The Colour

There were no cheap rooms available in Christchurch. On his own, Joseph would have walked out of the town and slept in a field, as he’d done before, but he had Harriet with him. Though his money was running very low, he told himself that all the expense he was incurring now would seem trivial at some future time.

One of the bellboys showed Joseph and Harriet to a room with a four-poster bed, hung with muslin. The bellboy opened the window on the sunny afternoon and stood by it, whistling for his tip.

As evening came on, Joseph heard the sound of a concertina being played downstairs and he thought what a long time it was since he had danced. On the bed, where the muslin moved softly in the draught from the open window, Joseph laid out his father’s pistol and a box of bullets and told Harriet that he wanted her to have them while he was gone.

She said she had never fired a pistol, so he showed her how to load it and close it and unlock the safety catch and how to aim, looking straight along her outstretched arm. She said: ‘We look like some Gang of Two, planning our crimes.’ And she smiled at him, still holding the pistol, pointing it at a mahogany wardrobe, and he saw once again that pearly tooth of hers which showed and was not meant to show when she smiled.

The concertina music was melancholy but warm and Joseph stood up and drew the curtains and thought he would let himself give in to the unexpected sweetness of the moment, because it might never come again.

He took the gun from Harriet’s hand and laid it down. Then he brought her to the bed and pulled the muslin round them and kissed her mouth. Her skirts were muddy from the walk to Rangiora, but Joseph didn’t remove them, only bunched them up so that the mound of them lay under his belly. He wished he could spread her hair out on the pillow, as he’d done in the early time of their marriage, but her hair was too short to spread. He tried to move in time to the music floating up the stairs and he felt her move with him. She smelled of the muddy flats, of dry leaves and sweat and earth.

He had to withdraw from her more quickly than he’d wanted. The music stopped and the only sound that Joseph could hear as he lay there with his wife was the thudding of his heart and he found this condition of silence intensely painful, as though everything in his world were about to cease.

Harriet’s arm circled Joseph’s back and her hand touched the hardness of his shoulder blades and she realised how thin he’d become from all his arduous work by the creek. Yet his body, lying on hers, felt very heavy, as if his bones were made of lead, and she wanted him to move away and walk through the muslin curtain and be gone.

But she lay there, unmoving, and suffered the weight of him because she saw how mean her thoughts were and how lovelessness carries with it a kind of shame, which grows more and more fearful as the days pass.

On a night-table by the bed, Harriet could see the gun. She stared at it. She thought how easy it would be to pick it up and put it against Joseph’s head and muffle the shot with the pillow. She saw how death would arrive with mundane simplicity in a single moment and how nothing in the hotel room would move – only the thin curtains in the afternoon breeze – and how, in a little while, the concertina music would start up again.

She imagined walking out from D’Erlanger’s Hotel in a clean dress and soon becoming lost in the crowds and going in search of some food and a horse and then riding away from Christchurch in the moonlight. She would eat her food and let the horse graze on the tussock and then she would lie down on the ground and sleep, with the horse tethered to a stone. And all the while, Joseph’s body would lie on the bed, his brain bleeding into the pillows, and no one would discover it until morning, when the chambermaids arrived with their brooms and pails. And by then, she would be far away, asleep in the emptiness of the flats. She would ride to the Orchard Run and have breakfast with Dorothy.

She didn’t know if anyone would track her down, arrest her, try her, condemn her, hang her. She thought that here, in New Zealand, murder might be one of a thousand crimes which could remain unpunished for years, the identity of the culprit lost in the immensity of distance.

Harriet heard Joseph’s breathing change and knew that he’d gone to sleep, lying on her, on her damp skirts. She knew she would always remember this room in D’Erlanger’s Hotel, with its open window and its elegant bed, and the sun on the face of the bellboy as he’d stood and whistled for his money, and the concertina music waltzing up the stairs.

Experimentally, she moved her arm and began to push aside the muslin drapes, so that the gun was within her grasp. She knew, if she decided to kill Joseph, how easy it was going to be to lie to Lilian, telling her that Joseph had boarded the steamship in Lyttelton Harbour and waved to her from its crowded deck as it sailed away.

So easy to lie to Lilian. On and on through the seasons the lie would share their house and breathe the air they breathed. On and on, until sufficient time had passed and Lilian began to suspect that something terrible had happened to her son. But even then, she would believe that Joseph had died trying to dig gold from a river-bed and never in the world imagine that Harriet had killed him in a Christchurch hotel, for no reason other than her inability to love him.

The gun was within a few inches of her hand now, an irksome little gun, Harriet thought, ornate and mean. She didn’t like it. Because it was when Joseph had showed her how to use the gun that he’d become aroused in just the way that he used to be, wanting his pleasure with an embarrassing desperation, arranging her body under his, pushing and pulling at her thighs, with no thought for what she was feeling, and it was this – only this, she now saw – which had brought on her murderous thoughts. If Joseph hadn’t touched her, if the weight of him hadn’t felt so great, then the idea of killing him would never have entered her mind.

The bed was soft and he congratulated himself on having found a comfortable hotel. He was still half in his dream, which was a dream of Rebecca. He was dancing with her at the Parton Magna fête, in a hall strung up with flags, and her breath smelled of cider and she took his hand and laid it on her breast, under the tight bodice of her dress.

They stayed two nights at D’Erlanger’s Hotel and on the day in between set about their purchases, which reminded Harriet of those early times when they were buying seed and utensils for the farm and when she still believed in the possibility of their love.

Joseph’s passage to Nelson and Hokitika on the old Wallabi, which should have cost £4, had risen to £15 because of the clamour of people wanting to get aboard. There were no berths left on it; Joseph would have to sleep on deck, among the chicken coops ‘and pray for a fine night, sir, or else get a drenching’. But he knew that, despite the expense and his poor place on the ship, he was lucky. All over the town, men worked, trying to save up their fares for the steamboat. They worked as porters and carters, or set up in small enterprises, selling canvas or knives or grog, or fashioning sluice-boxes out of beech planks.

The Survival Stall was still there in the market, the live eels being split and sliced and packed in bladder wrack, but Joseph heard a bystander remark that the eel preserver didn’t need to cross the sea to the goldfields; the ‘Preservation’ was his gold. And Joseph understood how a whole new economy can spring up around gold and fortunes be made by those on the periphery of the diggings, and he thought how, in his entire life, he had never had anything to sell, only his mundane skills as a livestock auctioneer. But he told himself that in the time to come, he would sell his gold for more money than he and his father had ever earned in their lives. He would become the kind of man who inspired envy in other men and longing in women.

He packed a swag with tea and tobacco, ham, flour and sugar. He added two jars of the salted eel. He bought a billy-can, a tent, an axe and a box of nails, strong boots and two pairs of moleskin trousers. When he put on one of the pairs of the trousers, he imagined himself already at work in a wide gully, pegging out his claim. He spent a long time looking at the sluice-boxes or ‘cradles’ with their iron slats and their layer of canvas beneath. He loved the ingenuity of them, but they were heavy and cumbersome and Joseph thought that, when he arrived, he would make his own cradle out of wood and nails and fit it with a wheel, so that he could push it like a barrow along the beaches or through swamps or into the dark unending world of the bush. He’d already built a house with a stone chimney and windows that didn’t leak; he was surely capable of making a simple device for sifting earth?

But the animal she liked the look of, a chestnut gelding with a high-stepping trot, answered to the name of Billy. ‘You can change the name if you want,’ commented the stable-owner, ‘but he won’t know who in the world you’re talking to.’

Harriet smiled. She now saw that Sentinel was a portentous kind of name and she thought how, in her dreams, she made herself astonishingly grand and singular. ‘Billy,’ she repeated. ‘I’ll call him Billy if that’s his name.’

She led the horse into a muddy, fenced paddock and the stable-man helped her into the saddle, sitting astride with her skirts tucked round her, and she walked Billy on, holding the reins loosely and patting his neck so that he would start to feel comfortable with her. Then she shortened the reins and spurred him into a trot and despite his high step, his gait was easy and his mouth sensitive and obedient to the bit. Already, she could imagine the horse in a flowing gallop across the flats, the birds flying from the grass as he came on.

She bought Billy for less than the price of a passage on the Wallabi. She paid for him to be re-shod and said she would collect him the following day and ride him home. Then, she returned to D’Erlanger’s Hotel and wrote a letter to her father:

I have a horse and I shall keep reminding everybody that he is mine.

Except that I do not know who this ‘everybody’ might be. When Joseph has left me tomorrow and I return to the Cob House, I shall be alone with Lilian and the animals.

The Wallabi ploughed slowly northwards out of Lyttelton, towards the high winds of the Cook Strait. The ship smelled of coal and grease and the crowded deck was as noisy as any boat’s deck could be. It was crammed with men: ‘new chums’ like Joseph and ‘old returners’ – diggers who had been in Otago three years before and were going back because the colour drew them back, like a lover. Around and in between the groups of men, a company of hens in wicker cages kept up a tuneless serenade to the sky.

Joseph set himself to endure it. He sat on a wooden crate in the stern, with a view of the flagpole and the Red Duster whipped sideways by the wind and the wake of the ship, flowing backwards towards everything that he was leaving. He stared at his hands and the dirt in the cracks of them and then at his swag, to which he was already attached, and he kept tightening the straps that held it together. Around him, games of cards and drinking began and laughter, but Joseph remained aloof from all of this.

He thought about Harriet riding home and hoped the horse wouldn’t stumble or fall. At the quayside, as the Wallabi had begun to shudder and smoke in its readiness to depart, and its bell was rung, summoning the last passengers, Joseph had held Harriet to him – as he might have held a friend, closely, but with no passion – and she had looked at him with sadness. The look was not devoid of affection, but it was such as a mother gives to a fond child who has disappointed her. And then she asked: ‘Do you think that we shall see each other again?’

He kissed her cheek, the hard, tight skin of her cheek under its high cheekbone. He thought her question melodramatic. But he told her calmly that he would certainly come back. He told her to look at the map of New Zealand to see that he would not even be very far away, but only just on the other side of the mountains.

The bell was clamouring and it was time for Joseph to turn and walk on to the gangplank of the ship, but he searched for something else to say because he didn’t want to let the parting end like this, in a dishonest way, as if it what had never seemed final were suddenly afflicted with finality. He was tempted to make the promise that he’d sail back with his swag full of money and begin work on a new house . . . the new house of his imaginings in a sheltered valley where the winds wouldn’t reach. But, out of superstition, he said none of this and instead asked: ‘When I return, why don’t we meet at D’Erlanger’s Hotel? And I shall buy us a fine dinner.’

He hoped she would smile; he wanted to be left with this – the sweetness of her flawed smile – not her showy kind of sorrow. But her look didn’t alter as she nodded and replied: ‘Yes. Why not? A fine dinner. I shall give you back the gun.’

And then he was gone, and he stood and watched Harriet on the quayside as the moorings of the boat were untied and it began to move away through the water. He saw her waving to him, standing very tall and still.

A boy of fifteen or sixteen now came to sit down near to Joseph on the Wallabi’s deck. The boy took out a penny whistle from his jerkin pocket and began turning it over and over in his hands. He had no possessions that Joseph could see, only the whistle. His boots were worn and the jerkin frayed at the cuffs.

She found Dorothy and Edwin whitewashing the stables. Dorothy, who was wearing a pinafore and a frayed old straw hat, said to Harriet: ‘Why do we like white so much? Is it the blankness of it?’

Harriet and Dorothy looked at him and saw his face and arms covered with the chalky wash. ‘Oh, so you are,’ said Dorothy. ‘Do you like being white, or shall we put you in the tub?’

Dorothy’s fondness for picnics decreed that the white-washing would be ‘suspended’ and saddle bags packed with cold pigeons and cheese ‘and any bottle of wine that Toby will not notice is missing’ and that the three of them would ride to the river and have lunch sitting on the grass. ‘The dogs can come with us,’ she said. ‘They like to bite minnows out of the water.’

They let Billy rest, after his ride from Christchurch. Edwin combed the sweat from the horse’s neck and put a rug on his back and Harriet was reminded for a moment of the old tartan rug with which they’d covered Beauty.

Together, they led Billy into the stable and put feed into the manger. Edwin’s face had a powdery, ghostly look. Through the powder, a single tear snaked down his cheek. He wiped it away.

‘Papa said yesterday “the West Coast is a terrible madness”. But I don’t know what he means. Sometimes he says “there is a terrible madness in these sums of yours, Edwin”.’

‘Gold isn’t difficult,’ said Edwin. ‘You get a pan and fill it with mud and water and slither it around and everything falls out except the gold. That’s what Mama taught me.’

‘There is the same kind of point as there is in going to the toi-toi grass to call to Pare. For a hundred days there may be no one there, just as, for a hundred days there might be no gold in the pan. But on the hundred-and-first day . . . there she will be.’

They sat by the river and the sun shone on the water. The pigeons were tender and tasted of something earthy, like fungus or like damp dead wood. The wine Dorothy had stolen from Toby’s store was sweet and cold.

While Edwin played in the creek with the dogs, Mollie and Baby, Dorothy talked about what it could mean to find riches in the earth. She said: ‘I have no right and Toby has no right to criticise anybody for going to the goldfields. My father owns a tin mine and almost all of what we’ve been able to build here comes from that money . . . that tin money. Chance arranged it this way. But for the men who work in my father’s mine . . . for them, every day is hard. I have seen them in the cold English winters, standing up to their knees in that icy, reddish water. And I think that on the West Coast, in the swamps and in the gullies, everything will be very hard indeed.’

‘No, I know,’ said Dorothy. ‘Building your house out of cob must have been extraordinarily hard. But I wonder what made him go now, when there is so much work to be done on your farm?’

Harriet started to explain about the creek and Joseph’s fossicking for gold there. She said: ‘He began to dream about gold. He couldn’t let it go. And the things Joseph wants, he has to try to have them then and there and cannot wait. That seems to be the way he is.’

When Dorothy said that she understood this and that every human life hurtles too fast through time ‘with too much spinning off and being left behind for ever’ and how we fly this way and that trying to catch those spinning things, Harriet’s mind returned to the brown curl she’d seen in Joseph’s fly box, and the person to whom it belonged, whoever she was, the person who had been left behind.

She looked over at Dorothy, still wearing her ancient hat, with her legs sticking straight out from her muddy skirts and seemingly with no thought for elegance or vanity, and saw in her a confidante whom she thought would be silent and true. She took a breath and said: ‘Joseph fled away from England. There were his father’s debts, but it was not only these. I think there was something else. Something he never talks about.’

Dorothy picked up her wine glass. She was a woman who liked wine very much and who thought every single sip a marvellous pleasure. After a few moments had passed in silence and pleasurable sipping, she said: ‘I have never supposed that men have no secrets. I discovered a postcard in Toby’s dressing-case which said Fondest love from Scarborough. I couldn’t read the signature, the writing was too poor. But it was Maud or Mabel or some name like that. It gave my heart a jolt. But then I thought, what does it signify? We can’t pretend the lives of men begin or end when we marry them – just as ours do not either. All we can hope is that nothing too hurtful has been done.’

Dorothy’s wide face, in the shadow of the hat, looked at Harriet intently. ‘Then I imagine, in time, it will come to light, because most of what we think is buried away for always seldom is. But you should not create a myth of wrongdoing, Harriet. I am sure that Joseph Blackstone is a good man.’

Joseph was trying to sleep on the windy deck of the Wallabi. Near him, the boy with the whistle, whose name was Will Sefton, lay and slept with his head on a coil of rope. Now, Joseph could see the holes in the soles of Will’s boots. He took out of his swag an old woollen jacket and covered the boy with this. There was something about Will Sefton which reminded him of Rebecca’s brother, Gabriel, and, after gazing at him for a while, Joseph looked away.

Not far from where Joseph sat, in the shelter of the ship’s housing, two Chinese men were boiling rice over a tiny spirit lamp and the fragile blue flame of the lamp, which would have had a little warmth to it, soon began to tease and torture Joseph. He couldn’t take his eye from it. He wondered whether he might approach the men and ask to warm his hands. He would try to explain that this was all he wanted, that he wasn’t begging for rice, but only to warm his frozen hands, so that he could go to sleep.

The Chinese men were whispering in their language, which was like a language of percussion, Joseph thought, each with an instrument on which he sounded a strange and startling measure. Joseph listened and watched. He could smell the rice beginning to boil. Lit by the small flame, the expressions on the faces of the men seemed neither cheerful nor sad, but to have about them a strong degree of resignation, as though the world had pestered them – like a mosquito or like a fly – pestered them for so long that they could no longer be bothered to swat it away, but just let it settle quietly on them.

Joseph remembered Mrs Dinsdale referring to a Chinese family who ran a market garden nearby as ‘the Celestials’ and when asked why she had coined this name for them, saying: ‘Well, I did not coin it. It is a general term. John Chinaman has his head in the heavens, owing to the opium he smokes, so I suppose that is how it came about. For there is nothing else celestial about them, even though they believe their Emperor to be divine. They are quite filled with degradation, so I have heard tell. And I, for one, would certainly think twice before purchasing a lettuce from them. One would not be able to tell what might be lingering on the leaves.’

On the Wallabi, the two men whom Joseph was watching so intently seemed to have crept into visibility only as the darkness had come on. They were barefoot but warmly clad in padded coats. They surely had no berth on the ship and so must have been there on the deck all the time, but Joseph hadn’t noticed them. It was as if no one had noticed them. Yet now, there they were with their lamp and their hot food, hunched quietly together, while all around them men lay and drank or snored, with their backs turned.

Joseph began to wonder how, in the crowded and competitive world of the gold-diggings, the Chinese would survive. He saw in them some quality of patience, which he envied. He knew how ardently, with what breathless expectation, he was rushing towards gold, but he also believed that it was that very desire which would sustain him, through disappointment and cruel weather, and which would ensure that he persevered until his fortune had been secured.

And yet he also knew, from the hours and days that he had worked sifting mud at the edge of the creek, that gold-mining is pure drudgery: a drudgery of the body and of the mind. And so perhaps the miner who is patient and resigned and goes about each day with so small a portion of hope that it is almost no hope at all can ferret out from difficult ground, or even from ground abandoned or overlooked by the multitude, nuggets of the precious colour nobody else would ever have found.

Joseph kept watching as the Chinese stirred their rice. He didn’t move from where he was, only tried to warm his hands on his own body. He understood that even here, on the open deck under the stars, these people had fashioned a private world for themselves around the minute flame of the lamp and that they would resist any intrusion into it.

Joseph closed his eyes. The Wallabi was a coast-hugging boat and the seas wouldn’t be rough until they reached the strait. He tried to empty his mind of everything that he longed for and let the rise and fall of the steamer lull him to sleep. At the edge of his internal vision he saw something white moving like a waterfall or like the muslin curtains he had drawn around himself and Harriet in the bedroom at D’Erlanger’s Hotel.