The Colour (5 page)

Sometimes, when she thought about it as generously as her mind would allow, she admitted that she could understand that, if you were young, as Joseph still was, if you had never attached yourself to anything too fiercely, this vast new empty country with its violent weather and its cheap land might seem to promise you something. She knew Joseph imagined himself, six or seven years from now, as the thriving owner of a big farm and a house built of stone and timber, with a verandah like Mrs Dinsdale's and a hammock where he would dream. To be fair to him, he had never pretended that the first months would not be hard and he had married the right wife for this kind of hardness. Somewhere inside her, Lilian admired her son's faith and Harriet's tenacity. Together, she thought, the two of them are all sinew and bone and obstinate will and if these things count for something, then they will succeed.

But she believed that it would be far better for them to be doing all this arduous work alone. For them, there was a future here and Lilian knew that most of what Man does, moment to moment, is for his imagined future, for the coming time, in which he will be happier than in time present. Merely, Joseph and Harriet had ignored the fact that Lilian, in this place, at the age she was, was so devoid of a future that she might as well be dead. Days and weeks and years would pass without an audience for her singing. The winds would scream in her head and muddle her thinking. Her china would break again along the same cracks she had glued together. Her spirit would fail.

So she tried to piece together her plan.

The next time Joseph set out in the donkey dray for Christchurch to buy supplies, she would send with him a letter to Mrs Dinsdale. She would explain to Lily Dinsdale that she owned a few items of value, inherited from her mother, the vicar's wife. They included a fine ivory fan, a tortoiseshell brush-and-comb set with a matching manicure case, a rope of pearls, a ruby brooch and several rings. These she proposed to pawn (she supposed that there were pawnbrokers in Christchurch because in any new place settlers will be at the mercy of seasonal poverty) and, with the money raised, to rent her old room at Mrs Dinsdale's for the few weeks that it would take for her to find some kind of employment in the town.

Though she had never worked at any ‘outside job' in her life, she did not see this as an insurmountable obstacle. She wondered whether she could be taken on at the clothier's where the Laura McPherson Glee Club had their meetings. She was gifted at sorting and ordering. And it was perfectly clear from her observation of the clothier's piles of boxes that this business was in a muddle. She didn't know how much a person of her standing might be paid for this kind of work, but she supposed it might just be enough to keep her in Christchurch. And that was where she would remain. She wouldn't attempt to cross the vast, black seas to England. Her house in Parton Magna was gone anyway, sold to pay Roderick's gaming debts. The idea of renting rooms in England made her weep, somehow. And yet, in Christchurch, she would be near the shore. She would know what ships were coming and going from the Old World. While she established a bearable routine with Lily Dinsdale and Laura McPherson and their circle of friends, the possibility of a return to England would be constantly within her sight.

Lilian went to her room, which wasn't a proper room, of course, with proper privacy, but merely a kind of tent within the house, from which she could hear everything – everything – that went on inside it.

She took out her fan, her brush and comb, her manicure set and her jewellery and looked at them. It was an ugly fact of the world that when you tried to buy anything of value it cost more than you had imagined and when you tried to sell it, its value had always mysteriously leaked away. Where had it leaked to? Lilian wished she lived in a society where people knew the answers to such questions.

Laid out on her bed in this tent in the Cob House, Lilian's little valuables, on which her plan depended, suddenly appeared anachronistic, like a shrine to some deity who demanded the strangest sacrifices from you and then fled away. She rearranged the pearls, the fan, the hairbrush and comb, the manicure set, but they still looked out of place and oddly worthless. For a long time, Lilian stared at them; then she felt such a deep weariness come over her that she pushed everything under her pillow and lay down on the hard mattress and fell instantly asleep. It was the middle of the afternoon and Joseph and Harriet were where they always were, out under the sky, and Lilian knew, as she closed her eyes, that she was probably gone completely from their minds.

IV

One evening at the beginning of July, the wind changed. A sou'wester began to howl, bringing with it a crawling, rolling mist, soundless and cold.

When Harriet went out to feed the hens, calling to them in the white gloom, she noticed a feeling of great weight in the air, as though it was now the sky which tugged at the earth. When she came into the Cob House, she said to Joseph: ‘Something is going to happen.'

Joseph stood at the door. He felt the mist furl over him and shuddered. He fetched Beauty from the pasture and put on her coat. While he tied it on, the animal lowed at the strangeness of the air. And Joseph could hear the donkey braying in its compound. Not for the first time, Joseph felt the solitude and worry of the ignorant settler, who isn't able to read the signals in the wind. He wondered whether he should hitch the donkey to the dray and set out for the Orchard Run, where they would tell him what was coming in on the sou'wester, but he was afraid of losing his way and being overtaken by the night.

They ate a supper of mutton stew with carrots and some of Lilian's brittle cocoa biscuits and all the while they could hear the cow and the donkey complaining out there in the dark. ‘I often wonder,' said Lilian, as she cleared away the cutlery, ‘why God gave the animals such ugly voices.'

In the night, the snow began to fall.

It fell stealthily, while the three people slept, piling up on the tin roof of the Cob House, drifting before the wind on to the windows, sealing up the door. Though Joseph and Harriet woke at dawn, they turned over and closed their eyes when they saw the darkness in their room, which they mistook for the continuing night. Lilian, who, more and more, was developing a passion for sleeping – a positive ardour for it, as if sleep were opium – also drifted back into her dreams, where she often found herself on stage in one of the great opera houses of the world.

When Harriet woke again at last, as the roof began to bend and creak under the weight of snow, it took her a moment to understand what was happening. She woke Joseph and they stood in their nightshirts staring at the strange grey light of the room. They dressed hurriedly, rubbed their hands uselessly on the insides of the blind windows. They went to the door and struggled to move it, but it opened only a bare inch. They listened for the sounds of their animals and heard nothing.

Joseph's thought was:
I escaped a coffin in England. Now, Nature builds another one round me.

But there was that inch of light outside the door. He had no tools inside the house, but he had his hands and his ingenuity.

Lilian was up now and Joseph instructed her and Harriet to build up the lignite fire in the range and put water on to heat. He would melt the snow that had drifted against the door. He prayed that there had been enough warmth left in the chimney during the night to keep it from being sealed up by the snow. He took up a stick and with this began working to move the door: two inches, three inches, four . . .

The lignite refused to burn. It smouldered like damp turf and in moments the low room filled with smoke. Harriet and Lilian, covering their mouths with their aprons, came to the door to take breaths of freezing air. The cold and dark in the Cob House seemed to be increasing all the time. Lilian lit the oil lamps. She and Harriet worked on at the fire in the range, riddling out the charred clinker, trying to coax a flame with sticks, a minute flame which flared and immediately went out.

They persevered, while Joseph scraped and kicked against the high drift against the door, until Lilian was seized by a choking cough so violent, she thought she might fall dead on to the earthen floor. Outside, through the slowly widening gap beyond the door, her bulging, weeping eyes could see that the snow was still falling: fat snowflakes, sticky as porridge, like none she'd ever seen. She cursed silently as she struggled for breath in the smoky tomb of a room.

Fetching water for her, Harriet suddenly understood how foolish all of this was. Three minds at work and all of them had overlooked an obvious thing.

Harriet handed the cup of water to Lilian, then snatched up the heavy iron cover of the range and slammed it down on the smoking lignite. She went to one of the windows. The snow on the sill was piled to seven or eight inches, but the window opened wide enough for Harriet to stretch out a hand and start pushing the snow away. She leaned out and looked at a white world in which nothing was visible, nothing moved except the snowflakes, so soundlessly, yet in a kind of hectic clamour, like a mute gathering of people anxious to reach some already crowded destination and find some last remaining space.

The smoke in the room began to disperse, eddying between the window and the door. Tugging her shawl round her, Lilian sat down on a chair and wiped her mouth. She stared first at Harriet, who was hitching up her skirt and clambering up on to the window sill, then down at the cold floor, on which she had just managed not to die.

Harriet climbed out of the window and jumped down into the snow.

The snow came over the top of her boots and melted against the warmth of her legs, and the pain of the icy snow-melt on her feet was fierce.

She began calling to Beauty.

Joseph struggled to follow her through the small window, folding and unfolding his long limbs, snagging his coat on a splinter, cursing as he heard it tear. He uncovered a shovel propped against the wall, and he and Harriet began to dig a pathway – with the shovel and with their hands – round the Cob House towards the door. New falling snow began to cover the path again as soon as their backs were turned. And the weight of the snow was like mud or like sand, its appearance of lightness a deception.

Harriet's hair hung loose and there was sweat on her head and bright colour in her face, but her expression was determined. From far away, they heard a bray so they knew that at least the donkey was alive, but no other sound came out of the silence. Resting for a moment, Harriet said to Joseph: ‘Even if Beauty is lost, we will go on.'

‘We will go on, Harriet,' he said, but he didn't pause in the arduous work and Harriet saw that this was the kind of man he was: that once he was embarked on a thing, he wouldn't rest.

She began shovelling again. No snow in England had ever fallen as fast and as stealthily as this. And coming on the unexpected south-westerly wind, a wind they were unable to understand, it had drifted almost waist-high against the south wall of the Cob House – as though it had been falling for a week without end.

‘Beauty!' Harriet kept calling, for the cow was obedient, and always tried to reach them when they shouted into the vast emptiness of the air. ‘Beauty!' And then listening in the white silence for the sound of her lowing. But it didn't come.

They had reached the end of the west wall now. Harriet was thirsty and held a handful of snow in her mouth and let it melt against her teeth.

Inside the Cob House, they could hear Lilian coughing. Then, as they turned and began to dig their way towards the door, Harriet saw Beauty's coat – a smudge of tartan just visible on a mound beside the front door.

‘There she is, Joseph!'

They began to wade through the drifts, thigh-deep, Joseph leading, trying to clear a path for his wife, towards the mound that was Beauty, who had simply done what she often did in the cold nights, come to the Cob House wall and lain in the shelter of it, seeking some warmth.

Harriet thought: I used to hear her breathing, but last night I heard nothing. The snow smothered every sound.

They uncovered Beauty's head. Furiously, they cleared the frozen snow from her nostrils, slapped her neck, put their faces close to hers, giving her their own breath. But the flesh of her muzzle, flesh that had been warm, supple, drooling, had become hard and set. Her amber eyes had rolled backwards under the long-lashed lids.

Harriet knelt in the snow, tears brimming, one hand helplessly tugging at the ridiculous tartan coat. What she felt, more strongly than anything else, was admiration for an animal who could die so slowly, so patiently, without a sound.

The Orchard Run

I

Toby Orchard was a big man who had always felt confined and hot and unhappy in his job in the City of London.

A voice inside had called to Toby night and day:
Set me free, set me free, set me free.
As his girth expanded and the buttons of his finely tailored coats kept bursting off, his dreams of owning his own horizon became more and more ardent. His brown eyes restlessly examined the sooty roofs and spires of Threadneedle Street and London Wall and found them fearful. He longed to ride strong, unbreakable horses and shoot guns and shout at dogs under a monumental sky. He thought he would die of this longing, if he did not satisfy it.

He set sail for New Zealand in 1856, with his heiress wife, Dorothy, and they lost no time in buying land and stock, as much as they could acquire, and taking on the labour they needed. They put in so many miles of fence posts, they could no longer remember where the fence had begun or where it ended. On this part of the Okuku flats, all that could be heard above the sighing of the wind was the bleating of Orchard sheep. Toby thought of his land as a continent. Acres of tussock grass were ploughed up and sown with clover for his horses, which seemed to spend their days galloping in wild, unknowable circles, stopping only to sniff and nibble at the succulent clover when the moon came up and glimmered on it and the stillness of the night let them rest.