The Colour (15 page)

An upper section, a tray made of metal slats, could be moved back and forth by hand (very much as a hand rocked a cradle) as water was played over it. Stones and coarse shingle would be trapped in the slats and most of the fine sand would be washed away by the play of the water. But beneath the slats was a shallow box, lined with pleated sacking, and on to this sacking any small but heavy particles would fall. Piles of dirt could be ‘washed' through this sluice-box and then the sacking picked over inch by inch. And all that had fallen would be preserved in the sacking, held by the pleats. If gold was present in the wash-dirt, there it would be.

Joseph looked at the
Otago Sluice-Box
for a long time. He wanted to buy it and load it into the donkey cart, hidden under the sacks of provisions he had yet to acquire. But he felt the morning brighten outside. He knew that the box was too cumbersome a thing to hide in the open air.

The Line

I

It was almost night once again when Joseph returned to the Cob House. He had to walk most of the way, holding the donkey's bridle, with the new milk cow tethered behind, swaying along at a slow pace. In the cart, Lilian slept with her head on a sack of coffee beans and didn't notice the sun going down and the gradual obliteration of the path by the gathering dusk. When they arrived at the farm, she woke up and asked: ‘What time is it, Roderick?'

A dry wind was blowing from the south-west. Harriet had worked all day at washing sheets and cloths, shirts, drawers and petticoats so that she could peg them out before the wind changed its mind. Her knuckles were bleeding and she could see a rash beginning to creep between her fingers. The only part of the arduous business of washing that she liked was turning the mangle. The rest of it was a purgatory. While she soaped and slapped and pummelled the soiled garments, she had wondered aloud how much of life was repetition. During her long years as a governess, it had been the year-by-year recapitulation of the same historical or mathematical facts that had sometimes made her want to scream.

In the night, when Joseph lay down beside her, she took his hand.

He turned his head and looked at her and said: ‘You should not have cut off your hair.'

Harriet lay still and replied: ‘I did it to see clearly, that's all. And now I see why you're digging by the creek.'

She felt him tense along the whole of his exhausted frame, but he said nothing, only turned his head away.

She said: ‘I understand that we have to keep some secrets from one another, Joseph, but I think gold is too heavy a thing to hide.'

She waited. She imagined her washing, like ghosts, flapping in the moonlight.

After a long while, Joseph said: ‘There is no gold.'

She didn't believe him. She said: ‘Yet you continue to look for it. What makes you continue?'

‘I saw . . . what I thought was the colour. Some particles of dust. If I had made a proper find, I would have told you.'

‘Where is the dust?'

She felt him tense again and he removed his hand from hers. ‘Washed away.'

‘There's nothing gleaned from all your work, then?'

‘No. Nothing. And now I know that I was mistaken to search here. The gold is on the West Coast.'

‘And in the south, on the Arrow. So Dorothy told me.'

‘The Arrow is finished. All of Otago is finished. They say only the Chinese are still there, picking over the tailings.'

‘Yet if there was gold in Otago and now on the West Coast, perhaps there will be gold in our creek? Perhaps there is gold to be found everywhere in New Zealand?'

Joseph lay still and silent. He was dog-tired. He didn't want to be interrogated. He closed his eyes and prayed that sleep would overtake him before Harriet said another word.

He had just begun that gentle see-saw between consciousness and darkness when some little noise reached him from beyond the calico wall and he knew that Lilian had cried out. ‘What is the matter?' Joseph said, without moving. But no one answered him.

II

Now, the summer began to come in.

The tussock was springy and bright. The cow, which had no name, meandered over the flats, munching without pause, and her milk was plentiful and thick with cream.

When Harriet found snails creeping over her first lettuces, she gathered them into a bucket and fed them to the pigs, who crunched them eagerly, making her smile. She saw, suddenly, that not only the pigs but everything else was beginning to thrive. Even the wheat Joseph had sown in his oddly shaped fields was appearing, a bit sparse and thin, but there nevertheless, a combing of pale green on which the sun came and went as the clouds allowed.

Harriet planted and hoed. Dorothy Orchard had given her strawberry plants and currant and gooseberry bushes. She cut tea-tree stakes from the bush to make a scaffolding for her beans. The stems of her onions were like neat green fountains against the dark of the earth. White flowers began to bloom in her potato patch. The first carrots were pulled and were sweet enough to eat raw. There was a sudden scent in the vegetable garden, which, on certain evenings, reminded Harriet of England. It was the scent of something which had begun to have permanence.

For the first time, they were no longer cold in the Cob House and often ate their mid-day meal with the door open, to let the sun dry the earthen floor. They could hear crickets beginning to chatter on the flats and the songs of birds they couldn't yet recognise. On a flax bush under one of the windows, orange buds started to open. When the rain fell, it was copious and warm.

Lilian got out her sewing machine and began to make curtains from a bolt of blue cloth she had bought ‘very advantageously' from the owners of the Christchurch tearooms where she had spent her night on the sofa. She leaned over the machine so closely that her pointed nose almost touched the
N
of the word
SINGER
inscribed on it, while her white hands guided the material into the perfectly turned seams she had been so proud of in the days in Parton Magna where she made chair covers from green brocade.

That there was nothing on which to hang the curtains troubled Lilian only fleetingly. She would nag Joseph until he had come up with some solution to the absence of poles and rings. She reminded him that ‘this whole enterprise turns upon ingenuity' and said she would not let him rest until the poles were up. ‘You made the windows,' she added crossly, as though this addition had been somehow reckless and unnecessary.

Christmas came in the middle of a hot spell. Lilian hoped for an invitation to Orchard House, so that the day would have some feeling of amplitude and grace and the dirty plates be taken care of by Janet, but the Orchards invited only the people who worked on the sheep run at Christmas time and had no room for anyone else.

Harriet decorated the kitchen in a simple way. Strings were nailed up and pulled taut just under the ceiling, and armfuls of green ferns were pressed behind the strings and arranged this way and that like a garland. The smell of the ferns was pungent ‘and not unpleasant' remarked Lilian. She made ribbons from her bolt of blue cloth and tied bows along the strings. The ribbons, too, turned out to be the solution to the hanging of the curtains. Joseph set tea-tree poles above the windows and the curtains were looped to these.

‘They draw very slowly,' said Lilian, ‘but I suppose this does not matter. Time is the one thing we have too much of.'

On Christmas morning, the Cob House kitchen looked as much like a proper room as it was ever going to look and as Harriet banked up the range in preparation for cooking two wild duck, she let herself feel proud of everything they had done. Soon, they would be able to trade vegetables and hams and butter for mutton and coal. Joseph had begun to talk about buying a horse and Harriet dreamed of this horse while she worked. She would ride it towards the mountains. She would see red-crowned parakeets flying in the forests.

As she seasoned the ducks, rubbing salt into their skins and folding them over where their necks had been, Harriet remembered the herons of the tea-box label and then the tea box itself, which she had never found. Joseph's secret, his digging for gold, was in the open now, but her secret was not.

She thought it pointless to torture herself with these matters and yet they came and went from her mind every day, usually towards evening, like rooks gathering at dusk. She longed to confide in somebody. She thought that perhaps what she longed to hear was that almost every life was arranged like this, around a void where love should have been and was not, and that her predicament was therefore an ordinary one.

She wondered whether Dorothy Orchard might tell her that she didn't love Toby, saying something like: ‘This is perfectly all right, Harriet. It is even
convenient,
because love makes people so wild and thoughtless. So really it is better to live quite outside it.'

Imagining this conversation comforted Harriet, but she didn't think it would take place, because she believed that what she saw, quite to the contrary, whenever she went to the Orchard Run was Dorothy's passion for Toby. When Dorothy heard his loud voice in the hall, his booming shout of ‘Doro! Doro!', her hand would fly up to her hair and try to smooth it down from whatever strange angle it was in, and when he entered the room, a smile formed on her lips, as though he were the one man in all the world who amused her.

Harriet found herself envying Edwin, who talked in secret to Pare and could tell her everything that was on his mind. She thought fancifully that this was what she longed for: an encounter with a stranger wearing a cloak of feathers.

Meanwhile, she cooked the ducks and the three of them sat down to their Christmas meal, with the blue curtains keeping out the sun and the ferns smelling of the earth. They exchanged no presents. When the light in the room faded and cooled, Lilian sang to them. ‘Jesus Occupies My Soul'. ‘Silent Night'.

III

They began to long for rain.

Day after day, the hot northerlies blew and dust streamed off the tilled land and the wheat began to look poor.

‘We have the creek,' said Joseph. ‘We must dig new channels for the water and contrive some system of irrigation.'

The earth was hard under the tussock. Joseph made sketches of where the channels should run and, dutifully, they tried to follow these, but the distances were so great, it was difficult to imagine this task having any end. Harriet wrote to her father:
Our life is digging now. We dig from sunrise to sunset and all the while above us the sky is an empty blue
.

The garden flourished because Harriet was able to water her vegetables with buckets and cans, filled at the creek's edge. She husbanded everything for the pigs and chickens, every snail and worm, every feathery carrot stem, every onion stalk and damaged lettuce leaf.

By her wheelbarrow sat Lady, swishing her black tail and watching Harriet's careful hands, and when they took the garden gleanings to the pigs, Lady darted round the animals, tidying them into an orderly group, like a flock of sheep. Lady was no longer a puppy and Harriet wrote to Henry Salt:

Late one evening, with Harriet's task of watering her vegetables almost complete, Lady began to bark. Harriet looked up and saw two men moving out from behind the beech trees towards the creek. One of them was pulling a cart, piled up with possessions, and the wheels of the cart squeaked – an unfamiliar, disturbing sound in the silence of the valley.

Hearing the dog, the men looked towards Harriet. They were almost at the creek and Harriet saw them hesitate, but their thirst called them on and they reached the water and squatted down and drank.

Lady began to run towards the men and she heard one of them yell: ‘Watch out! Dog's coming for us!'

Harriet began to move up the hill, calling to Lady. Never, in all their months here, had strangers walked across their land and Harriet would willingly have had Joseph at her side to confront them, but Joseph was far away by the pond and so she had no choice but to go on, wiping her hands on her apron, striding boldly forwards in her dusty boots. Lady wouldn't return to her, but nor did the dog go right up to the men, only cowered a little way off, barking and growling. Harriet reached her and put a hand on her collar and calmed her. The men stood by their cart. They wore wide-brimmed hats against the sun and so their faces were in shadow.

‘Your run, is it?' said one of the men. ‘But we can take a drink, can we, miss?'

Not since her days as a governess had Harriet been called ‘miss'.

She thought that – just as she was wondering who these strangers were – so they were wondering what a woman was doing out here on the flats alone.

‘Certainly, you may take a drink,' she said. ‘But I fear you must be lost. You are a long way from the road.'

The younger of the two men looked at the other, who was the one who had spoken and now this same one said: ‘Short cut. Through to the dray road at Amberley. But we're too westerly, are we?'

Harriet had never been to Amberley, but she knew it was some way from here, towards the sea.

‘If you carry on as you are going, you will get into the mountains . . .'

‘Saw that, didn't we, Bunny? We saw we'd be blocked off.'

Harriet looked at the cart, piled up and covered with sacking. The older man wiped his neck with a rag and said: ‘We'd beg some oil, if we could. If you have any . . . ?'

‘Some oil?'