The Colour (13 page)

Lilian remembered Lily Dinsdale's house as a place of quiet and salubriousness, but now, as she stood in the street, she could hear noisy laughter – men's laughter – coming from an upper room, and she noticed that the step on which she was standing had a patterning of mud on it, which could only have been made by heavy boots. She tried to peer, beyond the lace curtains, into one of the downstairs windows. Her heart lurched with the terrible thought that perhaps Lily Dinsdale was no longer here, indeed had died of some tropical infection brought from Fiji or Samoa, which no one knew how to cure. How ghastly life seems, she thought, when a person on whom we have depended in our minds goes suddenly missing.

The door opened and a young girl, wearing a creased and stained pinafore, stood before her. ‘No rooms, ma'am,' she said and was about to close the door in Lilian's face when Lilian reached out and held it ajar.

‘I am an old friend of Mrs Dinsdale's,' said Lilian, standing as straight and tall as she could on her painful feet. ‘Will you fetch her, please?'

The girl stared at Lilian, rudely looking her over. The male laughter which Lilian had heard in the street now came cascading down the stairs, causing Lilian's eyelids to flutter with revulsion. Then she heard Mrs Dinsdale's voice calling to the girl: ‘Tell them we are full, Hetty!'

‘We're full, ma'am,' said the girl, again trying to close the door, but Lilian pushed past her into the hall and called out: ‘Lily! It's Lilian Blackstone!'

There was a moment's pause, during which the laughter above burst out with new intensity. Laughter like gunfire, Lilian thought. And then Mrs Dinsdale appeared from the parlour and the two women stared at each other in shocked silence, both recognising that some kind of calamity was occurring. For the Mrs Dinsdale who stood before Lilian was really not the ‘dear Lily Dinsdale' who had been so kind to her and so very friendly on her first arrival in Christchurch; she was definitely some other Lily Dinsdale, not ‘dear' at all, a Lily Dinsdale dressed in a tight black satin dress, cut low above her white breasts, with, instead of her habitual lace cap, coquettish bows adorning her hair and tumbling in a silken tangle almost to her shoulders.

It was she, however, in all her conspicuous finery, who recovered before Lilian. Indeed, Lilian decided she was seeing something from which she might never recover and so she could only stand there and gape while her former friend began offering her apology.

‘It is the Rush,' said Mrs Dinsdale. ‘I am so sorry, Mrs Blackstone. The Rush has altered everything. You see? I expect you have seen what is happening on the road to Lyttelton Harbour . . . ?'

Lilian tried to say that she'd seen nothing, that she and Joseph had driven straight here, to this door, where they thought they would be welcome and had planned to lay their heads for the night, but she found herself unable to speak.

At this moment, a man's voice called down the stairs: ‘Lily! Lily-my-dainty! We're thirsty here!'

‘Ale,' said Lily Dinsdale, with a frail little smile. ‘That is what they all bleat for. I have told them I am not an ale-house. I have warned them they should get used to hardship and deprivation, but they take no notice.'

Mrs Dinsdale seemed to hope that Lilian would say something now, would see what her position was in a man's world and take her part, or at least release her from shame. But Lilian Blackstone was incapable of uttering a syllable; she stood there with her face hard as flint, remembering the letter she had almost sent here, remembering how, to this very day, the house of Lily Dinsdale had always featured in her plans for her own salvation. And realising now that
there was no salvation.
There was only this rowdy house of men and Lily's ridiculous clothes and the dabs of – what was it called? –
rouge
on her face.

Mrs Dinsdale gathered herself for a last effort at smoothing down what could not be smoothed down. ‘I am very sorry if you were hoping . . .' she said and then stopped and then began again. ‘I truly am sorry if you were expecting . . . but a Rush, you see . . . it will change everything. It will turn us all upside-down.'

At the word ‘turn', Lilian took some kind of desperate cue and whirled away from Mrs Dinsdale, striding the few paces to the door, where Hetty still stood in her greasy apron. She gave the girl a venomous shove which almost knocked her off her feet and walked away from the house, slamming the front door after her. She climbed into the donkey cart with an agility born of shock and fury and instructed Joseph to drive on.

Joseph found a tea-room and, tying the donkey to a post, installed his mother there with a bun untouched on a plate in front of her, until he saw a little colour return to her cheeks.

‘Eat the bun,' he said kindly.

Lilian took a tiny, sugary nibble, but found chewing difficult. ‘Gold,' she said, when she had swallowed the small mouthful. ‘Is that what she meant? A Gold Rush?'

Joseph said that, on entering Christchurch, he'd noticed groups of men – men alone, dressed in working clothes – moving restlessly about the streets. He'd noticed grog-shops that had not been there before. On the side of a cart piled high with canvas, he'd read the words
Buy your tent here Best prices
. He didn't say that at the sight of these things and knowing what they might mean, he'd felt a terrible unease. He didn't say that, until this particular afternoon, he'd imagined himself to be the sole possessor of new gold in all of New Zealand and that now he knew that he had been deluded. He didn't say that he had begun to pray – pray and pray to a God he hardly ever talked to – that whatever gold had been found, it was a long way from his own creek and that his secret (such as it now was) could remain safe. All he did say was: ‘Something has happened here.'

He suggested that he should leave Lilian in the warmth and relative comfort of the tea-room while he searched for information and found them somewhere to stay.

‘There will be nowhere to stay,' Lilian said bleakly.

‘Then,' Joseph said, ‘we shall buy a tent,' and hoped to see a smile cross his mother's face. But it was as if Lilian Blackstone had decided she would never smile again, that she would put that particular muscle of her face to sleep and never call on it to move any more for as long as she remained on the earth.

‘If only . . .' Lilian began. And then faltered.

‘If only what?'

‘If only she had not pretended to be my friend. To suggest we had so much in common . . . She even had the temerity to remark on the similarity of our Christian names . . .'

Joseph nodded. Then he said: ‘People change according to the times in which they live, that is all.'

‘It may be
all,
' said Lilian, ‘but it is also a great deal.'

Joseph stood up. The afternoon was already darkening and he knew that he had much to do. Not only did he have to find somewhere for his mother to sleep; he also had to discover where everyone was going and what this Rush portended. And he knew that he couldn't begin on the search for a room in this suddenly crowded town until he understood what was happening. First, then, he would go down to the market. Already, he'd begun to hope that the men he had seen were here to take ship out of Lyttelton to Nelson or down south to Dunedin – far from the Okuku Valley.

He had no wish to follow or take any part in a mass Rush. He had gold on his farm.

He walked through the dusk. As he came within sight of the market, he could hear a fiddler playing and the reckless little cries of people dancing. As he turned into Diamond Street, he found himself suddenly becoming part of an immense crowd, men and women both, but mainly men, wearing leather hats and moleskins, pushing carts or carrying on their backs the primitive tools of the miner: picks, shovels, pans, billy-cans, boots, and sacking. Money was changing hands at a brisk rate for the purchase of tea, flour, rice, candles, knives, canvas, brandy and a hundred other commodities men wanted to take with them into whatever wilderness they were going to. And there was a haste and an intensity to this commerce – with hands reaching and grabbing and coins counted at extraordinary speed – as though the coming night were going to place a curfew upon it and the wares had to be got now or for ever put beyond the people's reach.

Joseph stopped in front of a counter advertising itself as the Survival Stall. Others pressed around him as he watched a man in a sacking apron take a live eel from a bucket, lay it on a wooden block and slice off its head. The head lay still, but the body moved until it had almost slithered off the block. ‘Don't you dare, my boy!' said the stall-holder and spat on to the floor. He snatched up the eel and with a dexterity which astonished the small crowd, slit it in half and removed both backbone and gut and threw these away. He laid out on the block the two halves of the eel, pink and a little bloody, with tender care, like a jeweller laying out a ruby necklace for a rich customer.

‘Now,' he said. ‘Watch this. For this is the Preservation. This is the thing that will keep the meat sweet. And without it you may die.'

The people moved closer. Joseph could smell the eel flesh and could see, in the sagging pocket of the man's apron, a fine fistful of money.

The man laid on the block a jar of salt, reached into it with his bloodstained hand and spread the salt along one half of the eel.

‘Work it in,' he said. ‘Smother your eel in it. Pretend it is snow or ice. For snow and ice are the Preservation, too, but snow and ice you may not have, for they melt away. But salt you can keep.'

The eel, smothered with salt, was now sliced into pieces, which the stall-holder began to lay carefully in a pickling jar. Joseph had seen his mother preserving herring in just this way and was about to observe out loud that there was nothing new in all of this when the man turned his attention to the second half of the eel. He reached under his bench and brought out a second large bucket and a second jar. The bucket was filled with yellow-brown bladder wrack and he took up a fistful of the seaweed and held it aloft.

‘Now you thought that without salt you would have no Preservation, didn't you?' he said. ‘You were imagining lugging blocks of salt on your backs through the swamps of the Grey, weren't you? Well, salt is the finest Preservation, but wrack will do. And wrack is to be found all along the shore.'

The second fillet was sliced and laid in the jar with the bladder wrack packed closely round it. ‘Burst the blisters of the wrack on the flesh of your fish,' the man instructed. ‘Tamp it down. Pack it tight. You will have a brine.'

The lid of the jar was screwed down as tightly as it would go and bound with strips of damp canvas, split and tied at their ends like a bandage.

‘
Voilà
! As the Frenchies say,' the eel man concluded triumphantly. ‘You have your Preservation. A shilling for the eel. A penny for the lesson.'

The eel was bought and everyone in the cluster around the Survival Stall, including Joseph, dutifully handed over a penny piece. It would not have been difficult, thought Joseph, to slip away without paying, but in such a case, as the eel man knew only too well, some superstitious worry impels you towards an act of honesty.

As he moved away and realised that night was coming on very fast now, Joseph turned to faces all around him and asked: ‘Where is the Rush? Where is everybody going?'

Some laughed – as at the one fool in the company who is without the essential knowledge. But the person nearest to Joseph, a large man with the seamed and weathered face of a seasoned digger, pointed in the direction of the Port Hills. ‘The
Wallahi
waits at Lyttelton,' he said. ‘She's north-bound for Nelson and then – if the saints and the wild winds agree – for Hokitika.'

The word ‘Hokitika' acted like magic on Joseph, like a healing balm. His creek was safe, then. These men would set off with their jars of eels and their sluice-boxes, but they were travelling to the West Coast, to the other side of the South Island. They wouldn't come anywhere near his land.

Joseph began to retrace his steps towards the tea-room where he had left Lilian. He wouldn't bother to seek other accommodation. He would simply bribe the owner of the tea-shop to let his mother sleep there and, if the bribe was good enough, no doubt she would eventually agree. And as for him, he didn't care where he slept. He thought he could lie down anywhere and get a night's rest, just as he had done when he was building the Cob House, listening to tales of cockatoos in the firelight, with his head resting in the crook of his arm.

II

It was the time of year for burning the tussock. Though the land would be blackened and hideous for a while, new, succulent shoots would be summoned into existence by the fire and for a brief season, the dun-coloured flats would be dusted with green.

Dorothy Orchard had told Harriet that she loved ‘setting the fires and seeing the flames creep forward so obediently'. She whispered that she always set her fires at dusk ‘and watch them until they are embers in the dark. And then I'm afraid there is a smell of roasting meat that arrives on the wind and it is all the grasshoppers and the lizards cooked in the flames. And even this, I find to be almost thrilling.'

Alone with the dog, Lady, after Joseph and Lilian had departed for Christchurch, Harriet marked out an area for burning below the new cob shelters and the half-completed pond. ‘Even pigs', said Dorothy, ‘love to munch the new green tussock and it will keep them healthy, so you might burn your tussock, too, even though you have no sheep. But never choose a day of high wind.'

This November day was gentle, almost warm. Harriet waited until the afternoon began its drift towards evening and then started lighting her tapers. It had not rained for some days and the tussock was dry and brittle. Fires sprang into life at the first catch of flame – nine or ten small fires devouring the faded grass as they moved forward and fanned out and joined and divided and joined again, running downhill at a cantering kind of speed. Harriet thought that she had never seen fires that looked so contented. They made her smile; small fires, but busy and thorough.