The Colour (12 page)

Toby Orchard returned to the house in a good mood. The lambing season was just beginning on the run and every lamb he had visited today had been alive and inclined to suckle. Toby often boasted that mortality on the Orchard Run was low and when he discovered anything that contradicted this boast it made him feel intensely worried – as though he were a schoolboy again, at the mercy of a bully. But on this day, all was well and Toby felt exactly as he liked to feel – the lord of everything he could see. He'd stood alone by the river and smoked a pipe. He could hear the watery bleating of the new lambs trickle from valley to valley.

When he strode in and was told that Harriet and Lilian had arrived, he decided to open two bottles of good claret and told Janet to warm them near the range. He buttoned himself into a new waistcoat he'd bought in London long ago and never worn because Dorothy considered it ‘too horribly shiny', but now, he thought, he would damn well wear it – because his lambs were thriving, because there would be three women instead of one at his supper table, because the spring was almost here.

Dorothy recognised this mood of Toby's, this overflowing of his big, contented self. It both amused and irritated her. She thought it childish and foolish and hoped it wouldn't go on too long, but at the same time, she knew that human happiness is fleeting and that Toby Orchard was a good man and should be allowed his share.

At supper, she watched him carefully, without seeming to do so, with the merest glance, as he filled and refilled his glass and smoothed the front of his ridiculous yellow waistcoat. And she saw him gradually work his charm upon Lilian Blackstone, so that her austere face took on a softer look and her hands, which at first kept rearranging the cutlery and moving her wine glass here and there, became still.

They were talking about farming in England when this transformation overtook her. Lilian had begun to describe the arduous life of her late husband, the livestock auctioneer, when Toby said: ‘Ah. A livestock auctioneer. Now there is a group of people for whom I have the very greatest admiration.'

Lilian's disbelieving stare flew at Toby like a bullet, but he barely recoiled and pressed on in a loud jovial voice. ‘When I was a boy,' he said, ‘I spent all my holidays on my grandfather's farm and I was always enthralled by expeditions to the livestock auctions. For I heard a new language there, one I couldn't begin to comprehend, but I knew that those who did comprehend it were very clever.'

‘Well,' said Lilian, aligning her pudding spoon carefully with the edge of her table mat, ‘it is a language of abbreviations, that is all.'

‘No,' said Toby, ‘it is a language of mathematics, a scientific language.'

‘Perhaps “scientific” is too grand a word?'

‘Not at all,' said Toby. ‘It is not too grand a word. For the auctioneer must, simultaneously and at great speed, sing out the bids expected and made, and appraise every sinew of the animal in front of him, and how is this appraisal arrived at? Through scientific knowledge.'

‘Roderick would have been flattered to hear himself called a scientist,' said Lilian.

‘Yet he might, after consideration, have thought it appropriate. All of us underestimate the knowledge that we possess, for although the getting of it may be hard, once it is got, we think it innate, as though we were born with it. Am I not right, Doro?'

Dorothy, who had been feeding a morsel of rabbit to Mollie under the table, looked up and smiled generously at Toby. ‘I expect you are right, dearest,' she said. ‘Although certain ordinary things can continue to seem difficult when they should not.'

‘The skill of the livestock auctioneer is not “ordinary”, however,' said Toby and turned his big face, beginning to be pink from the claret, away from his wife and fully towards Lilian. ‘It is quite exceptional, in my opinion. We live in a slow and cumbersome world and wherever I encounter that which is quick and adroit, I am disposed to marvel.'

The word ‘marvel' seemed to have a wonderful effect upon Lilian. Though her hand had been creeping back towards her pudding spoon, to move it half an inch
away
from the mat, this hand now joined with its partner in a little impulsive, prayer-like clench. ‘I think that you're being too generous, Mr Orchard,' she said, ‘but on the other hand, I know that Roderick sometimes felt himself to be . . . underappreciated . . .'

‘That is a very great shame. The English used to show some reverence for skill of all kinds, but I fear they are now too much lost to the degrading spirit of commerce.'

‘That was certainly what Roderick perceived,' said Lilian with an intimate sigh and Dorothy saw in the look she gave to Toby the trace of some long-ago flirtatiousness she had probably thought dead, but which was not so completely dead that it couldn't be reawakened.

‘Are we finished with the stew?' asked Dorothy. ‘Shall I ask Janet to bring in the pudding?'

Toby nodded and went on: ‘In my former life, Mrs Blackstone, I lived and worked in the very heart of the commercial world. The City of London. But I can tell you that there was not a day that passed when I did not long for some other way of being. And I found it. Tomorrow, I will show you the new lambs on the run and perhaps you will feel some of the joy that I experience . . .'

‘Oh,' said Lilian. ‘I am certain that I will!'

Dorothy now suddenly felt that she had had enough of the spell Toby was working on Mrs Blackstone and in calling loudly for Janet she hoped to break it. What she could not know was that, on this particular evening, it could not be broken. For Lilian, who had felt snubbed on arrival and near to death from too great an accumulation of misery, now felt her heart beating wildly with joy. Her late husband had been reinstated to a position of honour in open company. He had been described as a ‘scientist' and Lilian Blackstone knew very well what weight, what marvellous respectability resided in this word.

She raised up her chin defiantly and smiled. Then she lifted her wine glass and sipped the delicious claret, remembering to hold her little finger out at an angle while she drank, as her own mother had always done when taking tea. That Toby Orchard did not know – when he made his scathing references to the degradations of commerce – about Roderick's disastrous debts to his bookmakers seemed not to matter at all to Lilian at this most exquisite moment.

VI

The next day dawned so bright that a vivid remembrance of summer came into Edwin Orchard's mind as he washed his face and he thought of Pare with her golden skin. He hoped she might come today and call out: ‘I am here, E'win. I am here.'

Edwin decided that he would take Harriet with him to the place in the toi-toi grass where Pare always waited. They would set out with Lady and he would pretend he was giving Harriet a lesson on how to make Lady obey her. He would tell his parents that no one else must come with them, or Lady would be too confused to show any obedience at all.

He thought that Pare might gather Lady into her cloak and stroke her nose with the precious kiwi feathers and laugh her laugh that was as musical as her weeping.

Edwin waited until his father and mother had set out with Mrs Lilian Blackstone to show her the new lambs and then he took Harriet's hand and they walked slowly and quietly, with the black-and-white puppy bouncing at their heels, in the direction of the clumps of toi-toi. The sun was still shining, but from the north a dark grey cloud was beginning to move across the sky.

‘When we get near,' instructed Edwin, ‘you mustn't make any sound. You must stop Lady from whining or barking or anything. And I shall call out: “Are you there, Pare?” And then we will just wait and see if any answer comes.'

He called several times and they stood and waited, while the huge dark cloud advanced upon the sun.

‘Are you there, Pare? Are you there?'

But there was no reply, only the wind moving in the grass. Harriet looked at Edwin and saw the intensity of his expression.

‘Sometimes, I can tell,' he whispered. ‘I can tell she is there before she has answered, even though I cannot see her.'

‘But she isn't there today?'

‘No. I don't think she is there. But we could go to the place where she sits, and wait and she might come.'

They moved forward and the scratchy grasses touched their arms and prickled the puppy's inquisitive nose and made her yelp. Edwin walked in a straight line for some distance, then turned right and left, as if following some hidden path. A brown bird flew up and fluttered away. Harriet saw Edwin standing still now – so still that he seemed to cast no shadow. Then slowly he beckoned to Harriet and, as she walked towards him, he crouched down and was hidden by the toi-toi.

By bending the harsh stems carefully, folding them one over another (in exactly the way that Pare folded them), Edwin contrived a soft and comfortable place for them to sit and the puppy lay down beside them.

Harriet didn't speak. She saw Edwin looking and listening intently still, as though Pare might yet be there or else moving closer to him, invisible in her feathered cloak, and waiting only for the moment when he would call to her.

The sun disappeared and the place where they sat felt suddenly dark.

Edwin looked up at Harriet and said: ‘Shall I tell you a secret?'

Harriet waited a moment before saying: ‘You shouldn't tell me anything you've been forbidden to tell.'

‘No,' said Edwin. ‘Not forbidden. It's just Mama or Papa . . .'

‘Is this is one of Pare's secrets?'

‘Yes. Pare knows things before the p
ā
keh
ā
people know them because the Maoris listen to the earth and they listen to the birds and the rivers. And in the rivers there are Maori spirits called taniwha who sometimes speak to them and the taniwha know everything in the world.'

‘Everything in the world?'

‘Yes. And one thing they know about is greenstone.'

‘Greenstone?'

‘Yes. You mustn't whisper this to Mama, but Pare told me that there's gold at Greenstone Creek. It would have been Maori gold, but they sold their land to the p
ā
keh
ā
. Long ago.'

‘Whose gold will it be, then?'

‘Pare says thousands of men will come. She says gold can make everybody do things they'd never normally do. She says people will die trying to cross the mountains.'

At this moment, the darkness which had settled on the landscape after the disappearance of the sun became still more sombre and hail began tumbling out of the black sky. Edwin and Harriet fell silent as the icy stones stung their heads and bounced all around them on the flattened grass. The dog stood up and went in a circle, trying first to shake the hailstones away and then snapping at them as though they were a swarm of white bees.

Edwin held out his hands, cupping them to catch the hail and then showing Harriet the perfect round white stones in his palm.

‘I like weather,' he said. ‘Don't you?'

Harriet nodded and smiled. The puppy looked from her to Edwin expectantly, but neither of them moved.

The Preservation

I

In November, with his small, irregular fields sown with wheat and lopsided cob shelters built for the animals, Joseph went down to Christchurch to buy a new milk cow. He took Lilian with him in the donkey cart.

On the journey, she talked about English trees. ‘You should put in willow saplings by the pond and poplars to shade the house, Joseph,' she said.

Joseph didn't say anything, but Lilian went on: ‘And I do think that a laurel hedge between the west window of the Cob House and Harriet's vegetable patch would be agreeable to the eye, wouldn't it?'

‘Yes,' he said, ‘it would be “agreeable to the eye”.'

‘What I mean,' continued Lilian, ‘is that now that the spring has come, it is surely time to make everything nicer?'

Joseph said nothing more, only muttered to the donkey, spurring it on. He wanted to say to Lilian that the day would arrive when he could give his attention to ‘niceness'. He wanted to tell his mother that once the creek had yielded up the gold that he knew was there, then he would rebuild the house lower down the flat and that the second house would be built of stone and wood and slate, with a large verandah sheltered from the winds. He longed to reassure Lilian that she wouldn't end her days in a room made of calico and he was on the point of telling her simply to have faith in him, for he knew the future would be bright. But he couldn't say any of this because this brightness was not yet assured in his mind. For gold is deceitful; this he was beginning to understand. It is as duplicitous as a girl. It shows itself and beckons. Within its first gleam lies the promise of more, much more, and so men go forward, cajoling the earth, breaking their backs and their hearts, but very often they're rewarded with nothing – or almost nothing: just the very little needed to keep hope and longing alive.

‘Box,' Lilian mused. ‘How sweet a low box hedge would be beside the door, Joseph.'

‘Yes,' replied Joseph, urging the donkey to a faster trot, ‘the scent of it would remind you of Parton.'

Lilian hoped, in Christchurch, to stay with Mrs Dinsdale, but to her chagrin, a large sign had been hung on Mrs Dinsdale's window, which read
NO ROOMS AVAILABLE HOUSE FULL
.

‘It cannot be,' Lilian said with a sniff. ‘It is merely Lily's way of selecting the genteel from the riff-raff. I will go in and find her and she will give me my old room.'

Lilian descended from the cart. The soles of her feet ached as they touched the ground. She rang the bell and waited. She noticed that Joseph had remained sitting, holding on to the reins, as though preparing to drive away.