The Colour (18 page)

Harriet stood very still, with the dog by her, with the moisture making silvery cobwebs in her hair. She didn't look at Joseph, but kept a watch on the earth, noting places where the rain didn't reach or where puddles were forming.

After a while, she bent down and stroked the dog's damp head, then straightened up and said: ‘And if I don't agree, what will you do?'

Joseph took off his hat and shook the rain from it and put it on again.

‘I must go,' he said. ‘I must go before all the gold is gone.'

‘And if there is no gold?'

‘Men are not risking their lives for nothing, Harriet.'

‘Men are risking their lives
in the hope of something.
That is all.'

‘I have dreams about the Grey River. I shall come back with enough . . . enough gold to transform our world.'

They were getting soaked, standing out there under the dark sky. Harriet hadn't minded this a moment ago, but now she saw how stupid it was; it was stupid because they were frail. ‘What have we been doing for all these months,' she said, ‘but endeavouring to “transform our world”?'

‘Yes,' said Joseph. ‘And we have. We have made the garden and the pond . . .'

‘But you've lost heart in these things?'

Joseph hung his head. He didn't want to say that he'd lost heart in them on the morning in late winter when he'd first seen the colour at the creek's edge, that from that moment he'd begun to see them as small and of very little account. He reached out and tentatively took Harriet's hand. ‘I want more,' he said.

She let him hold her hand for a brief second before pulling away.

‘And
I
want more!' she said crossly. Then she called to Lady and began to walk away from Joseph down the hill.

Later, when they were lying in bed in their calico room, Joseph, who couldn't leave the subject alone, began to plead: ‘If I don't go, then I'm less than men like Hopton Fellwater. Everyone in the South Island will be rich and we shall be left out, because I was too cowardly to go.'

‘Is that what you believe?' asked Harriet coldly.

‘Yes. It's what I believe.'

‘And if you go, what happens to the farm?'

‘You will manage,' Joseph said. ‘I've seen what you can do. You will take care of everything. And Lilian will help you. Then in the winter, I'll come back. I'll come back with the gold. And we shall begin again.'

Harriet now wanted to say that she didn't believe in the gold but saw that this was not quite what she meant. She certainly believed that gold had been found and indeed Edwin Orchard had already told her what Pare had said about the discoveries at Greenstone Creek. She could imagine, too, that Joseph would work heroically, work until he died, to find the colour at Hokitika and bring it out of the earth. What she decided she meant was that she didn't believe in Joseph's vision of the gold as something which would bring them happiness. She thought that happiness lay hidden somewhere, in a place just out of reach, and that one day it might reveal itself to her, but she didn't think that it would be contained in lumps of gold.

So she lay silent for a while, finding nothing to say. And in this silence, she began to imagine what her days and nights would be like without Joseph. She saw in not much time that she wouldn't mind his absence at all, just as she hadn't minded when he and Lilian had gone down to Christchurch and she had set her fires and seen the flame in the cabbage tree.

And Harriet soon understood another thing: by agreeing to what Joseph wanted, she could get something for herself, something which had constantly been refused her. So now at last she turned towards him in the bed. She touched his cheek more tenderly than she'd touched it for a long while.

‘You're right,' she said. ‘You should go, Joseph. There was certainly no gold in England. None.'

‘No,' he said. ‘None.'

‘So you should take the chance. Follow the crowd. See what you can get. It would be wrong of me to try to stop you.'

‘I will come back in the winter.'

‘Yes.'

‘And now that the rain has come . . .'

‘Yes. Now that the rain has come.'

‘Your bean crop will be good . . .'

‘How will you live, in Hokitika, Joseph?'

‘I have no idea. I shall do what the others do.'

‘But first and foremost, you will need supplies.'

Harriet waited to hear what he would say to this, because now she was nearing the thing that would be her part of the bargain. For they both knew that the donkey couldn't take them in the cart to Christchurch to fetch supplies, or even to Rangiora, and that, even if Joseph was prepared to walk down to Rangiora to hire a dray, Harriet and Lilian shouldn't be left alone at Okuku with no means of leaving the farm or reaching a town.

‘I shall make sure we get . . . from one of the farms lower down the flats . . . we shall find someone to sell us another donkey,' said Joseph. ‘and hope it will be in better spirits.'

‘No,' said Harriet. She removed her hand from Joseph's cheek and sat up. A candle still burned near her side of the bed and now her shadow loomed up large and dark against the white calico. ‘I want a horse,' she said. ‘If I can't have a horse, then I simply shall not let you go.'

‘Harriet . . .' Joseph began, but she cut him off.

‘A horse is strong enough to swim the Ashley, roped to the ferry, but a donkey is not. If there were any accident to either of us, a horse can take us in the cart very fast to a doctor at Rangiora. So it is a horse, Joseph, and nothing else that we must have.'

Joseph looked at her, her skin brown and dry from the days of burning heat, her eyes very black in the candlelight. He thought how she tricked him or manoeuvred him into giving her what he didn't want to give and what they couldn't afford: first the dog, Lady, who seemed attached to her and to no one else and now this, the tall horse she said she saw in her mind and about which she had begun to pester him.

He sighed. He felt chilled from having stood out so long in the rain and knew that, on this particular night, he lacked the will to argue with her.

‘Very well,' he said at last. ‘But if we buy a horse, we will have almost no money left. I suppose you understand that?'

IV

A week later, Joseph and Harriet trekked on foot to Rangiora and waited for a dray to take them to Christchurch.

Lilian sat alone in the Cob House, with Lady whining and turning in circles, searching for Harriet. ‘For goodness' sake,' said Lilian to the dog, ‘try to be still.'

But she was glad to have the dog with her. As night fell, everything outside the Cob House seemed to grow in immensity: the clouds moving across the moon, the distant mountains, the flat grassland all around. Lilian knew that she had never been as far removed from any other human being as she was now. It was as though she were aboard some strange conveyance, taking her further and further from small familiar things, into a universe of shadows.

She spent her evening mending broken plates, making sure that the tiny pattern of flowers was not disturbed by the joins, but as she worked, this feeling of travelling into vastness increased to a point where Lilian became dizzy and faint and had to lay her head down on the table.

She stared at the objects in the room: the chair by the range, the towels drying on the airing frame, a cheap almanac on a hook. And she wanted to gather these things to her and cling to them as she flew through the enormity of the night.

D'Erlanger's Hotel

I

There were no cheap rooms available in Christchurch. On his own, Joseph would have walked out of the town and slept in a field, as he'd done before, but he had Harriet with him. Though his money was running very low, he told himself that all the expense he was incurring now would seem trivial at some future time.

The place he found was called D'Erlanger's Hotel. It employed two bellboys, dressed in blue-and-red uniforms and smart little boxy hats.

One of the bellboys showed Joseph and Harriet to a room with a four-poster bed, hung with muslin. The bellboy opened the window on the sunny afternoon and stood by it, whistling for his tip.

As evening came on, Joseph heard the sound of a concertina being played downstairs and he thought what a long time it was since he had danced. On the bed, where the muslin moved softly in the draught from the open window, Joseph laid out his father's pistol and a box of bullets and told Harriet that he wanted her to have them while he was gone.

She said she had never fired a pistol, so he showed her how to load it and close it and unlock the safety catch and how to aim, looking straight along her outstretched arm. She said: ‘We look like some Gang of Two, planning our crimes.' And she smiled at him, still holding the pistol, pointing it at a mahogany wardrobe, and he saw once again that pearly tooth of hers which showed and was not meant to show when she smiled.

The concertina music was melancholy but warm and Joseph stood up and drew the curtains and thought he would let himself give in to the unexpected sweetness of the moment, because it might never come again.

He took the gun from Harriet's hand and laid it down. Then he brought her to the bed and pulled the muslin round them and kissed her mouth. Her skirts were muddy from the walk to Rangiora, but Joseph didn't remove them, only bunched them up so that the mound of them lay under his belly. He wished he could spread her hair out on the pillow, as he'd done in the early time of their marriage, but her hair was too short to spread. He tried to move in time to the music floating up the stairs and he felt her move with him. She smelled of the muddy flats, of dry leaves and sweat and earth.

He had to withdraw from her more quickly than he'd wanted. The music stopped and the only sound that Joseph could hear as he lay there with his wife was the thudding of his heart and he found this condition of silence intensely painful, as though everything in his world were about to cease.

Harriet's arm circled Joseph's back and her hand touched the hardness of his shoulder blades and she realised how thin he'd become from all his arduous work by the creek. Yet his body, lying on hers, felt very heavy, as if his bones were made of lead, and she wanted him to move away and walk through the muslin curtain and be gone.

But she lay there, unmoving, and suffered the weight of him because she saw how mean her thoughts were and how lovelessness carries with it a kind of shame, which grows more and more fearful as the days pass.

On a night-table by the bed, Harriet could see the gun. She stared at it. She thought how easy it would be to pick it up and put it against Joseph's head and muffle the shot with the pillow. She saw how death would arrive with mundane simplicity in a single moment and how nothing in the hotel room would move – only the thin curtains in the afternoon breeze – and how, in a little while, the concertina music would start up again.

She imagined walking out from D'Erlanger's Hotel in a clean dress and soon becoming lost in the crowds and going in search of some food and a horse and then riding away from Christchurch in the moonlight. She would eat her food and let the horse graze on the tussock and then she would lie down on the ground and sleep, with the horse tethered to a stone. And all the while, Joseph's body would lie on the bed, his brain bleeding into the pillows, and no one would discover it until morning, when the chambermaids arrived with their brooms and pails. And by then, she would be far away, asleep in the emptiness of the flats. She would ride to the Orchard Run and have breakfast with Dorothy.

She didn't know if anyone would track her down, arrest her, try her, condemn her, hang her. She thought that here, in New Zealand, murder might be one of a thousand crimes which could remain unpunished for years, the identity of the culprit lost in the immensity of distance.

Harriet heard Joseph's breathing change and knew that he'd gone to sleep, lying on her, on her damp skirts. She knew she would always remember this room in D'Erlanger's Hotel, with its open window and its elegant bed, and the sun on the face of the bellboy as he'd stood and whistled for his money, and the concertina music waltzing up the stairs.

Experimentally, she moved her arm and began to push aside the muslin drapes, so that the gun was within her grasp. She knew, if she decided to kill Joseph, how easy it was going to be to lie to Lilian, telling her that Joseph had boarded the steamship in Lyttelton Harbour and waved to her from its crowded deck as it sailed away.

‘What did he take with him?' Lilian would ask.

‘The thing they call a swag,' she would reply, ‘a rolled canvas bag secured with two straps and with a sling for carrying.'

‘And in the swag?'

‘Oh, provisions. Tall boots for the swampy ground. Money.'

‘But what for the diggings?'

‘Knives, a mallet, a pannikin, rope to peg out his claim. A little tent for when the winter comes.'

‘When the winter comes? He said he would be back by winter-time.'

‘Oh yes. Unless his finds are very good. Or unless he has no luck at all. In either event, he might stay longer . . .'

So easy to lie to Lilian. On and on through the seasons the lie would share their house and breathe the air they breathed. On and on, until sufficient time had passed and Lilian began to suspect that something terrible had happened to her son. But even then, she would believe that Joseph had died trying to dig gold from a river-bed and never in the world imagine that Harriet had killed him in a Christchurch hotel, for no reason other than her inability to love him.

The gun was within a few inches of her hand now, an irksome little gun, Harriet thought, ornate and mean. She didn't like it. Because it was when Joseph had showed her how to use the gun that he'd become aroused in just the way that he used to be, wanting his pleasure with an embarrassing desperation, arranging her body under his, pushing and pulling at her thighs, with no thought for what she was feeling, and it was this – only this, she now saw – which had brought on her murderous thoughts. If Joseph hadn't touched her, if the weight of him hadn't felt so great, then the idea of killing him would never have entered her mind.