The Colour by Rose Tremain Page B

building. Make a barn with cob. Roof it with ti-ti leaves. Anything. You’re high up near the Okuku, and the southerlies will bring in more snow this winter than you ever saw in Norfolk. Consider the latitude of the South Island of New Zealand! Nigh on fifty degrees south. Spend money on another milk cow and you will lose her too – unless you bring her in under your own roof.’
    While Dorothy nodded and Edwin watched his father gravely, Harriet tried to imagine what Lilian would say about sharing the Cob House with an animal. (‘I simply will not do it, Joseph. So why do you not put the cow in my bed and I will go out and sleep in the snow!’)
    A smile touched the corners of Harriet’s mouth as Toby continued.
    â€˜We can sell you milk,’ he said. ‘In this kind of cold, it will keep fresh for quite a few days. When you’ve made the shed, scythe last year’s tussock instead of burning it and dry it on the dry winds. No straw on the flats, of course, but tussock will do and cows must have plenty of it to keep them warm.’
    Harriet nodded.
    Edwin said: ‘Poor Beauty.’
    â€˜No fleece on a cow,’ Toby went on. ‘And nostrils too large. Breath freezes and blocks the air passage, then they try to breathe through their mouths and the cold burns their throats. You must wait until spring in October.’
    Harriet said: ‘Joseph thought he knew livestock . . .’
    â€˜No use,’ said Toby, ‘no use at all, unless you also know the weather.’
    The maid Janet removed the remains of the pigeon pie and brought in a trembling white blancmange, which she placed without hesitation in front of Dorothy, apparently knowing that a blancmange was not a real or pungent enough entity to engage Toby’s attention. When served his portion of this confection, Toby wrapped his big hand around a spoon, lifted a few morsels to his mouth and then abandoned it, pushing his plate away and wiping not only his mouth, but his nose and his eyes with the table napkin. Dorothy regarded him watchfully.
    â€˜Toby is out on the run from sunrise to sunset,’ she said softly to Harriet, ‘and by supper time he is very tired.’
    â€˜Forgive me, Mrs Blackstone,’ Toby Orchard said, getting to his feet and stretching. ‘I shall go to bed now and listen to the night birds.’
    Then to Dorothy, he said: ‘Perhaps you will show Mollie to our guest?’
    â€˜Certainly I will, dear,’ said Dorothy.
    â€˜Good-night, Papa,’ said Edwin.
    Toby came round to where his son sat, still eating his helping of blancmange, and put his wide hand tenderly on Edwin’s head. ‘I heard your hippopotamus,’ he said. ‘I thought him very good.’
    Dorothy and Harriet sat in front of the fire, into which they both stared.
    â€˜You will discover,’ said Dorothy, ‘what a minute world you have come to. Vast outside. So vast it takes our breath away. But our concerns are so very small: the health of the sheep, a dry shipment of chestnuts, firewood that doesn’t spit, a servant girl who can make mashed potato without lumps . . .’
    â€˜Oh,’ said Harriet, ‘but when I stand by my creek and look towards the mountains . . .’
    â€˜Precisely,’ said Dorothy, ‘they are grand. Nature is grand here. But too grand. To survive in New Zealand, we all have to re-create, if not the past exactly, then something very like it, something homely.’
    Harriet saw the branch of apple wood she was watching break and fall and a high flame spring up and begin to consume it. She said: ‘Our Cob House is not like any home I have been in.’
    â€˜Not yet,’ said Dorothy. ‘But if your farm prospers, then your husband will build a larger house, a house like this one, and you will serve tea in it, tea from China, but the rest of the world will have clean vanished from your