[WAR, 1900]
At the turn of the century, war is the topic on minds and lips. War against the Boers. South Africa, mission field for dedicated evangelists, home of improbable-looking black people and even more improbable animals, a place too far away in imagination to consider seriously, has suddenly leapt to familiarity and prominence. In a matter of weeks, names like the Transvaal, Kimberley and Ladysmith have suddenly taken on the intimacy of neighbouring West Coast settlements, rolling off tongues with the same easy intonation as Kumara, Reefton or Springs Junction. Almost overnight the attempt by a group of Dutch settler-farmers to challenge the British Empire has grown from a distant and confusing quarrel about gold, citizenship and the right to self-government to a personal struggle between every New Zealander and these faraway farmers of the veldt.
New Zealand, desperate to be the keenest, most willing and energetic of the empire’s obedient children, has dashed troops off to join the fray with passionate speed. Now, four months into the war, the presence of ‘our boys’ fighting and dying under the fierce African sun is a matter of pride for most New Zealanders. The citizens of Simpson’s Bridge are no exception.
Arthur Pascoe, now a leading businessman in the town, owner of substantial shares in the Leprechaun goldmine, along with the Brian Boru Hotel and the general store, reads the news of the siege of Ladysmith as he is shaving. The soap from his face spills down his neck, marking the Grey River Argus with a spray of bubbles. In the main street Mrs Burke asks Mr McCarthy how his son is doing ‘out there’ and discusses the best advice to send concerning blisters, while PJ, in front of the Haere Mai Tea and Dining Room, tries to convince a disbelieving Mrs Radford, who has scant time for the Irish, that Lord Kitchener was really born in Kerry.
Chapter 20
On that Sunday morning there was at least one person in Simpson’s Bridge not preoccupied with war. Oliver Hastings — eighteen years old, only weeks out of school — was walking in the water of Sandfly Creek, his new boots hung by their laces around his neck, and thinking of Rosaleen Pascoe. By rights Oliver should have been back at the Pascoes’ house, spooning up porridge and cream from a Mason’s Ironstone bowl or skewering a well-cooked kidney on a fork. But how could he be thinking of breakfast, knowing — or at least surmising — that just down the corridor, Rosaleen would be at that very moment peeling off her nightgown or stepping, all tender pinkness, into her hip bath? The thought was so heady that Oliver leaned against the riverbank, watching his ankles like pale fish in the current.
‘Rosaleen,’ he said aloud. ‘Rosaleen.’
Oliver sloshed on, wondering about the precise moment when liking became love. Was it something you could watch, the way the minute hand of a public clock could sometimes be seen jumping? Or was it different: a gradual suffusion like the changing pastels of sky? However it happened, Oliver was sure there must be a tangible minute when a person was transformed. One moment they were perceived in black and white like a photograph, the next in tinted colour. Oliver had known Rosaleen since he could first remember, but it was as if he had never seen her until yesterday: late afternoon, to be precise.
A few years back, when Oliver’s body first began to make odd, incoherent responses to the fluttering of a female garment or the swaying of a bosom, the sight of Rosaleen provoked no such response. Later, when Oliver began filling his wallet with postcards of women, dresses cascading off pearly shoulders, the portraits were of actresses and music-hall performers, not the girl from Simpson’s Bridge. In those days Rosaleen was just part of Oliver’s life, like a table or chair — something that was comfortably there, not someone you fell in love with.
Oliver had been at the Pascoes’ a few weeks. He was filling in a year working as a clerk in the Leprechaun Mine office before going to Ireland to university. It happened on a Saturday; Oliver and Rosaleen had been playing tennis. Rosaleen had gone indoors to fetch some more balls. Oliver was sitting on a deck-chair trying to rebind the handle of an old tennis racket and idly whistling ‘The Boy I Love is Up in the Gallery’. Rosaleen came out of the kitchen. As she crossed the path, Tibby, the Pascoes’ cat, leapt out of the outdoor meat safe with a trout in her mouth.
‘Help!’ Rosaleen shouted as she chased the cat.
Oliver jumped up and followed her. Tibby headed for the rhododendron dell, still holding the fish. Reaching the fence, the cat sprang to the top and vanished into the flax bushes on the other side. Rosaleen, prevented by the fence from going further, stopped and swung around, laughing. Oliver was behind her.
Then it happened, though Oliver had no idea how. Suddenly he and Rosaleen were holding each other. Kissing. Oliver had never kissed a girl before and in the past, when he’d considered it, he’d wondered how he’d know what to do. When it happened he did know: it was instinct, he thought, like a dog swimming.
Once they started kissing they didn’t seem to be able to stop. It was the most delicious sensation Oliver had ever experienced, his body swinging between one extraordinary state and another without anything familiar in between. It was only Aunt Maeve, coming out and calling for her daughter, who had made them stop.
For the next week Oliver felt as if his head and his feet were unrelated. He was excited, exalted: incapable of eating, working, thinking, sleeping. He was a new person, stronger, kinder, braver. He was wild with happiness and mad with misery.
Oliver was supposed to spend the greater part of each working day in the mine office but he quickly discovered ruses and excuses to get out. His notebook was at home; he needed a draught for a cough; his horse Jimmy had a sore fetlock that demanded attention; a guest at the hotel had a letter that had missed the post — and always somewhere in the midst of these outings there was Rosaleen: to be kissed, spoken with, waved to or looked for. Time only existed between seeing Rosaleen and seeing her again.
Oliver wrote poems and hid them in his blotter; he bought Rosaleen a bunch of pink roses from the travelling Chinese market gardener but threw them behind a hedge when he saw how wilted they’d become between lunch and dinner. Staying with the Pascoes should have made things easier but it didn’t. There were obligations, expectations: the night of the glee club practice, Aunt Maeve and Rosaleen’s weekly Mass, a visiting Scottish engineer who came to dinner. A quick walk or a few minutes’ kissing in the dark corner of the verandah were all the time alone Oliver and Rosaleen got.
Saturday afternoon, Oliver promised himself. So long as it was a fine day, Rosaleen and he would say they were going walking to the Hatter’s Hut.
As soon as the maid had cleared the table, Oliver was up.
‘Excuse me. We’ll have to hurry. Can’t count on the weather.’
They were away before there could be any alternative outings proposed or any suggestions that Aunt Maeve and Uncle Arthur might go along too.
‘What’s the matter?’ said Oliver, taking Rosaleen’s hand in his as soon as they were out of sight of the house. He sensed her mood. It was a worrying silence, rather than her usual laughing and breathless talking.
‘Nothing,’ she said.
‘There is,’ said Oliver. ‘I can feel it.’ He pulled her off the road and went to kiss her.
‘Don’t,’ said Rosaleen.
‘There’s no one coming,’ said Oliver, squinting up and down the track.
‘Still,’ said Rosaleen, ‘I don’t want to.’
‘Why not?’ said Oliver.
‘Don’t know,’ said Rosaleen, drawing a curve in the dust with the tip of her boot.
‘Is something wrong? Have I done something?’
‘No. It’s just …’
‘Just?’
‘I like you, I like you a lot and everything. It’s just …’
‘What?’
‘Changed my mind, I suppose.’
‘There’s someone else,’ said Oliver, feeling as if the floor of his chest had upturned.
‘There is, in a way.’
‘And this someone else — do I know him?’
�
�Yes.’
‘Who?’
‘PJ.’
‘Bloody PJ?’ For a moment Oliver felt he was going backwards in time, though he couldn’t remember to when or where. He’d known, of course, that Rosaleen worshipped PJ as some sort of Irish hero, and to tell the truth it had always made him jealous.
‘I have a sort of — I don’t know, a sort of understanding with PJ.’
‘Why didn’t you say before?’
‘Wasn’t sure, didn’t seem important, got carried away.’
‘It’s ridiculous. You hardly know the man, and he’s ancient.’
‘He’s not, he’s in his thirties, and I do know him. He was my uncle’s friend.’
‘The saintly bloody Fenian. And as for PJ, do you know he came from a workhouse? Hardly knows who his parents were?’
‘What’s wrong with that? It’s no worse than having a mother who runs off to a circus and lives with strange men.’ She hadn’t meant to say it: the words just came.
Oliver looked at her.
‘I’m sorry, Oliver, I really am. I didn’t mean …’ She put her arms around him but he shook her off.
‘Please,’ said Rosaleen, starting to cry. ‘Say it’s all right. I’m sorry, really sorry.’
‘For Christ’s sake, leave me alone,’ said Oliver. ‘Just go home and leave me alone.’
Damn PJ, damn Rosaleen, Oliver thought as he picked up a stick and sent a stone skidding down the road. All the time Rosaleen had been kissing and whispering with him she’d been thinking of PJ. And her vile little gibe about Huia. Oliver felt faintly sick. PJ and Rosaleen. When had it happened? He tried to be calm, tried to think. PJ came to Simpson’s Bridge only occasionally. He’d been there briefly last weekend but Rosaleen hadn’t been out of sight all that time. Before that? It must have been before Christmas. The Christmas party. Oliver remembered PJ dancing with Rosaleen that night. At suppertime hadn’t they been in the shrubbery when he had gone down there with the Nolan sisters? The Christmas party. That was it.
The Pascoes’ Christmas party had taken place on a warm evening husky with the smell of cabbage-tree flowers and bright with the tilly lamps hung around the garden. It was the night of Rosaleen, or so PJ afterwards called it to himself. PJ never forgot that Rosaleen was Mick Sullivan’s niece, and as she grew up she increasingly resembled her uncle. The imprint of one loved face on the other brought PJ feelings of special tenderness for the girl. He had watched Rosaleen for years. As a child she had reminded him of a dimpled pie, with her pale appley-coloured hair and freckled skin. In later years he had come to Simpson’s Bridge less often and his meetings with Rosaleen were infrequent. He remembered how once, when she had been home on holiday from the convent boarding school she attended in Christchurch, he had played a two-person game of hockey with her on the lawn; another time she’d been sitting on the back doorstep brushing her wet hair and PJ had found himself speechless, watching the way the light touched her curls like bits of broken rainbow. But despite the infrequency of their contact, PJ had no doubt about his feelings for Rosaleen. There were, of course, half a dozen other young misses who smiled and tossed and simpered in his direction, but PJ scarcely saw them. He also knew that Rosaleen, with her fairy hair and her father’s social position and financial success, would be much sought-after by men a great deal cleverer and more desirable than himself. Pay no heed to that — aren’t Rosaleen and me meant? PJ told himself, though he’d no idea how such a thing could happen.
As soon as he had received his invitation to the Pascoes’ Christmas party PJ had had a new jacket made and his best shoes repaired where the stitching had come adrift. He also went to ballroom dancing classes — though between mastering the intricacies of the schottische and worrying whether his palms were sweating through his gloves, the experience had been something of a misery. The cost had brought an end to PJ’s sweets purchases for several weeks, too.
Dancing with Rosaleen on the Pascoes’ lawn, as the lamps swung ribbons of light around his head, PJ was certain he’d been amply recompensed. The piano was out on the verandah and Arthur was belting out the ‘Hanky Panky Polka’. Geoffrey Hastings was dancing with Maeve. PJ caught sight of Oliver standing by the punch bowl, laughing. It was a moment of pure happiness: PJ wanted it to go on forever.
They had ices after the set and PJ brought Rosaleen hers. Together they walked down the garden path, spooning the cold red sweetness out of the glass dishes into their mouths on tiny spoons.
‘I never expected you to dance so well,’ said Rosaleen.
‘Would you not want a bar of me if I didn’t?’ said PJ.
‘Can’t tell,’ said Rosaleen. ‘Just didn’t take you for a dancing man.’
They stood under the cabbage trees, screened from the lawn by a topiary hedge clipped in the shape of a moa — a garden decoration that PJ thought peculiar. There was a table beside the gigantic bird. PJ took the ice bowls, put them down and looked at Rosaleen.
‘Do you know what an aisling is?’ he said in a half-whisper.
‘No,’ said Rosaleen, dropping her voice to match, though no one was about.
‘A fairy vision,’ said PJ. ‘That’s what you are.’
Rosaleen smiled.
‘Rosaleen,’ said PJ, suddenly gathered up in some unexpected wave of confidence. ‘Can you …? Do you know what I feel about you?’
Rosaleen shook her head, as if speech would break something.
‘I love you, Rosaleen. I always have, and seeing you tonight, shimmering in that gown, with your hair and all, I have to tell you. I know it’s not proper to say these things, being nothing, having nothing to offer you just yet, but I don’t intend being Mr Hastings’ clerk forever. I’m working hard on my photography and I’m saving. I want to branch out, set myself up, go around the camps and townships doing portraits and postcards, and when I’m something of a man of substance, would it be wrong to think, maybe, that I could ask your father if I could come a-courting?
Rosaleen laughed. ‘PJ, you’re a goose,’ she said. ‘So serious, so proper.’
‘But is there hope, Rosaleen? Haven’t I set my heart on you? If there’s no hope, it’s better to know now. Could you love the likes of me?’
Rosaleen took PJ’s hand in hers, pulling him towards her. Then she kissed him full on the mouth. PJ was so surprised he missed the best part of it.
Voices sounded on the path and Oliver and the two Nolan sisters appeared.
‘There you are,’ said Oliver. ‘Uncle Arthur says you’re to come in; he wants everyone in the drawing room for the Christmas tree.’
‘My mother says you have real crystal icicle decorations. Is that true, Rosaleen?’ said Franny Nolan.
‘See for yourself,’ said Rosaleen, gathering her dress in her hands and running back along the path, her pale-stockinged ankles and satin dancing-shoes twinkling.
The morning after the party PJ had gone back to Hokitika with Geoffrey. A few weeks later Rosaleen and her mother had called in at Wharenui on a shopping trip. There had been afternoon tea and PJ had offered Rosaleen a cake off a two-tiered stand. She chose a slice of Battenberg. PJ remembered her nails like little satin cushions, pink and shining as they touched the marzipan covering. Later in the summer he’d come up to Simpson’s Bridge a couple of times with the wagon but, though he’d spoken to Rosaleen once or twice and she’d shown him Tibby and the new kittens, there had been no chance to be alone.
PJ was ruling lines in the ledger when Oliver appeared in the doorway. Geoffrey had been away overnight in Greymouth, exhibiting tomatoes at a horticultural show.
‘Bedad, it’s yourself,’ said PJ, glancing up. ‘Thought you were up with the Pascoes.’
‘Finished with them,’ said Oliver.
‘Finished?’ said PJ.
‘She’s all yours now, PJ. No competition.’
‘In the name of God, what are you on about?’
‘Miss Pascoe, Rosaleen. You and her and the understanding.’
PJ put h
is pen into the inkpot and stood up. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Seems I was pre-empted, but she’s yours now, and if you’re lucky I might even get my head blown off.’
‘Oliver?’
‘I’ve joined up. Third Contingent. Rough Riders. Passed the riding and the shooting tests; I’ll be going into camp in a day or so. Then it’s South Africa here I come.’
‘You’re mad.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Are you getting one of them commissions? Will you be an officer?’
‘A trooper.’
‘Sure, you can’t go. You’re too young.’
‘Not as far as the recruiting sergeant’s concerned. They take your age as you give it.’
‘And your father …’
‘I’m not a kid, PJ, though I doubt you’ve noticed. And now I’m off to have a bath.’
PJ sat at the roll-top desk, looking at the rows of drawers and pigeonholes stuffed with letters, bills and seed catalogues. Oliver was going to South Africa, going to the war. Was it his fault? PJ wondered. It had never occurred to him that Oliver had an interest in Rosaleen; even if he had known, there was nothing he would have done differently.
PJ thought of the newspaper reports he’d read about the war. The heat and the killing. The trenches full of dead soldiers, the dumdum bullets that exploded on impact, the poisoned wounds. Oliver was going into that. He couldn’t, he mustn’t.
PJ got up and looked out at the garden. He had never mastered the names of plants but he liked those tall ones with their line of blue button flowers and black stamens. PJ imagined bees hanging lazily in those bright shelters, drowsy with sun and pollen. He thought of the Pascoes’ garden and of Rosaleen reaching to kiss him in her shimmering dress. So she preferred him to Oliver, called what they had an understanding. Thank God for that.
He went back to the desk. He knew what he must do. He would enlist himself: go to South Africa with Oliver. He’d heard that in the New Zealand contingents there were brothers, fathers and sons, country neighbours, friends and family fighting side by side. They said the war against the Boers was just; he supposed it was, hadn’t thought about it much if the truth be told. But he wasn’t having Oliver over there dead in a trench. The boy was his responsibility, always had been.
The Love Apple Page 25
