The Colour (47 page)

But now it seemed to Edwin that time was passing very fast and that he had to set off along the floating path before everything became as dark and absent as his own face, for he could see in the sky some alteration, as of a coming storm or the nearness of night, and as he began to move, he understood that he was walking towards a destination that would obey the laws of the new, altered world. It might not be recognisable, therefore, as a place of arrival and he began to worry that he might not know, from one second to the next, whether he'd arrived or whether he had to go on.

But then he saw a patch of earth. It was grey and hard, and on the earth, arranged in an order that seemed to express a perfect understanding of the relationship of one object to another, was a circle of stones.

Edwin knew that Pare had put these stones there. He knelt down and touched one stone and then another and what the stones seemed to tell him was that they had been waiting for a long time.

IV

When Toby returned to the Orchard Run with Dr Pettifer, the snow was still falling and, though it was near to mid-day, the air was piercingly cold.

Dorothy, still wearing her night-clothes, with her head uncovered and her feet bare, was standing in the middle of the lawn. From the distance of the verandah, Janet, who held in her hand a mug of something hot, which might have been tea, was calling to her to come inside, but Dorothy didn't move. She didn't appear to hear Janet or to see her or to notice anything around her, not even the arrival of Toby and Dr Pettifer. She just stood where she was, seeing nothing, with the snow falling on her, as it fell on to the grass and on to the dovecote and on to the trees, turning everything to an obliterating white.

Paak Mei's Laughter

I

Long ago, in the house on Heron Lake, Pao Yi had overheard his wife, Paak Mei, telling her friends a secret.

Paak Mei had a high laugh and she loved to giggle, as though giggling intoxicated her, as though by laughing more and more, she could arrive at happiness. The secret she revealed, amid a soaring flight of giggles, was that her husband, Pao Yi, was what she termed ‘a connoisseur of love'.

Pao Yi, startled as he was when he overheard this, immediately realised that the three women friends were fascinated by Paak Mei's revelation. ‘If he's a connoisseur of love,' they asked, ‘from whom did he learn his techniques?'

Pao Yi had to strain to listen to Paak Mei's answer because her voice subsided to an amused whisper, as though the laughter-bird had fluttered down and landed somewhere, as she said: ‘He was once the lover of the concubine of a war lord. I don't remember her name. But she taught him all her artistry. When you meet Pao Yi, you see, you assume he's just a poor fisherman from Heron Lake, but in fact, in the nights, he is an artist of love!'

A cascade of delighted laughter greeted these disclosures. Two of the friends said they wished their husbands had been the lovers of concubines. But then the third friend asked: ‘How do you know that Pao Yi is an “artist of love”, Paak Mei, if he is the only man who has ever touched you?' And there was a moment's silence, during which Pao Yi pressed his ear even closer to the wall.

After a little while, Paak Mei whispered: ‘Because he is so attentive to my pleasure. Sometimes, we never sleep at all, but make love over and over again until the sunrise. And then I feel so light and free and contented, it is as though I were floating on the tops of trees, as though Heron Lake and all the fish in it and all the water-lilies that grow in its shallows were mine.'

For some reason, this idea that little Paak Mei, with her minute and shuffling feet, could suddenly become the owner of Heron Lake amused the friends more than anything that had so far been said and the room was then filled with laughter so musical and prolonged that Pao Yi also found himself smiling.

But then, as he walked away from the house towards his boat, he began wondering where the story of the war lord's concubine had come from and why Paak Mei had decided to invent it and then boast about it.

The truth was, Pao Yi had been the lover of many women in his mind, but Paak Mei was the only one he'd ever truly known. Perhaps, he decided as he began to gather up his fishing nets, his imagination had served him better than he'd realised? Perhaps – because he had so often ‘seen' the soft curve of a woman's thigh, the pearly beads of sweat between her breasts or on her lip, and had found it easy to transport himself to wherever it was this woman lay waiting for him – he had learned all a man needed to know about love from his own reveries?

It occurred to him that in these reveries, time, which is the enemy of love, had always been entirely accommodating. As a young man, Pao Yi had been able to sustain a love-reverie through all the deep hours of the night or all the shallow hours of the dawn. His imaginary concubines had had fantastic names, Indigo Bird, Scarlet Tigress, Emerald Flower, and he had always been certain that these beautiful beings would be capable of feeling sexual pleasure as intense as his own.

So Pao Yi searched their bodies to try to discover precisely how that pleasure could be arrived at, and where the true source of it lay, because he saw that to imagine pleasure on the faces of Indigo Bird and Scarlet Tigress and Emerald Flower increased by several degrees the intensity of his own ecstasy. And by the time he married Paak Mei, he had found it.

On their wedding night, he lay with his head on Paak Mei's belly, lapping at the tiny bud he found among the perfumed tangle of her pubic hair, and Paak Mei – as she later admitted to her envious friends – thus became in her mind the Empress of Heron Lake, the one who could lie on the tops of trees and look down upon all her silvery endowments.

II

Now, as the snow began falling on his garden, Pao Yi's only thought was to become the perfect lover of the woman he called Hal Yet.

First of all, he banished time.

That the snow was falling delighted him. For he saw that now, provided it kept on falling, the way back to the sea, the way back to the real world, would soon be closed. All that would remain here would be the bed where they lay and the fire which they tried to keep burning day and night, and the food that they cooked and the white light of day at the window and the cave at their backs, blocked up with its wall of stones.

Heron Lake disappeared from Pao Yi's mind. He could no longer see it, no longer imagine his boat floating on it nor his house standing on its shore-line. Even the graves of Chen Lin and Chen Fen Ming became like faded pictures, or like clothes he'd once worn as a child and grown out of and could barely remember. And from the house itself, there was no sound at all, no sign of anyone moving, no whisper of Paak Mei's feet shuffling across the floor, no flute of laughter from the place where she cooked.

And Paak Shui, too, was absent most of the time. Pao Yi thought that no doubt his son still massaged his mother's feet with lavender oil, still gathered water chestnuts from the river, still flew his scarlet kite on Long Hill, still struggled with his calligraphy, but he could no longer see him do these things, nor hear his voice, nor remember the sweet smell of his hair.

All Pao Yi knew and all he wanted to know was that he had found his perfect woman and now he would love her. For her, he would be a real ‘connoisseur'. He would find the bud of her pleasure and make it flower. He would discover every inch of her and caress it with his hands and his lips and his sex and his mind. He would sleep inside her, with his head on her breast. He would press her to him so tenderly, with such human gentleness, that she and he would become like dancers, moving to the same intoxicating rhythm. Everywhere she moved, his eyes would follow. Everywhere he moved, her eyes would follow. There would be no stumbling or falling, no hurt, no shock or damage or dying. There would only be this: Pao Yi and Hal Yet; Hal Yet and Pao Yi.

That the world would disapprove of his love and would attempt to destroy it was something which Pao Yi knew with absolute certainty, but he put this from his mind. It was part of the future, and he willed himself to live in the present and give the future no thought.

The most extraordinary thing that he did (and even at the time Pao Yi knew that it was extraordinary) was to take down his pictures of his family and hide them behind the wooden board on which were written the names of his ancestors. To do this, to consign the people he had loved to the dark space between the wall and the ancestor chart, should have terrified and shamed him, but it did not. He didn't want them to see where he was or what he was doing and so he hid them away.

And it seemed to Pao Yi that Harriet, too, inhabited the room which contained their existence in a way that was absolute, in a way which refused both past and future. If he found her staring out sometimes, it was only, he believed, to reassure herself that the snow was still falling, that the paths to the sea were buried, that nothing and no one would come to disturb them.

Now and again, she put on the clothes she'd been wearing when the flood came and which she'd washed and hung to dry on the trees. But mostly she wore Pao Yi's grey cotton jacket and trousers, or she wore nothing at all and Pao Yi would gaze at the whiteness of her body, made whiter in daylight by the icy light at the edges of the sacking window which was the light of the South Pole, of a clean vastness, of a glittering, empty, untravelled world. He knew that this sight would live in his memory for as long as he was alive.

III

As Pao Yi guessed, Harriet, too, understood the role played by time in their love. She knew that in the Land of the Long White Cloud she and her lover had arrived by pure chance at a sequestered place and that the past had no business there.

Sometimes, it infiltrated her dreams, that recent past of the goldfields, and an image of Joseph drowning when the fresh came down upon the Kokatahi mine. She seemed to see his ghostly, suffering face. But when she woke up and discovered that she was lying, not with Joseph, but in Pao Yi's arms, she put everything else out of her mind.

Harriet was too wise, too rational a person not to understand that, one day, a different future would arrive. Sometimes, when Pao Yi went out of the shelter, closing the makeshift door behind him, Harriet forced herself to imagine that he had gone for ever. She imagined walking alone the long and difficult miles to Hokitika and the sea and waiting for a boat and then getting on the boat and not caring whether she survived or whether she drowned because her lover was gone. And sometimes the anxiety that she felt was so great that she would open the door of the hut and look down on the snow-covered garden, just to see him, just to hold him with her eyes. But there were times when even this wasn't enough and she had to call to him or go to where he was, as though he were about to disappear, as though, if she didn't feel the warmth and solidity of him and enfold him with her arms, he would vanish away into the snow.

The smallness of their world, its absolute simplicity, marked every object within it as precious to Harriet. Even the fire, which seemed to embody the ceaseless flickering of time, was touched with significance, and Harriet fed the fire as tenderly as she would have fed a child, to make sure that it wouldn't die. And beyond the fire, the arrangement of cooking pots and sacks and panniers and garden tools was etched on Harriet's mind with such clarity, had about it such an intense primacy, that it became in her imagination
the only arrangement
her life would ever require. She was amazed to remember what a quantity of furniture, objects and commodities had cluttered the rooms where she'd once lived and that even in the Cob House, she had considered as necessities things which now appeared to her as valueless.

And she concluded that passion of this kind effects an alteration on the material world so absolute that it could be said to resemble a long hallucination or dream, from which the lovers hope never to wake.

IV

It snowed for a long time and then it stopped.

Harriet looked out and saw the sun begin to melt the icicles on the solitary plum tree. She had no idea how many days and nights had gone by, nor what month they were in. She remembered that, after Beauty's death, the deep snow had melted away very fast.

So now it seemed to her that she and Pao Yi were no longer sufficiently hidden and walled away in their shack and she went to him and told him that they should move their bed into the cave.

Pao Yi remembered his opium reveries. He remembered the yellow flickering of the candlelight on the roof of the cave and the things he saw in the shadows and it frightened him. Deliberately, he had never lain with Harriet in the cave, because he was afraid that in there, in that silent space which nobody but he had ever entered, carnal love would become ungovernable and have no end and that it would feast upon itself until it died.

But now, all he longed for was to go there.

Stone by stone, he unblocked the wall. He placed a candle on a rocky ledge and together he and Harriet pulled the thin mattress into the narrow space that was just wide enough for their two bodies to lie side by side. It was so cold in the cave that Harriet almost faltered and changed her mind, but then she asked herself which she would choose – the icy darkness of the cave or the loss of her lover – and she told herself that she would get used to the cold, that she and Pao Yi would keep each other warm, that nothing mattered, only that they should not be discovered.

But Pao Yi knew that the cave in winter couldn't be endured except with the help of opium. He lit a pipe and they lay down together and the pipe passed from the one to the other and Harriet felt for the first time that stretching away of her being into fragments of extraordinary lightness which could rearrange themselves into any shape or form she might desire.

And she desired to be a white bird with warm soft feathers and a heart that beat in time to its own song and as a bird she lay on her lover's body and covered him with her wings and she felt him rise up in her as though he were growing there and she told him that they were one.