The Colour Read Online Free Page A

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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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