Had he but slept; instead he started shouting, ‘What’s taken the girl? I can see by they shoulders you’re op to yer old game. Well, you ent goin’ to make me suffer. I had too much, Ellen.’
‘Gee op, Tiger!’ She slapped the horse’s rump with the ends of the reins.
They rattled home at a fair pace, but the day was drawing in as she penned the ewes; it was dark before she finished milking.
She fried him a teddy-cake, which he pushed away. He sat pouring for his own consumption. Sometimes his elbow would fall short of the table.
He said, ‘You’ll always hate me. I bet tha’s stuck pins in me and throwed me to the fire.’
She messed the potato with her fork. ‘Why would I hate you?’
‘For bein’ your father.’
She had no answer.
‘If you dun’t hate me, you dun’t love me.’
Again she had no answer.
‘You’ve no cause to. An’ every cause. To love a father.’
She felt she might retch if she stayed, so she got up, and went outside, and started trapesing up and down through the drizzle which had begun again.
Once she looked his way, and he was sitting in the lamplit kitchen, amongst the unscraped dishes, sucking by now on his bottle.
She was too tired to postpone her return, whatever accusations might be preparing. Instead he stared at her, and asked in a distant, frightened voice unlike his own, ‘Nelly’ (he had never addressed her thus) ‘was it you knocked to the door? Or was it a token?’
He might have been coming to her, but stumbled, and fell against the dresser, and was gone before she could take him in her arms.
Whether it was grief she felt or terror at finding herself alone in a silent, no longer familiar house, with a stranger’s dead weight threatening to drag her under, she could not have told.
Captain Purdew was devouring prodigious quantities of pork, accompanied by gulps of green tea to assuage a thirst brought on by the saltness of the meat.
‘I wouldn’t exchange this sturdy little vessel, Mr Roxburgh, for any of your fast-sailing modern packets.’
‘May I pour you another cup, Captain?’ Mrs Roxburgh was still contemplating what might have been the skin of her own father’s hand.
She shivered. The gale had discovered cracks in the ‘sturdy little vessel’, the sea too, it appeared: a thin trickle of water was advancing across the saloon carpet.
Of a sudden Captain Purdew seemed to grow embarrassed for his hands, those great cracked flippers, coarsened by hard use and weather, stiffened and knobbed by the rheumatics.
‘As a boy’, Mr Roxburgh was leaning forward with an earnestness his wife recognized as the mode he adopted when indulging in confidences, ‘I experienced none of the rougher pleasures of life for being handicapped by poor health. The damp winters affected my chest. From early childhood I was dressed in the thickest wool and practically suffocated by well-meant precautions.’
If his wife had at first subscribed to the theory of prevention by suffocation, it was to win over her mother-in-law. Old Mrs Roxburgh was persuaded to see virtues in one who patently observed the tradition of Austin’s delicate health; humble origins and rude manners might be overlooked, to some extent, or anyway temporarily, in one who showed such dedication.
As a bride the young woman developed the habit of bringing her husband drinks of scalded milk from which she had been careful to take the skin according to instructions. The skin was the nourishing part, she protested without insisting, but he confessed he only had to catch sight of wrinkled skin on a tumbler of milk to feel queasy. On another occasion, on asking her to close a window, he made it known that open windows were a source of anxiety ever since he had developed pneumonia after an evening at whist in a friend’s over-ventilated house. But on a mild evening like this, she coaxed, the air can but warm the room. Instead of obeying, she forced the sash higher by several inches, on such a meadowful of placid light and sounds of rooks settling themselves in elm-castles, he must have decided to waive his objection.
‘… so I was sent abroad,’ Mr Roxburgh continued explaining, and leaned farther forward as his narrative took him into foreign parts, ‘first to Switzerland, then Italy, in the company of a tutor, a fool of a fellow, who at least left me to my books and my own devices while he pursued the ladies. So much so, we had to forgo the Levant after he was challenged to a duel at Palermo.’
No doubt remembering his duties now that his hunger was satisfield, the captain had grown fidgety. He resumed sitting on the hands which, he suspected, offended a lady’s sensibility, while he waited to seize the appropriate moment for breaking free.
Mrs Roxburgh yawned, and forgot that she ought to disguise it.
‘I was sent abroad,’ Mr Roxburgh repeated, ‘but was cured at last, cheaply, and at home.’
If he glanced half-amused half-regretful at his wife, it was because she remained unconscious of the reference; nor could she share his momentary vision of greenish-yellow light with the sound of wasps stealing upon them as she put up a hand to test the degree of ripeness her pears had reached inside their muslin bags. One forgets, Ellen, how much you know. And her reply, How much? how little is surely nearer the mark! He might have insisted in contradicting had modesty not suited her so well, and also because a wife’s modesty suits a husband.
His passengers’ visible withdrawal gave Captain Purdew his chance. ‘If you’ll excuse me, ma’am, I’ll return to duty — refreshed and encouraged, I needn’t say.’
While the passengers made no attempt to restrain one who must continue foreshortened in the light of their own lives and thoughts, the captain was glad to escape for no reason that he could properly explain.
After the steward had cleared the table Mr Austin Roxburgh fetched his writing-case, extracted his journal (Morocco-bound) selected a pen which, even so, he might not have cared for, and settled down to write.
15 May 1836
he inscribed it with perhaps too reckless a flourish,
Resumed our voyage in Bristol Maid. A wretched vessel if ever there was. Rolling horribly since dawn. Prudent enough to rise late and find my feet, but E. must venture early on deck, with the result that she returned soaked.
From the little we have seen of this Colony after the comparatively fertile expanses of Van Diemen’s Land, there was never an emptier, more hostile country (E. not altogether in agreement because of the fanciful, or ‘romantic’, streak in her nature).
Mr Roxburgh paused, and would have examined his wife’s face, half-expecting her to have read his mounting thoughts, but she had gone from the saloon into the cabin, from which, as she moved about the other side of the partition, came the sounds of tidying. She liked to pass the morning thus, even making up the bunks, as a favour to the steward, or, her husband rather suspected, in repentance for the sin of defecting from the lower class.
Complete isolation persuaded Mr Roxburgh to let himself go. He swallowed the bitterness in his mouth, and clenched his teeth as his nib slashed the surface of the page.
Oh the blackness in which it is never possible to distinguish the outline of a beloved form, or know the wife of one’s own choosing! No wonder that a state of doubt, anguish, even terror, should exist, to explore which might prove disastrous. I am from time to time the original Abyss, into which I must restrain my rational self from plunging for fear of the consequences. Happy, indeed, is he who can ignore the too substantial shadows of long afternoons at sea. The mornings can be filled with domestic details, and recall of life as we have experienced it, but not the reflecting glass of endless afternoon and evening …