The Colour (39 page)

They stood face to face on the grass. Harriet noticed that Chen had slender hands and that his pigtail was grey and that his eyes were large and bright.

Harriet wanted to begin by telling Chen that she'd been here before, stolen carrots, slept in the scant shade of the plum tree, but she had no idea how much of this he would understand, so she set down her boots, put a hand on her collar bone and said: ‘My name is Harriet.'

Lady was crouching in the wet grass, looking at Chen as if he were a stray sheep she would soon set about returning to the flock. When he looked down at the dog, Harriet saw his eyes flicker with amusement.

‘Black. White. Beautiful dog,' he said.

‘Yes,' said Harriet. ‘She is called Lady.'

‘Lady?' he said. ‘Woman?'

‘Like woman, yes. Lady.'

He nodded. ‘Lady.'

‘My name is Harriet.'

‘Hal Yet?'

‘Yes,' said Harriet. ‘Hal Yet. And you? Chen?'

Again, the Chinaman smiled. It was a smile of exquisite melancholy.

‘Chen. Family name,' he said. ‘My name. Pao Yi.'

‘Pao Yi?'

‘Yes. Pao Yi. Panyu County. Guangdong Province. China.'

Harriet nodded. ‘Far from home,' she said. ‘Very far from home.'

‘Yes,' said Pao Yi. ‘Far home. Far away lake.'

‘You live on a lake?'

‘Yes. Beautiful lake. Heron Lake. Far away.'

Pao Yi looked up at the sky, as if he saw in it some shimmering resemblance to the distant lake, or as if he could fly back to it like a bird. Then, he turned and walked towards the vegetable garden and Harriet bent down and put on her boots.

Gold. Secrecy. How was Harriet to explain about these things?

She put all of this to one side and told Pao Yi that she was going in search of a Maori woman called Pare. She asked him whether he had been to the waterfall. He told her that he had been once. In his own language he would have explained to her that the waterfall made him uneasy, that it reminded him of the weir over which his parents had tumbled to their deaths, but he lacked the English words to say this and Harriet saw him try to tell her something else about the waterfall and then stop and look away.

‘At the waterfall,' she said, ‘was anybody there? Did you see a Maori woman?'

‘No,' said Pao Yi. ‘No woman.'

They fell silent. Harriet could hear pigeons clattering in the high bush behind them. Then she asked to be shown the vegetable plot and they walked in single file along the neat paths and Pao Yi recited in English and in Cantonese the names of the things he had grown. After a while, Harriet asked: ‘Did you have a garden at Heron Lake?'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘Small garden. Boat. Everybody.'

‘Everybody?'

‘Everybody come to Pao Yi. Beautiful fishes.' And he pointed then to his net strung across the river. ‘Fish there,' he said. ‘Pao Yi stay alive.'

They gathered an armful of vegetables and Pao Yi put them in a sack. Harriet held out her money and Pao Yi took a few pence and then he bowed and turned and hurried away, as though this taking of money from her vexed him. She watched him take off his fur hat and go into his hut with its doorway made of sacking on a wooden frame and close the door behind him. Lady made as if to follow Pao Yi, but Harriet called her back.

Yet she waited. She thought that perhaps Pao Yi had gone to fetch something to show her and would quickly reappear. She tried to envisage what he might keep in his hut and whether he slept on a mattress or only on the hard earth or even in a hammock because he was a fisherman and could tie a net.

But he didn't reappear and, after five or six minutes had passed, Harriet felt stupid waiting there. She picked up the vegetable sack and walked back towards the river. She began thinking of the fine broth she was going to make and the long letter she was going to write to her father.

II

With his pick and with his hands, Pao Yi unblocked the entrance to his cave, stone by stone. He went into the cave and took with him a small oil lamp that burned with a steady blue-and-yellow flame. The lamp gave out a little heat, as well as light.

Pao Yi lay down, resting on one elbow and lit an opium pipe. He saw the walls of the cave begin to swell and gleam. He was filled with an apprehension of the beautiful strangeness of the world.

He began to dream of an avenue of lime trees. The scent of the trees and the vision of his own feet walking under them created in him a sense of the harmoniousness of all things.

Far away, a man hurled a fishing net into the air from a scarlet boat on Heron Lake, but the man was not he. Crabs came creeping into the net, an accumulation of whiskers and claws and eyes like seed pearls, but they were not his to sell when the man rowed to shore, for he was not the fisherman, he was not there; he was treading the long, soft road under the limes.

On he walked. And soon he saw that a woman, stately as the trees, was moving in step with him on slender, dusty feet and the lime seeds lay all about them like green grasshoppers, and in his own language he began to describe to her how, when a plague of grasshoppers had come to Heron Lake and devoured the string beans and choked the water-wheels, he had shown his ingenuity, his ability to adapt and survive, by netting the grasshoppers and roasting them in oil with salt and sesame seeds and they were as succulent as crisp, fried sea-grass, a veritable delicacy, and soon everybody was gathering them and eating them and praising him, Pao Yi, Brother of Righteousness, for inventing such a delicious recipe.

The woman smiled as she walked, smiled at his story of the roasted grasshoppers, and Pao Yi felt the attraction of this smile, which he knew to be flawed by some small detail that he couldn't identify, but which seemed to lead him, by slow degrees, to a feeling of desire.

The avenue of lime trees stretched out ahead of the two walkers in a swaying and shifting and endless green and Pao Yi knew that this garden, where the avenue had been planted, had been created on such a varied and colossal scale that he would be able to wander in it for a long, long time and never take exactly the same path nor tread twice in his own footsteps and always, as he went along, he would be aware of the woman engaged on her own journey – separate from his and yet by some coincidence in step with his – and find himself looking forward to every patch of dappled sunlight between the trees which revealed her face to him and searching his muddled head for some other story to tell her, like the story of the grasshoppers fried with sesame seeds, that would make her smile.

The day declined outside and the oil lamp in the cave flickered and burned low and Pao Yi finished the pipe and laid his head down on the hard floor.

He still walked in the avenue of his imaginings and he thought that when the trees finally ended, there he would discover a pond where pink carp swam in circles under the broad lily-leaves and where he would watch the woman lean over to wash her feet among the fishes.

III

Every morning, Joseph began work once more on the eighth shaft and its accompanying drainage bore. Bucketful after bucketful after bucketful of earth was hauled to the surface by the makeshift windlass, but Joseph didn't bother to wash any pay-dirt above the line of the blue clay, nor did he barrow it down to the water; he just tipped it out at the shaft-head, where it piled up and hardened in the late sun and the dry wind.

Though the windlass kept turning, though the heavy buckets were lifted and emptied, Joseph accomplished these tasks without giving them any thought and he knew that his life here at Kokatahi had become a sleep-walking life.

Alone in his tent, persecuted by nightmares, he examined the golden grains that Harriet had brought him, but he found he now had difficulty believing that what he held in his palm really was gold. Sometimes, he scratched at the grains with his nail, half expecting the sheen to peel away, to reveal the dull base metal beneath. He thought that this find of Harriet's had an illusory quality to it; it had been too easy, its timing too particular. He began to suspect her of some deception, knew her to be capable of outwitting him with ease, and he cursed his parents – his father in particular – for bequeathing to him a slow and unremarkable mind. If only he had been cleverer, he reasoned, then life would not have tortured him as it had.

But at other moments, he would see everything more positively.

He was able to tell himself to be patient, to trust his wife, to wait out the month that they had agreed upon and never be tempted to walk up-river to where she was camped and risk being followed by other men from Kokatahi. He thought her plan ingenious. She had understood what was needed; she had seen that their only hope lay in being ahead of the crowd.

That Harriet was panning for gold without a licence was a question which now and then worried Joseph, but he saw that there was no way to purchase a miner's right and still keep her whereabouts a secret. He tried, therefore, to ‘adjust' the matter in his mind, told himself that she was only ‘fossicking', that she had no real equipment, that once the gold was safe, then he would deal with the Government Licensing Office, bribe somebody if need be, or plead ignorance: ‘My wife went in search of a friend of the Orchard family, sir. She came upon her bank of gold by miraculous chance when washing her feet in the river . . .'

And then at the fly-blown hotel in Hokitika, he would gather the colour into his arms and know at last that he was free. Free in the way that Hamish McConnell was free, to embark on a new phase of his life, to begin everything again. For Joseph Blackstone knew now what he wanted to do:
he wanted to make amends to Rebecca's family for his crime
.

In his nightmares at Kokatahi, he returned to Parton in the time before the crime, to the days in which he was planning it with his friend, Merrick Dillane, the veterinary surgeon, a man who had soft, red hands and a tender voice and a cold, calculating mind. He saw again the ease with which he and Dillane had done what they'd done and walked away and thought themselves clever and free for a little while. He remembered that the whole process from beginning to end had rested upon Dillane's desire to be rid of a bad-tempered Shire horse . . .

Merrick Dillane bred Shires in his spare time. He loved the greys especially. He liked to stroke the white tresses of their feet. But he had one mare, named Dido, who bit him whenever he tried to do this and kicked at her fencing and bucked like a steer in the daisy field and generally vexed Dillane with all her ungovernable behaviour.

He came to Joseph, his friend the livestock auctioneer, to say he wanted to sell Dido. The day that he came was the day that Joseph had been told by Rebecca that she was carrying his child.

These two things would be for ever and always yoked together: the child and the horse.

The plan was swift to arrive in Joseph's mind and swift to accomplish. Joseph promised to guarantee Merrick Dillane a ‘pretty price' for Dido at the auctions if he would only help him with his present problem. He called it ‘getting help' and never referred to it in any other way. And Dillane picked up this term for it and carried it forward through the coming days. He would help his friend. Together, they would help Rebecca. What were friends for, if they could not help each other?

Dillane promised Joseph that Rebecca would have no memory of what they were planning to do to her. He said there would be no trace of it in her consciousness, neither at the time nor in memory in the time to come, that it would vanish
as though it had never been
. ‘All she will remember', he said, ‘will be the foal . . .'

They took her to see a new-born Shire foal in Dillane's stables. The soft-hearted Rebecca had a weakness for small creatures. She leaned into the stall, all entranced by the foal – as Joseph and Dillane had known she would be – and cooed to it, as to a baby of her own. She reached out her hand to stroke its nose. And at that moment, she was felled to sudden sleep by the passing under her nostrils of rag soaked in ether of chloride, cut with a pearly opiate, a ‘useful vapour' devised by Dillane himself and known to grateful farmers and pet owners as ‘Dillane's Dream'.

‘Good,' said Dillane. ‘Now she will enter a cloud of forgetting.'

They carried her into Dillane's house and laid her on the operating table, where sheep and cats and bulldog terriers had so often lain, and Dillane put on his surgical apron and his gloves. He told Joseph that he could stay ‘to see it done' if he wanted to, but Joseph began to feel faint, as though he had inhaled some of the vapour, and he understood that he wanted
not to know
how it was going to be done, so that he would never have to imagine it, could choose to think, if he wanted, that it had never really happened and that the events which it would bring in its wake occurred of their own accord and through no fault or design of Joseph Blackstone.

So Joseph went out of the room. It took very little time. Merrick Dillane's red hands, holding the surgical instrument, parted Rebecca's thighs, reached in and accomplished with two stabs all there was to do. He made sure the wall of the womb was ruptured. Then he came out and told Joseph that ‘our part in this is almost over'.

The two men carried Rebecca back to the stables, and laid her down on the floor by the foal's stall, exactly where she had lately been. They let her sleep for a while and then patted her cheek to wake her, and when she opened her eyes they told her she had fainted. They gave her smelling salts and Dillane went off to fetch a cup of water and Joseph stroked her curly hair and she clung to him and said: ‘Lord, Joseph Blackstone, that child of yours has begun to lead me a pretty dance already.'

She drank the water that Dillane brought. She stood and smoothed down her rumpled skirt and tried to smile. Then Joseph lifted her into his pony-cart and drove her home.