The Colour (49 page)

When she heard these words, Harriet was suddenly overcome with the sadness she was trying all the while to keep at bay. She sat down on a low wall made of cob and the feel of the scratchy bricks was still familiar to her, but it seemed to her that the woman who'd inhabited the Cob House had been someone else, not Harriet Blackstone, nor even Harriet Salt. And this woman she pitied, for she saw that nothing had stirred or inspired her except the idea of solitude. She'd kept a scrapbook, but there was almost nothing human in the book, only papers and feathers and leaves, things which had floated down to her as she stood alone under the empty sky. This woman had never smoked opium in a golden cave. This woman had never become a white-feathered bird so beautiful and wicked she could make her lover curse and rage and want to die . . .

Harriet put her face in her hands.

She knew that Pao Yi was still far out on the ocean, yet what she imagined once more was his return to the house on Heron Lake.

This time, she saw his son Paak Shui lead him inside the house, to where Paak Mei was waiting, waiting proudly behind a table of food she'd made to celebrate her husband's return as a rich man. She saw Pao Yi embrace his son and then move towards Paak Mei, with his habitual silent and graceful step, and he was smiling, smiling with pride that he had conquered his passion and returned, that he had not lost face, that he had not inflicted shame on the family. And then he bent down (for Paak Mei was shorter than he was) and kissed her and he remembered how, long ago, she'd been his bride and that he had loved her and that he loved her still . . .

The pain of these imaginings was so intense that Harriet decided she had to do something new to combat the agony, something which would help her to make sense of her future. She got up off the cob wall and walked slowly back to the hotel and went to her wardrobe, which was made of thin slabs of wood, like poor Lilian's coffin at Rangiora, and brought out her bundle of gold. She didn't look at it. She didn't want to remember how, by breaking the rock to tear out the colour, she and Pao Yi had destroyed their cave. She just shouldered the weight of it and began walking towards the Bank of New Zealand.

A coal fire was burning there. Two employees of the bank, wearing black, sat behind a counter, on which had been placed some large brass scales and a line of assorted weights.

One of the men was writing in a ledger, in a meticulous slow hand. The other man was polishing the weights with a soft cloth. His fingers were stained black with the tarnish his polishing had brought out. He held up a five-ounce weight and squinted at it, to assess its degree of brightness.

The men looked up as Harriet came in, but didn't pause in either of their tasks. Their commerce was seldom with any woman. It was only the men who possessed gold. The bank employees presumed they would soon have the momentary annoyance of redirecting Harriet to whichever establishment she had mistaken them for.

She said ‘Good morning' and then she laid the dusty shawl on their counter and untied the bundle and they saw the pieces of rock shot through with gold.

‘There will be a fine, I know,' Harriet said at once. ‘I paid no Miner's Right. I was fossicking on a beach above Kokatahi. I was swept across the river by the fresh and I sheltered from the winter in a cave. I was walled up there and couldn't come down to the coast or cross back to where I had been. All of this I brought out of the cave.'

The ledger was laid aside, the brass weight was put down and the two bankers reached out and touched the rocks and ran their fingers along the lines of gold. Harriet sat down on a high stool and waited. She could feel the warmth of the fire at her back and hear it hissing gently as it burned.

‘You said you had no Miner's Right?' said one of the men, with a choke in his voice.

‘No,' said Harriet.

‘Twenty per cent,' he announced. ‘That is the forfeit. I refer you to Rule Seven in the
Rules Governing the Acquisitions and Disbursements of Auriferous Matter in Canterbury County
, dated March 1865. And I quote: “Whatsoever is found of gold by any man, whether by accepted mining practice or whether by some other means not herein specified, but is wantonly got by him without a true and authentic Miner's Licence, issued by the Warden of the County, so shall this same gold be forfeit to the County Treasury as to twenty percent of its market value, this value to be ascertained by –”'

‘You need not go on,' said Harriet. ‘I shall pay the forfeit. I merely need to know whether you will buy the gold or whether I am to take it to another bank.'

‘We will buy it,' chimed the two men together.

‘We will certainly buy it,' said the man who had been writing in the ledger. ‘Now, may we offer you something? Tea? Tea with a dash of rum, while you are waiting?'

‘No thank you,' said Harriet. ‘Give me a receipt for the gold and I will return later, to see whether I am rich or not.'

‘You are rich,' said the man who had been polishing weights. ‘You've brought us a homeward bounder, ma'am. Nothing less.'

Harriet came out of the Bank of New Zealand. She didn't want to return to the hotel and sit in her room. She wanted to keep walking.

She walked nowhere in particular, pondering the knowledge of her new-found wealth. And she thought again how it was Joseph who had longed for riches, not she, but that if, after all, she was going to be rich, then she would make as good a life as she could for her child. For this was all that mattered to her now. She was going to give birth to Pao Yi's son (she was sure the baby was a boy) and in this boy's sweet face she would see the face of her lover, and the child would never leave her to return to Guangdong Province, never board a ship and sail away; he would be hers and nobody would take him from her. She would name him Hal. She would brush his black hair till it shone. She would build a strong wooden house for him, protected from the southerly winds. She would tell him that she had once discovered a golden cave, deep in the mountains . . .

Preoccupied with these imaginings, impatient now for time to pass so that her child could be born and she could hold him in her arms, Harriet looked up and found herself outside the door of the Hokitika Office of Shipping. She hadn't intended to come here. She'd been walking without any destination in mind. But when she saw where she was, she thought, suddenly, that perhaps the mystery of Joseph was going to be solved here, that it lay not in the records of the dead, nor in any continuing search for bodies washed up at Kaniere, but here, in the Shipping Office.

Harriet went inside. Unlike the bank, the place was cold and the floor damp, as though salt water from the decks of the fishing smacks and the old leaky steamboats seeped in and out of the place in a perpetual tide.

She told the clerk of the Shipping Office that she was in a state of uncertainty: she didn't know whether she was a widow or not. She explained that she had money to give to her husband, if he were still alive, if only she could find him . . .

The clerk picked up his monocle and through its sparkling lens he searched for the name Joseph Blackstone in his cumbersome ledgers. His gaze travelled up and down column after column of names. He murmured, in passing, that the quantity of people named Brown or Smith became ‘vexatious in the verification of passenger records', but observed that the name Blackstone ‘is not so very common'.

Then his gaze alighted in the middle of a column and remained there and didn't move. He pressed his ink-stained finger on to the page.

‘I have found him!' he exclaimed with genuine delight. ‘Joseph Roderick Blackstone. Here he is. He sailed for England on the Australian ship, the
Percy McKenzie,
on the last day of June.'

The clerk turned the ledger round so that Harriet could look at the column of names. And when she saw Joseph's name written there, she knew that what she felt was relief.

‘Sailed home, ma'am,' said the clerk. ‘Left you behind, what? Seems he wasn't bothered about his share of your money?'

‘Yes,' said Harriet. ‘It seems he wasn't.'

For a moment, Harriet thought how strange it was that, after all that had happened, Joseph had decided to go home with nothing except the few grains he possessed. But then she remembered that the river had still been running fast and deep when she and Pao Yi had begun their long trek to the sea; she hadn't been able to cross over to her little beach to recover her store of gold. But Joseph could have walked up there on the north side of the river. And perhaps her brimming cup had still lain buried in the shingle, still reachable above the new water line? She imagined Joseph squatting down and digging it up and holding it out to see its contents gleam in the sunlight.
The colour.
Perhaps, as he stowed the cup away in his swag, Joseph had decided that his wife was drowned, or perhaps he had simply told himself that – as his wife – whatever was hers belonged rightfully to him?

II

Through all the weeks of the voyage on the
Percy McKenzie
, Joseph Blackstone willed himself to survive.

He kept to his small cabin, roped himself to his bunk when storms blew, lived on biscuits and water, counted his grains of gold, rehearsed the words he was going to say to the Millward family. He felt that he was living only for this, for his moment of confession.

He spoke to no one. Sometimes, in the dead of night, he walked on the deck and stared at the stars or made his way to the stern of the ship and watched the wake streaming out behind it. He had the notion that he was being pursued, even across these vast oceans, and he longed for this pursuit to end.

Not until he arrived at last in Parton Magna did Joseph understand how strange he looked, how ill he had become. As soon as he glimpsed himself in the altered light of England, he found that he could no longer hold himself up.

He took a room at the Plough and the Stars. He lay in a narrow bed, listening to the doves on the roof. He slept a dreamless sleep.

He sent for a barber to cut his hair and shave off his beard. He mourned his mother and wished he had been able to bring her body home, to bury it here, in the shadow of the Church of the Redeemer.

Joseph had planned to go to the Millwards straightaway. He'd believed that his confession, so often rehearsed in his mind, would be made in the first days of his return and that, once he had made it, once he'd submitted himself to the anger and grief of the family and given money to them, he would be free to go on with his life.

But now he found that he wasn't yet strong enough to go anywhere near the Millwards' house. He told himself that he might become strong enough, when more days had passed. But then the days did pass and kept passing and he was no nearer being able to say what he'd come to say. Every morning he asked himself: ‘Shall I go today?' And every morning he answered: ‘No.' As the weeks accumulated, part of him began to admit that he would never be able to do it, that the words he would have to say were beyond saying.

One afternoon, walking with slow steps to the mere, he saw a figure standing there, feeding the ducks.

It was Susan Millward, Rebecca's younger sister. Joseph turned quickly and began to walk away, but she came after him, calling: ‘Joseph Blackstone! Joseph Blackstone! Won't you say hello to the likes of us any more?'

So he had to stop, couldn't scuttle away from her like a thief, had to let her catch him up. He stood and looked at her. She'd become more than ever like Rebecca. The same brown curls, the same teasing smile. The same snaggled teeth. He managed to bow to her and she laughed at the awkward formality of this and Joseph heard Rebecca's laugh. He knew that he should prostrate himself in front of Susan Millward, here on the pathway to the mere, start babbling that he'd kept himself alive for this, to make amends. But he was incapable of doing it.

‘What would you like?' he blurted out. ‘Tell me what I can give you.'

‘Beg pardon?' said Susan.

‘I have a little money now. I found gold in New Zealand. Perhaps you heard? Tell me what gift you would like.'

‘What?' she said coyly. ‘What wedding gift?'

‘Yes,' he said, but he was confused now. For what ‘wedding' was she talking about? Was it possible . . . was it conceivable that Susan Millward had set her sights on the man her sister had loved and lost?

‘Well,' said Susan, ‘my mam says people have already been far too kind.'

He stared at her. Confusion blurred his vision of everything, as though the day were suddenly darkening. And she seemed to him so young, so almost like a child, that surely it was impossible she should think of him, who now looked so much older than he was, as a man fit for her . . .

He waited for her to say something else, but she only smiled and squirmed and turned her head away. He saw the sun falling on her shiny hair and on her hands, which held a crumpled handkerchief. And then he saw the ring there. A small, brilliant stone set in a gold circlet and he understood.

‘So tell me,' he said, recovering himself, ‘for I've been away so long . . . tell me who you are to marry.'

Susan Millward blushed and pushed the hair from her face and smiled at him again. ‘Marrying above myself, so my mam teases me,' she said, ‘marrying the veterinary, Mr Merrick Dillane.'

Joseph wondered, after that, as he lay listening to the doves in his narrow room, whether he should leave Parton, leave Norfolk, go to some other county where he knew no one, where he could lead an invisible life. But he understood that he was incapable of this. He had travelled across the world to return here. He didn't have the strength to leave.

He bought a low, thatched cottage that had belonged to a toy-maker. In the small out-house, which had been the old man's workshop, the tools still hung on the walls. Over the brick floor, a pale and scented tide of wood shavings drifted towards the walls. The garden had long ago been abandoned to nettles and ground elder.