The Colour (31 page)

‘Women?'

‘From the Hokitika hotels. Wash their hair in his piss, they would, for an ounce of what he has.'

There was laughter and coughing. Joseph saw one of the Kaniere men kick out at one of his piles of wash-dirt and this man said: ‘Work alone, do you?'

‘Yes,' said Joseph. ‘Unless my boy returns.'

‘So, what've you found?'

He choked on the word ‘nothing'. He had lost count of the hours he'd toiled, the slabs he'd fixed, the load after load after load of dirt washed in his cradle. He couldn't bring himself to admit out loud that all of this, every single second of it, had been in vain.

‘Dust,' he said. ‘Small grains. Nothing notable.'

‘Diggers always lie,' said another of the men.

‘I'm not lying,' said Joseph. ‘I came here to be a bit away from the Scots, but you'd do better to go back there, peg claims as near to them as you can.'

‘All gone, chum,' said a young miner wearing what looked like an old bowler hat. ‘Not an inch of river left there. But they say the gold goes all the way up this line, right to where it narrows and becomes the Styx.'

‘Who says this?' asked Joseph.

‘Who says anything in this hell-hole? But one rumour's as good as another. And I'm too tired to go on, so tomorrow we're pegging here.'

These words were like a signal to all the others. They were tired, too, and the darkness was increasing all the time. They dumped their gear where they stood, just north of Joseph's boundary, and set up tents and hammered them in and began lighting fires and pouring grog and generally making ready for their night. Some of them splashed into the river and began washing themselves. The water that lapped round their thin bodies still had a glimmer of light on it and Joseph watched them until that light was gone.

The White Worm

I

Harriet was at Orchard House.

To Dorothy Orchard she admitted: ‘You said we weren't strong enough for stars and waterfalls and you were right. I wasn't strong enough for the Hurunui Gorge.'

‘My dear Harriet,' said Dorothy, ‘you went all the way up that terrible dray road and slept in Charlie Wilde's hut and endured the men's snoring and so forth. And then you went to the very edge of that precipice.
The very edge.
All of that shows enormous strength, doesn't it, Toby?'

‘Yes,' said Toby Orchard. ‘It does, Doro.'

‘Say it more forcefully, Toby! Don't merely agree with me. Tell Harriet how brave she's been.'

The three of them were sitting on the verandah of the house. The recent evenings had been cold, but suddenly this one evening was warm again, as though summer had barged in, like an old forgotten lover.

‘Of course it was brave,' said Toby, sucking on his pipe, ‘but it was also lunacy. It was suicide. And Harriet knows that.'

‘I don't think she knows that, at all, do you, Harriet?' said Dorothy.

Harriet stared out at the garden, with its smell of pungent fern. She thought that if she'd been on her own with Dorothy, she would have tried to describe that feeling she'd had in the manuka grove, that feeling of longing – of yearning for a thing she couldn't identify, but which certainly wasn't death. But something in Toby's presence, the incontrovertible and solid
bulk
of Toby, allied to his probable disdain for words such as ‘longing' or ‘yearning', prevented Harriet from mentioning this.

‘Harriet couldn't know what that gorge was like until she'd seen it, Toby,' continued Dorothy. ‘Until you've seen a thing –'

‘You don't have to
see
everything to know what it is, Dorothy. You've never seen the Himalayas, but you wouldn't think of attempting to climb them.'

‘No, I wouldn't, but –'

‘Toby's right,' said Harriet. ‘I was warned. But the idea of mountains has always drawn me to them. I expect it's because I grew up in Norfolk!'

Nobody laughed or even smiled at this. The three of them merely remained silent for a moment or two, Dorothy moving her chair a fraction away from Toby's, to show him that she thought him too severe. She was about to point out to him, for the second time, what a beautiful evening it was and suggest that they shouldn't sully it by saying anything even passingly antagonistic when Toby said: ‘I'm sorry if I sounded disagreeable, Harriet. As Dorothy knows, I'm all for women showing your kind of spirit. But we all have to learn the difference between what is brave and what is foolhardy. You showed great courage by turning back.'

‘That's better, Toby,' said Dorothy. ‘And of course he's right, Harriet. Imagine if we'd lost you.'

‘Yes,' said Harriet. ‘But I discovered that I didn't want to be lost.'

They talked of other things: of the new ice house being built beyond the pine spinney to store mutton carcasses, of the kingfishers Toby had seen that day at the creek. Then Toby finished his pipe and went to bed, leaving Dorothy and Harriet alone. Harriet was tired, but she felt comfortable in her verandah chair, breathing the night air of the garden, the scent of which floated to her more strongly now since Toby, with his man smell and his pipe, had disappeared into the house. She thought that, if she could just cover herself with a blanket, she could stay there all night and only wake up when some bird, startled by light, began its morning song.

Dorothy sighed. ‘I'm sorry Toby was peevish,' she said quietly. ‘He's so worried about Edwin that he can't concentrate properly on anything and so he doesn't feel the temperature of things.'

They were silent for a moment, then Dorothy went on: ‘Edwin won't eat. Only blancmange. We've tried to force him, but he can't. He just vomits everything up again. So now we let him eat the blancmange. Janet makes them all colours and we try to put some good things into them – honey and lemon rind and so forth. We took him to the doctor in Kaiapoi. He said he thought Edwin has a worm.'

‘A worm?'

‘He prescribed some medicine. Bitter as aloe. We have to put the medicine into the blancmanges, too. He says the medicine isn't to
kill
the worm. A dead worm inside you will poison the blood. So now we must keep the worm alive and try to flush it out. We examine every stool.'

Harriet now felt that the air on the verandah wasn't as balmy as it had been a few moments ago. She pulled her shawl round her shoulders.

‘I know what you're thinking,' said Dorothy. ‘You're remembering that the last time you were here, Edwin started talking about wings and robes and said he was going to die.'

‘Yes,' said Harriet. ‘I was thinking about that. We thought he'd had a dream . . .'

‘He still has them. He's terrified about something, but he will not tell us what. He says he cannot tell us, Harriet, that if we make him tell us he will die. So I said, “Will you tell the doctor then, Edwin?” But he refused. He said, “Mama, you do not understand about friendship.” And so we're more confused than ever. What friendship is he talking about? Toby thinks the fears are all in Edwin's mind, but I believe that there's a connection, between those fears, or dreams, or whatever they are, and the wretched worm.'

Now, Harriet felt as though she were standing again at a precipice edge. She'd failed in her mission to find Pare. She had seen the waterfall (the very one where Pare might have been?) and she had nevertheless turned back, without giving Pare a moment's thought, and this was a betrayal of a kind. But what faced her now was a sickening fall from loyalty. She felt the pull of the ground far below, the implacable gravity of what she could reasonably call good sense or
right.
Because to stay silent and let Edwin die would be a criminal act, a wrongdoing far worse than the betrayal of a secret. And yet to fall so far from trust also seemed unforgivable. She hadn't asked to become Edwin Orchard's confidante, but he, in his lonely life as an only child on a sheep-run, had given her this role and she'd sworn to honour it.

Tentatively, Harriet said: ‘Shall I try to talk to Edwin tomorrow? See if he will tell me? Because I know, from having been a governess for so long, that children will sometimes tell things to strangers that they can't say to their parents, not through any lack of love or trust, but because they're afraid to upset or anger them.'

Dorothy Orchard didn't reply immediately. She looked out at the night, moving her eyes from side to side, as though she had glimpsed something out there and was trying to identify it. Then she turned back to Harriet and said: ‘The power of dreams can be very great, I understand that. And perhaps telling a dream helps to diminish its power, does it? Or if we tell our dreams, then perhaps we also tell our fears without noticing? I don't know about any of this. If you were brought up in a manor in Cornwall, as I was, what do you know about the world of the mind? You know how to tell when something is not really silver, but plate, simply by the weight of it. You know a thousand things like this, but you know nothing about
feelings
, or what I mean is, you know about feelings, but you seldom know where they come from or what to do with them . . .

‘But a worm. What a terrible idea a worm is! Could any
feeling
have put a worm inside Edwin? Could telling that feeling bring the worm out again? I just do not know, Harriet. I just do not know anything.'

Dorothy had begun the conversation in a whisper, but now she was talking very loudly, as if she were urging herself towards a scream.

Her hands were on the arms of her chair, gripping it, trying to knead it like dough. ‘All I know,' she continued, ‘is that if anything happened to Edwin, we would be lost. Toby and me. We would be drowned. We would not be able to go on because there would be no point in going on. So we have to do whatever it takes, whatever it costs, whatever,
whatever
to bring that worm out, but the most wretched thing of all is that I really do not know what to do and nor does Toby and every time Edwin is sick, I feel . . . And all I can think of is blancmange. Make more blancmange . . .'

Dorothy put her face in her hands. Harriet wanted to reach out and comfort her, but the set of Dorothy's shoulders suggested a carapace in which she wanted to hide and not let anyone come near her.

‘You talk to him!' Dorothy burst out at last, running her hands wildly through her short hair. ‘Try to find out what he means by “friendship”. Why does it frighten him so? See if you can make sense of it.'

‘I'll try,' said Harriet.

‘And if . . . if there is some secret that he doesn't want to tell us . . . remind him that the only thing we care about is making him well. Nothing else is of any significance.'

Edwin Orchard could picture his worm.

He thought it was white and blind and lazy and lay coiled in him, barely moving, sucking up the sweet blancmange, becoming bloated and heavy. It had begun as something as thin as the stalk of a newly sown onion, but now it was much wider and longer than that. It was like a snake he'd seen in a picture book.

In his dreams, Pare on her ledge of stone talked to him in her low, anxious voice. She said that she knew he was suffering, just as she was suffering, and would have helped him if she could have reached him, but she couldn't reach him. She warned him that both she and he were probably going to die.

Some of the stories Pare had told Edwin returned to him, stories about people who leapt up to heaven on a bouncing rope, or killed their husbands and swallowed them like fish; about spirits who took the form of lizards or trees or cormorants or fire. He began to wonder whether his worm was one of these spirits. But one thing bothered him. He had no idea where this world of the spirits was. Edwin was a boy who liked to know exactly where things were. In the days of his caterpillar, he had been able to see it, at the corner of his eye, wherever it decided to wander – even when it made itself look like a twig or a little brown thistle – until it wandered so far away that it made itself invisible and became something else and then something else again. But he'd never
seen
the world of the spirits. Pare had never explained where it was or how it could be found. Was it under the earth or way up above the tops of the trees? And how could something from a different world which he'd never seen find its way inside him? He'd tried asking his father: ‘Is there one world, Papa, or lots of worlds?'

Toby Orchard had been in an angry mood on the day Edwin asked this question because he knew that someone was stealing sheep from the run. He had no proof, but sheep were vanishing, so there had to be a thief working the run: some clever cockatoo, who knew his trade and left no traces.

‘I don't know what you mean,' he'd snapped. ‘Are you talking about heaven?'

‘No,' said Edwin. ‘I don't mean a different world when you die. I mean a different world here. A world you hardly ever see.'

‘We all “see” things in our mind,' said Toby more gently. ‘We can all imagine things . . .'

‘I mean real things, but you can't see them all the time.'

‘Such as what?'

‘Such as . . . there could be a place where the Moa Bird is, couldn't there, Papa, but we can't see it?'

‘No,' said Toby. ‘There could not be a place where the Moa Bird is. The Moa Bird was hunted and killed until none were left. It can never come back.'

‘I know. I know it can't come back
here,
but it could come back to another world, couldn't it? Couldn't there be another world where it hadn't died? And if we could go there –'

‘No, Edwin. There is one world and one is quite hard enough to keep track of. You've got your thoughts into a bit of a muddle. Do you feel strong enough to get your pony? – You can help me see whether our sheep thief has left any clues lying around in the grass.'