The Colour Read online

  About the Author

  Rose Tremain is a writer of novels, short stories and screenplays. She lives in Norfolk and London with the biographer Richard Holmes. Her books have been translated into numerous languages, and have won many prizes including the Whitbread Novel of the Year, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Prix Femina Etranger, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Angel Literary Award and the Sunday Express Book of the Year.

  Restoration was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and made into a movie; The Colour was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and selected by the Daily Mail Reading Club. Rose Tremain’s most recent collection, The Darkness of Wallis Simpson, was shortlisted for both the First National Short Story Award and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and her latest novel, The Road Home, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. Three of her novels are currently in development as films.

  ALSO BY ROSE TREMAIN

  Novels

  Sadler’s Birthday

  Letter to Sister Benedicta

  The Cupboard

  The Swimming Pool Season

  Restoration

  Sacred Country

  The Way I Found Her

  Music & Silence

  The Road Home

  Short Story Collections

  The Colonel’s Daughter

  The Garden of the Villa Mollini

  Evangelista’s Fan

  The Darkness of Wallis Simpson

  For Children

  Journey to the Volcano

  THE COLOUR

  Rose Tremain

  This ebook is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form (including any digital form) other than this in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Epub ISBN: 9781446450437

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Vintage 2004

  8 10 9 7

  Copyright © Rose Tremain 2003

  Rose Tremain has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  First published in Great Britain in 2003 by Chatto & Windus

  First published by Vintage in 2004

  Vintage

  Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA

  www.vintage-books.co.uk

  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780099425151

  Contents

  PART ONE

  The Cob House. 1864

  Beauty’s Coat

  The Orchard Run

  The Tea Box from China

  Among the White Stones

  The Preservation

  The Line

  Bargains

  D’Erlanger’s Hotel

  PART TWO

  The Riser

  A Neat and Tidy Room

  The Torn Painting

  Dead Work

  The Road to the Taramakau

  ‘A man’s precious name’

  The White Worm

  The Forest under the Earth

  Distance

  PART THREE

  Towards the Fall

  The Power of Dreams

  Between Two Worlds

  The Fresh

  Bellbird Singing

  An Acre of Land

  Paak Mei’s Laughter

  Houses of Wood

  Acknowledgements

  For the Domino team, with all my love

  Gold diggings disorganise society, induce a moral blight, divert activity from saner enterprise and encourage a disagreeable immigration of the scum of China.

  Lyttelton Times, New Zealand, 1861

  Gold has been all in all to us.

  West Coast Times, New Zealand, 1866

  PART ONE

  The Cob House. 1864

  I

  The coldest winds came from the south and the Cob House had been built in the pathway of the winds.

  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.

  II

  After their arrival in Christchurch, Joseph had supervised the purchasing of materials for building the Cob House, and had hired men to help him, and horses and drays to lug the tin and the pine planks and the sacks of nails and bales of calico, and at last made ready to set off north-westwards, towards the Okuku River.

  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 i
t 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.

  III

  Settlers from England were known as cockatoos, Joseph was informed.

  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.

  ‘You’re a thoughtful one,’ the men said when the building of the Cob House began. They were mashing mud and grass for the walls, breaking stones for the chimney and they were stronger than Joseph, who rested more often and was observed staring down at the plains, known here as ‘flats’, wide plains with hardly any trees, stretching to infinity below him, staring as still as an owl.

  ‘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.

  IV

  The Rooms let to Harriet and Lilian by Mrs Dinsdale in Christchurch smelled of the resin which seeped from the matchboarded walls and of linen sprayed with hard water and scorched with burning irons.

  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 Din
sdale 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.’

  After Joseph had gone away to build the house, Harriet began her scrapbook. She told herself that she was making it for her father, Henry Salt, (a teacher of geography who had never travelled further afield than Switzerland) but she also knew that she was making it for herself.

  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.