The Colour

Among the White Stones

When Edwin’s Maori nurse, Pare, had been sent away from Orchard House, she had walked towards Kaiapoi, towards her tribe.

Going south-east, she arrived after several hours at a northerly tributary of the great Waimakariri River, and here she sat down as the sun came up.

She sat on a white stone, with her feet in the water, chewing some raisins she’d taken with her in the bundle of possessions Toby Orchard had allowed her to assemble.

In the liquid light of morning, with the birds beginning their song, Pare no longer felt afraid of the ngārara. She knew that what she’d seen on the verandah of Orchard House had probably been just an inquisitive gecko, and because of this – because of the terrifying wind and the power of an ancient story – she’d lost Edwin, a child who, in her childless life, Pare had begun to love as her own.

The raisins tasted over-sweet and were hard and indigestible.

Pare scooped up mouthfuls of the cool water of the river and drank and drank.

She hadn’t been allowed to see Edwin after Dorothy had rescued him and laid him in her bed; she’d been sent away into the night with almost nothing: her clothes, her treasured greenstone pendant, her basket made of flax. But she knew that Edwin was probably going to die. The cradle had risen up off the verandah and tipped out the infant into the dust. Pare imagined Edwin’s neck, that tender place she often kissed, being struck as if with a terrible blow from a matipo club, and his poor head hanging limp and dumb. Her tears began to flow, salty and bitter, and she knew that she would regret for as long as she lived that she had so offended the spirits.

As the sun rose higher, the birds quietened. Floating down towards Pare on the current of the river appeared a black-beech log. She stared at it. An uncomfortable feeling began to take hold of her stomach and she set the raisins aside and tried to alleviate this feeling by kneading her abdomen very gently, just as she’d sometimes done for Edwin when he screamed from colic. Nearer and nearer to her floated the black log. More and more cruel became the pains.

‘Auē!’ Pare wailed. ‘What are you?’

The log arrived almost at her feet, caught behind a little spur of white stones. It glistened blue-black in the sun. ‘What are you?’ Pare asked again.

Then she heard a voice inside her. The voice berated Pare. It told her she was like Houmea, the Cormorant Woman who swallowed her own children, as a spotted shag swallows fish. It warned her that the pākehā baby would die – and she would also die – unless she returned and kept vigil over him. While the voice spoke, Pare felt something creeping over her lips and she reached up and brushed away a fly which landed on her knee and she saw that it was a blowfly.

Pare vomited into the water. The voice said: ‘Now you see your own sickness. This is the beginning of your death.’

She lay under a cabbage tree and slept and when she woke, in its green shade, she wondered whether the voice she had heard had been the voice of a spirit, a taniwha. The taniwha could take many forms and this one could have assumed the shape of the black-beech log.

She got to her feet and walked unsteadily towards the water. The log was still there, but the current of the Waimakariri had moved it to the edge of the stone spur and now she saw it swing round and re-enter the fast-flowing river.

As it floated away, the voice seemed to whisper: ‘Go back and keep watch.’

Pare was hungry and weak. Her tribe lived no more than a few miles from here, whereas to go back to the Orchard Run would take her hours – on feet that were blistered, on a stomach that was empty – and so she decided that, for now, she had to ignore the warning of the voice and return to her old home.

So she trudged on towards Kaiapoi. As she walked, she reasoned that if she had imagined the ngārara, so perhaps, in her sadness for Edwin, she’d imagined the voice inside her head? And anyway, the voice had asked her to do an impossible thing. If she reappeared at Orchard House, Toby and Dorothy would simply send her away.

Pare was ill for a long time. She grew thinner as the seasons passed.

It was her mother who at last understood that she was dying and asked her to try to remember anything in her life which could have caused this fatal illness of hers. When she told her mother about the black-beech log and the voice she had heard (long ago now) she put her hands together gravely. Then she laid around Pare’s shoulders a soft cloak embroidered with kiwi tail feathers which was an heirloom of the tribe. She gave her water in a gourd and told her to return to the Orchard Run.

When she arrived within sight of the house, Pare waited, hidden amongst the scratchy toi-toi grass. The wind sighed all around her. She could hear the bleating of sheep and the barking of a collie dog.

From where she crouched, she could see the verandah and was able to recognise the exact spot where Edwin’s cradle had been lying when the wind first started to threaten her. But now the verandah was deserted and she imagined Dorothy and Toby Orchard inside the house somewhere, staring at walls, completing tasks for which they had no enthusiasm, locked into a life’s mourning for their dead son.

Pare sat with her thin arms round her bony shins. She was lighter than a child now, with no deep soft flesh on her body anywhere. She looked older than her forty years. Only her hair, which she kept oiled and plaited, was still thick and glossy.

She shivered among the stems of the toi-toi grass. She pulled her precious cloak close around her.

It was Pare’s weeping that brought four-year-old Edwin to the place where she sat. He’d been lolling in his titoki tree, letting his pet brown caterpillar promenade up and down its branches, when he’d heard an unfamiliar sound. Pare’s was a musical kind of weeping, and Edwin wondered whether this noise could be a giant Moa Bird crying for its lost ability to fly.

So then Edwin thought that he might be able to help the Moa, by lifting its wings, or something useful like that (his mother and father were always encouraging him to do ‘useful’ things) and he snatched up his caterpillar and came running towards the noise, dressed in a sailor suit for which he was very nearly too fat. And when he saw Pare, he didn’t feel afraid. He was disappointed, for a moment, not to find a Moa, but he’d often been told the story of his Maori nurse who had been responsible for the accident and so he decided at once that this was who she was.

She looked at him, a pākehā boy with wide grey eyes, and opened her arms to him and said his name: ‘E’win!’ and without hesitation, he ran to her. She held him to her for a long time and he stroked the kiwi feathers on her cloak and breathed in the scent of her oily hair.

She told him that she would come here from time to time, to watch over him, but that he must never, never tell his parents. He asked her where she had come from and if she lived in a house made of flax. She replied that she lived in the pā with her tribe, and she had been ill, but now that she had seen him, in his smart blue suit, she would start to recover. He proudly showed her his caterpillar and how it would walk round and round his hand. She laid her forehead against his and touched his nose with hers and it seemed to him that he remembered this, this closeness of Pare’s face to his and the shiny feel of her skin.

Then they heard Dorothy calling him and Edwin pulled away from Pare. She said: ‘Always look for me here, in the toi-toi grass. Sometimes I will be here and sometimes I will be far beyond the river with my tribe.’

‘Shall I look every day?’ whispered Edwin.

‘No,’ said Pare. ‘I cannot make such a journey every day. But you could call – always quietly, so that no one else can hear. Say “Pare, are you there?” – and if I am here, then I will answer.’

Pare’s sickness left her and she began eating eels and kūmara and the meat of birds, and soft flesh now covered her bones. The years passed like this. But Pare now believed that her vigil over Edwin Orchard would have to last as long as her life lasted. Every month, therefore, unknown to Dorothy or Toby, she returned and sat in the high grass, wearing her kiwi cloak, and waited.

Sometimes she had to wait a long time, sleeping in the grass, making her existence there, always afraid of being discovered. But she was not discovered. The cloak seemed to protect her from inquisitive dogs and hide her from every eye. And then, eventually, Edwin’s call would come: ‘Are you there, Pare?’ and she would whisper softly: ‘E’win, I am here. I am here.’ And then she and Edwin would sit on the grass she had plaited to make it soft and tell stories, and Edwin understood that the stories told by Pare were different from any others that he knew.

It was midwinter now. Midwinter in August.

Lilian Blackstone looked at her calendar disbelievingly as hailstones drove against the windows of the Cob House. She pictured the August light falling on the meadows and streams of Parton Magna and heard in her mind the fluttery, whistling cry of swallows.

She had progressed no further with her plan; her letter to Lily Dinsdale had never been sent. For, since Joseph’s illness, Lilian had decided that she couldn’t abandon him. Not now. For now, she would have to ‘knuckle down’ and make the best of things. Wulla. There were times when such a knuckling down simply couldn’t be avoided.

Lilian also saw that the winter was beginning to sap the strength not only of Joseph, who walked about the empty land with his shoulders hunched, opening and closing his hands, like a pianist about to attempt some difficult piece of music, but also of Harriet. Harriet Blackstone’s famous determination, on which so much had rested, had faltered, Lilian noted; there was no doubt about it. Sometimes, the young woman sat worryingly still at the table, some knife or implement in her hand, but the task in hand abandoned and her large eyes fixed on no object in the room but seemingly on some vivid internal landscape that seemed to have nothing about it that was consoling.

‘Harriet?’ Lilian would ask. ‘Have you gone into a daze?’

‘Oh no . . .’ Harriet would reply, and immediately get on with peeling carrots or rolling suet crust or whatever it was that she had been doing. But she admitted to Lilian that ‘the death of Beauty haunts me every day’. She said that she couldn’t understand how certain things had been allowed to happen.

She was often to be found searching for something she refused to identify. Lilian could hear her arguing with Joseph about the Orchards’ collie dog, Lady, which Harriet wanted and Joseph said they could not afford. She spent long, silent hours writing letters to her father, waiting for the day when they could be taken to Christchurch and posted. The unsent letters piled up, envelope upon envelope. Henry Salt, Esquire, The Red House, Swaithey, Norfolk, England.

In the nights, now, Lilian no longer heard her son making love to Harriet. In their calico room, they seemed hardly to speak to each other or murmur or move at all, but just lay still and soundless through the long dark hours and in the morning went their separate ways. They had been married less than a year. Rather to her own surprise, Lilian felt the sorrow of this estrangement. The revengeful part of her nature had wanted the farm to fail – as a punishment to Joseph for forcing her into a life for which she was not suited – but now that it seemed indeed to be failing, she felt it was a pity.

Though the monotony of the days tired Lilian, she tried very hard to retreat less often to her room and to resist sleep when it began to overwhelm her in her chair. Having decided that what the situation demanded of her was vigilance and a more willing hand, she told Joseph that she would even ‘take her turn with the pig’, a fat pregnant sow, bought from a farmer near Rangiora, and now so weighed down by the piglets she was carrying that her legs buckled under her and her teats scraped the ground.

The pig had to be fed with carrot peelings and stale bread and over-ripe kūmara and the scrapings from the soup kettle. Her sty, such as it was, had to be cleaned from time to time and this task was scarcely to Lilian’s liking. What the sow’s body couldn’t absorb of the poor rations it was fed, she squirted out of her anus with a kind of venomous purpose, as though aiming at some target lurking behind her. Lilian found this rudeness quite shocking. It reminded her subliminally of the terrible behaviour of ostriches. She would have preferred to have had nothing to do with the pig, but she knew that they must not let it die, and so she took her turn at setting down the pans of food at one end and shovelling away the muck at the other.

And it was Lilian who found the sow, in a damp early morning, delivering herself of her brood. Three piglets had already been born and the sow lay panting with her snout resting on the earth, her vagina roped with blood and her breath hanging like a blue cloud in the moist grey air. Lilian stared. In her past life as the wife of a livestock auctioneer, she was used to thinking of the births of animals in arithmetical terms, but here, alone with the pig as the daylight slowly gathered, she felt its suffering and the feelings it might have of strangeness, of something progressing that had not ever progressed before.

Instead of walking back to the Cob House to fetch Joseph, Lilian sat down by the sow on some dry tussock grass and took off her apron. With the apron, she lifted the newborn piglets one by one and wiped the blood and white fluid from their snouts, then laid them near the sow’s face, where their mother could lick them clean. Lilian had used the word ‘vigilant’ to herself. And now, she thought, as she saw the slippery body of a fourth piglet slide out on to the straw, I am going to keep my vigil here until they are all born.

The sky slowly whitened. Lilian felt the soft drizzle begin to saturate her hair and wished that she’d put on her bonnet before coming out.

III

As soon as Joseph recovered from his fever, he returned to the creek where he’d found the gold.

The waters were high after a snow-melt. Joseph understood that he and the river were now locked in combat, just as he had once been locked in combat with the girl Rebecca. The river could reveal to him the place he longed to find, or it could conceal and withhold it. The river could bring him satisfaction, or it could sweep him away.

He began to dig out a channel between the creek and the half-completed pond. In this way, he felt that he was both demonstrating his power over the flow of the water and covering his tracks. The piles of earth that soon lay around the new water-channel towards the pond made less noticeable the mounds of shingle which began to pile up at the creek’s edge. For there was no other way of getting at the gold than by digging and panning what was known as the ‘wash-dirt’ or the ‘pay-dirt’. Fossicking for the colour was a grimy business. For every tiny ounce of gold there was a huge, embarrassing pile of detritus.

The weeks began to pass. There was a difference between finding nothing whatsoever and the ‘almost-nothing’ that was a minute pinch of powdery colour, painstakingly rinsed from the soil and collected in a rag. And most days Joseph found nothing. Then he would experience a fury he knew was out of all proportion to his circumstances and he would bitterly recall his father saying: ‘Joseph, in every life, desires may be frustrated. Try to be more accommodating to the world when it crosses you.’ He found it very hard to accommodate the maddening absence of what he knew had to be there – if only he could see it. He would stare at the accumulation of earth and at his inadequate tools – his shovel and pick, the dented casserole dish, the tin jug – and feel the pain of a life that had always taunted him and refused to give him what he wanted. And what he wanted now was gold: nothing else. Joseph’s hopes for the farm disappeared under the weight of this new yearning. In his mind, gold transformed the farm from what it was – a few acres of land blasted by the southerly winds, stung by hail and blanketed by snow – into a thriving homestead, with great trees sheltering it and money flowing to it from fleece and mutton and timber. Sudden riches would cancel the years of struggle. Joseph Blackstone had been resigned to these years – or thought he had been resigned to them – and now he discovered that he would do almost anything not to have to suffer them.

Sometimes, when Lilian was feeding the pigs and Harriet was working on her vegetable plot, he opened the tea box and untied the handkerchief and added a few more grains and looked at what was there. He found each and every particle of the gold astonishing and beautiful. It had come out of the mud and it was his, because he alone had seen it and recognised it for what it was. He didn’t know how much the gold he had found was worth. But he wasn’t stupid; he knew there was not enough of it to make any difference to his life. He imagined the tea box filled with it, filled to the brim, and only then would he go down to Christchurch and ask to see the manager of the Bank of New Zealand.

He played out the scene in his mind. He would lay down the box on the wooden counter and open it with infinite care. The bank manager would be silent, staring at something he had not expected to see, and then Joseph would be ushered into a private room at the back of the bank, a room where a fire burned, and he would be given a drink of whisky and scales would be bought out and guineas counted and he would walk out into the sunshine with all his years of toil cancelled at one stroke.

He found it difficult to complete other tasks. The digging and sifting of the wash-dirt preoccupied him at the expense of everything else. With the first green signs of spring showing among the faded grass, Joseph knew that he would soon have to begin sowing the strangely shaped fields he had so patiently ploughed with the donkey, but every morning he felt himself drawn back to the creek.

One evening, Harriet asked him: ‘What are you doing to my river?’ And before replying Joseph cursed himself for giving the creek Harriet’s name. The creek – and all that it concealed – was his and he should have named it for himself. But he had his answer ready. ‘If we are to put trout into the pond,’ he said, ‘then they must have a shingle bottom on which to feed, or they will not thrive. So I am extracting shingle which, when I have dug deep enough, I shall lay into the pond.’

When I have dug deep enough.

Joseph had no notion of how far or how long he would have to dig by the river until he found what he was looking for.

When he worked with the dish and the water scoop, he had to be vigilant the whole time, watching the valley for the arrival of Harriet or Lilian and then, if necessary, hiding his tools under earth and stones. And this was exhausting and distracting. He began to feel that it was the constant fear of discovery that made his eye less sharp and his senses less keen. He knew that on the American and Australian goldfields it had been said that certain miners ‘had a feel for the colour’; it wasn’t a thing you could explain or even describe, but it had to do, perhaps, with concentration upon the particular shades of black and brown and red and yellow in a clodful of earth and upon the way it fell from the shovel, but also with something else – with the messages sent from a man’s will towards the thing he desired. And Joseph understood that his will was cramped by the near presence of his wife and his mother. He dreaded to see either of them there, walking towards him, with the wind billowing their skirts. He went so far as to feel that the very shape of a woman on a hillside appeared to him now as an ugly and oppressive thing.

He conceived a plan to get the women away from the land. He went to Harriet and told her that he would relent about the dog, Lady. He would give her money for it and she and Lilian would go together to visit the Orchards, and perhaps ‘stay there for a few days and go riding, as you did before’, and then bring the puppy back.

Harriet looked at Joseph sharply. He saw questions forming in her mind and prayed she would not ask them. Quickly, he said that he had been too severe on the subject of the dog ‘only in my belief that a dog is not a necessity and that our lives here must rest upon what is necessary and only that’.

She nodded. She opened her mouth to say something and then closed it again.

‘Yes,’ she said at last. ‘Thank you, Joseph.’

That night, lying on her back beside him, she said: ‘I was fond of my father’s dog. I would go so far as to say I loved it. Love for a dog is not necessarily a sentimental thing.’

Through the winter, Harriet had added only three objects to her scrapbook: a brown weka feather, a shard of greenstone found in her vegetable garden and a paper jam-pot cover from Orchard House, on which Edwin had done a drawing of a windmill.

Whenever Harriet opened the scrapbook at the first page, she stared at the entwined necks of the herons on the label and thought of the tea box.

The box had vanished.

Harriet had searched for it on every shelf and surface in the Cob House and had not found it. She dreamed that Joseph had understood exactly what it contained and had burned it. She did not dare to mention it. She half-believed that it was still there somewhere in the jumble of pots and tins in the kitchen but that she was somehow incapable of seeing it. In her mind, it grew unbearably heavy. She thought that if, one day, it did suddenly reappear, she might be unable to lift it.

She felt her spirits falter. She began to think – for the first time since deciding to marry Joseph – that she should have stayed in England, sitting in her governess’s chair, with her pencils and her books, with children she was able to grow fond of, with a father who loved her. Only the sight of the distant mountains, the sheer size and beauty and mystery of them, kept her from falling into a deep melancholy. When the spring came, Harriet promised herself, she would go into the mountains – with a strong horse if she had one by then, or with the donkey, or even on foot. She would go into the mountains alone and rediscover her willingness to continue with this New Zealand adventure.

Meanwhile, she set off with Lilian for the Orchard Run. As she climbed into the donkey cart, Harriet saw that Lilian had dressed herself in her best bonnet and a smart black cape trimmed with rabbit fur. She smiled tenderly at her mother-in-law. She thought that it was not difficult to imagine these things floating away on the swirling current of the Ashley River and the long-legged birds raising their inquisitive heads as they passed.

Once again, it was Edwin who ran to greet the cart. Lilian didn’t see him at first, so intense was her wonder at the tall trees that grew around Orchard House and the feeling of entering once again into a world she could recognise – a world where floors would have a shine to them, where the pattern on the soup tureen would match the ladle.

Then Dorothy came flying along the verandah and down the steps, with her cropped hair sticking out at its familiar capricious angle and Harriet saw Lilian touch her bonnet anxiously, like one who has turned up to a dinner wearing clothes too smart for the occasion.

‘Harriet!’ cried Dorothy, with evident delight. ‘And the donkey is still alive!’

Dorothy reached out to take the reins, but Edwin, who had grown just a little taller since Harriet’s last visit, already held them and was stroking the donkey’s nose. Harriet quickly enquired after his caterpillar.

‘It’s gone,’ he said, ‘hasn’t it, Mama? It’s turned into something called a larva.’

‘Yes,’ said Dorothy, ‘we have been discussing the great question of metamorphosis. But my dear Harriet, you must be so tired after the Ashley and all of that. Come along into the house. Edwin, help the ladies down.’

Stiff-kneed, Lilian descended from the cart. Aware that she had been disregarded in the flurry of this arrival, she took Dorothy Orchard’s extended hand only by its merest fingertips and withheld the smile she had felt on her lips only a few moments ago. The familiar feeling of being snubbed – a feeling she’d thought belonged only to England, where the disdain of the upper classes infected every encounter – made Lilian want to weep, or, worse, give Dorothy Orchard a vicious swipe across her badly coiffed head. Lilian was particularly vexed by the knowledge that she never understood exactly how people like Dorothy Orchard achieved their instantaneous mastery over others outside their class. It happened before you noticed it, like a perfectly executed card trick. It was done in an instant and what you were first aware of were the feelings it engendered, feelings it was designed to engender, of being ‘put in your place’, of being told (without any words being used) that you were of little account.

Though she couldn’t help but admire Orchard House, with its sheltering gardens and its solid verandah, and wish that one day Joseph might build something similar to replace the wretched Cob House, Lilian walked into it with a heavy heart. Clearly, both Dorothy and Edwin had taken Harriet into their magic ‘inner circle’ and the three of them were now talking excitedly about the collie pup, Lady. And she, Lilian, the sixty-four-year-old widow of a livestock auctioneer, trailed behind, her knees trembling from the journey, her rabbity cape bouncing foolishly around her shoulders, her nose boiling in the warmth of the house after the bitter cold of the journey.

She wished, suddenly, to be dead. She felt that everything wounding had gone on too long. It was beginning to get dark and Lilian decided that she would shut herself in whatever small room Dorothy would select for her and lie down and sleep and hope that she would never wake up.

She dozed for a while with her eyes open, staring at her discarded bonnet. The bed was soft and she felt grateful for this. The room was painted blue and contained an old mahogany armoire that creaked as the dark came on.

She heard Toby arriving back from the run with his dog, the mother of the pups, and calling to his wife: ‘Dorothy! Doro!’ The dog yelped.

A grandfather clock chimed six. All of this, thought Lilian, could be happening in Norfolk, on some large estate, to which poor Roderick would have made uncountable visits to inspect heifers and horses and never once have received an invitation to drink a glass of port or brandy with the squire.

She could hear the familiar southerly wind, but it blew more patiently here, rustling the bare branches of the tall poplars and Lilian lay there, with her nose pointing at the ceiling, praying that the wind would lull her towards some kind of eternal rest.

Toby Orchard returned to the house in a good mood. The lambing season was just beginning on the run and every lamb he had visited today had been alive and inclined to suckle. Toby often boasted that mortality on the Orchard Run was low and when he discovered anything that contradicted this boast it made him feel intensely worried – as though he were a schoolboy again, at the mercy of a bully. But on this day, all was well and Toby felt exactly as he liked to feel – the lord of everything he could see. He’d stood alone by the river and smoked a pipe. He could hear the watery bleating of the new lambs trickle from valley to valley.

When he strode in and was told that Harriet and Lilian had arrived, he decided to open two bottles of good claret and told Janet to warm them near the range. He buttoned himself into a new waistcoat he’d bought in London long ago and never worn because Dorothy considered it ‘too horribly shiny’, but now, he thought, he would damn well wear it – because his lambs were thriving, because there would be three women instead of one at his supper table, because the spring was almost here.

Dorothy recognised this mood of Toby’s, this overflowing of his big, contented self. It both amused and irritated her. She thought it childish and foolish and hoped it wouldn’t go on too long, but at the same time, she knew that human happiness is fleeting and that Toby Orchard was a good man and should be allowed his share.

At supper, she watched him carefully, without seeming to do so, with the merest glance, as he filled and refilled his glass and smoothed the front of his ridiculous yellow waistcoat. And she saw him gradually work his charm upon Lilian Blackstone, so that her austere face took on a softer look and her hands, which at first kept rearranging the cutlery and moving her wine glass here and there, became still.

They were talking about farming in England when this transformation overtook her. Lilian had begun to describe the arduous life of her late husband, the livestock auctioneer, when Toby said: ‘Ah. A livestock auctioneer. Now there is a group of people for whom I have the very greatest admiration.’

Lilian’s disbelieving stare flew at Toby like a bullet, but he barely recoiled and pressed on in a loud jovial voice. ‘When I was a boy,’ he said, ‘I spent all my holidays on my grandfather’s farm and I was always enthralled by expeditions to the livestock auctions. For I heard a new language there, one I couldn’t begin to comprehend, but I knew that those who did comprehend it were very clever.’

‘Well,’ said Lilian, aligning her pudding spoon carefully with the edge of her table mat, ‘it is a language of abbreviations, that is all.’

‘No,’ said Toby, ‘it is a language of mathematics, a scientific language.’

‘Perhaps “scientific” is too grand a word?’

‘Not at all,’ said Toby. ‘It is not too grand a word. For the auctioneer must, simultaneously and at great speed, sing out the bids expected and made, and appraise every sinew of the animal in front of him, and how is this appraisal arrived at? Through scientific knowledge.’

‘Roderick would have been flattered to hear himself called a scientist,’ said Lilian.

‘Yet he might, after consideration, have thought it appropriate. All of us underestimate the knowledge that we possess, for although the getting of it may be hard, once it is got, we think it innate, as though we were born with it. Am I not right, Doro?’

Dorothy, who had been feeding a morsel of rabbit to Mollie under the table, looked up and smiled generously at Toby. ‘I expect you are right, dearest,’ she said. ‘Although certain ordinary things can continue to seem difficult when they should not.’

‘The skill of the livestock auctioneer is not “ordinary”, however,’ said Toby and turned his big face, beginning to be pink from the claret, away from his wife and fully towards Lilian. ‘It is quite exceptional, in my opinion. We live in a slow and cumbersome world and wherever I encounter that which is quick and adroit, I am disposed to marvel.’

The word ‘marvel’ seemed to have a wonderful effect upon Lilian. Though her hand had been creeping back towards her pudding spoon, to move it half an inch away from the mat, this hand now joined with its partner in a little impulsive, prayer-like clench. ‘I think that you’re being too generous, Mr Orchard,’ she said, ‘but on the other hand, I know that Roderick sometimes felt himself to be . . . underappreciated . . .’

‘That is a very great shame. The English used to show some reverence for skill of all kinds, but I fear they are now too much lost to the degrading spirit of commerce.’

‘That was certainly what Roderick perceived,’ said Lilian with an intimate sigh and Dorothy saw in the look she gave to Toby the trace of some long-ago flirtatiousness she had probably thought dead, but which was not so completely dead that it couldn’t be reawakened.

‘Are we finished with the stew?’ asked Dorothy. ‘Shall I ask Janet to bring in the pudding?’

Toby nodded and went on: ‘In my former life, Mrs Blackstone, I lived and worked in the very heart of the commercial world. The City of London. But I can tell you that there was not a day that passed when I did not long for some other way of being. And I found it. Tomorrow, I will show you the new lambs on the run and perhaps you will feel some of the joy that I experience . . .’

‘Oh,’ said Lilian. ‘I am certain that I will!’

Dorothy now suddenly felt that she had had enough of the spell Toby was working on Mrs Blackstone and in calling loudly for Janet she hoped to break it. What she could not know was that, on this particular evening, it could not be broken. For Lilian, who had felt snubbed on arrival and near to death from too great an accumulation of misery, now felt her heart beating wildly with joy. Her late husband had been reinstated to a position of honour in open company. He had been described as a ‘scientist’ and Lilian Blackstone knew very well what weight, what marvellous respectability resided in this word.

She raised up her chin defiantly and smiled. Then she lifted her wine glass and sipped the delicious claret, remembering to hold her little finger out at an angle while she drank, as her own mother had always done when taking tea. That Toby Orchard did not know – when he made his scathing references to the degradations of commerce – about Roderick’s disastrous debts to his bookmakers seemed not to matter at all to Lilian at this most exquisite moment.

The next day dawned so bright that a vivid remembrance of summer came into Edwin Orchard’s mind as he washed his face and he thought of Pare with her golden skin. He hoped she might come today and call out: ‘I am here, E’win. I am here.’

Edwin decided that he would take Harriet with him to the place in the toi-toi grass where Pare always waited. They would set out with Lady and he would pretend he was giving Harriet a lesson on how to make Lady obey her. He would tell his parents that no one else must come with them, or Lady would be too confused to show any obedience at all.

He thought that Pare might gather Lady into her cloak and stroke her nose with the precious kiwi feathers and laugh her laugh that was as musical as her weeping.

Edwin waited until his father and mother had set out with Mrs Lilian Blackstone to show her the new lambs and then he took Harriet’s hand and they walked slowly and quietly, with the black-and-white puppy bouncing at their heels, in the direction of the clumps of toi-toi. The sun was still shining, but from the north a dark grey cloud was beginning to move across the sky.

‘When we get near,’ instructed Edwin, ‘you mustn’t make any sound. You must stop Lady from whining or barking or anything. And I shall call out: “Are you there, Pare?” And then we will just wait and see if any answer comes.’

He called several times and they stood and waited, while the huge dark cloud advanced upon the sun.

‘Are you there, Pare? Are you there?’

But there was no reply, only the wind moving in the grass. Harriet looked at Edwin and saw the intensity of his expression.

‘Sometimes, I can tell,’ he whispered. ‘I can tell she is there before she has answered, even though I cannot see her.’

‘But she isn’t there today?’

‘No. I don’t think she is there. But we could go to the place where she sits, and wait and she might come.’

They moved forward and the scratchy grasses touched their arms and prickled the puppy’s inquisitive nose and made her yelp. Edwin walked in a straight line for some distance, then turned right and left, as if following some hidden path. A brown bird flew up and fluttered away. Harriet saw Edwin standing still now – so still that he seemed to cast no shadow. Then slowly he beckoned to Harriet and, as she walked towards him, he crouched down and was hidden by the toi-toi.

By bending the harsh stems carefully, folding them one over another (in exactly the way that Pare folded them), Edwin contrived a soft and comfortable place for them to sit and the puppy lay down beside them.

Harriet didn’t speak. She saw Edwin looking and listening intently still, as though Pare might yet be there or else moving closer to him, invisible in her feathered cloak, and waiting only for the moment when he would call to her.

The sun disappeared and the place where they sat felt suddenly dark.

Edwin looked up at Harriet and said: ‘Shall I tell you a secret?’

Harriet waited a moment before saying: ‘You shouldn’t tell me anything you’ve been forbidden to tell.’

‘No,’ said Edwin. ‘Not forbidden. It’s just Mama or Papa . . .’

‘Is this is one of Pare’s secrets?’

‘Yes. Pare knows things before the pākehā people know them because the Maoris listen to the earth and they listen to the birds and the rivers. And in the rivers there are Maori spirits called taniwha who sometimes speak to them and the taniwha know everything in the world.’

‘Everything in the world?’

‘Yes. And one thing they know about is greenstone.’

‘Greenstone?’

‘Yes. You mustn’t whisper this to Mama, but Pare told me that there’s gold at Greenstone Creek. It would have been Maori gold, but they sold their land to the pākehā. Long ago.’

‘Whose gold will it be, then?’

‘Pare says thousands of men will come. She says gold can make everybody do things they’d never normally do. She says people will die trying to cross the mountains.’

At this moment, the darkness which had settled on the landscape after the disappearance of the sun became still more sombre and hail began tumbling out of the black sky. Edwin and Harriet fell silent as the icy stones stung their heads and bounced all around them on the flattened grass. The dog stood up and went in a circle, trying first to shake the hailstones away and then snapping at them as though they were a swarm of white bees.

Edwin held out his hands, cupping them to catch the hail and then showing Harriet the perfect round white stones in his palm.

‘I like weather,’ he said. ‘Don’t you?’

Harriet nodded and smiled. The puppy looked from her to Edwin expectantly, but neither of them moved.