Expectation and sleep had renewed a physiognomy ravaged by dusk, and dismissed the more palpable fears. She sat biting her lips, pale eyes straining to make use of returning vision, while he had recovered something of the languor of his youth, eyelids hung too heavy, too dark, features refined by sickness to an unnatural perfection which almost precluded life. They jumped up, however, with gasps. Scrambling. Uttering.
In the small hours the gale had considerably abated, but the vicinity of the stranded ship remained lathered with a restless foam. Gulls were circling overhead, shrieking, but coldly.
Into this world of cold white light and water, beneath the blue-white of unearthly gulls, stepped Mrs Roxburgh, her skirt lifted to the level at which boot and ankle meet as she scaled the raised threshold of the galley doorway. Her husband followed. Despite an untended moustache and beard, he was still wearing that mask of youthful perfection which sleep had returned to him. If they had been vouchsafed an audience, its hoariest members might have trembled for what amounted, over and above the flaws, to the Roxburghs’ spiritual innocence. But the attention of everybody, of whatever degree of understanding, was engaged elsewhere.
Launched at first light it seemed, the long-boat was bounding and thrashing on the water, still attached by its tackle to the parent ship.
Human voices could be heard shouting, one in particular rising above the others.
‘You’ll stave ’ur in,’ Mr Pilcher accused whoever was responsible, ‘and half of us ’ull be as good as sunk!’
The criticism was evidently aimed at the first mate, for at the heart of the general, though more subdued, vociferousness stood Mr Courtney, frozen into a frowning silence.
‘If we’re put to it, who will care to draw lots?’ Disregarding his own subordinate rank, Mr Pilcher continued flaying the air as a substitute for his superior officer. ‘I’ll not be left behind, waving goodbye to them born with better luck!’ Perhaps inspired by the motions of the long-boat dancing in frenzy at the end of its tether, Mr Pilcher blazed and twitched with passion.
Other advice was being offered in minor keys; normally muscular hands were united in knots which, this morning, did not hold.
When Captain Purdew was seen approaching from out of the wreckage of the charthouse, buttoning his jacket, hair flying, such of it as was left to him. If at nightfall the captain seemed to the Roxburghs to have relinquished his command, habit was driving him back to assume responsibility for a predicament which might prove fatal. So he shambled on, like a sleepwalker advancing into the heart of a nightmare, and arriving there, gave orders in a level, aged, but disciplinary voice, for the boat to be raised from the waters. As though that were possible. But it had to be. Himself lent a hand to perform the miracle expected of him.
The miracle almost occurred. The bows of the absurd cockle lifted, its whole length was raised into space, when it plopped back. The splash rose and hit them in their sweating faces. Then for an instant a lip curled on the greeny-white face of the sea and coral teeth snapped at the long-boat; whereupon human desperation helped raise her a second time. There she hung, dangling at the ends of the knotted arms, the blenched fingers, of convulsed bodies. They might have been prepared if necessary to secure the long boat with their own entrails.
But after an age of capricious resistance on the boat’s part, and of muscles threatening to tear, and lungs to burst inside the racked ribs of her wooers, she allowed herself to be jerked higher than any of them would have hoped, then after a further pause, in which her dead weight seemed to condemn half the souls among them to hell, she was swayed in their direction, practically sailing through the air, clearing the bulwark with little more than a graze, before ploughing the shuddering deck.
When the operation was over, several of the men made no attempt to disguise the trembling of their limbs and faces as they chattered together, and one fellow of powerful build went and sat apart on the deck, holding his head in his hands, his feet splayed like great yellow talons supporting his weight against the list.
But the long-boat was reclaimed.
All that morning and into the forenoon, hands were busy repairing its fallible shell, while the work of victualling went ahead under supervision of the boatswain. Mr Roxburgh joined a chain of lads engaged in bringing up from below casks of salt beef and pork, loaves of bread already mouldering, and demijohns of water, to provision the pinnace and supplement the long-boat’s stores, which the haste and enthusiasm of her premature launching had left somewhat skimpy; or rather, Mr Roxburgh went through the motions of helping as his mind ran with the tide. Below deck the perpetual lapping, only a tone above silence, recalled the many silent houses in which he had lain as a youth, by nightlight and sleepless, his feverish senses experiencing all the terrors of shipwreck long before he was confronted with them.
Mr Roxburgh appeared, and did in fact, feel calm enough, since the unaccustomed physical activity had purged him of his more obsessive humours. By contrast, some of the brawniest seamen around him shivered for what they were about to encounter, while trying to laugh it off. He could see the gooseflesh prickling on those bull-necks.
Towards the middle of the day he rejoined his wife where she was half-standing half-leaning against the bulwark, shading her stare with a firm hand. She glanced up at him, and he was surprised to notice how little wrinkles of age and weather had seized upon the corners of her eyes and mouth.
‘You must find a place and sit down,’ he ordered. ‘All this turmoil will wear you out.’
Was he trying to be rid of her?