The Colour

He’d already glimpsed the shine of the blue clay in Shaft 8 and had begun to feel the familiar yet futile resurgence of hope that always came when the clay bottom was reached. Then, he heard the roar of the water. He lifted his head. He’d just put a foot on to his rickety ladder when the flood arrived at the lip of the shaft. He fell back into the hole and the water came drenching down on him.

He grabbed the ladder and gripped it and climbed up and got his head out into the air, and he heard screaming all around him. Then the white waves broke against Joseph’s head, as against a stone, and he was hurled backwards into the shaft.

Again, he struggled to find the ladder and held it as the freezing water rose around him. He felt his feet leave the ground, but now, he forced his body down, taking gulps of air as and when he could, knowing that being below ground in the mine-shaft had saved him from being taken by the flood. For the pace of the river was like nothing that he’d ever seen. Joseph understood that any man standing out in the open would have been knocked down and whirled away in the freezing eddies of the fresh.

The water was so cold, it was as though Joseph were being packed in ice. But he knew he had to remain in the hole until the water began to pool and calm. He knew he was lucky that this particular shaft was near the back of his claim, furthest from the river, and when he came up for air again he could see that he was only a few feet from ground that was still dry under the manuka scrub.

When he surfaced once more, he could see tents and huts being crumpled and broken apart and sailing out on to the water, and one of these was his tent, with everything that he possessed, including his gun and his cradle and his cup of gold given to him by Harriet and the precious dust he’d found long ago at the old creek.

As he watched his tent disappear, Joseph thought how, in moments, the fresh would arrive at the Scots’ claim and come down upon Hamish McConnell and all his fancy machinery and upon Will Sefton. And the thought that Will might drown was, despite all that had happened, as wistful a thing as Joseph could contemplate and he imagined Will’s penny whistle floating out on the tide like a miniature raft, staying afloat for a long time, bobbing on the waves until at last it was swamped and gone.

All this while, as he hung on in the freezing shaft, Joseph gave no thought to Harriet. Perhaps, some part of him knew that the fresh must have come down from the mountains high up in the Styx Valley, where she was working her shingle beach, but it was as though he imagined that its true force had been unleashed only here, at Kokatahi, and that all the deaths would occur here and at Kaniere, and they would be miners’ deaths, the deaths of men, of old returners and new chums; and all the rest of the indifferent world would be spared, as it had been spared the days that he’d suffered here.

It was only some time later, when he could feel his blood begin to go cold in his veins and understood that he could die in the water and would have to try soon to reach the lip of dry ground, it was only then, when he had to act to save himself, that Joseph realised the full and fearful consequence to him of what had happened: Harriet and all the gold might also be drowned and gone. Her miraculous find – the only thing which had kept him from going mad with rage and disappointment – might now have been taken from him.

It was almost certainly his fury at this, pumping energy to his heart, bringing a sudden, murderous strength to his arms, that enabled Joseph to pull himself out of the shaft and claw his way on his hands and knees through the surging water to the manuka strand. He clasped a limb of the prickly scrub, knew it was tough and wouldn’t snap, threw himself forward into the bushes, immune to cuts and scratches, and lay where he fell, among the thorny leaves.

After a while, he stood up. He was trembling with shock and cold and with the horror of everything around him and the dread of everything that was to come. He saw that it was no longer raining and that a cold sun glimmered on the river, moving in its new and lethal course. He saw that nothing remained of the mounds of wash-dirt that had lined the water’s edge and that not one tent or hut had been left standing.

If he’d been able to make a fire to warm himself, Joseph might have tried to trek up-river, to where Harriet had pitched her tent. But he had nothing. And he knew that he could die of his drenching in the fresh if he let the cold night come on.

He took off his heavy, soaking shirt and tried to dry his neck and arms with grass. Then he began to walk in the direction of the McConnell claim and the distant shelter of Hokitika.

The path had gone. Joseph had to make his way over and around boulders, through scrub, cling precariously to trees to stop himself from slipping down into the surging water. Ahead of him, other survivors of the fresh were making this same long, difficult, melancholy journey. He saw some of the miners clinging to each other, almost as lovers cling, and it occurred to him now that men he’d thought crude and vexing at Kokatahi had perhaps been stoical and good-humoured and that he could have made friends here – but for Will Sefton – he could have become part of some camaraderie and got drunk with these people and felt less alone. But none of this signified now. They were all headed back to Hokitika. The Canterbury Government would have to authorise some assistance . . .

Joseph saw from a distance that McConnell’s horse-whim was still standing as well as two or three tents behind. But the river now ran only a few feet from them and most of the Brenner–McConnell claim was under water and there was no sign of any miner choosing to remain.

Nevertheless, when Joseph arrived there, he stood for a moment on the mud – on the very soil that had brought Hamish McConnell and his partner so much good fortune – and wondered if McConnell was still alive and would yet live to inhabit his castle in Scotland.

And he asked himself what the epitaphs of the Gold Rush would be and what would come after and how the country would be changed and who would eventually turn out to be the winners and losers. But he had no answers. All he could see and feel was the suffering that gold had brought upon the miners of Kokatahi. And although the idea of McConnell’s grand establishment had once made him half mad with envy, now he hoped that the man would get it after all and live in it like an aristocrat and spit in the eye of anyone who looked down on him, but yet remember to his dying day that he’d got his whole fortune by fossicking in the earth. For if McConnell was beaten, what hope was there for him or for any of the others?

He trudged on. He saw the sun getting low in the sky and dreaded to be overtaken by the dark. As he neared Kaniere, he saw a body washed up on the wide bank. A little way from it, stood a cluster of gulls and Joseph stopped and stared at them. He shouted out, trying to frighten the birds away, but they wouldn’t be moved. They were waiting for the moment when they would begin their feast. So now, like a madman, flapping his soaking shirt and screaming in just the way he’d screamed so often as a boy, Joseph ran at the gulls, and they hopped away from him over the mud and lazily took off, but only to fly in circles above him. Soon enough, he knew, they would land again.

He went to the body and turned it, half afraid it would be McConnell’s body, but it was a man he didn’t know, and the man had a strange smile on his face, as though he had just caught his first beautiful glimpse of the colour on his claim. And Joseph felt that this smile was one of the most terrible things he’d seen in all this long, terrible time. Barely aware of what he was doing, he began to wrap the man’s head in his wet shirt. He bound it tight.

He’d been billeted in one of the shanties that lined the Hokitika wharves. A widow, Ernestine Boyd, had taken him in, along with two other survivors, and handed out to them her late husband’s patched and mended clothes and given them what she had to eat, which was the sweet potato in its crimson gravy, and let them wrap themselves in the blankets from her bed, which were frayed and worn.

As she handed out the food, one of the other men said: ‘Shall we toss a coin for who keeps Ernestine warm tonight, now that her covers are all gone?’ The man was in his twenties, and Joseph looked at him and saw him wink at his companion and saw the widow Ernestine smile at them both and so he thought that, when they’d eaten their fill of the kūmara, he would be left alone to sleep by the fire.

He’d encountered no one that he knew in Hokitika. The Customs House had been turned into a morgue. Volunteers had brought bodies down from Kaniere for as long as the daylight lasted. Joseph thought that he should go into the morgue, to see whether Will or Harriet was laid out there among the drowned, but he was so tired now and felt so ill that he couldn’t go near the morgue, not in this frozen night, not until he’d rested and begun to get everything straight in his head . . .

What could he do and where could he go if Harriet were dead and there was no gold after all because the river had flooded the shingle bank and swept the gold away? And he thought of everything that he’d lost: his tent and most of his tools, all his money and his wallet that had been precious to him, his gun, his wash-box, the fishing rod Will had left, his stores, his grog, his cans and kettle, his blankets, his clothes that Harriet had washed, his pipe and his cup of gold and all that he’d brought with him from his brief time in the Cob House. He had nothing now. He was wearing a dead man’s mothballed rags. He had difficulty keeping down a spoonful of sweet potato. He was finished.

Ernestine Boyd took his plate away. Joseph saw that she was good-looking in a small way, with ample breasts and the vestige of a dimple in her cheek. ‘You sleep now,’ she said. ‘In the morning, I’ll get us some eggs and a handful of tea leaves. Then, you’ll feel more like a man.’

He heard the younger miners giggle, but didn’t care, didn’t pay them any heed, asked the widow to bank up the fire because the cold wouldn’t leave him, just wouldn’t go from his bones, and he didn’t want to wake up beside a dead fire, and she did as he asked and while she was fetching in logs Joseph raised his head and looked out of the small window and heard the sound of the sea.

She propped herself on her elbows. The fire was still bright, and Harriet noticed that the pieces of wood had been laid in a square, symmetrical pattern, like a trellis. And the fire seemed to burn like this, obediently, with hardly any alteration to its original design.

Her fever had cooled. She lifted the blankets she was wrapped in and saw that she was wearing Pao Yi’s clothes. They were grey and crumpled and smelled of her own sweat, but also of something strange, like incense. She sat up and stared at her white feet, coming out of the ends of the cotton trousers. She looked around to see where her skirts and chemise might be, but there was no sign of them. She had a sudden vision of pegging washing on a line near the Cob House and watching Joseph’s shirts billowing in the wind and knowing at the time that she felt no tenderness towards any clothes of his. Love, she thought, can be measured by what we feel for items of laundry.

In the daylight that was coming through the sacking at the door, Harriet let her eye wander around the hut, trying to read, from the objects she could see, something about the solitary life of the man who had saved her.

There was a black earthenware pot, which probably contained water, and an assembly of cooking pans and a wire sieve, hanging from nails driven into the walls. There were sacks of rice and flour and a jar of oil and a stone pestle and mortar. There was a dilapidated wicker trunk, which might have contained clothes or bedding. On top of the trunk were some thick sheets of yellowed paper, tied with ribbon into a worn leather binder.

On the near wall, where the hut had been lodged against the rock of the hillside, a rough wooden shelf had been put up and on this little shelf was a tablet, also made of wood and inscribed with Chinese characters. Some stubs of candle lay near the tablet and behind these, leaning against the stone, were four faded water-colour pictures of an elderly man and woman and of a young woman and a child. And Harriet understood that this was Pao Yi’s shrine to his real life, to his life on the lake, to the people he’d left and to whom he would one day return.

She lay down again. She found that she felt a kind of instantaneous attachment to the strangers in these watercolours, as though she had once known them, or as though they were here in some unselfish way to keep her company. And, more than this, she felt, in this low, dark place, that a kind of deep, indescribable tranquillity was present. And she thought that she would just lie here and not move and let everything quieten all around her and remain still. She thought that the tomorrow of her life would be harsh and lonely and long and that it could wait for her, wait a day or more than a day, wait till the river had fallen . . .

She felt sleepy, but she didn’t want to close her eyes because every moment that passed seemed to possess an unusual intensity, as though it wished to draw her attention to its own uniqueness. She tried to recollect whether she had ever before felt as she did now and it seemed to her that, in thirty-five years, consciousness had never presented itself to her in precisely this way, so that the texture, colour, smell and feel of things all combined to distil her mind and body to a perfect sensation of being.

After a while, after a lapse of time which might have been of long or short duration, Harriet couldn’t say, she heard Pao Yi taking off his boots at the door to the hut, so she lay down and pretended to sleep, pretended to be as helpless as she’d been in her fever, so that she could lie there and watch him as he moved about the hut. She thought it was still morning, but that Pao Yi might have been working since dawn in the garden and that he would be hungry. He would lay more wood on the square fire and prepare some food. When the food was ready, he would offer some to her and the taste of it would be different from any food she had ever eaten.

She heard him come quietly into the hut and close the door. She heard him fill a billy-can with water and drink. Then, it was as if he were no longer in the hut, so soundless did everything become, but when she opened her eyes again, she saw him standing in front of the shelf, where the tablet and the watercolours were propped up against the stone, and he was staring at them without moving, without seeming to blink or alter by any fraction the position of his head. But she knew that he was talking silently to the pictures, talking and then waiting, as if for an answer, always without moving or altering his gaze, then starting to talk again. And she wondered whether, in his solitary life at the edge of the Styx Valley, he was tormented by his loss of these people and by homesickness for his village and his boat and his lake.

So absorbed did Pao Yi seem to be in his conversation that Harriet continued to stare at him, believing him to be unaware of her, of her intrusive gaze, but suddenly, without warning, he turned his head and looked down at her, as though he’d been aware of her watching him all the time. And there was a new intensity to his look. It was as if he had returned from far away and brought the power of that far-away place back with him and it was now visible in his eyes.

Harriet lowered her gaze. She could feel the agitation of her heart. And as the seconds passed and she didn’t dare to move and Pao Yi didn’t move, she understood that what she wanted was for him to touch her.

Once she had allowed herself to admit this to herself, there was nothing but it and it alone in her mind and she thought that if he didn’t touch her, if he was indifferent to her or couldn’t see that this was what she wanted, her longing for his touch would only increase and increase. And yet she knew that she could say nothing, do nothing. She could only remain where she was, with her face turned away from him, but in her mind, with her will that had always been so strong, she began to call him to her.

She could see the firelight flickering on the slab wall of the hut and hear the river rushing onwards in its altered course and yet feel the suspension of time, as though the coil of a clock-spring had been wound to tightness and held there and prevented from breaking free.

She didn’t hear him move. She thought that he was still standing exactly where he’d been, in front of the faded pictures. But then she knew, from the warmth and scent of him, that he was beside her and she lifted her head and looked at him. She was reminded how absolute was the sadness of his expression, yet she now saw that the curve of his mouth was sensual and beautiful beyond any other that she’d seen, and she was unable to stop herself from reaching out, hesitantly, like a blind person trying to find her way, and touching his lips with her fingers.

Even now, while she touched his mouth and he held her gaze as intently as he had held the gaze of his family a moment or two ago, Harriet was terrified that he would suddenly pull away from her, as though this moment had somehow happened by mistake, by some crude misunderstanding, and he would act to bring it to a swift and terrible close. But Pao Yi didn’t pull away. He took Harriet’s outstretched wrist in his hand and crushed her palm against his lips and kissed it.

After some moments, he relinquished her hand and laid it down on her breast. Then he folded back her coverings and looked at her lying there, dressed in his own clothes, and he bent over her and took her foot in both his hands. He caressed the foot, seeming to examine every tender inch of it and then he moved very gradually towards it, holding her leg aloft for a moment, like a dancer’s leg, and then reaching down and taking out his sex, which was erect, and then bending her knee and bringing her leg down until her foot touched his penis and then starting to rub himself against her foot. And now Harriet saw the habitual sadness of his face transformed by an expression of pure wonder.

The feel of his heavy sex against her instep, the flagrant yet poignant intimacy of these gestures, made Harriet gasp. No moment of her life had appeared to her as astonishing or as exquisite or as overflowing with promise as this one. And it seemed to her that for all the time she’d been alive, desire had lain asleep in her and never stirred, so that she’d believed she would never feel it and would go through into middle age and old age never understanding what it could be.

Thirty shillings each they were given, the miners who had survived at Kokatahi and Kaniere – the thirty shillings which their claims had cost them, no less and no more. A newspaper article was posted on the door of the warden’s office, telling the claimants that the generosity of the Canterbury Government ‘had no precedent or equal on the goldfields’.

So they queued obediently at the warden’s office and took the money and wondered how long it would last. They queued again for a distribution of sheepskins that smelled of disinfectant and for tins of condensed milk, discovered in the back room of a grocery store.

Joseph stayed on with Ernestine Boyd, trying to swallow the poor meals she made, trying to gather his strength so that he could make the journey up the river to look for Harriet and her gold.

But when he contemplated the long trek back up the Kokatahi Valley, Joseph felt himself become dizzy and weak. He knew that he was a man at the end of his resources. He longed to clamber on to a ship and fall asleep on some soft, narrow bunk and not wake till the ship arrived in England. The possibility that he would never get there, never be able to make amends with the Millwards, never smell the wild flowers on Parton Green, burdened his mind so intolerably, it was as if he’d never ever had any wish but this – to arrive home in Norfolk. It was as if the man who had bought land on the Okuku and felt so optimistic about his farm were someone else, not him, someone blind and hasty and deluded whom he no longer talked to, no longer recognised.

Ernestine Boyd offered to cut his hair, which had grown straggly and long, but he refused. He wanted to remain as he was, cast out from normality and happiness, until he reached home.

Joseph thought he could see, in the flat, violet darkness of the sky, the approach of snow. So he understood that he was in a race with the weather. He might make his way up to Harriet’s camp and then be trapped by snow far up the valley, unable to get back to Hokitika. And he knew, in the weak state he was in, that he wouldn’t survive a winter in some makeshift shelter. He would just lay down his head and die. He would die like the cow, Beauty, without making a sound.

The river had fallen. Washed up on the banks, from Kaniere to Kokatahi, Joseph saw the familiar detritus of the diggings: slabs and wheels, torn tents, rusted buckets and chains, broken picks and shovels, and in one place, a peculiar isthmus of grey and brown rags, strung out into the shallows. Gulls squealed and bickered in the cold air.

Joseph dreaded to discover bodies. He saw rats tearing some carcass to pieces and turned his head away. He missed his gun. He felt too light, too insubstantial without the miner’s paraphernalia he used to carry. He tore a stick from the bush to use as a staff and thought how, wearing the disinfected sheepskin around his shoulders and with his wild hair and beard, he must look like some mad prophet of the wilderness.

When he came to the spot where his tent used to be, he sat down on the muddy grass and drank from the river. Water and milk kept him alive these days. The very thought of bacon or mutton made his flesh creep. Sometimes, in the shanty in Hokitika, he’d chewed bread or eaten the suet dumplings Mrs Boyd had set out in a plate of thin gravy, but even these he’d found difficult to swallow. He would have liked to drink beer, frothy and strong, but had no money for beer, knew he had to save as much as he could of the thirty shillings if he was to have any chance of a passage home.

He stood up and walked on. Now, he was on new territory, where he’d never before set foot, and he felt a quietness fall on the landscape, as though, at Kokatahi, the noise of the mine had still remained behind after everything had been swept away, but that here, beyond it, where no diggings had ever been started, silence returned because everything had persisted in its wild and sequestered state. He saw kingfishers darting over the water and a heron standing motionless on a rock. The grey density of the sky began to lift and a bolt of sunlight fell on to the narrow path.

Joseph knew that, at other moments in his life, he would have been cheered by the sight of these things, but it was as though nothing could cheer him now, nothing in New Zealand, nothing that Nature or Man could contrive here. All he wanted was to sail away.

He made very slow progress up the valley, leaning more and more on the stick. He kept searching the sky, wondering if snow was beginning to fall. He didn’t know how many hours he had walked when he lifted his head once more and saw, across the river, above the new line of the deep water, the Chinaman’s vegetable garden.

Joseph stopped. No snow was falling. The sun was, in fact, still shining, and Joseph stared at the startling colours of the planting and thought how, after all, what had been grown here might be the kind of food he could eat – food you could swallow when life took your appetite away. And he felt, for the first time, that his rage against Scurvy Jenny had been brutish and unnecessary, a shameful corollary to his enslavement to Will Sefton, a kind of madness.

He remembered that those Chinese he’d encountered – like the men he’d observed on the Wallabi – had all manifested a kind of quiet resignation, as though they’d understood better than anyone else how bitterly hard it is to survive in the world and rise up in it to any degree, and so decided to put their trust and their energies into small things and dream no grandiose dreams and even be content to fossick patiently through stray corners of earth left behind by others who had moved on.

He found that he envied them their ability to do this. He saw how his own head had always and ever been roaring with schemes and desires and, even now, wouldn’t let him rest. He dreaded to live his whole life like this, burning with unsatisfied longing. He looked over to the vegetable plot and understood another thing: that Scurvy Jenny no longer had any customers for his vegetables now that the diggings had gone, and yet the plot appeared newly hoed and weeded, as if Chen were indifferent to customers, as if the garden itself were what counted and nothing else were of any importance to him. And Joseph thought: This is the state to which I shall aspire, where what is important to me is already mine.

He walked on. He knew that he couldn’t be far from the strand of shingle where Harriet had found the colour. But he dreaded to arrive there now, dreaded what he was going to find. He faltered on the path, his breathing laboured, the sheepskin beginning to make him sweat and itch.

Again, he looked up at the sky, which was clearing all the while. And he wondered whether he wasn’t searching, now, for the snow clouds, looking for a reason to turn back. But the sky only looked pitilessly down. For a moment, Joseph remembered Lilian, standing on the flats, staring up at the rainbow, and he thought how long it was since anybody had said his name.

The tent leaned at a precarious angle, but still stood at the back of the beach. Nothing moved. Joseph held on to his staff like an old man and stared stupidly at the scene before him, trying, without moving nearer, to deduce what it had to say to him. He felt petrified. He opened his mouth to say the name ‘Harriet’, but he couldn’t utter it. And it was then that he remembered the dog, Lady. If the dog had been alive, she would have heard his approach and begun barking, but there was no sound at all, only the low, conversational noise of the river.

He forced himself to move forward again. He noticed a ring of blackened stones where a fire had once been made. He saw that the river had risen to within a few feet of the tent and then receded, leaving a flat shelf of mud on which there was no human footprint, but only lines of little arrow-like markings, where birds had trod.

So now at last he dared to approach the tent. He pushed it with his hands and it fell sideways, pulling on one rope. He lifted the canvas away and saw a careful huddle of familiar things. In the centre was the red blanket, folded in two on the flax mat, which looked clean and dry. Lying on the mat was the little gun he had given Harriet at D’Erlanger’s Hotel. Near this was Harriet’s knapsack and the long string which she sometimes used to tie Lady to a post or tree. There was a piece of ham gone mouldy in a muslin pouch, where a fly was crawling, and a careful arrangement of dry food in small, frayed sacks.

Joseph squatted down and touched the blanket. That Harriet had been here alone, existing in this minute and tidy way, touched him to some degree, but his mind danced about and wouldn’t remain fixed on her, but only kept insisting that the gold was here somewhere and that it was the gold that mattered.

He began to sift through her few possessions. She was dead, he told himself. The river had taken her. Harriet Blackstone was dead and gone, so all that remained here was his by right. He hurled away the pouch of ham. He emptied out the sacks of flour and sugar. He told himself that if he’d known Harriet better, he would have had a better idea of where her gold was hidden. Yet he hadn’t wanted to know her better. Since the death of Rebecca, he hadn’t wanted to know anybody at all.

He moved round the little encampment on all fours, like a scavenging wolf. He moved in circles, exploring the ground. He lifted up each stone blackened by the fire. He dug down beneath them with his hands.

Joseph sat on the red blanket and pulled it round him. He wondered whether, if a man longs ardently enough for death, death obligingly arrives. Then he reached out idly, to touch a flat stone, to feel the continuing reality of the earth, and he heard the stone scrape against something metal. He lifted up the stone and saw buried underneath it, deep down in the mud, a tin cup full of the colour.

Joseph threw off the scarlet blanket and spread it out and heaped the golden grains into the middle of it and gathered them up into his hands and let them fall again and then laid his cheek down on them. He saw his future come towards him. He saw the dawn coming up on the beech woods at Parton Magna. He saw that he was going to stay alive.

He pressed every last grain and fleck of gold into the empty sugar bag and then rolled it up in the blanket. He tucked the small gun into the waistband of his trousers. He scooped up a handful of sugar and ate it.

He looked up at the sky and saw that the day was advancing and that dusk would overtake him if he didn’t begin his homeward journey now. So he stood up and rinsed his hands in the river and then he turned and began to walk away.

When he drew parallel once again to Chen’s garden, he stopped because he felt hungry for the first time in a long while. He wondered whether he could find some safe crossing over the river. He imagined the iron-fresh taste of spinach leaves. But he could see that the water was still deep and the current swift. No crossing would be possible here until the winter had come and gone.

So Joseph walked on. He held the gold clasped to his chest as he might have held a child. When he reached the first bend in the river, a sound made him stop and look back. He thought at first that it was the sound of somebody crying out, but then everything went silent again, as silent and hushed as it always was, and Joseph assumed that he’d been mistaken: the sound had been made by the inquisitive bellbird following his human path.