The Colour

When she knocked on Dr Pettifer’s door, she was told by his wife that he was out delivering a baby. At first, Harriet said that she would wait for him, in the little low street, but then, suddenly afraid that a difference of half an hour’s delay might mean the difference between Lilian’s life and death, asked Dr Pettifer’s wife whether she might go to the house where the child was being born and catch him there.

She was directed to a shop, Parsons & Co., which sold tea and coffee, and told to ring the bell. She tied Billy to a post and stared in the shop window, and saw candles flickering on the counter and near it a trestle table on which was lying the scant remains of a meal, and she thought how the child about to be born might always remember this in his future life: eating his suppers by candlelight in the tiny store where his parents worked all day. She rang the bell, but nobody came. After ringing a second time, Harriet opened the door and went inside.

The smell of coffee was like the smell of a wood fire, she thought, because both spoke to the human mind of some pause in the onward rush of events, some parenthesis in which the body could be comfortable and still. And so – just for a moment – Harriet sat down on one of the chairs half pulled up to the table and breathed in the scent of the coffee beans, which were piled up in sacks all around the room, and let herself rest.

She knew that she was a trespasser in this house, and should have waited outside until someone answered the ringing of the bell, ‘but it seems’, she told herself calmly, ‘that I just did not do this, and I do not exactly know why’. And she considered for a moment the idea that her life might have been full of such small transgressions, which she had never brought to her own attention.

Now, she could hear, in the room adjacent to the coffee counter, a woman’s voice calling out: ‘Lucas, where are you?’ and then other voices consoling, urging, and the creak of a wooden bed and a fit of coughing and then again: ‘Lucas, let you come near.’

Harriet stood up and called softly: ‘Dr Pettifer?’ Yet she half expected that nobody would hear her and she also knew that she couldn’t go into the room where the labour was going on. She was a stranger who had no right to be here.

She sat down again and, to her own shame, picked up a piece of bread from a plate on the table and put it into her mouth. She reached for a pickled onion and ate this and then her hunger came roaring at her like a wolf and she was unable to stop herself from eating every single thing that had been left in front of her: bread, cheese, onions, shards of fatty ham, a fold of black treacle on a spoon. And all the while, as she ate, she could hear the voices next door and the coughing and the sudden moments of crying and calling out to Lucas and the movement of the wooden bed on the slab floor. And it was as though her hunger were in a race with the birth of the baby and if the baby were born too soon, then it wouldn’t be sated.

All urgency, Harriet realised, had somehow drained out of her mission to get the doctor to Lilian. It had been obliterated by her terrible desire to gobble food and she felt ashamed of every bite of everything that she took, but she went on eating until nothing remained on the plates, and then she wiped her mouth and looked at the clock on the wall above the sacks of coffee and felt the night assemble all around her, pressing on the windows and altering the colour of the candle-flames.

Lilian was lying as Harriet had left her, with her head wrapped in the towel and her body neat and straight in the bed. One arm was raised and resting on the pillow, however, and Lilian’s hand held up the darning egg, as though to demonstrate its usefulness or to show its marbled colours to the light. When Dr Pettifer took up the hand to feel for a pulse, the egg popped out of it and bounced on to the floor and Harriet saw the note she’d wrapped around it float down after it. As Harriet bent to retrieve the egg, Lilian opened one eye.

‘Lilian,’ said Harriet, leaning near. ‘Lil?’

‘She can’t hear you,’ said Dr Pettifer, who was now lowering Lilian’s arm and arranging it by the side of her body. ‘She’s dead as can be. I’d say she went two hours ago.’

‘She opened her eye . . .’

‘Both eyes normally open in death. Unless there is a little rheum present, so that the eyelid adheres – which we have, I expect, in her right eye, still. I would estimate that death occurred at eleven o’clock.’

Harriet remembered that it had been at this hour that the baby had been born in the back room of Parsons & Co., a boy, and that the father of the child had appeared in the shop, in search of grog, and found Harriet sitting at his table. He’d shown no surprise, as if, on this night of the birth of his son, he’d expected strangers to be waiting there. Nothing was said about the stolen food, but Harriet found herself explaining that her mother-in-law had been trying to build a wall out of sacks when she’d fallen over.

‘A wall of sacks?’

‘Filled with shingle and sand. To keep out the rain.’

‘Ah.’ Then the man smiled as his hand lighted on the grog flagon.

‘In New Zealand,’ he said, ‘you cannot keep out the rain.’

Now, Harriet stood up and looked down at Lilian. She stroked the hand that had held the egg. She thought of Lilian’s palm cross nailed to her room at Mrs Dinsdale’s and her white shawl laid out ready for the night. She said to Dr Pettifer: ‘If we had got here sooner, might you have been able to save her?’

But Dr Pettifer was already writing out the certificate of death and he was one of those self-important people who refused on principle to do two things – such as writing and talking – at the same time, and so he made no answer.

‘Christian name of the deceased?’ he snapped after a moment.

‘Lilian,’ replied Harriet.

‘Other names?’ he said with a long, exhausted sigh.

‘Lilian May,’ said Harriet, who had begun to unwind the towel from Lilian’s head. ‘Lilian May Blackstone.’

Harriet was told by Dr Pettifer that an undertaker would be sent from Rangiora ‘in a few days’. How many days he couldn’t say. And then he was gone, with his ether smell and his shabby coat and his tiredness, trotting away into the dark on his bay horse, and Harriet was left alone with Lilian.

She was glad that the heat-wave had passed. The cooler air of March would be kinder to the body. All she prayed was that the Cob House would endure and that the tin roof wouldn’t come crashing down upon Lilian as she lay and waited to be put into the ground.

Harriet fed the dog and made tea and she and Lady sat by Lilian’s side and the only sounds were the rattle of the teacup on its saucer and the grinding of the dog’s teeth on a worn bone.

Both Lilian’s eyes were closed now and her hair, in its wiry plait, was dry and smoothed back from her face. She looked as cheerful as she’d ever seemed. And Harriet remembered how, in the winter, she used to get into her bed very often and lie exactly like this, with her nose in the air, as though practising dying.

The night very slowly passed. Harriet kept vigil with a single lamp and Lady slept at her feet. Joseph was always on the edge of her thoughts and she knew that, although he seemed to be a man untouched by any strong emotion, he had tried to do his best for Lilian. And it was for Lilian, certainly, as much as for himself or for her or for any future they might have together, that Joseph was searching for gold.

Harriet didn’t know how Joseph would receive the news of his mother’s death. She thought he would be altered by it in ways that she couldn’t foresee. And so she understood that the news had to reach Joseph as soon as possible, wherever he was, and that the news would have to be carried by her, because who else was there to take it? As his wife, she owed him this.

When the morning came, Harriet pulled the sheet over Lilian’s face and went out to feed the animals. The sky was blue, but she could see clouds piling up on the southerly horizon and feel the wind rising again and smell the nearness of rain.

‘Poor woman,’ said Dorothy. Then she asked: ‘Was the coffin well made?’

Harriet shook her head. ‘I felt . . .’ she began, ‘that its sides were too thin. I was afraid that when they lifted it up, it was going to bend.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Dorothy. ‘I have heard just such a thing before, that the slabs they use are too insubstantial.’

‘But Lilian wasn’t heavy,’ Harriet went on. ‘I think that our life here had worn her out. She was carried safely into her grave.’

‘And I suppose you were the only mourner?’

‘Yes. But I managed to sing one hymn that Lilian liked: “Hold High the Fiery Banner”.’

Edwin, who had been in a corner of the parlour, writing a story about a Moa bird, now put down his pencil and asked suddenly: ‘What is bombazine?’

Harriet turned and looked at Edwin. She noticed that, in the shadowy room, Edwin’s eyes looked tired. She explained that bombazine was a kind of material, something between silk and worsted, of which mourning dresses were very often made.

Edwin said: ‘When you die and go to heaven, do you only have one suit of clothes for all eternity?’

‘Oh, of all the questions!’ said Dorothy. ‘But if children should die, I think that they would certainly have beautiful white robes and feathery wings.’

‘I don’t want white robes,’ said Edwin.

‘No?’ said Dorothy. ‘But then you’re not going to die. Not until you’re very, very old.’

‘Yes, I am,’ said Edwin. Then he sat down again at his story and began immediately writing: One day, the Moa looked around and saw that he was lonely . . . The two women glanced at each other and then they heard Edwin say: ‘I will ask if I can have the wings and not the robes.’

Dorothy got up and crossed the room to Edwin and put her arms round him. ‘Why do you say that you’re going to die, my darling?’ she asked. ‘What on earth has put that into your mind?’

Edwin didn’t look at his mother, but down at the drawing of the Moa he had made to illustrate his story. ‘Do you want to hear my story so far, Mama?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ said Dorothy, ‘I would very much like to hear your story. But first I want to know why you said that you were going to die.’

Edwin stared at his picture. He thought that perhaps the colouring he’d done was all wrong and that the Moa might not have been yellow and red, but a dull brown like the kiwi.

‘Edwin,’ said Dorothy, hugging him more tightly. ‘Answer me.’

‘The Moa wasn’t red and yellow, was it?’ he said.

‘I don’t know what colour it was,’ said Dorothy. ‘I want an answer to my question!’

Her voice had become cross, without Dorothy’s intending this. And this crossness brought tears to Edwin’s eyes, not tears for himself, but tears of sorrow for Pare who had vanished from his life. In his dreams, he saw Pare falling from a rock into a river and being swept away to her death, and in all of these dreams it seemed to him that she called to him to follow.

And now, in his waking life, Edwin Orchard believed that he would follow, at least in his mind, and that the calling of Pare would never stop until he reached her and that, to reach her, he would have to depart from his life here. He wouldn’t be able to say a word to his parents about it – except to try to find ways of warning them as he had just done – but quite soon he would have to leave them.

Dorothy was shaking Edwin now and tears had welled up in her eyes, too. ‘Edwin,’ she kept repeating, ‘tell me. Tell me. Tell me what you meant!’

Edwin knew that part of him wanted to follow Pare, but part of him wanted to stay here with Dorothy and Toby and the dogs and Janet’s blue blancmanges. His tears fell on to the picture of the Moa and the red and yellow merged together in places, to form a peculiar orange. He tried to push Dorothy away. ‘Don’t hold me so tight, Mama!’

‘I’ll hold you tight until you say what you meant. I’ll hold you and never let you go.’

‘I don’t know what I meant!’ Edwin blurted out at last.

‘I don’t believe you. Why would you have said such a thing for no reason?’

‘I only said I didn’t want those robes . . .’

‘But why is there a question of robes? Are you ill, Edwin? Is something happening that you haven’t told us?’

‘No! I just said that in case.’

‘In case? What d’you mean “in case”?’

‘In case I fell . . .’

‘Fell? Fell from where? From your pony?’

‘Fell anywhere. All I meant was, I’d like the wings by themselves and not those white things and not bombazine!’

Mother and son were both weeping now and clinging to each other and Harriet got up and slowly crossed the room to them and sat down opposite them.

‘Harriet,’ sobbed Dorothy, ‘what in the world has brought this into his mind?’

‘I think’, said Harriet gently, ‘that he may have had a dream. Am I right, Edwin? I think you may have been lying down somewhere comfortable, perhaps in your bed, or perhaps somewhere else like in the toi-toi grass, and then you went to sleep and had a dream about falling and dying. And now the dream won’t go away. Am I right?’

Edwin turned his head from where it was buried in Dorothy’s shoulder. His crying ceased. He said nothing, but only nodded and regarded Harriet gravely with his wide grey eyes.

‘Is that it?’ said Dorothy. ‘Is Harriet right? You had a dream?’

‘Yes,’ lied Edwin. ‘But now it’s gone.’

‘Perhaps there is no particular haste?’ suggested Dorothy. ‘For this kind of news does not alter, Toby.’

‘No,’ said Toby, ‘of course it does not “alter”, Doro. But when a man has lost his mother, he should be told about it. Harriet is perfectly right on that score. So. Our alternative is that we ride to Amberley, to the dray road, and talk to one of the foolhardy crew going west over the mountains and entrust a letter to a stranger of our choice – and hope that he, and the letter, may arrive at his destination in one piece.’

‘There is talk of a proper route being sought,’ said Dorothy. ‘Through one or other of the passes.’

‘Yes,’ said Toby, ‘but that does not help us at the moment, Doro, does it?’

‘No, I was merely remarking, there is to be a road one day.’

Toby looked critically at the end of his cigar, fearing it had gone out, but there was still a little glow on it and he concentrated on sucking this back into life while Dorothy said: ‘What I keep thinking about it is how, when any letter finds its way to Hokitika, it may also find its way to Joseph. For where is Joseph now, Toby? We do not know.’

‘No,’ said Toby. ‘We do not know. And I saw the goldfields in Otago and they were like a rabbit warren going on and on, with everywhere the same features and the same huts and shelters, and to find a man there would have been almost impossible. But Harriet might send a photograph – if she has one? And this could be passed around.’

Harriet replied that she had no photograph of Joseph, that he had not wanted a wedding picture, that the only likeness of him she had ever seen had been put into the ground with Lilian. And she saw in her mind’s eye the enormous distance that was already beginning to expand between Joseph and the news that was so necessary to him, so that it wasn’t difficult to imagine weeks and months going by, with a letter waiting somewhere, but never arriving in Joseph’s hand.

‘There is no certainty . . .’ she said.

Toby and Dorothy both looked up at her, expecting this sentence to continue somehow, but when it didn’t continue, Dorothy said: ‘Distance is so mighty here. Not so much in miles, but in the obstacles we must contend with. Isn’t that true, Toby?’

‘Yes, Doro, it is true,’ replied Toby. ‘If this were America, there would be a railroad through the passes by now. But there are too few of us here to build it. We are too isolated and alone.’

‘Now . . .’ she said.

Edwin was silent for a long time. Then he said: ‘Will you find Pare?’

Edwin’s candle rested on a small table and the flickering light cast enormous shadows on to the wall. Harriet began stroking Edwin’s head, but she suddenly saw the giant shadow of her hand as a strange, unwanted creature alighting on him and she asked herself whether the fondness she felt for Edwin Orchard was born only out of her own childlessness. She didn’t know the answer and thought that perhaps she never would know it because her childlessness would never have an end.

‘Is Pare with her tribe?’ she asked.

‘No,’ said Edwin. ‘She’s in a high-up place, on a ledge sort of thing. And underneath her there’s a waterfall going into a river.’

‘And where is this waterfall?’

‘I don’t know. She calls to me all the time, but I don’t want to go there because I don’t want to leave Mama and Papa and Mollie and Baby, so somebody has to find Pare and tell her to come back, and no one else knows about her except you.’

‘But how am I to find her?’ said Harriet. ‘How am I to know where to look?’

‘Look in the mountains,’ said Edwin. ‘You could ride there on Billy, couldn’t you? You told me you wanted to go into the mountains.’

‘Yes. I did.’

‘Please, Harriet. Just find the waterfall and call to her. Say “Pare, are you there?” Remember? “Pare, are you there?”’

Harriet was silent for a long while. Then she told Edwin that both Joseph and Pare were people who had to be found and that she would try to decide very soon how best this could be accomplished.

She was counting the tasks that awaited her when she crossed the southerly arm of the creek and turned into the valley where the Cob House stood. And it was then that she saw that what the drought had turned to dust, and the rain to mud, the rain and wind together had finally broken apart.

Harriet reined in Billy and he slowed to a walk and Lady began running ahead, barking at the strange things she saw: the sheets of red tin roofing resting in the tussock grass; the front door, blown almost to the creek’s edge, sticking into the mud like a meat cleaver; and all the yards of white calico lying across what remained of the walls and half covering the wild assembly of objects with which Harriet and Joseph had tried to begin their married life.

Harriet dismounted and walked slowly towards the peculiar scene.

In the still air, almost nothing moved, not even the calico, which was here and there stretched taut, attached to nails or snagged on thorns.

Staring at this, it came to Harriet Blackstone that what she was looking at was a painting of a life, a torn canvas which, at the moment of cutting, instead of holding its colours flat and fast to its surface, had spilled out what it had once depicted into three-dimensional space.

In escaping the confines of the painting that had held them together, objects had forgotten what purpose they were supposed to have. One of the iron beds stood on its end, as though offering itself as a perch for eagles. Pillows, lying here and there in the tussock, had the appearance of mushrooms. Broken shards of plates and cups decorated the ground like flowers.

Harriet remained a little way off. Dorothy Orchard had once said to her that men and women were destined always to make ‘a small world in the midst of a big one’ and she remembered this now and saw that it was exactly what she and Joseph had tried to do. They’d made their ‘little world’ for Lilian, with all the possessions she’d so laboriously and so insistently carted here from England, but also for themselves as well, because that was all they had known how to make. In a cave of ice, Harriet supposed, man would try to light a fire, carve chairs and tables from the walls. For what other means of living did he understand? What better thing could he aspire to if he wanted to survive?

Lady had returned to Harriet and was looking up at her now, for even the dog knew that some habitual arrangement of things had been turned on its head. Harriet stroked Lady’s neck to reassure her, but she asked herself what reassurance was there to be had on the empty flats? How could anything be put back together now? Struggling to save the Cob House with her sacks of stones had killed Lilian. Joseph was far away and knew nothing of what had happened and wouldn’t return – not even when winter came – unless he had filled his pockets with gold. She was alone.

A mocking voice in her head reminded Harriet that this was the very state after which she had yearned – to be alone in front of the mountains and under the sky. But now that she was face to face with her solitude she could only feel its enormity.

She nevertheless swept aside any thought of a cowardly return to Orchard House. She knew that if she went there, she would probably never leave, because her affection for Edwin Orchard was greater than her affection for her own husband. And she didn’t want to grow old as she would have grown old in England – as the caretaker of other people’s children. Why travel half the world to arrive at a place almost identical to the one you had left? Better to return to England, to her father, and care for him at least, than to become a cuckoo in the Orchards’ nest.

It was mid-afternoon and Harriet judged that there were four or five hours of light remaining. Before the night stole up on her, she must busy herself with inspecting what remained and seeing what shelter she might be able to contrive. She told herself that at such a moment, it was best to move from simple task to simple task, going slowly and keeping watch, like a mariner who prepares his small boat for the coming storm. Yet the mile upon mile of emptiness around her made her more afraid than she had ever expected and she found it difficult to move from the spot where she stood. She looked down at her feet, shod in dusty black boots, with the laces beginning to fray, and was struck by how small they appeared.