The Love Apple

by Coral Atkinson

  There had been a night some weeks after the birth when Huia was still permitting the baby in their bed. The moonlight was gentle on the room and Oliver was asleep in the soft tunnel between his parents’ bodies. Geoffrey had opened his eyes and found himself looking at the folded flesh of the baby’s neck and the fluff of his hair. My son, Geoffrey thought to himself, but also Huia’s; this child carried not only the blood of generations of Anglo-Irish gentry but also another, wilder, more startling inheritance — the Maori of New Zealand. At first Geoffrey had refused to let himself contemplate what that meant, the enormity of it too great, the prejudice of society too severe. He had comforted himself when he married Huia that she could easily pass for being part Spanish, Italian even. But he knew it wasn’t true and it was his shame that yearned for such invention.

  Looking at the sleeping Oliver another thought arose: why did it matter? The child was perfect. What was all this fear about race anyway? Dividing people up according to the past or their skin colour, setting them above or below or against each other, were ugly, staining things. Wasn’t there something fine and freeing in thinking that his son was one of a new people, a fresh creation?

  The baby had one arm up over his head. Geoffrey felt his whole being swoop with tenderness at the sight of the tiny hand like a shell on the pillow. Oliver sighed in his sleep and Geoffrey was overwhelmed by protectiveness. Pain, he knew, was an essential component of the human lot; yet the thought that his son might one day be confronted by injustice, prejudice, sadness and grief seemed unbearable. But he would protect him; Geoffrey vowed he would. He would shield him from danger, nurture him with his own life.

  Geoffrey gazed entranced at his small son as Oliver slept. The baby had the long eyelashes of his mother, his mouth a pink leaf. It seemed beyond belief that in the fierce moment of their two bodies coupling this flawless, new human life had been forged. Geoffrey looked across the bed at Huia and felt tender towards her. He got up and knelt on the floor beside his wife. She was so young it was hard to blame her for anything. Motherhood would soften and mature her. She would grow up. One day, with luck, he would feel they were a family.

  Huia’s long hair lay across the sheets and Geoffrey touched a strand of it with his fingers. Huia opened her eyes. She smiled up at him. Geoffrey kissed her neck.

  ‘You want to, Mr Battle?’ she said, holding his hand against her skin.

  ‘Yes,’ said Geoffrey, thinking of the hot pools. ‘If you’re well enough. But I don’t want to waken Oliver.’

  ‘Don’t mind him,’ Huia said, getting up. ‘We’ll do it on the floor.’

  Geoffrey’s longing was for gentle, languorous lovemaking in the soft white country of their bed. Huia ruched up his nightshirt and sat straddling his body.

  ‘You want a show?’ she said, laughing.

  Very slowly she gathered her clothing in her hands. Geoffrey could see her thighs, the soft thatch of her pubic hair, the roundness of her stomach, fuller now since she had given birth, and then her breasts. Huia pulled the nightdress over her head and up her arms. There were times like this when she still shocked him and yet, though he could hardly admit it, he also found it exciting.

  ‘Now,’ said Huia, ‘now,’ as she eased Geoffrey into her flesh, controlling his eagerness with her muscles, arousing and tantalising, making him wait. Geoffrey was urgent with desire, desperate for release, but Huia would not permit it. She nudged, provoked, parried and feinted. It was a duel that Geoffrey didn’t want, and couldn’t win. Finally, when he felt unable to survive another minute, Huia raised her hands above her head as her body lapped and quivered about him. She gave a shout. It was the coup de grâce.

  ‘You liked that, eh?’ she said against his ear.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Geoffrey. It sounded as hollow as he felt. The floor was hard and cold. Tenderness gone.

  Geoffrey was at his desk in the studio, sorting through an order of cabinet mounts he had just brought home from the printer. He liked this new, larger format and was pleased that he had chosen the dark green card, rather than the black. He was less certain about the gilded, bevelled edge, wondering if the impression was over-elaborate when coupled with the gold flourishes of his imprint: ‘Geoffrey Hastings, Photographic Artist, Hokitika, New Zealand’. In such matters he preferred the austere end of ostentation. Geoffrey had ordered the cartes with the intention of making a series of photographs of Oliver. Other portraits too, maybe. Following Oliver’s birth the revulsion he had felt for this type of work seemed to have left him. He wanted to produce a visual diary of Oliver’s growing up, an icon for every year, but it was more than that. He had never before had much interest in child portraiture. He found the children — stuffed into kilts, tam-o’-shanters or sailor suits, bullied into passivity and thrust before his camera — impossible to make live. Stony and vacant, the young sitters stared at his lens as if facing a firing squad. The swings, toy ships and skipping ropes that were the traditional props hung limp and spurious in their hands. His images were invariably of dead manikins, the ebullience of childhood obliterated by the photographic process. It would not be so with Oliver. The love Geoffrey felt for his son would illuminate each exposure: the pictures would glow with it, the child made new every time.

  There was a sound in the house. Geoffrey listened. Wailing was coming from the nursery. It had the despairing quality of a child that has been left weeping for a long time. Oliver was now six months old. The wet nurse had been dispensed with, it was the nurserymaid’s afternoon off and the cook-general was shopping. Huia will attend to the baby, Geoffrey thought.

  The crying grew louder. He went upstairs. Huia was nowhere about. Geoffrey went into the nursery to find Oliver, scarlet in the face, lying against the side of his cot, his face smeared with vomit. He had been sick on his pillow. Geoffrey took the baby in his arms and wiped Oliver’s face with his handkerchief. The child was hot, feverish and distressed. Geoffrey sat down in the rocking chair and tried to calm the boy. What was the matter with him? Was it serious? Should he get a doctor? And where was Huia? She must have gone out, leaving the child alone while Geoffrey himself was elsewhere. He felt anxiety for Oliver and anger at Huia. He felt worried and furious. It was as if all the irritations he’d harboured against her since they got married and had not allowed himself to indulge were suddenly unleashed. They rose up in a fiery bile, making his chest contract; bitterness overwhelmed him like heartburn. He had tried to be forbearing and understanding with Huia, made excuses for her, forced himself to remember her different social position, youth, pregnancy, the birth, learning the new ways of his life and household. He had overlooked her social gaffes, her insistence on running about at home barefoot, her refusal to learn which knives and forks were used for which courses, her sitting with her legs crossed, her holding her skirts immodestly high when she went upstairs, her pipe-smoking in the kitchen, her stirring sugar in her teacup as if mixing concrete and her treating the servants as intimates one minute and slaves the next. The list went on and on. And these were the minor annoyances: more important was Huia’s extravagance: her endless appetite for clothes, morning dresses, riding costumes, tea gowns, ball frocks. Clothes to outfit a London society belle, not the wife of a photographer in a hick gold-town at an obscure corner of the empire.

  But there was worse. It was Huia’s moods, her sulks and depressions, her constant need for attention and affection that Geoffrey found the most difficult. He had tried — God knew he had — but Huia’s desire for admiration seemed limitless. And there was the child. Geoffrey had assumed that mothers naturally loved their children but he wasn’t sure at all about Huia. Sometimes she seemed to be obsessively concerned for her son; at others her indifference frightened him.

  And there was the loss of Sybil. For days he had argued and debated with his sister-in-law over her advice that he should marry Huia. He had advanced every possible reason why he shouldn’t, and heaven knows there were plenty, but in the end Sybil, coupled with his own sense of guilt, ha
d triumphed. Geoffrey envisaged the marriage as a penance to be endured, a way of absolution for what he saw as his betrayal of Vanessa. No sooner had he agreed to marry Huia than Sybil started looking in the papers for governess positions. Weeks before the wedding she left Hokitika for employment on a high-country station in Canterbury.

  Once she was gone Geoffrey realised how much he had enjoyed her brief visit and how much he missed her. In retrospect it seemed that Sybil had offered not only a consolation for his grief, but an end to his loneliness: fate had sent her to him as his last desperate chance, an opportunity he was too ill-prepared to grasp. She continued to write to Geoffrey once a week. Calm, interesting letters full of good sense and sharp observation, but there was nothing personal about them. They seemed to Geoffrey letters written by someone looking down on the earth from a great height; letters devoid of sentiment or feeling.

  ‘Where in God’s name have you been?’ said Geoffrey as Huia came into the room. She was wearing her fashionable walking costume with the moiré lapels. At another time her husband might have noticed.

  ‘Shopping. Looking at the new English pattern books.’

  ‘Shopping,’ said Geoffrey. ‘You leave your child in the house on his own, while you go out looking at pattern books.’

  Oliver, who had become silent in Geoffrey’s arms, began whimpering.

  ‘Pepe wouldn’t stop bawling. I tried to stop him, I really did. But there was no one here and he was driving me wild, so I went out. I knew you’d be back soon. Don’t be cross,’ said Huia, beginning to cry herself.

  ‘Cross?’ said Geoffrey. ‘I’m livid. Oliver’s sick: can’t you see that? What’s the matter with you? It’s unnatural, the way you behave. You’re not fit to be a mother.’

  Oliver’s sickness wasn’t serious but that afternoon, something changed. On the surface the lives of Geoffrey and Huia went on much as before, but Geoffrey knew a turning point had been reached: from then on he no longer tried with his wife. He took to sleeping alone in the spare bedroom and deliberately moved away on the occasions when Huia climbed into the bed beside him. He seldom rebuked her to her face but his head seethed with judgement and blame. Sober, he observed every imperfection and excused nothing. Brandy mellowed him. Geoffrey’s despairing feeling of entrapment, the sense of his marriage as a life sentence, was magically transformed by alcohol. A few nips of spirits and he saw how young Huia was, how pretty; more brandy and her inadequacies seemed of little consequence; an evening of drinking and he was almost content. Some nights he didn’t go to bed, some days he didn’t get up. He was slipping backwards into the bottomless abyss of his first grief over Vanessa. There was an inevitability about his collapse that chilled and terrified him. Yet despite repeated good intentions, the resolutions of sobriety made in the morning under the duress of a hangover were abandoned before sunset. The one person Geoffrey knew might save him was Oliver. The thought of his son having a drunk for a father filled him with shame and loathing. Yet as he lifted a glass, so too did Oliver’s hold slacken: the imperative of the child’s needs diminished and melted as another mouthful was sipped and swallowed.

  PJ halted Midge the pony and peered carefully around before entering the tight tunnel of greenery and overhanging trees. The boy particularly disliked this place on the track to Tanners, though he found the entire New Zealand bush frightening and strange. There was a dark malevolence about the foliage that didn’t seem right. The trees infested by vines were odd shapes, trunks covered in evil-growing things like sores. PJ imagined the vegetation reaching out, ready to grasp and capture. He thought of tales he had heard of the little people who stole children, particularly boys. In Ireland hadn’t he seen lads as old as himself, on the very cusp of manhood, still dressed in skirts to protect them from such kidnappings? PJ felt fearful and wished for a petticoat. The bush was deserted, the farms and mining claims so far apart there were no other humans offering protection and comfort. The only sounds PJ could hear were those of birds and moving water. Had the birds been the familiar Irish blackbirds, thrushes, robins, chaffinches, he would have found their songs reassuring — but these birds, with their foreign-coloured feathers and odd music, made him feel even more of a stranger. New Zealand was altogether too fierce, too new and too empty.

  PJ was ashamed of course to say any of this, but as he rode about delivering groceries from Arthur Pascoe’s general store or running errands down the gorge to the township of Tanners, he would be overwhelmed with a sense of loneliness, a sense of dread. Fear so bad that at times he would close his eyes, leaving the pony to find her own way. In his mind he willed himself back to Ireland. The lanes crowded with people and their talk, the puckered hills and little fields, the land worn and comfortable as an old shoe.

  PJ had sensed something wrong as soon as Mrs Bell, the housekeeper at Killeigh, invited him into her sitting room behind the kitchen. If Mrs Sullivan was there, why didn’t someone get her; if she had left, why was he being taken inside?

  ‘Sit yourself down,’ Mrs Bell had said, pulling a rack of drying clothes away from the fire and nodding towards a chair. She poured PJ a cup of tea from the pot on the hob, added milk and sugar and handed it to him.

  ‘Molly Sullivan, poor dear thing,’ said Mrs Bell. ‘And you, PJ, like a son to her, wasn’t that what she always said?’

  ‘Can yiz be telling me what’s happened?’ said PJ. His hand had started to shake, making the cup and saucer writhe in a little dance.

  ‘It was June, just after midsummer. The fever, the scarlet fever. Several here and in the village with it, and herself out there night, noon and morning seeing to them, along with attending Mr Hamilton himself. Of course she, poor thing, got afflicted. A week she lasted, and didn’t I do all in my power for her?’

  ‘Passed away?’ said PJ in a whisper.

  ‘God rest her soul,’ said Mrs Bell, wiping her eyes. ‘She was a proper Christian.’

  PJ expected to cry but he didn’t. His head felt tight and dry as if his eyes were a desert. There were no tears left. The boy looked into the burning peat fire. Sparks ran up and down the sods of turf in processions of brilliance, then suddenly the turf ignited, turning from blackness into flame. He was more alone than ever. The death of Mick had brought him Mrs Sullivan, and now she was gone. There was no one else.

  ‘But I’m forgetting,’ said Mrs Bell. ‘Didn’t Mrs Sullivan leave something for you? “See PJ at Kinross House gets this.” Almost with her dying breath she said that, most insistent-like. Wasn’t I going to bring it myself when I went up there to Dublin to my sister this Christmas?’

  Mrs Bell went to a corner cupboard and took out a tin box. PJ looked up. He could see the lid of the box had a picture of kittens playing with knitting wool.

  ‘Open it,’ said Mrs Bell.

  Inside the box was a roll of pound notes tied with a scrap of ribbon, and a letter.

  ‘What’s it say?’ said PJ.

  Mrs Bell took the letter. She put the pince-nez she wore around her neck to her eyes and read aloud:

  Dear PJ,

  The money is for you. It is not much but it’s what I have managed to save. I will he gone when you get it and there will be no one to care for you here in Ireland. What I would like most is for you to use it to go to New Zealand to my daughter Maeve, who is married to a Mr Arthur Pascoe of Simpson’s Bridge, Westland. Mrs Bell, the housekeeper at Killeigh, is a good kind woman and she will help you arrange a passage out there.

  ‘New Zealand?’ said PJ. ‘Isn’t that a desperate far-off place?’

  ‘’Tis,’ said Mrs Bell. ‘’Tis indeed.’

  PJ opened his eyes. Down the track he could see Russian Pete’s shack, the house that marked the start of the settlement of Simpson’s Bridge. He nudged Midge into a trot, happy to be out of the bush and nearly home. Coming down the main — and only — street, he caught sight of Rosaleen Pascoe waiting for him. The toddler, wearing a tartan dress and white pinafore, was sitting on the wooden walkway outside her father�
�s shop, her booted feet in the gutter. She was holding the penny tin-plate horse that PJ had bought her the first time he’d gone down to Tanners.

  When Rosaleen saw PJ she got up and ran towards him.

  ‘Mind the street, Rosie!’ PJ shouted as a cart passed by. The child stopped and looked about. ‘And yer mammy will kill yiz, being out on the street and all.’

  ‘Rosie naughty?’ said Rosaleen with apparent surprise.

  PJ smiled at her as he dismounted. ‘Rosie’s a proper cod,’ he said, ruffling the child’s hair.

  Arthur Pascoe was sitting in the rocking chair in the snug, his wife on his knee and the tip of his tongue in her ear. Despite having been married over two years, the Pascoes were still as besotted as any young lovers. Maeve jumped as the door opened and PJ and Rosaleen came in.

  Arthur and Maeve had been unfailingly generous to PJ since his unexpected arrival from Ireland. They had given him a home and employment but the boy was uneasy with them. Living in the cramped quarters behind the shop, in such close proximity to the couple, made him feel an intruder. The kissing and giggling, the touching and cuddling that went on between the two of them was something he’d never witnessed before and it embarrassed him. Arthur was obviously a gentleman, yet his marriage and rough life as a bush shopkeeper made the boy uncertain. PJ thought Maeve both pretty and kind, and as Mick Sullivan’s sister she was someone to be idolised and adored, yet he had the feeling that Maeve wanted him gone so she could be alone with Arthur. Rosaleen was the one member of the household with whom PJ felt comfortable. He gave the child rides on his back, he brought her birds’ eggs, he made her a swing on a tree at the end of the yard and built her houses out of blankets. Rosaleen adored him. PJ thought her a dote.

  ‘I’m after thinking,’ said PJ, ‘if youse don’t mind, like, that maybe I should get employment elsewhere. God knows, youse have been very good to me but maybe I’d be better off in the town. Hokitika, perhaps.’