The Colour (14 page)

Lady barked at the little flames and, believing them alive, would have chased them as she could already chase sheep, but Harriet kept her close on a lead and together they followed them at a distance as the air began to fill with smoke. Like Dorothy, Harriet was enjoying her task – the more so because she was alone with the dog and Joseph and Lilian were far away and she could do whatever she pleased. Though the area of the fire was safely bounded by creek and plough, she had set the flames a single puzzle: in their path lay one cabbage tree, taller than a man, with its dragon leaves a bright, striking green against the pale colour of the flats.

What would the fires do? Would they circle the tree to carry on with their task of burning the tussock or would the tree prove irresistible? Would they climb into it, inch by inch, and devour it?

Harriet waited and watched. She glanced at Lady and saw that the yellow-brown eyes of the dog had taken on a strange brightness as the light of day drained from the sky. And it seemed to Harriet that already, the dog could feel her mood and tune its own way of being to hers.

The smoke stayed low over the valley, so that the top of the cabbage tree was still just visible above it when the first flames arrived at its feet. Harriet knew that these trees held dense moisture in their stems and she thought this would repel the fire. She saw it trying to climb the stem, thrusting itself upwards towards the giant leaves, then falling back, while all around the tree the busy fires on the ground scuttled on. Then, for a few moments, the direction of the wind veered slightly to the west, and smoke obscured the cabbage tree. Would it be burnt, or would it remain? Harriet thought how, though men and women struggle day and night to tame the world and make it theirs, so also do they long to see wild and random things and marvel at them and carry their memory away.

The tree began to burn. A single flame seemed to travel through it, splitting it like a spear and when this spear of flame caught the leaves, it burst into a fountain of yellow fire. Against the darkening sky, this fountain was of a colossal brightness, a biblical brightness, and both Harriet and Lady shivered with the wonder of it.

Later, in the dark, two kea came and feasted on roasted insects and lizards. Harriet, walking out with a lamp to make sure that the fires were extinguished, heard them squabbling and then watched them picking their meal from the cinders of the valley.

She watched them for a long time, attentive to the strangeness of them. Then she went indoors and began cutting off her hair.

The hair she cut smelled of the smoke and she thought how, in the hours that had just passed, alone with the dog, she had been entirely happy and that everything in the world around her had seemed beautiful to her. And it was this that she longed to preserve – this sense of a beautiful world. In cutting off her hair, she believed that she was preparing herself for all that was coming in the new season, so that she would see everything clearly, as clearly as she had seen the burning cabbage tree.

But this ‘everything' didn't pertain only to what Harriet called ‘the beautiful world'; it included all that Joseph was doing in secret.

She had been down to the creek. She had found her casserole dish, buried under shingle. She'd stood and stared at the mounds of soil at the creek's edge. She'd been amazed that Joseph thought her so stupid that she was incapable of deducing what he was doing. It made her furious – not that he was fossicking for gold in her creek, but that he was doing it like this, under the pretence of digging the gully to the pond and laying down a shingle bottom for the trout.

What made him lie about it? Had he found any gold? There was so much work to be done on the farm that surely Joseph would not have been turned aside from it, except by a discovery which had taken him by surprise and which he had not been able to resist? And then, for reasons which Harriet couldn't deduce but which might have to do with the egotism she saw in him, or with some
habit of lying
that he might barely recognise in himself, he had decided to keep everything secret.

The excavations at the creek were ugly. There was something obscene about them. But as Harriet contemplated them, she thought that perhaps they were no more ‘obscene' than the workings of her own mind and heart in relation to Joseph. For day by day, she kept secret from him her own lovelessness. It piled up in her. At times, it was not merely lack of love that she felt; it was hatred of the blackest kind. And though she struggled to conceal it from him, perhaps she succeeded no better than he did with his blatant heaps of earth? In the nights, she often awoke at first light to see him staring at her, his eye close to hers, his fists clenched around the sheets. Did he know that she did not love him? Did he understand all too clearly that she loved the wilderness he had brought her to, but not him?

Harriet peered at her face in the glass. She thought that it seemed larger now that her hair had been cut away, with its every expression more exaggerated and more transparent. From now on, her mind would surely be easier for Joseph to read?

After sweeping up her hair and throwing it into the range, Harriet began her search for the missing tea box. She was also looking for Joseph's gold.

One by one, she took down every kitchen implement, every pan and tin and sack, every china pot and glass jar, every sachet and square of folded muslin. All were clean, dry and empty and she replaced them exactly as they had been found. She stood in the kitchen, staring. Her candle burned with an even flame. Lady slept in front of the fire.

She took up the candle and moved into the calico bedroom. She lay down on the earth floor and peered into the dark space under the bed. She tugged out a pair of Joseph's boots and saw the mud of the creek still on them, dried to a bluish colour. She put her hand into each of the boots and shivered as she imagined that she felt there some vestigial warmth of Joseph's feet, but the boots were empty. Harriet turned them over, examining the mud, bringing the flame very near to the soles of the boots and trying to see whether there was any speck of yellow dust adhering to them. But there was nothing and she replaced them in the dark square under the bed. Then she went to the old trunk where Joseph kept his few possessions and slowly opened the lid.

She'd never looked in this trunk. She knew that Joseph hadn't brought very much with him to New Zealand; only his clothes and his books, and perhaps a few objects that had belonged to his father. And having little, she believed he was entitled to keep this little locked away. Even now, Harriet hesitated to search the trunk. She knelt, with her hand on the lid, looking quickly for any sign of the tea box and not finding it. But she knew also that she was memorising the contents of the chest and the precise arrangement of things, so that she could take everything out and put it back exactly as it had been found.

There were Joseph's clothes with their frayed pockets and worn collars. There was a Bible and a hymnal and a volume of poems by Andrew Marvell and another by William Wordsworth and a map of the world. There was a leather-bound fishing book, filled in with Joseph's handwriting and containing mainly disappointed entries: ‘A poor season.' ‘River low.' ‘Bitterly cold.' ‘No mayfly.' ‘Fish very choosy.' There was a small, ornate pistol in a wooden box and Harriet took a long time examining this, even looking down its barrel to see if anything had been concealed there.

At the bottom of the trunk were laid Joseph's fishing rods and hand-tied flies in a glass case, every one labelled in its own small compartment:
Iron Blue, Sawyer Nymph, Lunn.
Harriet opened the lid of the case and looked at the flies, which were the flies of an English river and might delude no fish in Aotearoa, but she thought them clever in their mimicry of insects and oddly beautiful. Harriet was about to replace the fly box when she noticed that one of the tiny compartments contained, not a fishing-fly, but a curl of human hair. She picked up the brown curl and stared at it: a memento so precious to Joseph, he'd hidden it away in the fly box in order to bring it with him to New Zealand.

Harriet felt breathless. She considered burning the brown curl, as she'd just burnt her own hair – burning it to punish Joseph, to let him know that she knew his secret. But, in truth, she did not know it and
did not want to know it
. She understood that there was nothing to be done with the curl except to put it away where she'd found it.

III

The owners of the tea-shop agreed to lodge Lilian for the night, but explained that their three bedrooms were already occupied and that she would have to sleep in the parlour that lay behind the tea-room itself.

The parlour was dark and cramped and contained nothing much except a sideboard and a small sofa, so plumply upholstered that it looked as though it would burst under the least impress of any human weight upon it. Lilian imagined how this ridiculously stuffed thing would bounce her bones from position to position all through the hours of darkness and never give them any rest. She let escape from her chest a deep, shuddering sigh. The day had been vile: the long journey in the small cart, then the terrible encounter with Mrs Dinsdale . . . and now the night promised to be quite ferociously as bad.

But she had no choice. She was told that every room in Christchurch was taken by people awaiting passage to Nelson and the West Coast on the
Wallabi
. Rooms that were not even rooms were taken. People were bedding down in stables and warehouses, in lofts and closets, in cellars and pump-rooms and bars. At the words ‘pump-rooms and bars' Lilian fanned herself with her gloves and informed her hostesses that she would gladly take advantage of the offending sofa. ‘Luckily,' she said, ‘I am not very tall.' ‘My husband was tall,' she added for no reason that she could explain (and Roderick Blackstone had not been particularly tall), ‘but I am not.'

Joseph bought a bag of hay for the donkey, then took supper with Lilian and the tea-shop owners and was shown the silk eiderdown that would cover his mother while she slept, as though this were an exhibit they were planning to offer at the local museum.

The supper was a meagre one of cold mutton cutlets and pickles and with this in his belly Joseph left them and walked away into the night. The donkey stood in the road, between the traces of the cart, sorrowfully munching its hay.

Joseph walked north-west out of the town, the way they had come, on the road to Okuku. He didn't want to be among the crowd of would-be gold-seekers heading towards Lyttelton. He didn't want anybody to inform him that on the Hokitika River there was the colour waiting in miraculous quantities or to hear how lives would be changed and fortunes made; he wanted to be alone and quiet and dream his own dreams.

Then, on the road, an awesome weariness overtook him. His legs felt as though they had walked across the world, from the Orient to the Alps. He wished he were lying by a fire with the beeches sighing on the empty hill and his vision of the Cob House still untainted by its reality.

He saw a barn in the distance and thought he would go in there and lie down. He didn't mind whether there was any straw or hay. He had his cloak. He would cover himself with that and fall instantly asleep. But as he approached the barn, he heard an agitated barking and whining coming from it and understood that the barn contained dogs – not the collies the run-holders used, but poorly fed hounds, by the sound of them, of the kind cockatoo farmers kept to kill weka and pukeko and retrieve pigeons. So Joseph skirted the barn, drank from a water butt, but didn't go inside, only settled himself by the barn wall, in the shadow of its roof, and watched the moon skim in and out of the clouds.

All night long, he could hear the dogs, sometimes near him scrabbling at their confinement, and sometimes in his dreams. He knew they could smell him – this human trespasser. They howled at his obstinacy in remaining there, pressed up against the wall, and he thought how he had heard this fury of theirs in his own mind for a long while – fury against himself, fury for the past which had been spoiled and for his audacious belief that he could begin everything afresh.

He woke at first light, when the dogs had fallen silent at last and with the grey pallor of the sky hung out like a sheet that never stirs in the wind. He walked on the wet grass, back and forth, to wake up his limbs and then set out to look for some breakfast before he began his round of purchases for the farm.

Though he prided himself that he was a man who seldom felt the cold, he found himself shivering on his walk back into Christchurch. Other men joined him on the way, moving, each aloof and alone, like ghosts without shadows in the overcast dawn. And although Joseph kept his head low and began no conversation with anyone, he noticed that the faces of these people looked wan, as though they had been coaxed into banishment by relatives in England or Scotland who were weary of them and who didn't care what became of them, just as long as they didn't return. And now they were going to try to sail to the West Coast, where no safe harbour existed, where ship after ship had been wrecked on the sandbars and hundreds had drowned in the violent surf. In their solitude and in their determination, these were people who had nothing to lose, but Joseph did not dare to pity them because he saw himself as one of them.

He drew his cloak tightly round his chest and moved with them towards the next moment, the next hour of the fast-approaching day.

In Hudson's Utilities, a cavernous, dusty store that smelled of chaff, Joseph saw that the usual stock of farm implements and seed had been shouldered to the back of the shop by a large consignment of gold-mining equipment.

He walked slowly along an array of pannikins, picks, shovels, knives, boots, hats, flasks, buckets and tents. He stood still and stared at these objects. Then his eye was caught by a hand-scribbled sign:
Change your fortunes with this cradle!
A contraption made of wood and iron, not unlike a small sleigh at first glance, stood underneath the sign and advertised itself as
The One and Only Otago Sluice-Box
. Joseph understood at once that this was an object of considerable ingenuity.