The Love Apple (12 page)

Oliver’s sickness wasn’t serious but that afternoon, something changed. On the surface the lives of Geoffrey and Huia went on much as before, but Geoffrey knew a turning point had been reached: from then on he no longer tried with his wife. He took to sleeping alone in the spare bedroom and deliberately moved away on the occasions when Huia climbed into the bed beside him. He seldom rebuked her to her face but his head seethed with judgement and blame. Sober, he observed every imperfection and excused nothing. Brandy mellowed him. Geoffrey’s despairing feeling of entrapment, the sense of his marriage as a life sentence, was magically transformed by alcohol. A few nips of spirits and he saw how young Huia was, how pretty; more brandy and her inadequacies seemed of little consequence; an evening of drinking and he was almost content. Some nights he didn’t go to bed, some days he didn’t get up. He was slipping backwards into the bottomless abyss of his first grief over Vanessa. There was an inevitability about his collapse that chilled and terrified him. Yet despite repeated good intentions, the resolutions of sobriety made in the morning under the duress of a hangover were abandoned before sunset. The one person Geoffrey knew might save him was Oliver. The thought of his son having a drunk for a father filled him with shame and loathing. Yet as he lifted a glass, so too did Oliver’s hold slacken: the imperative of the child’s needs diminished and melted as another mouthful was sipped and swallowed.

PJ halted Midge the pony and peered carefully around before entering the tight tunnel of greenery and overhanging trees. The boy particularly disliked this place on the track to Tanners, though he found the entire New Zealand bush frightening and strange. There was a dark malevolence about the foliage that didn’t seem right. The trees infested by vines were odd shapes, trunks covered in evil-growing things like sores. PJ imagined the
vegetation reaching out, ready to grasp and capture. He thought of tales he had heard of the little people who stole children, particularly boys. In Ireland hadn’t he seen lads as old as himself, on the very cusp of manhood, still dressed in skirts to protect them from such kidnappings? PJ felt fearful and wished for a petticoat. The bush was deserted, the farms and mining claims so far apart there were no other humans offering protection and comfort. The only sounds PJ could hear were those of birds and moving water. Had the birds been the familiar Irish blackbirds, thrushes, robins, chaffinches, he would have found their songs reassuring — but these birds, with their foreign-coloured feathers and odd music, made him feel even more of a stranger. New Zealand was altogether too fierce, too new and too empty.

PJ was ashamed of course to say any of this, but as he rode about delivering groceries from Arthur Pascoe’s general store or running errands down the gorge to the township of Tanners, he would be overwhelmed with a sense of loneliness, a sense of dread. Fear so bad that at times he would close his eyes, leaving the pony to find her own way. In his mind he willed himself back to Ireland. The lanes crowded with people and their talk, the puckered hills and little fields, the land worn and comfortable as an old shoe.

PJ had sensed something wrong as soon as Mrs Bell, the housekeeper at Killeigh, invited him into her sitting room behind the kitchen. If Mrs Sullivan was there, why didn’t someone get her; if she had left, why was he being taken inside?

‘Sit yourself down,’ Mrs Bell had said, pulling a rack of drying clothes away from the fire and nodding towards a chair. She poured PJ a cup of tea from the pot on the hob, added milk and sugar and handed it to him.

‘Molly Sullivan, poor dear thing,’ said Mrs Bell. ‘And you,
PJ, like a son to her, wasn’t that what she always said?’

‘Can yiz be telling me what’s happened?’ said PJ. His hand had started to shake, making the cup and saucer writhe in a little dance.

‘It was June, just after midsummer. The fever, the scarlet fever. Several here and in the village with it, and herself out there night, noon and morning seeing to them, along with attending Mr Hamilton himself. Of course she, poor thing, got afflicted. A week she lasted, and didn’t I do all in my power for her?’

‘Passed away?’ said PJ in a whisper.

‘God rest her soul,’ said Mrs Bell, wiping her eyes. ‘She was a proper Christian.’

PJ expected to cry but he didn’t. His head felt tight and dry as if his eyes were a desert. There were no tears left. The boy looked into the burning peat fire. Sparks ran up and down the sods of turf in processions of brilliance, then suddenly the turf ignited, turning from blackness into flame. He was more alone than ever. The death of Mick had brought him Mrs Sullivan, and now she was gone. There was no one else.

‘But I’m forgetting,’ said Mrs Bell. ‘Didn’t Mrs Sullivan leave something for you? “See PJ at Kinross House gets this.” Almost with her dying breath she said that, most insistent-like. Wasn’t I going to bring it myself when I went up there to Dublin to my sister this Christmas?’

Mrs Bell went to a corner cupboard and took out a tin box. PJ looked up. He could see the lid of the box had a picture of kittens playing with knitting wool.

‘Open it,’ said Mrs Bell.

Inside the box was a roll of pound notes tied with a scrap of ribbon, and a letter.

‘What’s it say?’ said PJ.

Mrs Bell took the letter. She put the pince-nez she wore around her neck to her eyes and read aloud:

‘New Zealand?’ said PJ. ‘Isn’t that a desperate far-off place?’

‘’Tis,’ said Mrs Bell. ‘’Tis indeed.’

PJ opened his eyes. Down the track he could see Russian Pete’s shack, the house that marked the start of the settlement of Simpson’s Bridge. He nudged Midge into a trot, happy to be out of the bush and nearly home. Coming down the main — and only — street, he caught sight of Rosaleen Pascoe waiting for him. The toddler, wearing a tartan dress and white pinafore, was sitting on the wooden walkway outside her father’s shop, her booted feet in the gutter. She was holding the penny tin-plate horse that PJ had bought her the first time he’d gone down to Tanners.

When Rosaleen saw PJ she got up and ran towards him.

‘Mind the street, Rosie!’ PJ shouted as a cart passed by. The child stopped and looked about. ‘And yer mammy will kill yiz, being out on the street and all.’

‘Rosie naughty?’ said Rosaleen with apparent surprise.

PJ smiled at her as he dismounted. ‘Rosie’s a proper cod,’ he said, ruffling the child’s hair.

Arthur Pascoe was sitting in the rocking chair in the snug, his wife on his knee and the tip of his tongue in her ear. Despite
having been married over two years, the Pascoes were still as besotted as any young lovers. Maeve jumped as the door opened and PJ and Rosaleen came in.

Arthur and Maeve had been unfailingly generous to PJ since his unexpected arrival from Ireland. They had given him a home and employment but the boy was uneasy with them. Living in the cramped quarters behind the shop, in such close proximity to the couple, made him feel an intruder. The kissing and giggling, the touching and cuddling that went on between the two of them was something he’d never witnessed before and it embarrassed him. Arthur was obviously a gentleman, yet his marriage and rough life as a bush shopkeeper made the boy uncertain. PJ thought Maeve both pretty and kind, and as Mick Sullivan’s sister she was someone to be idolised and adored, yet he had the feeling that Maeve wanted him gone so she could be alone with Arthur. Rosaleen was the one member of the household with whom PJ felt comfortable. He gave the child rides on his back, he brought her birds’ eggs, he made her a swing on a tree at the end of the yard and built her houses out of blankets. Rosaleen adored him. PJ thought her a dote.

‘I’m after thinking,’ said PJ, ‘if youse don’t mind, like, that maybe I should get employment elsewhere. God knows, youse have been very good to me but maybe I’d be better off in the town. Hokitika, perhaps.’

‘Aren’t you a bit young going off on your own?’ said Arthur.

‘Old enough,’ said PJ. ‘And sure I feel I’m creating a bulk, imposing with youse here.’

‘We’d miss you, Rosaleen especially, if you left,’ said Maeve, catching her daughter in her arms. ‘Wouldn’t you, little one?’

‘Have you thought what you’d do?’ said Arthur.

‘Ah no,’ said PJ. ‘Get a job. Message boy, perhaps.’

‘Wasn’t Mr Hastings saying he wanted someone down there at his studio, when he and Mrs Hastings came up for that picnic?’ said Maeve.

‘Yes,’ said Arthur. ‘I believe he was. Poor Hastings seems in a bad way again. Do you fancy working for a photographer, PJ?’

‘Photographer? Never had any truck with the likes of that before.’

‘At least he’s a fellow Irishman,’ said Arthur.

‘God bless him for that,’ said PJ, ‘and if he’s willing to have me, I’m willing to try.’

‘Good man,’ said Arthur. ‘That’s the ticket.’

H
ills surrounded the homestead and outbuildings. They crouched about the terrace where Lochinvar stood, stretching into the horizon in an ocean of crumpled humps, ragged peaks and sharp escarpments. Shingle slides covered whole hillsides, and occasionally Sybil could hear the roar of falling rocks. It was a landscape of movement and impermanence. Danger, too.

She wondered what description could have prepared her for this place. ‘Remote high-country station,’ the advertisement for a governess had stated.

It was the word ‘remote’ that first attracted her. There was something calm and soothing about such a word, with its overtones of retreat, its promise of distance as analgesic for pain. Of course Sybil could have placed greater distance between herself and Geoffrey Hastings — she could have returned to Ireland. Her friend and former pupil Claire Pascoe, who had come to New Zealand with her, had stayed only briefly with her brother at Simpson’s Bridge. Finding relations strained between her and Arthur’s wife Maeve, Claire had, after a brief tour of the beauty spots, arranged to return to Dublin. It would have been appropriate for Sybil to go with her, yet she shrank from it: such a decision would be too drastic, too severe. Exile to another part
of the South Island was pain enough. When Sybil left Hokitika she sought a chance to recover her feelings and compose her heart. Things were better accomplished gradually, she believed.

In the first weeks at Lochinvar, Sybil made a daily ritual of walking the rough road that went around the back of the homestead behind the vegetable garden, beyond the woolsheds to where a sheep track led to the top of one of the neighbouring peaks. Kanuka trees hung about the gullies, and tussock covered the ground in shaggy bundles.

Far below, the river’s braided channels passed like veins over the valley floor.

Breathless from the climb, Sybil sat on a rock that protruded from the ground; her dusty boots dangled over the grass. She looked west to where the hills eventually gave way to the whiteness of snow. Over those mountains and to the south — on the narrow strip of coast that lay like a hall runner between alps and sea — was Hokitika. Geoffrey.

It was morning and Sybil imagined Geoffrey eating
breakfast
. Alone. The thought that Huia might be sharing the meal with him in a moment of domestic coupledom was something Sybil preferred to ignore. Instead she saw Geoffrey at a table set for one, pulverising the top of a boiled egg with a spoon, then scooping away the shattered shell.

Why had she done it? Sybil asked herself over and over, as she plucked at the flowering grass. She was sick of herself and her plight, tired of the endless struggle, the constant imperatives of being polite, of doing the right thing, of putting other people first. Her whole life was dominated by constraints, drilled by society, dictated by the church. Meekness, humility, the first being last. The rewards never in this life: always the next. Now, throwing away her potential happiness by encouraging Geoffrey to marry Huia seemed more stupid than praiseworthy. A silly, heroic gesture causing more pain than if she had left
matters be. In retrospect, Geoffrey’s instinct to pay the girl off was probably the most sensible solution. And it wasn’t only Sybil who was suffering from Geoffrey’s decision to marry Huia: he himself was obviously miserable. His letters, though circumspect, were redolent with unhappiness, his new marriage already a disaster.

In one of the lower paddocks Sybil could see a mob of sheep being moved. The mounted shepherd shouted to his dogs, ‘Go away back!’, ‘Come in behind!’ The man’s voice was clear in the morning air. Sybil watched, wishing for such simple
imperatives
in her own life. What command could she give herself of any purpose, any value? What invocation would set her free? ‘Endure’ was the only word she could think of.

Later that night, lying awake as wind whipped up the gully and rain fell on the iron roof, she doubted her ability to survive the disappointment, the loss of Geoffrey this second time.

When she finally slept, her rest was full of dreams. She was running, holding the bridle of a horse; behind her was a procession and somewhere among those following was Geoffrey. Sybil knew she must get to him but was unable to look back. When she stopped or tried to turn, the crowd pushed her forward with the branches they carried. Beating her head and her back. The horse she led reared up and she was pulled into the air. Terrified, arms aching, Sybil was dragged higher and higher. She clung to the bridle: she would die if she let go.

Sybil dreamt again. She was sitting naked in the grass, holding her breasts in her hands. Geoffrey was beside her in a white garment. Carefully, as if undoing bandages, Sybil unwound the cloth. Shoulders, chest, stomach, sex, thighs and legs all exposed. She touched Geoffrey’s face. He leaned towards her. Sybil could smell the sweetness of his scent, a musky odour of sycamore leaves and water. The air contracted.

Geoffrey took Sybil’s hand in his. He pulled forward her
index finger and touched both of her breasts with it. ‘Stigmata,’ he said. ‘Wounds.’

And he began to weep.

Sybil woke. In the wire runs by the killing shed the farm dogs were howling.

The verandah of Lochinvar was used as an informal sitting room. In good weather lessons were held, games played and tea taken there. Among the wicker tables and chairs were old saddles, oilskin coats and a tea chest of Delft tiles intended for the hall mantelpiece and never installed. Unlike the formality of the main sitting room, which no one except the maid went into — and she only to clean — the verandah had a homely feeling that Sybil liked. To someone in her somewhat uncertain social position as governess, it offered a neutral sitting area belonging neither to servants nor the Powell family. Not that social
distinctions
were much in evidence at Lochinvar: Sybil herself had mistaken the owner, Freddy Powell, for a gardener or farm labourer when he’d met her as arranged at the Hurunui hotel, on her arrival off the coach several months before.

‘You must be the new lady, the governess,’ the man in the collarless shirt and ancient suit said, wiping his hand on his trouser leg and offering it to Sybil. ‘I’m the cocky from Lochinvar. Name’s Powell, Freddy Powell.’

‘How do you do,’ said Sybil, feeling her formality absurd, but uncertain how else to respond. ‘I’m Sybil Percival.’

‘Aren’t I pleased to see you, Miss Percival,’ said Powell, smiling. ‘Those two young scoundrels of mine have been kicking up merry hell since the last governess gave notice. Though maybe I shouldn’t tell you that — might make you change your mind and we can’t have that!’ He laughed. ‘Get up into the buggy, Miss Percival,’ he continued, gathering up Sybil’s luggage, ‘and I’ll take you home.’

‘Is it far?’ said Sybil.

‘Couple of hours,’ said Powell, ‘provided there are no rocks down, the river’s behaving and the roads are clear. Usually go in and out with horses or the oxen wagon but wasn’t sure how you felt about riding, you being from the old country. My wife said I’d better take the buggy.’

‘Very kind,’ said Sybil, grateful to be spared negotiating rough high-country terrain on horseback. In spite of girlhood riding lessons she found horses, with their rolling eyes and large teeth, unpredictable and frightening.

‘What brings you to New Zealand?’ said Freddy Powell as they jogged along.

Love, Sybil wanted to say, but she straightened her polished cotton skirt and answered, ‘My sister — my sister was married on the West Coast. She died recently.’

‘Accept my condolences,’ said Powell. ‘Too much death in this country altogether. Accidents, sickness, fires. Young ones, too. Lost two girls of my own. Breaks your heart. The wife’s never recovered from it.’

‘I’m very sorry,’ said Sybil.

It was some time before either of them spoke again. ‘Your sons,’ Sybil said. ‘Robert and Denis. I’d like to hear about them.’

‘Forewarned is forearmed,’ said Powell. ‘A pair of right monkeys, but not bad lads. Not scholars, sorry to say. More interested in sport than schoolbooks.’

Sybil, sitting now on the verandah, could hear the sounds of the captive decoy kea that Robert and Denis had in the yard. Attracted by the desperate cries of their fellows, other kea would be drawn to the homestead, to fall in a frenzied flutter before the boys’ slingshots. It was said the birds killed lambs. Sybil had no idea whether this was true, though her sympathies were drawn to the kea with their magnificent plumage and shrewd-looking faces. She hated their captivity and their slaughter. The casual
and constant carnage at Lochinvar disgusted her. She shrank from the frantic screaming of a pig trussed on a pole, having its throat cut; the butchering of sheep and cattle in the killing shed. Sending refrigerated mutton to England was the new thing — ‘a corker opportunity to get us out of this depression’, Powell called it. Sybil found it incongruous and slightly disturbing that beautiful, pristine New Zealand was pinning its hopes on becoming an abattoir for the empire. She preferred the gold that built Hokitika, but people said gold was finished.

It seemed to Sybil that every day some bleeding trophy would be cast for inspection at her feet. ‘Look, Miss,’ the boys would say cheerfully, throwing down some bloody bundle on the verandah floor. Hunting rabbits, rooks, possums, quail and kea was where the boys’ enthusiasm lay; attempts at education were seen as a tiresome interruption of their lives. The boys made spitballs out of blotting paper that they flicked about when Sybil wasn’t looking; they stabbed at their books with pencils when she was, Sybil having banned pens because of constant spillages of ink. The copybooks were an ugly mass of misshapen
hieroglyphics
and grubby rubbing-out. Attempts to interest the lads in
Little
Arthur’s
History
of
England
were met with fidgets and yawns, and Sybil’s efforts to couch mathematical problems in the language of stock and farm failed to bring a response.

Once the boys nailed a dead fish under the table. Sybil, alerted by the smell, removed the remains and aroused the brothers’ grudging respect by imposing an impromptu biology lesson rather than sending them to their father for the beating they expected.

‘That’s the dining-room clock striking,’ Robert would say, a good ten minutes before the hour.

‘Shall I go and see, Miss?’ said Denis, jumping to his feet.

‘No,’ said Sybil, consulting her watch. ‘There’s still some time left.’

When lessons ended for the day the brothers banged the covers of the books together and ran off down the hall, sliding on the rugs in glee. At first Sybil made them return and repeat their exit in an orderly manner but after months with no improvement she gave up.

‘Seems you like walking,’ Powell said, meeting Sybil one afternoon down by the willows that bordered the creek. ‘Saw you crossing that shingle slide over by Jack’s Hill. You need to watch yourself there, and you should have a stick. I’ll cut one for you. Don’t want you breaking a leg.’

Powell was as good as his word. The next morning he came into the schoolroom carrying a manuka musterer’s stick. ‘Sorry for the intrusion,’ he said, handing it to Sybil. ‘See what this is like when you go out. Give us a shout if it’s too long and I’ll knock a bit off. Where are the lads? Are the young monkeys not at their books this morning?’

‘No,’ said Sybil. ‘They wanted to go out to see that new colt broken. I promised them yesterday that if they finished their
compositions
, they could have a half-hour off. Hope you don’t mind.’

‘Mind?’ said Powell, laughing. ‘Course not. No worries so long as you gave them the okay. Mrs Powell and I reckon you’re doing a fine job with the youngsters.’

Mrs Powell, an invalid with an indefinite complaint, stayed in her room and directed the household haphazardly from her bed. There were cobwebs hanging from the deer antlers in the hall and dust lingered on the skirting boards. Domestic tasks were roughly performed by a married couple and a rapidly changing succession of maids, washerwomen and the occasional tramp who did odd jobs in return for a few days’ food and a place to sleep.

Sybil had met Mrs Powell only once. The bedroom was dark and smelt of aniseed balls. Mrs Powell, a small woman in her early forties, was propped up on pillows in an ornate brass
bed. She had big, astonished eyes like holes in her face. ‘Hope you’ll stay here longer than the others, Miss Percival,’ she said, clutching at the sheet with little hands.

‘Thank you,’ said Sybil.

‘You know what? No one stays long at Lochinvar if they don’t have to. Comings and goings, that’s all we get. You’ve no sooner appointed someone than they’re grizzling to be off again.’

‘It is rather isolated,’ said Sybil, ‘but I’m sure you grow to love it when it’s your home.’

‘Home?’ said Mrs Percival. ‘Everyone talks about home as if it just happens when you stop somewhere long enough. I’ve lived here nearly fourteen years; it’ll never be my home. Too many sad memories once my two little angels were taken. When my parents came from England they bought a property in Hawke’s Bay. There were always people coming to the house — afternoon teas, visiting, lovely parties. Here it’s like the moon: nothing but scrubby hills, wretched sheep, rough men and servants forever giving notice.’

The one person who seemed to appreciate Sybil was Nellie, the Jacksons’ five-year-old daughter. Mr Jackson acted as poultrykeeper and cook for the hired men; his wife cooked for the Powell household and did the domestic mending. After Nellie discovered that Sybil had several children’s books in her possession and was prepared to read them aloud, the child was constantly at her side. ‘Can we have the one with the boy whose nails grew like cat claws?’ Nellie would say. Or, ‘Please, Miss, please, can it be Alice again?’

Sometimes Nellie would sit on Sybil’s knee as she read. The child had a round, open face like a clock and chubby limbs smelling of pastry. Sybil enjoyed reading to her and would look up with pleasure when she heard the sound of Nellie’s little boots running along the verandah floor. Maternal instinct, Sybil thought to herself.