They talked about New Zealand; most of all they talked about Vanessa — ‘my lost treasure’, as Geoffrey called her. There was no doubt Geoffrey loved Vanessa. No doubt at all. Strange, though: the first thing Sybil had noticed when she came to Geoffrey’s house was the lack of any photograph of her sister.
‘I destroyed most of the prints, the glass plates as well,’ said Geoffrey when she asked.
‘Why?’
‘Too painful,’ said Geoffrey. ‘Too much of a link, a way in to the heartbreak. Problem is, it’s the loss and the memory, not the images, that make the scars. You can’t get rid of them so easily.’
‘But you still have some portraits of V left?’ said Sybil.
‘A few,’ said Geoffrey, thinking of the intimate set in the attic, photographs he didn’t dare look at.
‘So you’ve come about the position as parlourmaid,’ said Sybil to the girl in the old-fashioned dress who stood at the door. ‘Do step inside.’
‘I’ve come to see Mr Hastings,’ said Huia. ‘I don’t know anything about the parlourmaid.’
‘I’m afraid Mr Hastings is out,’ said Sybil. ‘But he won’t be long. You can wait in here if you like.’
Huia followed Sybil through the narrow hallway into the drawing room. ‘Who are you?’ Huia said.
Sybil smiled. She’d heard the colonials were direct; this girl was certainly true to type. ‘I’m Miss Percival, a friend from Ireland,’ said Sybil.
‘Related?’ said Huia, finding the answer unsatisfactory and wondering if this woman was some kind of rival for Geoffrey’s affection.
‘In a way,’ said Sybil. ‘Mrs Hastings — the late Mrs Hastings — was my older sister.’
‘The dead wife,’ said Huia. ‘The one he’s always on about. Was she like you? I thought she was young and pretty.’
‘She was,’ said Sybil, snapping the ledger shut with a crisp sound.
Huia looked at Sybil. Old, she thought: certainly over thirty. The dress Miss Percival wore was of an expensive-looking material but a dowdy sort of nothing-colour, and the way she had pulled her hair back didn’t show much style for someone who spoke so posh. Huia felt a sudden relief. This Miss Percival was too ridiculously old and spinsterish to be much competition.
‘Sybil!’ shouted Geoffrey as he opened the door into the hall. ‘I’ve just picked up another novel by that Mr Hardy.’
He came into the room, a small parcel in his hand. The moment Huia saw him, something within pitched over and the rhythm of her heart blundered.
‘Huia!’ said Geoffrey.
‘I came to thank you for the gloves.’
‘A pleasure,’ said Geoffrey, looking red and confused. ‘And I see you have already met my late wife’s sister. Sybil, this is Miss Bluett; Huia, this is Miss Percival.’
The two women gave tentative smiles.
‘I need to see you,’ said Huia.
‘Well, why don’t we all sit down?’ said Geoffrey.
‘No,’ said Huia, ‘I mean see you on our own. Without her.’
‘I do apologise,’ said Sybil. ‘Anyway I need to go out to the kitchen and check if the bread is risen yet.’
‘I think,’ said Geoffrey, ‘it would be better if you stayed.’
Sybil hesitated by the door, then sat down at the table.
‘Now, what can we do for you, Huia?’ said Geoffrey.
Huia looked at him, so neat and dapper in his chequered suit. It was the wrong time, she knew that, but would there be a right time? Whatever this woman Percival was about, Geoffrey clearly wanted to keep her in the room, to use her between them. And there was the way he had said ‘what can we do for you?’ — as if there were anything he and this schoolmarmish person could ever do together for Huia.
‘It’s private,’ said Huia.
‘Come,’ said Geoffrey, ‘whatever you want to say can be said before Miss Percival. She’s family and a close friend.’
Huia felt as if her mouth were on a gathering thread that was pulled tight, leaving only a tiny ‘o’. Then, as if the taut thread were suddenly snipped, the words came tumbling out.
‘I want us to get married.’
‘Married!’ said Sybil.
Geoffrey said nothing.
‘I love you and I think you love me and …’
‘I’m afraid, Huia, you’re greatly mistaken.’
‘Mistaken?’ said Huia. ‘So I’m bloody mistaken. And … I suppose I’m mistaken about what you said about me being a water fairy, about what beautiful eyes I’ve got. You’ll say it’s just a lie, all just made up. And what happened at the pools. I suppose you’ll say I’m bloody mistaken about that too. Say it: say that never happened. Say it! Say it!’
‘Huia! Huia!’ said Geoffrey, catching her arms. ‘Calm down.’
‘Why? Why bloody why should I calm down? I suppose you don’t want a scene, not in front of her. You want her to think you’re all right and proper. Your la-di-da dead wife’s sister; I suppose she’s here to marry you. Is that it? Well she can’t, she can’t. You’ve got to marry me, ’cause it’s me, me, and not her. It’s me that’s having the baby.’
‘So,’ said Sybil, straightening her pens and ruler on the table. She had just come back from putting a weeping and slightly hysterical Huia to bed in the hotel across the road. She had seen that the girl had a copper hot-water bottle for her feet and a drink of warm milk before she had left her for the night and returned to Geoffrey’s. Sybil was good in a crisis. She had learnt from the various tragedies and difficulties of her life that in spite of what one thinks, it is possible to keep functioning when all the interior supports of existence seem destroyed.
‘So?’ she said again. ‘What’s going to happen?’
Geoffrey was sitting in an armchair, Champ on his knee. He was rubbing the dog’s ears obsessively. The Waterford brandy decanter was at his elbow and a tumbler beside it.
‘Pay her off, I suppose,’ said Geoffrey. ‘See that she and the child are properly provided for.’
‘A large cheque — you think that will solve everything?’ said Sybil.
‘For God’s sake, Sybil. I feel utterly damned; the only appealing course is putting a bullet in my brain but I doubt you’d find that a superior solution.’
‘True,’ said Sybil.
‘What am I to do? I’m ashamed, mortified, humiliated. I would have done anything to spare you having to witness this. The whole thing is a nightmare. An appalling mistake. I’ve been through hell over Vanessa and then when I went upcountry with Huia and her father I began feeling better and, well, this happened. At the time it seemed like something quite separate, a million miles from morality, repercussions or ordinary life. It was only afterwards that I began to feel culpable. I suppose I sent her the gloves to appease the guilt. Make an end to it.’
The gloves, Geoffrey thought, remembering the downy softness of the suede as he held them in his hands. He had bought them feeling laden with dread. The previous night he’d had a dream. He was on the beach with Huia, watching her cook breakfast.
‘See what I brought you,’ Huia had said, reaching into her saddlebag.
She pulled out her paisley shawl. Geoffrey parted the fabric. Deep in the folds was a baby.
‘He’s for you,’ Huia said, passing the bundle into Geoffrey’s arms. Geoffrey looked at the infant’s face and as he did so the plump, pastel-tinted skin began to wither. The features dissolved into a bleached white object that might have been a scrap of paper or a sun-whitened bone.
Geoffrey had woken shaking. He hadn’t thought of Huia being pregnant: now he was sure of it. Of course he could deny responsibility, say the girl was a wanton young thing — maybe she was, and yet there was a perfect irony about her pregnancy to him, a sort of symmetry of fate, that rendered such denial impossible. When married to Vanessa he had always thought how much he would have liked them to have a baby, but it had never happened. Now this wild Maori girl, for whom he cared nothing, was carrying his child. He, Geoffrey Hastin
gs, gentle-man: father of a bastard and, just to make it even more mortifying and humiliating, a part-native bastard at that. Of course illegitimacy happened all the time. Didn’t they say the Prince of Wales himself had had suits more than once and society looked the other way? Just keep it quiet, keep it dark. It wasn’t so dreadful, really. The thing was to be generous, honourable, pay the girl off. He wouldn’t even have to see her — just instruct a solicitor. And yet … the gloves had been a sop to panic, an appeasement of guilt, an offering to ensure the premonition was false.
‘So what’s so wrong with an offer of money? I’ll ensure the child’s provided for and let that be an end of it.’
‘Nothing’s ever that simple; everything’s attached to everything else; there are always consequences, good and bad.’
‘You sound like a Methodist preacher.’
‘I suppose I do,’ said Sybil, drawing something on the blotting paper with her silver propelling pencil. ‘Did you love Miss Bluett?’
‘Good Lord, no. You’ve seen her. She’s a rough, brash, part-Maori, ill-educated daughter of the bush. How could I love her? We belong in different worlds. Can you imagine introducing Huia to my family in County Kildare? They’d disinherit me on the spot, think I’d gone totally native.’
‘But surely things are different out here in the colonies?’ said Sybil. ‘Think of young Arthur Pascoe, gloriously happy up there on the goldfields with his demimonde bride; a mixed marriage too, with her being a Catholic. I don’t see him fretting because the family in Ireland disapprove.’
Arthur, who was known to both Sybil and Geoffrey, was the brother of Sybil’s former pupil and recent travelling companion Claire.
‘No comparison,’ said Geoffrey. ‘The Pascoes’ is a love match if ever I’ve seen one. The new Mrs Pascoe may not be a Protestant and certainly doesn’t come from the top drawer, but she’s still a fine young woman, and a handsome one.’
‘Miss Bluett’s an exceptionally pretty girl too,’ said Sybil.
‘Granted,’ said Geoffrey. ‘If she wasn’t, none of this would have happened. I don’t know why it is that our eyes and our bodies play these tricks: beauty and a whiff of danger, such irresistible fuel for desire. I knew Huia was a temptation from the first time she came here beseeching me to take her photograph.’
‘You didn’t take it?’
‘No, though that would have been a lot better than what I did do. Poor Huia. And you, Sybil, you must think I’m some sort of Dr Faustus, debauching innocent maidens.’
‘I don’t think any such thing,’ said Sybil, ‘and my impression is that she may well be more knowing than you imagine. But I do feel sorry for her. She’s everything you say but she’s also frightened, unloved and, from what I can make out, a motherless child. And if I’m not mistaken, she’s rather brave.’
‘Right again,’ said Geoffrey.
There was silence, except for the slight hiss of the fire as the salt from the driftwood burned, and the sound of Geoffrey swallowing brandy.
When Sybil and Vanessa were children they had lived in a house with a garden that stretched to the main Dublin-Galway railway line. Of course they were prohibited from leaving the property, but despite this they would sometimes climb over the stone wall that separated their garden from the track. It was a different world altogether, a world of nettles and old man’s beard. In the weeds near the track there was a rotten cabin-trunk that the two little girls would sit on as the train went past. At first the noise was faint; gradually it grew louder and louder. There was always the toot at the crossing and then the overwhelming chaos of smoke, steam and rushing air as the train thundered alongside them. The gentle afternoon, yellow with sunshine or opaque rain, would suddenly be torn apart. Many years later, on the other side of the world in Geoffrey’s drawing room, Sybil thought of the Galway train and the unexpected, fearful brutality as it passed.
‘What am I to do, Sybil?’ said Geoffrey.
‘I can tell you what the Church or society says, but you know all that already. Beyond that only you can decide.’
‘Tell me what you think yourself.’
Sybil stood up, went to the window and plucked at the lace curtain. ‘Marry her,’ she said.
‘For heaven’s sake, Sybil, don’t be absurd,’ said Geoffrey angrily. ‘Even if I was prepared to make the girl my wife, which I’m not, I couldn’t besmirch Vanessa’s memory like that. I still feel married to your sister. And as for Huia, I certainly don’t love her. I’m not sure I even like her.’
‘Pity her, then,’ said Sybil, her voice uncertain and her eyes starred with tears. ‘It’s another kind of love.’
Geoffrey looked at Sybil, her nose red, her face shiny and wet. It was her eyes that held his attention. Such a clear, honest, intelligent brown gaze. He thought of the line: The truth in her eyes ever dawning.
Diverted for a moment, Geoffrey wondered why Sybil wasn’t already married and felt a stab of irrational jealousy at the thought of her as wife to another man. He had only once seen Sybil weep before and he wondered at her tears. Who were they for? Himself? Huia? Or could it be that by following conscience and advising him to marry Huia, Sybil was denying herself a potential life with him? That she might hold such a notion hadn’t occurred to him before.
I must be a fool, thought Sybil, looking out as a horse and dray passed on the street; already thirty, an old maid in the eyes of the world, advising the only man I’ve ever loved to marry someone else.
‘I suspect your conscience will never leave you in peace if you don’t marry her,’ she said.
‘You’re being preposterous, Sybil. You know I’d never have a happy day if I did,’ said Geoffrey.
Neither would I, thought Sybil as she let the lace curtain drop.
Book 2
[IRELAND, 1881]
Hanging on the petticoats of Europe is Ireland, ruled and abused by Britain for hundreds of years. The old Gaelic chiefs, the native nobles, were replaced for the most part by English and Scottish soldiers and adventurers. Descendants of these men still hold the power and own the great estates, prizes of war wrested from enemies now long dead. The children of the defeated Irish survive as best they can.
By the 1880s things are changing. The fields and little towns of Ireland are restless, the words Home Rule on every tongue. Tenants and small farmers have had enough. They form a new society: the Land League. Men outside public houses speak behind their hands; nods and winks and secrets are exchanged. Landlords are targeted, crops destroyed, cattle mutilated, boycotts and worse. Ireland is discontented, aggressive and mutinous. It is a time of war. Land war. ‘The country is ungovernable,’ the British say.
The old remember the great potato famine of the 1840s, when folk fell down famished in the lanes, when mouths were stuffed with grass to still agonies of hunger. Thousands died; thousands emigrated. Crops have failed in other years since. Families without food or money to pay their rent are still being evicted, forced out on the hillside or the roads.
In the big houses, and the not-so-big, the gentry still sit in their morning rooms. They go up to Dublin for the season, or to London. Feathers flutter amid the coiled locks on female heads; dress swords brush shapely male thighs as bows and curtsies are made to the Lord Lieutenant or, better still, the Queen herself. In the country there are parties and dances and hunts. There are always horses: owning a stud is a fine hobby for a gentleman.
Colonel Fitzgibbon has such a stud in Meath, and another in County Dublin. He has trainers and grooms and stablehands working for him, along with the usual cook, housekeeper, butlers, maids, gardeners and their assistants. And there is a ten-year-old orphan, PJ. Not even the colonel — if he ever thought about it, which he doesn’t — knows if PJ is actually employed on the estate, though the boy lives and works there. Anyone can tell you that.
Chapter 8
The blackberries among the castle ruins were the biggest PJ had ever seen. Huge gobs of fruit dark as bruises. The boy was famished. He clawed at
the brambles, tearing off handfuls of the berries and slamming fistfuls of the purplish mush into his mouth.
Hunger was a constant in PJ’s life; ever since Mick Sullivan was killed PJ had been starving. Mick had been PJ’s friend and protector. The others who worked at the horse stud at Kinross House were well aware that anyone who raised a hand to the boy or shoved him about would catch it from Sullivan. It was Sullivan who had originally found PJ, in one of the loose boxes eating the hot meal intended for the horses. It was Sullivan who had kept the child alive with potatoes and heels of bread filched from the kitchen. And it was Sullivan who, months later, brought PJ up to the house to eat with the rest of the staff.
‘And who gave you permission, Mr Lord Bountiful Sullivan, to start inviting every corner boy in the parish to dinner?’ Miss Hill, the housekeeper, asked the first time she’d caught PJ sitting down to eat with the other servants.
‘Doesn’t the boy work here?’ said Sullivan.
‘Since when?’ said Miss Hill, fiddling with the cameo brooch she wore at her collar.
No one could say for certain. It had been winter when the boy was found in the stables. Since then he had attached himself to Sullivan, always at his elbow, ready to run a message, hold a bridle or carry a bale of straw.
‘He’s a willing enough little blighter. Quite useful, really,’ said Frazer, the English trainer, breaking off a corner of bread and dropping it in the gravy on his plate. ‘Seems only right he gets a square meal in return.’
‘If you say so, Mr Frazer,’ said Miss Hill. ‘I suppose exceptions can be made.’ The housekeeper was soft in the head when it came to the trainer. Didn’t they all know it?
‘Sure, PJ’s the divil of a hard worker, just as Mr Frazer says,’ said Mick. ‘He deserves his whack.’
‘I hardly think it’s your place, Mick Sullivan, to be deciding who eats here,’ said Miss Hill. ‘If Mr Frazer’s of the opinion that the child’s worth feeding it’s another matter. But remember, the boy’s your responsibility, Sullivan — make no mistake about that.’
The Love Apple Page 10
