The Love Apple

by Coral Atkinson

  ‘I’ll just take it as it is,’ Geoffrey said.

  There had been a row, one of many. Huia was heavily pregnant, and refusing to disguise it with the conventional soft-falling sacque bodices or forgiving wraps that most women wore. Worse, as far as Geoffrey was concerned, was her insistence on walking about the town in that state, something only the wives and women of the roughest of working men — day labourers, fish-gutters, night-soil collectors — did. Poor women forced by circumstance to go about: women who clutched old-fashioned cloaks or their husband’s second-hand overcoats across their swollen bodies, in an attempt at modesty.

  Geoffrey had been in the office of the livery stables settling an account. He had raised his head from the invoice he was reading to see Huia going past on the street, her pregnant shape very obvious under her velvet costume.

  ‘Hope she doesn’t drop it,’ Geoffrey heard one of the lads in the yard say.

  ‘Easier to get in than get out,’ another replied. There was bawdy laughter.

  Geoffrey had gone home embarrassed and angry. ‘Humiliated’, ‘No sense of decency,’ he fumed at Huia.

  ‘Decency?’ Huia shouted. ‘You’re the one. Going on as if shit wouldn’t melt in your mouth. You liked putting me up the duff well enough, and now you’re playing sourpuss and want no one seeing. What’s wrong with them knowing, anyway? It’s only a baby.’

  They had slept, at first angrily turned away from each other, but in the night Geoffrey woke to find his hand on Huia’s stomach. Her nightdress had ridden up and her belly lay under his touch. Geoffrey began to stroke the taut flesh, thinking of the child, his child, that lay beneath. It was a wonder, a miracle.

  ‘Huia,’ he had said.

  Huia turned sleepily towards him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Geoffrey said. ‘You were right and I was wrong.’

  In the blade of light that fell through the meeting of the curtains, Geoffrey saw Huia smile. He gathered her into his arms, laying his mouth against hers, her stomach pressing full and exciting against his hips. Running his hands over the distended flesh provoked in Geoffrey a delicious fluttering hardening of his sex. He pulled Huia’s nightdress further up and stroked her body: the contours, curves, tucked and hidden places.

  Huia had snuggled close against him, making soft moaning noises. He pushed her onto her side, reaching his hands around her to hold her breasts, satisfyingly solid in his hands. His penis searching, stabbing, quivering with need.

  ‘First say you love me,’ said Huia, suddenly wriggling away.

  ‘I love you,’ Geoffrey said, desire slipping the words out readily enough.

  Afterwards, he had heard her crying. It was the next day he had bought the locket.

  In the days after Birtwistle’s visit, Geoffrey hardly spoke. He was most often to be seen in the rowing boat on the lake that bordered Wharenui’s grounds, or walking with staff and rucksack up the Hokitika River into the bush with Banjo, Champ’s successor, at his heel.

  ‘Hope you don’t mind seeing to the place,’ Geoffrey would say to PJ on his brief visits to the office or packing sheds.

  ‘Sure, it’s a pleasure,’ said PJ, who enjoyed acting the boss, keeping things shipshape when Geoffrey was absent. In the early days of the tomato-growing enterprise PJ had felt a certain contempt for the fruit. Compared to the hearty goodness of potatoes, which he regarded as the best part of most meals and the king of crops, the tomato, with its brazen colour and waterlogged flesh, seemed effete and insubstantial — hardly a food at all. Yet as time passed PJ’s prejudice lessened; he’d never much like the old red things himself, but others did and there was no accounting for taste. The parts of the operation PJ did enjoy were using his recently acquired skill as scribe and bookkeeper: turning boxes of tomatoes, carters and buyers, workers and suppliers into neat lists of columns, figures and sums was an absorbing and satisfying trick.

  Poor creature, taking her death hard, PJ thought as he watched Geoffrey, head bowed, walking down the garden path towards the trees.

  Geoffrey pushed his way through the bush with furious impatience. These days he rowed and walked powered by a compulsion to feel air, touch leaf and water. Alone among trees and sky, he fruitlessly sought some code or pattern that absolved guilt and answered why. That morning he had written Oliver a stiff little letter advising the boy of Huia’s death. Geoffrey beat back a frond head that slouched over the path, thinking of the letter’s inadequacies. He felt angry, defeated, doomed. He thought of Vanessa, whom he’d let slip into the river, love and joy now distant as a dream; Huia, pathetic neglected girl whom he’d used and lectured, driven away to death; and Oliver, his only child, deprived of a mother, palmed off with a handful of impotent words: regret, sorry, sympathy.

  Geoffrey decided he hated the bush. The way the vegetation came crowding in, the jealous jostling for space and light, the lack of order and ceaseless fecundity seemed oppressive. The small path he followed had disappeared but Geoffrey pushed on, hacking at the undergrowth, paying scant attention to where he was going. He was thinking of Sybil, thinking of the invitation. The coupled names. He had looked at them over and over: Miss Sybil Percival, Mr Frederick Powell, side by side. Sybil, his Sybil and this, this … farmer. It was not that Geoffrey had ever imagined his own name linked with Sybil on a marriage invitation, but she was his in another way: his one, his only real friend, and she had been taken from him by — and Geoffrey imagined this — some short man with foxy whiskers. He saw the farmer leaning close to Sybil, undoing with mottled hands the ribbon tying on her hat. Sybil was married. Sybil was now Mrs Frederick Powell.

  Geoffrey stopped and looked around in the heavy green dimness. He had no idea where he was or where he should be heading. The river, of which he had previously been aware on his left, had vanished and the canopy of trees was so thick overhead that even the sun was absent. The bush stretched enigmatically on every side.

  ‘Damn,’ said Geoffrey.

  He turned to retrace his steps but after only a few yards he was baffled by the surrounding profusion of ferns, trees and creepers. He was scarcely an hour away from the town and lost as thoroughly as if he had been hundreds of miles from civilisation. Geoffrey walked about, impatient and increasingly fearful. He had heard the stories often enough: tales of missing travellers, skeletons found in unlikely places, men and women who had disappeared among the trees, never to return. Death in the bush was all too common.

  Geoffrey tried not to panic, to keep calm, but fear got the upper hand. He could hear his breath quicken. He slipped on a bank and rolled into a small dell, and picking himself up he hit his head sharply against an overhanging bough. Banjo sniffed about, catching the mood, anxious and uncertain. Geoffrey took out his watch. It was four-thirty; in two hours it would be dark.

  He looked for Banjo. At first he couldn’t see him. Then by a log at some distance he caught the white flash of the dog’s back. He called but Banjo didn’t come, so he set off to where the dog was licking something on the forest floor. A bird’s nest had fallen; one perfect blue egg still lay within it. The others, which were broken, were being eaten by the dog.

  As Geoffrey climbed a pile of logs to get to Banjo he heard something. Behind the sound of the birds was another sound. He listened. Then he pushed forward in the direction it was coming from and there, beyond the foliage, was the glint of running water. He was close to the tributary of the river. He’d be able to follow that. He was safe.

  That night Geoffrey had a dream, or maybe many dreams. He was again in the bush but the trees were no longer trees. Every bough and branch was a human limb, wrapped and coiled and clutching another. Male and female, breasts and bellies swayed and groped, thrust and joined in some cosmic copulation. Geoffrey woke in a lather of agitation, his hands fiercely clutching the sheets, his body rigid with sexual hunger.

  In the years that Huia had been absent Geoffrey had lived in a state of resigned celibacy that had grown less painful as time went on. Now he was gripped and torme
nted. He saw Huia, hands in the air, pulling a nightdress over her naked body; he remembered her putting on a corduroy and patent leather boot and how her stockinged foot had curved inward as she slid it forward; he saw the lavender crease in her arm where the elbow bent, and the way her wrists were small and tight. Memory of Vanessa was obscured. It was like an eclipse. He felt sullied. Desperate.

  Geoffrey had known about May Hennessey for years — what man in Hokitika didn’t? But to be on the street outside her rooms contemplating a visit was not something he would ever have envisaged. Yet here he was, waiting for a gap in the pedestrians so he could make a discreet entrance. He had already walked up and down the block several times and thought better of the whole thing at least twice. Part of him wished that some unexpected event — a runaway horse, a pregnant woman going into labour — would suddenly happen in front of him and crisis would offer an alternative. No such emergency intervened. Instead the afternoon was quiet: a single cart rolled past the intersection, a child carrying a large cauliflower partly wrapped in newspaper walked by, and two women who had been outside the butcher’s shop talking about cooking tripe moved off together down the street. It was this or the brandy bottle, Geoffrey thought as he climbed the stairs.

  His hand gripped the porcelain handle and he went in. May was lying on a sofa smoking a cigarette. She was wearing an open-lace turquoise peignoir over a dark brown corset. Her skin was very white and pouched over the rigid confines of her stays, making Geoffrey think of soft cream centres flowing out of chocolate.

  ‘Congratulations!’ May said, smiling. She didn’t get up. ‘Was watching you from the window; didn’t know if you’d make it. You a visitor to Hoki?’

  ‘No,’ said Geoffrey, ‘I live here.’

  ‘First time with a dove that’s just a little soiled about the feathers?’

  Geoffrey nodded. His response wasn’t strictly accurate. There had been another time, at eighteen, in Vienna.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said May, ‘I won’t eat you.’ She laughed. ‘Well, not if you don’t want me to. Now sit down, for heaven’s sake, and stop hovering about. Want a ciggy?’ She held out the box.

  Geoffrey shook his head and sat down.

  ‘Business first,’ said May, getting up and moving over to him. ‘The ordinary, common or garden you-know-what for the likes of you is a pound. Fancies are an extra ten bob, though I have my standards and it depends if I like you.’

  Geoffrey nodded.

  ‘Come now,’ she said, catching Geoffrey’s head under the chin and raising it with her fingers. ‘You don’t have to stay, sweetheart, if you don’t want to. It’s meant to be pleasure, though with some of you blokes you’d never guess.’

  The touch of May’s hands on Geoffrey’s face, the closeness of her soft, confined flesh, the heady mixture of her smell of lily of the valley, tobacco and female sweat was exciting. Geoffrey felt agitated, feverish, his body quick with desire. He wanted to fall on this woman, feel her flesh under him. To plunge himself into her. To forget everything in the oblivion of the act.

  ‘Now,’ he said.

  May didn’t answer.

  She pulled him towards the bed, dropping her tea gown as she went. Geoffrey tore at his clothing, opening only what was necessary. He threw himself heavily on May, pushing himself into her with all his force.

  It didn’t take long. Geoffrey gave two fragmented cries and rolled on his back. May stroked his hair as if he were a sick child.

  ‘Better?’ she said.

  Geoffrey felt as if he had just been dragged off the bottom of the sea. Limp and breathless.

  ‘There’s something wrong, isn’t there?’ said May, sitting up on one elbow. ‘You’re mad at someone or something. I can always tell when a fellow hacks at me like that.’

  ‘I apologise,’ said Geoffrey.

  ‘Forget it,’ said May. ‘Isn’t that what I’m here for?’

  Geoffrey looked at the ceiling.

  ‘You want her and she’s not having it, or not available.’

  Geoffrey got off the bed and started buttoning his clothing.

  ‘And the lady’s name?’ said May.

  Geoffrey turned. He looked into May’s face. Her eyes were soft. Friendly.

  ‘What’s the lady’s name?’

  Geoffrey had no idea how to answer.

  ‘Mmm,’ said May, patting the bed. ‘You just come right back here. I won’t have my gentlemen bolting.’

  Geoffrey remained where he was. May went to him, pulling him tight against her body, and guided him back to the bed.

  ‘No need for all this bull-in-a-china-shop stuff. Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know.’

  May pushed down her shoulder strap and pulled a plump breast over the top of her corset.

  ‘There,’ she said, guiding Geoffrey’s face to her nipple. ‘Lovely, isn’t it?’

  Her hands fluttered against his skin, stroking and fondling. When Geoffrey tried to push her back on the bed she resisted.

  ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘Soon.’

  It was easy for Geoffrey to wait: the edge gone out of him. He drew his hand up May’s arm and over the plump, ruched flesh at the top of her corset. He tunnelled a finger into her armpit, where hair bunched in a tufty brush.

  May opened the hooks on the front of her stays and her body fell forward, surrounding Geoffrey’s face. Geoffrey kissed the ample flesh and thought of the soda bread he and his sisters used to make illicitly in a pot over the nursery fire. Broken scuds of the new loaf piercingly sweet in his mouth.

  When it was over May pulled a green satin eiderdown from a chair and covered them. Outside there was the clink of drays, the sound of horses, the normal world; here there was only the half-light of the room with the blind down and this soft woman smiling at him, holding him against her perfumed flesh. Geoffrey wanted to stay lying in May’s bed, breathing her scent, thinking of nothing.

  ‘Now,’ May said, lighting another cigarette, ‘with that business over, we can talk. So what’s the story?’

  ‘I’d better go,’ said Geoffrey, opening his eyes. ‘It’s not your concern.’

  ‘Not my concern?’ said May. ‘Didn’t anyone tell you, sonny Jim, that it’s never wise to fuck and run? Something’s buggering you. What?’

  ‘I feel cursed, if you must know.’

  ‘Cursed? That’s a new one, or is it just the toff’s way of saying angry and horny?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Geoffrey.

  ‘What’s so bad that you reckon you’re cursed?’

  ‘Life,’ said Geoffrey. ‘Death, rather; I’ve had two wives.’

  ‘Dead?’

  Geoffrey nodded.

  ‘You think it’s your fault?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Geoffrey. ‘I’m guilty, cursed, condemned.’

  May got out of bed and went to the window, the dazzling red of her hair a garnet halo around her face.

  ‘You know your trouble?’ she said. ‘You whinge too much. Fancy you’re so special you’re being specially punished. Think everything that happens is your own doing. Life, death, love, hate — most of it comes and goes without us. You get what you get, and the good bits see you through.’

  Geoffrey said nothing.

  ‘Things work out — you’ll see,’ May went on as she tied the bow at the neck of her gown. ‘Nothing bad lasts forever.’

  ‘Can’t see much good coming my way,’ said Geoffrey.

  ‘Just as I say, you like being miserable and guilty. Time you bucked up and had more faith or what have you. “Only believe and you will see”, as the Sallies say.’

  ‘Do you really swallow that?’ said Geoffrey.

  ‘Yes,’ said May. ‘In this line of work you’ve got to be hopeful.’

  ‘My first wife. I loved her and she died. The second I didn’t love and she’s dead too. What’s there to be hopeful about in that?’

  ‘Damn all,’ said May, ‘but there’s always another day, another chance. Love isn’t rationed like milk in a billy; there�
�s always more to be had. Every time we lose it we think it’s gone forever but it’s out there all the time. And now you’d better get out of my bed. Other blokes will be waiting.’

  The sun was setting when Geoffrey came down the stairs onto the street. The buildings were extravagantly outlined with light; the air smelt of salt.

  Geoffrey paused for a moment as he unhitched his horse. He watched the people walking past: hurrying home to fried chops, cold offcuts from the Sunday roast, or maybe just bread and jam. He thought about them clutching joy and sadness like invisible parcels. The sweethearts who said yes or no, babies who were ill or getting better, husbands who’d lost or found a job, children proud of a new marble bouncing in a pocket. He felt goodwill and pity for them all.

  He remembered the other time he’d visited a prostitute: it was a recollection he had kept carefully hidden, even from himself. He’d been with two student friends in Vienna. They had hired a victoria and driven about the city, drinking a great deal of champagne, and laughing. Later they’d gone to a brothel full of obese velvet furniture and heavy painted beds. Geoffrey found himself in such a bed with a woman whose false teeth clacked and who insisted on dabbing at his body with a cold green fluid that she poured onto a cloth from a bottle. He had felt sick and revolted. It was only youthful ardour that made performance possible. He still remembered his urgent desire to escape as soon as it was over, the sharp, seemingly endless, steep stairs he had run down, and sitting in the gutter vomiting over the mauve petals from some flowering tree.

  In later years he had felt enormous guilt for what happened in Vienna. He now wondered why. If sin was commensurate with pleasure, he was innocent, though in that case he supposed he should feel remorse about his visit to May. He didn’t.

  A man on a cart passed him. ‘Fine evening,’ the man said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Geoffrey, looking about. ‘A very fine evening.’

  In the east the mountains had retreated into darkness. The sky over the sea was still alive with light.

  Book 4