THE COLOUR

Joseph Blackstone lay awake at night. He wondered whether he should dismantle the house and reconstruct it in a different place, lower down in the valley, where it would be sheltered. He dismantled it in his mind.

He rebuilt it in his mind in the lee of a gentle hill. But he said nothing and did nothing. Days passed and weeks and the winter came, and the Cob House remained where it was, in the pathway of the annihilating winds.

It was their first winter. The earth under their boots was grey. The yellow tussock-grass was salty with hail. In the violet clouds of afternoon lay the promise of a great winding-sheet of snow.

Joseph’s mother, Lilian, sat at the wooden table, wearing a bonnet against the chill in the room, mending china. China broken on its shipment from England. Broken by carelessness, said Lilian Blackstone, by inept loading and unloading, by the disregard of people who did not know the value of personal possessions. Joseph reminded her gently that you could not travel across the world – to its very furthest other side – and not expect something to be broken on the way. ‘Something,’ snapped Lilian. ‘But this is a great deal more than something.’

Her furious voice dismayed him. He watched her with a kind of familiar dread. She seemed lost in the puzzle of the china, as though she were unable to remember the shape of ordinary things. She kept moving pieces around and around, like letters which refused to form a word. Only occasionally did she suddenly discover where something fitted and dare to smear a shard with glue. Then she would press this shard into place with a kind of passionate, unnecessary ardour and her lips would move in what might have been a prayer or might have been a silent utterance of the only French word in Lilian Blackstone’s vocabulary: voilà, which she pronounced ‘wulla’. And what Joseph saw in all of this was an affirmation of what he already knew: that by bringing his mother here to New Zealand he had failed her, just as he had always and always failed her. He had tried all his life – or so it seemed to him – to please her, but he couldn’t remember any single day when he had pleased her enough.

But now he had a wife.

She was tall and her hair was brown. Her name was Harriet Salt. Of her, Lilian Blackstone had remarked: ‘She carries herself well’ and Joseph found this observation accurate and more acute than Lilian could know.

He turned away from his mother and looked admiringly at this new wife of his, kneeling by the reluctant fire. And he felt his heart suddenly fill to its very core with gratitude and affection. He watched her working the bellows, patient and still, ‘carrying herself well’ even here in the Cob House, in this cold and smoky room, even here, with the wind sighing outside and the smell of glue like some potent medicine all three of them were now obliged to take. Joseph wanted to cross the room and put his arms round Harriet and gather her hair into a knot in his hand. He wanted to lay his head on her shoulder and tell her the one thing that he would never be able to admit to her – that she had saved his life.

Harriet had asked her new husband to take her with him. She clung to him and pleaded – she who never whined or complained, who carried herself so well. But she was a woman who longed for the unfamiliar and the strange. As a child, she’d seen it waiting for her, in dreams or in the colossal darkness of the sky: some wild world which lay outside the realm of everything she knew. And the idea that she could build a house out of stones and earth and put windows and doors in it and a chimney and a roof to keep out the weather and then live in it thrilled her. She wanted to see it take shape like that, out of nothing. She wanted to learn how to mash mud and chop the yellow tussock to make the cob. She wanted to see her own hand in everything. No matter if it took a long time. No matter if her skin was burned in the summer heat. No matter if she had to learn each new task like a child. She had been a governess for twelve years. Now, she had travelled an ocean and stood in a new place, but she wanted to go still further, into a wilderness.

Joseph Blackstone had looked tenderly at her. He saw how ardently she wanted to embark on the next stage of their journey, but, as always, there was Lilian to think of. As always, the choices that he made were never simple.

‘Harriet,’ he said, ‘I am sorry, but you must stay in Christchurch. I’m relying on you to help Lilian to become accustomed to New Zealand life. A choral society must be found for her.’

Harriet suggested that, with the help of Mrs Dinsdale, in whose neat and tidy Rooms they were lodging, Lilian would be able to find the choral society on her own. ‘And then,’ Harriet added, ‘she will have no more need of me, Joseph, for it is her voice that sings, not mine.’

‘There is the strangeness of everything,’ said Joseph. ‘You cannot comprehend the degree to which this new world is disconcerting to a woman of sixty-three.’

‘The Rooms are not strange,’ insisted Harriet. ‘The jug and basin are of a pattern almost identical to the pot your mother kept under her bed in Norfolk . . .’

‘Different birds sing outside the window.’

‘Oh but still they are birds singing, not monkeys.’

‘The light is other.’

‘Brighter. But only within a degree of brightness. It will not harm her.’

On and on it went, this conversation, for it was not a conversation but a war, a small war, the first war they had ever had, but one which would never be quite forgotten, even after Harriet had lost it. And on the morning when Joseph set off towards the ochre-coloured plains, Harriet had to turn away from him and from Lilian so that neither of them would see how bitterly angry she felt.

She ran up the wooden stairs to the Rooms, went into the green-painted parlour and closed the door. She stood at the open window, breathing the salty air. She longed to be a bird or a whale – some creature which might slip between men’s actions and their forgetfulness to arrive at its own private destination. For she knew that in her thirty-four years of life she had never been tried or tested, never gone beyond the boundaries society had set for her. And now, once again, she had been left behind. It would be Joseph who would make their house rise out of nothing on the empty plains, Joseph who would build a fire under the stars and hear the cry of the distant bush. Harriet yawned. In the tidy parlour, she felt her anger gradually give way to a deep and paralysing boredom.

Cockatoos? He couldn’t imagine why. He couldn’t even remember what kind of bird a cockatoo really was.

‘Scratch a bit of ground, take what you can get from it, screech a bit and move on. Like a cockatoo.’

Joseph thought of a parrot, grey and morose, fretting among seeds in a cage. He said this wasn’t appropriate to him. He said he wanted to make a new life near the Okuku River, make his acres pay, strive for things which would last.

‘Good for you, Mr Blackstone,’ the men opined. ‘All credit to you.’

What Joseph did not say was that, in England, he had done a disgraceful thing.

‘Penny for them? Missing home?’

‘No.’

‘Wouldn’t blame you, Mr Blackstone. Homesickness: we know a lot about that here.’

‘No,’ he said again. And took up his knife and sharpened it and returned to his task of the grass-shredding and made himself whistle so that the men could read his mood correctly, his mood of optimism. Because what he felt as he surveyed the flats or turned and looked up towards the distant mountains was a sudden surge of hope. He was here. He was in the South Island of New Zealand, the place they called Aotearoa – Land of the Long White Cloud. Though he had done a terrible thing in England, he had survived. The future lay around him, in the stones, in the restless water of the creek, in the distant forest.

And with Harriet’s help, he told himself, he would contrive to live an honest and prosperous life, one in which Lilian would eventually feel comfortable and cared for and some day put her hand on his cheek and tell him that she was proud of all that he’d achieved.

Mrs Dinsdale had come to Christchurch from Dunedin and to Dunedin from Edinburgh. In Edinburgh, she said, there had been no creases in her laundry.

She was Lilian’s age and a widow like her, but with an obstinate prettiness which had not quite gone away, that kind of prettiness which suggested that Mrs Dinsdale might soon become – even at her age – Mrs Somebody-Else.

Lilian said to Harriet: ‘I do believe she’s a coquette. Is that the word?’

And in strange contrast to her savage way with the smoothing iron, Mrs Dinsdale seemed to be such a light and gentle person that it was not long before Lilian found herself sitting on what Mrs Dinsdale called ‘my best verandah’, drinking lemonade and confiding many of the sorrows and embarrassments of her former life.

Under her steel-grey hair, parted in the middle and whipped round her head in a stringy plait, Lilian Blackstone’s face was as white as dough as she described to Mrs Dinsdale her ‘struggles’ with her late husband, Roderick. Barely paying attention to Mrs Dinsdale’s observation that ‘marriage was always and ever a rare battle of wills’, Lilian whispered to her new friend how Roderick had possessed one vice and this vice it was which had caused his embarrassing death.

At the word ‘vice’, Mrs Dinsdale’s blue eyes took on an eager glitter and she moved forward a fraction in her wickerwork chair.

‘Oh, vice,’ she said.

‘Some would not call it “vice”,’ said Lilian. ‘But I do.’

‘And what was the particular . . . vice?’

‘Curiosity.’

‘Curiosity?’

‘Yes. Roderick could leave nothing alone. If he had been able to leave things alone, he would not have died and I never would have been manhandled across the globe like this.’

Mrs Dinsdale took the beaded muslin off the jug of lemonade and refilled the two glasses. In this little action, Lilian saw, in drawing her attention to the way the sun scintillated so satisfactorily, so un-Englishly in the pale liquid, Mrs Dinsdale was reminding Lilian that Christchurch had its charms and that she should not refuse to notice them.

‘I do not mean any criticism of New Zealand,’ said Lilian hastily. ‘All I mean is that I had the life I wanted, in the village of Parton Magna in Norfolk, and I would not have chosen to leave it. It was my son’s idea, to abandon the Old World. And once that idea had come into his head . . .’

‘Oh yes. Once an idea has come to them, they will not be turned aside.’

‘Exactly.’

‘And as a widow you had inadequate means, perhaps?’

‘Miserably inadequate. Roderick had not expected to die.’

Mrs Dinsdale crossed her feet, shod, Lilian noticed, in very choice little brown boots.

‘So, it was his curiosity, then?’ said Mrs Dinsdale, her eyes still wide and expressing sparkling interest. ‘But how can curiosity kill a man?’

Lilian sipped her lemonade. She had never liked it very much, but, here, you were at risk from scurvy if you did not drink it, someone had told her.

‘Ostriches,’ she whispered.

‘Ostriches, Mrs Blackstone?’

‘Yes. I really cannot bear to say it out loud because people are so mocking. But I can whisper it to you: Roderick was killed by ostriches.’

In her first letter to Henry Salt, she said that she did not expect the scrapbook to contain ‘much of irresistible interest’ at first, but that when the Cob House was built, when they were living there, out in the middle of nothing, ‘then I think I will find something to intrigue you’.

She had been surprised to discover a very beautifully bound leather book in a shop in Worcester Street, with pages stiff and creamy as starched pillow-slips. She was tempted to ask for her name to be inscribed on the cover in tooled gold lettering, but Joseph had warned her not to spend money on ‘anything dear or inessential’. What she had of currency was going to be used to buy vegetable seed, poultry, fence posts, wire and a dairy cow. She knew she should not really have bought the book itself, but it was her way of marking a line between her new life and her old.

The first thing Harriet put into the book was a leaf. She thought it was a maple leaf. It had fallen out of the sky on to the ship in the middle of the Tasman Sea – or so it had seemed. She named it Leaf out of sky on board the SS Albert. The second item was a label from a box of Chinese tea she had bought at a shop called Read’s Commodities. On the label was a drawing of two herons, with their necks entwined amid some Chinese writing, and Harriet thought it beautiful and strange. She labelled it First purchase of tea.

She added some photographs of boats at anchor in Lyttelton Harbour, found in the shop where she bought the book, and some New Zealand stamps with Queen Victoria’s head on them. Neither of these last things did she find interesting, but she saw that the leaf and the tea label on their own did not convey the idea of the coming book.

And it was this that excited her, the scrapbook filling up with all the elements of her future life. To her father she wrote:

There would eventually be pigs on Joseph and Harriet’s farm, but where, Harriet wondered, can one be certain of finding the snails?

The iron hinges of the door glinted in the heat. The tin roof was nailed down. Inside, the earth was soaked and tamped and beaten smooth and hard, but there were no interior rooms, no closed and private spaces, only partitions made with stretched calico.

Joseph sat with his back against the cob wall, smoking a brittle pipe, and congratulated himself for finding the right spot for the house, where the afternoon breeze shivered in the beech leaves and set the calico gently swaying. Though the men had advised him to build lower down ‘deeper into the flat, Mr Blackstone, where you won’t feel the winters so bad’, he’d resisted them. He wanted to build high, near the straggly trees. He wanted to feel the bush at his back and the flats beneath. He was a Norfolk man, the son of a livestock auctioneer, whose clerk he’d been, travelling roads and farm tracks in all weathers. Winter held no terrors for him. And the chimney was well shaped and solid. Harriet and Lilian would be warm in the Cob House when the snows came – if the snows came. And whenever he looked out of the nicely crafted wooden windows, he would see the great sweep of land that belonged to him, the first land he had ever owned and for which he had paid a mere £1 an acre. In time – in not very much time at all – that land would be transformed. It would be fenced and planted with hedges and trees. He would dig out a pond for ducks and geese. Willows would lean towards the pond, as they leaned towards a Norfolk mere. The tussock grass would be ploughed up and the land sown with clover for the horses and wheat for the household. There would be a mill.

Joseph worked so hard on the Cob House that, in the hot nights, listening to the melancholy cry of the weka, he fell without difficulty into a stunned, dreamless sleep. He lay near the creek, rolled up in a striped blanket that smelled of camphor, with his head in the crook of his arm. He was thirty-five, a lean and stringy man with pale eyes. His hair was dark and his feet were large and narrow. Already, he’d formed the habit of stroking his sparse black beard when he closed his eyes.

The noise of the water usually woke him at dawn, but seldom before dawn, as if the river settled into a silent pool for all the hours of darkness and only gathered strength to start flowing again in the morning.

The men told Joseph that this particular creek had no name ‘for the plain reason that no one has stopped here long enough to name it’.

So Joseph decided to call it ‘Harriet’s Creek’ because he knew how much this would please his new wife. He imagined her sitting at the old mahogany table carted out from England on the Albert and writing to her father, the geography teacher, telling him how fast the water rushed over the stones, ‘and don’t you think this is very romantic of Joseph?’

Lilian wouldn’t be happy about this, of course. Joseph knew that his mother would prefer to have the river named after her, to know herself to be at the centre of everything, even if this everything now consisted of a calico tent within a house made of mud. But in time, he told himself, once the pond was there and the willows, and the land was fenced and the animals began to thrive . . . then surely Lilian would become susceptible to the beauty of this new world? Surely, she would begin to feel that her only child had done the right thing? And, if she didn’t, well at least he would break his back trying.

A determined bloody cockatoo, the men began to call him among themselves. And they told him cockatoo stories in the dusk, round their fires. ‘You know a cockatoo can imitate a hawk, Mr Blackstone? He does it to scare the fowls. He does it for the fun of it, to see the fowls run away squawking! And it can laugh, too. Anyone tell you that? Fowls all scuttle away or drop dead from fear and old heartless cockatoo, he laughs like a hyena.’

Joseph smiled, because he was expected to smile, because he wanted to stay on good terms with these people who were helping him and teaching him the skills he needed to survive. But the word ‘heartless’ made him shiver. He drew closer to the fire. He clung to thoughts of Harriet, evoking as consolation not her silky hair or her strong body, but a single tooth of hers that showed and was not meant to show when she smiled. Without this flaw, this little ivory flaw in what he thought of as her impenetrable hardness, perhaps he would not have had the courage to marry her? It was the tooth which had given him hope, that here was a woman he would grow to love. And loving her as he would and living sensibly with her, without loathing and without damage, then he believed, his past would slowly vanish. He would be able to grow old without it, just as, if a man is careful, he can grow old without yearning.

The only thing he dreaded was that Harriet would pester him to father a child. He’d never said anything to her on this subject, but he hoped she sensed it: he hoped she understood that a child was not part of the bargain they’d made. She was a clever woman. He prayed she understood that it would have to be the two of them and Lilian and whatever they could make of that; the two of them and that until the end.

Harriet examined the walls and ceiling of her room. She never heard them move or creak in the darkness. Though resin continued to bubble out of the boards, there was no other outward sign of any precariousness, but how was one to know – someone like her, who didn’t understand the mechanics of construction – how was she to be sure the roof wouldn’t fall down and crush her while she slept?

She went to McArthur Street and looked at a building that had fallen. She tried to imagine where, in which exact spot – through all the months of the building’s existence – the earth had tugged and called and beckoned to the rafters. She knew that this was a fanciful, womanish kind of a thing to imagine, that the heavy earth tugged and called and beckoned to every single thing upon it for all eternity and in time every single thing would fall. Yet she found herself hoping that Joseph was paying attention to this in the building of the Cob House, that he had imagination enough to listen to the earth.

Joseph Blackstone. She didn’t know him yet. She saw – what she had known from the first but had not particularly minded – that he was rather an ordinary man. She knew that they had almost passed each other by. And then, for no reason that she could determine, he had come back, hurried back in a stumbling way one autumn evening, as though he’d suddenly remembered what it was he wanted to say or do, as though part of him had been missing when he first met her and then he had rediscovered it.

He wooed her with dreams of escape. She sat on the hearth rug with her head on his knee and he described to her the paradise he would create on the other side of the world. It was his words that made her cling to him when he touched her. And, feeling the warmth of him and the smell of his clothes, which reminded her of the scent of tree bark, she saw how sick of her life as a governess she was, how weary of owning nothing and going nowhere and spending her days by other people’s meagre fires. So she knew in a very short time that she was happy to go off with Joseph Blackstone, to buy a trousseau for a new world, to stare at the sky and imagine the altered constellations of a different hemisphere.

Barely time to have the wedding, though. Barely time to put on the ring. Barely time to lie in a tall bed while he did what he did with his hand over her face (so that she might not see it?) and withdrew just before he came to his pleasure. And then, in a frenzy of endeavour, in a kind of fury, he was running her from shop to shop, pulling out of his fusty pockets orders and measuring tapes and money. Boots, shawls, stockings, woollen dresses, and aprons: these workaday clothes appeared to be the currency of her marriage, not kisses – or not many – not whispered confidences, nor laughter.

But he went on talking about New Zealand and she went on listening and while she listened she liked to be lying close to him and feeling the rise and fall of his breath.

One night, he told her about the First People. They were known as the moa hunters. They killed the giant Moa Bird and lived off its flesh and built huts with its bones and went to sleep wrapped in its feathers. They hunted it to extinction and then looked around them in disbelief. They did not know how else to live, except from the Moa, and so they sickened and died. ‘And this, Harriet,’ said Joseph, ‘teaches us a valuable lesson. We will not cling to familiar ways. We will imagine ourselves reborn over there. On the acres I am buying, everything will begin afresh.’

They were lying in his bedroom in Lilian’s house and the darkness of Norfolk pressed on them at the half-open window. Harriet liked her new husband’s use of the word ‘reborn’. She took his hand and drifted into a dream of sleep, wrapped in the feathers of a brown bird.

The club had no premises of its own yet, but met in the store-room of a clothier’s shop, where Mrs McPherson had been allowed to rearrange the piles of hat boxes and armoires of linen-wrapped coats and dresses ‘in a more acoustically favourable way’. It was a dark space, cool as a church, into which a small upright piano had been squeezed. Laura McPherson walked round and round it, adjusting the position of everything, including the clothier’s fire bucket and his ironing table. Then she dusted off her wide shelf of a bosom and stood before the assembled women and sang to them in a sweet, throaty contralto, ‘Jesus, Hear My Song in the Afternoon’.

Lilian listened and was moved. She felt herself to be back ‘in civilisation’ and let out a long, melancholy sigh. She hoped her own voice would be considered good enough. She hoped that these women would befriend her as dear Mrs Dinsdale had done. She even dared for a moment to wonder whether they might intercede on her behalf with Joseph and say to him that really and truly a person of her age and background (she had always considered herself – the daughter of a vicar – superior to Roderick, the livestock auctioneer) could not be expected to set off into the hills or bushes or flats or whatever the wretched places were called, to play her lonely piano and sing, unheard, to the birds and the wind . . .

Then she remembered money. Almost everything that remained to her and to Joseph had been spent on their passage on the SS Albert and on the ‘farm’. The rest would be eaten away, as though by weevils or dust-mites, by the dreary purchase of corn seed and poultry and pigs. There would be nothing left for her to live on in Christchurch. And to beg or to borrow, to stoop to any kind of charity, was beyond Lilian Blackstone. She had her pride. Wulla. It would go with her into the wilderness. It would be the one thing that nobody would take away.

All she could do for now was to pop a throat pastille into her mouth and join in the handing out of music sheets. She put on her spectacles and saw that the first piece they were going to attempt was ‘Hold High the Fiery Banner’. She remembered singing this in Cromer. It had been a time of storms. She had seen the sea rise up in a grey wall and come towards her.

She stood on the Persian rug and looked around. By Lilian’s bed was a pastel drawing of a child wearing a dress. Harriet picked this up and saw from the dark curls and the little frown on the face that the child was Joseph. He was sitting in a large armchair and his baby fingers clutched its padded arms, as though the huge chair were a carriage, moving joltingly through some precarious, new landscape. She replaced the picture on Lilian’s night table beside a bottle of eau-de-Cologne and a linen handkerchief-sachet. Spread out tenderly – as if for someone else, not for herself – on Lilian’s bed was a white woollen shawl in which, at night, she liked to wind herself. Harriet touched a corner of it and smelled her mother-in-law; a mixture of rosewater and something like peppermint, a sharp smell which you knew you would not be able to tolerate for long.

Harriet sat down on the bed. The room was very tidy. Everything seemed to be in its rightful place, including, on the far wall, a palm cross stuck into the matchboarding with an unobtrusive nail. Near to this was a framed sketch of the Market Cross at Parton Magna, Norfolk.

On the front of the wardrobe hung Lilian’s second-best bonnet, its ribbons creased where she’d tied them sternly under her chin. And, looking at these things, Harriet thought how hard it is to get old and to nail up a fragile cross on your wall and stare at a little boy in a dress and not know . . . not know what time remains or whether the man who was once the child is going to take care of you or not . . .

Poor Lilian.

Poor unhappy Lilian.

Harriet sat very still and prayed that, before her own life began to move towards such an uncertain ending, she would have seen or known at least one extraordinary and unforgettable thing.

He looked thin and the skin of his face was lined and brown. But he was triumphant: the Cob House was built. There was a paddock for the donkey and hen-houses made of rushes and wire. The evening clouds over the flats were the colour of red clay.

Lilian wept. Some part of her had believed the house would never have an existence except in Joseph’s mind. But now it did. She took out a clean lace handkerchief ironed by Mrs Dinsdale and held it, still neatly folded, to her face. Joseph stared at her in dismay. Then he attempted to put his arm round her shoulders, but she pushed him away.

Lilian thought of Roderick’s grey marble grave at Parton and his name on it so blackly chiselled, so resistant to the sunshine and the rain.

Harriet left the room and waited for Joseph to come to her. Her heart was on fire with the red-clay clouds and the white Cob House waiting for her in its shelter of stringy trees. When, after some time, his hand crept over her face, she removed it. For Harriet wanted to see him now, in his nakedness, in his fussy strivings – her husband who had built a house on the edge of the world and survived. She brought his face down to hers and he kissed her like a stranger, a hard, dry kiss. Then, just as he was about to withdraw from her, he whispered to her that he’d named the river Harriet’s Creek.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘My creek. Mine!’ And she clung to him.

She wanted to leave for the farm straightaway. Drays to cart the furniture and Lilian’s china could be hired without difficulty. But Lilian refused. She wouldn’t even consider it. The Laura McPherson Glee Club were giving their first public concert on the nineteenth of April and she had given her word she would participate, for there was one high note in ‘Fiery Banner’ which only her voice, her voice alone in the fledgling company, could veritably reach.

‘One note,’ said Harriet to Joseph. ‘Are we going to sacrifice a season’s planting for one note?’

He told her gently there was little they could plant in autumn, that for the first winter they must live on what they could take with them – tea, flour, biscuits, pilchards, sugar and hams – and on mutton that they would buy from the Orchard Run, the biggest sheep-run on the Okuku flats. He also admitted that he needed to rest. His feet were blistered and his hands cut and raw. His neck ached from lying in the crook of his arm.

So they lingered at Mrs Dinsdale’s Rooms for another three weeks, making lists: twenty-five laying hens and a cock, one dairy cow, a donkey, oats, corn seed, saplings, fence posts, wire . . .

They were together in everything now, scribbling and counting, feverishly bargaining, sifting, rejecting and acquiring. While Lilian’s singing voice, in defiance of its coming separation from the edge of the civilised world, seemed suddenly to gain a new, maddening perfection, Joseph and Harriet walked away out of earshot of it, arm-in-arm from one end of the town to the other. They were recognised, now, in some of the Christchurch stores, the tall Joseph Blackstone and his tall, excitable wife.

Harriet remembered the frenzied buying of clothes in England and told Joseph how much she preferred this, this ‘farm business’, and how, at last, she could visualise their future. She was so proud of him, she said. She looked at him with a new feeling of desire. Running her long-fingered hands over the blade of a scythe in McKinley’s Hardware Store, she said: ‘Joseph, we should not let this life of ours merely arrive and then slip away.’

Slip away? What did she mean by this?

Oh, she didn’t know, exactly, she said. But she thought there should be something – a marker. ‘It will have to have a purpose,’ was what she decided to say.

Joseph thought that he would strive to find ‘purpose’ in every day of it. In the dawns which would arrive at their backs, threading light between the blue-green leaves; in the never-ending rush and swirl of Harriet’s Creek; even in the cold nights when they would hear the flightless birds calling, calling from their holes and hideaways. He would strive and he hoped he would succeed.

But then he stared at Harriet, at her face mirrored in the polished blade of the scythe. Was she talking about something else? He waited, holding himself still and straight, disguising a sudden, boiling-up of pain in his chest.

‘Well?’ she asked.

‘Of course it will have . . . purpose . . .’ he stammered.

‘And,’ she said lightly, turning to him and touching his arm, ‘after us?’

This was it. The question he feared. Now it was here and would be here always.

‘After us?’

She laid her face, just for a moment, against his shoulder. There was a smell of dust on him in this store, of cinders or ash, of something burned and gone.

‘Don’t you think there could be a child?’

Now, more than ever, he tried to hold himself tall, never to let her see that he longed to squirm away, to knead the area of his heart until it no longer hurt him. He tried to swallow, but his spittle stayed in his mouth and he had to tug out a handkerchief and wipe his lips.

‘Harriet, I had never . . .’ he began.

‘Never what?’

‘I had never imagined that. I always thought your age –’

‘I’m thirty-four, Joseph.’

‘Exactly.’

She could have told him how profusely she bled each month, how so many wretched rags had to be soaped and slapped and rinsed and hung out where they wouldn’t be seen. But she didn’t know him well enough to talk about this. She let go of the scythe and walked on down the long row of bright implements stacked against McKinley’s makeshift walls, and he followed her at a distance.

‘What is it?’ she kept asking.

He couldn’t tell her that he thought the house was in the wrong place, couldn’t possibly say that he’d been too stubborn to take advice from the men who had helped him. Because he needed to win her love and respect. In these lay his salvation.

He said only that he was worried about Lilian, who, when she stirred the washing in the heavy cauldron, had begun talking angrily to the underwear. She asked it why one soaping and rinsing couldn’t suffice for a longer time, why it ‘took dirt so easily’. When she hung it out to dry, she beat it with a wooden paddle. At other times, tired perhaps from scolding something which never answered her, she sat still and absent in her chair, rolling a darning egg in her palm.

‘We must do more for her,’ Joseph said.

‘What more?’ asked Harriet.

He didn’t know. He wanted Harriet to tell him, to light on something. Women understood each other, or so he assumed, for someone must understand them and he knew that he did not. Only that they longed for things. And their longing seemed to be so tenacious that it could lead you to behaviour you had never ever imagined yourself capable of. It could destroy you . . .

But it wasn’t difficult to understand what his mother longed for. She made no effort to conceal it: she longed to be away from here. And Joseph saw, in the way she scowled at the calico walls and looked pityingly at her familiar pieces of furniture stranded like embarrassed guests on the clay floors, that she didn’t even bother to plead with this longing; she just let it be.

‘I don’t know what more,’ he said. ‘Except that you might be a closer companion to her. I mean that you might be indoors with her, instead of out . . .’

‘Joseph,’ Harriet said, ‘I have spent my life indoors. What do you imagine a governess does all day but sit and read and write and breathe the indoor air?’

‘I know. But I worry that Lilian is alone too much.’

‘When my vegetable garden is planted. Then, I will be with her more often. But you know that she could come outside and work with me if she chose.’

Joseph said nothing, only turned over on the hard bed. Harriet lay quite still beside him. Above her, a soft rain made the tin roof gently sing.

Lilian said: ‘I thought a field was meant to be a straight and square thing.’

‘I am trying to make it as straight and square as I can,’ said Joseph.

‘Well,’ said Lilian, ‘it looks a drunken shape to me. I’m glad that we have no neighbours to remark upon its peculiarity.’

Joseph allowed himself to smile. He reminded his mother that ‘everything we’re undertaking here, we’re undertaking for the first time, but slowly, we shall learn’.

‘I am not at all certain,’ said Lilian, ‘that I shall ever learn to cook on this range.’ And she gave the old iron cooker, on which she was boiling a kettle, a spiteful kick. Fired with smouldering lignite, the range didn’t seem eager to bake the loaves that Lilian put into it, only to steam them. They barely rose to the top of the tin and could achieve nothing better than the consistency of suet. Slices cut from them left a disappointing film of moisture on the knife. In Parton Magna, Lilian’s bread had been crusty and ample and irresistible to Roderick Blackstone, who had adored the way it scratched the roof of his mouth, and had devoured great quantities of it, spread with beef dripping, on the morning that he died.

‘In this godforsaken place,’ said Lilian, ‘everything is worse.’

Harriet hurried away. She hurried to the back of the Cob House, where her garden waited. There was nothing there yet, only a rectangle of tilled earth, where birds she didn’t recognise parleyed in the early mornings when the sun rose over the valley and the beech leaves glinted like oil. Slowly, she was picking the stones from the soil, dividing the ground into squares with planks of totara pine, fencing it with tin. ‘A stone wall round a plot of these dimensions’, Joseph had told her, ‘is pure make-believe. Have you any idea how long it took three men to build a stone chimney?’

Harriet had imagined the stone wall, but it could wait. She painted the tin white, nailed it to sapling stems. There was no gate. The tin enclosed the garden all the way round. Whenever Joseph and Lilian came out to see it, they stood watching Harriet from the other side of the wall, as though she were a prisoner they were not allowed to visit. They saw her working with her hair tied up in a kerchief, stooping over her planting, her apron bunched full of her seed potatoes, her boots clotted with mud.

‘Is she happy doing that?’ asked Lilian.

‘Yes,’ replied Joseph. ‘She is.’

Lilian sniffed. ‘It looks like convict work to me,’ she announced.

The creek came snaking down behind Harriet’s garden, noisy after a fresh, rattling the stones, carrying with it stems of red matipo and black beech from the high bush. Harriet had never touched nor tasted water of such icy sweetness. When the afternoon dusk fell and she saw the first glimmer of Lilian’s lamps at the Cob House windows, Harriet stood at the creek’s edge, listening to her new world. If the wind had died a little, she might hear an owl far away in the trees, or the mournful kooo-li kooo-li of the weka, which Joseph had taught her to recognise. Sometimes, she would spread out her muddy apron and kneel on this, rinsing her hands, then scooping water into her mouth. Often, she stayed here, with her face close to the water, for so long that when she stood up she discovered that an absolute darkness had come on.

When the sun shone and they had forgotten to take off Beauty’s coat, steam rose through the wool. The smell of Beauty, Harriet thought, was almost as delectable as that of any person she had ever known and she imagined that her own children might smell like this, of milk and earth and warm wool.

Milking Beauty was her favourite task. The cow would stay perfectly still, while Harriet’s hands, which were red and rough from her work in the garden, tugged at the warm, rubbery teats. Only Beauty’s flank twitched from time to time and her curly head turned and her heavy-lashed eyes stared into the sunset or the rain.

Sometimes at night, wearing her coat, Beauty lay down by the Cob House wall and Harriet could hear her breathing. To Henry Salt she wrote: My nights are full of sighing; the wind and Beauty’s breath and Joseph’s anxiety. But she knew that he, the geography teacher, would understand what this sentence was: not a complaint, just part of her evocation of her world, so that he would be able to use her letter like a map, to see and hear her in her new landscape. And at the end of the letter she drew for him pictures of objects she particularly liked: her hoe, the donkey-plough, the milking-stool, the butter churn. Of the churn she said:

On the third page of the scrapbook, Harriet added a square of calico, labelled A piece of our wall, a ground plan of her vegetable garden, a spiky green frond from a ti-ti palm, a brown weka feather, and a curl from Beauty’s head. She glued them in with minute drops of Lilian’s china glue. She noticed that near her, on the dresser, a Spode tea-service was slowly piecing itself back together again, shard by shard.

Remembering her old life as a governess, she wondered what she would have collected into a scrapbook across twelve years: curls, perhaps – not from the head of a cow who looked so sweetly foolish draped in a rug in the New Zealand winter – but from the heads of her English pupils, curls that darkened as they grew and were sent away to school and forgot her; drawings and pages of writing they were proud of; pieces of knitting or squares of cross-stitch they had made.