The Colour (44 page)

‘Eat,' said the woman's voice. ‘You'd better eat.'

He tried again but couldn't swallow the k
Å«
mara, sipped a dribble of sweet red sauce and retched.

He'd been billeted in one of the shanties that lined the Hokitika wharves. A widow, Ernestine Boyd, had taken him in, along with two other survivors, and handed out to them her late husband's patched and mended clothes and given them what she had to eat, which was the sweet potato in its crimson gravy, and let them wrap themselves in the blankets from her bed, which were frayed and worn.

As she handed out the food, one of the other men said: ‘Shall we toss a coin for who keeps Ernestine warm tonight, now that her covers are all gone?' The man was in his twenties, and Joseph looked at him and saw him wink at his companion and saw the widow Ernestine smile at them both and so he thought that, when they'd eaten their fill of the k
Å«
mara, he would be left alone to sleep by the fire.

He'd encountered no one that he knew in Hokitika. The Customs House had been turned into a morgue. Volunteers had brought bodies down from Kaniere for as long as the daylight lasted. Joseph thought that he should go into the morgue, to see whether Will or Harriet was laid out there among the drowned, but he was so tired now and felt so ill that he couldn't go near the morgue, not in this frozen night, not until he'd rested and begun to get everything straight in his head . . .

For what if he found Harriet's body?

What could he do and where could he go if Harriet were dead and there was no gold after all because the river had flooded the shingle bank and swept the gold away? And he thought of everything that he'd lost: his tent and most of his tools, all his money and his wallet that had been precious to him, his gun, his wash-box, the fishing rod Will had left, his stores, his grog, his cans and kettle, his blankets, his clothes that Harriet had washed, his pipe and his cup of gold and all that he'd brought with him from his brief time in the Cob House. He had nothing now. He was wearing a dead man's mothballed rags. He had difficulty keeping down a spoonful of sweet potato. He was finished.

Ernestine Boyd took his plate away. Joseph saw that she was good-looking in a small way, with ample breasts and the vestige of a dimple in her cheek. ‘You sleep now,' she said. ‘In the morning, I'll get us some eggs and a handful of tea leaves. Then, you'll feel more like a man.'

He heard the younger miners giggle, but didn't care, didn't pay them any heed, asked the widow to bank up the fire because the cold wouldn't leave him, just wouldn't go from his bones, and he didn't want to wake up beside a dead fire, and she did as he asked and while she was fetching in logs Joseph raised his head and looked out of the small window and heard the sound of the sea.

III

When Harriet woke up again, she saw that she was alone in Pao Yi's hut.

She propped herself on her elbows. The fire was still bright, and Harriet noticed that the pieces of wood had been laid in a square, symmetrical pattern, like a trellis. And the fire seemed to burn like this, obediently, with hardly any alteration to its original design.

Her fever had cooled. She lifted the blankets she was wrapped in and saw that she was wearing Pao Yi's clothes. They were grey and crumpled and smelled of her own sweat, but also of something strange, like incense. She sat up and stared at her white feet, coming out of the ends of the cotton trousers. She looked around to see where her skirts and chemise might be, but there was no sign of them. She had a sudden vision of pegging washing on a line near the Cob House and watching Joseph's shirts billowing in the wind and knowing at the time that she felt no tenderness towards any clothes of his. Love, she thought, can be measured by what we feel for items of laundry.

In the daylight that was coming through the sacking at the door, Harriet let her eye wander around the hut, trying to read, from the objects she could see, something about the solitary life of the man who had saved her.

There was a black earthenware pot, which probably contained water, and an assembly of cooking pans and a wire sieve, hanging from nails driven into the walls. There were sacks of rice and flour and a jar of oil and a stone pestle and mortar. There was a dilapidated wicker trunk, which might have contained clothes or bedding. On top of the trunk were some thick sheets of yellowed paper, tied with ribbon into a worn leather binder.

On the near wall, where the hut had been lodged against the rock of the hillside, a rough wooden shelf had been put up and on this little shelf was a tablet, also made of wood and inscribed with Chinese characters. Some stubs of candle lay near the tablet and behind these, leaning against the stone, were four faded water-colour pictures of an elderly man and woman and of a young woman and a child. And Harriet understood that this was Pao Yi's shrine to his real life, to his life on the lake, to the people he'd left and to whom he would one day return.

She lay down again. She found that she felt a kind of instantaneous attachment to the strangers in these watercolours, as though she had once known them, or as though they were here in some unselfish way to keep her company. And, more than this, she felt, in this low, dark place, that a kind of deep, indescribable tranquillity was present. And she thought that she would just lie here and not move and let everything quieten all around her and remain still. She thought that the tomorrow of her life would be harsh and lonely and long and that it could wait for her, wait a day or more than a day, wait till the river had fallen . . .

She felt sleepy, but she didn't want to close her eyes because every moment that passed seemed to possess an unusual intensity, as though it wished to draw her attention to its own uniqueness. She tried to recollect whether she had ever before felt as she did now and it seemed to her that, in thirty-five years, consciousness had never presented itself to her in precisely this way, so that the texture, colour, smell and feel of things all combined to distil her mind and body to a perfect sensation of
being
.

After a while, after a lapse of time which might have been of long or short duration, Harriet couldn't say, she heard Pao Yi taking off his boots at the door to the hut, so she lay down and pretended to sleep, pretended to be as helpless as she'd been in her fever, so that she could lie there and watch him as he moved about the hut. She thought it was still morning, but that Pao Yi might have been working since dawn in the garden and that he would be hungry. He would lay more wood on the square fire and prepare some food. When the food was ready, he would offer some to her and the taste of it would be different from any food she had ever eaten.

She heard him come quietly into the hut and close the door. She heard him fill a billy-can with water and drink. Then, it was as if he were no longer in the hut, so soundless did everything become, but when she opened her eyes again, she saw him standing in front of the shelf, where the tablet and the watercolours were propped up against the stone, and he was staring at them without moving, without seeming to blink or alter by any fraction the position of his head. But she knew that he was talking silently to the pictures, talking and then waiting, as if for an answer, always without moving or altering his gaze, then starting to talk again. And she wondered whether, in his solitary life at the edge of the Styx Valley, he was tormented by his loss of these people and by homesickness for his village and his boat and his lake.

So absorbed did Pao Yi seem to be in his conversation that Harriet continued to stare at him, believing him to be unaware of her, of her intrusive gaze, but suddenly, without warning, he turned his head and looked down at her, as though he'd been aware of her watching him all the time. And there was a new intensity to his look. It was as if he had returned from far away and brought the power of that far-away place back with him and it was now visible in his eyes.

Harriet lowered her gaze. She could feel the agitation of her heart. And as the seconds passed and she didn't dare to move and Pao Yi didn't move, she understood that what she wanted was for him to touch her.

Once she had allowed herself to admit this to herself, there was nothing but it and it alone in her mind and she thought that if he didn't touch her, if he was indifferent to her or couldn't see that this was what she wanted, her longing for his touch would only increase and increase. And yet she knew that she could say nothing, do nothing. She could only remain where she was, with her face turned away from him, but in her mind, with her will that had always been so strong, she began to call him to her.

She could see the firelight flickering on the slab wall of the hut and hear the river rushing onwards in its altered course and yet feel the suspension of time, as though the coil of a clock-spring had been wound to tightness and held there and prevented from breaking free.

She didn't hear him move. She thought that he was still standing exactly where he'd been, in front of the faded pictures. But then she knew, from the warmth and scent of him, that he was beside her and she lifted her head and looked at him. She was reminded how absolute was the sadness of his expression, yet she now saw that the curve of his mouth was sensual and beautiful beyond any other that she'd seen, and she was unable to stop herself from reaching out, hesitantly, like a blind person trying to find her way, and touching his lips with her fingers.

Even now, while she touched his mouth and he held her gaze as intently as he had held the gaze of his family a moment or two ago, Harriet was terrified that he would suddenly pull away from her, as though this moment had somehow happened by mistake, by some crude misunderstanding, and he would act to bring it to a swift and terrible close. But Pao Yi didn't pull away. He took Harriet's outstretched wrist in his hand and crushed her palm against his lips and kissed it.

After some moments, he relinquished her hand and laid it down on her breast. Then he folded back her coverings and looked at her lying there, dressed in his own clothes, and he bent over her and took her foot in both his hands. He caressed the foot, seeming to examine every tender inch of it and then he moved very gradually towards it, holding her leg aloft for a moment, like a dancer's leg, and then reaching down and taking out his sex, which was erect, and then bending her knee and bringing her leg down until her foot touched his penis and then starting to rub himself against her foot. And now Harriet saw the habitual sadness of his face transformed by an expression of pure wonder.

The feel of his heavy sex against her instep, the flagrant yet poignant intimacy of these gestures, made Harriet gasp. No moment of her life had appeared to her as astonishing or as exquisite or as overflowing with promise as this one. And it seemed to her that for all the time she'd been alive, desire had lain asleep in her and never stirred, so that she'd believed she would never feel it and would go through into middle age and old age never understanding what it could be.

But now it had been woken by this one man. She whispered his name: ‘Pao Yi.'

IV

Thirty shillings each they were given, the miners who had survived at Kokatahi and Kaniere – the thirty shillings which their claims had cost them, no less and no more. A newspaper article was posted on the door of the warden's office, telling the claimants that the generosity of the Canterbury Government ‘had no precedent or equal on the goldfields'.

So they queued obediently at the warden's office and took the money and wondered how long it would last. They queued again for a distribution of sheepskins that smelled of disinfectant and for tins of condensed milk, discovered in the back room of a grocery store.

Joseph stayed on with Ernestine Boyd, trying to swallow the poor meals she made, trying to gather his strength so that he could make the journey up the river to look for Harriet and her gold.

But when he contemplated the long trek back up the Kokatahi Valley, Joseph felt himself become dizzy and weak. He knew that he was a man at the end of his resources. He longed to clamber on to a ship and fall asleep on some soft, narrow bunk and not wake till the ship arrived in England. The possibility that he would never get there, never be able to make amends with the Millwards, never smell the wild flowers on Parton Green, burdened his mind so intolerably, it was as if he'd never ever had any wish but this – to arrive home in Norfolk. It was as if the man who had bought land on the Okuku and felt so optimistic about his farm were someone else, not him, someone blind and hasty and deluded whom he no longer talked to, no longer recognised.

He delayed setting out for Kokatahi.

Ernestine Boyd offered to cut his hair, which had grown straggly and long, but he refused. He wanted to remain as he was, cast out from normality and happiness, until he reached home.

He began the journey up-river on a cold morning.

Joseph thought he could see, in the flat, violet darkness of the sky, the approach of snow. So he understood that he was in a race with the weather. He might make his way up to Harriet's camp and then be trapped by snow far up the valley, unable to get back to Hokitika. And he knew, in the weak state he was in, that he wouldn't survive a winter in some makeshift shelter. He would just lay down his head and die. He would die like the cow, Beauty, without making a sound.

The river had fallen. Washed up on the banks, from Kaniere to Kokatahi, Joseph saw the familiar detritus of the diggings: slabs and wheels, torn tents, rusted buckets and chains, broken picks and shovels, and in one place, a peculiar isthmus of grey and brown rags, strung out into the shallows. Gulls squealed and bickered in the cold air.

Joseph dreaded to discover bodies. He saw rats tearing some carcass to pieces and turned his head away. He missed his gun. He felt too light, too insubstantial without the miner's paraphernalia he used to carry. He tore a stick from the bush to use as a staff and thought how, wearing the disinfected sheepskin around his shoulders and with his wild hair and beard, he must look like some mad prophet of the wilderness.