The Love Apple (24 page)

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 bright 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.

Oliver slumped in a chair, his arms cradling his face. ‘Come on, lad,’ said PJ, going to him. ‘Up and out; sure, there’s nothing more we can do for them two.’

‘It’s bloody, bloody, bloody,’ said Oliver, getting unsteadily to his feet.

‘By God, it is,’ said PJ, his hand on the boy’s back.

PJ was for trying to bury the dead woman and her child but McGibbon and Kirk said he was a halfwit. What implements there might have been on the farm, with the exception of a pitchfork and a hoe, had vanished. None of them much fancied
scuffling in the hard soil with bayonet or pocketknives. PJ would have done it if the others were willing but they weren’t. Oliver, who was hunched beneath a tree, took no part in the discussion. PJ doubted the boy had strength left to dig anyhow. Orders were to fire the place: better to leave the bodies burn.

McGibbon and Kirk went chasing some chickens, the only livestock the farm appeared to have left. One of the chickens, injured by a flying stone from Kirk, flapped and hopped. McGibbon grabbed to catch it and fell.

The house burned easily. Fire rolled out of the windows with a gruff roar and black smoke billowed from the roof. They left it blazing and rode away, McGibbon and Kirk with the dead poultry hanging in forage nets from their saddles.

Early the next morning they were ordered to fall in. A small convoy of supply wagons was moving out and some Rough Riders were detailed as escort. Lieutenant Powell was the officer in charge. Oliver loathed him. Powell, who had kept up his bullying from school, was forever picking on Oliver and this morning was no exception.

Oliver was adjusting Jimmy’s surcingle when Powell came around the edge of a wagon. ‘Trooper Hastings!’ he bellowed, though he was standing close enough. ‘Army regulations demand you salute an officer.’

Oliver snapped to attention, his hand at his head.

‘Improperly dressed, Trooper,’ said Powell. ‘Take that bloody slouch hat off immediately and replace it with regulation headgear.’

‘Sir!’ said Oliver.

‘If I see any of you wearing those hats again you’re up on a charge.’ Turning to PJ, Powell said, ‘And that goes for you too, Joseph, you bloody bogtrotter.’

Bad cess to him, PJ thought darkly, but said nothing.

The convoy moved out. The wagons with their eight or nine span of oxen lumbered slowly along. ‘You’re ill,’ PJ said, looking at Oliver riding beside him. ‘Report sick — you’re not well enough for duty.’ Oliver just stared at him and rode on, his long arms barely grasping Jimmy’s bridle, his boyish head slumped halfway to his chest.

If something happened to Oliver … PJ tried not to think about it. He looked at the sparrow-coloured land stretching all around him and willed himself elsewhere. He thought of New Zealand: the damp greenness of the West Coast, the mountains all ice and glitter. He thought of Ireland: the little hills, the moist sun and the swaggering clouds over squelching bog. He forced himself to suck the images as if they were sweets.

Towards afternoon the landscape changed. The plains gave way to a broken terrain of small kopjes and scattered boulders. Miles later the land slid into a dried-out riverbed. On the far side of the waterless drift was a ragged group of hillocks. One of the wagons, with Powell and some troopers in front, had already cleared the ford and was making for the other side. The next was moving down into the drift, the rest of the convoy behind. PJ and Oliver, with some half-dozen troopers, were alongside this second wagon.

‘Hands up!’ a voice shouted from the nearest kopje. A few hands went up but not many. There was a flurry of bullets and the appearance of Boer riflemen on the higher ground. ‘God almighty!’ said PJ, pulling his rifle out of its scabbard.