The Love Apple

by Coral Atkinson

  ‘PJ!’ called Rosaleen, waving over the banisters as she came down the stairs with her parents.

  ‘Shush, Rosie!’ said her father. ‘Keep your voice down.’

  PJ pushed his way through the crowd to where the family was standing. ‘Good evening, Mr and Mrs Pascoe, Miss Rosaleen. Wasn’t it a grand occasion?’

  ‘I think Mr Dillon’s the best gentleman I’ve ever seen,’ said Rosaleen.

  ‘Do you indeed?’ said Maeve Pascoe, smiling.

  ‘We’re staying at a hotel,’ said Rosaleen to PJ. ‘There are blue velvet curtains with gold silk tassels in the dining room and you get crumpets for afternoon tea.’ She turned to her father. ‘Can PJ come and have supper with us at the hotel?’

  There was a moment’s hesitation before Arthur replied. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘We’d be delighted.’

  PJ, sensing the lack of enthusiasm, said, ‘Thanks very much but I think I need a walk. Need to clear my head.’

  ‘Supper indeed,’ said Maeve Pascoe. ‘’Tis straight into bed for you, young lady.’

  PJ walked home alone. Not that he felt alone. The street was still full of people and camaraderie was in the air. Everyone he knew in the town seemed to be abroad and keen to have a word. Groups stood about gossiping and Irish songs were sung inside and out of public houses. Hope filled the warm evening like a huge flower. Home Rule would come: with men like Dillon fighting for it in the British Parliament, how could it fail? Ireland would be free at last. But that was not all. The visit of the Irish delegation had brought a sense of connectedness, of belonging. The universal fear in immigrant hearts of being forgotten, dead to their land and their people, was stilled.

  ‘If you could have seen himself,’ PJ said to the dead Mick Sullivan, as the lad lay in bed that night and thought of the evening. ‘Mr John Dillon, MP, up there on the platform before my very eyes. He’s a great man, Mick, a great man. Not a fighter like you, Mick, but a country needs them talkers as much as the fighters.’

  PJ thought of that night nearly ten years ago in County Wicklow when he, child that he was, had insisted on going out with Mick and the Fenians to steal weapons from the Butler house. In the moonlight with Mick, so steady and sure, it had seemed like a magnificent game, he and Mick tossing guns out the window to the waiting men below. And then … the dog barking, the wild dash, the man in the military overcoat on top of a nightshirt and the sound of shots. Mick writhing in the bushes. Dying. PJ rent by horror, not knowing if he should run or stay.

  ‘Sure, you wouldn’t think I’ve forgotten, Mick,’ said PJ. ‘And one day I’ll be back to take over what you didn’t get finished.’

  He blew out the candle, turned over and immediately slept. He dreamed of the hedgerow at Ballyderry and the nameless scampering animals that called it home.

  Chapter 16

  The dark was still and absolute. A point of light brushed a gauzy figure. The brightness took on a swirling motion, and the notes of the piano swelled in the gloom.

  Hale, the boy who managed the limelight, turned up the oxyhydrogen torch. A daub of brilliance illuminated the stage with its glittering backdrop of stars and silver moon. Perched on the crescent was a woman, her breasts plumped over her tight, shimmering bodice, her skirt scandalously short to show off her stockinged legs and satin pumps. The audience sucked in its breath and then, as if on a signal, began to clap, to stamp, to cheer. For there in the newly erected hall, smiling directly into the eyes of each one of them, was Princess Huia of Maoriland: Every Man’s Daring Darling.

  It was immediate seduction. In that tiny fragment of time, when the potential ‘no’ becomes ‘yes’, Huia was as the audience saw her — holding each gaze, embodying all desire. The fact that the dazzling tunic was soiled from frequent wearing, that some of the sequins had fallen off, that the hooks and eyes had made small rust marks all the way down the back, that there were sweat marks at the armpits, that underneath the pale tights Huia’s thighs and buttocks were a mass of bruises gathered from practising a new trick, that her corset was laced spiflicatingly tightly, and that the red fire in her hair was in reality powdered paprika, were all as nothing. In that instant Huia was sweetheart, enchantress, siren, queen. It was the moment she lived for.

  No one could say she had arrived there easily. McCaskey, remembering the popularity of scantily dressed ladies swinging overhead in the bordellos and honky-tonk halls of the American west, had taught Huia to use the trapeze.

  ‘Sit on the swing,’ McCaskey had said. ‘Lie back. Now let go with one hand and grab the hanging cord with your feet.’

  Huia did as directed.

  ‘Now swing, star-shaped.’

  Huia would never forget the moment. The fear. The wild pleasure. She set herself to learn with fierce determination. Her shoulders ached; the palms of her hands were covered in blisters. She could scarcely handle a needle to sew.

  ‘Don’t know why you bother,’ said Mademoiselle Ida as the two women sat on the threadbare carpet of the boarding-house bedroom mending costumes. ‘Kicking’s hard enough, God knows, but at least dancers are real artistes. Knocking yourself out so you can swing about like a monkey is not my idea of art or fun. And look at your hands, Hu — they’re like old sandpaper. Take it from me, men like a nice pair of hands.’

  ‘And you’d know, of course,’ said Huia, who had her suspicions about Ida and Birtwistle.

  ‘No need to be personal,’ said Ida. ‘Just offering friendly advice.’

  ‘I like trapeze,’ said Huia. ‘Pain, bruises, dry hands, who cares? I’m going to be good. Very good. I’m going to be famous.’

  ‘Doesn’t everyone think they’re Christmas when they start?’

  ‘The boss says I’m good enough for the swinging trapeze now. He’s going to get me on one when we get to Nelson.’

  ‘Skite,’ said Ida, her mouth full of pins.

  At first Huia had learnt on the simple static trapeze McCaskey rigged up for her in hall or tent. In her free time she would hang the tackle off a tree limb and practise there as well. She loved the sensation of running, catching, swinging. The dizzying kiss of air and colour as the world flew past. She invented tricks for herself: somersaults, splits, swinging upside down. McCaskey, seeing she was ready for more challenging work, got a blacksmith to make a swinging trapeze. Huia liked this even better. The weights on the ends of the bar moved the trapeze with satisfying gusto. Rigged high over the audience, Huia learned to pump the bar so hard it would swing far out. She could soar about, throwing a garter, hanging from one hand, dangling upside down. Audiences loved her and their appreciation spurred Huia on to greater daring and new tricks.

  ‘Watch me, Ma!’ Huia whispered, as she did whenever she performed, for though she hadn’t seen her mother since childhood, she liked to imagine that Florrie was still close. Ready to watch and smile and say, ‘Aren’t you a right wee tearaway’, just as when Huia had done a somersault or walked on her hands as a child.

  Huia began to dance. Slowly at first, then faster and faster. She liked dancing: it warmed her up, stretched her muscles, got her in the mood. She grasped the swath of silk at the side of the stage and climbed it as if it were a rope. Pausing halfway up, she did a couple of splits, turned and waved. Then it was onto the platform and the trapeze swing. One, two, three, Huia pumped the bar back and forwards. In the wings McCaskey gave the drum roll and Huia swung forward over the audience, out into the darkness. A blaze of white light followed her as she went.

  The hall was solidly packed with men in working gear and only a sprinkling of women and children. Vaudeville, with its coarse jokes and scantily clad performers, was not respectable entertainment for the young or the female, and anyway Frampton, like most mining towns, was a brawny, masculine little place. It had been hacked out of the bush in the ’60s as a gold settlement and forsaken a few years later when the precious stuff ran out. After nearly ten years’ abandonment, the discovery that gold was still present and could be water-blasted from rock brought th
e settlement back to life. Men whose fathers had sluiced solitary claims in surrounding hills came back to bully the land with high-pressure hoses. Shops, livery stables, churches were built, and for entertainment and enlightenment there was a newly erected hall.

  In the front row a small boy wearing a large white lace-collared Fauntleroy blouse and bare feet was sitting on his father’s knee. Huia smiled at the man and the child and blew them a kiss. She thought of Oliver. He would be that age now, she supposed. What was he like? Would she ever see him again? When such thoughts came Huia immediately banished them, though sometimes, on the cusp of sleep when determination was weakened, she would remember the freckles on Oliver’s arm or the way he used to poke out his tongue, just a little, when he was thinking. The recollections made her sad but she refused to humour them. Princess Huia, the leading lady of McCaskey’s company, had other things to do. Hadn’t McCaskey even changed the name of his troupe to accommodate her act? The word ‘Flying’ was added to the Royal Variety name. And wasn’t she really, truly ‘every man’s daring darling’? She herself had seen admirers fighting over her, smashing each other’s faces with bare knuckles, and wasn’t she met by men with wilted posies and offers of dinner and champagne at makeshift stage doors and tent flaps up and down the country? Huia accepted the flowers, ate the dinners, drank the wine and responded to the men’s advances as it suited her, her desperate longing, her famished hunger for kisses and holding gone. When she occasionally opened her door and her thighs to Birtwistle or other admirers it was to humour a whim rather than satisfy a need. Huia’s real lovers were collective. Hanging from the trapeze swing high above eager rows of lustful male faces, or leaping through the air, danger undiminished by safety net or harness, brought her a thump of excitement and satisfaction far superior to any sticky bodily imperatives.

  Once, after Huia became known as a variety performer, her father came to see her. In the years she was married and lived in Hokitika, Alf Bluett had made only a single visit.

  ‘You did all right for yourself, girlie,’ he had said, looking around Geoffrey’s drawing room with its ornate mahogany face protector and heavy gilt mirror. ‘But don’t take any lip from her, mind, Mr Hastings. A good hiding never did her any harm.’

  Huia was performing in Westport when Bluett came to her lodgings. Returning to the dimly lit boarding-house hall after a rehearsal, Huia noticed a man sitting on the cabin trunk by the stairs. ‘Hu,’ the stranger said, grabbing her arm. She turned and saw it was her father. He looked thin. Shrivelled.

  ‘Da,’ said Huia.

  ‘Hear you’re making a bob or two,’ said Bluett. ‘Though don’t think I bloody approve of you leaving your husband and running around the country showing your knickers like a whore.’

  Huia went to walk on.

  ‘A minute,’ said Bluett, as he tightened his grip. ‘I’m your father. At least you can pass the time of day with me.’

  ‘Fat lot of good as a father you ever were,’ said Huia.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Bluett, ‘but I’m not here about bygones.’

  ‘What do you want, then?’ said Huia. ‘Can’t imagine you coming all this way just to see me.’

  ‘Always had a nasty tongue, didn’t you?’ said Bluett.

  ‘Wonder where it came from?’ said Huia.

  ‘Look, Hu, I didn’t come here to quarrel. I’ve been sick: had to lie up for months; still no bloody good.’

  ‘Seen a doctor?’ said Huia.

  ‘Don’t be daft. Where would I get the money? Anyway, the bloody quacks just make you worse. The truth is I’m on my uppers, and feeling bloody crook. Say, Hu, could you lend me a few quid, just till I’m on my feet?’

  ‘Money,’ said Huia. ‘That’s why you came. I should have guessed.’

  ‘Be a sport, Hu. You owe me something. I brought you up, didn’t I?’

  ‘You beat and bullied me and drove my mother away. I worked and worked for you and you gave me nothing, nothing at all. You threw my gloves down the dunny. Maybe I could forgive all the rest but I’ll never forgive you that.’

  ‘Aw, Hu. I’m a bloody sick man.’

  Huia put her hand in her reticule and took out her purse. She had a ten-shilling note in it. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘That’s it — all you’re getting — and if you ever come near me again I’ll call the police.’

  Bluett took the money and went out the front door: a thin, shabby cut-out against the light. He looked old, though she knew he was still nearer forty than fifty. She marvelled that he was the man who once terrified her, that she had ever felt frightened of him. Huia watched Bluett go down the path to the gate. She had no doubt that her father was ill, dying maybe. She never wanted to see him again. Never. But the thought of his death made her unaccountably sad.

  Huia removed a sequined garter from her leg and tossed it into the crowd. A man caught it and held it to his lips. The audience cheered.

  Maybe, Huia thought, it was all becoming too easy. Maybe it was time she left McCaskey’s troupe and these sodden, muddy settlements. She was tired of performing to cloddish audiences in the backblocks, tired of scolding Hale for the careless way he strung the riggings for her act. She should move on. To Australia, America maybe. Huia knew she was good and getting better. Hadn’t her routine been described by a goldfields newspaper as ‘being like watching an exquisite flying pendant’? She would be the greatest aerialist of her time.

  ‘She smiled at me. The moon lady likes me,’ the boy said. His words went unheard in the din.

  Huia pushed her legs through the bar and swung upside down. At this point she always pulled the pins from her hair and let it fall. The crowd roared.

  ‘Seems Frampton loves you,’ said Birtwistle, dressed in tiger-skin, as Huia came down the ladder in the wings. Birtwistle’s strongman act was billed immediately after the Flying Moon dance.

  ‘They always love me,’ said Huia as she passed.

  There was a thunder of boots stamped on the wooden floors. Huia waited until the noise reached a crescendo — no point in wasting anticipation and reappearing too soon — and then, as she did whenever she performed, she ran back on the stage blowing kisses.

  Birtwistle watched as she began her well-rehearsed encore. Huia’s success and her popularity with men incensed him. It also made her enormously desirable. Later that evening he would be outside the door of Huia’s lodgings, begging to be allowed in her bed. ‘Fucking bitch,’ he said, unable to turn away.

  When Geoffrey Hastings looked at his tomato plants he imagined himself as God on the sixth day, being very well pleased. Geoffrey had no regrets about buying Wharenui and extending the glasshouses into a small commercial operation. He enjoyed the challenge and the newness of it all. There was still a great deal of distrust and lack of enthusiasm for tomatoes. People said they were dangerous, poisonous even, that they must be treated with caution, boiled rather than eaten raw. Many ordinary folk wouldn’t touch them. But even in New Zealand tomatoes had their aficionados. Geoffrey had built up a small clientele, some of the high-class gentlemen’s clubs, a few hotels with foreign chefs and an increasing group of travelled people who had tasted the luscious red fruit in France, Italy and Spain and never forgotten it. Getting the tomatoes around the country was the worst problem: often there was no alternative but to pick them green. It was not ideal but it served.

  Geoffrey considered his vines dripping with ruby fruit and thought of how the tomato and the potato had both come from the Americas, their potential seized on by rapacious conquistadors. Once in Europe, however, the history of the two crops had been very different. The potato, so humble and nourishing, quickly became staple fare for the poor, especially in Ireland, while the tomato, like some flamboyant outsider, hung about on the verges of respectability for generations.

  Geoffrey felt an absurd sense of gratitude towards his tomato plants. The destruction of his home and business and the departure of Huia had finished one period of his life. It had also — so far — brought an end to his
drinking. He had looked at Oliver in the hospital, the child’s face a scarlet, screaming disk, his baby arms covered in bandages over his burns, and vowed never to touch alcohol again. Without the interest and challenge of the tomato growing Geoffrey was sure he would have reneged. Now when he yearned for the seduction of brandy, as he still did, he would open one of the books on tomato cultivation that he had ordered from England or Australia, or go for a walk in his glasshouses. Geoffrey loved the spiky scent of tomatoes and the Hand of Fatima-shaped leaves. In season he would wander amid the foliage admiring the voluptuous trusses of fruit, marvelling at the heavy yield of his plants.

  He picked a ripe ‘Large Red’ tomato and held it in his hand. There was something deeply satisfying about its plump flesh and the way it fitted his palm. It was Saturday afternoon, a half day, and neither the head gardener, Sandy Ludlow, nor the other labourers were at work. PJ and Oliver were up at Simpson’s Bridge with the wagon.

  Geoffrey sat on a pile of spare timber, took his penknife from his pocket and sliced open the tomato. The sphere divided like parts of an ornate casket. He picked a segment and put it in his mouth. Warm from the sun, succulent and sweet, it tasted of perfection. Geoffrey looked out the slightly clouded windows of the glasshouse at the shrubbery and well-maintained lawns that stretched to the house. In the distance he could see the mountains, white as well-rinsed porcelain. There are times like this, he thought, when a man ought to be happy. But he wasn’t. Geoffrey thought of how it would be when he went back indoors. Wharenui’s interior, its woody breath, the glass door throwing blisters of light on the floor at the end of the hall, and empty silence. It was an elaborate kennel to crawl into; there was no joy there.

  Geoffrey thought of Huia and felt the familiar fury. Not the bright, bile-filled rage of the early days but a deeper, dull anger at being tied to this woman; shackled, he liked to think. He could eventually get a divorce — ample grounds, of course — but he had no stomach for the church’s condemnation or the scandal, and what was the point, when no respectable woman would ever consider marriage to a divorced man? Huia’s desertion had condemned him to a life of limbo, neither bachelor nor married man. Hope she breaks her bloody neck, he said to himself.