The Colour Read Online Free PDF

mutton stews and chops, mutton pies and pasties. I think we smell like sheep.
    Then, she told him about the cow, whom she and Joseph had named Beauty
    because her nature is so nice and her eyes are like pools of amber and the curls on her head appear quite as though they had been set in curl-papers.
    Beauty had no stable or barn. But from an old rug and some lengths of twine, Lilian had manufactured a coat for her. This had been the one task Lilian Blackstone had done with something like enthusiasm and now it was a strange and tender sight, to see a cow wandering about wearing a human garment as it munched the yellow hay.
    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:
    Waiting for the butter gives me such excitement. The extraordinary change of colour! I think I have always been enthralled by any process by which one thing is transformed into something else. I can understand the obsession of the alchemists of the Ancient World.
    Her scrapbook was beginning, very slowly, to fill. In between the heavy pages were leaves of gossamer-fine paper, almost transparent, and sometimes Harriet looked at her entries through the paper, as though they were already almost vanished and part of the past. For this was what the book was, she knew: a catalogue of the passing of time. Already the maple leaf that had floated down on to the SS Albert in the middle of the Tasman Sea was faded and brittle, the Chinese tea label very slightly yellowed, and the Queen Victoria stamps smudged with dust or dirt of some kind, as though they’d endured a long journey on a letter.
    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.
    And perhaps a solitary banknote, a ten-shilling note, given to her by Mr Melchior Gable, to be spent on gloves she was supposed to wear when she visited his bank on the occasion of its summer open day. On this day, visitors were shown a fine collection of weights and