The Colour (20 page)

She looked over at Dorothy, still wearing her ancient hat, with her legs sticking straight out from her muddy skirts and seemingly with no thought for elegance or vanity, and saw in her a confidante whom she thought would be silent and true. She took a breath and said: ‘Joseph fled away from England. There were his father's debts, but it was not only these. I think there was something else. Something he never talks about.'

Dorothy picked up her wine glass. She was a woman who liked wine very much and who thought every single sip a marvellous pleasure. After a few moments had passed in silence and pleasurable sipping, she said: ‘I have never supposed that men have no secrets. I discovered a postcard in Toby's dressing-case which said
Fondest love from Scarborough.
I couldn't read the signature, the writing was too poor. But it was Maud or Mabel or some name like that. It gave my heart a jolt. But then I thought, what does it signify? We can't pretend the lives of men begin or end when we marry them – just as ours do not either. All we can hope is that nothing too hurtful has been done.'

Harriet picked at the grass. She found that her appetite for the cheese which lay beside them on the dry tussock had vanished.

‘And suppose something hurtful
has
been done?'

Dorothy's wide face, in the shadow of the hat, looked at Harriet intently. ‘Then I imagine, in time, it will come to light, because most of what we think is buried away for always seldom is. But you should not create a myth of wrongdoing, Harriet. I am sure that Joseph Blackstone is a good man.'

VI

Joseph was trying to sleep on the windy deck of the
Wallabi
. Near him, the boy with the whistle, whose name was Will Sefton, lay and slept with his head on a coil of rope. Now, Joseph could see the holes in the soles of Will's boots. He took out of his swag an old woollen jacket and covered the boy with this. There was something about Will Sefton which reminded him of Rebecca's brother, Gabriel, and, after gazing at him for a while, Joseph looked away.

Not far from where Joseph sat, in the shelter of the ship's housing, two Chinese men were boiling rice over a tiny spirit lamp and the fragile blue flame of the lamp, which would have had a little warmth to it, soon began to tease and torture Joseph. He couldn't take his eye from it. He wondered whether he might approach the men and ask to warm his hands. He would try to explain that this was all he wanted, that he wasn't begging for rice, but only to warm his frozen hands, so that he could go to sleep.

The Chinese men were whispering in their language, which was like a language of percussion, Joseph thought, each with an instrument on which he sounded a strange and startling measure. Joseph listened and watched. He could smell the rice beginning to boil. Lit by the small flame, the expressions on the faces of the men seemed neither cheerful nor sad, but to have about them a strong degree of resignation, as though the world had pestered them – like a mosquito or like a fly – pestered them for so long that they could no longer be bothered to swat it away, but just let it settle quietly on them.

Joseph remembered Mrs Dinsdale referring to a Chinese family who ran a market garden nearby as ‘the Celestials' and when asked why she had coined this name for them, saying: ‘Well, I did not coin it. It is a general term. John Chinaman has his head in the heavens, owing to the opium he smokes, so I suppose that is how it came about. For there is nothing else celestial about them, even though they believe their Emperor to be divine. They are quite filled with degradation, so I have heard tell. And I, for one, would certainly think twice before purchasing a lettuce from them. One would not be able to tell what might be lingering on the leaves.'

On the
Wallabi,
the two men whom Joseph was watching so intently seemed to have crept into visibility only as the darkness had come on. They were barefoot but warmly clad in padded coats. They surely had no berth on the ship and so must have been there on the deck all the time, but Joseph hadn't noticed them. It was as if
no one
had noticed them. Yet now, there they were with their lamp and their hot food, hunched quietly together, while all around them men lay and drank or snored, with their backs turned.

Joseph began to wonder how, in the crowded and competitive world of the gold-diggings, the Chinese would survive. He saw in them some quality of patience, which he envied. He knew how ardently, with what breathless expectation, he was rushing towards gold, but he also believed that it was that very desire which would sustain him, through disappointment and cruel weather, and which would ensure that he persevered until his fortune had been secured.

And yet he also knew, from the hours and days that he had worked sifting mud at the edge of the creek, that gold-mining is pure drudgery: a drudgery of the body and of the mind. And so perhaps the miner who is patient and resigned and goes about each day with so small a portion of hope that it is almost no hope at all can ferret out from difficult ground, or even from ground abandoned or overlooked by the multitude, nuggets of the precious colour nobody else would ever have found.

Joseph kept watching as the Chinese stirred their rice. He didn't move from where he was, only tried to warm his hands on his own body. He understood that even here, on the open deck under the stars, these people had fashioned a private world for themselves around the minute flame of the lamp and that they would resist any intrusion into it.

Joseph closed his eyes. The
Wallabi
was a coast-hugging boat and the seas wouldn't be rough until they reached the strait. He tried to empty his mind of everything that he longed for and let the rise and fall of the steamer lull him to sleep. At the edge of his internal vision he saw something white moving like a waterfall or like the muslin curtains he had drawn around himself and Harriet in the bedroom at D'Erlanger's Hotel.

PART TWO

The Riser

I

Out of Nelson, the
Wallabi
ploughed north into the Tasman Sea with a strong southerly wind in pursuit, helping to speed it on. But as the old steamboat rounded Cape Farewell and turned south-west into the roar of the wind, it seemed to the passengers of the
Wallabi
that they had entered an altered world.

Now, they felt the true and heartless immensity of the sea. Through the mist and spray, they could see land, still, and they turned their eyes again and again towards it, wanting to glimpse some refuge there, in case the struggle of the ship against the high waves began to be lost. But what they saw on the shore were mountains rising into view, one above the other, straight from the water's edge, and it seemed to them, on this West Coast, that the land had set its face against them.

They kept searching for a place where a boat might put in if it had to, but none appeared. The cliffs were implacable, the dense bush clinging to every inch of their fantastic height. The men on the boat could only hang on to the
Wallabi,
to those objects that were bolted down, objects that should have been immovable, but which now seemed to alter position as the ship pitched and rolled. They were heard to curse as a taut rope suddenly went slack, or the ship's rail – even this – reared up and bruised them on the arm or the jaw. A perpetual ache lodged itself in them. They felt as though they had walked a hundred miles.

Joseph stared at the mountains. He thought back to the journey from England on the
SS Albert
, and the hope that had seemed to shine then on the blue-green waters and the triumphant feeling that he'd had of sailing away from danger. He could barely recall days of cloud and cold, though there must have been some on that first voyage, but in his memory, all across the Indian Ocean, as week followed week, the seas had been bountiful and bright.

Hours he'd spent, staring at the wake of the
Albert
, seeing distance accumulate between him and the things that had almost destroyed him, and it was as though the sun were following him, moving southwards as he moved, and in the nights the stars came crowding to his eye.

But here, after Cape Farewell, both sun and stars disappeared, as though for always, as though the
Wallabi
were moving irrevocably beyond any ordinary or comforting thing into a place from which nobody on board would ever return.

Joseph and the boy, Will Sefton, held to the ship's rail in the stern. The boy was pale, sunk in silence, shivering in the raw cold. When something white and slick floated up and was borne along for a moment in the wake of the boat, Will stared at it until it disappeared. Then he began to tell Joseph how he'd spent two years working for an undertaker in Queenstown.

‘The job I had,' he said, ‘was the filthiest job on earth. Sucking out with tubes the foul stuff from the dead man's gut and pumping in the chemicals.' He said: ‘If you want to know what I think, Mister Blackstone, I think the living body is ninety per cent dead matter and only some little spark in us keeps the rest of it alive.'

Now, he mumbled to Joseph, as the spray rose and drenched them for the hundredth time: ‘I feel I'm dead, Mister Blackstone. All through me.'

Joseph urged the boy to endure, for that was all there was to do, to carry on existing. Either the
Wallabi
would be engulfed by the waves and they would all drown and their bodies be hurled against the hard roots of the bush at the edge of the land, or the paddle-wheels would keep turning, inching them on against the onrush of the sea, until the mouth of the Grey River was passed and the level ground of the Hokitika plain let them in.

But when Joseph contemplated the shore and let his gaze rest on its green vastness, he felt for the first time that the struggle to dig gold out of such a wilderness would be greater than any vision he'd ever had of it. He thought that his arduous work on the Cob House, cutting tussock grass and mashing it with earth, would seem as nothing compared to what would be asked of him here and that perhaps gold was the only thing that could lure men to a place where Nature asserted so supremely her disdain for anything unable to exist in the darkness of the forest floor or in the high branches of black beech.

To the boy, Joseph said: ‘How shall you survive these miles of bush, Will?'

Will stared out and up at the mountains. His eye rested on the tops for a moment, then on the sky above, where now and then they could spy a bird circling, but his expression didn't alter. ‘Same way as I survived on the Arrow,' he said. ‘Do my duties. Keep silent. Wash my arse in the river.'

There was sickness on the ship, with men vomiting and spitting and some howling like dogs in their misery and fear. And most of them thought, while these days lasted, that no cradleful of gold was worth the terror that had rushed in on them with the southward turn of the ship. They wished themselves back in Christchurch or wherever they had come from. They longed for warmth and stillness and a soft place to lie. They found it difficult to breathe in the salt air. They complained that they had not been warned that, on the West Coast, there was nothing but mountains – mountains on land and mountains of dark water rising up in the winds against the dark sky.

Joseph, too, was sick. As he clung to the rail, retching, his body felt so weak, it was as if it had capitulated again to the fever that had arrived on the afternoon when he'd found gold at the creek and from which it had taken him so long to recover. He lay down on the deck and Will covered him with his blanket and he was grateful for this little kindness and he managed to fall asleep, even in the teeth of the wind.

Hour after hour, the
Wallabi
limped on, round the cape and on, past the mouth of the Grey River and then at last the passengers saw the change in the shore-line they had waited for. It was as though the mountains had moved, because in this place, there seemed to be nothing that was not moving and altering from moment to moment; the mountains had stepped aside and shown them a scrub-covered plain and a long grey strip of beach.

And now, the steamboat was turning and slowing. Joseph woke and felt stronger and stood up and saw that they were making for the shore, where the beach came slowly into view. Will produced a stale ginger biscuit from his pocket and gave it to Joseph and he ate it gratefully, glad of its sweetness.

Closer and closer came the beach and a cluster of low buildings could be seen along the estuary edge. The mist had turned to rain when two of the exhausted crew pushed through the crowded decks to the prow, where they dropped a lead-line and stared down into the depths of the sea, shouting instructions back to the wheel-house. The passengers, soaked and weak and shivering, clustered round them, sensing that something new was happening and the danger wasn't over yet.

‘What?' they asked. ‘What have you seen?'

‘Seldom anything to see,' replied one of the crew men. ‘But it's there.'

The word went round: it was the Hokitika Bar, a long snake of sand and shingle that shifted with the tides, sometimes swelling up into a solid mass, lurking a mere two fathoms beneath the surface of the water. It lay in wait for incoming ships, calling to the keels of ships like a magnet and breaking them apart. One rumour had it that only the Maoris knew the moods and alterations of the bar and that, in their shallow mokihi, they whispered to the sand, whispered death to the p
ā
keh
ā
on their tall, keel-heavy boats. On the grey beach, among the driftwood, the men aboard the
Wallabi
could see the empty hulls and broken masts of ships wrecked on the bar. ‘Every tenth day, on average, there's a drowning at Hokitika,' said one of the diggers, with a satisfied smile. And all had the same thought: could we swim to shore from here if the steamship strikes the bar? So a conversation began. How cold was the water? How great was the pull of the undertow? How powerful were the breakers?