The Colour (16 page)

‘For the blessed wheels. Just come on, this squeak. Come on to torture us.'

‘Aye,' said the younger man. ‘Abandon it, we almost would.'

‘But we can't,' said the other. ‘Key to our fortune, you see? If you meet us in time future, coming the other way, we'll be rich men.'

Lady had stopped barking and had begun to whine, frustrated that she wasn't allowed near the men, to sniff them out, to round them up . . .

‘Nice dog, a collie,' said the younger man. ‘I'd like one of them for myself.'

Harriet held tightly to Lady's collar.

‘No dogs allowed on the fields,' said the older man with a grin. ‘Just the curs of humanity!'

‘On the fields?' said Harriet.

‘At the diggings. Didn't guess where we were bound?'

‘Amberley.'

‘The dray road. Takes you to the Hurunui or just short of it. The Waitohi Gorge. Then you're on your own. Across the Saddle and it's downhill, but they say the downhill is the worst of it. They say the downhill freezes your soul.'

Now Harriet looked in admiration at the men. They were planning to struggle across the mountains, all the way to the West Coast. They had nothing, it seemed, no horse, no guns, just a handcart. They were going to attempt the ‘stairway of hell' and they believed they could survive.

‘Come down to the house,' said Harriet. ‘We can oil the wheels of the cart and you can take some supper with us before you go on.'

Their names were Hopton Fellwater and Bunny McGee. Hopton may have been near fifty and Bunny fifteen years younger, but they had come out from Peebles in the Scottish Border country together, ‘each of us having no wife nor bairns'. They said they'd arrived too late for the Otago diggings, where there was ‘nothing left but a wee pasty bit of colour along the Clutha', but they'd heard that on the Grey and the Hokitika there was ‘real true gold'.

They'd worked as sheep-shearers on one of the Canterbury runs and as porters on the Dunedin docks. They'd lived rough and didn't mind it because, they said, ‘there's promise here. You can smell it in the air.'

Harriet heated mutton stew for them and Lilian made suet dumplings to make the meat go further. The presence of strangers in the Cob House somehow brightened the atmosphere, thought Lilian, even if they were rough-and-ready Scots. She liked listening to their voices and laughed with them when Hopton described one of the shacks where they'd lived on the sheep-run: ‘Leaky plank walls and do you know what they were papered with? Copies of the
Illustrated London News
. I never learned the art of reading myself, but Bunny, he used to lie in his bunk and read to me, about the Queen's spaniels and the sayings of Lord Melbourne!'

‘And on the goldfields, where will you live?' asked Lilian.

The men shrugged their shoulders. Bunny wiped his mouth with the linen napkin Lilian had provided for him. ‘A Gold Rush, ma'am,' he said, ‘is pure and absolute chaos. We saw it in Otago – and that was the last breath of the main Rush. So you really cannot say at all where you will live. Some nights, you have to lay your head on a stone.'

‘Aye,' said Hopton. ‘That's right. You cannot say at all. You might be snug in a tent on terra firma or you might be perched on a rock ledge with a south-westerly trying to blow you to hell.'

There was a short silence while more of the mutton stew was going down, then Harriet said: ‘Why don't you take ship from Lyttelton, if the mountain route is so difficult?'

‘If you told us we were mad,' said Hopton, ‘you wouldn't be the first. But the way we see it, there
is
a way over the Hurunui Saddle. It's a treacherous way. They say sunlight never creeps into some of those deep gorges, but what are a few days of darkness if you're moving towards a bright gleam?'

‘We cannot afford the ship,' said Bunny flatly. ‘That's the truth of it. Cost of a passage rises every day. The Hurunui is our only chance.'

Joseph, who had remained silent during the meal, now raised his eyes and looked anxiously at the men and they took this as a sign of sympathy with their dilemma, which it was, but it was also more than this. It was his sudden realisation that men such as these – men who couldn't read, men who had been ragged and poor all their lives – might, in the coming season, before another winter had come and gone, overtake him so far in material wealth that everything he now possessed would seem pitiful to them in comparison. They might be able to buy his farm and the Cob House and everything that it contained five times over. It had been said of the goldfields that they were ‘a fine force for levelling out in society', and Joseph now saw how true this could prove, for it wasn't the rich who went to the swamps and the river-beds and broke their backs filling and emptying a sluice-box from dawn till nightfall, it was men like Hopton Fellwater and Bunny McGee. And it might in the end be they, not him, who became wealthy men.

The question that Joseph began to ask himself as the supper went on was this: was he being obstinate and foolish to trust in his own creek? Should he forget about the scratchings of gold dust he had found there and follow the Rush? He glanced over at Lilian, who seemed – quite contrary to what Joseph would have expected, especially after the disasters of their visit to Christchurch – somehow entranced by these men. He wondered whether she was thinking these very same thoughts, that he, Joseph, should join the gold-seekers before it was too late, or whether . . . and here he paused and stared harder at his mother . . . she was only enraptured by the idea that these people were about to walk to their deaths in the mountains. Very often, Joseph could tell exactly what Lilian was thinking, but tonight, he couldn't.

As a dessert, they munched on some chocolate flapjacks Lilian had made two days before and drank a pot of tea and by the time they had finished, it was beginning to get dark. Hopton Fellwater looked towards the windows draped with the blue curtains and then at Bunny, who was yawning. ‘Time to go,' he said.

Bunny obediently stood up and looked around for his hat, yet everybody fell silent, because this didn't seem to be quite right, for the strangers to walk out like this, into the dark flats, into the huge, featureless night.

Harriet was the first to speak. ‘Why not wait till morning?' she said. ‘Don't you agree, Joseph? Then Joseph can direct you towards the Amberley road . . .'

‘Oh no,' said Hopton, ‘we won't trouble you.'

‘It's no trouble,' said Harriet quickly. ‘You can sleep here on the floor. Lady will watch over you.'

‘I agree,' said Lilian, who sounded, to Joseph, as she sometimes used to sound in Parton Magna when Roderick over-filled her glass of rum cordial. ‘I most certainly agree. Look at Mr McGee. He can barely keep his eyes open.'

‘I shall be well, ma'am,' said Bunny, but Lilian laid a firm hand on his arm, as though to guide him to some child's bedroom where a nightlight was burning and a musical box would lull him to sleep. ‘You need rest,' she said. ‘In the morning, you shall go on.'

Harriet lay in her calico room and listened to them snoring. She thought that maybe snoring was something only the carefree did because those who were not carefree slept a hunched-over sleep with their noses buried in the pillow.

She tried to imagine what it was like to be Hopton Fellwater and Bunny McGee, headed for the vast shaded forests and the long silent valleys of the Taramakau. They had no overcoats. The cart they were dragging would break apart long before they reached the West Coast. Yet she envied them. They would walk across waterfalls. They would see the sacred kingfisher. They would live on fern roots and minnows. They would sleep in greenstone caves.

Harriet planned to be awake before they left, to fry a hunk of bacon for them and watch them walk away beyond her garden, going towards Amberley and the dray path. But they departed like ghosts before it was light. They left behind them a little patterning of oil on the dusty floor, from the silenced wheels of their cart.

IV

Joseph stood and looked into the pond. The water, which had at first stayed clear above the shingle he had laid in, was now muddy and his plans for stocking the pond with Tasmanian trout had come to nothing. Toby Orchard had reminded him that trout needed a fresh, running current and would survive very little time in this kind of confinement. So the pond remained empty. No trees had been planted at its edge. It was just a crater in the landscape.

It was getting towards evening and Joseph could see gnats, lit by the amber light of the sun, dancing just above the water. Then, something disturbed the surface of the pond and a circle of ripples expanded briefly before disappearing. Joseph stared at the spot where the ripples had been. On a Norfolk river, he would have seen this as the sign of a fish rising, and it occurred to him that when he had let in water from the creek to fill the pond, perhaps a fish had been swept along with it and was now swimming in slow circles there. His fisherman's eye checked the movement of his own shadow on the water and he moved slowly round the pond until his shadow fell behind him. He waited.

A slant of sun still caught at the gnats' wings. Then came another flick, another rippling of the water, unmistakable to Joseph as the feeding of a fish on the surface. And he thought, with a strange, intense pleasure, that Nature now and again idly fulfils a man's desires – by fortunate accident, by a confluence of time and matter that could not have been predicted.

Joseph walked back to the Cob House and found it empty of people. For a while now, Lilian had taken to helping Harriet with her evening watering and he could hear the two women talking companionably together in the garden. He felt glad that he didn't have to talk to either of them.

He went to his trunk and opened it and took out his favourite fishing rod and a selection of flies. He stared at the brown curl once cut from Rebecca's head and his hand moved towards it for a moment, then away. He closed the trunk and walked out, feeling the sun still burning on him as he made his way back to the pond.

He had no idea which fly to choose. Everything was different in New Zealand. He tied on a Nymph and began casting, enjoying the familiar movement of his arms and the delicate swish of the line. He wondered whether, when he was old, his life would permit him to be idle and spend his days fishing by some quiet river. But he recognised that these wonderings were futile, because the river that he imagined was in England and this was the one place to which he would never be able to return.

He moved silently round the bright side of the pond, taking care with shadows. His skill in placing a fly very delicately on the water had not deserted him. Nothing moved.

The fish he imagined in the depths of the pond was a silvery blue. He thought it would have the muddy-tasting flesh of a trout and weigh three pounds or more. He wanted to hook it cleanly, bring it in adroitly. He looked around for a rock to break its skull, felt a pull on the line. His heart was beating fast, but he wound in the line as gently as he could. The pull was still there, the rod bending as it took the weight.

We are dead, as dead trees. Then a sudden green shoot breaks free
 . . .

Playing his fish, even though he couldn't see it, playing it with his old, beautiful skill, Joseph felt himself slide into previous time and the thrill of it tugged at him. He didn't want to go there, but for the first time since coming to New Zealand, he felt himself returning . . .

Vividly, in the golden evening, he saw the girl, Rebecca, sitting astride the gate, showing him her brand-new brown boots. He saw her bunch up her skirts and the hem of her petticoat and display the shine on the boots and their smart new laces, but he looked only glancingly at the boots because he had seen blood on the petticoat, a startling red smear of fresh blood. And it was this knowledge that she was bleeding, that it was her time and that he knew this intimate thing about her, which excited him. He longed to put his hand under her skirts, in among the rags, and feel the blood oozing there. And then he wanted to lay her down on the field, just where she was by the iron gate, and put his hand around her arching back and pull her towards him and find release in her,
release with no consequence,
because she was bleeding and she had shown him this.

He saw that, at sixteen, Rebecca Millward was already full of wickedness. She had deliberately let him see the stain on her petticoat. And look at how she sat there, with her legs wide apart, sat there smiling at him with her crooked teeth all on display, luring him on . . . But here was the beauty of it; he would be saved by the blood from having to love her . . .

Joseph remained sunk in his past for enough time to discover, when he returned to the present moment, that his back and his arms were aching. Something still tugged on his line, but it seemed to lie deep down in the pond and never showed itself near the surface, and so his image of what it was began to change. Instead of seeing a nimble fish like a trout, he saw some black, writhing creature like a water-snake. It felt heavy and thick. He gave a deliberate jab to the line, trying to free the hook. The descending sun disappeared behind a cloud and the water of the pond was suddenly flat and without shadow. Joseph jabbed again, but the hook stayed in. Now, he regretted fetching the fishing rod. He wished he'd never opened the trunk and thought only with intense sadness of the curl he kept in the fly box.

He kept jabbing on the line, something he never would have done on any of his trout-fishing expeditions. He thought what a fool and a madman he must look, pulling helplessly on his line, and wished he had a knife with him so that he could cut himself free. He looked around him, as though he might find something at the pond's edge to make the cut, but there was nothing except the dry earth and the yellow tussock bleached by the south-west wind.