The Colour

Lilian now worked hard in the vegetable garden. When the spinach she’d sown and faithfully watered came clustering up above her boots, she ran her hands through its bright green leaves and said: ‘Harriet, you know this looks better to me than anything we grew at Parton.’ She sat on the ground, eating carrots out of the earth, spreading her skirts in the sunlight. She didn’t tire of picking snails from the lettuces for the pigs. Sometimes, she went out before sunrise, so that she could hear the bellbirds singing.

Lilian Blackstone was reconstructing Roderick’s life and death in her mind and it was this reconstruction ‘along scientific lines’ that enabled her to feel more comfortable with her past and more resigned to her future in New Zealand. Tormented by the idea that she’d spent thirty-five years married to a mediocre and irresponsible man who, by dying an untimely and ridiculous death, had consigned her to an unendurable fate, Lilian now tried to see everything pertaining to Roderick in an altered light.

Toby Orchard had expressed his admiration for the livestock auctioneer’s sophisticated grasp of mathematics; now, Lilian understood that mathematics, or what Toby had called a comprehension of ‘scientific language’, had also played a part in Roddy’s gambling enterprises.

He’d often described these enterprises as ‘experiments’. He had sometimes tried to explain to his wife the rules of the law of averages and the ‘indisputable frequent reappearance of the only even prime number, the number 2, in any random selection of numbers, such as those designated to horses entering the Winners’ Enclosure at Newmarket’.

In games of poker, Roddy told her, he would seldom discard a low 2, ‘because the 2 can be a magnet, attracting a pair or even a third replica of itself’ and he claimed that he had won more than a few games by ‘trusting solely in the Even Prime’.

At the time when he had explained this, Lilian had understood not one word of what he was talking about, but now she saw clearly that Roderick had at least had a system and that his betting was not quite the random venture she had taken it for. He’d always claimed to ‘study form’ on the racecourse and had kept, Lilian remembered now, a notebook with more than a hundred horses’ names in it and their placings in successive races. She had never entirely seen the point of this. She recalled saying: ‘Because something has occurred in the past, Roderick, this does not mean it will necessarily occur again.’ But it was clear to her now that she had been wrong to be so sceptical about the Form Notebook. For not long before he died, Roddy’s luck on horses had begun to turn and he had seen this as ‘a combination of my adherence to the Even Prime and the growing sophistication of my form book’.

What Lilian now chose to believe was that her husband would have emerged from his mire of debt, had he not been killed by scientific curiosity. He was on the way, she told herself: I should have trusted in his systems. He would have pulled us free.

And as for the death itself, here Lilian made a bargain with memory: she would force herself to think about it, to look it in the eye, to relive it as far as was possible, given that she hadn’t actually witnessed it, provided she was able to give it a different frame of reference.

The stark facts remained: Roderick Blackstone had been killed in a field by ostriches. The peculiar birds belonged to an enterprising Norfolk farmer, who had planned to make a fortune by selling their plumes to the millinery trade and by ‘introducing the delicate taste of ostrich meat to the discerning people of the county, including Her Majesty Queen Victoria herself at Sandringham’.

Invited to inspect these creatures he’d never seen before, Roderick Blackstone’s curiosity had been roused by the sight of their long necks and startled eyes and fluttering feathers. Instead of remaining on the other side of their fence, while the farmer went away to attend to a ewe caught in a bramble hedge, Roddy climbed into the ostrich field and approached the birds.

Inquisitive as they were, the ostriches immediately surrounded Roderick and began pecking at his top hat. They were known (it was later said) to be fascinated by hard, shiny things and no doubt what Roderick should have done was remove the hat and run as fast as he could away from them. But he didn’t remove his hat. He died with his hat on. And the question of why he hadn’t removed it had always taunted and maddened Lilian. Surely, he couldn’t have been so stubborn as to believe, when his life was threatened, that propriety or convention required that he keep his hat on in the middle of a meadow? The ridiculousness of this notion made her want to cry out with fury.

There had never been any proper explanation of the hat business – until now. But here it was at last: Roderick had simply been so altruistically curious – as a scientist – about the behaviour of the eccentric birds that he hadn’t understood their intention until it was too late, until after one of them had jabbed at his face and taken half his nose away in its long beak and he had fallen down, screaming with pain and covered in blood and the birds had pecked him to death.

Lilian now chose to see that Roddy’s actions, far from being foolish, had been brave. Her gratitude to Toby Orchard for suggesting to her this new way of thinking about Roderick was overwhelming. She dreamed of going back to the Orchard Run and confiding everything to Toby – the gambling, the ostriches, all of it. She imagined Toby putting his arm round her, as she shed a tear. She remembered the comfortable, blue room at Orchard House and the creaking mahogany armoire, and predicted how well she would sleep in it now, with the presence of Toby just along the landing.

But for the time being Lilian had to content herself only with her new feelings of optimism. Neither she nor Harriet nor anyone could make the journey to the Orchard Run for the simple reason that the donkey was no longer capable of pulling the cart.

Harriet tried to cosset it, feeding it soft radish leaves from her palm and stroking its neck. She would see its eyes close, as if the touch of her hand gave it some longed-for permission to sleep, or even to die. Joseph swore that the donkey had croup and would recover, but both Harriet and Lilian disagreed. They knew that the donkey would never survive another winter. And one night, in the hot silence of their room, Harriet said to Joseph: ‘What we must buy in the autumn is a horse.’

Edwin Orchard didn’t know that Harriet couldn’t use the donkeycart to make the journey to Orchard House and he hoped she would arrive soon so that he could confide to her his worries about Pare.

Pare had not come to the meeting place in the toi-toi grass for a long time – a longer time than Edwin could ever remember. In this time, his caterpillar had hatched out of its cocoon as a scarlet-and-black butterfly and fluttered away; the spring lambs on the run had stopped kicking and prancing and started bleating like ordinary sheep; his mother had cut off his ringlets; Toby had shot twenty-seven weka; a family of moreporks had hatched in one of the barns; and Janet had made a blue blancmange, the like of which no one had ever seen before.

Edwin longed to tell Pare about the moreporks and the blue blancmange. He felt lonely without his caterpillar. He wanted to hear about the gold at Greenstone Creek and to stroke the kiwi feathers of Pare’s magic cloak. Every day, now, he walked into the grass and called softly: ‘Are you there, Pare?’ But there was never any answer, only the hot wind sighing and the grasshoppers scratching, and the bleating of sheep, far away.

The thing that worried him most was the possibility that Pare had come one day and seen him without his ringlets and not recognised him and gone away, thinking that some other boy lived on the run now. For he saw that he looked completely different. ‘You should not have done that cutting, Mama!’ he said angrily to Dorothy. And his mother’s reply surprised him and worried him yet more. ‘I know, Edwin,’ said Dorothy. ‘It almost broke my heart to lose my baby. But it was time for a transformation.’

Edwin looked furiously at Dorothy. He wanted to take a cruel bite out of her hand. He knew what a transformation was. It was what his caterpillar had undergone. It was one thing becoming something else. ‘I did not want that!’ he said.

Edwin drew a picture of himself on a slate, with his hair sticking straight out, like his mother’s. He didn’t know whether Pare could read, but under the drawing he wrote on the slate: This is not a koko nut this is me now Ewin.

As the drought continued, the mounds of earth at the creek’s edge hardened and cracked and whitened. Joseph thought that they began to resemble a range of miniature mountains and that, like mountains, they would be there for ever because he didn’t possess the strength to break them up.

The level of the creek was falling. More and more muddy shingle appeared and every day, Joseph dutifully shovelled and sifted it, but he found nothing. He began to feel the terror of a future without gold and without water.

Channelling the river so that it flowed, almost unimpeded, into his pond, he consoled himself with the thought that at least all the work he’d put into the pond had not been in vain. What had started as a sentimental attempt to contrive a corner of English landscape might now be the thing that would save the farm from ruin. He hoped the flow into the pond wouldn’t stop. He dreaded to see the level of the pond fall and the great black worm he knew lay in the mud underneath the water be revealed.

But the slow drift of Joseph’s mind was towards the Hokitika and the Grey. He began to feel that he’d been wrong to trust in his own creek. It was proving obstinate and valueless, but these vast, inaccessible rivers of the West Coast would be yielding and rich. They would gradually give up their colour. They would turn from gold to silver to brown as the men who had had the resolution to approach them – ordinary men like Hopton Fellwater and Bunny McGee – washed the gold from their banks and saw their lives change and happiness come in.

So intensely did Joseph long for happiness that, to ease his mind, he began to plan what he would do once he possessed his share of the gold. He thought he would send money to Rebecca’s family, enough money to repair their roof, to build a new privy, enough to let them buy a forest, if that was their desire, or set themselves up in the lucrative business of rearing pheasants. He would make sure the money reached them anonymously and that they would never know its sender nor its source.

This was how Joseph’s thinking went. And what he hoped might come in the wake of these actions would be a rediscovery of his feelings for Harriet. For he knew how cold he was. How could he not know?

He remembered her laughing with delight over their first purchases for the farm, and taking his arm in the street and kissing his face . . . he could remember these actions very vividly and yet he saw that he had somehow sent them away, sent them out of his life like children punished by being sent out of a room.

And he recognised that this was lamentable and shocking. Harriet deserved his love and yet he couldn’t give it, not only because he’d never loved her as much as he’d hoped to, but because, now, his mind had gone towards gold. And this drift towards gold had somehow opened a door on to the past, a door he had thought was closed for ever, but was not.

The rain came early in February. It fell in torrents from a black sky and, to Joseph’s astonishment, began to dissolve the ‘mountains’ by the creek’s edge, letting the earth slide back into the river.

Harriet stood by the wall of her garden, listening to the rain on her bean leaves. Then she turned and saw Joseph coming up towards her and knew that he had something to say, something which the longed-for rain had released in him.

He began by admiring the vegetable patch: the tiny stems of fruit on the currant bushes and the wine-coloured stalks of the beet tops. Then, he said: ‘I have made my decision. Now that the rain has come I can leave for a while and not worry that everything might die or fail. So, if you agree, I shall buy a boat passage to Nelson, then on to Hokitika.’

Harriet stood very still, with the dog by her, with the moisture making silvery cobwebs in her hair. She didn’t look at Joseph, but kept a watch on the earth, noting places where the rain didn’t reach or where puddles were forming.

They were getting soaked, standing out there under the dark sky. Harriet hadn’t minded this a moment ago, but now she saw how stupid it was; it was stupid because they were frail. ‘What have we been doing for all these months,’ she said, ‘but endeavouring to “transform our world”?’

Joseph hung his head. He didn’t want to say that he’d lost heart in them on the morning in late winter when he’d first seen the colour at the creek’s edge, that from that moment he’d begun to see them as small and of very little account. He reached out and tentatively took Harriet’s hand. ‘I want more,’ he said.

Later, when they were lying in bed in their calico room, Joseph, who couldn’t leave the subject alone, began to plead: ‘If I don’t go, then I’m less than men like Hopton Fellwater. Everyone in the South Island will be rich and we shall be left out, because I was too cowardly to go.’

‘You will manage,’ Joseph said. ‘I’ve seen what you can do. You will take care of everything. And Lilian will help you. Then in the winter, I’ll come back. I’ll come back with the gold. And we shall begin again.’

Harriet now wanted to say that she didn’t believe in the gold but saw that this was not quite what she meant. She certainly believed that gold had been found and indeed Edwin Orchard had already told her what Pare had said about the discoveries at Greenstone Creek. She could imagine, too, that Joseph would work heroically, work until he died, to find the colour at Hokitika and bring it out of the earth. What she decided she meant was that she didn’t believe in Joseph’s vision of the gold as something which would bring them happiness. She thought that happiness lay hidden somewhere, in a place just out of reach, and that one day it might reveal itself to her, but she didn’t think that it would be contained in lumps of gold.

So she lay silent for a while, finding nothing to say. And in this silence, she began to imagine what her days and nights would be like without Joseph. She saw in not much time that she wouldn’t mind his absence at all, just as she hadn’t minded when he and Lilian had gone down to Christchurch and she had set her fires and seen the flame in the cabbage tree.

And Harriet soon understood another thing: by agreeing to what Joseph wanted, she could get something for herself, something which had constantly been refused her. So now at last she turned towards him in the bed. She touched his cheek more tenderly than she’d touched it for a long while.

Harriet waited to hear what he would say to this, because now she was nearing the thing that would be her part of the bargain. For they both knew that the donkey couldn’t take them in the cart to Christchurch to fetch supplies, or even to Rangiora, and that, even if Joseph was prepared to walk down to Rangiora to hire a dray, Harriet and Lilian shouldn’t be left alone at Okuku with no means of leaving the farm or reaching a town.

‘I shall make sure we get . . . from one of the farms lower down the flats . . . we shall find someone to sell us another donkey,’ said Joseph. ‘and hope it will be in better spirits.’

‘No,’ said Harriet. She removed her hand from Joseph’s cheek and sat up. A candle still burned near her side of the bed and now her shadow loomed up large and dark against the white calico. ‘I want a horse,’ she said. ‘If I can’t have a horse, then I simply shall not let you go.’

‘A horse is strong enough to swim the Ashley, roped to the ferry, but a donkey is not. If there were any accident to either of us, a horse can take us in the cart very fast to a doctor at Rangiora. So it is a horse, Joseph, and nothing else that we must have.’

Joseph looked at her, her skin brown and dry from the days of burning heat, her eyes very black in the candlelight. He thought how she tricked him or manoeuvred him into giving her what he didn’t want to give and what they couldn’t afford: first the dog, Lady, who seemed attached to her and to no one else and now this, the tall horse she said she saw in her mind and about which she had begun to pester him.

But she was glad to have the dog with her. As night fell, everything outside the Cob House seemed to grow in immensity: the clouds moving across the moon, the distant mountains, the flat grassland all around. Lilian knew that she had never been as far removed from any other human being as she was now. It was as though she were aboard some strange conveyance, taking her further and further from small familiar things, into a universe of shadows.

She spent her evening mending broken plates, making sure that the tiny pattern of flowers was not disturbed by the joins, but as she worked, this feeling of travelling into vastness increased to a point where Lilian became dizzy and faint and had to lay her head down on the table.

She stared at the objects in the room: the chair by the range, the towels drying on the airing frame, a cheap almanac on a hook. And she wanted to gather these things to her and cling to them as she flew through the enormity of the night.