The Colour (19 page)

Downstairs, the concertina music began again. Joseph woke up and moved off Harriet's body and lay with his back to her, listening to the tune.

The bed was soft and he congratulated himself on having found a comfortable hotel. He was still half in his dream, which was a dream of Rebecca. He was dancing with her at the Parton Magna fête, in a hall strung up with flags, and her breath smelled of cider and she took his hand and laid it on her breast, under the tight bodice of her dress.

Joseph felt Harriet turn over and move towards him. She put a hand on his neck and whispered: ‘Can you hear people laughing?'

II

They stayed two nights at D'Erlanger's Hotel and on the day in between set about their purchases, which reminded Harriet of those early times when they were buying seed and utensils for the farm and when she still believed in the possibility of their love.

Joseph's passage to Nelson and Hokitika on the old
Wallabi
, which should have cost £4, had risen to £15 because of the clamour of people wanting to get aboard. There were no berths left on it; Joseph would have to sleep on deck, among the chicken coops ‘and pray for a fine night, sir, or else get a drenching'. But he knew that, despite the expense and his poor place on the ship, he was lucky. All over the town, men worked, trying to save up their fares for the steamboat. They worked as porters and carters, or set up in small enterprises, selling canvas or knives or grog, or fashioning sluice-boxes out of beech planks.

The Survival Stall was still there in the market, the live eels being split and sliced and packed in bladder wrack, but Joseph heard a bystander remark that the eel preserver didn't need to cross the sea to the goldfields; the ‘Preservation' was his gold. And Joseph understood how a whole new economy can spring up around gold and fortunes be made by those on the periphery of the diggings, and he thought how, in his entire life, he had never had anything to sell, only his mundane skills as a livestock auctioneer. But he told himself that in the time to come, he would sell his gold for more money than he and his father had ever earned in their lives. He would become the kind of man who inspired envy in other men and longing in women.

He packed a swag with tea and tobacco, ham, flour and sugar. He added two jars of the salted eel. He bought a billy-can, a tent, an axe and a box of nails, strong boots and two pairs of moleskin trousers. When he put on one of the pairs of the trousers, he imagined himself already at work in a wide gully, pegging out his claim. He spent a long time looking at the sluice-boxes or ‘cradles' with their iron slats and their layer of canvas beneath. He loved the ingenuity of them, but they were heavy and cumbersome and Joseph thought that, when he arrived, he would make his own cradle out of wood and nails and fit it with a wheel, so that he could push it like a barrow along the beaches or through swamps or into the dark unending world of the bush. He'd already built a house with a stone chimney and windows that didn't leak; he was surely capable of making a simple device for sifting earth?

He sat in the bar of D'Erlanger's Hotel, drinking beer and making sketches of his sluice. He felt his readiness for his adventure creep all through him, like a strange fever.

III

Harriet had thought she would call her horse ‘Sentinel'. In all her dreams of the horse, it stood on a high ridge, keeping watch.

But the animal she liked the look of, a chestnut gelding with a high-stepping trot, answered to the name of Billy. ‘You can change the name if you want,' commented the stable-owner, ‘but he won't know who in the world you're talking to.'

Harriet smiled. She now saw that Sentinel was a portentous kind of name and she thought how, in her dreams, she made herself astonishingly grand and singular. ‘Billy,' she repeated. ‘I'll call him Billy if that's his name.'

She led the horse into a muddy, fenced paddock and the stable-man helped her into the saddle, sitting astride with her skirts tucked round her, and she walked Billy on, holding the reins loosely and patting his neck so that he would start to feel comfortable with her. Then she shortened the reins and spurred him into a trot and despite his high step, his gait was easy and his mouth sensitive and obedient to the bit. Already, she could imagine the horse in a flowing gallop across the flats, the birds flying from the grass as he came on.

She bought Billy for less than the price of a passage on the
Wallabi.
She paid for him to be re-shod and said she would collect him the following day and ride him home. Then, she returned to D'Erlanger's Hotel and wrote a letter to her father:

IV

The
Wallabi
ploughed slowly northwards out of Lyttelton, towards the high winds of the Cook Strait. The ship smelled of coal and grease and the crowded deck was as noisy as any boat's deck could be. It was crammed with men: ‘new chums' like Joseph and ‘old returners' – diggers who had been in Otago three years before and were going back because the colour drew them back, like a lover. Around and in between the groups of men, a company of hens in wicker cages kept up a tuneless serenade to the sky.

Joseph set himself to endure it. He sat on a wooden crate in the stern, with a view of the flagpole and the Red Duster whipped sideways by the wind and the wake of the ship, flowing backwards towards everything that he was leaving. He stared at his hands and the dirt in the cracks of them and then at his swag, to which he was already attached, and he kept tightening the straps that held it together. Around him, games of cards and drinking began and laughter, but Joseph remained aloof from all of this.

He thought about Harriet riding home and hoped the horse wouldn't stumble or fall. At the quayside, as the
Wallabi
had begun to shudder and smoke in its readiness to depart, and its bell was rung, summoning the last passengers, Joseph had held Harriet to him – as he might have held a friend, closely, but with no passion – and she had looked at him with sadness. The look was not devoid of affection, but it was such as a mother gives to a fond child who has disappointed her. And then she asked: ‘Do you think that we shall see each other again?'

He kissed her cheek, the hard, tight skin of her cheek under its high cheekbone. He thought her question melodramatic. But he told her calmly that he would certainly come back. He told her to look at the map of New Zealand to see that he would not even be very far away, but only just on the other side of the mountains.

‘Ah,' said Harriet. ‘The mountains that cannot be crossed.'

‘Men have crossed them.'

‘But I cannot, Joseph, and nor can you.'

The bell was clamouring and it was time for Joseph to turn and walk on to the gangplank of the ship, but he searched for something else to say because he didn't want to let the parting end like this, in a dishonest way, as if it what had never seemed final were suddenly afflicted with finality. He was tempted to make the promise that he'd sail back with his swag full of money and begin work on a new house . . . the new house of his imaginings in a sheltered valley where the winds wouldn't reach. But, out of superstition, he said none of this and instead asked: ‘When I return, why don't we meet at D'Erlanger's Hotel? And I shall buy us a fine dinner.'

He hoped she would smile; he wanted to be left with this – the sweetness of her flawed smile – not her showy kind of sorrow. But her look didn't alter as she nodded and replied: ‘Yes. Why not? A fine dinner. I shall give you back the gun.'

And then he was gone, and he stood and watched Harriet on the quayside as the moorings of the boat were untied and it began to move away through the water. He saw her waving to him, standing very tall and still.

A boy of fifteen or sixteen now came to sit down near to Joseph on the
Wallabi
's deck. The boy took out a penny whistle from his jerkin pocket and began turning it over and over in his hands. He had no possessions that Joseph could see, only the whistle. His boots were worn and the jerkin frayed at the cuffs.

‘Why do you not play something?' Joseph said gently.

‘On the Arrow, I played,' said the boy. ‘Played my whistle and done all kinds of service and got a little gold, but I was cheated of it in the end.'

‘But now you're trying again?'

‘All I can do, mister. Try again. Play my whistle again. Do my services again. Hope not to die again.'

V

Harriet rode to the Orchard Run. Billy's gallop was frisky and he held his ears high. Harriet loved the sight of his fast-moving shadow on the ground.

She found Dorothy and Edwin whitewashing the stables. Dorothy, who was wearing a pinafore and a frayed old straw hat, said to Harriet: ‘Why do we like white so much? Is it the blankness of it?'

‘I am white now, Mama,' announced Edwin.

Harriet and Dorothy looked at him and saw his face and arms covered with the chalky wash. ‘Oh, so you are,' said Dorothy. ‘Do you like being white, or shall we put you in the tub?'

‘I like being white,' said Edwin.

Dorothy's fondness for picnics decreed that the white-washing would be ‘suspended' and saddle bags packed with cold pigeons and cheese ‘and any bottle of wine that Toby will not notice is missing' and that the three of them would ride to the river and have lunch sitting on the grass. ‘The dogs can come with us,' she said. ‘They like to bite minnows out of the water.'

They let Billy rest, after his ride from Christchurch. Edwin combed the sweat from the horse's neck and put a rug on his back and Harriet was reminded for a moment of the old tartan rug with which they'd covered Beauty.

Edwin said: ‘He's pretty like this, on his own.'

‘On his own?'

‘I mean, not attached to the cart.'

‘Sometimes, he will have to pull the cart.'

‘Your donkey can pull the cart.'

‘The donkey walks very slowly now.'

‘Pare used to walk very slowly,' said Edwin.

Harriet looked around to see whether Dorothy was within earshot, but Dorothy was striding towards the house, calling to Janet to prepare the picnic.

‘Have you seen Pare?' Harriet asked.

‘No,' said Edwin. ‘I think that log came back and her voice told her not to visit me any more.'

‘Suppose she came today, while you were white?'

‘She won't come. She never comes.'

Together, they led Billy into the stable and put feed into the manger. Edwin's face had a powdery, ghostly look. Through the powder, a single tear snaked down his cheek. He wiped it away.

‘Shall I shall tell you what has happened to me?' Harriet asked gently.

‘Is it something bad?'

‘I don't know yet. It's about Joseph. He's gone away to look for gold.'

‘Gone away to the West Coast?'

‘Yes.'

‘Papa said yesterday “the West Coast is a terrible madness”. But I don't know what he means. Sometimes he says “there is a terrible madness in these sums of yours, Edwin”.'

Harriet stroked her horse, smoothed a tangle from his mane.

‘Perhaps your Papa means that all these things are difficult to understand?'

‘Gold isn't difficult,' said Edwin. ‘You get a pan and fill it with mud and water and slither it around and everything falls out except the gold. That's what Mama taught me.'

‘Yes. But sometimes there is no gold in the pan to remain after the rest has fallen out.'

‘Then there is no point in it.'

‘There is the same kind of point as there is in going to the toi-toi grass to call to Pare. For a hundred days there may be no one there, just as, for a hundred days there might be no gold in the pan. But on the hundred-and-first day . . . there she will be.'

Edwin looked solemnly at Harriet. After a while, he said: ‘I'm going to begin counting.'

They sat by the river and the sun shone on the water. The pigeons were tender and tasted of something earthy, like fungus or like damp dead wood. The wine Dorothy had stolen from Toby's store was sweet and cold.

While Edwin played in the creek with the dogs, Mollie and Baby, Dorothy talked about what it could mean to find riches in the earth. She said: ‘I have no right and Toby has no right to criticise anybody for going to the goldfields. My father owns a tin mine and almost all of what we've been able to build here comes from that money . . . that tin money. Chance arranged it this way. But for the men who work in my father's mine . . . for them, every day is hard. I have seen them in the cold English winters, standing up to their knees in that icy, reddish water. And I think that on the West Coast, in the swamps and in the gullies, everything will be very hard indeed.'

Harriet rested on her elbows and looked at the sky. She felt stiff from her ride. ‘Joseph isn't afraid of hardship,' she said.

‘No, I know,' said Dorothy. ‘Building your house out of cob must have been extraordinarily hard. But I wonder what made him go now, when there is so much work to be done on your farm?'

Harriet started to explain about the creek and Joseph's fossicking for gold there. She said: ‘He began to dream about gold. He couldn't let it go. And the things Joseph wants, he has to try to have them then and there and cannot wait. That seems to be the way he is.'

When Dorothy said that she understood this and that every human life hurtles too fast through time ‘with too much spinning off and being left behind for ever' and how we fly this way and that trying to catch those spinning things, Harriet's mind returned to the brown curl she'd seen in Joseph's fly box, and the person to whom it belonged, whoever she was, the person who had been left behind.