The Colour

He couldn’t tell her that he thought the house was in the wrong place, couldn’t possibly say that he’d been too stubborn to take advice from the men who had helped him. Because he needed to win her love and respect. In these lay his salvation.

He said only that he was worried about Lilian, who, when she stirred the washing in the heavy cauldron, had begun talking angrily to the underwear. She asked it why one soaping and rinsing couldn’t suffice for a longer time, why it ‘took dirt so easily’. When she hung it out to dry, she beat it with a wooden paddle. At other times, tired perhaps from scolding something which never answered her, she sat still and absent in her chair, rolling a darning egg in her palm.

He didn’t know. He wanted Harriet to tell him, to light on something. Women understood each other, or so he assumed, for someone must understand them and he knew that he did not. Only that they longed for things. And their longing seemed to be so tenacious that it could lead you to behaviour you had never ever imagined yourself capable of. It could destroy you . . .

But it wasn’t difficult to understand what his mother longed for. She made no effort to conceal it: she longed to be away from here. And Joseph saw, in the way she scowled at the calico walls and looked pityingly at her familiar pieces of furniture stranded like embarrassed guests on the clay floors, that she didn’t even bother to plead with this longing; she just let it be.

They had a milk cow, but no horse. Joseph said they would not be able to afford a horse until the following year, when they would have wheat and corn and young animals to sell. So the plough was yoked to a donkey, heavily blinkered, and Joseph and the donkey walked up and down and back and forth all day and the tussock grass was slowly lifted and turned in wavering lines.

‘I am not at all certain,’ said Lilian, ‘that I shall ever learn to cook on this range.’ And she gave the old iron cooker, on which she was boiling a kettle, a spiteful kick. Fired with smouldering lignite, the range didn’t seem eager to bake the loaves that Lilian put into it, only to steam them. They barely rose to the top of the tin and could achieve nothing better than the consistency of suet. Slices cut from them left a disappointing film of moisture on the knife. In Parton Magna, Lilian’s bread had been crusty and ample and irresistible to Roderick Blackstone, who had adored the way it scratched the roof of his mouth, and had devoured great quantities of it, spread with beef dripping, on the morning that he died.

Harriet hurried away. She hurried to the back of the Cob House, where her garden waited. There was nothing there yet, only a rectangle of tilled earth, where birds she didn’t recognise parleyed in the early mornings when the sun rose over the valley and the beech leaves glinted like oil. Slowly, she was picking the stones from the soil, dividing the ground into squares with planks of totara pine, fencing it with tin. ‘A stone wall round a plot of these dimensions’, Joseph had told her, ‘is pure make-believe. Have you any idea how long it took three men to build a stone chimney?’

Harriet had imagined the stone wall, but it could wait. She painted the tin white, nailed it to sapling stems. There was no gate. The tin enclosed the garden all the way round. Whenever Joseph and Lilian came out to see it, they stood watching Harriet from the other side of the wall, as though she were a prisoner they were not allowed to visit. They saw her working with her hair tied up in a kerchief, stooping over her planting, her apron bunched full of her seed potatoes, her boots clotted with mud.

The creek came snaking down behind Harriet’s garden, noisy after a fresh, rattling the stones, carrying with it stems of red matipo and black beech from the high bush. Harriet had never touched nor tasted water of such icy sweetness. When the afternoon dusk fell and she saw the first glimmer of Lilian’s lamps at the Cob House windows, Harriet stood at the creek’s edge, listening to her new world. If the wind had died a little, she might hear an owl far away in the trees, or the mournful kooo-li kooo-li of the weka, which Joseph had taught her to recognise. Sometimes, she would spread out her muddy apron and kneel on this, rinsing her hands, then scooping water into her mouth. Often, she stayed here, with her face close to the water, for so long that when she stood up she discovered that an absolute darkness had come on.

Beauty had no stable or barn. But from an old rug and some lengths of twine, Lilian had manufactured a coat for her. This had been the one task Lilian Blackstone had done with something like enthusiasm and now it was a strange and tender sight, to see a cow wandering about wearing a human garment as it munched the yellow hay.

When the sun shone and they had forgotten to take off Beauty’s coat, steam rose through the wool. The smell of Beauty, Harriet thought, was almost as delectable as that of any person she had ever known and she imagined that her own children might smell like this, of milk and earth and warm wool.

Milking Beauty was her favourite task. The cow would stay perfectly still, while Harriet’s hands, which were red and rough from her work in the garden, tugged at the warm, rubbery teats. Only Beauty’s flank twitched from time to time and her curly head turned and her heavy-lashed eyes stared into the sunset or the rain.

Sometimes at night, wearing her coat, Beauty lay down by the Cob House wall and Harriet could hear her breathing. To Henry Salt she wrote: My nights are full of sighing; the wind and Beauty’s breath and Joseph’s anxiety. But she knew that he, the geography teacher, would understand what this sentence was: not a complaint, just part of her evocation of her world, so that he would be able to use her letter like a map, to see and hear her in her new landscape. And at the end of the letter she drew for him pictures of objects she particularly liked: her hoe, the donkey-plough, the milking-stool, the butter churn. Of the churn she said:

Waiting for the butter gives me such excitement. The extraordinary change of colour! I think I have always been enthralled by any process by which one thing is transformed into something else. I can understand the obsession of the alchemists of the Ancient World.

Her scrapbook was beginning, very slowly, to fill. In between the heavy pages were leaves of gossamer-fine paper, almost transparent, and sometimes Harriet looked at her entries through the paper, as though they were already almost vanished and part of the past. For this was what the book was, she knew: a catalogue of the passing of time. Already the maple leaf that had floated down on to the SS Albert in the middle of the Tasman Sea was faded and brittle, the Chinese tea label very slightly yellowed, and the Queen Victoria stamps smudged with dust or dirt of some kind, as though they’d endured a long journey on a letter.

On the third page of the scrapbook, Harriet added a square of calico, labelled A piece of our wall, a ground plan of her vegetable garden, a spiky green frond from a ti-ti palm, a brown weka feather, and a curl from Beauty’s head. She glued them in with minute drops of Lilian’s china glue. She noticed that near her, on the dresser, a Spode tea-service was slowly piecing itself back together again, shard by shard.

Remembering her old life as a governess, she wondered what she would have collected into a scrapbook across twelve years: curls, perhaps – not from the head of a cow who looked so sweetly foolish draped in a rug in the New Zealand winter – but from the heads of her English pupils, curls that darkened as they grew and were sent away to school and forgot her; drawings and pages of writing they were proud of; pieces of knitting or squares of cross-stitch they had made.

And perhaps a solitary banknote, a ten-shilling note, given to her by Mr Melchior Gable, to be spent on gloves she was supposed to wear when she visited his bank on the occasion of its summer open day. On this day, visitors were shown a fine collection of weights and measures, a display of Roman coins and early examples of the ‘Gable Safe-and-Sound’, a patented brass lock which thieves were supposedly incapable of breaking. But Harriet hadn’t been among the visitors. The ten-shilling note had never been alchemised into a pair of gloves. Mr Gable’s love-letters to her had stood in a pile, hidden inside a cracked washing jug – hidden from the world and from Harriet herself, who had no wish to read them again and would shortly feed them to the fire.

She had tried to return the ten-shilling note to Melchior Gable. She had sent it round to the bank with her handwritten refusal of his proposal of marriage. But it had come back. She had asked her father to post it to him and he had done so, but once again it returned. So she kept it in a box and never spent it. She used to look at it sometimes – her alternative life, the land where she had not gone. And then, on the day she married Joseph Blackstone, she burned it.

He thought of the pond as soundless, a place that the wind would barely touch and around which the distant bush would soon seed itself – if only the seeds were not blown away. Though he’d imagined Norfolk willows, he’d be perfectly content with cabbage trees and manuka scrub.

He sited the pond in a dip in the fold of hills. A long, curving trench would be carved out to let water into the pond from Harriet’s Creek and then out again by some means that Joseph couldn’t precisely envisage. He found himself wishing that he were more of an engineer.

Lilian came out of the house, wrapped in a shawl, and stood watching Joseph. The ground was as hard as wood. Lilian stared at her son’s booted foot on the shovel, heard the repeated knock of the hob-nails against the shovel’s edge. Though he was tall, in the surrounding panorama of yellow grass he appeared oddly insubstantial, almost as if he were a figure her mind had conjured. Perhaps, when she next looked at him, he would no longer be there. She asked herself whether she had ever really seen him or understood who he was.

For how was it possible that the Joseph she thought she’d known – from baby boy in a hand-sewn dress to gawky man with raven hair and a commanding voice – now believed that his future and hers could be lived out here in this desert of grass? What had put this preposterous idea into his mind?

It was a day of light wind with a sun that came and went and showers that seemed to fall straight out of a brilliant rainbow. For the first time in a long while, Lilian raised her face towards the horizon. She liked rainbows, for they behaved as God had told them to behave: ‘I do set my bow in the cloud and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.’ But Lilian examined this one critically, as though she believed a New Zealand rainbow might somehow be disobedient to God’s law. She counted the colours, verified the precision of the arc, qualified the brightness. She barely listened as Joseph began to describe the pond to her; she was intent on the rainbow. It was too big, she decided after a while: in its vastness it had no humility. She distantly heard Joseph say that when spring came and green shoots snaked up through the mud at the edge of the water, the mallard and the native blue-duck would leave the creek and come to swim in his pond, in sweet domestic circles. But she felt obliged to remark. ‘Your pond will not necessarily behave as English ponds do,’ she said.

As she walked away towards the Cob House, Lilian remembered that she was, at least, working on a possible plan of escape. The plan was tentative and far too dependent on unverifiable factors, but it was a plan, and that was something. It was important in life, she told herself, always to have a plan. She should have planned for the eventuality of Roderick’s death, but she had not and now she had lost her old life and the little daily diet of hope that had gone with it.

Sometimes, when she thought about it as generously as her mind would allow, she admitted that she could understand that, if you were young, as Joseph still was, if you had never attached yourself to anything too fiercely, this vast new empty country with its violent weather and its cheap land might seem to promise you something. She knew Joseph imagined himself, six or seven years from now, as the thriving owner of a big farm and a house built of stone and timber, with a verandah like Mrs Dinsdale’s and a hammock where he would dream. To be fair to him, he had never pretended that the first months would not be hard and he had married the right wife for this kind of hardness. Somewhere inside her, Lilian admired her son’s faith and Harriet’s tenacity. Together, she thought, the two of them are all sinew and bone and obstinate will and if these things count for something, then they will succeed.

But she believed that it would be far better for them to be doing all this arduous work alone. For them, there was a future here and Lilian knew that most of what Man does, moment to moment, is for his imagined future, for the coming time, in which he will be happier than in time present. Merely, Joseph and Harriet had ignored the fact that Lilian, in this place, at the age she was, was so devoid of a future that she might as well be dead. Days and weeks and years would pass without an audience for her singing. The winds would scream in her head and muddle her thinking. Her china would break again along the same cracks she had glued together. Her spirit would fail.

The next time Joseph set out in the donkey dray for Christchurch to buy supplies, she would send with him a letter to Mrs Dinsdale. She would explain to Lily Dinsdale that she owned a few items of value, inherited from her mother, the vicar’s wife. They included a fine ivory fan, a tortoiseshell brush-and-comb set with a matching manicure case, a rope of pearls, a ruby brooch and several rings. These she proposed to pawn (she supposed that there were pawnbrokers in Christchurch because in any new place settlers will be at the mercy of seasonal poverty) and, with the money raised, to rent her old room at Mrs Dinsdale’s for the few weeks that it would take for her to find some kind of employment in the town.

Though she had never worked at any ‘outside job’ in her life, she did not see this as an insurmountable obstacle. She wondered whether she could be taken on at the clothier’s where the Laura McPherson Glee Club had their meetings. She was gifted at sorting and ordering. And it was perfectly clear from her observation of the clothier’s piles of boxes that this business was in a muddle. She didn’t know how much a person of her standing might be paid for this kind of work, but she supposed it might just be enough to keep her in Christchurch. And that was where she would remain. She wouldn’t attempt to cross the vast, black seas to England. Her house in Parton Magna was gone anyway, sold to pay Roderick’s gaming debts. The idea of renting rooms in England made her weep, somehow. And yet, in Christchurch, she would be near the shore. She would know what ships were coming and going from the Old World. While she established a bearable routine with Lily Dinsdale and Laura McPherson and their circle of friends, the possibility of a return to England would be constantly within her sight.

She took out her fan, her brush and comb, her manicure set and her jewellery and looked at them. It was an ugly fact of the world that when you tried to buy anything of value it cost more than you had imagined and when you tried to sell it, its value had always mysteriously leaked away. Where had it leaked to? Lilian wished she lived in a society where people knew the answers to such questions.

Laid out on her bed in this tent in the Cob House, Lilian’s little valuables, on which her plan depended, suddenly appeared anachronistic, like a shrine to some deity who demanded the strangest sacrifices from you and then fled away. She rearranged the pearls, the fan, the hairbrush and comb, the manicure set, but they still looked out of place and oddly worthless. For a long time, Lilian stared at them; then she felt such a deep weariness come over her that she pushed everything under her pillow and lay down on the hard mattress and fell instantly asleep. It was the middle of the afternoon and Joseph and Harriet were where they always were, out under the sky, and Lilian knew, as she closed her eyes, that she was probably gone completely from their minds.

When Harriet went out to feed the hens, calling to them in the white gloom, she noticed a feeling of great weight in the air, as though it was now the sky which tugged at the earth. When she came into the Cob House, she said to Joseph: ‘Something is going to happen.’

Joseph stood at the door. He felt the mist furl over him and shuddered. He fetched Beauty from the pasture and put on her coat. While he tied it on, the animal lowed at the strangeness of the air. And Joseph could hear the donkey braying in its compound. Not for the first time, Joseph felt the solitude and worry of the ignorant settler, who isn’t able to read the signals in the wind. He wondered whether he should hitch the donkey to the dray and set out for the Orchard Run, where they would tell him what was coming in on the sou’wester, but he was afraid of losing his way and being overtaken by the night.

They ate a supper of mutton stew with carrots and some of Lilian’s brittle cocoa biscuits and all the while they could hear the cow and the donkey complaining out there in the dark. ‘I often wonder,’ said Lilian, as she cleared away the cutlery, ‘why God gave the animals such ugly voices.’

It fell stealthily, while the three people slept, piling up on the tin roof of the Cob House, drifting before the wind on to the windows, sealing up the door. Though Joseph and Harriet woke at dawn, they turned over and closed their eyes when they saw the darkness in their room, which they mistook for the continuing night. Lilian, who, more and more, was developing a passion for sleeping – a positive ardour for it, as if sleep were opium – also drifted back into her dreams, where she often found herself on stage in one of the great opera houses of the world.

When Harriet woke again at last, as the roof began to bend and creak under the weight of snow, it took her a moment to understand what was happening. She woke Joseph and they stood in their nightshirts staring at the strange grey light of the room. They dressed hurriedly, rubbed their hands uselessly on the insides of the blind windows. They went to the door and struggled to move it, but it opened only a bare inch. They listened for the sounds of their animals and heard nothing.

Lilian was up now and Joseph instructed her and Harriet to build up the lignite fire in the range and put water on to heat. He would melt the snow that had drifted against the door. He prayed that there had been enough warmth left in the chimney during the night to keep it from being sealed up by the snow. He took up a stick and with this began working to move the door: two inches, three inches, four . . .

The lignite refused to burn. It smouldered like damp turf and in moments the low room filled with smoke. Harriet and Lilian, covering their mouths with their aprons, came to the door to take breaths of freezing air. The cold and dark in the Cob House seemed to be increasing all the time. Lilian lit the oil lamps. She and Harriet worked on at the fire in the range, riddling out the charred clinker, trying to coax a flame with sticks, a minute flame which flared and immediately went out.

They persevered, while Joseph scraped and kicked against the high drift against the door, until Lilian was seized by a choking cough so violent, she thought she might fall dead on to the earthen floor. Outside, through the slowly widening gap beyond the door, her bulging, weeping eyes could see that the snow was still falling: fat snowflakes, sticky as porridge, like none she’d ever seen. She cursed silently as she struggled for breath in the smoky tomb of a room.

Harriet handed the cup of water to Lilian, then snatched up the heavy iron cover of the range and slammed it down on the smoking lignite. She went to one of the windows. The snow on the sill was piled to seven or eight inches, but the window opened wide enough for Harriet to stretch out a hand and start pushing the snow away. She leaned out and looked at a white world in which nothing was visible, nothing moved except the snowflakes, so soundlessly, yet in a kind of hectic clamour, like a mute gathering of people anxious to reach some already crowded destination and find some last remaining space.

The smoke in the room began to disperse, eddying between the window and the door. Tugging her shawl round her, Lilian sat down on a chair and wiped her mouth. She stared first at Harriet, who was hitching up her skirt and clambering up on to the window sill, then down at the cold floor, on which she had just managed not to die.

Joseph struggled to follow her through the small window, folding and unfolding his long limbs, snagging his coat on a splinter, cursing as he heard it tear. He uncovered a shovel propped against the wall, and he and Harriet began to dig a pathway – with the shovel and with their hands – round the Cob House towards the door. New falling snow began to cover the path again as soon as their backs were turned. And the weight of the snow was like mud or like sand, its appearance of lightness a deception.

Harriet’s hair hung loose and there was sweat on her head and bright colour in her face, but her expression was determined. From far away, they heard a bray so they knew that at least the donkey was alive, but no other sound came out of the silence. Resting for a moment, Harriet said to Joseph: ‘Even if Beauty is lost, we will go on.’

She began shovelling again. No snow in England had ever fallen as fast and as stealthily as this. And coming on the unexpected south-westerly wind, a wind they were unable to understand, it had drifted almost waist-high against the south wall of the Cob House – as though it had been falling for a week without end.

‘Beauty!’ Harriet kept calling, for the cow was obedient, and always tried to reach them when they shouted into the vast emptiness of the air. ‘Beauty!’ And then listening in the white silence for the sound of her lowing. But it didn’t come.

They began to wade through the drifts, thigh-deep, Joseph leading, trying to clear a path for his wife, towards the mound that was Beauty, who had simply done what she often did in the cold nights, come to the Cob House wall and lain in the shelter of it, seeking some warmth.

They uncovered Beauty’s head. Furiously, they cleared the frozen snow from her nostrils, slapped her neck, put their faces close to hers, giving her their own breath. But the flesh of her muzzle, flesh that had been warm, supple, drooling, had become hard and set. Her amber eyes had rolled backwards under the long-lashed lids.

Harriet knelt in the snow, tears brimming, one hand helplessly tugging at the ridiculous tartan coat. What she felt, more strongly than anything else, was admiration for an animal who could die so slowly, so patiently, without a sound.