The Colour (2 page)

‘Good for you, Mr Blackstone,' the men opined. ‘All credit to you.'

What Joseph did not say was that, in England, he had done a disgraceful thing.

‘You're a thoughtful one,' the men said when the building of the Cob House began. They were mashing mud and grass for the walls, breaking stones for the chimney and they were stronger than Joseph, who rested more often and was observed staring down at the plains, known here as ‘flats', wide plains with hardly any trees, stretching to infinity below him, staring as still as an owl.

‘Penny for them? Missing home?'

‘No.'

‘Wouldn't blame you, Mr Blackstone. Homesickness: we know a lot about that here.'

‘No,' he said again. And took up his knife and sharpened it and returned to his task of the grass-shredding and made himself whistle so that the men could read his mood correctly, his mood of optimism. Because what he felt as he surveyed the flats or turned and looked up towards the distant mountains was a sudden surge of hope. He was here. He was in the South Island of New Zealand, the place they called Aotearoa – Land of the Long White Cloud. Though he had done a terrible thing in England, he had survived. The future lay around him, in the stones, in the restless water of the creek, in the distant forest.

And with Harriet's help, he told himself, he would contrive to live an honest and prosperous life, one in which Lilian would eventually feel comfortable and cared for and some day put her hand on his cheek and tell him that she was proud of all that he'd achieved.

IV

The Rooms let to Harriet and Lilian by Mrs Dinsdale in Christchurch smelled of the resin which seeped from the matchboarded walls and of linen sprayed with hard water and scorched with burning irons.

Mrs Dinsdale had come to Christchurch from Dunedin and to Dunedin from Edinburgh. In Edinburgh, she said, there had been no creases in her laundry.

She was Lilian's age and a widow like her, but with an obstinate prettiness which had not quite gone away, that kind of prettiness which suggested that Mrs Dinsdale might soon become – even at her age – Mrs Somebody-Else.

Lilian said to Harriet: ‘I do believe she's a coquette. Is that the word?'

And in strange contrast to her savage way with the smoothing iron, Mrs Dinsdale seemed to be such a light and gentle person that it was not long before Lilian found herself sitting on what Mrs Dinsdale called ‘my best verandah', drinking lemonade and confiding many of the sorrows and embarrassments of her former life.

Under her steel-grey hair, parted in the middle and whipped round her head in a stringy plait, Lilian Blackstone's face was as white as dough as she described to Mrs Dinsdale her ‘struggles' with her late husband, Roderick. Barely paying attention to Mrs Dinsdale's observation that ‘marriage was always and ever a rare battle of wills', Lilian whispered to her new friend how Roderick had possessed one vice and this vice it was which had caused his embarrassing death.

At the word ‘vice', Mrs Dinsdale's blue eyes took on an eager glitter and she moved forward a fraction in her wickerwork chair.

‘Oh, vice,' she said.

‘Some would not call it “vice”,' said Lilian. ‘But I do.'

‘And what was the particular . . . vice?'

‘Curiosity.'

‘Curiosity?'

‘Yes. Roderick could leave nothing alone. If he had been able to leave things alone, he would not have died and I never would have been manhandled across the globe like this.'

Mrs Dinsdale took the beaded muslin off the jug of lemonade and refilled the two glasses. In this little action, Lilian saw, in drawing her attention to the way the sun scintillated so satisfactorily, so un-Englishly in the pale liquid, Mrs Dinsdale was reminding Lilian that Christchurch had its charms and that she should not refuse to notice them.

‘I do not mean any criticism of New Zealand,' said Lilian hastily. ‘All I mean is that I had the life I wanted, in the village of Parton Magna in Norfolk, and I would not have chosen to leave it. It was my son's idea, to abandon the Old World. And once that idea had come into his head . . .'

‘Oh yes. Once an idea has come to them, they will not be turned aside.'

‘Exactly.'

‘And as a widow you had inadequate means, perhaps?'

‘Miserably inadequate. Roderick had not expected to die.'

Mrs Dinsdale crossed her feet, shod, Lilian noticed, in very choice little brown boots.

‘So, it was his curiosity, then?' said Mrs Dinsdale, her eyes still wide and expressing sparkling interest. ‘But how can curiosity kill a man?'

Lilian sipped her lemonade. She had never liked it very much, but, here, you were at risk from scurvy if you did not drink it, someone had told her.

‘Ostriches,' she whispered.

‘Ostriches, Mrs Blackstone?'

‘Yes. I really cannot bear to say it out loud because people are so mocking. But I can whisper it to you: Roderick was killed by ostriches.'

After Joseph had gone away to build the house, Harriet began her scrapbook. She told herself that she was making it for her father, Henry Salt, (a teacher of geography who had never travelled further afield than Switzerland) but she also knew that she was making it for herself.

In her first letter to Henry Salt, she said that she did not expect the scrapbook to contain ‘much of irresistible interest' at first, but that when the Cob House was built, when they were living there, out in the middle of nothing, ‘then I think I will find something to intrigue you'.

She had been surprised to discover a very beautifully bound leather book in a shop in Worcester Street, with pages stiff and creamy as starched pillow-slips. She was tempted to ask for her name to be inscribed on the cover in tooled gold lettering, but Joseph had warned her not to spend money on ‘anything dear or inessential'. What she had of currency was going to be used to buy vegetable seed, poultry, fence posts, wire and a dairy cow. She knew she should not really have bought the book itself, but it was her way of marking a line between her new life and her old.

The first thing Harriet put into the book was a leaf. She thought it was a maple leaf. It had fallen out of the sky on to the ship in the middle of the Tasman Sea – or so it had seemed. She named it
Leaf out of sky on board the
SS Albert. The second item was a label from a box of Chinese tea she had bought at a shop called Read's Commodities. On the label was a drawing of two herons, with their necks entwined amid some Chinese writing, and Harriet thought it beautiful and strange. She labelled it
First purchase of tea
.

She added some photographs of boats at anchor in Lyttelton Harbour, found in the shop where she bought the book, and some New Zealand stamps with Queen Victoria's head on them. Neither of these last things did she find interesting, but she saw that the leaf and the tea label on their own did not convey the idea of the coming book.

And it was this that excited her, the scrapbook filling up with all the elements of her future life. To her father she wrote:

To pass the time, while Lilian and Mrs Dinsdale sat on the ‘best verandah' drinking lemonade, Harriet designed a vegetable garden for the Cob House. She wanted to put wooden fencing round the plot, but she had been told that wood was expensive and that they could afford wooden windows and doors for the house, but nothing else. So she enclosed her garden with stones. She imagined the warm touch of the stones in the summer sun and the icy touch of them in winter. She put in carrots and parsnips and k
Å«
gmara, the sweet potato which was a staple of their lives, said Mrs Dinsdale, ‘as vital as bread'. In among her peas, beans and lettuces, she sketched lines of dandelion. The farmers of New Zealand, she'd heard, fed their pigs on a diet of dandelion leaves and snails and these pigs were as healthy as any pigs in the world. They were frisky in their movements and their tails were bristly and pert and their flesh tasted like veal.

There would eventually be pigs on Joseph and Harriet's farm, but where, Harriet wondered, can one be certain of finding the snails?

V

Meanwhile, the Cob House took shape around its stone chimney.

The iron hinges of the door glinted in the heat. The tin roof was nailed down. Inside, the earth was soaked and tamped and beaten smooth and hard, but there were no interior rooms, no closed and private spaces, only partitions made with stretched calico.

Joseph sat with his back against the cob wall, smoking a brittle pipe, and congratulated himself for finding the right spot for the house, where the afternoon breeze shivered in the beech leaves and set the calico gently swaying. Though the men had advised him to build lower down ‘deeper into the flat, Mr Blackstone, where you won't feel the winters so bad', he'd resisted them. He wanted to build high, near the straggly trees. He wanted to feel the bush at his back and the flats beneath. He was a Norfolk man, the son of a livestock auctioneer, whose clerk he'd been, travelling roads and farm tracks in all weathers. Winter held no terrors for him. And the chimney was well shaped and solid. Harriet and Lilian would be warm in the Cob House when the snows came – if the snows came. And whenever he looked out of the nicely crafted wooden windows, he would see the great sweep of land that belonged to him, the first land he had ever owned and for which he had paid a mere £1 an acre. In time – in not very much time at all – that land would be transformed. It would be fenced and planted with hedges and trees. He would dig out a pond for ducks and geese. Willows would lean towards the pond, as they leaned towards a Norfolk mere. The tussock grass would be ploughed up and the land sown with clover for the horses and wheat for the household. There would be a mill.

Joseph worked so hard on the Cob House that, in the hot nights, listening to the melancholy cry of the weka, he fell without difficulty into a stunned, dreamless sleep. He lay near the creek, rolled up in a striped blanket that smelled of camphor, with his head in the crook of his arm. He was thirty-five, a lean and stringy man with pale eyes. His hair was dark and his feet were large and narrow. Already, he'd formed the habit of stroking his sparse black beard when he closed his eyes.

The noise of the water usually woke him at dawn, but seldom before dawn, as if the river settled into a silent pool for all the hours of darkness and only gathered strength to start flowing again in the morning.

The men told Joseph that this particular creek had no name ‘for the plain reason that no one has stopped here long enough to name it'.

So Joseph decided to call it ‘Harriet's Creek' because he knew how much this would please his new wife. He imagined her sitting at the old mahogany table carted out from England on the
Albert
and writing to her father, the geography teacher, telling him how fast the water rushed over the stones, ‘and don't you think this is very romantic of Joseph?'

Lilian wouldn't be happy about this, of course. Joseph knew that his mother would prefer to have the river named after her, to know herself to be at the centre of everything, even if this everything now consisted of a calico tent within a house made of mud. But in time, he told himself, once the pond was there and the willows, and the land was fenced and the animals began to thrive . . . then surely Lilian would become susceptible to the beauty of this new world? Surely, she would begin to feel that her only child had done the right thing? And, if she didn't, well at least he would break his back trying.

A determined bloody cockatoo, the men began to call him among themselves. And they told him cockatoo stories in the dusk, round their fires. ‘You know a cockatoo can imitate a hawk, Mr Blackstone? He does it to scare the fowls. He does it for the fun of it, to see the fowls run away squawking! And it can laugh, too. Anyone tell you that? Fowls all scuttle away or drop dead from fear and old heartless cockatoo, he laughs like a hyena.'

Joseph smiled, because he was expected to smile, because he wanted to stay on good terms with these people who were helping him and teaching him the skills he needed to survive. But the word ‘heartless' made him shiver. He drew closer to the fire. He clung to thoughts of Harriet, evoking as consolation not her silky hair or her strong body, but a single tooth of hers that showed and was not meant to show when she smiled. Without this flaw, this little ivory flaw in what he thought of as her impenetrable hardness, perhaps he would not have had the courage to marry her? It was the tooth which had given him hope, that here was a woman he would grow to love. And loving her as he would and living sensibly with her, without loathing and without damage, then he believed, his past would slowly vanish. He would be able to grow old without it, just as, if a man is careful, he can grow old without yearning.

The only thing he dreaded was that Harriet would pester him to father a child. He'd never said anything to her on this subject, but he hoped she sensed it: he hoped she understood that a child was not part of the bargain they'd made. She was a clever woman. He prayed she understood that it would have to be the two of them and Lilian and whatever they could make of that; the two of them and that until the end.

VI

So slowly the summer passed for Harriet Blackstone. In January, when temperatures in Christchurch were so high that Lilian twice fainted on Mrs Dinsdale's stairs, buildings were rumoured to be collapsing all over the town. Some people said that the mechanics of construction were not sufficiently understood in New Zealand and that there could be an epidemic of collapse before the year was out.