Colour Scheme

‘The sooner we’re all dead, the better,’ Dr Ackrington replied cheerfully. He gave a falsetto barking noise, and limped quickly down the steps.

‘Was that a joke?’ said the hall porter to the servant. The servant turned up his eyes.

II

Colonel and Mrs Claire had lived for twelve years at Wai-ata-tapu Springs. They had come to New Zealand from India when their daughter Barbara, born ten years after their marriage, was thirteen, and their son Simon, nine years old. They had told their friends in gentle voices that they wanted to get away from the conventions of retired army life in England. They had spoken blithely, for they took an uncritical delight in such phrases, of wide-open spaces and of a small inheritance that had come to the Colonel. With most of this inheritance they had built the boarding house they now lived in. The remaining sums had been quietly lost in a series of timid speculations. They had worked like slaves, receiving good advice with well-bred resentment and bad advice with touching gratitude. Beside these failings, they had a positive genius for collecting impossible people, and at the time when this tale opens were at the mercy of a certain incubus called Herbert Smith.

On the retirement of her distinguished and irascible brother from practice in London, Mrs Claire had invited him to join them. He had consented to do so only as a paying guest, as he wished to enjoy complete freedom for making criticisms and complaints, an exercise he indulged with particular energy, especially in regard to his nephew Simon. His niece Barbara Claire had from the first done the work of two servants and, because she went out so little, retained the sort of English vicarage-garden atmosphere that emanated from her mother. Simon, on the contrary, had attended the Harpoon State schools and, influenced on the one hand by the persistent family attitude of poor but proud gentility and on the other by his schoolfellows’ suspicion of ‘pommy’ settlers, had become truculently colonial, somewhat introverted and defiantly uncouth. A year before the outbreak of war he left school, and now was taking the preliminary Air Force training at home.

On the morning of Dr Ackrington’s visit to Harpoon, the Claires pursued their normal occupations. At midday Colonel Claire took his lumbago to the radioactivity of the mud pool, Mrs Claire steeped her sciatica in a hot spring, Simon went into his cabin to practise Morse code, and Barbara cooked the midday meal in a hot and primitive kitchen with Huia, the Maori help, in attendance.

‘You can dish up, Huia,’ said Barbara. She brushed the locks of damp hair from her eyes with the back of her forearm. ‘I’m afraid I seem to have used a lot of dishes. There’ll be six in the dining-room. Mr Questing’s out for lunch.’

‘Good job,’ said Huia skittishly. Barbara pretended not to hear. Huia, moving with the half-languid, half-vigorous grace of the young Maori, smiled brilliantly, and began to pile stacks of plates on a tray. ‘He’s no good,’ she said softly.

Barbara glanced at her. Huia laughed richly, lifting her short upper lip. ‘I shall never understand them,’ Barbara thought. Aloud she said: ‘Mightn’t it be better if you just pretended not to hear when Mr Questing starts those – starts being – starts teasing you?’

‘He makes me very angry,’ said Huia, and suddenly she became childishly angry, flashing her eyes and stamping her foot. ‘Silly ass,’ she said.

‘But you’re not really angry.’

Huia looked out of the corners of her eyes at Barbara, pulled an equivocal grimace, and tittered.

‘Don’t forget your cap and apron,’ said Barbara, and left the sweltering kitchen for the dining-room.

Wai-ata-tapu Hostel was a one-storeyed wooden building shaped like an E with the middle stroke missing. The dining-room occupied the centre of the long section separating the kitchen and serveries from the boarders’ bedrooms, which extended into the east wing. The west wing, private to the Claires, was a series of cramped cabins and a tiny sitting-room. The house had been designed by Colonel Claire on army-hut lines with an additional flavour of sanatorium. There were no passages, and all the rooms opened on a partially covered-in verandah. The inside walls were of yellowish-red oiled wood. The house smelt faintly of linseed oil and positively of sulphur. An observant visitor might have traced in it the history of the Claires’ venture. The framed London Board-of-Trade posters, the chairs and tables painted, not very capably, in primary colours, the notices in careful script, the archly reproachful rhyme sheets in bathrooms and lavatories, all spoke of high beginnings. Broken passe-partout, chipped paint and fly-blown papers hanging by single drawing pins traced unmistakably a gradual but inexorable decline. The house was clean but unexpectedly so, tidy but not orderly, and only vaguely uncomfortable. The front wall of the dining-room was built of glass panels designed to slide in grooves, but devilishly inclined to jam. These looked across the verandah to the hot springs themselves.

Barbara stood for a moment at one of the open windows and stared absently at a freakish landscape. Hills smudged with scrub were ranked against a heavy sky. Beyond them, across the hidden inlet, but tall enough to dominate the scene, rose the truncated cone of Rangi’s Peak, an extinct volcano so characteristically shaped that it might have been placed in the landscape by a modern artist with a passion for simplified form. Though some eight miles away, it was actually clearer than the nearby hills, for their margins, dark and firm, were broken at intervals by plumes of steam that rose perpendicularly from the eight thermal pools. These lay close at hand, just beyond the earth-and-pumice sweep in front of the house. Five of them were hot springs hidden from the windows by fences of manuka scrub. The sixth was enclosed by a rough bath shed. The seventh was almost a lake over whose dark waters wraiths of steam vaguely drifted. The eighth was a mud pool, not hot enough to give off steam, and dark in colour with a kind of iridescence across its surface. This pool was only half-screened and from its open end protruded a naked pink head on top of a long neck. Barbara went out to the verandah, seized a brass schoolroom bell, and rang it vigorously. The pink head travelled slowly through the mud like some fantastic periscope until it disappeared behind the screen.

‘Lunch, Father,’ screamed Barbara unnecessarily. She walked across the sweep and entered the enclosure. On a brush fence that screened the first path hung a weather-worn placard: ‘The Elfin Pool. Engaged.’ The Claires had given each of the pools some amazingly insipid title, and Barbara had neatly executed the placards in poker work.

‘Are you there, Mummy?’ asked Barbara.

‘Come in, my dear.’

She walked round the screen and found her mother at her feet, submerged up to the shoulders in bright blue steaming water that quite hid her plump body. Over her fuzz of hair Mrs Claire wore a rubber bag with a frilled edge and she had spectacles on her nose. With her right hand she held above the water a shilling edition of Cranford.

‘So charming,’ she said. ‘They are all such dears. I never tire of them.’

‘Lunch is nearly in.’

‘I must pop out. The Elf is really wonderful, Ba. My tiresome arm is quite cleared up.’

‘I’m so glad, Mummy,’ said Barbara in a loud voice. ‘I want to ask you something.’

‘What is it?’ said Mrs Claire, turning a page with her thumb.

‘Do you like Mr Questing?’

Mrs Claire looked up over the top of her book. Barbara was standing at a curious angle, balanced on her right leg. Her left foot was hooked round her right ankle.

‘Dear,’ said Mrs Claire, ‘don’t stand like that. It pushes all the wrong things out and tucks the right ones in.’

‘But do you?’ Barbara persisted, changing her posture with a jerk.

‘Well, he’s not out of the top drawer of course, poor thing.’

‘I don’t mind about that. And anyway what is the top drawer? It’s a maddening sort of way to classify people. Such cheek! I’m sorry, Mummy, I didn’t mean to be rude. But honestly, for us to talk about class!’ Barbara gave a loud hoot of laughter. ‘Look at us!’ she said.

Mrs Claire edged modestly towards the side of the pool and thrust her book at her daughter. Stronger waves of sulphurous smells rose from the disturbed waters. A cascade of drops fell from the elderly rounded arm.

‘Take Cranford,’ she said. Barbara took it. Mrs Claire pulled her rubber bag a little closer about her ears. ‘My dear,’ she said, pitching her voice on a note that she usually reserved for death, ‘aren’t you mixing up money and breeding? It doesn’t matter what one does surely …’ She paused.

‘There is an innate something …’ she began. ‘One can always tell,’ she added.

‘Can one? Look at Simon.’

‘Dear old Simon,’ said her mother reproachfully.

‘Yes, I know. I’m very fond of him. I couldn’t have a kinder brother, but there isn’t much innate something about Simon, is there?’

‘It’s only that awful accent. If we could have afforded …’

‘There you are, you see,’ cried Barbara, and she went on in a great hurry, shooting out her words as if she fired them from a gun that was too big for her. ‘Class consciousness is all my eye. Fundamentally it’s based on money.’

On the verandah the bell was rung again with some abandon.

‘I must pop out,’ said Mrs Claire. ‘That’s Huia ringing.’

‘It’s not because he talks a different language or any of those things,’ said Barbara hurriedly, ‘that I don’t like Mr Questing. I don’t like him. And I don’t like the way he behaves with Huia. Or,’ she added under her breath, ‘with me.’

‘I expect,’ said Mrs Claire, ‘that’s only because he used to be a commercial traveller. It’s just his way.’

‘Mummy, why do you find excuses for him? Why does Daddy, who would ordinarily loathe Mr Questing, put up with him? He even laughs at his awful jokes. It isn’t because we want his board money. Look how Daddy and Uncle James practically froze out those rich Americans who were very nice, I thought.’ Barbara drove her long fingers through her mouse-coloured hair, and avoiding her mother’s gaze stared at the top of Rangi’s Peak. ‘You’d think Mr Questing had a sort of hold on us,’ she said, and then burst into one of her fits of nervous laughter.

‘Barbie darling,’ said her mother, on a note that contrived to suggest the menace of some frightful indelicacy, ‘I think we won’t talk about it any more.’

‘Uncle James hates him, anyway.’

‘Barbara!’

‘Lunch, Agnes,’ said a quiet voice on the other side of the fence. ‘You’re late again.’

‘Coming, dear. Please go on ahead with Daddy, Barbara,’ said Mrs Claire.

III

Dr Ackrington bucketed his car down the drive and pulled up at the verandah with a savage jolt just as Barbara reached it. She waited for him and took his arm.