The Colour (50 page)

Joseph left everything as he found it.

He purchased new linen, but he slept in the toy-maker's bed and read the books which had been stuffed into the shelf above it,
Gulliver's Travels, A Short History of India, Famous Dolls' Houses of the World.

Gulliver
made him too anxious and he laid this aside without finishing it. The
History of India,
likewise, seemed to him too filled with an unsettling anger and gave him dreams that he was being pecked to death by some peculiar animal, just as his father had been pecked to death by ostriches.

Only the book about dolls' houses gave him any consolation. He would stare for a long time at the pictures, intensely aware of how the human mind finds agreeable and wondrous everything that is a miniature replica of something else. And after a few weeks had passed, Joseph decided that he would try to make a doll's house – to give to Susan Millward and Merrick Dillane, for the children they would one day have.

He cleared the toy-maker's work bench, but left the sea of wood shavings on the floor, not only because he liked to walk in it but because he was able to imagine all the years of work of which it had been a part – as though this had been
his
work and all his labours in New Zealand had been a dream from which he'd now woken. He bought plywood and slate and nails and a glass cutter. He bought tins of paint and varnish and glue and slabs of putty.

Now, when he woke in the morning, this was what he thought about: his doll's house. He drank a mug of weak tea and sometimes heated a muffin in a blackened pan and ate it with jam. Then he made his way to the workshop and, with a patience so infinite it surprised him, went on with the task of building an elegant little Georgian dwelling, modelled on that once owned by the eldest daughter of the eleventh Duke of Hereford.

The house had five bedrooms. Joseph read in
Famous Dolls' Houses
that the floors of the hall and drawing-room had been paved with miniature parquet and the kitchen floor with slate and he knew that his house wouldn't be complete until all of this had been installed. He thought that the cutting of the parquet blocks and the tiny slate slabs might take him his whole lifetime, but he found that he didn't mind.

The marriage of Susan Millward to Merrick Dillane came and went and nobody invited Joseph Blackstone, but from the workshop window he saw the wedding procession pass and heard the bells ringing in the church. And it was on this day that he decided he would never give the doll's house away, neither to Susan and Merrick nor to anybody else; the doll's house was his –
his house
– and it would be the place where he would take refuge from the world.

As the winter came, Joseph worked more and more slowly. The house now had its roof of slate, and ornate chimney-pots made of clay, and fourteen windows. He began on the parquet. But he understood that what hope he had left resided here, in this house made of wood, and that when it was finished, in all its last, tender detail, and he closed its door for the last time, his world would fade to silence.

III

Early in the New Zealand summer, Harriet arrived at the Orchard Run.

She walked arm-in-arm with Dorothy round the garden and Dorothy said: ‘I hate summer. I don't want to see the shine on the grass. I don't want to feel the sun on my face. I don't want to see flowers growing.'

When the women passed the titoki tree, and saw the remains of Edwin's tree house, they clung together and wept. Dorothy stammered: ‘He was spirited away. I know he was. I look for him everywhere, in everything. I look for him in the dust on my shoes.'

Upstairs, the door of Edwin's room, which had been left exactly as it was the morning he died, remained closed. Dorothy told Harriet that on a slate by his bed was a single word:
bombazine.
She said that the room smelled of him and that it always would. She said the old, faded drawing of the red and yellow Moa Bird was still glued to the wall. She said: ‘Janet is mourning, too. She puts salt into cake and sugar into gravy. I should sack her, really, but I don't suppose I will.'

As for Toby Orchard, the two women barely saw him. He slept very little and got up at dawn and went out. The only way in which he could combat his despair was by riding horses at a wild gallop over the sheep-run; not with any purpose, not to round up his sheep or inspect the dipping pits or talk to the hired hands, because he was no longer interested in any of these things, no longer knew what purpose a sheep-run or the money he made from it could possibly serve, but only to keep moving, always moving under the vault of the sky, to wear himself out, to wear the horses out, to go on until he could go on no longer and a blessed unconsciousness smothered his mind.

Dorothy sometimes tried to reason with Toby by saying he would kill himself, kill the horses, bring about more tragedy if he went on leading his life in this way, but Toby appeared not to hear this, not even to listen to it, as though Dorothy could have been reading from a sentimental novel he knew he would despise.

‘I can't talk to him,' said Dorothy to Harriet. ‘And he can't talk to me. I suppose that now we shall be silent until the end of time.'

Harriet knew that Dorothy had been glad when she arrived, that she, who was now alone so much, valued her companionship, yet Harriet knew that, despite this, she couldn't linger on in this household. She'd promised herself long ago that she wouldn't become a cuckoo in the Orchards' nest and now she saw that she had to honour that promise. And besides, she had her future to build: her future in her new house.

She would site it lower down the flats, not far from the pond and the southern arm of the creek, where it would be sheltered from the wind. It would have a wide verandah, Harriet decided, and a tiled roof. There would be five or six rooms with floors of totara pine and bright colours on the walls and one of these rooms would be for her father, Henry Salt. Already, Harriet could imagine him there, sitting at a desk, making sketches of birds and plants that he'd never seen before.

Next to her own bedroom would be a room for Hal and Hal would have a cradle of wood and soft curtains at the windows to keep out the light. And when he was old enough to run, she and her father would make him a kite out of scarlet paper.

When she told her plan to Dorothy and Toby, Dorothy said: ‘I don't want you to leave. I want you to live here with us. You and the child.'

But Toby, who was for once sitting with the women by the fire, said: ‘Take no notice of Dorothy, Harriet. Everybody has to live their own life. Just remember drainage. Drainage is the first necessity of human comfort. Dig a cesspit and run your pipes into it. I can find men to help you.'

And there and then, Toby got up and found paper and pen and ink and drew an elegant plan of a drainage system, with water carried in a box flume from the river to a water tank on iron stilts, and underground clay pipes running down into a pit.

He laid the plan in front of Harriet. She saw that his fingers were stained with ink, like the fingers of the shipping clerk in Hokitika.

‘Your land has a natural fall,' he said. ‘You can site the house looking any way you want, provided the tank is above the roof line and provided the drains follow the inclination of the hills.'

The following day, laying her hand gently on Harriet's large belly, Dorothy whispered: ‘That cesspit was the only thing Toby has shown an interest in since Edwin died. And then in the night he made love to me. Perhaps, if we can become a family again, we can survive after all?'

IV

Harriet was reunited with her horse, Billy. One morning very early, she saddled him and began to ride towards the land on the Okuku flats which Joseph Blackstone had bought for £1 an acre and where, now that he was on the other side of the world, she would build her house.

As she rode, she remembered the pleasure of the empty valleys and the shadows of clouds moving with her across the earth. When she crossed the Ashley River on the ferry, Billy swam beside it, and Harriet remembered the donkey and the donkey cart of her first season in New Zealand and she remembered Lady washed away in the fresh. And then she remembered what was always in her heart.

When she came to the place where the Cob House had stood, she saw that the tussock-grass was long and green and that it had come clustering round the old range, as if to try to hide this embarrassing human invention, so that the winds would no longer see it, no longer try to destroy it, but only howl around it and pass on.

Acknowledgements

My grateful thanks to Chris Price, Jenny Patrick, Harriet Allan, Tilly Lloyd, Fiona Clayton, John Glusman, Sylvie Audoly, Roger Cazalet, Mary Gibson, Caroline Michel, Vivien Green, Alison Samuel, Penelope Hoare and of course Richard Holmes.

I also acknowledge a debt to the work of Denis Glover, Judy Corbalis, James Ng, William F. Heinz, Margaret Orbell, Philip Ross May, Lady Barker, Keith Sinclair, H. A. Glasson, G. J. Griffiths, June A. Wood, Rona Adshead and Jillian Johnson, and to the inspirational singing of the St Joseph's Maori Girls College Choir.

  

Rebecca Millward successfully achieved immortality in this book by bidding at the ‘Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture' 2000 Immortality auction. The Foundation would like to thank Rose Tremain for taking part in the event and supporting the Foundation.
www.torturecare.org.uk