Several steps behind in his acceptance of the situation, Mr Roxburgh was appalled by his wife’s unexpected callousness. ‘Why on earth didn’t you tell me?’
‘I forgot,’ she answered. ‘There were other things on my mind.’
It was not wholly true, but then, he would have recoiled from being told while horror at the death still possessed her, and later of course she had been shaken by the blows Pilcher dealt her in making his unjust accusations.
Just then Spurgeon, enjoying an invalid’s privileges within earshot of his benefactor, was roused by what he overheard. ‘What — the nipper gone? Oswald was a fine lad. But crikey, you can’t blame the lady. Singin’ out won’t call back the dead.’
Although displeased that his wife should have found an ally in one he considered his personal conquest, Mr Roxburgh welcomed the double assurance that formal mourning was not expected.
A sigh or two, a click of the tongue, and he had done his duty. ‘You are the one I’m sorry for, Ellen. The boy was so devoted to you.’
‘I loved him,’ she said simply, but again so dull of voice that Austin Roxburgh need not experience the slightest twinge, either of remorse or jealousy.
In any event, the distance which the recalcitrant pinnace had already put between herself and the long-boat increased the unreality of most human relationships. Faith in integrity persisted while the rope held, but with the severing of the hawser and gradual disappearance of the master boat, the horizon had become clouded with doubts.
Mr Roxburgh wished he was still in possession of his journal, to discuss his mood in rational terms, and thus restore a moral balance.
Now it was sea and wind holding the balance, or maliciously maintaining a lack of it as they were buffeted day and night, in which direction Mr Courtney, if questioned, professed to know.
‘I’d say — by my calculations — we’re a hundred and fifty mile to the east of Percy Island’ or ‘At this rate we’re headed back for the Cumberlands’ or again, ‘With any luck, we might make landfall tomorrow evening at Bustard Bay.’
His clear but rather stupid eyes had never looked farther and seen less; his jaws beneath their doggy whiskers were cracking with responsibility.
While Captain Purdew, an old child huddled near his guardian’s ankles, laughed low. ‘Yarmouth, or Barnstaple, it’s all the same — as God knows.’
It made sense to everyone: geography was anybody’s guess; the chart might have been torn up and instruments tossed into the surf before they embarked on this erratic voyage.
Which in the days, or weeks, or months that followed, concerned Ellen Roxburgh more than anyone. On her the waters in the doomed boat reached higher, almost to her waist it seemed, clambering, lapping, sipping the blood out of her flaccid body.
That was the least part of her. Herself sank. The fringe of her green shawl trailed through depths in which it was often indistinguishable from beaded weed or the veils and streamers of fish drifting and catching on coral hummocks then dissolving free for the simple reason that the whole universe was watered down.
Somebody, a man, was holding a stinking vessel to her lips, ‘Here Mrs Roxburgh is a drop of rum only a nip the dregs but will put new life into ’ee.’
She allowed it to happen, more than anything to pacify whoever it was that prescribed the cure, not because she feared life might be leaving her; everyone else, but not herself, she was so convinced, or egotistical.
And again was lowered into twilit depths where only a brown throbbing distinguished what she was experiencing now from anything she had experienced before. Grave schooners were sailing beside her brushing her ribs eyeing her through isinglass portholes. It must have been the rum causing the red-brown throbbing of her thoughts. As for the creature which had begun to persecute her its increasingly remonstrative form undulating out of time with her own somewhere in the folds of her petticoats bunting nibbling at her numb legs this slippery fish was pushing in the direction of a freedom to which she had never yet attained.
Whether forced to it by mental anguish or physical stress, Mrs Roxburgh raised herself from the position in which her husband had been supporting her in the waterlogged boat.
‘Ohhh!’ she moaned, or lowed rather, through thick lips, her face offered flat to the sky. ‘Aw, my Gore!’
It was a still evening, comparatively benign. In the circumstances, the sounds he had just heard uttered struck Mr Roxburgh as positively bestial. His sensibility would have shut them out had it been at all possible.
As it was not, he voiced the precept taught in youth, ‘We must keep our heads, Ellen,’ while going through the motions of soothing a delirious wife.
Who cried, ‘There’s no question — it’s lost — however I tried — nobody can blame me, Austin — can they?’
Although startled by her unwonted use of his Christian name, he tried to assure her, ‘Nobody intends to add to your sufferings by accusations,’ and drew his fingers along the wet, blubbery cheek of one by whom he thought he had done his duty in every sense.
But she began clutching at his hand, whimpering and muttering childishly, in an attempt to draw him down to her level.
‘Then what is it?’ he hissed, as desperate as he was irritated.
On grasping the full enormity of the situation there was nothing he could do but accept. ‘It is unfortunate, but neither of us will die of it,’ he predicted.
All his life he might have been on equal terms with reality.
After delivering his wife of their stillborn child, and somebody had produced what must have been Oswald’s glory-bag, he emptied the bag of its contents, the buttons, twine, a pencil-stub, a keepsake or two, a martyred prayerbook. In the absence of a conventional shroud the bag provided a substitute to accommodate this other, more portentous object.
Again Mr Roxburgh was satisfied he had done his duty; his hands only fumbled as he tightened the draw-string at the canvas neck, and out of his throat came a hideous sound as of tearing.
Weak from hunger and from marinating in brine, Captain Purdew dragged himself aft like an attenuated black cormorant. He seized upon Oswald Dignam’s book, and began performing an office to which life at sea had accustomed him.
Mrs Roxburgh closed her eyes. The words she but half-overheard did not impress themselves on her mind; they seemed rather, to break upon her eyelids, to be turned away as a flickering of light.
‘… man that is born …
… forasmuch as it pleases …
… thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts …’
She stirred where she lay and ripples were sent through the water in the boat, to be answered by this faint plash beyond the gunwale.
‘… our vile body …
… His glorious body …
… to subdue all things to Himself.
Amennn.’
Captain Purdew concluded with a twang, after which there was a re-settling of caps to an accompaniment of barely audible agreement or reservation.
If tears struggled out of the captain’s eyes, it was because, as everybody knew, his wits were leaving him, and though some of the men were shaken by what had occurred, it was also for remembering wives and sweethearts, or even a favourite dog. By comparison the Roxburghs appeared untouched in the halcyon evening prepared for their child’s burial. Beneath a peacock sky her face, reduced by suffering to a drained pudding-colour, wore an expression of assent bordering on tranquillity, while her husband, upright beside her, might have been enjoying congratulations for his performance in a classic role.