Nobody could accuse them of not trying to comport themselves. It was during the silences that Mrs Roxburgh, to her own knowledge, got out of hand. In silence she was able to indulge, even flaunt, a difference she had been made to feel most forcibly as they helped her over the side, probing with a foot for the rope ladder, in her passage to the long-boat from the familiar deck of Bristol Maid. She was dangling, a bundle of incredible clothes, cruel stays, and spasmodic breathing. She had been softened and made more defenceless, as was to be expected, by the precious child she was carrying, when in normal circumstances, she, if no one else, knew herself to be tough-fibred. So it was also frightening to be suspended in this airy limbo. The strong hands of rough, kindly men had held, only to relinquish her. Swinging and bumping on the rope ladder, she was at the mercy of her own initiative, and that of the wind filling her skirts, making of her a mute bell which would have emitted a pathetic tinkle had it attempted to chime. Other men stood goggling up at her ankles from below. One fellow blushed for her as he passed her on. She was quick to conceal the cause of his shame on feeling solid boards beneath her feet. Until now, she had been proud of her neat glacé button boots, bought a year or two before on a visit to London.
A day later, still set in one of the only two attitudes she found it possible to adopt in the space allotted to them, she only had to work her toes very slightly to feel the water squelching in her boots, a pastime not without its melancholy pleasure. When she was not taking her turn at bailing, a soporific so potent that sight of a trickle of blood from a cut in her hand did not detract from its effect, she sat and watched men exerting themselves, the certain rough elegance of even the thickest wrists alternately compelling and rejecting a boat’s oar. As their movements fused and confused she saw above all her father’s wrist flicking the whip with a movement of its own as they jogged side by side in the cart, or on feast days, the jingle. She stepped forward at last over the legs of the rowers and closed the scaly lids when the eyes were no longer looking at her and folded the hands on the wesket before hurrying up the road for help. Had she been left to mature naturally she had inherited that same chapped skin. Looking at her hands, Mrs Roxburgh noticed that she was returning, and not by slow degrees, to nature.
During the voyage, of circumnavigation as it seemed to have become, the shore so distant, if not mythical, the boy Oswald moved about the boat more freely than most, now taking his turn at bailing, now straining upon an oar, but always with an end in mind: to seat himself at the knees of one who was not so much the lady as a Divine Presence. Thus crouched, he would concentrate on the pair of hands lying in a lap.
He did not see them in their present shape, as scratched and filthy as a man’s, but as he remembered them, like a pair of smooth, dazzling fish, only hidden to be re-discovered, while playing together in a white sea of fog. He had even experienced their touch, and shivered again at the approach of jewels, in particular the ring with a curious nest of stones which glittered like dark, clotting blood. The memory of this ring, rather than its counterfeit on a grimy finger, seared his already burning cheek.
‘You are contributing as much, Oswald, as any of the men.’ Mrs Roxburgh spoke with the dutiful kindness of the dull woman she felt herself to be.
So lethargic, she could scarcely raise a hand to remove a hair from her lips, or brush away the crumbs which tumbled down her front when she ate her ration of mouldy bread. If she glanced disinterestedly, it did not seem unnatural that the grey, and in some cases, green crumbs should be lying on the shelf her bosom provided. Agreeable enough in itself, her lassitude gave her a plausible excuse for neglecting her person, as well as an argument for not resisting, morally at least, the stares of the rowers and the boy at her feet.
It could have been lassitude again which was developing her faith, not in God, in whose service she had never been punctilious, nor in the more compelling gods of the countryside into which she had been born, but in the umbilical rope joining the long-boat to the pinnace. No, it was more than the ebb of her mental and physical powers, it was life itself dictating her faith in this insubstantial cord.
‘You will bring us to land,’ she said to the boy because he was so conveniently placed, ‘and we shall find water — and limpets — winkles. Oh yes, I’m certain of it!’
She dismissed the painful probability of cutting her hands in the struggle to open shellfish, and could already feel the slither of fat oysters down her throat.
As they progressed, if they did, the smoother passages under sail, but more often jerked forward by manpower, she learned the least tic, the faintest convulsion, the essential ugliness of men’s straining faces, if also their relaxed beauty while they rested sweaty and thoughtless after exertion.
Only at such moments, when she was most absorbed in her lesson, did Oswald dare cone her face. Then he would try to delve beneath the salt scales and ruins of the original skin, to reconstruct a beauty, true as well as legendary, which he had discovered for the first time on a foggy afternoon, and never again experienced a perfection he knew to exist, if only in a dream, or fog.
Mrs Roxburgh was driven to exclaim, ‘How you love to ferret into a person’s thoughts! What do you expect to find?’ then regretted her indiscretion because the boy grew ashamed to the point of colouring up.
A seaman who had overheard increased his distress by invading what should have remained a private world. ‘That lad ’ud stare out the clock’s face, and not ’ave nothun to show for’t.’
Full of good-natured insensitivity, the man kicked out at the boy, now thoroughly sullen from betrayal by the one he most respected. He sat clutching the canvas bag which held his possessions, unable to escape from his betrayer for the press of knees and hairy calves.
The afternoon dissolved into rain, which reduced every face, especially Mrs Roxburgh’s, to the state of first innocence. What would she not have given for innocence enough to lean forward and stroke the rounded cheek of this boy who might otherwise remain closed against her.
Taking advantage of a burst of thunder which she hoped might prevent her remark carrying to other ears, she tried to re-instate herself. ‘I was put in mind of the ferret, Oswald, we spoke of the other day. You remember?’
He did not appear to, or else would not let himself, and she was left with her image of small red eyes ferreting through Cornish furze and hussock after rabbits of ill-omen.
So she sat back and allowed the rain to drench her. It seemed a natural occurrence that the black rain should be rushing at them. She gave herself up to it inside her clothes.
Mr Roxburgh had been holding himself exceptionally erect ever since deciding that the inevitable could not be overcome. Seated on his wife’s starboard side he was protecting her, whether necessary or not, with an arm numbed by duty. Mr Roxburgh’s long thin fingers would have shown up blenched as they gripped the gunwale for support, had they not been blackened by sun and grime.
‘Comfortable, Ellen?’ he had formed the habit of inquiring, as though that too, were necessary.
For Austin Roxburgh the real necessity was the rather inconvenient volume buttoned inside his bosom. Its weight and angles had become his only solace. Would it be possible on a desert island to find sufficient shade in which to enjoy the pleasures of Virgil?
This was Mr Roxburgh’s secret longing. Indifferent health, the irritability which comes of chronic constipation, even jealousy, no longer tormented him. He could not very well become jealous of a boy however secretive, so he told himself. For Austin Roxburgh had guessed the boy’s secret after his wife had disappeared over the side, swinging and plunging on the rope ladder. Awaiting his turn, Oswald Dignam stood frowning away his emotions, nervously fiddling with the draw-neck of a glory-bag he was holding behind him. The most feminine member of the crew, he did not intend to be parted from whatever odds and ends he carried in the canvas bag with its sinnet-work in crimson twine, and did at last smuggle it past the boatswain’s notice, to Mr Roxburgh’s satisfaction. His own contraband made him approve of this bagful of secrets, and accept those less tangible which rose to the surface of the boy’s face as his divinity sank.