The Colour (10 page)

Exhausted, he lay down on his pillows again and pulled the eiderdown over his head and wiped his eyes. He sank into a haunted sleep. He found himself running through the lanes and alleys of some English town, poorly lit, pushing Rebecca in front of him, urging her forward too roughly, paying no heed to her protests, intent only at arriving on the appointed destination.

He woke quite soon, needing the flask again. His penis ached and burned. He looked round the room for the wretched flask and saw it near him on the chair. He reached out for it and with his other hand, intent on pulling up his nightshirt, discovered something hard in the tangled folds of the shirt between his legs. He pulled it out. It was his lost handkerchief.

Thereafter, he never let it go. It was always in his fist or beneath his long fingers under the pillow.

Only when he was well again, some two weeks later, did he consign the handkerchief to a place he considered safe – an empty wooden box high up on a kitchen shelf, which had once contained tea, but from which the label had been torn and which he now believed had been forgotten.

Joseph took the box, its lid carefully nailed down around its precious contents, to the small space between the stretched calico and the outer cob wall of his room and pressed it into the earth and covered it over. He was as certain as he could be that neither Lilian nor Harriet would ever discover the box here, for the simple reason that – because the calico represented a solid wall – their imaginations never travelled to the space behind it. It was, in effect, a space which did not really exist, a space which everybody pretended was not there.

Among the White Stones

I

When Edwin's Maori nurse, Pare, had been sent away from Orchard House, she had walked towards Kaiapoi, towards her tribe.

Going south-east, she arrived after several hours at a northerly tributary of the great Waimakariri River, and here she sat down as the sun came up.

She sat on a white stone, with her feet in the water, chewing some raisins she'd taken with her in the bundle of possessions Toby Orchard had allowed her to assemble.

In the liquid light of morning, with the birds beginning their song, Pare no longer felt afraid of the ng
ā
rara. She knew that what she'd seen on the verandah of Orchard House had probably been just an inquisitive gecko, and because of this – because of the terrifying wind and the power of an ancient
story
– she'd lost Edwin, a child who, in her childless life, Pare had begun to love as her own.

The raisins tasted over-sweet and were hard and indigestible.

Pare scooped up mouthfuls of the cool water of the river and drank and drank.

She hadn't been allowed to see Edwin after Dorothy had rescued him and laid him in her bed; she'd been sent away into the night with almost nothing: her clothes, her treasured greenstone pendant, her basket made of flax. But she knew that Edwin was probably going to die. The cradle had risen up off the verandah and tipped out the infant into the dust. Pare imagined Edwin's neck, that tender place she often kissed, being struck as if with a terrible blow from a matipo club, and his poor head hanging limp and dumb. Her tears began to flow, salty and bitter, and she knew that she would regret for as long as she lived that she had so offended the spirits.

As the sun rose higher, the birds quietened. Floating down towards Pare on the current of the river appeared a black-beech log. She stared at it. An uncomfortable feeling began to take hold of her stomach and she set the raisins aside and tried to alleviate this feeling by kneading her abdomen very gently, just as she'd sometimes done for Edwin when he screamed from colic. Nearer and nearer to her floated the black log. More and more cruel became the pains.

‘Au
ē
!' Pare wailed. ‘What are you?'

The log arrived almost at her feet, caught behind a little spur of white stones. It glistened blue-black in the sun. ‘What are you?' Pare asked again.

Then she heard a voice inside her. The voice berated Pare. It told her she was like Houmea, the Cormorant Woman who swallowed her own children, as a spotted shag swallows fish. It warned her that the p
ā
keh
ā
baby would die – and she would also die –
unless
she returned and kept vigil over him. While the voice spoke, Pare felt something creeping over her lips and she reached up and brushed away a fly which landed on her knee and she saw that it was a blowfly.

Pare vomited into the water. The voice said: ‘Now you see your own sickness. This is the beginning of your death.'

She lay under a cabbage tree and slept and when she woke, in its green shade, she wondered whether the voice she had heard had been the voice of a spirit, a taniwha. The taniwha could take many forms and this one could have assumed the shape of the black-beech log.

She got to her feet and walked unsteadily towards the water. The log was still there, but the current of the Waimakariri had moved it to the edge of the stone spur and now she saw it swing round and re-enter the fast-flowing river.

As it floated away, the voice seemed to whisper: ‘
Go back and keep watch
.'

Pare was hungry and weak. Her tribe lived no more than a few miles from here, whereas to go back to the Orchard Run would take her hours – on feet that were blistered, on a stomach that was empty – and so she decided that, for now, she had to ignore the warning of the voice and return to her old home.

So she trudged on towards Kaiapoi. As she walked, she reasoned that if she had imagined the ng
ā
rara, so perhaps, in her sadness for Edwin, she'd imagined the voice inside her head? And anyway, the voice had asked her to do an impossible thing. If she reappeared at Orchard House, Toby and Dorothy would simply send her away.

Pare was ill for a long time. She grew thinner as the seasons passed.

It was her mother who at last understood that she was dying and asked her to try to remember anything in her life which could have caused this fatal illness of hers. When she told her mother about the black-beech log and the voice she had heard (long ago now) she put her hands together gravely. Then she laid around Pare's shoulders a soft cloak embroidered with kiwi tail feathers which was an heirloom of the tribe. She gave her water in a gourd and told her to return to the Orchard Run.

When she arrived within sight of the house, Pare waited, hidden amongst the scratchy toi-toi grass. The wind sighed all around her. She could hear the bleating of sheep and the barking of a collie dog.

From where she crouched, she could see the verandah and was able to recognise the exact spot where Edwin's cradle had been lying when the wind first started to threaten her. But now the verandah was deserted and she imagined Dorothy and Toby Orchard inside the house somewhere, staring at walls, completing tasks for which they had no enthusiasm, locked into a life's mourning for their dead son.

Pare sat with her thin arms round her bony shins. She was lighter than a child now, with no deep soft flesh on her body anywhere. She looked older than her forty years. Only her hair, which she kept oiled and plaited, was still thick and glossy.

She shivered among the stems of the toi-toi grass. She pulled her precious cloak close around her.

It was Pare's weeping that brought four-year-old Edwin to the place where she sat. He'd been lolling in his titoki tree, letting his pet brown caterpillar promenade up and down its branches, when he'd heard an unfamiliar sound. Pare's was a musical kind of weeping, and Edwin wondered whether this noise could be a giant Moa Bird crying for its lost ability to fly.

So then Edwin thought that he might be able to help the Moa, by lifting its wings, or something useful like that (his mother and father were always encouraging him to do ‘useful' things) and he snatched up his caterpillar and came running towards the noise, dressed in a sailor suit for which he was very nearly too fat. And when he saw Pare, he didn't feel afraid. He was disappointed, for a moment, not to find a Moa, but he'd often been told the story of his Maori nurse who had been responsible for the accident and so he decided at once that this was who she was.

She looked at him, a p
ā
keh
ā
boy with wide grey eyes, and opened her arms to him and said his name: ‘E'win!' and without hesitation, he ran to her. She held him to her for a long time and he stroked the kiwi feathers on her cloak and breathed in the scent of her oily hair.

She told him that she would come here from time to time, to watch over him, but that he must never, never tell his parents. He asked her where she had come from and if she lived in a house made of flax. She replied that she lived in the p
ā
with her tribe, and she had been ill, but now that she had seen him, in his smart blue suit, she would start to recover. He proudly showed her his caterpillar and how it would walk round and round his hand. She laid her forehead against his and touched his nose with hers and it seemed to him that he remembered this, this closeness of Pare's face to his and the shiny feel of her skin.

Then they heard Dorothy calling him and Edwin pulled away from Pare. She said: ‘Always look for me here, in the toi-toi grass. Sometimes I will be here and sometimes I will be far beyond the river with my tribe.'

‘Shall I look every day?' whispered Edwin.

‘No,' said Pare. ‘I cannot make such a journey every day. But you could call – always quietly, so that no one else can hear. Say “Pare, are you there?” – and if I am here, then I will answer.'

Pare's sickness left her and she began eating eels and k
Å«
mara and the meat of birds, and soft flesh now covered her bones. The years passed like this. But Pare now believed that her vigil over Edwin Orchard would have to last as long as her life lasted. Every month, therefore, unknown to Dorothy or Toby, she returned and sat in the high grass, wearing her kiwi cloak, and waited.

Sometimes she had to wait a long time, sleeping in the grass, making her existence there, always afraid of being discovered. But she was not discovered. The cloak seemed to protect her from inquisitive dogs and hide her from every eye. And then, eventually, Edwin's call would come: ‘Are you there, Pare?' and she would whisper softly: ‘E'win, I am here. I am here.' And then she and Edwin would sit on the grass she had plaited to make it soft and tell stories, and Edwin understood that the stories told by Pare were different from any others that he knew.

II

It was midwinter now. Midwinter in August.

Lilian Blackstone looked at her calendar disbelievingly as hailstones drove against the windows of the Cob House. She pictured the August light falling on the meadows and streams of Parton Magna and heard in her mind the fluttery, whistling cry of swallows.

She had progressed no further with her plan; her letter to Lily Dinsdale had never been sent. For, since Joseph's illness, Lilian had decided that she couldn't abandon him. Not now. For now, she would have to ‘knuckle down' and make the best of things.
Wulla.
There were times when such a knuckling down simply couldn't be avoided.

Lilian also saw that the winter was beginning to sap the strength not only of Joseph, who walked about the empty land with his shoulders hunched, opening and closing his hands, like a pianist about to attempt some difficult piece of music, but also of Harriet. Harriet Blackstone's famous determination, on which so much had rested, had faltered, Lilian noted; there was no doubt about it. Sometimes, the young woman sat worryingly still at the table, some knife or implement in her hand, but the task in hand abandoned and her large eyes fixed on no object in the room but seemingly on some vivid internal landscape that seemed to have nothing about it that was consoling.

‘Harriet?' Lilian would ask. ‘Have you gone into a daze?'

‘Oh no . . .' Harriet would reply, and immediately get on with peeling carrots or rolling suet crust or whatever it was that she had been doing. But she admitted to Lilian that ‘the death of Beauty haunts me every day'. She said that she couldn't understand how certain things had been allowed to happen.

She was often to be found searching for something she refused to identify. Lilian could hear her arguing with Joseph about the Orchards' collie dog, Lady, which Harriet wanted and Joseph said they could not afford. She spent long, silent hours writing letters to her father, waiting for the day when they could be taken to Christchurch and posted. The unsent letters piled up, envelope upon envelope.
Henry Salt, Esquire, The Red House, Swaithey, Norfolk, England
.

In the nights, now, Lilian no longer heard her son making love to Harriet. In their calico room, they seemed hardly to speak to each other or murmur or move at all, but just lay still and soundless through the long dark hours and in the morning went their separate ways. They had been married less than a year. Rather to her own surprise, Lilian felt the sorrow of this estrangement. The revengeful part of her nature had wanted the farm to fail – as a punishment to Joseph for forcing her into a life for which she was not suited – but now that it seemed indeed to be failing, she felt it was a pity.

Though the monotony of the days tired Lilian, she tried very hard to retreat less often to her room and to resist sleep when it began to overwhelm her in her chair. Having decided that what the situation demanded of her was vigilance and a more willing hand, she told Joseph that she would even ‘take her turn with the pig', a fat pregnant sow, bought from a farmer near Rangiora, and now so weighed down by the piglets she was carrying that her legs buckled under her and her teats scraped the ground.

The pig had to be fed with carrot peelings and stale bread and over-ripe k
Å«
mara and the scrapings from the soup kettle. Her sty, such as it was, had to be cleaned from time to time and this task was scarcely to Lilian's liking. What the sow's body couldn't absorb of the poor rations it was fed, she squirted out of her anus with a kind of venomous purpose, as though aiming at some target lurking behind her. Lilian found this rudeness quite shocking. It reminded her subliminally of the terrible behaviour of ostriches. She would have preferred to have had nothing to do with the pig, but she knew that they must not let it die, and so she took her turn at setting down the pans of food at one end and shovelling away the muck at the other.