The Love Apple

by Coral Atkinson

  Bindon’s large sitting room had been converted to a ballroom for the occasion, hung with ferns and flags and the carpet rolled back. Most of the furniture, with the exception of the piano, had been put outside the French doors on the wide verandah. Food was laid out in the dining room, with tea, coffee, sandwiches, sausage rolls and cakes served from the moment the guests arrived; a mid-evening supper of meat, poultry, pies, trifles, jellies and all manner of desserts; and a final round of soup for those who felt hungry in the small hours of the morning. Dancing was continuous and, as men considerably outnumbered women, Sybil was in constant demand. Her card was quickly completed and her evening filled with waltzes, polkas, reels, cotillions and the lancers. It seemed to Sybil that the men who partnered her all said similar things: ‘How long have you been over here?’, ‘How do you like New Zealand?’, ‘What do you think of the colony?’, ‘Economy a bit depressed at present. You should have been here ten years back.’ But they were friendly, cheerful men without artifice and she felt comfortable with them.

  Powell didn’t dance. He stood at the verandah doorway, smoking cigars, drinking whisky and talking with the men who occasionally joined him. When Sybil looked in his direction, he smiled. He’s watching me, Sybil thought. She couldn’t decide if she minded or was glad.

  It was becoming light when the party ended and Powell handed Sybil into the cart for the journey home. Chamberlain, who had drunk a lot of punch, sank against an old saddle in the back. He was asleep before they reached the gate.

  ‘I hope you enjoyed yourself,’ said Powell.

  ‘Yes, I did,’ said Sybil. It was years since she had danced so much. Her feet ached and she was hungry for sleep but she really had enjoyed the party. More importantly, she had only once thought of Geoffrey Hastings, and that was at the very beginning of the evening when she had glanced down and seen her kid-gloved hand on the sleeve of a man’s jacket.

  ‘I was watching to see you were all right. If you’ll forgive me being personal, you looked as if you were in need of a good time.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Sybil, grateful for the kindness but embarrassed by the remark.

  ‘Life’s not easy for any of us. Most folks seem to carry more sorrows than they say.’

  ‘True,’ said Sybil. ‘But I did enjoy tonight, I really did.’

  The sunrise was sending splinters of light down the gorge by the time they reached the river, each hill outlined in a cuticle of brilliance. The river with its multitude of channels spread out before them. The stones clattered under Meg’s hooves as they made for the first stream.

  ‘We’re lucky the flow’s well down,’ said Powell. ‘Don’t fancy a dip in all our finery. A plunge in the Blackburn certainly wouldn’t do much for your gown.’

  ‘Do you really have to swim sometimes?’ said Sybil.

  ‘Course,’ said Powell. ‘Once I miscalculated, ended up hanging onto the horse’s tail in a huge fresh. Really thought my number was up that day.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me all this about the river before?’ said Sybil.

  ‘’Fraid you wouldn’t have come,’ said Powell. ‘Anyway, it’s not important: flooding doesn’t happen often. Most times it’s like it was last night or this morning. No bother at all — water only up to Meg’s fetlock.’

  They passed through the river channels easily. Maybe, Sybil thought, as the cart joggled along in the unfolding light, maybe she would not just endure; maybe she would eventually be happy.

  Chapter 12

  Geoffrey would be furious if he saw her, but Huia told herself she didn’t care. She had left the house wearing her full riding habit. Her high black hat gleamed from brushing; a net veil covered her face becomingly. At the livery stables, much to the shock and delight of the stablehands, she had removed the skirt of her habit, exposing the tight suede breeches that were de rigueur to wear beneath. She said she would ride astride. The issue of Huia’s riding had been a constant source of irritation between her and Geoffrey. Though Huia enjoyed the elegance of the aside seat, she wanted to adopt it only sometimes; while Geoffrey, along with the rest of polite society, insisted that it was the only way a lady could respectably ride. Huia, unused to the constraints of a side saddle, found it restrictive and inhibiting. It denied her the freedom and wild exhilaration she craved.

  Huia galloped down the beach along the wet sand feeling miserable. These days Geoffrey hardly noticed her except to disapprove. He was drinking too much and she didn’t know how to stop him. ‘It’s no concern of yours,’ he’d say angrily when she suggested he’d had enough.

  When Huia and Geoffrey got married she’d believed that as long as she was pretty he would love her. She remembered the afternoon just before the wedding when she’d found Vanessa’s evening dress. Geoffrey had been in a foul mood all day, shut up with some old photograph albums. Huia had thought the dress would surprise and charm him. She had brushed her hair until her arm ached, and perfumed herself with Essence of Spring Violets, which she found in Vanessa’s drawer. She was the alluring Lillie Langtry as she swung into the drawing room. Huia knew now that it had been a childish mistake to wear Vanessa’s old dress but even later, when she wore her own clothes and tried to make herself as beautiful and fashionable as possible, Geoffrey didn’t seem to see her. Other men did. Huia was grateful for the smiles and winks, whistles and catcalls that came her way as she went about the town. And then there was Oliver, her pepe. She loved the child but looking after him frightened her. When he was very small she was terrified of even touching him, certain he would break when she picked him up. She hated it when he cried and she didn’t know how to make him stop. Ruby the nursemaid and Geoffrey seemed to understand Oliver. Huia was distant and uncertain. She felt Geoffrey considered her no good as a mother. She thought he must be right.

  There was a man on the sand between the breakers and the heaps of driftwood, some distance off. Huia could see him stretching and bending, and lifting his knees up to his chin as if running on the spot. The man appeared to be wearing his undergarments — a vest and long Johns. Huia thought that odd and wondered if perhaps this was some lunatic escaped from the asylum. She slowed Fleur so she could watch without getting too close. The man was blond and well proportioned, his shoulders wide, his hips slight, but the most surprising thing was the contours of his arms and legs. His thighs and upper arms bulged and rippled with muscle. Huia rode closer.

  The man shook the hair out of his face as he looked up. It was Stan Birtwistle.

  ‘Huia Bluett,’ he said. ‘Well, I’m buggered.’

  ‘Huia Hastings now. I’m married.’

  ‘And doing rather well, I reckon.’

  Huia pulled her feet out of the stirrups and jumped to the ground. At the sight of her tight suede breeches Birtwistle let out a low whistle.

  ‘Why are you here in the middle of the day, skylarking about in your underclothes?’ said Huia.

  ‘Exercising, body sculpting,’ said Birtwistle. ‘I’m a weightlifter, a circusan, member of McCaskey’s Royal Variety Troupe. Also much in demand for living statues — supposed to be just a foil for the body-stockinged ladies but the wives and little tarts nearly piss their pants at the sight of a nice bit of male muscle, not to mention the nancy boys.’

  ‘What happened to the bushwhacking?’

  ‘Long gone. Vaudeville’s much better. More hoot, less yakka and the girls go mad for you. Just here getting up a new show and then we’ll be off. My word, Hu, it’s bloody good to see you.’

  ‘You threw me over,’ said Huia.

  ‘Had to, or the missus would have found out.’

  ‘Missus?’ said Huia. ‘Didn’t know you were married.’

  ‘Not any more. Bitch took the kids and ran off to Sydney with a fucking sewing-machine salesman.’

  ‘I’ve still got the soldier’s cap you gave me.’

  Birtwistle laughed. ‘And you’re still a bloody fine-looking sheila. This Hastings is a lucky bastard. What about a kiss, Hu, for old times�
� sake?’

  He didn’t wait for an answer. He caught Huia by the arm with one hand and bent her head back with the other. Her hat and veil fell into the sand. Huia felt a moment of sweet recognition at the smell of Birtwistle’s sweat. The kissing, too, especially the fierce way he struck her mouth with his lips and slid his tongue relentlessly forward.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said, wriggling out of his grasp and glancing back along the beach towards the town. Some distance off a boy — was it PJ? — was foraging around among the driftwood, and further still two figures were dragging something heavy towards the port.

  ‘People might see,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I’m married.’

  ‘And what does the lord and master think of you running about dressed like that?’ said Birtwistle.

  ‘None of your business,’ said Huia, picking up her fallen hat.

  ‘Just curious.’

  ‘I’d better be off,’ said Huia, again glancing up the beach to the town.

  ‘Already?’ said Birtwistle. ‘You’ve only just arrived.’

  Huia didn’t reply as she swung herself up onto Fleur’s saddle.

  ‘But I’ll see you again, Hu. I’ll be here in Hoki for a bit, same time, same place.’

  ‘What makes you think I’ll be back?’

  ‘You will.’

  PJ, who was supposed to be tidying Geoffrey’s studio, had spread a pile of photographs out on the table. They were of Lake Tarepo, and PJ was arranging the images according to which he liked best. The boy had never seen Lake Tarepo or any of the South Westland lakes but the way each image was subtly different, taken from a different angle, interested him. He examined each picture minutely before consigning it a place.

  Geoffrey came into the room. It was two in the afternoon and he had just got up.

  ‘The light, PJ,’ said Geoffrey, putting his hands to his eyes.

  ‘Got a desperate head, Mr Hastings?’ said PJ, pulling the curtains over.

  ‘Yes,’ said Geoffrey.

  ‘Do yiz want some tay?’ said PJ. ‘Couldn’t I go and ask Joan for a drop?’

  ‘Not just now,’ said Geoffrey.

  PJ liked working for Geoffrey. The photographer’s craft fascinated him. The darkroom, the props, the chemicals, even the cameras themselves seemed possessions of a sorcerer rather than a tradesman. The photographic images were a constant source of wonder to the boy. The way Mr Hastings used light to capture likenesses on paper was an act of pure magic.

  Living in Hokitika was grand, PJ thought. There was none of the panic he’d felt up at the store in the bush, or the difficulties and confusion of sharing a house with Maeve and Arthur Pascoe. Hokitika was a town: there were streets and pavements and shops and people; comfortingly familiar human things stood between him and the terrifying, empty bush and white, fang-like mountains. In the house at Simpson’s Bridge PJ had never felt comfortable. He’d had a constant feeling of intruding, of not really being wanted, of never being sure if he were friend or employee. In Hokitika he was the delivery and odd-job boy; Mr Hastings was the boss, fair but distant. PJ ate in the kitchen and slept on an old iron bed in a converted shed in the yard. The boy spent the day in the studio or running about the town delivering messages. In his free time he mooched about the seashore behind the wooden warehouses. PJ liked the beach. He would look at the huge folding breakers and the distant horizon and think of Ireland. The breezes that floated up at him off the ocean were the same winds that touched the fields and little lanes of home. The thought comforted PJ. Most times he went beach-raking for the bits and pieces washed up from the numerous boats sunk coming into port, or hunting out small bits of driftwood that he carved with a penknife the Pascoes had given him.

  PJ found Huia, with her elaborate bustled dresses and strange New Zealand speech, somewhat perplexing, but he seldom saw her. Oliver was a different matter: PJ would take the child and carry him around the yard while Ruby hung out the washing. He laughed and tickled the baby when Oliver was brought down to the studio, and carved boats out of bits of stick for the toddler’s bath.

  ‘Jaysis, I’m on the pig’s back,’ PJ would say to himself when he considered his new life, but even as he said it there was always a niggle of doubt. He missed Ireland in a way he could neither explain nor understand. When the men spilled out of the pub across the road and hung about under the light drunkenly singing ‘I’ll take you home again, Kathleen’, or ‘The Minstrel Boy’, PJ would open the door of his room to listen, tears in his eyes.

  ‘Aren’t I a proper amadaun for minding?’ he’d say to dead Mick. ‘Would it be a terrible class of a thing to go back one day, when your mammy, God rest her, gave all her money to get me here?’ But though PJ posed the question night after night, Mick never answered. There were only the sounds of the street and the more distant sighs of the sea.

  Geoffrey sat at his desk, fiddling with a ruler and watching PJ as the child dusted the skirting boards at the far end of the room. When first asked by Arthur Pascoe if he would employ the lad, Geoffrey had been evasive. There seemed enough problems in his life already without adding an illiterate eleven-or twelve-year-old — the child wasn’t sure — Catholic foundling, of Fenian views, to his household. In the end Geoffrey employed the boy purely as a favour to his friends.

  PJ was singing very softly under his breath as he flicked the feather duster about. Geoffrey strained to hear the words, which he recognised as something his nurse used to sing:

  Then according to promise at midnight I rose

  And found nothing there but the down-folded clothes,

  The sheets they were empty, as plain as you see,

  And out of the window with another went she.

  Listening to the half-whispered song Geoffrey could again see the virginal Irish light, jewelled fields and timid blue sky of home. Yet there was no way he could take Huia to County Kildare to parade his indiscretion and unhappiness before his family. He imagined his mother, Elizabeth, drawing back her shoulders and fiddling with her amethyst brooch as she looked Huia up and down. ‘A disaster, an unmitigated disaster. Not only appallingly common but the girl’s obviously some sort of native as well,’ Elizabeth Hastings would say later — privately, of course — to Geoffrey’s father, William. Geoffrey could see his parents standing in the window of their bedroom, his mother fixing the ends of William’s black bow-tie.

  ‘Bit of a problem out there in the colonies, I suppose — can’t be too many women of the right sort about, but good Lord, thought my son could have done better than this …’ His father’s words would trail off.

  Geoffrey was not willing to go back home alone, leaving Oliver behind, and he could hardly take the child without the mother. I’m caught, he thought, for the thousandth time. A mouse in a trap, a sheep in a thicket. There’s no way forward and no way back and no one except myself to blame.

  ‘Did yiz know, Mr Hastings, that a few years ago there was the cross up at the cemetery here in Hokitika — a sort of pretend tomb for the Irish Fenian martyrs of 1867?’ said PJ, pausing with his duster and breaking in on Geoffrey’s thoughts.

  ‘Yes,’ said Geoffrey coolly, ‘I did know.’

  ‘Seems grand somehow that though they were hanged in England, they’d be remembered way out here,’ said PJ.

  ‘I wish to God they weren’t. Ireland’s got enough problems without exporting them around the world. And … I think you’d better understand, PJ, I have little sympathy for Fenianism, or idolising people who kill in the name of so-called Irish independence, either here or at home.’

  ‘Are yiz telling me that then?’ said PJ, rubbing the doorknob fiercely with his duster.

  Geoffrey put his head in his hands and wondered if he had been right to agree to take the boy on. In some ways PJ was a real asset, always cheerful, bright and willing, but Geoffrey had seen the agitators at work in Ireland — the rick burnings, cattle maimings, the threats and violence against landlords — and it sickened him. Maeve Pascoe had once let slip that her brother had di
ed in a Fenian raid with PJ present, and on several occasions Geoffrey himself had noticed the boy talking with the crowd outside the Harp of Erin: drunken miners and navvies, men from Tipperary, Kerry and Cork who bawled Irish rebel songs like ‘God Save Ireland’ and traded insults and blows with some of the town’s more belligerent Ulster Protestants. If Geoffrey had been really honest, which he wasn’t, he’d have admitted that he didn’t really trust working-class Irish Catholics — ‘the native Irish’, as his parents called these people. Deep down he felt there was a dishonesty about them, despite their ‘No, mister’, ‘To be sure, mister’. There was always the feeling that something sinister, something you didn’t entirely understand, was simmering behind your back. Geoffrey had hoped that in New Zealand these things would not exist but Hokitika was full of such Irishmen; now he had one in his own house.

  ‘I won’t have you mixing with Fenian troublemakers,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Any whiff of that and you’re dismissed.’

  PJ said nothing, though he had stopped rubbing the doorknob.

  ‘Do you hear me?’ said Geoffrey.

  ‘Sure, I do,’ said PJ.

  ‘And?’ said Geoffrey, standing up.

  ‘Don’t I know, Mr Hastings, that we’re not of the same persuasion,’ said PJ. ‘But I can’t make a promise like that, though if yiz want me to go now, I will.’

  Geoffrey looked at him and thought how small and vulnerable the boy seemed with his ragged hair, uncollared shirt and oversized trousers — cast-offs from Arthur Pascoe, no doubt.

  ‘No, PJ, I don’t want you to leave,’ said Geoffrey, touched by the boy’s appearance and spirit. ‘Just keep away from all this nationalist mischief and don’t spend so much time hanging about outside the Harp of Erin. I don’t trust those people — they’re no good.’