The Colour (17 page)

Backwards and forwards Joseph walked, hoping to free the line by altering its direction, but the thing on the end of it also moved. There was sweat, now, on Joseph's face and he felt a panic in his heart. He felt that he would never be able to outwit the creature that had taken his Nymph. He could wrestle with it till nightfall and it would stay down in the mud of the pond, as though it were luring him towards it, as though it might suddenly pull so strongly on the line that he would be thrown into the water.

Joseph knelt and laid the rod down and took up a section of line and began tearing at it with his teeth. The line was made of gut. He knew how strong it was. But Joseph clamped his teeth on it and tugged and tugged until he felt it begin to fray. And the fraying line tasted salty and bitter. It almost made him retch, but still he endured it and clung on until he could feel only a tiny thread against his tongue. And then it snapped and he spat it out and watched as the line drifted out on to the water and lay for a moment on the surface before disappearing.

Bargains

I

Lilian now worked hard in the vegetable garden. When the spinach she'd sown and faithfully watered came clustering up above her boots, she ran her hands through its bright green leaves and said: ‘Harriet, you know this looks better to me than anything we grew at Parton.' She sat on the ground, eating carrots out of the earth, spreading her skirts in the sunlight. She didn't tire of picking snails from the lettuces for the pigs. Sometimes, she went out before sunrise, so that she could hear the bellbirds singing.

Lilian Blackstone was reconstructing Roderick's life and death in her mind and it was this reconstruction ‘along scientific lines' that enabled her to feel more comfortable with her past and more resigned to her future in New Zealand. Tormented by the idea that she'd spent thirty-five years married to a mediocre and irresponsible man who, by dying an untimely and ridiculous death, had consigned her to an unendurable fate, Lilian now tried to see everything pertaining to Roderick in an altered light.

Toby Orchard had expressed his admiration for the livestock auctioneer's sophisticated grasp of mathematics; now, Lilian understood that mathematics, or what Toby had called a comprehension of ‘scientific language', had also played a part in Roddy's gambling enterprises.

He'd often described these enterprises as ‘experiments'. He had sometimes tried to explain to his wife the rules of the law of averages and the ‘indisputable frequent reappearance of the only even prime number, the number 2, in any random selection of numbers, such as those designated to horses entering the Winners' Enclosure at Newmarket'.

In games of poker, Roddy told her, he would seldom discard a low 2, ‘because the 2 can be a magnet, attracting a pair or even a third replica of itself' and he claimed that he had won more than a few games by ‘trusting solely in the Even Prime'.

At the time when he had explained this, Lilian had understood not one word of what he was talking about, but now she saw clearly that Roderick had at least had a
system
and that his betting was not quite the random venture she had taken it for. He'd always claimed to ‘study form' on the racecourse and had kept, Lilian remembered now, a notebook with more than a hundred horses' names in it and their placings in successive races. She had never entirely seen the point of this. She recalled saying: ‘Because something has occurred in the past, Roderick, this does not mean it will necessarily occur again.' But it was clear to her now that she had been wrong to be so sceptical about the Form Notebook. For not long before he died, Roddy's luck on horses had begun to turn and he had seen this as ‘a combination of my adherence to the Even Prime and the growing sophistication of my form book'.

What Lilian now chose to believe was that her husband would have emerged from his mire of debt, had he not been killed by scientific curiosity. He was on the way, she told herself: I should have trusted in his systems. He would have pulled us free.

And as for the death itself, here Lilian made a bargain with memory: she would force herself to think about it, to look it in the eye, to relive it as far as was possible, given that she hadn't actually witnessed it, provided she was able to give it a different frame of reference.

The stark facts remained: Roderick Blackstone had been killed in a field by ostriches. The peculiar birds belonged to an enterprising Norfolk farmer, who had planned to make a fortune by selling their plumes to the millinery trade and by ‘introducing the delicate taste of ostrich meat to the discerning people of the county, including Her Majesty Queen Victoria herself at Sandringham'.

Invited to inspect these creatures he'd never seen before, Roderick Blackstone's curiosity had been roused by the sight of their long necks and startled eyes and fluttering feathers. Instead of remaining on the other side of their fence, while the farmer went away to attend to a ewe caught in a bramble hedge, Roddy climbed into the ostrich field and approached the birds.

Inquisitive as they were, the ostriches immediately surrounded Roderick and began pecking at his top hat. They were known (it was later said) to be fascinated by hard, shiny things and no doubt what Roderick should have done was remove the hat and run as fast as he could away from them. But he didn't remove his hat. He died with his hat
on
. And the question of why he hadn't removed it had always taunted and maddened Lilian. Surely, he couldn't have been so stubborn as to believe, when his life was threatened, that propriety or convention required that he keep his hat on in the middle of a meadow? The ridiculousness of this notion made her want to cry out with fury.

There had never been any proper explanation of the hat business – until now. But here it was at last: Roderick had simply been so altruistically curious – as a scientist – about the behaviour of the eccentric birds that he hadn't understood their intention until it was too late, until after one of them had jabbed at his face and taken half his nose away in its long beak and he had fallen down, screaming with pain and covered in blood and the birds had pecked him to death.

Lilian now chose to see that Roddy's actions, far from being foolish, had been brave. Her gratitude to Toby Orchard for suggesting to her this new way of thinking about Roderick was overwhelming. She dreamed of going back to the Orchard Run and confiding everything to Toby – the gambling, the ostriches, all of it. She imagined Toby putting his arm round her, as she shed a tear. She remembered the comfortable, blue room at Orchard House and the creaking mahogany armoire, and predicted how well she would sleep in it now, with the presence of Toby just along the landing.

But for the time being Lilian had to content herself only with her new feelings of optimism. Neither she nor Harriet nor anyone could make the journey to the Orchard Run for the simple reason that the donkey was no longer capable of pulling the cart.

The donkey walked with ever more faltering steps and brayed all day at the flies. It stood in the little patch of shade afforded by the new cow barn and stared at the ground.

Harriet tried to cosset it, feeding it soft radish leaves from her palm and stroking its neck. She would see its eyes close, as if the touch of her hand gave it some longed-for permission to sleep, or even to die. Joseph swore that the donkey had croup and would recover, but both Harriet and Lilian disagreed. They knew that the donkey would never survive another winter. And one night, in the hot silence of their room, Harriet said to Joseph: ‘What we must buy in the autumn is a horse.'

Joseph made no reply. She heard him sigh, as if everything she said wearied him, as if she were a child begging him for hoops and skittles and dolls with china faces.

II

Edwin Orchard didn't know that Harriet couldn't use the donkeycart to make the journey to Orchard House and he hoped she would arrive soon so that he could confide to her his worries about Pare.

Pare had not come to the meeting place in the toi-toi grass for a long time – a longer time than Edwin could ever remember. In this time, his caterpillar had hatched out of its cocoon as a scarlet-and-black butterfly and fluttered away; the spring lambs on the run had stopped kicking and prancing and started bleating like ordinary sheep; his mother had cut off his ringlets; Toby had shot twenty-seven weka; a family of moreporks had hatched in one of the barns; and Janet had made a blue blancmange, the like of which no one had ever seen before.

Edwin longed to tell Pare about the moreporks and the blue blancmange. He felt lonely without his caterpillar. He wanted to hear about the gold at Greenstone Creek and to stroke the kiwi feathers of Pare's magic cloak. Every day, now, he walked into the grass and called softly: ‘Are you there, Pare?' But there was never any answer, only the hot wind sighing and the grasshoppers scratching, and the bleating of sheep, far away.

The thing that worried him most was the possibility that Pare
had
come one day and seen him without his ringlets and not recognised him and gone away, thinking that some other boy lived on the run now. For he saw that he looked completely different. ‘You should not have done that cutting, Mama!' he said angrily to Dorothy. And his mother's reply surprised him and worried him yet more. ‘I know, Edwin,' said Dorothy. ‘It almost broke my heart to lose my baby. But it was time for a transformation.'

Edwin looked furiously at Dorothy. He wanted to take a cruel bite out of her hand. He knew what a transformation was. It was what his caterpillar had undergone. It was one thing becoming something else. ‘I did not
want
that!' he said.

Edwin drew a picture of himself on a slate, with his hair sticking straight out, like his mother's. He didn't know whether Pare could read, but under the drawing he wrote on the slate:
This is not a koko nut this is me now Ewin
.

He laid the slate on some white stones in the toi-toi grass. He hoped the dry weather would last.

III

As the drought continued, the mounds of earth at the creek's edge hardened and cracked and whitened. Joseph thought that they began to resemble a range of miniature mountains and that, like mountains, they would be there for ever because he didn't possess the strength to break them up.

The level of the creek was falling. More and more muddy shingle appeared and every day, Joseph dutifully shovelled and sifted it, but he found nothing. He began to feel the terror of a future without gold and without water.

Channelling the river so that it flowed, almost unimpeded, into his pond, he consoled himself with the thought that at least all the work he'd put into the pond had not been in vain. What had started as a sentimental attempt to contrive a corner of English landscape might now be the thing that would save the farm from ruin. He hoped the flow into the pond wouldn't stop. He dreaded to see the level of the pond fall and the great black worm he knew lay in the mud underneath the water be revealed.

But the slow drift of Joseph's mind was towards the Hokitika and the Grey. He began to feel that he'd been wrong to trust in his own creek. It was proving obstinate and valueless, but these vast, inaccessible rivers of the West Coast would be yielding and rich. They would gradually give up their colour. They would turn from gold to silver to brown as the men who had had the resolution to approach them – ordinary men like Hopton Fellwater and Bunny McGee – washed the gold from their banks and saw their lives change and happiness come in.

So intensely did Joseph long for happiness that, to ease his mind, he began to plan what he would do once he possessed his share of the gold. He thought he would send money to Rebecca's family, enough money to repair their roof, to build a new privy, enough to let them buy a forest, if that was their desire, or set themselves up in the lucrative business of rearing pheasants. He would make sure the money reached them anonymously and that they would never know its sender nor its source.

This was how Joseph's thinking went. And what he hoped might come in the wake of these actions would be a rediscovery of his feelings for Harriet. For he knew how cold he was. How could he not know?

He remembered her laughing with delight over their first purchases for the farm, and taking his arm in the street and kissing his face . . . he could remember these actions very vividly and yet he saw that he had somehow sent them away, sent them out of his life like children punished by being sent out of a room.

And he recognised that this was lamentable and shocking. Harriet deserved his love and yet he couldn't give it, not only because he'd
never
loved her as much as he'd hoped to, but because, now, his mind had gone towards gold. And this drift towards gold had somehow opened a door on to the past, a door he had thought was closed for ever, but was not.

The rain came early in February. It fell in torrents from a black sky and, to Joseph's astonishment, began to dissolve the ‘mountains' by the creek's edge, letting the earth slide back into the river.

Harriet stood by the wall of her garden, listening to the rain on her bean leaves. Then she turned and saw Joseph coming up towards her and knew that he had something to say, something which the longed-for rain had released in him.

He began by admiring the vegetable patch: the tiny stems of fruit on the currant bushes and the wine-coloured stalks of the beet tops. Then, he said: ‘I have made my decision. Now that the rain has come I can leave for a while and not worry that everything might die or fail. So, if you agree, I shall buy a boat passage to Nelson, then on to Hokitika.'