The Colour (23 page)

The first rains arrived early in March.

They were gentle at first, almost invisible, like an English rain. Then the wind veered due south, bringing a freezing torrent towards them from the Antarctic.

‘Spiteful rain', Lilian called it, a rain that whipped and beat at the faces of the two women as they struggled out to feed the hens and collect eggs for their supper. And, in its spite, the rain seemed intent upon completing what the drought had begun. The cob, made so brittle by the heat, now turned to mud. Holes appeared in the walls near the stone chimney. No sooner had the women patched the holes, with rags or paper or wood or whatever they had to hand, than they reappeared, and the rain came through and began pouring down the kitchen wall.

Harriet and Lilian asked themselves what Joseph would have done, had he been here, but they agreed that neither of them knew. Joseph had never been the kind of man who dreamed up ingenious solutions to things.

‘Roderick, on the contrary,
was
,' said Lilian firmly. ‘Roderick was a veritable inventor because his mind had a scientific disposition. But Joseph didn't inherit it, not that I can see. Joseph too often relies on the visions of others.'

‘So what would Roderick have invented for our present predicament?' asked Harriet. And Lilian said she would think about this, said she was sure that poor dear Roddy would ‘come up with something'.

Lilian's head filled with imaginary solutions: walls of stone rising miraculously around the cob, to enclose it; a solid wooden frame attached to the cob somehow and totara planks nailed to the frame. But she knew that none of these materials was to hand and that they had no saw to cut planks nor any heavy hammer to break stones. And they were women, after all, Lilian Blackstone told herself. There was a limit to their strength.

Then, one night, she remembered a time of autumn floods in Norfolk and how Roderick had built a wall out of sacks of sand, to keep the water away from their door. She could see it so very clearly: Roddy patiently filling bag after bag and laying them one on top of the other, in a plaited kind of pattern, almost up to window level. Hours and hours of arduous work, but entirely successful because all her carpets had been saved and hers was the only door-mat that had remained dry in Parton Magna.

‘Sacks!' she announced the next morning to Harriet. ‘Do we not have very many empty flour sacks and potato sacks and sacks of all kinds and sizes? We shall fill these with sand and press them up against the wall on the chimney side, as high as we can possibly go.'

Harriet thought about this and said: ‘Where are we to find sand, Lilian?'

‘At the creek!' replied Lilian triumphantly. ‘For what are those mounds Joseph left but heaps of shingle and sand?'

Harriet seldom went to that place. It felt to her like a landscape of the dead, as though the mounds were graves, as though she would find bones in the earth. What she saw there was Joseph's secrecy of soul.

‘It is a good idea, Lilian,' she said, ‘but I think the material is not right.'

She would do it herself, Lilian decided. She would save the Cob House. She would begin the next morning, before Harriet was awake. If the rain had let up, then good, the task would be almost enjoyable, but if it hadn't, she would simply get a soaking and not care to mind about it. She would pretend she was a Foot Guard at the Battle of Waterloo. She would endure until victory had been won.

The morning dawned dry but very cold. It was difficult to imagine the hot days that had passed. Lilian wrapped a scarf round her neck and put on her linen hat and took a barrow and a shovel and a pile of sacks down to the creek's edge as the sun came up.

She began work. The rain had loosened the shingle mounds, but she knew that this stony sludge was heavier than sand. She decided to hang each sack on to the front of the barrow by two nails, counteracting its growing weight by stones laid in the back of the cart. When the sack was full enough, she heaved it backwards into the barrow. This was scientific, she thought proudly. This was a
system
.

She returned to the Cob House towards eight o'clock to eat porridge with Harriet, telling her she had been walking out on the flats in the fine morning. She had filled five sacks. Up and down her spine ran a shiver of pain, but she didn't mention this. As she poured milk on her porridge, she found herself wishing she had the bones of the young girl she'd once been, who had walked on her hands five times round the nursery. This was how she had to think of herself, she decided, part Foot Guard and part ten-year-old girl with her toes pointed towards the ceiling and her white drawers falling backwards down her legs.

She set off again, as though to continue her walk, knowing Harriet would be occupied with the animals all morning. She hoped the pain in her back would diminish soon, for now she had to push the barrow uphill to the house and lay the filled sacks round the chimney in a careful pattern, just as Roderick had laid them round the door at Parton Magna. She allowed herself to imagine that, when Joseph returned, Harriet would tell him that she, Lilian, had saved the house single-handed with her fine ‘sack artifice' and there would be no day when it was not gazed upon and admired.

Pushing the barrow was ‘terrible, quite terrible' and, with each difficult step, Lilian cursed the house for being so far away from where it should have stood. But she arrived at last and wheeled the sacks round to the chimney, where she saw some creature – a mouse or a rat – scuttle out of one of the holes in the cob. My remedy, she thought, has come not a moment too soon.

Once she had leaned for a moment against the wall and caught her breath and wiped her face, she began hauling the sacks out. But she found she couldn't lay them in a sensible pattern, as Roddy had done, she just had to let them fall in a heap, then push and kick them into position. And when she'd laid them she saw that the distance between them and the worst of the holes was colossal.
Colossal.
The Cob House had always seemed so small. She remembered that snow had almost smothered it in one night. But now, Lilian could swear that it had grown taller. The wall dwarfed her and her labours. But she told herself that that was how life was arranged: things made you small. What you had to do was fight against insignificance.

Lilian went back to the creek. She worked so arduously that she didn't feel the cold, except in her feet, where they stood at the river's edge.

Nor did she really notice when the rain began to fall once more. She just kept on until – from one moment to the next – she felt that she could go on no more. She let her shovel fall. She told herself that in a while she would wheel her second – or was it her third? – barrow-load of filled sacks up to the house and continue the ‘wall' she'd begun. But now, she felt herself fall into a kind of daze. It was like no daze into which she had ever fallen before and one part of Lilian's mind was fascinated by its strangeness. She thought she would sit down, exactly where she was, between two of Joseph's shingle heaps, and think about what kind of daze it could be.

So she sat and the rain fell on her and stained her linen hat and ran into her pockets and trickled through the eyeholes of her muddy boots.

She looked about her, not recognising anything. Aloud, she said: ‘Is it Waterloo?'

Lady found her in the early afternoon and began whimpering and Harriet came running as fast as she could over the flats. Lilian was lying by the creek and her white face looked oily in the rain.

Harriet knelt by Lilian and felt a faint pulse. She saw the barrow half filled with sacks. Sorrow for Lilian made her utter a little cry. She pulled Lilian into her arms and stood up and laid her gently on the barrow.

She whistled to Lady, who was drinking at the creek, and the dog followed her as she slowly pushed the cart back to the house.

Harriet undressed Lilian and dried her and wrapped her head in a towel and put her favourite flannel nightgown on her. All the while, she was trying to decide what she should do: stay with her and nurse her herself, or ride to Rangiora for Doctor Pettifer before night came on.

She laid Lilian in her bed and covered her with as many blankets as she could find. She kept patting her hand and her cheek and saying her name, but Lilian didn't open her eyes. Outside, Harriet could see the light of afternoon beginning to wane.

She stood up. She wrote a note to Lilian:
Gone to Rangiora for doctor.
Then she found Lilian's favourite darning egg and wrapped the note around this and pressed it into Lilian's hand. She told Lady to stay and went running out to find Billy.

Lilian woke and found herself in the dark.

She had no memory of filling sacks with stones. There was a burning pain in the area of her heart and there was something binding her head, which she took to be a helmet made of iron.

She thought that perhaps she should pray, but she couldn't remember the words of any prayer or hymn or psalm or anything connected to God except the word God. So she said this.
God. Dear God
.

She was in a furnace. She couldn't see any flames, but they were there, she could feel them, they were all around her and in her and the heat of them was greater than any heat she had ever known. She was in a furnace, wearing a helmet made of iron: she was in hell.

She tried to move her hand and found that she could move it and thought that if she could move her hand, then she might be able to climb out of hell and ascend to heaven by some light and beautiful ladder made of muslin. So she reached up and saw that she had arrived in a familiar room.

She would have recognised it anywhere: it was her room. She couldn't remember the name of the place where this room was, but she knew it was hers. There was a small window, where the sun came in between chintz curtains, and under the window an oak chest-of-drawers with, arranged very neatly on it, a selection of photographs in cherrywood frames.

The room was papered with a yellow striped wallpaper. On a wash-stand stood a china jug and bowl, made by Paines of Stafford. And next to the jug and bowl was a glass vase of flowers and Lilian could smell these flowers and imagine the place they'd come from, which was a green meadow.

Her room.

She hoped it was tidy. She'd taken pride in neatness.

It looked tidy enough. In the shadowy part of it, she could recognise the familiar wardrobe, with, carefully folded on its top, the tartan rug she placed on the bed in winter. But Lilian didn't think that it was winter now, or summer either, now she came to think of it, because there was no burning heat in the room of the kind that she'd felt a moment ago. No. The room was, in fact, exactly as she liked it to be, not cold, not too warm. And so Lilian let her hand fall back on to the pillow. She could rest now, she told herself. She was in her room in England and it was springtime.

The Torn Painting

I

As Harriet rode through the gathering darkness towards Rangiora she thought that, all in all, life had asked very little of her compared to what it demanded of many people, but now, on this night, it was asking something important: it was asking her to save Lilian.

When she knocked on Dr Pettifer's door, she was told by his wife that he was out delivering a baby. At first, Harriet said that she would wait for him, in the little low street, but then, suddenly afraid that a difference of half an hour's delay might mean the difference between Lilian's life and death, asked Dr Pettifer's wife whether she might go to the house where the child was being born and catch him there.

She was directed to a shop, Parsons & Co., which sold tea and coffee, and told to ring the bell. She tied Billy to a post and stared in the shop window, and saw candles flickering on the counter and near it a trestle table on which was lying the scant remains of a meal, and she thought how the child about to be born might always remember this in his future life: eating his suppers by candlelight in the tiny store where his parents worked all day. She rang the bell, but nobody came. After ringing a second time, Harriet opened the door and went inside.

The smell of coffee was like the smell of a wood fire, she thought, because both spoke to the human mind of some pause in the onward rush of events, some parenthesis in which the body could be comfortable and still. And so – just for a moment – Harriet sat down on one of the chairs half pulled up to the table and breathed in the scent of the coffee beans, which were piled up in sacks all around the room, and let herself rest.

She knew that she was a trespasser in this house, and should have waited outside until someone answered the ringing of the bell, ‘but it seems', she told herself calmly, ‘that I just did not do this, and I do not exactly know why'. And she considered for a moment the idea that her life might have been full of such small transgressions, which she had never brought to her own attention.

Now, she could hear, in the room adjacent to the coffee counter, a woman's voice calling out: ‘Lucas, where are you?' and then other voices consoling, urging, and the creak of a wooden bed and a fit of coughing and then again: ‘Lucas, let you come near.'

Harriet stood up and called softly: ‘Dr Pettifer?' Yet she half expected that nobody would hear her and she also knew that she couldn't go into the room where the labour was going on. She was a stranger who had no right to be here.

She sat down again and, to her own shame, picked up a piece of bread from a plate on the table and put it into her mouth. She reached for a pickled onion and ate this and then her hunger came roaring at her like a wolf and she was unable to stop herself from eating every single thing that had been left in front of her: bread, cheese, onions, shards of fatty ham, a fold of black treacle on a spoon. And all the while, as she ate, she could hear the voices next door and the coughing and the sudden moments of crying and calling out to Lucas and the movement of the wooden bed on the slab floor. And it was as though her hunger were in a race with the birth of the baby and if the baby were born too soon, then it wouldn't be sated.