Free The Colour by Rose Tremain Page A

thrown or a hoop bowled, the sudden flight of a bird out of a tree in the garden. He screamed at a red-and-yellow spinning top given to him for his seventh birthday. The way the red and yellow merged, as the top spun, to become one indescribable colour, the way the top changed direction without warning, these things made him scream.
    Lilian couldn’t endure this screaming of his. She would clamp her hand over his mouth. Sometimes her hand smelled of potato peelings and sometimes it smelled of chocolate or eau-de-Cologne. She threatened to glue his lips together. She told him screaming was ‘vulgar’. She told him poor people screamed but not the son of a livestock auctioneer, not the grandson of a vicar.
    One evening, Lilian and Roderick Blackstone took Joseph to a circus and he saw acrobats swooping through the air. He felt Lilian’s hand clamp itself across his mouth. He tried to be quiet. The costumes of the acrobats were spangled, as though they were made of glass and might shatter. Then a man with a whip came into the ring and round the man paced three snarling tigers and it seemed to Joseph that there was nothing anyone could do, in the face of these tigers, other than to scream at them.
    Lilian took him by the collar and marched him out into the darkness, marched him all the way home along the moonlit lanes and tied him into his bed and bound his mouth with an old sash which smelled of camphor. She told him that if he screamed any more he would no longer be her son.
    After that night of the circus, he tried never to scream at anything, to keep all strong emotion locked inside him. When he felt a scream coming on, he would run away and bite his arm or his knee. Sometimes, he hid in the cupboard under the stairs, where the brooms and brushes were kept, and he would stare at these things and long to be them, or long to be, like them, something which had no feeling.
    When his father died, Joseph felt his old desire to scream returning. He could master it only by refusing to think about the ostriches and the mutilated body in the field. So he gradually fell into the habit of suppressing, both to himself and to others, the actual manner of Roderick Blackstone’s dying, referring only to ‘his last sufferings’ as though his father had expired from a protracted illness. And in this way, he was able to remain mute and controlled.
    Joseph stood up. Today, the sky above the Cob House was a deep and startling blue, a rarefied un-English blue that made him yearn for the return of summer. He walked to the creek’s edge and squatted down and put his hands in the icy water. Swollen with the snow-melt, Harriet’s Creek was now a rushing torrent. Once the channel was dug to his pond, it would fill very fast. Joseph had heard that Tasmanian trout might be bought somewhere along the Ashley and had decided he would stock his pond with these.
    Joseph wiped his hands on the tussock and began to walk back towards the Cob House, following the creek. Where scrub roots clung to the very edge of the further bank, the water, in its new frenzy, had taken a different course, revealing a sliver of muddy shore, on which some blue-duck were wading. Joseph stopped to watch the birds. As the winter progressed, he knew that he would have to take out his gun and begin shooting what wildfowl he could track down to keep the three of them fed.
    But now, hearing the cry of the ducks, he felt his mind return to an autumn morning in Norfolk, waiting with his gun for mallard and widgeon, watching the haze begin to lift off the river, fumbling with his bag of cartridges, feeling the cold and his own solitude and then seeing, approaching through the mist, Rebecca wrapped in her brown cloak, her face oval and white in the mauvish light of dawn.
    She called to him: ‘Brought you griddle-cakes and tea, Joseph Blackstone. Gave my mam the slip.’ And she came and stood by him, holding her little basket of food, and his hand on