The Colour (4 page)

Beauty's Coat

I

Harriet knew that Joseph lay awake at night. In their calico room which trembled, she heard him sigh.

‘What is it?' she kept asking.

He couldn't tell her that he thought the house was in the wrong place, couldn't possibly say that he'd been too stubborn to take advice from the men who had helped him. Because he needed to win her love and respect. In these lay his salvation.

He said only that he was worried about Lilian, who, when she stirred the washing in the heavy cauldron, had begun talking angrily to the underwear. She asked it why one soaping and rinsing couldn't suffice for a longer time, why it ‘took dirt so easily'. When she hung it out to dry, she beat it with a wooden paddle. At other times, tired perhaps from scolding something which never answered her, she sat still and absent in her chair, rolling a darning egg in her palm.

‘We must do more for her,' Joseph said.

‘What more?' asked Harriet.

He didn't know. He wanted Harriet to tell
him,
to light on something. Women understood each other, or so he assumed, for someone must understand them and he knew that he did not. Only that they longed for things. And their longing seemed to be so tenacious that it could lead you to behaviour you had never ever imagined yourself capable of. It could destroy you . . .

But it wasn't difficult to understand what his mother longed for. She made no effort to conceal it: she longed to be away from here. And Joseph saw, in the way she scowled at the calico walls and looked pityingly at her familiar pieces of furniture stranded like embarrassed guests on the clay floors, that she didn't even bother to plead with this longing; she just let it be.

‘I don't know what more,' he said. ‘Except that you might be a closer companion to her. I mean that you might be indoors with her, instead of out . . .'

‘Joseph,' Harriet said, ‘I have spent my life indoors. What do you imagine a governess does all day but sit and read and write and breathe the indoor air?'

‘I know. But I worry that Lilian is alone too much.'

‘When my vegetable garden is planted. Then, I will be with her more often. But you know that she could come outside and work with me if she chose.'

Joseph said nothing, only turned over on the hard bed. Harriet lay quite still beside him. Above her, a soft rain made the tin roof gently sing.

They had a milk cow, but no horse. Joseph said they would not be able to afford a horse until the following year, when they would have wheat and corn and young animals to sell. So the plough was yoked to a donkey, heavily blinkered, and Joseph and the donkey walked up and down and back and forth all day and the tussock grass was slowly lifted and turned in wavering lines.

Lilian said: ‘I thought a field was meant to be a straight and square thing.'

‘I am trying to make it as straight and square as I can,' said Joseph.

‘Well,' said Lilian, ‘it looks a drunken shape to me. I'm glad that we have no neighbours to remark upon its peculiarity.'

Joseph allowed himself to smile. He reminded his mother that ‘everything we're undertaking here, we're undertaking for the first time, but slowly, we shall learn'.

‘I am not at all certain,' said Lilian, ‘that I shall ever learn to cook on this range.' And she gave the old iron cooker, on which she was boiling a kettle, a spiteful kick. Fired with smouldering lignite, the range didn't seem eager to bake the loaves that Lilian put into it, only to steam them. They barely rose to the top of the tin and could achieve nothing better than the consistency of suet. Slices cut from them left a disappointing film of moisture on the knife. In Parton Magna, Lilian's bread had been crusty and ample and irresistible to Roderick Blackstone, who had adored the way it scratched the roof of his mouth, and had devoured great quantities of it, spread with beef dripping, on the morning that he died.

‘In this godforsaken place,' said Lilian, ‘everything is worse.'

Harriet hurried away. She hurried to the back of the Cob House, where her garden waited. There was nothing there yet, only a rectangle of tilled earth, where birds she didn't recognise parleyed in the early mornings when the sun rose over the valley and the beech leaves glinted like oil. Slowly, she was picking the stones from the soil, dividing the ground into squares with planks of totara pine, fencing it with tin. ‘A stone wall round a plot of these dimensions', Joseph had told her, ‘is pure make-believe. Have you any idea how long it took three men to build a stone chimney?'

Harriet had imagined the stone wall, but it could wait. She painted the tin white, nailed it to sapling stems. There was no gate. The tin enclosed the garden all the way round. Whenever Joseph and Lilian came out to see it, they stood watching Harriet from the other side of the wall, as though she were a prisoner they were not allowed to visit. They saw her working with her hair tied up in a kerchief, stooping over her planting, her apron bunched full of her seed potatoes, her boots clotted with mud.

‘Is she happy doing that?' asked Lilian.

‘Yes,' replied Joseph. ‘She is.'

Lilian sniffed. ‘It looks like convict work to me,' she announced.

The creek came snaking down behind Harriet's garden, noisy after a fresh, rattling the stones, carrying with it stems of red matipo and black beech from the high bush. Harriet had never touched nor tasted water of such icy sweetness. When the afternoon dusk fell and she saw the first glimmer of Lilian's lamps at the Cob House windows, Harriet stood at the creek's edge, listening to her new world. If the wind had died a little, she might hear an owl far away in the trees, or the mournful
kooo-li kooo-li
of the weka, which Joseph had taught her to recognise. Sometimes, she would spread out her muddy apron and kneel on this, rinsing her hands, then scooping water into her mouth. Often, she stayed here, with her face close to the water, for so long that when she stood up she discovered that an absolute darkness had come on.

II

In her first letter to her father, Henry Salt, Harriet wrote:

Then, she told him about the cow, whom she and Joseph had named Beauty

Beauty had no stable or barn. But from an old rug and some lengths of twine, Lilian had manufactured a coat for her. This had been the one task Lilian Blackstone had done with something like enthusiasm and now it was a strange and tender sight, to see a cow wandering about wearing a human garment as it munched the yellow hay.

When the sun shone and they had forgotten to take off Beauty's coat, steam rose through the wool. The smell of Beauty, Harriet thought, was almost as delectable as that of any person she had ever known and she imagined that her own children might smell like this, of milk and earth and warm wool.

Milking Beauty was her favourite task. The cow would stay perfectly still, while Harriet's hands, which were red and rough from her work in the garden, tugged at the warm, rubbery teats. Only Beauty's flank twitched from time to time and her curly head turned and her heavy-lashed eyes stared into the sunset or the rain.

Sometimes at night, wearing her coat, Beauty lay down by the Cob House wall and Harriet could hear her breathing. To Henry Salt she wrote:
My nights are full of sighing; the wind and Beauty's breath and Joseph's anxiety
. But she knew that he, the geography teacher, would understand what this sentence was: not a complaint, just part of her evocation of her world, so that he would be able to use her letter like a map, to see and hear her in her new landscape. And at the end of the letter she drew for him pictures of objects she particularly liked: her hoe, the donkey-plough, the milking-stool, the butter churn. Of the churn she said:

Her scrapbook was beginning, very slowly, to fill. In between the heavy pages were leaves of gossamer-fine paper, almost transparent, and sometimes Harriet looked at her entries through the paper, as though they were already almost vanished and part of the past. For this was what the book was, she knew: a catalogue of the passing of time. Already the maple leaf that had floated down on to the SS
Albert
in the middle of the Tasman Sea was faded and brittle, the Chinese tea label very slightly yellowed, and the Queen Victoria stamps smudged with dust or dirt of some kind, as though they'd endured a long journey on a letter.

On the third page of the scrapbook, Harriet added a square of calico, labelled
A piece of our wall
, a ground plan of her vegetable garden, a spiky green frond from a ti-ti palm, a brown weka feather, and a curl from Beauty's head. She glued them in with minute drops of Lilian's china glue. She noticed that near her, on the dresser, a Spode tea-service was slowly piecing itself back together again, shard by shard.

Remembering her old life as a governess, she wondered what she would have collected into a scrapbook across twelve years: curls, perhaps – not from the head of a cow who looked so sweetly foolish draped in a rug in the New Zealand winter – but from the heads of her English pupils, curls that darkened as they grew and were sent away to school and forgot her; drawings and pages of writing they were proud of; pieces of knitting or squares of cross-stitch they had made.

And perhaps a solitary banknote, a ten-shilling note, given to her by Mr Melchior Gable, to be spent on gloves she was supposed to wear when she visited his bank on the occasion of its summer open day. On this day, visitors were shown a fine collection of weights and measures, a display of Roman coins and early examples of the ‘Gable Safe-and-Sound', a patented brass lock which thieves were supposedly incapable of breaking. But Harriet hadn't been among the visitors. The ten-shilling note had never been alchemised into a pair of gloves. Mr Gable's love-letters to her had stood in a pile, hidden inside a cracked washing jug – hidden from the world and from Harriet herself, who had no wish to read them again and would shortly feed them to the fire.

She had tried to return the ten-shilling note to Melchior Gable. She had sent it round to the bank with her handwritten refusal of his proposal of marriage. But it had come back. She had asked her father to post it to him and he had done so, but once again it returned. So she kept it in a box and never spent it. She used to look at it sometimes – her alternative life, the land where she had not gone. And then, on the day she married Joseph Blackstone, she burned it.

III

When the donkey needed rest, Joseph worked at digging his pond.

He thought of the pond as soundless, a place that the wind would barely touch and around which the distant bush would soon seed itself – if only the seeds were not blown away. Though he'd imagined Norfolk willows, he'd be perfectly content with cabbage trees and manuka scrub.

He sited the pond in a dip in the fold of hills. A long, curving trench would be carved out to let water into the pond from Harriet's Creek and then out again by some means that Joseph couldn't precisely envisage. He found himself wishing that he were more of an engineer.

Lilian came out of the house, wrapped in a shawl, and stood watching Joseph. The ground was as hard as wood. Lilian stared at her son's booted foot on the shovel, heard the repeated knock of the hob-nails against the shovel's edge. Though he was tall, in the surrounding panorama of yellow grass he appeared oddly insubstantial, almost as if he were a figure her mind had conjured. Perhaps, when she next looked at him, he would no longer be there. She asked herself whether she had ever really
seen
him or understood who he was.

For how was it possible that the Joseph she thought she'd known – from baby boy in a hand-sewn dress to gawky man with raven hair and a commanding voice – now believed that his future and hers could be lived out here in this desert of grass? What had put this preposterous idea into his mind?

It was a day of light wind with a sun that came and went and showers that seemed to fall straight out of a brilliant rainbow. For the first time in a long while, Lilian raised her face towards the horizon. She liked rainbows, for they behaved as God had told them to behave: ‘I do set my bow in the cloud and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.' But Lilian examined this one critically, as though she believed a New Zealand rainbow might somehow be disobedient to God's law. She counted the colours, verified the precision of the arc, qualified the brightness. She barely listened as Joseph began to describe the pond to her; she was intent on the rainbow. It was too big, she decided after a while: in its vastness it had no humility. She distantly heard Joseph say that when spring came and green shoots snaked up through the mud at the edge of the water, the mallard and the native blue-duck would leave the creek and come to swim in his pond, in sweet domestic circles. But she felt obliged to remark. ‘Your pond will not necessarily behave as English ponds do,' she said.

Joseph turned a tired face towards her. ‘What do you mean?' he asked.

‘I mean,' said Lilian, ‘that nothing here is ever quite as one has imagined it.'

As she walked away towards the Cob House, Lilian remembered that she was, at least, working on a possible plan of escape. The plan was tentative and far too dependent on unverifiable factors, but it was a plan, and that was something. It was important in life, she told herself, always
to have a plan
. She should have planned for the eventuality of Roderick's death, but she had not and now she had lost her old life and the little daily diet of hope that had gone with it.