Free The Colour by Rose Tremain

valleys and sailed on. Ahead of her, Dorothy’s chestnut mare and Edwin’s grey pony raced through the bright air faster and faster, until Harriet could no longer hear the sound of their hooves and they became smaller and smaller, a tiny, shimmering cluster of colour on the fawn palette of hills.
    And the further away from her they moved, the more exhilarated Harriet became. To be alone here, alone with a strong horse in all this magnificent vastness! Alone and alone and alone, with no one guiding or leading. Alone in a desert of hills that lay between the mountains and the sea . . .
    She began to rein in the horse, slowing it to a canter and then to a trot. She pulled it at last to a stop and it remained still, sneezing and blowing and tossing its mane in the wind. Sweat ran into Harriet’s eyes. Her heart pulsed with a rhythm unrecognisable as its own. She wiped her eyes with her sleeve, patted the horse’s neck, heard her breath tearing at her lungs.
    She didn’t dismount, but stayed in the saddle, looking from horizon to horizon and finding no one and nothing but herself and the horse and their shadows and the shadows of clouds. A bird turned above her, against the cold blue of the sky. Harriet saw it as the majestic witness of a sudden happiness and she knew that in the time to come she would remember it.
    She knew also that, in a little while, Dorothy and Edwin would return, worried that she had fallen. In fairness to them, she must gather the reins and urge the horse on. Yet she didn’t want to move, didn’t want to join the picnic and the fishing. She wanted to remain where she was. She wanted the dusk to come on and then the darkness. She wanted to ride alone through the hours of the night with a silent escort of stars.

The Tea Box from China
    I
    While Harriet was away, Joseph walked down the line of the creek to the place where the Cob House should have been built – to the place where he rebuilt it in his mind.
    There were no trees here, no scrub, no ferns, no features at all, only a level plateau of tussock grass and stones. But the plateau was protected by a south-facing spur. When you arrived here, you could feel the air sweeten. The terrible sighing and pounding of the wind in your ears suddenly ceased. The men who had called Joseph a cockatoo had been right and he had been wrong; this was where the house would eventually have to stand.
    Joseph paced out the plateau, measured its distance from the creek, tried with his bare hands to pull a grey boulder out of the earth. When the summer came, he told himself, if any money remained to buy timber, he would lay down the foundations of a new building. Years, it might take, for he would be alone in his task, could afford no more hired labour. But at least he would have begun, he would have admitted his error. In the new beginnings of this second house would lie his hopes for the future. All life, he thought as he tugged at the boulder, is a flight from mistake to mistake.
    Joseph sat on the hard ground and looked up the line of the creek to where the Cob House stood. While working on it, in his first euphoria of construction, he had thought up names for it: Hope Farm, White Cloud Farm, New Paradise Farm, but as yet, he hadn’t burdened it with any of these. It was just ‘the cob house’ and in this anonymity lay his admission that it was contingent, that for Lilian’s sake, if for no one else’s, he would have to build something better than this one day.
    Joseph Blackstone longed to do something that would please his mother. Something definitive. Something which would undo all that he’d done wrongly or inadequately in the past. He thought that if he could achieve this, then he would rest. He didn’t know precisely what he meant by rest.
    Now, as he sat on the hard ground of the sheltered plateau, he remembered how, as a child, he used to scream. He screamed at things that moved towards him: a ball