As the evening progressed the sweetbreads proved to have disintegrated; the fowl had not done likewise because held together by antipodean muscle; and excessive sugar in the bread pudding soothed the palate at least, after the bitter ale in which the diners had drowned the worst of their revulsion.
Too familiar to each other, they sat and crumbled untidy fragments of conversation.
‘The brown woman — that eagle — or vulture, would peck out a man’s liver for tuppence.’
‘You are unkind to ladies on principle, but depend on them more than most men.’
‘Do you think there are rats on board? I could swear I felt one run across me in my sleep.’
‘In your sleep! Since we left home, I’ve experienced worse awake. A dream rat is nothing, Mr Roxburgh!.’
‘A sea voyage is recuperative.’
‘Did you like the man? I liked the man better than the women.’
‘He was somebody to whom I had nothing to say.’
‘Tisn’t always necessary. There are simple, honest men who put us to shame. We ought to be silent with those.’
Silence fell on the remains of the valedictory meal.
‘That is the kind of man your Mr Merivale is,’ she broke in with uncharacteristic harshness. ‘He has got wisdom in a hard country. He was always, I think, a countryman at heart, and most country folk are not for sellin’ what they know, or else,’ she raised her chin to recover her balance and her husband’s good opinion, ‘they dun’t want to be thought soft.’
But Mr Roxburgh had neither heard nor seen, it appeared, as he rolled little pellets of grey bread. ‘Merivale was Garnet’s friend. They racketed over the county on horses. It’s a wonder they didn’t break their necks.’
In spite of the pellets he continued rolling Mr Roxburgh was far removed from his physical activity.
‘Garnet has thickened. It’s surprising he didn’t re-marry. They say he’s attractive to women, and that there are several who would accept an offer.’
‘There are those who have his interests at heart. So I gathered.’
‘And were you surprised?’
‘Who am I to pass judgment on a man I only slightly know?’
‘But surely you formed an opinion?’
‘My opinion is that your brother is noticeably attached to his brother.’
‘We were always fond of each other. That is natural — something, Ellen, I should have thought you might accept.’
‘Oh, but I do! Indeed I do!’
He heard the exasperated swish of petticoat as she came round the table and knelt beside him. In her agitation Mrs Roxburgh had dragged the cloth askew, threatening the remnants of their bread pudding.
‘I can accept anything’, she said, ‘for the sake of peace — in this frightening world’ and held her head for him to stroke.
Upon realizing, he obliged.
‘Listen to the silence!’ Ellen Roxburgh shivered. ‘To the water!’
From the moored vessel, each sounded immeasurable.
‘I’ll listen gladly’, he told her, ‘when I hear it flowing against our sides.’
‘Flowing and flowing. For months and months.’
Although their ship remained stationary, the cosmos revolved about them as he caressed her head with the short circular motions he had cultivated as a sickly boy, when a cat he owned would spring and curl up on his lap. It sometimes occurred to him on remembering Tabby that he had not been on better terms with any living being.
Possibly due to excitement over their promised departure, or the recurring taste of bread pudding, Mrs Roxburgh felt slightly sick.
3
Falling asleep she had resolved to wake at dawn, to watch their passage through Sydney Heads, and perhaps contribute something of her own strength of will to their setting out. But when she awoke the light had matured, and was flowing dappled over the timbers, like water itself. She lay a few moments to watch the light and allow wakefulness to seep back into filleted limbs and a stuffy mind. Then she realized the air too, was flowing, that the vessel was plunging and groaning, in different directions it seemed at first, and that her slippers had slithered from the place where she had stood them in a neat pair the night before.
Bristol Maid was already at sea.
So Mrs Roxburgh screwed up her eyes, and bit her lips, though not to the extent of experiencing pain. She put out her arms to embrace the cold future, for no voyage fails to provoke a sensual shudder in the beginning. Then she clambered carefully down. It had angered her husband to find the carpenter had fitted their cabin with bunks one above the other instead of side by side. But Mrs Roxburgh pointed out that such an arrangement would have left no room, and calmed him by offering to take the upper berth. It was out of the question that he, in his precarious state of health, should scramble up and down during a voyage of months, and she had soon grown adept at reaching and leaving her shelf without disturbing him in any way.
Now, while unbuttoning and divesting in the chill morning, she observed her husband. Mr Roxburgh lay stretched asleep. Always when laid to rest behind his features, they appeared the finer for it, and this, together with an exaggerated pallor on the morning of Bristol Maid’s departure, might have given her cause for alarm had the gravity of her own thoughts not been relieved by the expression on his face. Mr Roxburgh’s chin had receded under the influence of sleep. He was blowing through his mouth with an intensity verging on desperation, sucking in, from beneath a jutting lip, the draughts of air vouchsafed him. It was comical as well as touching. She might have laughed had she not toppled and bruised her thigh against one of the many corners with which their small cabin was furnished.
When she had regained her balance and taken off her nightgown, her skin appeared already to have darkened in warning of the bruise to come. It made her body look too white, too full, too softly defenceless, though in normal circumstances her figure would not have been considered noticeably ample.
She finished dressing at a speed which did not dispel a mood of faint melancholy nourished by tenderness and resignation. At such moments she was consoled to think she understood their marriage.
In the same state of conviction or delusion she climbed the companion-ladder. Bristol Maid was labouring by now. What had seemed a morning of limpid light in the cabin below was in fact tatters of increasing grey. The wind blowing from the south had begun fetching up fog as well; great clouts of dirty fog caught in the rigging before tearing free. The sea rolled, still revealing glints of a glaucous underbelly, but its surfaces were grey where not churned into a lather of white. She was reminded of a pail she had withdrawn too quickly from a cow’s threatening heels and how the ordinarily mild milk had run as hot as the despair she felt for her clumsiness. So a shrieking of gulls in the present came closer to sounding human. Mrs Roxburgh kept up her spirits by watching the more unearthly rise and fall of their immaculate wings.
At the same time she was carried staggering across the deck, clinging, with an alarm she could not quite laugh off, to any object which offered itself. Whatever she touched, ratline or bulwark, or her own person, was drenched with salt moisture. She had battened down her bonnet with a scarf, and swathed her shawl closer to her form, and would advance of her own volition whenever it became possible, arms rigid against her sides, hands stiff as butter-pats, till reaching the mainmast and comparative security.
Here she was sighted by Captain Purdew, who immediately left a group composed of Mr Pilcher the second mate, a couple of seamen, and one she presumed was the boatswain from the authority he exercised and the quantities of hair which overgrew him. Even the captain, for all his professional experience, seemed to make only human headway against the careening deck, thrusting himself into the wind, hands clutching fortuitously at holds of rope.