The Colour (36 page)

The sea journey on the
Wallabi
had been long and cold and rough. Harriet was so tired by the time she reached Joseph's room in the Hokitika hotel that she felt sleep overcome her almost before she'd thought about sleep. She tried, then, to stay awake for at least a little while, to reflect on what she knew she should be reflecting – on the change in Joseph's appearance. He'd always been thin, but now he looked like . . . what did he look like? A scarecrow? A castaway? A convict? There was also, Harriet decided, as sleep kept creeping near her, stretching her thoughts into meaningless, weightless threads, something of a picture-book Jesus about him: his hair long and wild, his beard thick and curly, his suffering eyes too large for his face . . .

Fighting sleep, she asked herself a hard, sensible, well-made question: was this what gold-mining did to a man? When she reached the goldfields, would she see a hundred men looking as Joseph looked? Or had something else happened to him in the time that he'd been away? Harriet turned her head and looked down at him where he lay on his mattress. Joseph Blackstone. She hadn't yet admitted to him that she knew the secret of the gold at the creek and now she wondered whether she would ever admit it. For she felt that this might be just one among a thousand things that he'd concealed from her, felt as though secrets might have accumulated in him so thickly that they could never be unravelled. What purpose then, would any confrontation serve?

Harriet sailed into a sea of sleep so black and wide it had no features and no shape and was enlivened by no dreams. When Lady jumped up on to the bed, she didn't stir. People shouted in the corridors, banged doors, coughed, laughed and swore, but Harriet knew nothing of all this. And the sound of Joseph's crying? Perhaps, once or twice, she was woken by this, but never for quite long enough to hear it.

In the morning, as they ate porridge and eggs together, surrounded by the noisy new chums who had been aboard the
Wallabi,
Joseph said: ‘I thought all night about what we should do now. I shall renew my licence and go back to Kokatahi, for two months at least, because I can't give up yet. But I won't take you with me. There are no women on the gold-diggings. And winter's almost here. You will have to return to Christchurch.'

Harriet said nothing.

Joseph wiped grey flecks of porridge from his beard. He longed to tell Harriet to go to Toby Orchard and persuade him to buy all the land he and Harriet had bought and all that remained of the Cob House and the barn and the vegetable plot. He wanted to announce that everything between them was at an end, that he was relieved the Cob House had been blown away in the storms, that nature had confirmed what he already knew to be true: the farming experiment in New Zealand had failed.

But because he couldn't see what lay beyond this ‘end', he knew that it wasn't yet possible to pronounce the word
end
. Once he'd found gold, once he had money, then he would be able to make some plan which was fair to them both, a plan which was pragmatic and rational and which took account, somehow, of the hopes they'd both had at the beginning. But until this day came, when he had the wherewithal to devise a future, all he could do was to ask Harriet to let him be, to live some kind of quiet, inexpensive life far away from him, so that he wouldn't have to worry about her or even to think about her at all.

‘I suggest,' he said, ‘that you stay with the Orchards. I know that Dorothy is very fond of you . . .'

‘Yes,' said Harriet, ‘and I am very fond of her. But I can't stay indefinitely with the Orchards, Joseph. I can't trespass upon them. And anyway, having come all this long way by sea, I want to see the goldfields.'

‘No,' said Joseph. ‘No. The goldfields are no place for you.'

‘Why? Because they're rough? Because gold-mining is ugly?'

‘It's no world for the likes of you.'

‘The likes of me? I remember that you said something of that sort when you went away to build the Cob House. I was left behind in Christchurch.'

‘For the sake of Lilian.'

‘Very well. But Lilian is no longer here, is she?'

‘You wouldn't be happy at Kokatahi, Harriet.'

‘Why do you always mention happiness? As though that were the only thing to strive for?'

She seemed tall, even sitting on the hard chair, eating her breakfast. Joseph marvelled that he could ever have thought he could endure this: a woman who was as tall as he. When he'd taken Rebecca in his arms, her head had arrived approximately at his shoulder and he had been able to place his chin on her curls and smell the comfrey oil she used to wash her hair.

He wanted to say that he mentioned happiness because he and it were strangers, just as he and Harriet were strangers now. And he was tired of living among strangers! So tired of it that he felt himself begin to stoop and lean down towards the earth like an old man. He thought of Hamish McConnell with his Scottish castle. He thought of Will Sefton getting rich on Brenner-McConnell gold. He felt a scream rising in his throat. He saw the three tigers pacing round the circus ring . . .

‘The thought of taking me to Kokatahi wearies you,' said Harriet. ‘I can see that it might. But I shall not stay long, Joseph. I've promised Edwin Orchard to search for a friend of his who is hereabouts somewhere. And when I find her, then I may get back on the steamer and sail away and she will come with me. But until then, I shall stay with you and help you on your claim. If I can dig a garden, I can probably dig for gold.'

Joseph put his face into his hands and looked at Harriet over the top of them. He saw that he couldn't order this woman he had married back on to the
Wallabi.
She was quite alone except for her dog, with no house to return to and all her possessions in a warehouse and every day now the winter was creeping on. By looking closely at her, he tried to ascertain what she expected from him. Did she, too, feel, as he hoped she did, that they could no longer touch, no longer admit to being people who had once touched?

He couldn't bear to hold his gaze on her for long. She looked too plain in the cold morning light, her hair too short, her nose too long, her skin too weathered by her days out on the farm and by the salt sea winds.

He wondered if he'd ever found her beautiful, but couldn't remember whether he had or not.

Joseph cleared his throat. ‘If you are to come with me,' he said, in his auctioneer's formal voice, ‘then you will need your own tent. Mine is too small for us both. We shall buy that and some better cooking pots and –'

‘I am to cook for you? Is this all?'

‘Cooking would be of great help. I've been half starved . . . Perhaps my luck would change if I were stronger . . .?'

He wondered whether he should tell her about the bush rats. Perhaps he had only to describe the way the rats were always and ever crawling over the claim now and how they sometimes found their way inside the tent and how they could bite and the way they squealed and mated and burrowed and were shot for food and their skins thrown into the river; perhaps he only had to talk about them and Harriet would decide, after all, not to come anywhere near Kokatahi?

‘I don't mind cooking,' said Harriet. ‘But won't you let me look for gold, as well?'

‘There
is
no gold!' Joseph blurted out so loudly that some of the new arrivals eating their porridge turned to look at him and there was a sudden shocked silence near their table.

‘He only means,' said Harriet, turning politely towards the men, ‘that there is no gold on his claim yet. I expect this is what Mr McConnell said the day before he made his marvellous find.'

So much is left unsaid, Harriet thought again, as she and Joseph set out to make their purchases in Hokitika. The distance between Joseph and me has become unbridgeable . . .

But now, she found at last that she truly had no urge to bridge it, that her curiosity about Joseph was dead. For it seemed to her that to know everything about another was very hell, that marriage was a wretched state if this was what it entailed. What human soul, bared to nakedness, does not look hideous – her own included? What fool society decreed that man-and-wife (so separate and different in their experience of the world and in their very natures) should be as one?

Let be
. This had been poor Roderick Blackstone's lament, but he had been right to keep repeating it. Harriet had been told the story of the crumpled anti-macassars and now it appeared to her like a scene in a tragedy.

She was glad to buy her own tent. And it occurred to her that, with a tent, and with the gun Joseph had given her, and with Lady by her side and with some rudimentary supplies, she would be able to go where she liked. She decided, as she paid for the tent and a scarlet blanket which seemed both soft and warm, that she would stay only a brief time at Kokatahi. Then, she would leave Joseph. She would embark on the quest with which Edwin Orchard had entrusted her: she would go in search of Pare. And she knew that this search would take her into the mountains, going in a different direction towards the shadowy valley from which she had once turned back.

PART THREE

Towards the Fall

I

She was a curiosity: a woman at Kokatahi – just as she'd been a curiosity on the dray road to the Hurunui.

All the way up from Kaniere, diggers stared at Harriet as she passed. Those who knew Joseph's solitary ways made two assumptions, both of them mistaken. They thought he'd been morose because he'd missed her – this tall, almost beautiful wife of his, with her defiant look and her cropped hair; and they thought that he believed his luck would change now that she was by his side.

But when they watched Harriet set up her separate tent some distance from his, they returned to sniggering and whispering about him. They called him an ‘odd eel', a ‘singular bush rat'. Some had heard rumours of the boy who had been with him for a while. ‘Now,' they joked, ‘he's got no chicken and no fish neither!'

Harriet pegged down her tent at the very edge of Joseph's claim, furthest from the river, with her back to the scrub-line, where a narrow mat of grass was still green. But the stench of wash-dirt and human waste hung over the whole site, as though the earth had erupted from beneath, and spewed out all the rotten matter which lay around.

The tent was surrounded on two sides by huts and hovels and Harriet soon found herself staring, for long stretches of time, at the varied architecture of these constructions. Some were squared off and ship-shape, with slabs cut to length and doors or windows made of wire, hung with sacking. Others looked as if they'd been made by children or by beavers: low structures of indeterminate shape, roofed with thin branches of beech from which the wind began to tear the leaves away.

Harriet had seen face to face what the weather had done to the Cob House. She thought now that perhaps nothing at Kokatahi would survive the winter. One gale blowing down from the peaks, one snow-fall like that which had killed Beauty, one week of drenching rain to swell the river to a fresh: this seemed to her to be all that it would take to level the Kokatahi diggings.

Wrapped in her red blanket, lying on the hard ground, Harriet imagined dramatic endings to the Kokatahi gold-mine. She did this to lull herself to sleep above the noise of the men and the flicker of their night-time fires. She did it because, for all its ceaseless activity, she liked to think of this place as insubstantial as a sand-castle.

She decided that the wind would arrive first. It would come sweeping down the dark valley of the Styx and begin snatching at the tents and hovels as it had snatched at the roof of the Cob House and at the dust of its walls. Tents would bound away from their pegs, inflate, perhaps, for a moment like parasols torn from the gloved hands of women on a windy racecourse, then fall back to earth as rags of calico, chivvied into moving shapes, borne along to the river, where they would slowly sink. And against this wind, the fragile windlasses would have no resistance. They would simply topple over, subside into the shafts, the buckets clanking against shingle, then gone.

After the wind, the rain would begin to fall and bubble in the mounds of dirt, as in a hot spring. And all the while, in the mountains, the springs would be filling and filling, one day to burst out from the rock face as waterfalls. And then the snow would arrive. Harriet could remember the stickiness of the New Zealand snow, the fatness of its flakes, the way it accumulated so fast, so silently, the way it drifted and piled up and kept falling and filling the sky. Here, it would block the valley. It would rise up as cliffs at the river's edge, rise much higher than a man, higher than all the men, long gone, that fat snow . . . It would be bent on the obliteration of all that had been tried here. The weight of it would level the earth. It would freeze to a seamless, sparkling crust.

When daybreak arrived, Harriet washed herself inside her tent and folded her red blanket and put on her clothes, which had begun to take on the smell of Kokatahi. She'd dug herself a privy hole among the manuka. Yellow flies, obscenely bright, clustered on the insubstantial evacuations her body produced. Bush rats squeaked among the manuka stems but Harriet didn't mind being stared at by the rats; it was the men's stare she dreaded, the stare which said: ‘You're one of us now, you poor bitch, you digger's wife, you sorry helpless bit of flesh.' She tried to fan out her skirt as she crouched down, not merely to hide herself from the men, but to hide herself from herself. She felt that she'd come to a place where her body had begun to die.

She lit a fire in the mornings and made tea and she and Joseph crouched by the fire, eating bacon or salted fish, and Harriet saw Joseph's eye begin to wander over the piles of pay-dirt on his claim and on those adjacent to it, in case the colour had been there all along and somehow escaped his notice. He admitted to her that he had a dream of going blind. In this dream, he tried to read the earth with his hands, but all around him he could hear the laughter of the men. ‘A blind gold-miner! Now, there's a peach of a joke!'