The Colour, page 27
He thought it too conventional. He told himself that a man entering a cave expects to find something. He decided it would therefore be far better to hide the nugget in a place where nobody expected to find anything. But Pao Yi couldn’t see exactly where such a place might be. He was living in a land where men expected to discover gold in every meagre handful of earth; indeed, he felt that expectation covered the entire landscape with a kind of invisible blight.
It then came to him that he should replace the gold exactly where he’d found it – under the baby onion. For, surely, when a man looks at an onion bed, all that he expects to find underneath the earth are the bulbs of the onions? The idea that there is something beneath what is beneath would very rarely occur to him.
Pao Yi dismantled the cunningly made wall at the cave entrance, climbed over the fallen stones and went into the cave. The sweetness of its darkness always gladdened him. He picked up the golden nugget and returned to the vegetable garden. A pigeon was feasting on a worm and flew away with the thing half eaten and had to land again almost immediately to swallow it down, and this made Pao Yi smile.
He walked slowly to the exact place, under the seventeenth baby onion, where he’d found the gold. The onion appeared to have done nothing since he’d planted it, but when he lifted it, he could feel the minute hairy roots clutch at the earth and Pao Yi was reminded that the inclination of almost every living thing is to cling on, to remain where it is, but that his own inclination – his own nature – suspended him always in a kind of no man’s land between remaining and leaving.
With his blackened fingers, he gouged a well in the soil, laid the nugget in, covered it with more soil, then made a well in this for the onion.
He shored up the onion. Then, he fetched his hoe and swept away every trace of his own footprints in the earth.
He looked at all of this and congratulated himself for listening to his own anxieties. Now, he felt that his gold was safe. But Pao Yi also knew that his task wasn’t finished and that, by perverse logic, he had to block up the entrance to the cave all over again. Though he knew that the cave now contained nothing, he felt a compulsion to wall up that nothingness. He knew that he was behaving as though the cave contained something after all, something which he hadn’t yet seen. Half-way through his task of walling it up again, Pao Yi was almost tempted to take down the stones for a second time in order to go and look inside for the unseen thing. But he told himself that this was truly childish. He had to stop changing his mind, or else his tasks would never end.
He continued to rebuild the cave entrance and finished this within an hour or so. Nevertheless, almost a whole day had passed while Pao Yi went to and fro, to and fro like a water-buffalo, between the onion bed and the cave. Now, the sky was a deep violet blue and the vegetables were shadows in the ground. But he felt at last that everything was almost as it should be.
He expected to sleep very well. But his sleep was fitful and crowded with dreams.
He kept seeing Chen Lin and Chen Fen Ming, walking around with limbs missing from their bodies. Chen Fen Ming had only one eye, and this one eye flamed with a terrifying, intense anger, cursing her living son.
Pao Yi woke and lay in the dark of his hut. He knew how much he missed his parents. Filial duty had always played such a large part in his life, submitting to his father’s bad temper, trying to become skilled as his father had been skilled as a fisherman on Heron Lake and to cast the nets in precisely the same way as Chen Lin; devising pleasant small surprises for his mother, letting her eat first, even when he was faint from hunger, kneeling beside her to take his turn at brushing her long hair and massaging her wounded feet.
He had tried in each and every thing to obey Chen Lin and Chen Fen Ming. Now, there was no one to obey, nobody to be filial to. And Pao Yi knew that the appointed order of things, with which he had been comfortable, was broken. He felt that a kind of chaos was lying in wait for him somewhere and he didn’t know what he could do to keep it at bay.
He tried picturing Paak Mei, as she shuffled round his small house in her beaded slippers, but he found that this shuffle of Paak Mei’s, to which he’d thought himself perfectly attached, irritated him. Perhaps it had always irritated him and he had just never admitted this, or never noticed this before? He wished his wife could walk elegantly. He wished she could leap and run like a child. The sound of her shuffling was like the snicker of a broom, endlessly pushing little eddies of dust towards some ever-retreating dust-pan. It was ridiculous.
When Pao Yi slept again, he dreamed of dancers. They wore red silk skirts and satin shoes and they moved with a fluid and entrancing grace. Their feet were curved, with a high instep, but not broken. They could balance on the tops of their toes. They could leap and fly. And the surface on which they danced was made of gold and a big golden light shone upwards into their faces.
Pao Yi wanted to prolong this dream, but it evaporated with the sound of the wind rattling the makeshift door to the hut, and he lay there, marvelling at the scarlet dancers and waiting for the morning.
II
Joseph’s room at the Hokitika hotel was small and contained one narrow bed. This bed, after the hard ground of Kokatahi, had felt, to Joseph, like the most comfortable place in the world, and when he understood that he was going to have to play the chivalrous husband and give it up to Harriet, he felt sick at heart.
He managed to procure a thin straw mattress for himself and laid this on the floor by the bed, but he felt stupid lying there, so much lower than the bed; felt like an infant, consigned to a lowly position, and when he looked up at Harriet, sleeping soundly, almost carelessly, in the place that was rightfully his, he hated her. The dog Lady began the night under the bed, but soon jumped up on to it and went to sleep lying contentedly across Harriet’s feet. And this exacerbated Joseph’s fury. Now, of the three breathing creatures in the tiny room, only he could feel the hard planks of the floor, breathe the dust that had been allowed to accumulate on the skirting . . .
I’m the cur kicked into a snivelling corner.
Joseph felt tears come to his eyes. He thought that he’d hardly ever cried before coming to New Zealand, but that now he wanted to weep all the time. The man who had built the Cob House – and had not minded where he laid his head and had not minded the way the men teased and mocked him as a ‘cockatoo’ – this man was gone, just as the Cob House was gone and Lilian was gone, and the creature who had replaced him was going mad with suffering.
He let his tears fall. Why should they not fall? Who saw them? Who cared whether he wept or not? His mother might have cared, but she was in her grave at Rangiora, in a cheap coffin made of totara pine, in a graveyard no one would visit . . .
Harriet had described Lilian’s funeral. In Parton Magna, perhaps most of the village and half of Parton Parva would have turned out for the wife of the livestock auctioneer, but at Rangiora, there was hardly any village to turn out and no one had known who Lilian Blackstone was or seen the trouble she’d taken over broken china or remembered her love of singing or witnessed the neatness of her darning. The only mourner had been Harriet. Joseph could imagine his wife, ‘carrying herself well’ even here, and mouthing a few prayers, then watching silently as Lilian’s body was put into a grave like a horizontal mine-shaft, a grave of blue clay.
‘I didn’t know what to give her, what to lay in the coffin with her,’ Harriet had told him, ‘because I really had no idea what object she loved the best. I thought about one of her pieces of Staffordshire, but in the end, I chose the pastel drawing of you as a child, wearing your little white dress. I think she would have wanted this with her. Was I right?’
Joseph had said nothing. He felt more than ever glad to have no child to humiliate in lace frills and white petticoats. He wished there had been a picture of him as a grown man, wearing a smart coat and a silk necktie.
‘Was I right, Joseph?’ asked Harriet again.
‘I don’t know, Harriet,’ he said. ‘Who can ever know?’
But he could imagine Lilian’s thin hands folded neatly over the picture.
Indeed, he could imagine his mother dead very clearly and it broke his heart to think that now, whatever he did or however he succeeded, she would never be there to witness it, but always and forever remain dead in her coffin, her fingers decaying to bone as they lay on the ridiculous picture of him, done before his life was barely begun.
And there was one other thing which began to torment him.
He hoped and prayed that Lilian’s coffin had had some lining or other, something to hold his mother in its grip, because she had been a person who had always inhabited her space very meticulously, keeping her knees side by side and her elbows in and her shawl pulled tight, and he couldn’t bear to think of Lilian May Blackstone sliding around inside a wooden box: a state of affairs she would have detested.
Joseph wanted to ask Harriet whether the coffin had had a lining, but he was too afraid that her answer would be no. Because what he saw, when he imagined the small church at Rangiora, made of planking painted green and topped with a warped little bell-house, was a fearful kind of makeshift frailty. He saw things gaping, nailed together, splitting and buckling in the heat and cold; everything thin and shoddy and not built to last. He knew, therefore, that the chances of there being a coffin lining for Lilian were remote and so – lying on his mattress while Harriet and the dog slept comfortably on the bed – Joseph told himself that he was weeping for this, for the absence of a coffin lining for his dead mother, and that this was a perfectly legitimate reason for a man to cry.
The sea journey on the Wallabi had been long and cold and rough. Harriet was so tired by the time she reached Joseph’s room in the Hokitika hotel that she felt sleep overcome her almost before she’d thought about sleep. She tried, then, to stay awake for at least a little while, to reflect on what she knew she should be reflecting – on the change in Joseph’s appearance. He’d always been thin, but now he looked like . . . what did he look like? A scarecrow? A castaway? A convict? There was also, Harriet decided, as sleep kept creeping near her, stretching her thoughts into meaningless, weightless threads, something of a picture-book Jesus about him: his hair long and wild, his beard thick and curly, his suffering eyes too large for his face . . .
Fighting sleep, she asked herself a hard, sensible, well-made question: was this what gold-mining did to a man? When she reached the goldfields, would she see a hundred men looking as Joseph looked? Or had something else happened to him in the time that he’d been away? Harriet turned her head and looked down at him where he lay on his mattress. Joseph Blackstone. She hadn’t yet admitted to him that she knew the secret of the gold at the creek and now she wondered whether she would ever admit it. For she felt that this might be just one among a thousand things that he’d concealed from her, felt as though secrets might have accumulated in him so thickly that they could never be unravelled. What purpose then, would any confrontation serve?
Harriet sailed into a sea of sleep so black and wide it had no features and no shape and was enlivened by no dreams. When Lady jumped up on to the bed, she didn’t stir. People shouted in the corridors, banged doors, coughed, laughed and swore, but Harriet knew nothing of all this. And the sound of Joseph’s crying? Perhaps, once or twice, she was woken by this, but never for quite long enough to hear it.
In the morning, as they ate porridge and eggs together, surrounded by the noisy new chums who had been aboard the Wallabi, Joseph said: ‘I thought all night about what we should do now. I shall renew my licence and go back to Kokatahi, for two months at least, because I can’t give up yet. But I won’t take you with me. There are no women on the gold-diggings. And winter’s almost here. You will have to return to Christchurch.’
Harriet said nothing.
Joseph wiped grey flecks of porridge from his beard. He longed to tell Harriet to go to Toby Orchard and persuade him to buy all the land he and Harriet had bought and all that remained of the Cob House and the barn and the vegetable plot. He wanted to announce that everything between them was at an end, that he was relieved the Cob House had been blown away in the storms, that nature had confirmed what he already knew to be true: the farming experiment in New Zealand had failed.
But because he couldn’t see what lay beyond this ‘end’, he knew that it wasn’t yet possible to pronounce the word end. Once he’d found gold, once he had money, then he would be able to make some plan which was fair to them both, a plan which was pragmatic and rational and which took account, somehow, of the hopes they’d both had at the beginning. But until this day came, when he had the wherewithal to devise a future, all he could do was to ask Harriet to let him be, to live some kind of quiet, inexpensive life far away from him, so that he wouldn’t have to worry about her or even to think about her at all.
‘I suggest,’ he said, ‘that you stay with the Orchards. I know that Dorothy is very fond of you . . .’
‘Yes,’ said Harriet, ‘and I am very fond of her. But I can’t stay indefinitely with the Orchards, Joseph. I can’t trespass upon them. And anyway, having come all this long way by sea, I want to see the goldfields.’
‘No,’ said Joseph. ‘No. The goldfields are no place for you.’
‘Why? Because they’re rough? Because gold-mining is ugly?’
‘It’s no world for the likes of you.’
‘The likes of me? I remember that you said something of that sort when you went away to build the Cob House. I was left behind in Christchurch.’
‘For the sake of Lilian.’
‘Very well. But Lilian is no longer here, is she?’
‘You wouldn’t be happy at Kokatahi, Harriet.’
‘Why do you always mention happiness? As though that were the only thing to strive for?’
She seemed tall, even sitting on the hard chair, eating her breakfast. Joseph marvelled that he could ever have thought he could endure this: a woman who was as tall as he. When he’d taken Rebecca in his arms, her head had arrived approximately at his shoulder and he had been able to place his chin on her curls and smell the comfrey oil she used to wash her hair.
He wanted to say that he mentioned happiness because he and it were strangers, just as he and Harriet were strangers now. And he was tired of living among strangers! So tired of it that he felt himself begin to stoop and lean down towards the earth like an old man. He thought of Hamish McConnell with his Scottish castle. He thought of Will Sefton getting rich on Brenner-McConnell gold. He felt a scream rising in his throat. He saw the three tigers pacing round the circus ring . . .
‘The thought of taking me to Kokatahi wearies you,’ said Harriet. ‘I can see that it might. But I shall not stay long, Joseph. I’ve promised Edwin Orchard to search for a friend of his who is hereabouts somewhere. And when I find her, then I may get back on the steamer and sail away and she will come with me. But until then, I shall stay with you and help you on your claim. If I can dig a garden, I can probably dig for gold.’
Joseph put his face into his hands and looked at Harriet over the top of them. He saw that he couldn’t order this woman he had married back on to the Wallabi. She was quite alone except for her dog, with no house to return to and all her possessions in a warehouse and every day now the winter was creeping on. By looking closely at her, he tried to ascertain what she expected from him. Did she, too, feel, as he hoped she did, that they could no longer touch, no longer admit to being people who had once touched?
He couldn’t bear to hold his gaze on her for long. She looked too plain in the cold morning light, her hair too short, her nose too long, her skin too weathered by her days out on the farm and by the salt sea winds.
He wondered if he’d ever found her beautiful, but couldn’t remember whether he had or not.
Joseph cleared his throat. ‘If you are to come with me,’ he said, in his auctioneer’s formal voice, ‘then you will need your own tent. Mine is too small for us both. We shall buy that and some better cooking pots and –’
‘I am to cook for you? Is this all?’
‘Cooking would be of great help. I’ve been half starved . . . Perhaps my luck would change if I were stronger . . .?’
He wondered whether he should tell her about the bush rats. Perhaps he had only to describe the way the rats were always and ever crawling over the claim now and how they sometimes found their way inside the tent and how they could bite and the way they squealed and mated and burrowed and were shot for food and their skins thrown into the river; perhaps he only had to talk about them and Harriet would decide, after all, not to come anywhere near Kokatahi?
‘I don’t mind cooking,’ said Harriet. ‘But won’t you let me look for gold, as well?’
‘There is no gold!’ Joseph blurted out so loudly that some of the new arrivals eating their porridge turned to look at him and there was a sudden shocked silence near their table.
‘He only means,’ said Harriet, turning politely towards the men, ‘that there is no gold on his claim yet. I expect this is what Mr McConnell said the day before he made his marvellous find.’
So much is left unsaid, Harriet thought again, as she and Joseph set out to make their purchases in Hokitika. The distance between Joseph and me has become unbridgeable . . .
But now, she found at last that she truly had no urge to bridge it, that her curiosity about Joseph was dead. For it seemed to her that to know everything about another was very hell, that marriage was a wretched state if this was what it entailed. What human soul, bared to nakedness, does not look hideous – her own included? What fool society decreed that man-and-wife (so separate and different in their experience of the world and in their very natures) should be as one?
Let be. This had been poor Roderick Blackstone’s lament, but he had been right to keep repeating it. Harriet had been told the story of the crumpled anti-macassars and now it appeared to her like a scene in a tragedy.
