The Colour Read Online Free PDF Page B

measures, a display of Roman coins and early examples of the ‘Gable Safe-and-Sound’, a patented brass lock which thieves were supposedly incapable of breaking. But Harriet hadn’t been among the visitors. The ten-shilling note had never been alchemised into a pair of gloves. Mr Gable’s love-letters to her had stood in a pile, hidden inside a cracked washing jug – hidden from the world and from Harriet herself, who had no wish to read them again and would shortly feed them to the fire.
    She had tried to return the ten-shilling note to Melchior Gable. She had sent it round to the bank with her handwritten refusal of his proposal of marriage. But it had come back. She had asked her father to post it to him and he had done so, but once again it returned. So she kept it in a box and never spent it. She used to look at it sometimes – her alternative life, the land where she had not gone. And then, on the day she married Joseph Blackstone, she burned it.
    III
    When the donkey needed rest, Joseph worked at digging his pond.
    He thought of the pond as soundless, a place that the wind would barely touch and around which the distant bush would soon seed itself – if only the seeds were not blown away. Though he’d imagined Norfolk willows, he’d be perfectly content with cabbage trees and manuka scrub.
    He sited the pond in a dip in the fold of hills. A long, curving trench would be carved out to let water into the pond from Harriet’s Creek and then out again by some means that Joseph couldn’t precisely envisage. He found himself wishing that he were more of an engineer.
    Lilian came out of the house, wrapped in a shawl, and stood watching Joseph. The ground was as hard as wood. Lilian stared at her son’s booted foot on the shovel, heard the repeated knock of the hob-nails against the shovel’s edge. Though he was tall, in the surrounding panorama of yellow grass he appeared oddly insubstantial, almost as if he were a figure her mind had conjured. Perhaps, when she next looked at him, he would no longer be there. She asked herself whether she had ever really seen him or understood who he was.
    For how was it possible that the Joseph she thought she’d known – from baby boy in a hand-sewn dress to gawky man with raven hair and a commanding voice – now believed that his future and hers could be lived out here in this desert of grass? What had put this preposterous idea into his mind?
    It was a day of light wind with a sun that came and went and showers that seemed to fall straight out of a brilliant rainbow. For the first time in a long while, Lilian raised her face towards the horizon. She liked rainbows, for they behaved as God had told them to behave: ‘I do set my bow in the cloud and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.’ But Lilian examined this one critically, as though she believed a New Zealand rainbow might somehow be disobedient to God’s law. She counted the colours, verified the precision of the arc, qualified the brightness. She barely listened as Joseph began to describe the pond to her; she was intent on the rainbow. It was too big, she decided after a while: in its vastness it had no humility. She distantly heard Joseph say that when spring came and green shoots snaked up through the mud at the edge of the water, the mallard and the native blue-duck would leave the creek and come to swim in his pond, in sweet domestic circles. But she felt obliged to remark. ‘Your pond will not necessarily behave as English ponds do,’ she said.
    Joseph turned a tired face towards her. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
    â€˜I mean,’ said Lilian, ‘that nothing here is ever quite as one has imagined it.’
    As she walked away towards the Cob House, Lilian remembered that she was, at least, working on a possible plan of escape. The plan was tentative and far too dependent on unverifiable factors, but