The Colour

The Maoris of Pare’s tribe saw a season of hunger approaching. They stared at their kūmara plantations, which were yellow and sickly, and they prayed to the spirits of the air to send rain. Some of them saw the spirits turning cartwheels in the flames of the sunset, but still no rain clouds appeared in the sky.

Pare sat alone in a corner of the pā that was seldom visited and looked out at the dusty earth and heard the fury of the wind and knew that she was responsible for the drought. She had offended the gods of the the natural world. She heard their anger in the trees, saw it in the cracks which began to split the furrows of the fields, felt it in her stomach and in her heart. They had already commanded her – or so she believed – to cease her journeys to Orchard House – and she’d done what they asked. But now she saw that this was not enough. It was as if the Maori gods understood that Pare’s love for Edwin Orchard was stronger than her love for her own people and they were determined to punish her. To make this punishment yet more bitter, they were visiting suffering upon the whole tribe.

Pare stared at her legs. She noticed they were much thinner than they had once been. It frightened her to know that her old sickness had returned. She felt intensely aware of the ever-moving, ever-changing nature of the world, realising that no minute of existence is identical to that which precedes it nor that which follows it. She saw herself being hurried faster and faster through time, towards her death.

The sun was going down and Pare could smell fires and roasting meat, but she had no appetite. Even in the sheltered place where she sat, the wind discovered her and blew her hair across her face. She held her arms out to the wind, to Tane, the fierce God of the Forest, and prayed to be forgiven. Then she began to ask herself what she could do to appease the gods. Her head burned with a fever and her thoughts were confused, as though insects were swarming inside her skull or the skull itself were turning to dust. The darkness settled quietly round her and she didn’t move.

In the dream, the tea-brown water rose and slopped about her naked legs and it was icy and she felt its intention, to pull her down among the weeds and the black eels. But she knew that it was not to drown her there, but only to make her search for something in the darkness of the mud. So she let herself be carried down and down into the depths of the cold river and her hands explored the oozing mud of the river-bottom. She didn’t know what she was looking for, yet she knew, even though her lungs were hurting and the eels were winding themselves around her arms, that she had to remain there until she found it.

Then, at last, there was something solid in her hand. Pare clutched it. She unwound the eels and pushed them away and swam to the surface and when she reached the surface, she saw that the sun had risen and was sparkling on the water and touching the leaves with silver and she knew that she had found the answer to her puzzle. In her hand lay a piece of greenstone.

The next day, Pare told her mother she was going on a journey to find greenstone for the gods. She was going to walk across the mountains to the place where the pākehā were digging for gold, for gold and greenstone often lie along the same lines in the earth. And when she had found the greenstone and offered it to the spirits, the rain would come and all the seasons revert to what they had once been and there would be no more drought or suffering.

Pare’s mother stared at her daughter. She touched her nose, her glossy hair. She reminded her that the mountains were treacherous and cold. Then she went and fetched her few precious things: a shark-toothed knife, a wooden pot filled with poroporo balm, a coloured blanket, a phial of red ochre, a paua shell and a coil of fishing line with ten hooks. Pare already had the small greenstone pendant, which had in turn been worn by her mother and her grandmother before that.

‘Take these,’ said Pare’s mother. ‘Break up the shell into little pieces that will resemble minnows in the water and tie them to your hooks, and with these you will catch large fish. And you will survive.’

Pare hung the greenstone pendant round her neck and wrapped the other objects into a bundle, which she would carry on her back. Then she swept a corner of the pā and shook out her flax mat and folded this into the bundle. Where her mat had lain she placed a small circle of stones. Before leaving, Pare arranged and rearranged these stones several times until each one seemed perfectly settled in the place where she’d put it. She knew that, in the cold silence of the mountains, she would dream of her life here in the pā and long to return to it. And, to comfort herself, she would imagine the stones, waiting for her, untouched and unmoving.

Harriet stood low down on the flat and looked up at her home. Silhouetted against the evening sun, she could see an unending swirl of dust blowing off the Cob House walls. Mixed with the dust was a speckling of dry, mashed grass and Harriet understood now why everybody had said that cob was ‘temporary’, ‘contingent’, ‘unstable’. With every gust of wind, the house was beginning to crumble.

She and Lilian tugged out a ladder from the cow barn. They went back and forth from the creek, filling cans with water and then Harriet climbed up the ladder and poured water down the walls and with their hands the women tried to tamp down the brittle cob and press new handfuls of mud into the places where gaps were appearing.

Harriet smiled. Less and less did Lilian dress herself in fine clothes or bonnets; she wore smocks now, and sacking aprons, and pushed her grey hair into a net under a crumpled linen hat to keep off the sun. She said that she was ‘getting quite attached to the pigs’ and even her struggles with the smoky range seemed to vex her less than they had done. Her bread became crustier, ‘more’, she said proudly, ‘as Roderick would have liked it’, and sometimes she and Harriet were so hungry after their day on the farm that they consumed an entire loaf, smeared with dripping, between them. ‘If only,’ Lilian said one evening, as she sat contentedly sewing, ‘there could be no return to winter.’

Harriet, who was working on her scrapbook, placing in it a shrivelled ear of wheat and a turquoise kingfisher feather, looked up at Lilian. She wondered whether this slow arrival of cheerfulness owed itself to Lilian’s hopes for Joseph’s expedition. Was her mother-in-law simply dreaming of the way their lives would alter when her son returned as a rich man? For even the fact that the Cob House was disintegrating did not seem to dismay her particularly. Perhaps poor Lilian felt so certain that a new dwelling – one more resembling the Orchards’ magnificent place – would be built at last that she was perfectly resigned to patching up the walls of the old cob shack for a little while. For they wouldn’t be there for very long. One winter? Or, at worst, one winter and one spring? Harriet supposed that Lilian comforted herself with a vision of polished floorboards, marble mantelpieces, carpets from Chengchow. And who was she to say, if Joseph was alive and working on the goldfields, Lilian might not be given them one day?

She discovered that almost every memory she had of him produced in her a feeling of disquiet. Though she had to work harder, she found life much easier without him. In her bed, she let Lady lie in the space where Joseph had been. In her dreams, Joseph and the odious Mr Melchior Gable became indistinguishable in her mind.

Yet, she also lay and wondered about her life. She hoped that something else awaited her, beyond the drudgery of the farm. Better that we never know, she wrote to her father, what lies beyond the next hill.

For the answer might come back ‘nothing’. And I confess, that having travelled across the world, I do not feel I would be content with that ‘nothing’. My habit of looking at the mountains has not gone away. They are so fine. I wish that I could paint a picture of them for you. And they contain a mystery: that is what I feel. And I ask myself: is the mystery they contain the mystery of my life?

She rode every day now. She thought Billy the nicest horse she’d ever encountered. His gallop was skittish, earnest, like a pony’s, but his heart and lungs were strong and he never seemed to tire. Harriet wished she could reward him with the grass of a green field, but she let him graze by the pond, where the tussock was still moist, and fed him carrots from her vegetable plot. She talked to him as she groomed him and he would sometimes turn his head and rest it against her back. She told him that the task of keeping all the animals alive was getting harder and harder as every day passed. Yet she knew she wasn’t unhappy. She told the horse this as well. She told him she was happier than she’d been for a long time.

‘Spiteful rain’, Lilian called it, a rain that whipped and beat at the faces of the two women as they struggled out to feed the hens and collect eggs for their supper. And, in its spite, the rain seemed intent upon completing what the drought had begun. The cob, made so brittle by the heat, now turned to mud. Holes appeared in the walls near the stone chimney. No sooner had the women patched the holes, with rags or paper or wood or whatever they had to hand, than they reappeared, and the rain came through and began pouring down the kitchen wall.

Harriet and Lilian asked themselves what Joseph would have done, had he been here, but they agreed that neither of them knew. Joseph had never been the kind of man who dreamed up ingenious solutions to things.

‘Roderick, on the contrary, was,’ said Lilian firmly. ‘Roderick was a veritable inventor because his mind had a scientific disposition. But Joseph didn’t inherit it, not that I can see. Joseph too often relies on the visions of others.’

Lilian’s head filled with imaginary solutions: walls of stone rising miraculously around the cob, to enclose it; a solid wooden frame attached to the cob somehow and totara planks nailed to the frame. But she knew that none of these materials was to hand and that they had no saw to cut planks nor any heavy hammer to break stones. And they were women, after all, Lilian Blackstone told herself. There was a limit to their strength.

Then, one night, she remembered a time of autumn floods in Norfolk and how Roderick had built a wall out of sacks of sand, to keep the water away from their door. She could see it so very clearly: Roddy patiently filling bag after bag and laying them one on top of the other, in a plaited kind of pattern, almost up to window level. Hours and hours of arduous work, but entirely successful because all her carpets had been saved and hers was the only door-mat that had remained dry in Parton Magna.

‘Sacks!’ she announced the next morning to Harriet. ‘Do we not have very many empty flour sacks and potato sacks and sacks of all kinds and sizes? We shall fill these with sand and press them up against the wall on the chimney side, as high as we can possibly go.’

Harriet seldom went to that place. It felt to her like a landscape of the dead, as though the mounds were graves, as though she would find bones in the earth. What she saw there was Joseph’s secrecy of soul.

She would do it herself, Lilian decided. She would save the Cob House. She would begin the next morning, before Harriet was awake. If the rain had let up, then good, the task would be almost enjoyable, but if it hadn’t, she would simply get a soaking and not care to mind about it. She would pretend she was a Foot Guard at the Battle of Waterloo. She would endure until victory had been won.

The morning dawned dry but very cold. It was difficult to imagine the hot days that had passed. Lilian wrapped a scarf round her neck and put on her linen hat and took a barrow and a shovel and a pile of sacks down to the creek’s edge as the sun came up.

She began work. The rain had loosened the shingle mounds, but she knew that this stony sludge was heavier than sand. She decided to hang each sack on to the front of the barrow by two nails, counteracting its growing weight by stones laid in the back of the cart. When the sack was full enough, she heaved it backwards into the barrow. This was scientific, she thought proudly. This was a system.

She returned to the Cob House towards eight o’clock to eat porridge with Harriet, telling her she had been walking out on the flats in the fine morning. She had filled five sacks. Up and down her spine ran a shiver of pain, but she didn’t mention this. As she poured milk on her porridge, she found herself wishing she had the bones of the young girl she’d once been, who had walked on her hands five times round the nursery. This was how she had to think of herself, she decided, part Foot Guard and part ten-year-old girl with her toes pointed towards the ceiling and her white drawers falling backwards down her legs.

She set off again, as though to continue her walk, knowing Harriet would be occupied with the animals all morning. She hoped the pain in her back would diminish soon, for now she had to push the barrow uphill to the house and lay the filled sacks round the chimney in a careful pattern, just as Roderick had laid them round the door at Parton Magna. She allowed herself to imagine that, when Joseph returned, Harriet would tell him that she, Lilian, had saved the house single-handed with her fine ‘sack artifice’ and there would be no day when it was not gazed upon and admired.

Pushing the barrow was ‘terrible, quite terrible’ and, with each difficult step, Lilian cursed the house for being so far away from where it should have stood. But she arrived at last and wheeled the sacks round to the chimney, where she saw some creature – a mouse or a rat – scuttle out of one of the holes in the cob. My remedy, she thought, has come not a moment too soon.

Once she had leaned for a moment against the wall and caught her breath and wiped her face, she began hauling the sacks out. But she found she couldn’t lay them in a sensible pattern, as Roddy had done, she just had to let them fall in a heap, then push and kick them into position. And when she’d laid them she saw that the distance between them and the worst of the holes was colossal. Colossal. The Cob House had always seemed so small. She remembered that snow had almost smothered it in one night. But now, Lilian could swear that it had grown taller. The wall dwarfed her and her labours. But she told herself that that was how life was arranged: things made you small. What you had to do was fight against insignificance.

Nor did she really notice when the rain began to fall once more. She just kept on until – from one moment to the next – she felt that she could go on no more. She let her shovel fall. She told herself that in a while she would wheel her second – or was it her third? – barrow-load of filled sacks up to the house and continue the ‘wall’ she’d begun. But now, she felt herself fall into a kind of daze. It was like no daze into which she had ever fallen before and one part of Lilian’s mind was fascinated by its strangeness. She thought she would sit down, exactly where she was, between two of Joseph’s shingle heaps, and think about what kind of daze it could be.

Harriet knelt by Lilian and felt a faint pulse. She saw the barrow half filled with sacks. Sorrow for Lilian made her utter a little cry. She pulled Lilian into her arms and stood up and laid her gently on the barrow.

Harriet undressed Lilian and dried her and wrapped her head in a towel and put her favourite flannel nightgown on her. All the while, she was trying to decide what she should do: stay with her and nurse her herself, or ride to Rangiora for Doctor Pettifer before night came on.

She laid Lilian in her bed and covered her with as many blankets as she could find. She kept patting her hand and her cheek and saying her name, but Lilian didn’t open her eyes. Outside, Harriet could see the light of afternoon beginning to wane.

She stood up. She wrote a note to Lilian: Gone to Rangiora for doctor. Then she found Lilian’s favourite darning egg and wrapped the note around this and pressed it into Lilian’s hand. She told Lady to stay and went running out to find Billy.

She was in a furnace. She couldn’t see any flames, but they were there, she could feel them, they were all around her and in her and the heat of them was greater than any heat she had ever known. She was in a furnace, wearing a helmet made of iron: she was in hell.

She tried to move her hand and found that she could move it and thought that if she could move her hand, then she might be able to climb out of hell and ascend to heaven by some light and beautiful ladder made of muslin. So she reached up and saw that she had arrived in a familiar room.

She would have recognised it anywhere: it was her room. She couldn’t remember the name of the place where this room was, but she knew it was hers. There was a small window, where the sun came in between chintz curtains, and under the window an oak chest-of-drawers with, arranged very neatly on it, a selection of photographs in cherrywood frames.

The room was papered with a yellow striped wallpaper. On a wash-stand stood a china jug and bowl, made by Paines of Stafford. And next to the jug and bowl was a glass vase of flowers and Lilian could smell these flowers and imagine the place they’d come from, which was a green meadow.

It looked tidy enough. In the shadowy part of it, she could recognise the familiar wardrobe, with, carefully folded on its top, the tartan rug she placed on the bed in winter. But Lilian didn’t think that it was winter now, or summer either, now she came to think of it, because there was no burning heat in the room of the kind that she’d felt a moment ago. No. The room was, in fact, exactly as she liked it to be, not cold, not too warm. And so Lilian let her hand fall back on to the pillow. She could rest now, she told herself. She was in her room in England and it was springtime.