The Colour (45 page)

When he came to the spot where his tent used to be, he sat down on the muddy grass and drank from the river. Water and milk kept him alive these days. The very thought of bacon or mutton made his flesh creep. Sometimes, in the shanty in Hokitika, he'd chewed bread or eaten the suet dumplings Mrs Boyd had set out in a plate of thin gravy, but even these he'd found difficult to swallow. He would have liked to drink beer, frothy and strong, but had no money for beer, knew he had to save as much as he could of the thirty shillings if he was to have any chance of a passage home.

He stood up and walked on. Now, he was on new territory, where he'd never before set foot, and he felt a quietness fall on the landscape, as though, at Kokatahi, the noise of the mine had still remained behind after everything had been swept away, but that here, beyond it, where no diggings had ever been started, silence returned because everything had persisted in its wild and sequestered state. He saw kingfishers darting over the water and a heron standing motionless on a rock. The grey density of the sky began to lift and a bolt of sunlight fell on to the narrow path.

Joseph knew that, at other moments in his life, he would have been cheered by the sight of these things, but it was as though nothing could cheer him now, nothing in New Zealand, nothing that Nature or Man could contrive here. All he wanted was to sail away.

He made very slow progress up the valley, leaning more and more on the stick. He kept searching the sky, wondering if snow was beginning to fall. He didn't know how many hours he had walked when he lifted his head once more and saw, across the river, above the new line of the deep water, the Chinaman's vegetable garden.

Joseph stopped. No snow was falling. The sun was, in fact, still shining, and Joseph stared at the startling colours of the planting and thought how, after all, what had been grown here might be the kind of food he could eat – food you could swallow when life took your appetite away. And he felt, for the first time, that his rage against Scurvy Jenny had been brutish and unnecessary, a shameful corollary to his enslavement to Will Sefton, a kind of madness.

He remembered that those Chinese he'd encountered – like the men he'd observed on the
Wallabi
– had all manifested a kind of quiet resignation, as though they'd understood better than anyone else how bitterly hard it is to survive in the world and rise up in it to any degree, and so decided to put their trust and their energies into small things and dream no grandiose dreams and even be content to fossick patiently through stray corners of earth left behind by others who had moved on.

He found that he envied them their ability to do this. He saw how his own head had always and ever been roaring with schemes and desires and, even now, wouldn't let him rest. He dreaded to live his whole life like this, burning with unsatisfied longing. He looked over to the vegetable plot and understood another thing: that Scurvy Jenny no longer had any customers for his vegetables now that the diggings had gone, and yet the plot appeared newly hoed and weeded, as if Chen were indifferent to customers, as if the garden itself were what counted and nothing else were of any importance to him. And Joseph thought: This is the state to which I shall aspire, where what is important to me is already mine.

He walked on. He knew that he couldn't be far from the strand of shingle where Harriet had found the colour. But he dreaded to arrive there now, dreaded what he was going to find. He faltered on the path, his breathing laboured, the sheepskin beginning to make him sweat and itch.

Again, he looked up at the sky, which was clearing all the while. And he wondered whether he wasn't searching, now, for the snow clouds, looking for a reason to turn back. But the sky only looked pitilessly down. For a moment, Joseph remembered Lilian, standing on the flats, staring up at the rainbow, and he thought how long it was since anybody had said his name.

He went on like a sleep-walker. His heart thudded in his chest. He began to mumble some long-forgotten prayer.

Now, he had reached the river's bend. Now, he saw Harriet's tent. Bile rose in his mouth and he spat it out on to the grass.

The tent leaned at a precarious angle, but still stood at the back of the beach. Nothing moved. Joseph held on to his staff like an old man and stared stupidly at the scene before him, trying, without moving nearer, to deduce what it had to say to him. He felt petrified. He opened his mouth to say the name ‘Harriet', but he couldn't utter it. And it was then that he remembered the dog, Lady. If the dog had been alive, she would have heard his approach and begun barking, but there was no sound at all, only the low, conversational noise of the river.

He forced himself to move forward again. He noticed a ring of blackened stones where a fire had once been made. He saw that the river had risen to within a few feet of the tent and then receded, leaving a flat shelf of mud on which there was no human footprint, but only lines of little arrow-like markings, where birds had trod.

Joseph took off his sheepskin and laid down his stick. He sniffed the air to see whether there was any sweet stench of death, but there was none.

So now at last he dared to approach the tent. He pushed it with his hands and it fell sideways, pulling on one rope. He lifted the canvas away and saw a careful huddle of familiar things. In the centre was the red blanket, folded in two on the flax mat, which looked clean and dry. Lying on the mat was the little gun he had given Harriet at D'Erlanger's Hotel. Near this was Harriet's knapsack and the long string which she sometimes used to tie Lady to a post or tree. There was a piece of ham gone mouldy in a muslin pouch, where a fly was crawling, and a careful arrangement of dry food in small, frayed sacks.

Joseph squatted down and touched the blanket. That Harriet had been here alone, existing in this minute and tidy way, touched him to some degree, but his mind danced about and wouldn't remain fixed on her, but only kept insisting that the gold was here somewhere and that it was the gold that mattered.

He began to sift through her few possessions. She was dead, he told himself. The river had taken her. Harriet Blackstone was dead and gone, so all that remained here was his by right. He hurled away the pouch of ham. He emptied out the sacks of flour and sugar. He told himself that if he'd known Harriet better, he would have had a better idea of where her gold was hidden. Yet he hadn't wanted to know her better. Since the death of Rebecca, he hadn't wanted to know anybody at all.

He moved round the little encampment on all fours, like a scavenging wolf. He moved in circles, exploring the ground. He lifted up each stone blackened by the fire. He dug down beneath them with his hands.

He found no gold.

Joseph sat on the red blanket and pulled it round him. He wondered whether, if a man longs ardently enough for death, death obligingly arrives. Then he reached out idly, to touch a flat stone, to feel the continuing reality of the earth, and he heard the stone scrape against something metal. He lifted up the stone and saw buried underneath it, deep down in the mud, a tin cup full of the colour.

Joseph threw off the scarlet blanket and spread it out and heaped the golden grains into the middle of it and gathered them up into his hands and let them fall again and then laid his cheek down on them. He saw his future come towards him. He saw the dawn coming up on the beech woods at Parton Magna. He saw that he was going to stay alive.

He wanted to waste no time.

He pressed every last grain and fleck of gold into the empty sugar bag and then rolled it up in the blanket. He tucked the small gun into the waistband of his trousers. He scooped up a handful of sugar and ate it.

He looked up at the sky and saw that the day was advancing and that dusk would overtake him if he didn't begin his homeward journey now. So he stood up and rinsed his hands in the river and then he turned and began to walk away.

He walked as briskly as he was able to walk. He knew that his tread was lighter now. Somewhere up above him, he could hear a bellbird singing.

When he drew parallel once again to Chen's garden, he stopped because he felt hungry for the first time in a long while. He wondered whether he could find some safe crossing over the river. He imagined the iron-fresh taste of spinach leaves. But he could see that the water was still deep and the current swift. No crossing would be possible here until the winter had come and gone.

So Joseph walked on. He held the gold clasped to his chest as he might have held a child. When he reached the first bend in the river, a sound made him stop and look back. He thought at first that it was the sound of somebody crying out, but then everything went silent again, as silent and hushed as it always was, and Joseph assumed that he'd been mistaken: the sound had been made by the inquisitive bellbird following his human path.

An Acre of Land

I

On the night of the twenty-fourth of May, the worm in Edwin Orchard's gut wound itself into a coil so tight that Edwin could feel his intestines bunching and twisting, and a hard, writhing cone appeared beneath the skin of his belly. He began screaming.

Dorothy and Toby came running into Edwin's room. They held him and talked to him and lit lamps round him and Dorothy began to sing him old nursery rhymes that he knew by heart. Janet crept up the stairs and stood at the door, with a handkerchief pressed to her mouth. Toby banked up the fire and went to search for a bottle of rum and brought this back to the room and tried to dribble a few drops into Edwin's mouth and to join in Dorothy's singing, because he always sang out of tune and he thought that this might make his son laugh, as it usually did.

In the middle of this song, Edwin stopped screaming and went quiet. The worm had suddenly uncoiled itself and the pain went away. Dorothy and Toby could see that the cone had disappeared, that the worm now lay in a U-shape just above Edwin's groin, and they watched it, as a dog would watch a rat, to see where and how it was going to move next, but it didn't move.

After a while, they gently pulled the covers back over Edwin and tucked him in. Toby was sweating in the heat of the fire. Edwin stared up at his parents and at the shadows from the firelight dancing on the wall. ‘Go on with the song, Mama,' he whispered.

So while Toby mopped his face with a silk handkerchief and Janet crept nearer to the bed and perched on a hard chest that had once contained Edwin's blue sailor suit, Dorothy continued:

‘But I don't know where it could be,' interrupted Edwin.

‘Where could what be, my darling?'

‘The acre of land. There's no room for it.'

‘No,' said Dorothy. ‘But you remember that this is a rhyme about impossible things. For how can you make a cambric shirt without needlework?'

‘What's cambric?' asked Edwin.

‘A kind of material . . .'

‘Like bombazine?'

‘No . . .'

‘Worsted. Alpaca. Chenille. I've never understood the names for materials. What are they? Do you know what they are, Papa?'

‘Lord, no!' hooted Toby, throwing his head back. ‘What the devil are they? I don't think anybody knows, do they? Are they materials or are they spun sugar? How do we know? Are they feather bolsters?'

The ghost of a smile passed over Edwin's face, then it vanished and he said: ‘Pare's cloak had magic feathers.'

Toby looked at Dorothy and she looked back.

‘You couldn't possibly remember Pare,' said Dorothy gently. ‘You were a tiny baby when she was sent away.'

Edwin stared up at his parents. A look of great weariness was on his face. It seemed important to him that his mama and papa should, at last, know that there was another world, where spirits danced about on the edge of the sun or hid themselves in floating logs and where a kiwi-feather cloak could make you invisible.

‘She came back,' Edwin began. ‘She called to me when I was playing in the toi-toi. She used to say: “E'win, are you there?” She couldn't pronounce the
d
.'

Toby opened his mouth to speak. Then he closed it. He remembered how Pare had always referred to the baby as ‘E'win'. He took Edwin's thin hand in his that was large and red and burning hot. ‘Go on,' he said.

‘She told me stories,' continued Edwin. ‘She told me about the taniwha and the wind god and about the patupaiarehe, who are sort of fairies and they come and steal from you sometimes. And the cloak was magic, which was why you never saw her. It was only me who could see her. She had long black hair tied back and her legs were brown and thin.'

‘Are you sure that you didn't dream her?' said Dorothy.

‘I didn't dream her, Mama. And you have to believe in her world, that's what Pare said. You have to try to see it, like when you see a lizard, it could be something else . . .'

‘No, Edwin,' said Toby firmly. ‘You're talking about superstition. Superstition has to be resisted, not encouraged. This is why the Maoris have not got on as well as they might have done –'

‘I don't know what “superstition” means,' said Edwin.

‘It means,' said Toby, ‘exactly the things you're talking about: believing that a lizard is a monster, when it's only a lizard. On the day that Pare abandoned you on the verandah, she thought she saw a monster, but we know that there was no monster, just a gecko. She almost let you die, you see, because of her ridiculous superstition!'