The Colour (3 page)

Harriet examined the walls and ceiling of her room. She never heard them move or creak in the darkness. Though resin continued to bubble out of the boards, there was no other outward sign of any precariousness, but how was one to know – someone like her, who didn't understand the mechanics of construction – how was she to be sure the roof wouldn't fall down and crush her while she slept?

She went to McArthur Street and looked at a building that had fallen. She tried to imagine where, in which exact spot – through all the months of the building's existence – the earth had tugged and called and beckoned to the rafters. She knew that this was a fanciful, womanish kind of a thing to imagine, that the heavy earth tugged and called and beckoned to every single thing upon it for all eternity and in time every single thing would fall. Yet she found herself hoping that Joseph was paying attention to this in the building of the Cob House, that he had imagination enough to listen to the earth.

Joseph Blackstone. She didn't know him yet. She saw – what she had known from the first but had not particularly minded – that he was rather an ordinary man. She knew that they had almost passed each other by. And then, for no reason that she could determine, he had come back, hurried back in a stumbling way one autumn evening, as though he'd suddenly remembered what it was he wanted to say or do, as though part of him had been missing when he first met her and then he had rediscovered it.

He wooed her with dreams of escape. She sat on the hearth rug with her head on his knee and he described to her the paradise he would create on the other side of the world. It was his words that made her cling to him when he touched her. And, feeling the warmth of him and the smell of his clothes, which reminded her of the scent of tree bark, she saw how sick of her life as a governess she was, how weary of owning nothing and going nowhere and spending her days by other people's meagre fires. So she knew in a very short time that she was happy to go off with Joseph Blackstone, to buy a trousseau for a new world, to stare at the sky and imagine the altered constellations of a different hemisphere.

Barely time to have the wedding, though. Barely time to put on the ring. Barely time to lie in a tall bed while he did what he did with his hand over her face (so that she might not see it?) and withdrew just before he came to his pleasure. And then, in a frenzy of endeavour, in a kind of fury, he was running her from shop to shop, pulling out of his fusty pockets orders and measuring tapes and money. Boots, shawls, stockings, woollen dresses, and aprons: these workaday clothes appeared to be the currency of her marriage, not kisses – or not many – not whispered confidences, nor laughter.

But he went on talking about New Zealand and she went on listening and while she listened she liked to be lying close to him and feeling the rise and fall of his breath.

One night, he told her about the First People. They were known as the moa hunters. They killed the giant Moa Bird and lived off its flesh and built huts with its bones and went to sleep wrapped in its feathers. They hunted it to extinction and then looked around them in disbelief. They did not know how else to live, except from the Moa, and so they sickened and died. ‘And this, Harriet,' said Joseph, ‘teaches us a valuable lesson. We will not cling to familiar ways. We will imagine ourselves reborn over there. On the acres I am buying, everything will begin afresh.'

They were lying in his bedroom in Lilian's house and the darkness of Norfolk pressed on them at the half-open window. Harriet liked her new husband's use of the word ‘reborn'. She took his hand and drifted into a dream of sleep, wrapped in the feathers of a brown bird.

When she returned to Mrs Dinsdale's after staring at the fallen building, Harriet examined her face in the mirror. Her hair was curly in the afternoon heat, her cheeks red and moist. She had not often looked quite like this, so wild and agitated and damp. But then, everything in her life was changing. Less than six months ago she had not known Joseph Blackstone; now she was his wife and bore his name. Somehow, like the earth that called to the breaking rafters, he had called to her and she had answered.

Though Lilian complained that it was ‘too hot for singing', she went off with Mrs Dinsdale on a Wednesday evening to the recently founded Laura McPherson Glee Club.

The club had no premises of its own yet, but met in the store-room of a clothier's shop, where Mrs McPherson had been allowed to rearrange the piles of hat boxes and armoires of linen-wrapped coats and dresses ‘in a more acoustically favourable way'. It was a dark space, cool as a church, into which a small upright piano had been squeezed. Laura McPherson walked round and round it, adjusting the position of everything, including the clothier's fire bucket and his ironing table. Then she dusted off her wide shelf of a bosom and stood before the assembled women and sang to them in a sweet, throaty contralto, ‘Jesus, Hear My Song in the Afternoon'.

Lilian listened and was moved. She felt herself to be back ‘in civilisation' and let out a long, melancholy sigh. She hoped her own voice would be considered good enough. She hoped that these women would befriend her as dear Mrs Dinsdale had done. She even dared for a moment to wonder whether they might intercede on her behalf with Joseph and say to him that really and truly a person of her age and background (she had always considered herself – the daughter of a vicar – superior to Roderick, the livestock auctioneer) could not be expected to set off into the hills or bushes or flats or whatever the wretched places were called, to play her lonely piano and sing, unheard, to the birds and the wind . . .

Then she remembered money. Almost everything that remained to her and to Joseph had been spent on their passage on the SS
Albert
and on the ‘farm'. The rest would be eaten away, as though by weevils or dust-mites, by the dreary purchase of corn seed and poultry and pigs. There would be nothing left for her to live on in Christchurch. And to beg or to borrow, to stoop to any kind of charity, was beyond Lilian Blackstone. She had her pride.
Wulla
. It would go with her into the wilderness. It would be the one thing that nobody would take away.

All she could do for now was to pop a throat pastille into her mouth and join in the handing out of music sheets. She put on her spectacles and saw that the first piece they were going to attempt was ‘Hold High the Fiery Banner'. She remembered singing this in Cromer. It had been a time of storms. She had seen the sea rise up in a grey wall and come towards her.

As the women formed themselves into a smart line and began the difficult two-part harmony of ‘Fiery Banner', Harriet opened the door of Lilian's room and went in.

She stood on the Persian rug and looked around. By Lilian's bed was a pastel drawing of a child wearing a dress. Harriet picked this up and saw from the dark curls and the little frown on the face that the child was Joseph. He was sitting in a large armchair and his baby fingers clutched its padded arms, as though the huge chair were a carriage, moving joltingly through some precarious, new landscape. She replaced the picture on Lilian's night table beside a bottle of eau-de-Cologne and a linen handkerchief-sachet. Spread out tenderly – as if for someone else, not for herself – on Lilian's bed was a white woollen shawl in which, at night, she liked to wind herself. Harriet touched a corner of it and smelled her mother-in-law; a mixture of rosewater and something like peppermint, a sharp smell which you knew you would not be able to tolerate for long.

Harriet sat down on the bed. The room was very tidy. Everything seemed to be in its rightful place, including, on the far wall, a palm cross stuck into the matchboarding with an unobtrusive nail. Near to this was a framed sketch of the Market Cross at Parton Magna, Norfolk.

On the front of the wardrobe hung Lilian's second-best bonnet, its ribbons creased where she'd tied them sternly under her chin. And, looking at these things, Harriet thought how hard it is to get old and to nail up a fragile cross on your wall and stare at a little boy in a dress and not know . . . not know what time remains or whether the man who was once the child is going to take care of you or not . . .

Poor Lilian.

Poor unhappy Lilian.

Harriet sat very still and prayed that, before her own life began to move towards such an uncertain ending, she would have seen or known at least one extraordinary and unforgettable thing.

VII

It was already autumn when Joseph returned. Autumn in April.

He looked thin and the skin of his face was lined and brown. But he was triumphant: the Cob House was built. There was a paddock for the donkey and hen-houses made of rushes and wire. The evening clouds over the flats were the colour of red clay.

Lilian wept. Some part of her had believed the house would never have an existence except in Joseph's mind. But now it did. She took out a clean lace handkerchief ironed by Mrs Dinsdale and held it, still neatly folded, to her face. Joseph stared at her in dismay. Then he attempted to put his arm round her shoulders, but she pushed him away.

Lilian thought of Roderick's grey marble grave at Parton and his name on it so blackly chiselled, so resistant to the sunshine and the rain.

Harriet left the room and waited for Joseph to come to her. Her heart was on fire with the red-clay clouds and the white Cob House waiting for her in its shelter of stringy trees. When, after some time, his hand crept over her face, she removed it. For Harriet wanted to see him now, in his nakedness, in his fussy strivings – her husband who had built a house on the edge of the world and survived. She brought his face down to hers and he kissed her like a stranger, a hard, dry kiss. Then, just as he was about to withdraw from her, he whispered to her that he'd named the river Harriet's Creek.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘My creek. Mine!' And she clung to him.

She wanted to leave for the farm straightaway. Drays to cart the furniture and Lilian's china could be hired without difficulty. But Lilian refused. She wouldn't even consider it. The Laura McPherson Glee Club were giving their first public concert on the nineteenth of April and she had given her word she would participate, for there was one high note in ‘Fiery Banner' which only her voice, her voice alone in the fledgling company, could veritably reach.

‘One note,' said Harriet to Joseph. ‘Are we going to sacrifice a season's planting for one note?'

He told her gently there was little they could plant in autumn, that for the first winter they must live on what they could take with them – tea, flour, biscuits, pilchards, sugar and hams – and on mutton that they would buy from the Orchard Run, the biggest sheep-run on the Okuku flats. He also admitted that he needed to rest. His feet were blistered and his hands cut and raw. His neck ached from lying in the crook of his arm.

So they lingered at Mrs Dinsdale's Rooms for another three weeks, making lists: twenty-five laying hens and a cock, one dairy cow, a donkey, oats, corn seed, saplings, fence posts, wire . . .

They were together in everything now, scribbling and counting, feverishly bargaining, sifting, rejecting and acquiring. While Lilian's singing voice, in defiance of its coming separation from the edge of the civilised world, seemed suddenly to gain a new, maddening perfection, Joseph and Harriet walked away out of earshot of it, arm-in-arm from one end of the town to the other. They were recognised, now, in some of the Christchurch stores, the tall Joseph Blackstone and his tall, excitable wife.

Harriet remembered the frenzied buying of clothes in England and told Joseph how much she preferred this, this ‘farm business', and how, at last, she could visualise their future. She was so proud of him, she said. She looked at him with a new feeling of desire. Running her long-fingered hands over the blade of a scythe in McKinley's Hardware Store, she said: ‘Joseph, we should not let this life of ours merely arrive and then slip away.'

Slip away? What did she mean by this?

Oh, she didn't know, exactly, she said. But she thought there should be something –
a marker.
‘It will have to have a purpose,' was what she decided to say.

Joseph thought that he would strive to find ‘purpose' in every day of it. In the dawns which would arrive at their backs, threading light between the blue-green leaves; in the never-ending rush and swirl of Harriet's Creek; even in the cold nights when they would hear the flightless birds calling, calling from their holes and hideaways. He would strive and he hoped he would succeed.

But then he stared at Harriet, at her face mirrored in the polished blade of the scythe. Was she talking about something else? He waited, holding himself still and straight, disguising a sudden, boiling-up of pain in his chest.

‘Well?' she asked.

‘Of course it will have . . . purpose . . .' he stammered.

‘And,' she said lightly, turning to him and touching his arm, ‘after us?'

This was it. The question he feared. Now it was here and would be here always.

‘After us?'

She laid her face, just for a moment, against his shoulder. There was a smell of dust on him in this store, of cinders or ash, of something burned and gone.

‘Don't you think there could be a child?'

Now, more than ever, he tried to hold himself tall, never to let her see that he longed to squirm away, to knead the area of his heart until it no longer hurt him. He tried to swallow, but his spittle stayed in his mouth and he had to tug out a handkerchief and wipe his lips.

‘Harriet, I had never . . .' he began.

‘Never what?'

‘I had never imagined that. I always thought your age –'

‘I'm thirty-four, Joseph.'

‘Exactly.'

She could have told him how profusely she bled each month, how so many wretched rags had to be soaped and slapped and rinsed and hung out where they wouldn't be seen. But she didn't know him well enough to talk about this. She let go of the scythe and walked on down the long row of bright implements stacked against McKinley's makeshift walls, and he followed her at a distance.