The Love Apple

by Coral Atkinson

  He looked at his fingers holding the paper. The hand seemed to belong to someone else. Geoffrey wondered what this strange hand was doing in front of him and why the paper was shaking. There was something written on the paper, something terrible. He needed to know what it was. He smoothed out the telegram and looked at the words again and again.

  For days Geoffrey stayed in his bedroom. He pulled the curtains and lay on his bed bundled in an eiderdown, his head beneath the covers. Daylight seemed an intrusion and an affront: he wanted darkness and oblivion. He shook uncontrollably. He wished there was someone to hold him, to calm his shaking, to provide the warmth and comfort of another human being. There was no one. Every few hours Daisy would knock on the door, asking if he wanted anything, leaving soup, bringing sandwiches. Geoffrey ate nothing. When his throat and mouth ached from thirst he swallowed a little water from the decanter on the washstand.

  On the third morning he got up. He knew Sybil was in Christchurch and he was going to see her. He spoke to himself as if to another person. ‘You must wash now’, ‘You must shave’, and his hands obediently followed the instructions, while inside grief howled unabated.

  He stood on the deck of the steamer bound for Lyttelton and looked at the sea. It was a calm day and the water was thin and limp and endlessly blue. Geoffrey thought of Vanessa, Huia and Oliver: all sucked away into some similarly incomprehensible vastness. He felt like a man marooned on a drifting island as the shore of Hokitika receded and the ragged jaw of the mountains grew small against the sky.

  ‘The moment when the telegram arrived was an abomination,’ Geoffrey told Sybil later, as he sat in her Christchurch drawing room. ‘Doors closed: it was like seeing an Advent calendar in reverse.’

  Sybil had been on the downstairs verandah sticking pictures on a decoupage screen when Geoffrey walked in the gate and past the bamboo clumps of the Powells’ townhouse. He had never visited the Cashel Street house before and his arrival was totally unexpected.

  ‘Geoffrey!’ Sybil said, quickly getting up, a flock of brightly coloured scraps falling from her skirt. ‘Geoffrey, is something wrong?’

  ‘Got the news on Monday,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Had to come as soon as I heard.’

  ‘Heard?’

  ‘My boy, dead — presumed dead they say, but he’s dead all right.’

  Sybil held out her arms and Geoffrey fell against her, his tears falling into her hair and wetting her forehead. ‘Dearest, dearest,’ Sybil said, aware as she murmured the words that behind her sadness at the loss of her young godson, her empathy for Geoffrey, there was another, opposing feeling. A warm joy. Geoffrey had sought her out; Geoffrey had come to her with his sorrow. Love would clasp grief.

  Freddy Powell was upcountry at Lochinvar and other than the maid and cook there was no one else in the house. For three days Geoffrey and Sybil talked, though mostly Geoffrey talked and Sybil listened. At first she suggested that his extreme grief might be premature, that missing did not mean dead, and hadn’t the papers been full of cases where men posted ‘missing’ had returned, but Geoffrey would have none of it. Oliver was dead: he knew it. Often he talked of how much he loved his son, of the photographs he’d taken of him, the boy’s way with horses, his enthusiasm for the coach trips over Arthur’s Pass and how Oliver knew every regular driver on the route and his particular driving style.

  ‘When Oliver was a little boy he had a box of stone blocks,’ Geoffrey said. ‘German blocks, all different shapes. He loved them and used to build stables and stalls for his toy horses. The difficulty was he never wanted to dismantle them. After getting him three boxes of those blocks I drew the line at buying more, yet he was constantly torn between wanting to build and keeping what he had made. I remember telling him that everything has to come to an end sometime, and him saying, “Not me, Papa, I’ll just go on.”’

  ‘And so he shall,’ said Sybil.

  ‘Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:

  Thou madest man, he knows not why;

  He thinks he was not made to die;

  And thou hast made him; thou art just.’

  ‘Trite,’ said Geoffrey. ‘Too trite and easy.’

  ‘Tennyson didn’t think so.’

  ‘It’s certainly not what I can believe just now, though that doesn’t mean much. You know, Sybil, it’s as if I’ve disappeared even from myself at present. I’m somewhere else, don’t know where or how to get back. Loss cuts you so adrift, drives you out into the corners.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sybil adamantly. ‘It does, of course it does.’

  At other times Geoffrey fumed at the war: the stupidity of it, the arrogance of the cause, the criminal waste of life. Mostly he berated himself for not having stopped Oliver from joining up.

  ‘You couldn’t have prevented him,’ Sybil had said.

  ‘I should have tried. I should at least have tried.’

  And there were the times when Geoffrey wept and Sybil held him against her body and felt his sobs jolting through her covered flesh. Holding him in her arms, stroking his hair was deeply satisfying to Sybil; too satisfying, too full of yearning. No, Sybil told herself. I haven’t the right. But the pleasure of the embrace was unabated. There had never been such an embrace between Sybil and Freddie Powell. Sybil had found sex with her husband an insignificant domestic chore, neither fulfilling nor disgusting.

  On the third day of Geoffrey’s visit they took the gig to Sumner beach. It was winter, the sky sharply blue, and in the distance Mt Tapuae-O-Uenuku’s white muzzle protruded over the sea. They walked over the dunes to the beach, Geoffrey carrying a rug and a picnic basket. The cane handle had split so he was constantly repositioning his hold.

  They made desultory conversation: the atmosphere was tense. In the house there had been an intimacy between them, tender, unripe, something the excursion outdoors seemed to have damaged. Sybil was in a state of turmoil. She knew she shouldn’t have asked Geoffrey to stay, pressing him to abandon his room at the Canterbury Club for a guest bedroom at her home. Since her marriage she had always managed to keep Geoffrey at a distance, but what else could she have done when he came through the iron gate, crippled with loss? Geoffrey had his room, she had hers, but Sybil knew it was unwise all the same, and that her husband wouldn’t be pleased if he found out. Nothing improper had happened, of course, but something had happened nonetheless, something subtler, harder to define than any romantic interlude. In the days they spent together there had been openness, a vulnerability in Geoffrey’s grief that had brought them close. They had reached out and touched beneath the skin.

  Sybil remembered how, as a girl on holiday in England, she and Vanessa had gone with their parents to a church bazaar in a large old house. There was a maze in the garden and for a farthing you could go through it. Sybil and Vanessa had been keen to try but once inside the puzzle Sybil had hated the feeling of captivity and the way the high hedge walls kept blocking the path, forcing the sisters to turn back. There was a group of other girls in the maze, factory girls maybe, who had come to the bazaar on their day off. They laughed and shouted. One girl pulled a hat off another’s head and pushed it through a hole in the hedge onto a parallel path. The hatless girl didn’t seem to mind; she laughed, hitched up her dress and crawled through another nearby hole. Immediately all the girls followed. Sybil could hear them giggling and shrieking their way to the exit while the Percival sisters diligently walked back and forth, up and down one blind alley after another. It was like that with her and Geoffrey, Sybil thought. There could be no going forward, and she doubted there was any way out.

  ‘Let’s go through the cave,’ she said. ‘We might find some sheltered place to sit.’

  ‘Worth a look,’ said Geoffrey.

  They walked on, their feet making faint sucking noises in the sand.

  ‘I always think this is a very good cave,’ said Sybil as they came under the arching roof. ‘It gives you adventure without danger.’

  ‘Doubt we ever get that,’ said Geoffrey
.

  They both stopped. At the far end of the cave was an opening onto another part of the beach. In the distance between the rocks was a tiny splinter of sea. Geoffrey put down the basket and the rug on the sand.

  ‘Sybil,’ he said.

  She turned to face him and as she did, her hand brushed his. Geoffrey caught her fingers. In the dim, cathedral-like light they looked into each other’s faces.

  Geoffrey bent down and kissed her, his mouth opening her lips, his tongue slipping readily between her teeth.

  ‘No,’ said Sybil, pulling herself away. She was shaking all over, as if her bones were shivering. She felt as if a door into a blizzard had swung open. ‘No. It can’t be that.’

  ‘Sybil, I’m so sorry. I should never have done it,’ said Geoffrey, stepping back. ‘Put it down to grief. Not in my right mind, as they say.’

  Sybil made no answer. She walked quickly ahead of him out of the cave and onto the beach, her boots sinking deep in the softness of the sand.

  Epilogue

  [IRELAND, 1904]

  PJ, his stomach amply lined with fried bread, a heap of bacon rashers and a cup of tea strong enough to trot mice on, walked down the quays. He looked at the dark, burnt-coloured water of the Liffey and sniffed the sooty, manure-tinged Dublin air.

  It was morning, the city freshly awake. Women carried trays of cinders through back doors, and tossed last night’s wet tea leaves out of pots into bushes. Pannikins changed hands between milkmen and housewives, horses stamped on cold cobbles, and children on their way to school balanced on top of walls and swung off railings. PJ watched these morning rituals with tender attention. Since arriving in Ireland three days before, he had gone about dazed by memory and recognition. He wanted to get down on the rough flagstones and embrace the entire place.

  Passing the blind woman with the concert harp and the barefoot children begging for farthings, PJ came to what he already thought of as his front door. He had made the final arrangements the previous afternoon, and the key, with its strong cardboard label, lay clenched in his hand. In his excitement he feared that the key might fail him, that it was for some other door, but sure enough, he turned it once and the lock clicked open. PJ took a step into the shop, put down his suitcase and looked about. The interior, dim from the newspaper-covered windows, smelt of damp. The shop had previously belonged to a watchmaker and the walls still held the dark recollection of clocks. There was a fire neatly set in the fireplace towards the back, a couple of sods of turf in a broken creel on the floor and a basket chair with a faded blue velvet cushion drawn up at the hearth. Otherwise the place was empty.

  PJ went out the back into the small kitchen with its low ceiling and stone floor. A window smoky with grime looked out onto a paved yard. There was a steep flight of stairs to the first floor. Once probably divided into small rooms, the upper floor had been used by a dancing teacher for his classes. The one long room ran the length of the building, with windows at either end and a skylight in the middle. It was this room that had convinced PJ to take the place. He had come up the stairs with the agent and known immediately that here was his studio, the place where he would make photographs, record Dublin in all her poverty and blousy loveliness. Hadn’t he already planned a series on ‘Street Sellers of Moore Street’ and ‘Children of the Liffey’?

  PJ went to the window and looked down at the street below. Men were hauling out their pavement tables and stacking them with books, bric-a-brac and china. Hansom cabs and trams passed in the street. In the next block he could see the three brass balls of a pawnbroker and a line of women, some with children and prams, waiting outside. Beyond the pawnbroker’s, in the distance he could see the Dublin Mountains. PJ smiled that these soft wrinkles of green could be called mountains but he loved them for being there all the same. He felt indulgent and protective of everything his eyes touched.

  Downstairs a plump black-and-white cat that had come through the open door from the street greeted him as a friend. PJ took a box of matches out of his pocket and lit the fire. The flames broke into a riot of brightness.

  He opened the lock on his suitcase and rummaged among his clothes. At the bottom, under a pair of boots, his finger closed on a paper parcel. PJ pulled it out and opened it. A green flag fluttered in his hands. He would pin it up above the mantelpiece.

  The flag had been the first thing PJ had seen when he woke after his capture. There was the broken, peeling pain of his sunburnt lips, the burden like a bag of shot inside his chest, telling him Oliver was dead, and the flag tied to a stake, stirring slightly. A gold harp on a green ground. The men were moving about the camp, watering horses, dragging what looked like ammunition boxes about, and talking.

  ‘New Zealander,’ said one of the men, coming over to PJ. ‘We’ll be taking you along with us. Need you to answer some questions.’

  ‘You’re Irish,’ said PJ.

  ‘I am that,’ said the man. ‘Aren’t we all Irish here. McBride’s men, the Irish Brigade.’

  ‘God almighty!’ said PJ. ‘Are you here helping the Boers?’

  ‘We are indeed,’ said the man. ‘And from the voice on you, I’d say you should be fighting alongside us, not for those British bastards.’

  ‘You might be right there,’ said PJ. ‘Bedad you might.’

  The choice had been simple: hardly a choice at all. PJ would be turned over to the Boers as a prisoner of war or he could join the brigade. It had not been difficult to convince PJ that the Boers’ fight to govern themselves was little different from that of the Irish; that burning settlers’ farms was as bad as the evictions, and any enemy of the British was a friend of Ireland.

  ‘And aren’t we learning a few tricks, too,’ the men said to PJ. ‘’Tis a rehearsal, like, for what will happen one day back home.’

  The commandos that captured PJ styled themselves the Wreckers Corps, most of them Irishmen who had worked in the South African goldmines, many of them skilled with explosives. They specialised in blowing up railway bridges, a risky business demanding skill and precision, along with a cool head and a flair for quick retreat. PJ found himself moving rails with iron bars and drilling holes where dynamite could be placed.

  By the end of the year the war had turned and the Irishmen, hungry and discouraged, retreated east along the coast. At Komatiport in the Transvaal the brigade disbanded. PJ, with a brace of Boer rifles in a tarpaulin, the commando flag and a number of fellow brigaders, took the train to Lourenco Marques. There was no going back to New Zealand, no going back to Ireland, certainly not until things calmed down. PJ had sailed for the United States and gone to work for a Boston-Irish photographer. He lived in a room behind a shirt factory, ate potato soup cooked with bacon bones, and saved his money. Faithfully he wrote to Rosaleen. ‘Soon, my darling girl,’ he said. ‘Soon.’

  PJ looked in the suitcase again and pulled out a pair of embroidered slippers rolled in a shirt. They were dark green silk decorated with shamrocks and the words Erin go brah on each toe. His feet would speak. He would have Irish feet. PJ stroked the slippers with devotion. She had made them: made them especially for him. PJ took off his boots and put on the slippers, holding his feet up admiringly to the fire. The black-and-white cat jumped on his knee and he tickled it under the chin. ‘Soon,’ PJ said to the cat. ‘Soon she’ll be here herself. Hasn’t she said so?’

  He glanced around the bare walls with their marks of the clocks and imagined the room transformed. He thought of Rosaleen with her fairy hair sitting by this very fire doing her fancy work or even — and was this too much to hope for? — rocking a cradle with her lady’s hand. And he thought of the Boer rifles he’d brought back to Ireland and wondered if they had a part to play in other battles still to be fought, other freedoms yet to win.

  [NEW ZEALAND]

  The rosette was a gaudy affair of bright blue silk, the circular centre covered in ornate red writing surrounded by a halo of tightly pleated ribbons: a hideous thing from any point of view.

  Geof
frey held it in his hands, aware of its ugliness yet feeling an immense sense of pride that it was his. The decoration had come from yesterday’s annual combined West Coast Horticultural Show, where his ‘Big Red’ tomatoes had won not just first prize in the section but, as the rosette testified, the coveted Champion of Champions Award as well.

  Geoffrey went outside to the marble table. Its simple whiteness, with the wall of the summerhouse behind, worked well in photographs. He covered the base of his silver epergne with ferns and carefully arranged the prize tomatoes with the rosette — writing facing outwards — anchored on the side. He would hand-tint the photograph himself and send copies to Sybil upcountry and to PJ in Dublin.

  When Geoffrey thought of PJ his mind flicked to Oliver. Months after the news of Oliver’s death, a letter had come from PJ in Lourenco Marques, explaining what had happened. Geoffrey had never quite made sense of it. Not that he cared that PJ had deserted and gone over to the other side — he might have once, but not any more. PJ had stayed with Oliver to the end: that was what counted.

  War was the lunacy: monstrous and pitiable. War had taken Oliver, singled him out as hostage to fortune, eighteen years of growing and love casually obliterated, Geoffrey’s stake in the future wiped from the earth. His Oliver, so new, so sure, his boy’s body mouldering under a heap of stones half a world away: that was the shame and the obscenity, not which side you were on.

  They had put up a war memorial, a fancy clock, in the main street of Hokitika. Geoffrey, who had made a generous donation, as was expected, closed his eyes each time he went past. How could Oliver be commemorated by a clock — a civil amenity little better than a public convenience? How could he be commemorated at all? He had come, he had gone: a scribble of light on the darkness and it was over. There were times when Geoffrey wondered whether the boy had ever existed or whether he had invented him in some need of his own.