The Colour (11 page)

And it was Lilian who found the sow, in a damp early morning, delivering herself of her brood. Three piglets had already been born and the sow lay panting with her snout resting on the earth, her vagina roped with blood and her breath hanging like a blue cloud in the moist grey air. Lilian stared. In her past life as the wife of a livestock auctioneer, she was used to thinking of the births of animals in arithmetical terms, but here, alone with the pig as the daylight slowly gathered, she felt its suffering and the feelings it might have of strangeness, of something progressing that had not ever progressed before.

Instead of walking back to the Cob House to fetch Joseph, Lilian sat down by the sow on some dry tussock grass and took off her apron. With the apron, she lifted the newborn piglets one by one and wiped the blood and white fluid from their snouts, then laid them near the sow's face, where their mother could lick them clean. Lilian had used the word ‘vigilant' to herself. And now, she thought, as she saw the slippery body of a fourth piglet slide out on to the straw, I am going to keep my vigil here until they are all born.

The sky slowly whitened. Lilian felt the soft drizzle begin to saturate her hair and wished that she'd put on her bonnet before coming out.

III

As soon as Joseph recovered from his fever, he returned to the creek where he'd found the gold.

The waters were high after a snow-melt. Joseph understood that he and the river were now locked in combat, just as he had once been locked in combat with the girl Rebecca. The river could reveal to him the place he longed to find, or it could conceal and withhold it. The river could bring him satisfaction, or it could sweep him away.

He began to dig out a channel between the creek and the half-completed pond. In this way, he felt that he was both demonstrating his power over the flow of the water and covering his tracks. The piles of earth that soon lay around the new water-channel towards the pond made less noticeable the mounds of shingle which began to pile up at the creek's edge. For there was no other way of getting at the gold than by digging and panning what was known as the ‘wash-dirt' or the ‘pay-dirt'. Fossicking for the colour was a grimy business. For every tiny ounce of gold there was a huge, embarrassing pile of detritus.

The weeks began to pass. There was a difference between finding nothing whatsoever and the ‘almost-nothing' that was a minute pinch of powdery colour, painstakingly rinsed from the soil and collected in a rag. And most days Joseph found nothing. Then he would experience a fury he knew was out of all proportion to his circumstances and he would bitterly recall his father saying: ‘Joseph, in every life, desires may be frustrated. Try to be more accommodating to the world when it crosses you.' He found it very hard to accommodate the maddening absence of what he knew
had to be there
– if only he could see it. He would stare at the accumulation of earth and at his inadequate tools – his shovel and pick, the dented casserole dish, the tin jug – and feel the pain of a life that had always taunted him and refused to give him what he wanted. And what he wanted now was gold: nothing else. Joseph's hopes for the farm disappeared under the weight of this new yearning. In his mind, gold transformed the farm from what it was – a few acres of land blasted by the southerly winds, stung by hail and blanketed by snow – into a thriving homestead, with great trees sheltering it and money flowing to it from fleece and mutton and timber. Sudden riches would cancel the years of struggle. Joseph Blackstone had been resigned to these years – or thought he had been resigned to them – and now he discovered that he would do almost anything not to have to suffer them.

Sometimes, when Lilian was feeding the pigs and Harriet was working on her vegetable plot, he opened the tea box and untied the handkerchief and added a few more grains and looked at what was there. He found each and every particle of the gold astonishing and beautiful. It had come out of the mud and it was
his,
because he alone had seen it and recognised it for what it was. He didn't know how much the gold he had found was worth. But he wasn't stupid; he knew there was not enough of it to make any difference to his life. He imagined the tea box filled with it, filled to the brim, and only then would he go down to Christchurch and ask to see the manager of the Bank of New Zealand.

He played out the scene in his mind. He would lay down the box on the wooden counter and open it with infinite care. The bank manager would be silent, staring at something he had not expected to see, and then Joseph would be ushered into a private room at the back of the bank, a room where a fire burned, and he would be given a drink of whisky and scales would be bought out and guineas counted and he would walk out into the sunshine with all his years of toil cancelled at one stroke.

He found it difficult to complete other tasks. The digging and sifting of the wash-dirt preoccupied him at the expense of everything else. With the first green signs of spring showing among the faded grass, Joseph knew that he would soon have to begin sowing the strangely shaped fields he had so patiently ploughed with the donkey, but every morning he felt himself drawn back to the creek.

One evening, Harriet asked him: ‘What are you doing to my river?' And before replying Joseph cursed himself for giving the creek Harriet's name. The creek – and all that it concealed – was
his
and he should have named it for himself. But he had his answer ready. ‘If we are to put trout into the pond,' he said, ‘then they must have a shingle bottom on which to feed, or they will not thrive. So I am extracting shingle which, when I have dug deep enough, I shall lay into the pond.'

Joseph had no notion of how far or how long he would have to dig by the river until he found what he was looking for.

When he worked with the dish and the water scoop, he had to be vigilant the whole time, watching the valley for the arrival of Harriet or Lilian and then, if necessary, hiding his tools under earth and stones. And this was exhausting and distracting. He began to feel that it was the constant fear of discovery that made his eye less sharp and his senses less keen. He knew that on the American and Australian goldfields it had been said that certain miners ‘had a feel for the colour'; it wasn't a thing you could explain or even describe, but it had to do, perhaps, with concentration upon the particular shades of black and brown and red and yellow in a clodful of earth and upon the way it fell from the shovel, but also with something else – with the messages sent from a man's will towards the thing he desired. And Joseph understood that his will was cramped by the near presence of his wife and his mother. He dreaded to see either of them there, walking towards him, with the wind billowing their skirts. He went so far as to feel that the very shape of a woman on a hillside appeared to him now as an ugly and oppressive thing.

He conceived a plan to get the women away from the land. He went to Harriet and told her that he would relent about the dog, Lady. He would give her money for it and she and Lilian would go together to visit the Orchards, and perhaps ‘stay there for a few days and go riding, as you did before', and then bring the puppy back.

Harriet looked at Joseph sharply. He saw questions forming in her mind and prayed she would not ask them. Quickly, he said that he had been too severe on the subject of the dog ‘only in my belief that a dog is not a necessity and that our lives here must rest upon what is necessary and only that'.

She nodded. She opened her mouth to say something and then closed it again.

‘Yes,' she said at last. ‘Thank you, Joseph.'

That night, lying on her back beside him, she said: ‘I was fond of my father's dog. I would go so far as to say I loved it. Love for a dog is not necessarily a sentimental thing.'

IV

Through the winter, Harriet had added only three objects to her scrapbook: a brown weka feather, a shard of greenstone found in her vegetable garden and a paper jam-pot cover from Orchard House, on which Edwin had done a drawing of a windmill.

Whenever Harriet opened the scrapbook at the first page, she stared at the entwined necks of the herons on the label and thought of the tea box.

The box had vanished.

Harriet had searched for it on every shelf and surface in the Cob House and had not found it. She dreamed that Joseph had understood exactly what it contained and had burned it. She did not dare to mention it. She half-believed that it was still there somewhere in the jumble of pots and tins in the kitchen but that she was somehow incapable of seeing it. In her mind, it grew unbearably heavy. She thought that if, one day, it did suddenly reappear, she might be unable to lift it.

She felt her spirits falter. She began to think – for the first time since deciding to marry Joseph – that she should have stayed in England, sitting in her governess's chair, with her pencils and her books, with children she was able to grow fond of, with a father who loved her. Only the sight of the distant mountains, the sheer size and beauty and
mystery
of them, kept her from falling into a deep melancholy. When the spring came, Harriet promised herself, she would go into the mountains – with a strong horse if she had one by then, or with the donkey, or even on foot. She would go into the mountains alone and rediscover her willingness to continue with this New Zealand adventure.

Meanwhile, she set off with Lilian for the Orchard Run. As she climbed into the donkey cart, Harriet saw that Lilian had dressed herself in her best bonnet and a smart black cape trimmed with rabbit fur. She smiled tenderly at her mother-in-law. She thought that it was not difficult to imagine these things floating away on the swirling current of the Ashley River and the long-legged birds raising their inquisitive heads as they passed.

V

Once again, it was Edwin who ran to greet the cart. Lilian didn't see him at first, so intense was her wonder at the tall trees that grew around Orchard House and the feeling of entering once again into a world she could recognise – a world where floors would have a shine to them, where the pattern on the soup tureen would match the ladle.

Then Dorothy came flying along the verandah and down the steps, with her cropped hair sticking out at its familiar capricious angle and Harriet saw Lilian touch her bonnet anxiously, like one who has turned up to a dinner wearing clothes too smart for the occasion.

‘Harriet!' cried Dorothy, with evident delight. ‘And the donkey is still alive!'

Dorothy reached out to take the reins, but Edwin, who had grown just a little taller since Harriet's last visit, already held them and was stroking the donkey's nose. Harriet quickly enquired after his caterpillar.

‘It's gone,' he said, ‘hasn't it, Mama? It's turned into something called a larva.'

‘Yes,' said Dorothy, ‘we have been discussing the great question of metamorphosis. But my dear Harriet, you must be so tired after the Ashley and all of that. Come along into the house. Edwin, help the ladies down.'

Stiff-kneed, Lilian descended from the cart. Aware that she had been disregarded in the flurry of this arrival, she took Dorothy Orchard's extended hand only by its merest fingertips and withheld the smile she had felt on her lips only a few moments ago. The familiar feeling of being snubbed – a feeling she'd thought belonged only to England, where the disdain of the upper classes infected every encounter – made Lilian want to weep, or, worse, give Dorothy Orchard a vicious swipe across her badly coiffed head. Lilian was particularly vexed by the knowledge that she never understood exactly how people like Dorothy Orchard achieved their instantaneous mastery over others outside their class. It happened before you noticed it, like a perfectly executed card trick. It was done in an instant and what you were first aware of were the
feelings
it engendered, feelings it was designed to engender, of being ‘put in your place', of being told (without any words being used) that you were of little account.

Though she couldn't help but admire Orchard House, with its sheltering gardens and its solid verandah, and wish that one day Joseph might build something similar to replace the wretched Cob House, Lilian walked into it with a heavy heart. Clearly, both Dorothy and Edwin had taken Harriet into their magic ‘inner circle' and the three of them were now talking excitedly about the collie pup, Lady. And she, Lilian, the sixty-four-year-old widow of a livestock auctioneer, trailed behind, her knees trembling from the journey, her rabbity cape bouncing foolishly around her shoulders, her nose boiling in the warmth of the house after the bitter cold of the journey.

She wished, suddenly, to be dead. She felt that everything wounding had gone on too long. It was beginning to get dark and Lilian decided that she would shut herself in whatever small room Dorothy would select for her and lie down and sleep and hope that she would never wake up.

She dozed for a while with her eyes open, staring at her discarded bonnet. The bed was soft and she felt grateful for this. The room was painted blue and contained an old mahogany armoire that creaked as the dark came on.

She heard Toby arriving back from the run with his dog, the mother of the pups, and calling to his wife: ‘Dorothy! Doro!' The dog yelped.

A grandfather clock chimed six. All of this, thought Lilian, could be happening in Norfolk, on some large estate, to which poor Roderick would have made uncountable visits to inspect heifers and horses and never once have received an invitation to drink a glass of port or brandy with the squire.

She could hear the familiar southerly wind, but it blew more patiently here, rustling the bare branches of the tall poplars and Lilian lay there, with her nose pointing at the ceiling, praying that the wind would lull her towards some kind of eternal rest.