The Love Apple (4 page)

Sometimes he’d still be mad next day and occasionally would swing his fists into Florrie’s face or slap Huia with the flat of his hand, but his rage was never as bad as when he came home freshly stoked from the pub. Usually by morning Florrie could deflect his anger. In her nightdress she’d kneel beside him, arms around his neck and, making soft chucking noises, would kiss and humour him awake. Then she would draw him down the tiny corridor from the kitchen into the still-warm bed.

‘Get on down the creek and look for cockabullies,’ Florrie
would say, if Huia hung about. Knowing better than to dawdle, Huia would gather up an old tin and scramble outside. The child would hear Florrie bolting the door on the inside as she went down the cinder path to the river. Things were always better when Huia got home; often Bluett was asleep.

It had seemed just an ordinary Saturday night when Florrie had vanished. It was midsummer and only half dark as Bluett came back from town, swearing and shouting on the track.

‘Quick, before your father comes,’ said Florrie, and together she and Huia moved the chest into position. They had just squeezed themselves down between the bed and the wall when Bluett opened the back door.

‘Where are you, you bloody whore?’ he shouted, and gave the bedroom door a violent kick. ‘Come on, open it. I know you’re in there, and the girl, too.’

Florrie put her finger to her lips. Huia held her breath.

‘Don’t think I don’t know what you’ve been up to behind my back,’ roared Bluett, kicking the door harder. ‘The laughing stock of the whole fucking town. My missus and John bloody Grady. Well, you’re not bloody getting away with it. I’m going to teach you a lesson and give you a hiding you won’t forget.’

Huia saw the fear on her mother’s face as it crumpled into tears. John Grady was a bushman who sometimes worked with her father. Huia knew her mother liked him. She always sent up an extra mutton pie or a few more meat sandwiches when he was cutting timber up the back. Once, when her father wasn’t about, Huia had been enormously surprised, and rather shocked, to come upon her mother and Grady walking through the trees, holding hands.

There was silence in the hallway for a moment. Bluett had gone into the kitchen. Maybe he would fall down or sleep it off in the chair, like he usually did. But he came back, roaring obscenities and thundering on the door with what sounded like
a mallet or a hammer. ‘Let me in, you stinking fucking bitch! Let me in before I break the bloody door down!’

Huia and Florrie hunkered together, flattening themselves further against the newspaper cuttings that papered the walls.

‘Don’t let him get us,’ sobbed Huia.

‘Ssh,’ said Florrie, putting her hand over her daughter’s mouth.

At that moment the hammer smashed through the door, firing splinters of wood into the room and onto the white bedspread. ‘So you are bloody in there,’ shouted Bluett, his red face against the broken opening. ‘Shift this bloody chest smartly or I’ll chop it and the whole fucking door down.’

Florrie and Huia didn’t move.

‘Are you deaf or something? Here, girl, bloody jump to it. Do as you’re fucking well told.’

Huia looked at her mother, who gave a slight nod. The girl got up and went to the door. In the instant the child crossed the floor, Florrie was on her feet. Running across the room, she tore back the shabby bit of lace curtain and threw up the window. Then she jumped onto a trunk, straddled the sill and climbed out. Her departure was so sudden and unexpected that it took Bluett a moment to grasp what had taken place. By the time he was out the front door, his wife was already beyond the fence and down the track. Sober, Bluett would have had no difficulty catching her, but drink slowed him, and even in her long skirts Florrie was a fast runner.

Sobbing and trembling, Huia ran across the paddock into the bush. The only response was the cries of pukeko in the flax swamp and the human-sounding voices of ruru. When cold drove Huia back into the house at dawn, her father was asleep at the kitchen table.

It turned out Florrie had gone for good. The lessons in reading, writing and arithmetic that Florrie had given Huia,
using pencil and slate, ended also. Huia was eleven when the new school opened at Skuse Creek and the law said she must go. She never did. Alf insisted she was needed at home, so Huia washed, cooked, cleaned and mended in her mother’s place. She milked the house cow, churned the butter and tended the fowls. Bluett didn’t mention his wife again, and refused to reply to questions about her. Huia didn’t know what had happened to Florrie, and as the months and years passed she willed herself to forget.

In time Huia invented other histories. Sometimes her mother was a titled lady who had come with the Duke of Edinburgh when he visited New Zealand; other times she was the child of a Maori princess found in the bush, wrapped in a flax mat. Always Huia was a foundling whom Alf Bluett had discovered abandoned and taken home. Lying in bed watching the day shrink into darkness across the rough tongue-and-groove walls of her room, or jumping in the cow dung on frosty mornings to keep her naked feet warm, Huia would console herself with the thought that all this was only temporary. She would leave Hobbs Forks just as soon as she could.

She’d often considered running away and getting a job in Hokitika or Greymouth. Making an escape and gaining employment seemed difficult enough — and where would it lead? A life emptying chamber pots and blacking ranges for some townie mistress was hardly appealing. So Huia waited and hoped. Holding the cracked hand-mirror she had taken from her mother’s abandoned possessions, she would pout and preen into the glass. ‘Lovely, lovely,’ she would say to herself as she tossed her dark curls back and forth. Then she would purse her lips, kiss the reflection and pull away, looking admiringly at the image of her mouth left on the mirror. At that moment a silken male voice always said, ‘I love you.’

‘Mr Bloody Photographer can go to buggery for all I care,’ said Huia as she stood up and went to the gate. But she knew it wasn’t like that, not at all.

Alf Bluett came out of May Hennessey’s room with a tomato in his pocket. The notice on the door — written in pencil and attached with hatpins — said:
Miss
Hennessey.
Afternoons
and
evenings.
Not
Sunday.
Please
knock.

Saturday was a popular time. Men were waiting, sitting on the floor of the landing beside the rattan table or on the steep flight of stairs that led to the street. Today, as always, Bluett visited May Hennessey sweetened by his first bout of drinking and before the stupor of the second. He was proud of being able to gauge and consume just the amount of whisky needed to increase sexual desire but not jeopardise the performance.

May was neither young nor a beauty. The flesh under her chin sagged and her once-red hair was now persuaded, with the aid of a bottle of henna, to a hectic sunset shade. It was her breasts and buttocks that men lusted after. Big bosoms tipped with aureoles like dabs of strawberry jam dripping from sponge rolls; buttocks that filled hands with comforting amplitude. May’s body invoked memories of childhood pleasure, of warm dough and bowls of sugary mixtures waiting to be licked. Best of all, May, unlike many of the sharp-tongued girls of the dancing rooms, the pavement nymphs and ladies of the night, actually enjoyed men. She was always prepared to listen and to talk.

‘Look,’ she said. Still stretched on the bed, May grasped the blind cord with one bare foot. The blind rolled up and the room was suddenly naked with light. ‘Look, Bluett,’ she said. ‘See what a sailor gave me.’

Bluett, who was pulling on his braces, turned. In May’s hand was what he thought at first was a child’s toy. A red ball with something green on top.

‘Ever seen one of these before?’ May said.

‘What is it?’ said Bluett.

‘A new sort of fruit, called a tomato. All the rage in America. They’re delicious.’

‘You’ve tried them?’ said Bluett.

‘Yes,’ said May. ‘Ate a bagful. This is the last one. Have a bite. You’ll like it.’

‘No, thanks,’ said Bluett.

‘Come on, Blue, give it a go. The sailor said these tomato things used to be called “love apples” — they’re supposed to make you randy as hell.’

‘You saying I need it?’ said Bluett, buttoning his waistcoat and picking his jacket off the floor.

‘Never. You’ll do as you are,’ said May, rolling onto her stomach, still holding the tomato. ‘Any road, I didn’t notice much after eating them myself. Just the taste. Corker taste.’

Bluett pulled a coin out of his waistcoat pocket and put it on May’s washstand.

‘Ta,’ said May.

As he went to the door she threw the tomato to him.

‘For next time,’ she said, and laughed.

May Hennessey’s room was above a butcher’s shop. When Alf Bluett came out the doorway at the foot of the stairs the first person he saw was Huia, staring vacantly at the stripped carcasses hanging from the ceiling of the shop. Bloodstains lay in dark pools on the sawdust-covered floor. Huia was crying.

‘What the hell are you doing down here, bawling in the street, when you’re supposed to be running errands?’ Bluett said, hoping the girl didn’t know where he’d been. ‘And all tarted up, too. Have you been seeing someone?’

‘Yes,’ said Huia.

‘Who?’ said Bluett.

‘Mr Hastings.’

‘The posh English photographer?’

‘He’s Irish.’

‘And no lip from you, miss. Why the devil did you go to see him?’

‘Wanted him to take my photograph, if you must know.’

‘Photograph? What do you want with a bloody photograph? And what were you going to pay him with? Answer me that?’

‘He wouldn’t do it,’ said Huia, ignoring the question.

‘What did you expect? Hastings wouldn’t want to waste his time taking pictures of scruffy little sheilas like you, even if you had the money.’

Huia began to cry again, though she usually knew better than to weep in front of her father. Today Bluett, mellowed by the pleasures of the afternoon, was in a good mood.

‘Pack in the bloody snivelling and take a look at this,’ he said, pulling out the tomato. A red sphere the colour of rata flowers lay in Bluett’s hand.

‘What is it?’ said Huia.

‘Some fancy new fruit,’ said Bluett. ‘It’s called a tomato, supposed to have a corker flavour.’

Huia thought it looked like fire: bright, exciting and dangerous. ‘Can I have a taste?’ she said.

‘No,’ said her father, ‘wouldn’t be good for you.’ And he put the tomato back in his pocket.

I
t rained. How it rained. Rain pelted against the windows and on the roof and the iron of the green-and-white striped verandah. Rats climbed up drainpipes to get to higher ground. Dogs moaned on chains.

Down at the beach the wind struggled and howled. Breakers smashed their cargoes of driftwood and uprooted trees on the stony foreshore, and the ships anchored in the river mouth swung and lunged on the current. Water began to trickle around kegs of brandy, sacks of flour and sugar. If it kept up, the cellars and warehouses on the ocean side of Revell Street would be awash by morning.

The lantern outside the hotel threw light into the upstairs room. The china basin and ewer, the marble-topped washstand and the brass bed end glinted.

Noiselessly she came to him, a swan on a night lake. Over the bare boards in her white kid boots — the ones with the embossed pattern of cornflowers and the pearl buttons. Geoffrey couldn’t see her face but he felt her hand. It was her touch that roused him — her fingers lying like a glove across his mouth. She spoke, her words floating on the dark air of the bedroom.

‘It will not be long, love,’ Vanessa said. ‘It will not be long …’

‘God almighty!’ said Geoffrey, sitting up in bed. He looked about. He was alone.

He was shaking. His hands scrabbled about on the table beside the bed, seeking the wax matches. With difficulty he lit the candle; a dandelion of brightness illuminated the room. Geoffrey looked at the bedroom door, expecting to see his dressing gown swaying slightly on the brass hook. It seemed the door had just shut; the silence of the room had recently been parted. Yet nothing moved.

It had happened before and he hated it: Vanessa coming to him in a dream, or what he supposed was a dream. She was so real he sometimes doubted it. Her presence, her voice, even the scent of violets were all so vivid. Waking afterwards was the worst part. Having to relearn the completeness of loss, confronting the moment of desolation. The cusp of the void, where the heart stands still.

Geoffrey filled his pipe; maybe smoking would help. An article he once read on falconry said that the falcon’s prey had to be taken from it the moment the bird landed. That was how it was with these visions of Vanessa. He found her in dreams; consciousness sternly removed her. But there were some memories that no malevolent waking could commandeer.

Nights with Vanessa. The times neither of them could sleep and they would find themselves awake, facing over the pillows, looking into each other’s eyes. They always whispered then, not that there was any need. There was only themselves — and Sarah at a distance downstairs in the maid’s room by the scullery. And when they made love in the veiled darkness there was a mystery about it, a tenderness different from any coupling by day or lamplight. Afterwards Geoffrey would go to the kitchen and make honey sandwiches and cocoa. They would eat in bed, licking the sweetness off each other’s fingers; talking about childhood and Ireland and how one day, when Geoffrey’s
cough was completely better, they would go home.

Vanessa’s
Book
of
Common
Prayer
lay on the table beside the bed, untouched since she died. Geoffrey hadn’t touched his own prayer book for a long time either. Brought up in the Church of Ireland, the Protestant faith of his fathers, Geoffrey had gone through a heady romantic enthusiasm for religion as a young man but its last vestiges seemed to have absconded, along with Vanessa. He had gone to church and taken the sacrament only twice in the last year, at Christmas and Easter. Neither occasion brought him solace; rather, he felt a hypocrite, for despite what the church preached, Geoffrey now felt that God, if He existed at all, was not to be trusted. The clergy weren’t much help either. When Geoffrey had tried to discuss his guilt over Vanessa’s death, his yearning for understanding and forgiveness had been met with embarrassed reassurances from the Reverend Carson that of course Geoffrey was not to blame, not at all.

He flicked open Vanessa’s prayer book. A reading of the Psalms might calm him down. The book was old and the cover very ornate: crimson velvet with a brass clasp, the cross studded with glittering stones.

The words swayed before Geoffrey’s eyes.

Vanessa had bought the prayer book at a fair in Ireland the year after they were married: Bantry or Skibbereen, Geoffrey couldn’t recall which. They had gone there with the darkroom on the wagon to take photographs. Vanessa had wandered off to look at the stalls as he and the wagon man set up the camera. A group of urchins pressed around, the boys’ naked toes white in the muck and straw.

‘By Jaysis, what’s that?’

‘For the love of Mike, have you seen himself?’

Geoffrey was under the cloth, just about to make the exposure, when one of the boys yelled, ‘Look behind you, mister!’ Without realising he was being had, Geoffrey withdrew his head and glanced back. Vanessa was walking towards him holding the prayer book she had just bought.

Geoffrey faltered now over the words:

Who indeed? The ornate language of the familiar psalm shrivelled in his mouth.

He thought of Vanessa at the fair, that winter afternoon, the sun setting. Geoffrey remembered the flood of love he’d felt for his wife as she moved across the square. One crystal on the book cover had caught the lingering light. In his memory it seemed that Vanessa carried a solitary star.

Outside in the street the sound of rain had dulled to a persistent lisp. Thank God for that, Geoffrey thought. He and Alf Bluett planned to set out in the morning for the Routledge. Geoffrey was looking forward to the journey, to days in the solitude of bush and mountain, and to using the new hand-held camera he had just got from England. No cumbersome outdoor darkrooms this time, he thought; instead he had followed the latest findings of British photographers. Carefully prepared glass plates, which he had painted with a gelatin-silver bromide emulsion and heat-matured, lay stacked in his gear. According to what Geoffrey had read, such plates would not only keep their light sensitivity, but once exposed would hold the image to be developed days later in the comfort of his own Hokitika darkroom.

He was pleased to hear the rain ease. He had no wish to ride south in a downpour, even though chances were that they’d
be drenched numerous times before getting home.

Geoffrey was in the mood for a new project. He had taken no major series of photographs during the last two years, though the German postcard-makers who bought his images were constantly demanding new and spectacular views. Geoffrey’s vision of landscape had changed since Vanessa’s death. Gone was the desire to communicate the soft pastoral gaze of his early years in New Zealand. His intention now was to capture the harsh, unforgiving immensity of the scenery he photographed, imbued with his own desolation.

There was a photographic competition in London he intended entering and he hoped that shots of the Routledge would provide the pictures he needed. Doubtless the subject would be popular; those safe and comfortable at the centre of empire enjoyed contemplating the exotic wilderness and solitary dangers of the colonial fringe. The Routledge Range, several days’ ride south-east of Hokitika, was increasingly discussed in the bars and billiard rooms of the town. Surveyors and the more intrepid travellers who had begun to penetrate the wilderness of south Westland reported it as a particularly scenic region of glaciers, high snow-clad peaks, enormous waterfalls and a circle of hot pools. Tales of these freakish springs, which oozed boiling water out of an icy, glacier-fed river, added to the region’s allure. Some talked of the hot pools opening up an entirely new bonanza for the West Coast. The genteel envisaged a spa hotel with potted palms and small orchestras, while wilder entrepreneurs toyed with the idea of the Sulphuretted Mountain Hoo, a luxurious bathhouse offering the additional pleasures of dancing girls, strong drink and faro gambling. Those of a less adventurous disposition dismissed all such speculation as nonsense, pointing out that with not even a serviceable dray road heading south, the current difficulties of getting to the hot pools made any such undertaking unlikely.

There was no disagreement, however, about the beauty of the place. Everyone said the area was magnificent, and expressions like ‘solemn’, ‘awe-inspiring’ and ‘incredible’ were frequently used. The Routledge sounded like the inspiration Geoffrey sought.

The McIntyre Bait and Livery Stable was a lively place with a steady traffic of horses, gigs, buggies and freight wagons. There were always children there, hanging about, hoping for a farthing for helping to unload incoming wagons, walking with arms outstretched on the rails of the corral around the back or getting in the way as hay was winched off the carts into the hay loft. The large horse-drawn schooner wagons bound for various parts of the West Coast and Nelson left from McIntyre’s and their comings and goings created noise and excitement.

Joe McIntyre, the proprietor, was a genial man with a love of horses. Woe betide any carter or drunk farmer who left his beast tied and neglected for too long in the neighbouring streets. McIntyre would send one of his lads to bring the unfortunate horse in to be fed and watered and the owner would receive a dressing down when he finally fronted up at the office door. To call it an office implied a commercial dimension the room didn’t really possess, being only a space partitioned off at the end of a half-verandah. There was certainly a desk littered with papers but there was also a table and chairs, a deck of cards, newspapers and a set of tumblers on top of a red wooden gin box. The room also served as unofficial men’s club. Customers waiting for horses read newspapers, drank nips of McIntyre’s whisky or convivially played a hand of cards at the table below the clock.

It was before six in the morning when Geoffrey arrived and even at this early hour the place was active. Six horses were being hooked up to a schooner. The leaders obediently took their
places at the front, ready to be coupled together. A big bay backed in beside the handles, a chestnut took the centre under the whip and a strawberry roan moved in on the off-side. The horses were attached to the chain and the teamster climbed onto the seat and whistled up his dog. The wagon set off amid shouts, the sound of hooves and a throaty rumble of wheels.

Geoffrey, who kept his own horse, Tsar, at the stables, had hired other horses for the trip south.

‘We need five,’ Bluett had said. ‘Three for pack, one for me and one for the cook.’

It didn’t occur to Geoffrey to inquire about the cook. The mechanics of hiring them was not something he had had much practice with. Cooks, like all servants, were just there: employed, directed and complained about by other people, usually women.

Geoffrey was standing reading the
Grey
River
Argus,
with Champ at his feet sniffing a verandah pole, when Alf and Huia Bluett came down the street. Alf Bluett pushed a loaded handmade barrow and Huia, once again wearing a skirt over trousers, carried an axe, two blanket rolls and what appeared to be a horse’s nosebag stuffed with clothing.

‘Good morning,’ called Geoffrey, somewhat surprised to see that Bluett had brought his daughter.

‘Morning,’ said Bluett. Huia said nothing.

‘Capital morning,’ said Geoffrey, looking across the street at the wide blue sky, which hinted at a perfect day. The rapid changes in Hokitika’s weather still astonished him. There was something melodramatic about the speed and totality with which a torrential downpour, such as that of the previous night, could be replaced by glittering sunshine.

‘Day’s good enough,’ said Bluett, leaning the barrow against the verandah steps. Huia continued to ignore Geoffrey. She just dropped her load on a convenient chair and immediately went to the open stable door, where one of McIntyre’s hands
was adjusting the buckles on a harness.

‘I’ve checked the supplies,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Everything’s here. I suppose we’re ready to go once we’ve loaded up and the cook arrives.’

‘Cook?’ said Bluett. ‘The cook’s my girl, Hu. Thought you knew.’

‘Miss Bluett,’ said Geoffrey. ‘Well …’

‘Got an objection?’

‘No,’ said Geoffrey, watching Huia and thinking of her swearing at him in the back yard. He wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to spend several days upcountry in her company, or that her inclusion in the party was entirely appropriate, but it seemed too late to make changes and he had no desire to alienate her father. ‘No, of course not.’

‘The girl’s a fair rouseabout and she knows how to ride. Brought her up to be useful, no mollycoddling for that one. And she can make a camp stew or a damper as good as the next.’

They got to Ross for a very late breakfast. This town, scattered about hills, had always reminded Geoffrey of a northern Italian village. It had the same random appearance, with houses seemingly thrown about the hilly terrain. Like all West Coast settlements it had an air of improbability. The surrounding ranges were densely covered with bush, like the dark pelt of some animal, and in the midst of this gigantic primeval forest humans had made their small, pathetic mark. The township itself was a cleared area of burnt tree stumps, mining tailings, streets, buildings and the giant sluicing machines. A cankerous patch in a solidly green landscape. To the west lay a swampy foreshore and the sea.

Ross was a gold town and unlike Hokitika, its larger neighbour, its preoccupation was still with acquiring the precious metal. There was an air of single-mindedness about the place,
a feeling of outpost and frontier. Beyond Ross, the road led south, becoming (like the scattered farms and settlements it served) increasingly tentative the farther one went.