The Colour (7 page)

When he had served out all the portions of pigeon and mumbled a grace, he fell triumphantly upon his food. He tore bread in his hands and drenched it with gravy and swallowed everything down – pigeon flesh, pastry, potatoes, sauce and bread – so fast that the pattern of roses on the plate seemed hardly to have been covered up before it appeared again, shiny and clean. And Harriet understood that while Toby was in this first euphoria of his eating, he expected no one to talk to him. Dorothy smiled benevolently upon him between her own meagre mouthfuls. Edwin quietly recited to his mother a poem he had made up that day; it was about a hippopotamus. Harriet savoured the food and the fire in the room and waited to tell her story of the death of Beauty in the snow.

When she began her tale, the three faces stared at her as though at a waterfall, wondering at its downward precipitation. She supposed they were trying to imagine what kind of ignorant people could put a rug on a cow. Edwin's eyes were sorrowful as he asked: ‘Why did you not put Beauty in her shed?'

‘Because there is no shed,' said Harriet.

‘That was the trouble,' said Dorothy gently, ‘as it is with sheep when a southerly blows like that. There is never enough shelter.'

Toby Orchard began slapping crumbs from his coat-front. He did this impatiently, tidying himself up before beginning to speak.

‘When we began here on the run,' he said at last, ‘we lost livestock with every southerly gale. Sheep can be blown clean off a hill or they can cough till their hearts burst or cluster under the river-banks and drown. But what I said to Dorothy then, and what I say to you now, is
never give up
. Keep building. Make a barn with cob. Roof it with ti-ti leaves. Anything. You're high up near the Okuku, and the southerlies will bring in more snow this winter than you ever saw in Norfolk. Consider the latitude of the South Island of New Zealand! Nigh on fifty degrees south. Spend money on another milk cow and you will lose her too – unless you bring her in under your own roof.'

While Dorothy nodded and Edwin watched his father gravely, Harriet tried to imagine what Lilian would say about sharing the Cob House with an animal. (‘I simply will not do it, Joseph. So why do you not put the cow in my bed and I will go out and sleep in the snow!')

A smile touched the corners of Harriet's mouth as Toby continued.

‘We can sell you milk,' he said. ‘In this kind of cold, it will keep fresh for quite a few days. When you've made the shed, scythe last year's tussock instead of burning it and dry it on the dry winds. No straw on the flats, of course, but tussock will do and cows must have plenty of it to keep them warm.'

Harriet nodded.

Edwin said: ‘Poor Beauty.'

‘No fleece on a cow,' Toby went on. ‘And nostrils too large. Breath freezes and blocks the air passage, then they try to breathe through their mouths and the cold burns their throats. You must wait until spring in October.'

Harriet said: ‘Joseph thought he knew livestock . . .'

‘No use,' said Toby, ‘no use at all, unless you also know the weather.'

The maid Janet removed the remains of the pigeon pie and brought in a trembling white blancmange, which she placed without hesitation in front of Dorothy, apparently knowing that a blancmange was not a real or pungent enough entity to engage Toby's attention. When served his portion of this confection, Toby wrapped his big hand around a spoon, lifted a few morsels to his mouth and then abandoned it, pushing his plate away and wiping not only his mouth, but his nose and his eyes with the table napkin. Dorothy regarded him watchfully.

‘Toby is out on the run from sunrise to sunset,' she said softly to Harriet, ‘and by supper time he is very tired.'

‘Forgive me, Mrs Blackstone,' Toby Orchard said, getting to his feet and stretching. ‘I shall go to bed now and listen to the night birds.'

Then to Dorothy, he said: ‘Perhaps you will show Mollie to our guest?'

‘Certainly I will, dear,' said Dorothy.

‘Good-night, Papa,' said Edwin.

Toby came round to where his son sat, still eating his helping of blancmange, and put his wide hand tenderly on Edwin's head. ‘I heard your hippopotamus,' he said. ‘I thought him very good.'

Dorothy and Harriet sat in front of the fire, into which they both stared.

‘You will discover,' said Dorothy, ‘what a minute world you have come to. Vast outside. So vast it takes our breath away. But our concerns are so very small: the health of the sheep, a dry shipment of chestnuts, firewood that doesn't spit, a servant girl who can make mashed potato without lumps . . .'

‘Oh,' said Harriet, ‘but when I stand by my creek and look towards the mountains . . .'

‘Precisely,' said Dorothy, ‘they are grand. Nature is grand here. But too grand. To survive in New Zealand, we all have to re-create, if not the past exactly, then something very like it, something homely.'

Harriet saw the branch of apple wood she was watching break and fall and a high flame spring up and begin to consume it. She said: ‘Our Cob House is not like any home I have been in.'

‘Not yet,' said Dorothy. ‘But if your farm prospers, then your husband will build a larger house, a house like this one, and you will serve tea in it, tea from China, but the rest of the world will have clean vanished from your head.'

‘Well then,' said Harriet, ‘I hope we may stay always in the Cob House, always listening to the river, always walking out at night to see the stars . . .'

‘No,' said Dorothy. ‘Take my word for it. We are not strong enough for rivers and stars. We think we are at first, but we are not.'

‘What do you mean, Mrs Orchard?' asked Harriet.

‘I think you might call me Dorothy and I shall call you Harriet, if I may? What do I mean? I mean that inevitably we make a small world in the midst of a big one. For a small world is all that we know how to make.'

Harriet was silent. Here in this room was indeed a comfortable little piece of England reassembled. It was pretty and welcoming and outside were English trees moving in the dark.

‘But then,' she said, ‘we are not tested.'

‘Now it is my turn to ask you what you mean.'

‘Well, I am not sure I know what I mean. But when I am working in my vegetable garden, on my own, and I look up at the mountains, that is where I long to go.'

Dorothy Orchard ran her hands through her cropped hair. She looked at Harriet, at her muddied skirts and her slender feet in their brown boots, and tried to guess her age. ‘The mountains, as you call them, the Southern Alps are as fearful in their way as anything in the world. I've heard them called “the stairway of hell”. If you don't want your children to lose a mother, then stay away from the Alps.'

‘I have no children,' said Harriet.

‘Ah.'

Dorothy paused for an anxious second or two, but then went hurriedly on: ‘But you have a husband and you would not want him to be left alone.'

‘No,' replied Harriet. But it came to her at that moment that there was a part of Joseph which, even in their bed, remained resolutely alone. This was not a thing they would ever speak of, but it was nevertheless true.

Dorothy stood up. ‘It is getting late,' she said, ‘and we shall go to bed, but Toby made me promise to show you Mollie, who, at the moment, is a resident of the airing cupboard.'

The two women went slowly up the stairs of Orchard House, Dorothy leading the way with a candle burning in a silver candlestick. They arrived at a landing from which they could hear Toby snoring.

Dorothy opened a small door and a warm, acrid smell made Harriet's nostrils flare. ‘Toby is very proud of the airing cupboard,' Dorothy whispered. ‘Heat from the range rises and warms the stones, so this is where we dry clothes and air the sheets and now if I shine the light down a little, you will see Mollie.'

Harriet saw two yellow eyes staring at her over the rim of a rushwork basket.

‘Mollie the collie,' said Dorothy. ‘Edwin named her and of course Toby thought this very droll. He used to make Edwin say “Mollie-the-collie must not be mollycoddled!” But now look beside her, there. Two pups. Born eight days ago, so we let her live in here with them until she weans them.'

Harriet knelt down and gently put a hand out to the dog. The pups came clustering to the edge of the basket.

‘Good girls,' said Dorothy. ‘Brave girls.' Then to Harriet she said: ‘Mollie is the cleverest dog we've had. Knows every inch of the run. Knows which sheep are the strayers and the slowcoaches. Toby will keep one of the pups – the one Edwin has named Baby – and train her. But we never keep more than two dogs. We shall find a home for the other.'

In among the dogs' pungent warmth, Harriet's hand caressed them gently. She thought affectionately of her father's old wolfhound, a grey stumbling creature who was never fond of walking or running but preferred to lie all day across his master's feet in their heavy, polished shoes, with one eye closed and the other on its own reflection in the fender. Without thinking further, she said: ‘May I ask Joseph if we could buy the other puppy?'

The snoring in Toby Orchard's room stopped suddenly and Harriet imagined that he might at any moment appear – to deny her request, not wanting a dog of his to live in so poor a place as the Cob House, a place where animals died because the people were too new to the landscape and had no understanding of the sky. But the snoring resumed more quietly and Dorothy merely said: ‘Yes, by all means ask and I will ask Toby. But collies must work, you know. They must work or they are not happy.'

‘We can put her to work,' said Harriet. ‘And I believe things might go better for us if we had a dog.'

She and Dorothy said good-night and Harriet walked towards her room, a room with solid walls and a Dutch bed and a silvered looking-glass.

As she opened her door, she heard Dorothy say: ‘The dogs are all named by Edwin. The one you want is called Lady.'

III

Harriet slept for a long time.

When she woke up, there was sun at her window and no sound at all inside the house. Harriet lay still and looked at the room, which had been painted the colour of cream and hung with faded samplers:

Her body ached. She knew she should go back to the Cob House, taking milk and Toby Orchard's instructions to build barns for the animals, but the task of returning – the long, slow miles over the flats with the donkey and the cart, the perilous crossing of the Ashley – suddenly filled her with desolation.

Shivering, Harriet poured cold water into a bowl and washed herself and put on her muddy dress. As she laced her boots, she thought with dismay: The desolation doesn't lie in the journey, nor in the crossing of the river, but in the return to Joseph. And then her fingers and the dirty laces fell into a muddle and didn't move.

She understood for the first time that Joseph Blackstone was a selfish man. She saw how he moved about in the world, deciding who should go where and when, with so poor an understanding of what they wanted. She saw how he refused to share himself, even with her, shying away from the subject of children, as though he couldn't bear to be responsible for anything beyond his own desires. But what
were
his real desires? Why, when he made love to her, did he cover her face? Harriet had thought, at the beginning, that perhaps his passion embarrassed him, that he didn't want her to see him in those moments. But now she wondered whether he was smothering her features so that he wouldn't see them; whether even in their bed he took himself elsewhere, to the private place of his desire, and never minded that she was left stranded and far behind.

Harriet returned to the task of lacing her boots. She saw that her hands were shaking. For what was going to happen to her if she couldn't love Joseph Blackstone? What was the purpose of all their arduous work? She'd told herself that, here in New Zealand, love would come in like a quiet change in the seasons, that she wouldn't have to strive for it; it would become as easy to her as breathing. But she saw now that it wasn't easy, that it hadn't thrived as she'd expected.

A knock on Harriet's bedroom door halted for a moment the terror into which she was plunging. She straightened up. She'd heard no footsteps in the corridor, but it was Janet who came in, carrying a jug of hot water.

‘For your morning absolution, ma'am,' she quaintly said.

Harriet thanked her and she went out. Jane or Janet? Jane, the real name; Janet, the name the girl had to answer to here. But how much did a name matter? Harriet Salt. Harriet Blackstone. What was going to happen to her now that her name had irrevocably changed?

Harriet stared stupidly at the hot water. Slowly, she removed her bodice and began to wash herself again.

Dorothy fed her with coffee and bread and honey and told her she wouldn't be able to leave the Orchard Run that day because ‘your poor donkey is lying down on a bed of straw and refusing to get to its feet. If you try to lead it home, you will certainly both be swirled to your deaths in the Ashley.'

Edwin took Harriet to the stable. He sat by the donkey and fed it sugar and washed its face and eyes with a rag.

‘How does a windmill work?' Edwin asked.

A windmill. Harriet leaned against the open stable door. She thought: Life has turned and brought me here. I could become Edwin Orchard's governess and never return to Joseph and Lilian.

Harriet said to Edwin: ‘A windmill is built on a platform that is able to turn, so that the sails may always face into the wind. The sails revolve and a ratcheted wheel revolves with them.'