The Love Apple (8 page)

Silver
nitrate
,
the woman wrote in the leather-covered ledger. She blotted the ink with absorbent pink paper, taking great care that the letters didn’t run. Sybil Percival put effort into her elegant copperplate and the results, with their floral curves and flourishes, pleased her. She was sitting at Geoffrey’s chenille-covered table surrounded by small bottles, cataloguing the chemicals he used in his photography. In a few minutes she would rewrite and stick new labels on the bottles. She had made the paste herself, boiling up flour and water in a pot on the kitchen range. The saucepan now stood at her elbow on a plate, a brush beside it ready for use.

Geoffrey was out and Sybil was doing one of the things she enjoyed best; she called it ‘ordering’. There was such a sense of satisfaction about the gathering-up, the tying-in of the loose threads that life and other people perpetually left lying about. Sybil was Geoffrey’s sister-in-law, or rather had been until Vanessa died. She had been in New Zealand for a week and this afternoon in Geoffrey’s house, surrounded by his things, helping with his work, she felt a profound sense of contentment and joy. It seemed as if everything that had gone before in her life — the withered hope, the disappointment, the enduring loneliness so painful and inexplicable at the time — was behind her.

Sybil stirred the brush in the paste and thought of a long-ago afternoon when she was fifteen years of age and at her parents’ house in Dublin. The day was unusually fine and the family were having afternoon tea in the garden. They sat on the lawn in chairs that had been brought out from the house for the occasion. A slight breeze stirred the lace cloth that covered the table. Everyone had finished eating and drinking and, in Sybil’s memory at least, nothing other than the tablecloth moved.
Mrs Percival’s eyelids drooped just a little on her cheeks, while Mr Percival looked at the lilac trees and mentally reviewed the state of his investments. Geoffrey and Vanessa, who had very recently announced their intention to marry, stared longingly at each other, across plates covered in cake crumbs and empty teacups. Sybil sat with her hands folded in her lap, as she had been taught, and thought about her prospective brother-in-law. She had first met Geoffrey over a year earlier, when he had arrived to escort Vanessa to a viceregal presentation. Finding Sybil playing the piano in the morning room, he had asked her to dance so he could practise waltzing wearing a court sword. Sybil, in her short, schoolgirl dress and beribboned hair, thought it the most exciting and also the most embarrassing moment of her life.

In the following months Sybil had watched Geoffrey closely. To someone brought up with only one sibling, this stylish young man with his ready smile and mulberry frock-coats, his interest in photography and ability to mimic everyone — whether it was Mrs Dolan who brought the milk or the provost of the university — seemed to Sybil like a being from another, more fascinating planet. When Geoffrey paid a visit, Sybil was usually the first to welcome him, saving up interesting shells from her collection to show him, or offering new books that she bought for the sole purpose of lending to him. In return, Geoffrey smiled and joked and chatted, but his eyes told Sybil he saw her as a child: his eyes were always on Vanessa. Who could blame him? Sybil thought, standing in her nightdress in front of her bedroom mirror and looking at her pale, sticky arms and legs, her hair that never lay flat but poked out at odd angles. Vanessa, at nineteen, had soft, fair skin and bright blue eyes. She had rounded limbs and dimpled hands; beside her Sybil felt gawky and ugly.

In Geoffrey’s absence, Sybil remembered the way he spoke. She thought of how his otherwise straight hair curled slightly
at one side at the back, remembered what he said about his brothers and sisters, the names of the dogs of his childhood, and how he had once called the
Mona
Lisa
‘a woman’s picture’. She wondered what he meant and whether he was right.

Sybil had asked to be excused from the tea table. When Geoffrey looked at Vanessa like that it made her miserable, shut out, as if an impenetrable wall had sprung up around the sweethearts. She imagined the wall as tall and stone, with broken glass sprinkled along the top, and pictured herself forever on the other side, circling around, seeking a way in.

Sybil had picked up her drawing pad and pencil and walked over to the small pond in the rockery. She sat on a rock and looked at the greenish water. She had set herself the task of sketching the tadpoles as they grew into frogs. She had pictures of them with back legs and with front legs. She had just started drawing the little creatures, now in the process of losing their tails, when Geoffrey came and hunkered beside her. Sybil saw the fabric of his trouser legs taut over his thighs, the leather of his boots; she caught the distinctive smell of the man, which she could never quite describe to herself. She wanted desperately to reach out and put her hand on Geoffrey’s knee, to feel the warmth of his flesh beneath her fingers and to have him smile and look at her as he did at Vanessa.

‘Won’t be long now,’ said Geoffrey, peering into the pond, ‘and those young fellows will be off.’

Sybil pretended to be absorbed in her drawing. She didn’t look up.

‘Must be amazing to be living in water one day and on land the next, your whole world totally changed. Impossible to imagine, really.’

‘I can imagine it,’ said Sybil.

‘So what’s it like, then?’ said Geoffrey, smiling and getting to his feet.

‘It’s like,’ said Sybil, hesitating and becoming red, ‘I think it’s like falling in love.’

Geoffrey made a soft sound like a low whistle and Sybil stood up. She pulled the sheet of paper she’d been drawing out of the pad and tore it in two.

‘What did you do that for?’ said Geoffrey. ‘You’d drawn those chaps really well.’

‘No, I didn’t,’ said Sybil. ‘They’re horrible, all wrong.’ Then she began to weep.

Mrs Percival said her daughter was suffering from sunstroke and insisted she went to bed. Sybil, who felt very silly about the whole thing, lay under a sheet and watched the panels of summer light move across the wall. She wished Geoffrey hadn’t seen her like that, but she also knew something important had happened: like the tadpoles, her world had changed. A few months later Geoffrey married Vanessa.

On the far side of the globe, in the Hokitika parlour, Sybil smeared glue on a label and thought of her sister’s wedding. Geoffrey in his jewel-green frock-coat, Vanessa in her swaying crinoline, walking arm in arm down the aisle of the church. Sybil could still recall the smell of lilies and tight sleeve of her bridesmaid’s dress as it bit into her armpit. The discomfort in her flesh like an extension of the pain inside.

Years passed. Geoffrey and Vanessa went to New Zealand; Sybil stayed in Ireland. Sometimes young men looked her way but Sybil saw them as if from a great height or distance, and it wasn’t long before they sought love elsewhere. At about this time Sybil’s father lost his money in an investment fraud and took his life rather than face his now-penniless family. Mrs Percival died in the wake of the tragedy. Sybil, who had suddenly to earn her own living, gratefully accepted a position as a governess with the Pascoes, who were family friends. They were bleak years, but through them all Sybil had kept her brother-in-law’s image
lovingly, and somewhat guiltily, in her locket and in her heart.

Then came the news of Vanessa’s death. At first Sybil had experienced nothing but the huge rent in her life caused by the loss of her sister. Vanessa — the one person who had known her from the very beginning, her closest friend — was suddenly and forever absent, not just from Ireland but from life itself.

Sybil was in her upstairs bedroom in the Pascoes’ house, cutting paper lining for her dressing-table drawers, when the thought arrived. A thought so daring that at first she was not sure she should permit herself to entertain it. She picked up the ruler and measured the drawer again as a means of distraction but the notion was insistent. Geoffrey was a widower now. She could visit him in New Zealand; there was even money for the trip, for Vanessa had left her a small inheritance. Sybil’s former charge, Claire Pascoe, sometimes talked of visiting the colony to see her brother. Claire and Sybil would go together. The opportunity was perfect. And there was something else: English and Irish law forbade any marriage between a man and his deceased wife’s sister, but Sybil had read that this no longer applied in New Zealand, where the law had recently been altered.

Some months later, Sybil sat on the upper deck of the
Benbow
watching the waves, every lurch and swing of the ship bringing her closer to Hokitika, closer to Geoffrey. There was possibility now, she thought, the chance of happiness.

Sybil glanced up from her work, looked at the fire and smiled. It was a late summer day but cool. The blaze gave both an extra brightness to the room and a welcome warmth. The fire was entirely Geoffrey and Sybil’s creation, the household being currently without servants as Mrs Caulder, the cook-charwoman, had handed in her notice in a flounce when Sybil suggested she replaced the increasingly filthy water as she moved about the house scrubbing the floor. The place also lacked a parlourmaid,
the previous one having left to be married some weeks before. The transitory passage and general uppityness of colonial employees left Geoffrey bewildered, and once Sybil arrived he had gratefully handed over the task of appointing of new servants to her. Meantime the two of them made do as best they could. There was a cosy domesticity about it that Sybil enjoyed; this morning out in the yard at the chopping block as Geoffrey split the kindling with an axe, and later as Sybil showed him how to fold newspapers into rosettes for setting the fire. It was, Sybil thought, as if they were a married couple, so comfortable were they with each other, so confident. It was too soon after Vanessa’s death, too soon altogether of course to think of anything between them, anything permanent, but after all the despairing years Sybil at last had the luxury of hope.

She marvelled at the interests she and Geoffrey shared, the opinions they had in common. They talked together a great deal, conversing so readily and well. When Sybil returned each evening to the boarding house where she — for the purpose of decorum — stayed, she would notice the ache in her throat from the wealth of conversing she and Geoffrey had done. They talked about Ireland, about Home Rule, the troubles there, the boycotts of landlords, and about their youth: the time they first met when Geoffrey had arrived to take Vanessa to her coming-out ball at Dublin Castle and how he had asked Sybil to practise waltzing with him around the morning room. They talked about books. Had he read
Middlemarch
?
What did she think of
The
Adventures
of
Tom
Sawyer
?

They talked about New Zealand; most of all they talked about Vanessa — ‘my lost treasure’, as Geoffrey called her. There was no doubt Geoffrey loved Vanessa. No doubt at all. Strange, though: the first thing Sybil had noticed when she came to Geoffrey’s house was the lack of any photograph of her sister.

‘I destroyed most of the prints, the glass plates as well,’ said Geoffrey when she asked.

‘Why?’

‘Too painful,’ said Geoffrey. ‘Too much of a link, a way in to the heartbreak. Problem is, it’s the loss and the memory, not the images, that make the scars. You can’t get rid of them so easily.’

‘But you still have some portraits of V left?’ said Sybil.

‘A few,’ said Geoffrey, thinking of the intimate set in the attic, photographs he didn’t dare look at.

‘So you’ve come about the position as parlourmaid,’ said Sybil to the girl in the old-fashioned dress who stood at the door. ‘Do step inside.’

‘I’ve come to see Mr Hastings,’ said Huia. ‘I don’t know anything about the parlourmaid.’

‘I’m afraid Mr Hastings is out,’ said Sybil. ‘But he won’t be long. You can wait in here if you like.’

Huia followed Sybil through the narrow hallway into the drawing room. ‘Who are you?’ Huia said.

Sybil smiled. She’d heard the colonials were direct; this girl was certainly true to type. ‘I’m Miss Percival, a friend from Ireland,’ said Sybil.

‘Related?’ said Huia, finding the answer unsatisfactory and wondering if this woman was some kind of rival for Geoffrey’s affection.

‘In a way,’ said Sybil. ‘Mrs Hastings — the late Mrs Hastings — was my older sister.’

‘The dead wife,’ said Huia. ‘The one he’s always on about. Was she like you? I thought she was young and pretty.’

‘She was,’ said Sybil, snapping the ledger shut with a crisp sound.

Huia looked at Sybil. Old, she thought: certainly over thirty.
The dress Miss Percival wore was of an expensive-looking material but a dowdy sort of nothing-colour, and the way she had pulled her hair back didn’t show much style for someone who spoke so posh. Huia felt a sudden relief. This Miss Percival was too ridiculously old and spinsterish to be much competition.

‘Sybil!’ shouted Geoffrey as he opened the door into the hall. ‘I’ve just picked up another novel by that Mr Hardy.’

He came into the room, a small parcel in his hand. The moment Huia saw him, something within pitched over and the rhythm of her heart blundered.

‘Huia!’ said Geoffrey.

‘I came to thank you for the gloves.’

‘A pleasure,’ said Geoffrey, looking red and confused. ‘And I see you have already met my late wife’s sister. Sybil, this is Miss Bluett; Huia, this is Miss Percival.’

The two women gave tentative smiles.

‘I need to see you,’ said Huia.

‘Well, why don’t we all sit down?’ said Geoffrey.

‘No,’ said Huia, ‘I mean see you on our own. Without her.’

‘I do apologise,’ said Sybil. ‘Anyway I need to go out to the kitchen and check if the bread is risen yet.’

‘I think,’ said Geoffrey, ‘it would be better if you stayed.’

Sybil hesitated by the door, then sat down at the table.

‘Now, what can we do for you, Huia?’ said Geoffrey.

Huia looked at him, so neat and dapper in his chequered suit. It was the wrong time, she knew that, but would there be a right time? Whatever this woman Percival was about, Geoffrey clearly wanted to keep her in the room, to use her between them. And there was the way he had said ‘what can we do for you?’ — as if there were anything he and this schoolmarmish person could ever do together for Huia.