Mr Courtney was so solidly built, anything overwrought or inessential could only expect to be skittled. It was unlikely that the mate’s own mind would ever wander out of bounds, except perhaps during sleep, heaving in those more incalculable waters like one of the whales it delighted him to watch.
Mr Courtney spouted rather than spoke, ‘Captain sends his compliments, but was called away, and you mustn’t wait dinner for him.’ As one accustomed to give orders rather than deliver speeches, the mate drew breath. ‘Other news — wind is veering, and unless we’re out of luck we’ll sail at dawn.’
Cap in hand, Mr Courtney continued standing. The upper, whiter part of his forehead glimmered in the dusk above a leather mask fringed with whiskers, the effect of which might have made him look sinister had it not been for the ingenuous eyes. On discovering that Mr Courtney was the least sinister of men, Mrs Roxburgh had felt free during daylit moments to examine the texture of his weathered skin, for her own secret pleasure and his hardly concealed discomfiture. In spite of the broad wedding band the mate was not at ease with ladies.
But rank compelled him to make the occasional effort. ‘Has the feller forgot to bring candles?’ His Adam’s apple jerked it out painfully.
‘On the contrary,’ Mrs Roxburgh answered, brighter than before, ‘we’ve had them all this while, but preferred to enjoy the evening light and our conversation.’ She patted her husband’s arm, asking him to support her, not so much in a falsehood as out of social expediency.
‘Nothing could have lit our gloom better than the news you’ve brought us,’ the gentleman contributed.
Mr Courtney grunted and laughed together. ‘Hasn’t Sydney found favour with you?’
‘I can neither admire nor dislike what irritation prevents me seeing.’
Her husband’s gravity so abashed the mate, Mrs Roxburgh lit the pair of yellow candles to alleviate a situation.
His skin ablaze, Mr Courtney announced, ‘I’ll leave you, then. There’s things to attend to. And the feller’ll be fetching down your dinner in a jiffy.’ It implied that himself had found good reason why he should not sit down with the gentry.
The instant after, he was gone; his great boots could be heard maltreating the timbers.
Mrs Roxburgh’s spirits soared. She could have sung, and literally, but her music-making had never been admired. Instead her face reflected the joy she hoped to find in her husband, and indeed, the weight had been lifted even from Austin Roxburgh.
So much so, he was moved closer to his wife, laughing without constraint, and pinched her on the chin. She might have been a child, not theirs, certainly (he would have been more guarded in the presence of their own) but a sympathetic substitute who would not grow up to accuse him, however mutely, of the folly of bringing her into the world.
‘I can’t express my feelings adequately,’ Mr Roxburgh blurted.
That was obvious enough as he teetered with a joy and relief to which he was unaccustomed, the long, fastidious hands inspired to gestures equally foreign to them. The husband had never danced with his wife, yet at the moment, she sensed, they almost might have begun. Given more suitable conditions, she would have guided him through a few judicious steps guaranteed not to unbalance his importance or his dignity. Nobody must see him without those.
Instead Mrs Roxburgh made the effort to control her own obstreperous exhilaration. ‘Quietly! Quietly, though!’ she advised. ‘You might bring on one of your attacks.’
‘My attacks!’ he snorted.
At his moments of extravagance he wanted no one to present him with the bill; he was wealthy enough to ignore reason when it suited him.
‘When you are so much improved,’ she remarked perhaps imprudently.
Austin Roxburgh was so far provoked that he pouted. To be coddled was intolerable; on the other hand, to be ignored might have struck him as worse.
‘Do you know where your drops are?’ she persisted in her role of solicitous wife.
‘Of course,’ he snapped, yet was in sufficient doubt to start working a couple of fingers around inside a waistcoat pocket.
Mrs Roxburgh touched him to dispel an anxiety she could see rising. Her own eyes were filling and frowning at the same time; she too may have felt in need of some drug, tenderness rather than digitalis. But whatever the illness from which either suffered, the interior of the wooden ship shimmered an instant with stimulated hopes and tranquillized fears.
When footsteps were again heard, of a flatter, more slithery persuasion than before. The ‘fellow’ who waited on them had taken advantage of the captain’s absence to ease a bunion by leaving off his boots. The horny feet slapping the boards gave out a sound not unlike that of a razor in conjunction with the strop.
Spurgeon the steward (cook too, Mrs Roxburgh fancied) was a somehow disappointed character whose reactions were on the mournful side. His attempts at cleanliness failed to deceive, yet in spite of it all, they had grown attached to him, and it amused Mr Roxburgh, if not Spurgeon, to tease the fellow out of himself.
‘Well, Spurgeon, we’re about to embark on the next stage of our Odyssey,’ the gentleman launched his evening joke. ‘When we reach the island I trust you’ll find your Penelope has waited for you.’
Spurgeon had long since given up expecting sense from any member of the educated classes, so did not bother to rack his brains, but grumbled in undertone to satisfy the superiors he was unable to avoid. The cloth he flung billowed an instant from his fingertips before settling miraculously on the table, its chart spread for further inspection. Many an imaginary voyage had Mrs Roxburgh traced round the continents and archipelagos of the saloon table-cloth.
Sight of the familiar, grubby cloth inspired her to fresh attempts at winning their steward’s approval. ‘Look, Spurgeon, my flower is still alive’ she indicated the teasel in its jar as though it were the symbol of some conspiracy between them.
‘I wouldn’ know that,’ he replied without deigning to look. ‘There’s a lot in this part of the world that looks alive when it’s dead, and vicey versy.’
He continued absorbed by a problem of cutlery until somebody stuck his head through the doorway.
‘Hey, Mr Spurgeon,’ a boy called in what he might have hoped a voice the passengers would not hear, ‘the chook’s all but fell apart.’
Spurgeon left to perform more esoteric duties with a stateliness sometimes achieved by thin people of painful bones.
By the time Mrs Roxburgh had washed her hands and smoothed her hair, and added a pair of ear-rings to match the intaglio brooch, the steward re-appeared with a tureen.
‘The captain’s compliments,’ he said, ‘there’ll be sweetbreads atop of this, and a fowl. Better make the most of ’em, because the salt tack is all you can expect from now on.’
As the passengers sat restraining with their spoons the circles of grease which eddied on the surface of the soup, Mr Roxburgh noticed his wife’s ear-rings. ‘I believe you would dress yourself up, Ellen, for a breakfast of yams and opossum with savages in the bush.’
‘I would dress myself up for my husband,’ she replied, ‘if he was there.’
Downcast eyes did not prevent a certain fierceness of expression, and it pleased him to think he had dominion over a divinity, even one whose beauty was wrapped in nothing more mystical than a cloud rising out of a dish of greasy soup.