The Love Apple

by Coral Atkinson

  ‘Better not get burnt,’ said PJ, rolling over and standing up. ‘Heard incapacity from deliberate overexposure to sunlight is a military offence.’

  ‘Can just imagine bloody Powell making a meal of that one,’ said Oliver, pulling on his shirt.

  Once fully clothed, they addressed themselves to the fruit they had brought and to the bottle of brandy. Oliver put the bottle to his lips and was just about to swallow when he inadvertently tipped the contents over his chin and down the front of his military tunic. He was searching unsuccessfully in his pockets for a handkerchief to brush off the sticky liquid when they heard laughter and a blue-and-white tablecloth landed in the sand beside him. Two young women whom Oliver and PJ hadn’t noticed before were sitting having a picnic on a hillock behind them.

  ‘Mop yourself up with that,’ called a tall blonde, wearing a pale lilac blouse and feathery hat.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Oliver, rubbing his tunic with the tablecloth and wondering, with some embarrassment, how long the two women had been watching and whether they had been there when he and PJ had been in their underclothes.

  ‘Why don’t you come and join us?’ called the second young woman, who had brown curls escaping from under a straw boater.

  ‘I’m Maria and this is Jo,’ said the girl in the feathered hat. ‘Are you some of the New Zealanders who’ve just arrived in camp? The ones they call the Rough Riders?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Oliver, and introduced himself and PJ.

  ‘Want a sandwich?’ said Jo, taking a cloth-wrapped bundle out of the basket beside her. ‘We brought a picnic but these are left over. We’re typists in an office in town. It’s our half holiday.’

  Oliver bit into the folded bread and decided it was the best ham sandwich he had ever tasted: the crust firm, the bread fresh, the meat moist and delicious. He handed around the brandy and they all drank from the bottle. The girls, who were much more forward than any women Oliver had ever met before, chatted, giggled and asked personal questions. They insisted on seeing the presents for Rosaleen, though neither PJ nor Oliver wanted to show them. When the gifts were opened, Jo fiddled with the fan and both women tried on the evening sandals.

  ‘Here,’ said Oliver, gathering up the shoes, dusting off the sand and putting them back in the wrapping, ‘that’s enough; you’ll ruin them.’

  ‘Temper, temper,’ said Jo, laughing and hitting Oliver on the neck with a blade of grass.

  ‘Why don’t we go dancing?’ said Maria.

  ‘Dancing?’ said PJ, sitting up and looking around. ‘Where?’

  ‘Down at the Pavilion. They have tea dances. The Pavilion’s just along in the next bay — it’s not far.’

  The four set off along the narrow beach path, single file; hands around one another’s hips as in a promenade. Maria started singing ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ and the others joined in.

  Oliver was not much used to drinking alcohol and now everything he looked at seemed to have grown a bright, furry outline. The sea and sand bobbed unsteadily before his eyes. But Jo’s waist was firm and inviting in his hands and Oliver, holding it tight, felt recklessly happy.

  The dancing area at the Pavilion was in an enclosed garden. A lush place where tropical and semi-tropical plants looped and swayed, and swags of flowers of colours and shapes quite unknown to PJ and Oliver climbed about, pouring brightness over trellises and partly screened conversation nooks. The circular dance floor was crowded with couples, many of the men in uniform. In the centre of the floor was a fountain that splashed amid a jungle of ferns. Black waiters in scarlet satin jackets brought drinks to the people sitting out the dance on basket chairs, while the orchestra, carefully concealed behind the greenery, played waltzes and polkas.

  Oliver felt his feet glide and sashay as Jo’s feet answered every step he made. He had never before thought of himself as a good dancer but in this place, with this partner, he felt magnificent. After the third dance Jo put her arms around his neck and rested her cheek against his. Oliver hoped she would go on doing it. Her skin was very smooth and smelt of vanilla, and her fingers on the back of his neck sent a delicious surge of pleasure down his spine. Momentarily Oliver thought of Rosaleen but the recollection, or maybe the brandy, made him muddled so he gave it up.

  ‘I like you, Trooper Oliver Kiwi,’ said Jo, smiling up at him.

  ‘I like you too,’ said Oliver, though he knew as he said it that this wasn’t what he meant at all. What he really wanted to say was that he liked everything: Jo’s cheek against his, her arms on his neck, the music, the dancing, the air, the flowers, the feeling of being young and fit and independent. He wanted to explain how he was swamped in the sheer joy and wonder of it, overwhelmed by the whole dazzling panoply of being alive, but he couldn’t imagine how to describe his feelings or what Jo would think if he tried.

  ‘We’re going to have to get back soon,’ said PJ, touching Oliver’s arm. ‘We’ve got a fair walk to camp.’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Oliver, pulling Jo back onto the dance floor.

  ‘Last dance, then,’ said PJ, ‘and I’m off.’

  Oliver gave Jo a kiss on the cheek, put her address on a slip of paper in his pocket and reluctantly followed PJ out. They had offered to see Maria and Jo home but the girls said they’d stay at the Pavilion and go down to the bar.

  ‘Looking for someone else?’ said Oliver, feeling a twinge of disappointment.

  ‘Ask no questions, hear no lies,’ said Jo, laughing.

  The sun was setting in a flurry of salmon-coloured gauze and strips of turquoise as Oliver and PJ approached the New Zealand camp. Somewhere in the distance was the war neither of them had mentioned all day.

  ‘Didn’t we have a grand time?’ said PJ.

  ‘Too right,’ said Oliver, looking at the rows of tents and feeling glum. The elation had left him: he felt bereft and sad. ‘Tough going back into camp after a day like this. It’s as if everything has ended and there’ll never be another time like it again.’

  ‘Maudlin tripe,’ said PJ, slapping him on the back. ‘It’s just the drink talking.’

  The birds were singing outside Wharenui, an anarchic jumble like china, glass and cutlery carelessly tumbled together. Geoffrey opened his eyes and looked at the ornate brass scrolls on the bed end, above his blanket-covered feet. He thought anxiously of Oliver, as he did when he wakened every morning, and wondered where the boy was, what he was doing; most of all, whether he were still alive. During the preceding months Geoffrey had clung to the comforting notion that if danger or death confronted his son he would feel a telepathic sense of loss, like stepping on the very top rung of a ladder and finding nothing left to hang on to, or brace yourself against: so long as there was no such feeling of desolation he could assume Oliver was all right.

  But, he thought as he rolled over in the bed, could it be that he was just plain deluded? What evidence had he that such things occurred? There was no rational reason why he should be aware of what was happening to the boy thousands of miles away. It was the first time Geoffrey had considered this possibility and the thought panicked him. He saw himself here in Wharenui inspecting the tomato-plant leaves for signs of blight, bending down to give the dog a biscuit, scraping dirt from under his fingernails with the point of a scissor blade, and in that second, as he was absorbed in some trivial, mundane task, Oliver would die in far-off South Africa. Days, weeks, months even, would pass before the news of the death would reach New Zealand and during that time everything would go on unchanged. There would be no dramatic curdling of the air, no sense of momentous loss; the tides on the beach would move in and out over the stones, the sun shine, the rain fall, night would follow day and Geoffrey would know nothing.

  He got out of bed, opened the curtains and stood in his nightshirt looking out at the neatly cut lawns and gravelled paths that surrounded the house. To one side, at a slight distance beyond the stables, were the greenhouses. Their glass sides and roofs, so sparkling in sunshine, looked grey and drear in the early
light. Geoffrey thought of the letters he’d had from Oliver in South Africa. The first were excited and breathless, telling of flowers and fruit, sunsets and strange sights, but that quickly changed once the Third Contingent entered the war zone. Stiff, clichéd words parched of meaning or emotion covered the pages. Oliver spoke of ‘scraps’ with the Boers, ‘hot exchanges of gunfire’, being ordered to fix bayonets to their carbines so they could use them as lances. Sometimes there was ‘a bit of a scare’, or references to ‘poor blokes and plucky fellows’ who’d been injured, killed or ‘gone down with enteric fever’. There was no telling what the boy really thought or how he felt.

  PJ had sent a postcard from East London; that was all. Geoffrey was very grateful to PJ for being there with Oliver, even though he sorely missed his secretary in the office. He clung to the notion that PJ would see Oliver right, but as Geoffrey looked at the garden, still dim from the receding night, he wondered if he was deluded in this as well.

  The land was like brown paper, stiff and dry — every aspect uncomfortable and much that was dangerous. Side by side, PJ and Oliver rode with the other troopers, each man expecting death, expecting murder at every bush and hiccup in the ground.

  They rode for miles, their throats a tunnel of thirst, bellies a hollow of hunger and the sun up there aching in the sky. It was an angry place: bitter at night, scorching by day, and with little to see except occasional fleeting movements of black men and women scurrying away into the horizon. Bully beef and biscuit tins marked former campsites and further off the remains of horses, maggots seething on putrid flesh, vultures wheeling in the air. The smell was sickening, even at a distance. Occasionally there was a human corpse. The less squeamish stripped the dead of anything that might be useful — a penknife, a hat, a pair of socks. PJ saw a young soldier take a wallet, throw the contents into a thorn bush and repack the leather container with a photograph of his own sweetheart and a few coins.

  The Rough Riders had been in South Africa a matter of months; to PJ it seemed years since they’d swum and danced in East London. In that time he had witnessed death in a hundred different guises; seen friend and enemy hacked to oblivion, impaled men screaming on the end of bayonets, soldiers clutching bursting entrails in their hands. He had looked at faces smashed, pulped, shattered, and watched fever overtake the army: killing ruthless and random as any Mauser bullet. PJ and the others of the Third Contingent had trekked and fought, manned pickets, acted as scouts — New Zealanders were good at scouting. Now they rode north to Johannesburg, a small colonial group in a vast army of thousands of men, horses, guns and wagons slowly making its way across the veldt. A hungry, tattered company.

  PJ remembered how it had been when they left New Zealand, the Knight Templar rounding the heads at Lyttelton and sliding into the ocean. The lads bright as new money in their tunics and jodhpurs, cocky grins under slouch hats. What remained of their uniforms was now torn, dirty, seams laden with lice, the original khaki bleached to a pinkish beige; their horses were an assortment of bones held together by scuffed hide. Even Jimmy, once the finest horse in the contingent, looked thin and sorry, despite Oliver’s careful grooming and constant scrounging for extra rations of hay and chaff. Hunger, heat, injury and over-riding were killers among the horses.

  At the beginning the troopers had ribbed and joshed with one another, shouted catcalls and nicknames, baptised odd bluffs and rivers with the names of Canterbury creek beds or the mountains of home. They were silent now. PJ’s camera, which he had originally pointed so enthusiastically at everything that took his fancy, lay unused in his saddlebag. Memory had recorded enough horror: he had no appetite for more.

  It was not just the cruelty, the killing and the death PJ found appalling — there was something else. Looking at the dying faces of Boer men and boys, he was overcome with both pity and hungry sympathy. He thought the Boers, with their own language, their little farms and fierce need to govern themselves, not unlike the Irish. When he rode into Wepener under the stiff glance of British officers with their white gloves and swagger sticks, dead Mick Sullivan suddenly spoke. ‘Didn’t I say you were a blithering amadaun, PJ, messing with these joxers?’ The truth, which PJ had tried to hide from himself for months, threw him like a blow. But what was he to do? Desert? Abandon Oliver? And Rosaleen — for despite the little bunch of shamrocks she had pressed in his hand, and the ‘luck of the Irish’ she breathed in his ear (and PJ returned often to the frisson of that whisper), he doubted Rosaleen would love a deserter. What woman would?

  PJ and Oliver didn’t talk of Rosaleen. There was no point. Each night in the moments of privacy before sleep, PJ would secretly slide Rosaleen’s carte de visite from his tunic pocket. Often it was too dark to see but he knew the image by heart so it hardly mattered. Rosaleen: a dark ribbon threaded through the high lace collar of her dress, her head slightly forward as if about to speak.

  Now it looked as if Oliver was ill. Enteric fever was everywhere and PJ was of a mind that Oliver had it too. The boy refused to admit it. ‘I’m fine,’ he said when PJ inquired. ‘Just the heat, the damned heat and these bloody new helmets — they make your head blaze and ache.’

  They had been riding all day. Now it was evening. Oliver crouched on the ground watching a column of ants on his arm, too tired to flick them off. He remembered looking at that same sleeve in his bedroom at Wharenui on his final embarkation leave. Pacing up and down, slamming to attention in front of the mirror, saluting his reflection with admiring glee. He’d worn his uniform to bed that night, the thought of taking it off even for a few hours too much to bear. What a fool he’d been: self-important, ridiculous. Riding with the rest of the contingent over the river and through the streets of Christchurch to the railway station had been the proudest moment of his life. Even the hurt of Rosaleen had shrunk in the excitement of flags and faces and bands playing. Women had smiled and touched their hair in coy invitation, strangers shouted ‘Godspeed’, children waved and cheered and ran beside the troops.

  If only, Oliver thought, he could have known what it would be like. Fear was now a constant: the stomach cramps, the stifled need to cry and run away, the waking every day to a world of terror. Worst of all were the battles and skirmishes, forcing your horse forward into the storm of bullets, offering your body over and over to injury, agony, death. Always having to be brave. Oliver pictured courage like water in a canteen. What he feared most was that one day his would run dry. Hadn’t he seen it happen: men turning, fleeing, felled by a shot from an officer’s revolver or a firing squad?

  Oliver’s head buzzed with pain. He wanted to lie down, safe in some dark and hidden place. He imagined being under trees. He thought longingly of the hut he’d played in with Rosaleen as a child, and the bush with its dappled, conciliatory light.

  There was trouble on the railway line. Trains attacked, bridges detonated, lines sabotaged, troops fired on. The field marshal would have none of it. Burgher farms along the track were sheltering the commandos; sanctuary must be removed, perpetrators punished. Following orders, the Rough Riders had burnt several suspects’ houses, first herding the old men, women and children out into the little gardens, their chairs, tables, baby cradles stacked around them. The silent accusation of Boer eyes was worse than a hundred curses as homes were torched, livestock slaughtered or commandeered for food. And food the Rough Riders needed. Desperately. Day followed day on half rations, sometimes nothing at all. There was so little to be had that squadron cooks were dispensed with: in fours, the men messed together and went foraging.

  McGibbon and Kirk bashed in the door with the butts of their rifles. PJ and Oliver kept them covered; you never knew who was about, though the place seemed deserted. The room was dark, hard at first to see what was there. In the corner by the window was something white, something hazy. A figure at a table, a woman on a bentwood chair holding a child and bending over a large book; neither child nor woman moved. There was a glass oil-lamp on the table. It wasn’t lit. PJ noticed the br
ight crystal pendants that fell blood red from the shade.

  ‘Out!’ said McGibbon to the woman. ‘Inhabitants of this vicinity are suspected of doing wanton damage to railway bridges and telegraph lines. You’ve got to get out. Orders Field Marshal Roberts, Commander in Chief.’

  PJ went towards the woman, waving his revolver and pointing to the door. The woman didn’t look up; maybe she couldn’t speak English. ‘Beg your pardon, Missus, but you’ve got to get out,’ said PJ. ‘Orders. We’re going to have to fire the place.’

  The woman’s arm twitched, the movement so quick that only PJ caught it. He saw her hand jerk from the folds of the child’s dress, holding something metallic. She put her clenched fingers towards her forehead and there was a shot. The retort filled the room as woman and child slid to the ground. The light chair fell. McGibbon began firing.

  ‘Cut that out, for bloody Christ’s sake!’ shouted PJ. ‘Can’t you see what’s happened?’ McGibbon held his fire and the men gathered around the fallen pair. The woman’s forehead was a ragged crater of blood and smashed bone. Darkness poured from the wound, staining the lace frills of her big sunbonnet.

  ‘Mother of Heaven!’ said PJ.

  ‘And the kid?’ said Oliver. The child, like a discarded doll — eyes wide, arms outstretched — lay on its back on the floor. ‘McGibbon’s killed the kid.’

  ‘He did not,’ said PJ, touching the infant’s stiff little face. ‘Hasn’t she been dead for hours?’ He picked up the child, his thumb stroking over the small eyelids as if smoothing down a stamp, but the glassy stare continued to look up. ‘There you go,’ said PJ half to himself as he put the child face down on the mother’s breast. He supposed he should say a bit of a prayer but no words came; there’d been too much killing for that.

  ‘Better take a look for Johnny Boer,’ said McGibbon as he and Kirk kicked open a door and went into a bedroom.