The Love Apple (16 page)

McCaskey certainly needed a crowd-pleaser, and he had a hunch the public would like Huia. It was not the girl’s skill or her pluck that would captivate them — in the world of vaudeville, dexterity and courage were two a penny, and her childish antics on the pony were hardly spectacular — it was something else. McCaskey was sure of it: she had that indefinable quality all great female entertainers possess. He’d sensed it immediately Huia rode into the ring; when she smiled as she tossed the violets, he had no doubt. Huia Hastings was a woman who compelled a man’s attention: she singled him out, made him feel desirable. Her look was alluring, exciting and deliciously sexual. It promised intimacy. Dancing, trapeze, acrobatics; it probably didn’t matter much. Dress her up in a scanty costume covered in sequins, put her on a stage and every man in the audience would want her.

Maybe at last McCaskey’s luck had turned. He’d need to find a good stage name — like ‘Princess Huia of Maoriland: Every Man’s Darling’. Maybe even ‘Every Man’s Daring Darling’. Could be this Huia Hastings was the great discovery of his life. McCaskey would make her famous, and she would make
his fortune. But there was to be no entanglement, despite those saucy glances. ‘No passes at the cast’ was one of McCaskey’s maxims, adopted after some sticky affairs with leading ladies resulted in his hurriedly leaving California, wanted for bigamy. McCaskey now restricted his amorousness to women from brothels and bars: less darned nuisance that way. But when it came to Huia Hastings, he would need to work hard to stick to his resolve, control his wayward hands. The girl might be a prize, but he guessed she could also be trouble.

In retrospect, Geoffrey came to feel that the fire and Huia’s disappearance had merged as a single happening; in fact, the two were separated by several weeks. There was a pristine finality, a fierce destruction of everything before, a savage cauterising of the past welding events together. The fire purged the household of Huia’s clothes and possessions. The things she subsequently bought disappeared into her horse’s saddlebags the night she left home.

Geoffrey was in Huia’s bedroom in Wharenui, the newly rented house. He peered into the rose-covered ewer and basin, opened drawers in the elaborate, marble-topped kauri dressing table and looked in the matching wardrobe. Everything was empty. He had no idea what he was seeking but felt compelled to search; as if among the shoe-stretchers and camphor balls he would find a clue, an explanation for what had happened, a direction as to what he should do, a token of absolution from guilt and failure. Evidence of Huia’s adultery. The wastepaper basket held a tangle of her hair off her comb. It was the only relic his wife left, other than the note on the hall-stand the night she went:
Don’t try to find me. I won’t be coming back. Look after Oliver. I’m a no-good mother. H.

Geoffrey held the tangle of black hair in his hand. It lay like a dark scar across his palm. He wasn’t going after Huia, or
the lover he was sure she had fled to. She had chosen to leave him and her child. He had no intention of trying to compel his wife’s return, though anger rose in his chest like heartburn every time he thought about her. Maybe he could have forgiven her for leaving him, but for her to leave Oliver beggared belief. Geoffrey thought about his son, the engaging way the child had of tussling with order, forever closing cupboard doors, shutting drawers, lining up toys. He thought of the way Oliver ran to him when he came in, jumping into his arms, rubbing his face against his cheek. He wondered incredulously how Huia could voluntarily forsake such joy.

Geoffrey told himself he didn’t care if she had a lover; secretly he wasn’t so sure. There was a feeling of raw hurt, a wound he seemed to be in the middle of that he couldn’t explain. Geoffrey threw Huia’s hair back where he had found it and went into the garden.

Wharenui was a little way out of the town. It had been built by Juicy Neale, a successful storekeeper who had seen his business grow from a tent with a plank counter in the early gold rushes of the 1860s to a large emporium with curvaceous, frosted writing on the entrance doors and a staff of assistants in crackling white aprons. Neale had died the previous year and Wharenui was let while the estate was wound up. The substantial ten-room house — the interior extensively panelled with kauri, carefully painted to imitate the more fashionable oak — was surrounded by verandahs on three sides, set in generous gardens complete with lawns, fountains and two glasshouses.

Laughter was coming from the larger glasshouse as Geoffrey walked out of the shrubbery. PJ and Oliver were inside. Geoffrey had never heard PJ laugh before. The realisation made him sad. Oliver was chasing PJ, throwing small red balls at him. PJ was dodging and running. Geoffrey stopped for a moment to watch the two playing together: how young PJ looked, and what
a debt he owed him. Geoffrey thought with shame of his earlier misgivings, of his hostility to everything the boy was and stood for — his poor Irish origins, his enthusiasm for the rebel cause. He’d been sure that employing the lad had been a mistake. Now he saw that he had been a prig and a fool and he didn’t deserve PJ’s bravery.

Oliver saw his father through the glass and ran out to him.

‘Papa, Papa,’ he said, clutching Geoffrey’s plus fours with slippery fingers.

‘What are you lads up to?’ said Geoffrey.

‘Sorry, Mr Hastings,’ said PJ. ‘We were just having a bit of craic.’

‘Look, Papa, baws,’ said Oliver, holding two shrunken tomatoes out to his father.

Geoffrey stepped into the glasshouse, followed by the two boys. The place had a high-pitched smell. The remains of the previous season’s tomato crop hung on expiring plants.

‘What sort of yokes are they?’ said PJ.

‘Tomatoes,’ said Geoffrey. ‘Had them once when I was in Italy. Wonderful summery taste when they’re ripe. People used to say they were dangerous. The colour, I suppose, and you know how it is when something’s new.’

‘Not to be trusted, like, were they?’ said PJ.

‘Something like that. Didn’t realise they were growing here in New Zealand.’

Oliver pulled up a bamboo stake and ran about with it.

‘Were yiz looking for me, Mr Hastings?’ said PJ.

‘Yes,’ said Geoffrey. ‘I told you, PJ, that I put some money in trust for you till you’re twenty-one, but I’d like you to give you something else now, as a more immediate present for saving Oliver. I remember when I was your age: twenty-one seemed an awfully long way off. Is there something you’d like now?’

‘Ah, that’s really grand. And don’t I know that I’m ignorant
and all,’ said PJ, fiddling with two wizened tomatoes. ‘But would yiz ever have a mind to take me on, train me up as a photographer in the business?’

The business. Geoffrey had tried not to think about that since the fire had destroyed all his gear and most of his negatives and prints. Photography, the sorcery that had fascinated him since he was a boy. The occult power to hoard the past, freeze the present, confer immortality. The perpetual looking over the shoulder implicit in the craft. In recent years it had brought him nothing but misery. Geoffrey thought of the aching destruction of Vanessa’s pictures as he looked at the dying tomato plants. Here today, gone tomorrow. Tossed on the fire, just as the Bible said. Blossoming. Flourishing. Withering. Perishing. At least with growing things there was always the promise of next year, the new season. The brutality of death transformed. There was honesty about such things, an everlasting hope. But photography — the evil eye, capturing light to feed the human hunger for permanence. The incessant interruption of present by past. Images constantly waiting to return, to haunt. Geoffrey saw them coming on little light feet, like dreams conjured from darkness. Trick. Fraud. Sham. He was done with it.

‘I don’t think I’ll reopen a studio,’ said Geoffrey, surprised that the decision, which had hovered on the brink of consciousness for some days, was suddenly made and spoken.

‘Are yiz telling me that?’ said PJ in a very small voice.

‘Might it help,’ said Geoffrey, aware of the lad’s
disappointment
, ‘if I bought you a camera? There’s some good portable ones about now I could get you. I’d teach you to use it, too.’

‘Would yiz? Really?’ said PJ.

‘Of course,’ said Geoffrey.

‘Me very own camera?’

‘Yes.’

‘Me want one too,’ said Oliver.

They laughed.

‘There’s something else,’ said PJ, ‘if it wasn’t too much trouble, like.’

‘What’s that?’ said Geoffrey.

‘Book learning,’ said PJ. ‘Sure, I’m desperate for it.’

‘I’ll teach you to read and write, if you want,’ said Geoffrey.

‘Glory be to God, would yiz?’

‘Yes,’ said Geoffrey, ‘and if you stick with it I can put you to work making copies of my letters. I find it so tedious having to rewrite them.’

‘Me, a lettered man. That would be really grand,’ said PJ.

‘Actually, you could be very useful with the paperwork,’ said Geoffrey, ‘as I think I’m going to take up a new occupation. Growing things.’

‘A farmer?’ said PJ.

‘No,’ said Geoffrey. ‘Flowers, fruit.’

‘These quare red particles?’ said PJ.

‘Tomatoes?’ said Geoffrey. ‘Hadn’t thought of them.’

R
osaleen Pascoe was eight. Oliver Hastings, who was several months younger, thought her beautiful. She had pale tussock-coloured hair held off her face in a bow, and wore an over-large sunbonnet. It was the beginning of the long holidays, which Oliver always spent with his father’s friends, the Pascoes, at Simpson’s Bridge. Oliver thought these times the best days of his life. Home in Hokitika meant Mr Custer’s school, a grim place of tiered classrooms with boys wedged together on hard benches. Mr Custer stalked the rows looking for error and wrongdoing. There was the unvarying whirling of the cane and stifled sobs.

Oliver, who was more interested in drawing than the three Rs, had only one friend at school, Ben Lock wood. Other boys teased him, especially after the rumour got about that the vaudeville performer and aerialist Princess Huia of Maoriland: Every Man’s Daring Darling was his mother. At lunchtimes, when the rest of the school played wild games of Bar the Door or He, Oliver retreated to the back of the shelter shed or hid behind the outdoor dunny to escape the jeering and smutty innuendoes. Until the teasing began Oliver had known nothing about his mother except that she had ‘gone away’ when he was very young. He imagined her like the lost girl Lucy Gray,
endlessly wandering the darkness singing ‘a solitary song’ and never looking back. Oliver said nothing to his father about the taunts at school: such things were better left unreported.

And anyway, school was generally unpleasant. In class Oliver seldom managed to survive the daily hearing of spelling without errors and punishment. When a teacher barked ‘four and thirteen’ or ‘fifteen and three’ at him in the morning mental arithmetic sessions, fear and tension caused him to stumble. There were drills for everything. A ritual of commands: stand, sit, hands on heads, hands behind backs, feet in front, fold arms, begin work, show slates. And woe betide the child who did not instantly obey.

At Simpson’s Bridge there were no such orders. Breakfast over, Oliver and Rosaleen would be sent outside to play. ‘Only as far as Sandfly Creek’, ‘No talking to strangers or going in the river’ and ‘See you’re back by midday’ were the only restrictions Rosaleen’s mother, Maeve, put on them.

The two children ducked through the hole in the fence at the end of the garden and headed down the track. The morning was dusky with promise, the sunlight thick on the ground like the golden syrup that came out of the big tins with the sleeping lion picture on them. In the bush just beyond the edge of the settlement was a decaying hut, once lived in by a prospector. A hatter. No one was quite sure why such solitary men were so called: some said they ate out of their hats, others that they succumbed to lunacy from loneliness.

Whatever the reason, all that now remained of occupancy was the derelict shack — known locally as Hatter’s Hut — and the knee-high grass clearing surrounded by bush and creek. The interior of the hut, its walls roughly covered in bits of newspaper and pictures from the magazines’ Christmas annuals, was divided by a decaying piece of calico that had once served to separate the sleeping and living areas. On one side was a broken
bentwood chair and a rough fireplace backed up against a detached chimney; there was a homemade sacking stretcher and a tin basin in the ‘bedroom’.

Rosaleen and Oliver had long ago staked out their claim to Hatter’s Hut. They swept the floor with bundles of twigs, removing dead birds, cobwebs and the evidence of rats. They put an old cushion that Rosaleen had taken from home on the broken chair and pretended this was where the owner of the hut sat. They called him Mr Hatter and brought him rata flowers and clematis that they shoved in jam jars and left to wither. They never opened the sagging door without first calling out, ‘Can we come in, Mr Hatter?’

There was only one problem. Oliver wanted to have a room each and, as he claimed to have found Hatter’s Hut in the first place, he considered he had a right.

‘It’s our hut and Mr Hatter’s,’ said Rosaleen. ‘Why do you need a special part?’

‘So it can be just mine,’ said Oliver.

‘Couldn’t I go in your part?’ said Rosaleen.

‘Course,’ said Oliver, ‘but you’d need to be invited.’

‘That’s silly,’ said Rosaleen. And so the matter stood.

On this morning the children had other things in mind. They had potatoes to roast and eggs to cook in the tin hung over the fire. They had a bottle of Maeve’s homemade lemonade and a slab of toffee that Arthur Pascoe had given them from the shop. Later they would have a feast. They put the food in the hut and, taking the toffee with them, went out into the sunshine.

‘Horses,’ said Rosaleen, running through the grass to the bush. Oliver followed her.

The horses were two fallen trees just above the creek. They had rope bridles and sacks for saddles. Rosaleen called her horse Lovely because she had once found an orchid growing on the tree’s trunk. Oliver’s horse was Zebra. Oliver and Rosaleen had
been promised ponies of their own in a year or two, but for now they had Lovely and Zebra. On them they rode with the Galway Blazers, the Tips, the Scarteen Black and Tans: famous Irish hunts that Geoffrey Hastings spoke about. They won prizes at the Kumara Races and the English Grand National. They were knights and ladies, and Red Indian braves riding the prairie.

Light was dappled over the horses. Oliver watched it floating in bright flakes on his skin. His hands looked odd — it was as if they belonged to someone else. Oliver glanced down to where his sailor-suit breeches ended under long stockings. His legs seemed those of a boy he was observing, not his own. He looked across at Rosaleen. She had her head down against Lovely’s ‘mane’, her arms clasped around the tree trunk. Her hair dripped over the bark, her broderie anglaise pinafore was extravagantly white above the dark ferns of the bush floor.

I will remember this moment, Oliver thought. I will remember it always.

The two children lay in the grass. It was damp and you weren’t supposed to lie on wet grass — it gave you something called rheumatic fever. They didn’t care. The toffee was thick in their mouths. Teeth wallowed in the sticky mess, distorting speech.

‘There’s a giant potato on top of a spoon,’ said Rosaleen, looking at a cloud.

‘It’s not,’ said Oliver. ‘It’s a blacksmith holding a horse’s hoof.’

‘You sound like a frog when you talk,’ said Rosaleen.

‘You sound like a frog that’s being squashed by a mangle,’ said Oliver.

Rosaleen hit his arm with a seeding grass head.

‘I’m going to marry you when I grow up,’ said Oliver.

‘I’m going to marry PJ,’ said Rosaleen.

‘PJ?’ said Oliver, amazed and disbelieving. ‘He’s old!’

‘He won’t be old when I marry him.’

PJ being a potential rival had never occurred to Oliver. PJ was his friend — hadn’t he worked for the Hastings family forever? But PJ was also a grown-up, inhabiting a different world. And what did Rosaleen know of him, anyway? PJ only came up to Simpson’s Bridge to deliver Oliver in the wagon or bring tomatoes for sale at the Pascoes’ store. PJ belonged to Oliver and Hokitika. What right did Rosaleen have fancying herself marrying him?

‘Why do you want to marry
him
?’ said Oliver.

‘He’s nice,’ said Rosaleen. ‘He was my Uncle Mick’s friend. Uncle Mick was a hero for Ireland: that’s why he died.’

‘Bollocks!’ said Oliver angrily, using a forbidden word.

Oliver rolled over in the grass, feeling cross. Betrayed. He was angry with PJ. It seemed a desertion that Rosaleen claimed him. PJ — who had always supported Oliver, been on his side. Everyone knew the story of how PJ had rescued him from the fire. PJ was like that. Dependable. PJ could never be Rosaleen’s; PJ was Oliver’s. Just as Rosaleen was Oliver’s. His.

Oliver had been coming home from school one day, walking with Ben Lockwood to where the road forked to Ben’s place; after that Oliver was on his own. The trees were packed close to the track, like people standing very close together at a horse race. Ferns pushed between the trunks like children peering through adults’ legs. The trees looked at you, Oliver was sure of that. And they talked — talked to one another. Oliver could hear them. It’s just the birds, he told himself, but the talking persisted, louder now. Oliver began to run. The talking ran with him.

‘Tart’s kid,’ a tree said.

‘Mammy’s a jam tart,’ said another.

‘Jam tart, jam tart, jam tart!’

Oliver shut his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see the talking trees. He ran as fast as he could. Home soon, he said to himself, though he knew it was a lie: he had a good mile to go. Oliver’s throat and his chest hurt. Something hit hard against his face. A stone. The trees were throwing stones. Oliver opened his eyes and saw boys running out onto the track. Green, Pierson, McDowell and Kelly: older, from school. They were waving flax flowers and shouting. Kelly had a shanghai in his hand. The boys stood in a ring around Oliver.

‘Your mammy’s dirt,’ said Green, giving Oliver a hard shove.

‘See that shit?’ said Pierson, gesturing to a pile of horse droppings on the track. ‘That’s what Hastings’ mother is.’

‘Maori shit,’ said Green, gripping Oliver’s collar.

Oliver could feel tears cluster like swarming insects behind his eyes. He clenched his fists, digging his nails into his palms.

‘Want to taste some of the shit?’ said Kelly.

Pierson caught Oliver by his collar. Kelly and McDowell grabbed at his arms and legs and swung him off the ground. Oliver was frightened: he was sure he would wet himself.

‘Let me down,’ he said, wriggling unsuccessfully to break free as the trio dragged him over the stones. ‘I’ll give you my yellow and glass taw if you let me go.’

‘’Fraidy cat,’ said Pierson, tightening his grip. ‘’Fraid of a little bit of shit.’

There was the sound of hooves.

‘Put him down, bloody little gurriers!’ shouted PJ, galloping into the group. The boys dropped Oliver in
astonishment
. There were yelps of pain as PJ flailed about with his riding crop. ‘I’ll larn youse. I bloody will if I catch any of youse at him again,’ PJ shouted, as Oliver staggered to his feet. The four boys disappeared into the bush.

‘Come on up,’ said PJ, gathering a weeping Oliver onto the
saddle in front of him. ‘Yer all right, Master Oliver. One peep more from those chancers and they’ll have me walloping them good and all.’

Jogging along, enclosed by PJ’s arms holding the bridle, felt safe and comforting. Oliver stopped crying.

‘What’s a tart?’ said Oliver.

‘Sure yiz know,’ said PJ. ‘A pudding, like.’

‘They said my mama’s a tart,’ said Oliver.

‘Pay no heed,’ said PJ. ‘That lot say more than their prayers.’

Oliver put his nose down into the grass. It smelt of mud. The morning didn’t seem the same as before.

‘Are you sulking?’ said Rosaleen, her face close to his ear. ‘Sulking ’cause I’m going to marry PJ?’

‘Course not,’ said Oliver, without looking up.

‘I could marry you as well as PJ,’ said Rosaleen.

‘It’s not allowed.’

‘Who says?’ said Rosaleen, taking a lump of toffee out of her mouth and rolling it in her fingers.

‘Anyway,’ said Oliver, feeling oddly sullied even before the words left his lips, ‘your papa wouldn’t let you marry PJ. PJ’s common.’

PJ had grown several inches, put on weight, filled out. On the outside he looked a young colonial; inside he was all Irish. Unlike some immigrants who were quick with new allegiance, PJ felt his Irishness like the rare gold nugget that drunk miners boasted of finding: a lodestar in his heart. Hokitika was full of the Irish. ‘Sure, I’m sorry for your trouble’, ‘Going about she was in her figure’, ‘A scunner, he had a real scunner’, the voices said as you walked through the town. At St Mary’s Church PJ would loiter about after Mass: to catch up with the gossip about
Ireland, to hear the latest news on Home Rule and Mr Parnell, sometimes just to watch his countryfolk with their faces big as meat plates and to hear the speech of home.

‘Do you ever think of going back, Mr Hastings?’ he asked one morning as Geoffrey was dictating a letter to a Dublin seed merchant.

PJ was an apt pupil learning to read and write. He worked at both skills with a fierce determination and now, though his spelling needed assistance, he could write a creditable
copperplate
hand. His grammar was improving also, and Geoffrey had even taught him that ‘you’ was both singular and plural and that ‘yiz’ and ‘youse’ had no place in ‘correct’ English usage. Along with the other changes PJ had a new name, not that anyone used it.

‘You can’t go about without a proper name,’ Geoffrey told him.

‘Sure I was always just PJ. Never knew more than that.’

‘Let’s suppose the PJ is for Patrick Joseph.’

‘That’s what they wrote on the passenger list when I came out here.’

‘Well, what about it, Mr Patrick Joseph?’

‘Good as the next,’ said PJ.

Geoffrey put down the seed catalogue he was holding. ‘I do intend going back to Ireland,’ he said, ‘but not now. Maybe when Oliver gets to university. I’d like him to go to Trinity in Dublin; perhaps then.’

‘Do you miss the old country?’

‘Not sure,’ said Geoffrey. ‘My home’s here now, I suppose. I came to New Zealand for my health originally, never intended staying, but things creep up on you and you find yourself increasingly tied to one place. I’ve got so interested in these damned tomatoes; I just can’t imagine leaving them even for a short while.’

‘I want to go back,’ said PJ. ‘I’m not ungrateful like, and don’t I think it grand out here, in spite of what some folk are saying about there being a depression these last years, but sometimes I feel it wasn’t right running off from Ireland just because there’s somewhere better to go. Mick Sullivan, Mrs Pascoe’s brother, always used to say there was no mitching till a job’s done, and people should stay and put things right in Ireland rather than been so keen on the emigrating. Being in New Zealand makes me feel proper poorly sometimes, as if I shouldn’t rightfully be here.’