The Colour Read Online Free Page B

straight, disguising a sudden, boiling-up of pain in his chest.
    â€˜Well?’ she asked.
    â€˜Of course it will have . . . purpose . . .’ he stammered.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Harriet, I had never . . .’ he began.
    â€˜Never what?’
    â€˜I had never imagined that. I always thought your age –’
    â€˜I’m thirty-four, Joseph.’
    â€˜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.

Beauty’s Coat
    I
    Harriet knew that Joseph lay awake at night. In their calico room which trembled, she heard him sigh.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜We must do more for her,’ Joseph said.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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 . . .’
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜I know. But I worry that Lilian is alone too much.’
    â€˜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