The Colour (46 page)

Edwin was silent for a moment, his eyes large and sad. Then he said: ‘Pare wasn't ridiculous, Papa. I don't think you should say that. Especially now.'

‘Especially now, why?'

‘When she's gone, when she's dead.'

Again, Toby and Dorothy looked at each other. They didn't know what this story of Pare meant, or whether to believe it or whether to dismiss it as one of Edwin's inventions, like the red and yellow Moa Bird he'd drawn so many times.

‘How do you know that Pare is dead?' asked Dorothy.

‘I just do,' said Edwin. ‘She was on a ledge near a waterfall for a long time. I saw her on the ledge and she –'

‘What
ledge,
Edwin? What are you talking about?'

‘He just imagined it,' snapped Toby.

Edwin now started to struggle in the bed, to try to pull himself up.

‘I didn't imagine it!' he cried out. ‘I saw the ledge! And Pare wanted me to go there, to help her, but I couldn't. I asked Harriet to find her, but she wouldn't go over the Hurunui, she was too frightened.'

‘Harriet? You told Harriet about this?'

‘Yes. And she didn't say it was silly. She believed me!'

‘Hush,' said Dorothy. ‘We believe you, don't we, Toby?'

‘No we do
not
!' said Toby, pressing Edwin's hand. ‘You had a
dream,
Edwin. Listen to me. You had some very frightening nightmares and they've made you ill. So you have to forget them and then your worm will come out and you will get well.'

‘No!' said Edwin, tugging his hand away. ‘Pare was real! I smelt her. I touched her. She gave me a kiwi feather. I could show you the place in the toi-toi where we used to sit. My caterpillar used to crawl up her arm. She saw Mollie and Baby . . . She was
real
!'

Edwin began weeping now and Janet, perched on the wooden clothes chest, couldn't help but cry too, as silently as she could, trying not to draw attention to herself.

‘Papa is right, Edwin,' said Dorothy with a sigh, wiping Edwin's tears away with her hand. ‘You have to forget this now. You have to concentrate on getting well.'

‘I'm not going to get well!' cried Edwin. ‘You don't understand! Pare died.
She died
! I know when it happened because she kept calling and calling –'

‘Oh my goodness!' said Toby, angry now. ‘What on earth is all this? I do believe I've had enough of it. Go to sleep, Edwin. Forget your nonsense. Your pain has gone now. Try to sleep.'

‘I'm not going to sleep!' shouted Edwin. ‘I'm going to die!'

‘No,' said Toby. ‘You are
not
going to die. We are not going to let you. The worm has come lower down with the medicine you're taking. Another day or two and it will be out. And then you will get well.'

Edwin began to hit out at his father with his pale fists.

‘Stop this, darling,' said Dorothy firmly. ‘Lie down. Why don't we sing the song again?'

‘What song? What stupid song? About impossible things? About “cambric”? Nobody knows what cambric is! Cambric isn't real. But Pare's real and I know where she is and I'm going there, I'm going to see her!'

‘Ssh, Edwin, Edwin . . .'

‘Because the worm died! It bunched itself into that cone thing and then it died. And that's the end of my life!'

The only sounds, now, in the room were Edwin's exhausted breathing and the weeping of Janet. Toby got slowly to his feet.

‘Stay with him, Dorothy,' he said. ‘I'll ride to Rangiora. I'll fetch Dr Pettifer.'

II

The daylight was coming up by the time Toby Orchard had dressed himself and saddled the horse and set out, and with the slow arrival of the light, the snow began to fall.

Toby knew the weather. It was still only May and the snow wouldn't lie for long. He didn't doubt he could get through, but tired and anxious as he was, he felt tormented, as he cantered on, by the dancing snowflakes, which stung his eyes and impaired his vision. He cursed the arrival of winter. He cursed the vastness of the land – the very thing which normally exhilarated him and reminded him how wise and fortunate he'd been to escape his old, unbearable life in London.

He'd ridden only a few miles and was still well within the boundaries of the Orchard Run, when he saw a figure, indistinct in the maddening snow, but just visible to him as a man running along with an animal. And he saw, as he came closer, that it was indeed an elderly man in threadbare coat and a dented felt hat, leading a sheep by a long piece of twine, and seeming to try to escape Toby as he came level with him, veering suddenly away northwards, stumbling on the tussock and pulling wildly on the frayed string.

And Toby knew then, without any doubt in his mind, that in this cold dawn, he'd found the man who, for months, had been stealing sheep off the run and that, urgent as was his mission to Dr Pettifer, he couldn't let this go by.

He turned his horse and again drew level with the man and rode beyond him a little and reined in the horse and looked back. The sheep-stealer stopped, yet pulled the sheep closer to him by looping the twine over his hand.

Toby could now see, through the daze of falling snow, that the man's eyes looked outwards, one to each side of his head, and couldn't focus, and this made for an expression of perpetual confusion on his face, and Toby found it difficult to decide which eye to look at when he began to speak, so he directed his gaze above the eyes towards the ignominious hat.

‘That is my animal,' Toby announced angrily. ‘You're on the Orchard Run – on
my
run – and that's
my sheep
you're trying to take.'

The man wiped off the snow, where it had clung to his moustache, with a mittened hand. His wall eyes looked east and west and nowhere in between.

‘May be your animal, sir,' he said. ‘But this sheep tried to bite me! An' I'll take my revenge on any beast which tries to do that! I'll slit her neck and eat her for my dinner and make a coat from her wool because she tried to nip me clean through to the bone.'

Toby faltered for a moment. The man's reply was so unexpected, so cunning in a small way, that Toby Orchard knew that, at some other time, if only all that was happening to Edwin had been far behind him, then it would have amused him enough to let the man go, warn him off the run, but let him go now, let him have his mutton dinner and his armful of wool, because he was a poor cockatoo who had nothing and Toby Orchard had everything he wanted in the world. But on this icy morning, the flicker of amusement that he allowed himself to feel was replaced, in the next second, by a fury so colossal that he felt his large chest was going to burst apart.

He held the horse on a tight rein and took up his whip. He raised his arm in the air and brought the whip down in a stinging blow on the man's shoulder. The horse reared and whinnied and the man cried out and fell backwards, but all the while managed to keep hold of the string.

‘Christ, love us!' babbled the man. ‘Christ save me from
you
!'

‘Nothing will save you!' shouted Toby, inflicting a second terrible cut with the whip. ‘You're a liar! The world is full of liars and I will not tolerate it any more! People come here and they think they can take away everything that's mine, everything that's precious to me, everything I'd give my life for. They think they can come in the night and spirit it away and that I won't catch them and punish them. But they're wrong!'

As Toby raised his whip arm again, the man staggered to his feet and managed to dance away from the blow and he let go of the string and the sheep skittered off at a frantic run.

‘Don't kill me!' the man cried out. ‘Don't kill me for a sheep. I've let her go, see? I've let her go!' And then he tripped over a mound of tussock, beginning to be slippery in the snow, and fell into a heap and covered his head with his hands. But the lash of the whip fell on to his back, fell twice more and then a third time, until Toby Orchard's surge of rage began to diminish and he began to see the man once more for what he was – a poor creature with a sorry existence, freighted with hunger and want, bowed down by failed hopes – and at last he restrained his arm.

The man was whimpering, but Toby could barely hear this. He himself was short of breath, making a wheezing, sobbing sound in his throat, and he felt as though he were going to choke and die of misery right there, as he sat on his horse. He looked at all that appeared before him, at all that he had been unable to prevent or alter, and confronted the horror of it.

His son was going to die.

A man in a frayed coat lay on his land in agony, with his flesh bleeding.

In the cold air, Toby could hear the foolish, endless bleating of the sheep and he wanted it to cease. He wanted never to hear it again. He thought it nothing but a futile serenade to dreams which had once been realised, but which had now vanished away.

III

Edwin was dreaming.

He was standing by a lake, but the lake was so still, it was as though there was nothing alive in it, nor any wind to coax the surface of it into movement. But in this glassy, silent lake he could recognise his own reflection and he could see that his face, which had been moon-white, was no longer pale, but blotched a deep, dark purplish colour, as though his blood had seeped out of his veins and come to the surface and was pooling underneath his skin.

He stood perfectly still and observed the way his appearance was changing, but after some time had passed, he saw that his face had become so dark that it refracted no light whatsoever and that where it had been reflected in the lake, there was now merely
an absence
, as though his body ended at his shoulders. The absence of his face was remarkable, but he found that he was able to accept quite readily the idea that it might no longer be there.

Yet he could still see.

This meant that he still had eyes, even if they were unable to see themselves. And now he understood that, although this seemed illogical and contradictory, he had no choice but to accept this too, because he'd entered a world where the impossible was everywhere, a world where all the rules he'd once learned were broken. And this realisation filled him with a strange excitement and he turned away from the lake to look around him to see how everything was changed.

The most surprising thing he noticed was the altered disposition of the lakeside (where he was standing) in relation to the lake. Instead of descending or curving down into the water, the land seemed to
float
in a rolling pathway, just above the still surface of it. It was solid ground, the colour of greenstone, yet behaved as though it were a skein of mist, and Edwin wanted to run back to his mother and tell her that he'd seen it now, the acre of land between the water and the sand! He wanted to reveal to her that there was no end to what was possible in the world and that, in their lives together at the Orchard Run, this realisation had somehow passed them by, so that they had done the same things in the same way day after day and year after year and never seen how each and every one of these things might have been different.

He remembered suddenly that Janet, who dreamed that a blancmange might be blue, had engineered what everyone had thought of as an impossible pudding and how the blue blancmanges had been a source of wonder and had never ever ceased to be wondrous, even after they'd eaten dozens and dozens of them. But they'd none of them ever seen, not even Janet had ever seen, that if a blancmange could be blue, then a thousand other living or inanimate things might be other than they were. And now it was too late to tell them this. The world of the Orchard Run, the world of lamplight and firelight and bounding dogs and scorched linen and crayons and books and silver dishes, had disappeared somewhere – somewhere unreachable and unknowable. It had become, in this new universe of altered possibility, the one impossible place, to which he could never return.

Edwin would never see his mama and papa again. He understood this. So, before he set off along the greenstone pathway, which, in its mysteriousness, drew him on, he also wanted to allow himself to remember them.

He saw his father, sitting in his armchair, which creaked and whined under the bulk of him, trying to light and relight his pipe, which never burned with a steady rhythm, but always threatened to go out. Edwin remembered that once his mother had said: ‘Toby dearest, why don't we try to find you a new pipe the next time we are in Christchurch?' and that his father had simply shaken his head and lit another taper from the fire and puffed once more on the old pipe and said: ‘No thank you, Doro.'

And Edwin thought now that this was what he'd loved most about his papa, this stubborn perseverance of his, and he hoped that, for as long as his existence lasted, wherever that existence might be, it would remain and that Toby Orchard would never give up and never give in.

And as to his mama, Edwin liked to imagine her bending over him – as though he might be a baby again in his cradle – and singing her melancholy songs.

Her voice had always been consoling and she sang with a kind of smile on her face, as though there was something amusing about the words of the verses that only she could understand. Edwin had sometimes thought of asking her what it was which made her almost laugh, but he never had and now the songs were fading, growing fainter, and all their words becoming muddled and lost. The songs would no longer be for him.

‘She will sing to Papa,' Edwin told himself. ‘They will sit either side of the fire and Janet will draw the curtains on the darkness and Papa will fuss with his pipe and Mama will start singing . . .'