The Colour (33 page)

They seemed to give no thought to the man who had arrived here first. Perhaps they assumed that he'd soon decide to leave? Or else they saw, simply, that Joseph Blackstone had roped a duffer claim and would die working ground in which gold would never ever be found, and they wanted no part in his mistakes.

There were days when Joseph did no mining, never washed nor ate, never came out of his tent, but lay and listened to the noise all around him and was eaten up with a hatred of the world so deep he felt that he wouldn't survive it. He brought out his shotgun from his filthy swag and loaded it and lay it by him, within reach of his hand. He imagined the sweet silence of death, the absolution from failure, the rest from being. But something always kept him from taking up the gun.

Something.

It was a familiar memory and it still had the power to transport him to another place. It was a place on the other side of the world, but Joseph liked to imagine it as lying far down
underneath
him, as a place that could be reached, if only he could dig deep enough and wide enough for long enough. For long enough, harsh and lonely time . . .

. . . He was walking along a Norfolk lane in June, going home to Parton with his auctioneer's ledger under his arm, wearing his brown suit and a tweed cap. The sun was beginning to go down.

He rounded the corner of Parton Woods and came to a green meadow where Lilian gathered mushrooms in September, and there she was: Rebecca Millward. She was sitting on the gate, sucking a stem of grass between her teeth. She was sixteen and her face was brown from the sun and there were laughter lines at the corners of her eyes. When she saw Joseph, she bunched her skirts up between her legs, so that Joseph could see her calves going down into her brand-new boots.

He glanced tenderly at these boots, was moved that she wanted to show them to him, show him that her father could afford them, that her father, the fishmonger, spoiled her.

‘Mr Blackstone,' she said. ‘Been at the market, have you? Glad I'm not a sheep or a heifer to come under your hammer!'

She tossed her grass away and laughed. He didn't know what to reply to this, didn't really know what she meant, except that she wanted to say something provoking, to show him she dared to tease him. So he said nothing, but of course he looked at her more closely, at her laughing mouth, at her curly hair falling round her shoulders . . . and so, having got his attention, she contrived to show him something else: the smear of blood on her petticoat, to see what this would do to him.

Joseph supposed, when he thought back to this moment, that there may have been some conversation between them – some dull questions about the livestock market or the fish shop or about the weather or about her brother Gabriel who had an Irish sweetheart – but he had no recollection of any inconsequential patter on that first afternoon. He remembered only what he did next, there in the slowly declining sun of the summer day. He approached Rebecca and then stood between her spread legs, where she still sat on the gate, and kissed her, and the moment he kissed her, he knew that in his thirty years of life he'd desired no one as much as he desired her, this sixteen-year-old girl in her smart boots and her soiled petticoat.

What she whispered to him then was: ‘If you want it, Mr Blackstone, we could go somewhere now and it would be safe. No consequence, you see? Just the pleasure of it. For I've always wanted you – so smart and tidy in that suit of yours – since the day I watched you sell my father's mare. I'd swear that mare was on heat for you, Mr Blackstone! The way she pranced about in front of you. But I know, for Gabriel says it, that what men want . . . what men want is only the pleasure and no consequence nine months later. No foal! Tell me if I be wrong?'

He told her she wasn't wrong.

He thought it a kind of contract:
no consequence
.

It immediately became the thing that held him to her, the thing which made her different from anyone else, the thing which gave him a sweet tranquillity of mind.

But here, Joseph's memory began to be unstable, to slide about towards the time which followed, towards a time that he preferred to forget. For after that day, and the next and the next, and then again a month later when she had her bleeding again, how was there to be ‘no consequence' to what they did?

He kept asking her. He expected her to know, but of course she didn't know. She said: ‘What does it matter now, Joseph Blackstone, if you love me?'

He was distressed and confused. He replied that it did matter. He said it was part of the contract. But Rebecca whined that she didn't know what ‘contract' he was referring to. She kept on with her tedious refrain about love until he felt that the very word ‘love' would drive him insane.

And so he left her.

He thought that what he felt had nothing to do with love. He left her for two months and twenty-three days and tried to forget about her. Once, he saw her standing in the garden of Lilian's house in Parton, watching the windows, and he called out to her to go away. But it broke his heart to say that to her, because the moment he saw her all he wanted was to hold her in his arms.

She entered his dreams. He got no rest from his longing. He cursed her as a witch, a caster of spells. He despised himself for his need of her. He wanted to take a knife and cut her out of his heart. The world about him and every single person in it created in him a boredom so immense he thought he would suffocate. To drag himself round the farms or to the market with his father hurt his skull, put a stone in his chest. He couldn't eat the food his mother cooked, couldn't breathe when he lay down in his bed.

So in the autumn he went looking for her, where she worked with her father at the fishmonger's and led her, ladylike, on his arm to Parton Woods and before she could resist or cry out, he took her in her scut, in her little darling tail, and he was in heaven there and died when he got to his pleasure, died to the world, to everything but that.

No consequence
.

Now, he could meet her whenever he liked. She protested that it hurt, but he didn't care if he hurt her. What was there on earth that had no hurt to it? he asked her. And she said in her innocence that there were plenty of things and started naming them, but this wearied him, her homely list of what she loved, so he stood up and buttoned himself and walked away, leaving her lying on the ground. The wind sighed all around her in the beech woods and a light rain was beginning and she added her tears to the rain, but he was unmoved.

When winter came, and she passed her seventeenth birthday and Gabriel married his Irish girl, she began to pester him to ‘make an honest woman of her'. He refused. He said he didn't want a wife. All he wanted was what they had. And so she grew sulky and tearful and seemed never to laugh at anything or return his kisses and, worse, far worse than anything, wouldn't let him go to the place he craved. She sealed it off, the sorceress. She stuffed it with cotton: anything rather than let him do what he wanted to do there.

So he was in torment. He still told himself that he didn't love her, this brazen, stubborn girl, the fishmonger's daughter, and yet he knew that she had enslaved him. He felt that he would never be able to live without her, but knew that living with her was out of the question. For how could he, who tried so hard to please his mother, ‘make an honest woman' of someone like Rebecca Millward or bring her to Lilian's parlour with the antimacassars on the velvet chairs? Already, he was able to predict exactly what Lilian would say: ‘That girl is a common minx, Joseph Blackstone! And don't you dare to let her ruin your life.'

He thought that Lilian was right. Rebecca was a minx. And yet he remembered what it was like to try to live without her. He remembered the tedium of days, the nights without breath.

So he trusted to chance. He let himself make love to Rebecca Millward as most men made love to their sweethearts or wives. He even let her get her own pleasure. The skin of his back was pierced by her stubby little nails. She bit his lips, his ears, his shoulders. And all went on as it had to go on until one day she came to him and told him she was carrying his child. And at that moment, it seemed to him that he woke up: woke up from his enslavement; woke to a nightmare; woke to
consequence
; woke to the inevitability, the necessity of a crime . . .

In his tent at Kokatahi, Joseph always managed to stop his memories there – before any crime was committed, before any crime was even thought about.

He brought other events into his mind, which were pure inventions. He imagined marrying Rebecca Millward at Parton on a spring morning, with all her curly hair snowed by a muslin veil and a posy of pinks, bright as her mouth, in her fish-girl hands. He imagined dancing with her at their wedding and taking her to bed in some honeymoon inn, with a mad fiddler playing in the courtyard below, and undressing her piece by piece as he'd never undressed her, and looking at her body that was his and his only and would never belong to anyone else and never be hurt or damaged.

And these imaginings brought him a kind of rest. A rest from guilt. A rest from shame. They blotted out for a while the never-ending noise outside the tent, the squealing and scampering of the rats and the rattle of the wash-boxes and the whine of the windlasses turning and turning, and the wailing of the autumn winds.

But Joseph had to keep working. He couldn't keep hiding in his tent, scratching his skin, dreaming, aching, staring at death. He had to continue to mine for gold.

He was digging his eighth shaft. He had to bring out the dirt and sift it and then get down into the hole and slab it up and try to drain it. The earth was cold, iron cold. Joseph was reminded by the cold in the earth that his miner's right on this claim had expired and that, if he didn't want the Kaniere men to take it over as casually as they had taken over Will's fishing chair, he would have to go down to Hokitika to renew his licence.

Part of him now suspected that he'd selected a worthless claim. Perhaps, if the Kaniere diggers hadn't arrived, he would have moved on or tried to move back, nearer the Brenner-McConnell bounder. But part of him also believed that it was not the claim that was worthless, it was
he
who was worthless. He had no right to riches and so he found nothing. This was his punishment for wrongdoing. God knew what was in his soul. God had seen his cruelty towards Rebecca. God knew what he'd done with Will Sefton. But God was also a humorist, could make a Job of anyone he chose. It was quite possible – even probable – that the moment he relinquished his plot at Kokatahi, and one of the Kaniere men began fossicking there, gold would be discovered.

So, one cold March morning, Joseph set out for Hokitika.

All along the river, now, right through to Kaniere and beyond, claims were being worked. At every moment, by every tent or shack that he passed, Joseph expected to discover Will, even found himself listening for the sound of his whistle above the noise of the picks and cradles, but there was no sign of him.

On the Brenner-McConnell claim, there now stood a neat hut made of slabs and stone and tussock thatch. Near this, a horse-whim had been constructed to pump water from the river into a box flume, so that all the land pegged by Brenner and McConnell could be washed without the need to cart water in buckets from the creek. This was successful mining, resourceful mining, mining with money behind it, and Hamish McConnell stood in front of his hut with his arms folded, wearing a clean shirt, smiling.

‘How goes it at Kokatahi?' he called out to Joseph. ‘Raised a colour yet, have ye?'

Joseph thought: The look of me, the scarecrow I've become must tell you the answer to that. He knew that his hair was wild and his skin grey and his collar bone was visible all along its length, like a clothes hanger.

‘Not much to show . . .' he began, once again choking on saying the word ‘nothing'. ‘Not yet. But there's a good blue-clay bottom.'

‘Good luck, then,' said McConnell, whose fine fortune had made him kinder than before.

‘Sent money home to Scotland, have you?' asked Joseph.

‘Aye,' said McConnell, laughing. ‘Told my wife to find us a castle!'

As he trekked on towards the sea, Joseph thought that this was one more thing to torment him: he owned nothing but a mud house in the pathway of the winds, where his mother stared at the mended pieces of china and cried in the night; but Hamish McConnell would soon look out from stone battlements on to wide lawns and cedar trees. Servants would stand in a line to greet him when he returned. He would sleep in a high, four-poster bed.

Was McConnell a better man than Joseph Blackstone? Joseph didn't know. He saw only that misery could be endured in the midst of misery. But set adjacent to the good fortune of others, it became far, far harder to bear.

Joseph was glad to find himself once again on the beach at Hokitika, with its freight of driftwood and wrecked ships.

He stood and looked at the sea. He felt broken and brittle. But the bounding waves and the clean smell of the ocean reminded him that he wasn't trapped in the hell of Kokatahi. He could decide to leave. He still had a little money. He could admit failure in the Gold Rush and sail back to Lyttelton and try to pick up the threads of the farm. No doubt he wouldn't be the first to accept this kind of fate. And he thought that to be alone at his own creek, digging his own pond, would be very heaven compared to the rat-infested banks of the Hokitika.

But, when he remembered Harriet, a feeling of sickness spread right through him, right to the floor of his being.

He saw her on her vegetable plot, tall in her green garden – too tall for him, too clever, with too fierce a will – the wife he'd married to escape the snares of love. And he felt, as he watched the breakers come in, that the kindest thing he could do would be to stay away from her for ever. He'd send money – if he ever found gold. She'd married him in good faith and had a right to some share of everything he might still get, if his luck changed. But he couldn't go back to his life with her, that sham thing he'd tried so hard to live. Because he knew the truth of his feelings now. It was as simple as that. He understood what his true feelings had been and, more than this, he had also begun to believe that, in some way or other, he was going to have to honour them.