He had spent a sleepless night castigating himself for what had happened at the pools: his immorality, his corruption of Huia, his careless disregard for Vanessa’s memory. Moments before he was thinking of finding Champ; now he was consumed by desire. The memory of the previous day threw images like magic lantern slides in his head. He saw the ribbon of Huia’s body as she drifted towards him in the pool, the sweet undulations of hip and buttocks, the seemingly aquatic caves of marvellous flesh that lay between her thighs. For a moment he hesitated. He was like a man on the edge of a cliff, bent on destruction but pausing briefly at the thought of a fire left dangerously untended at home, or an unlocked door inviting burglary. Then he pulled back Huia’s clothing and began to kiss and bite her shoulders.
‘You do love me, I can tell,’ said Huia as they sank onto the forest floor.
Geoffrey couldn’t have replied even if he’d wanted to. The furore of his feelings, the chaotic confusion of need, recollection, lust and surrender rendered speech impossible.
They’d got back to Hokitika somehow: Bluett’s ankle had prevented any thought of continuing on up the Routledge. As it was, it didn’t seem to matter. Geoffrey had lost all enthusiasm for the expedition and just wanted to get home. Huia remembered little of the return journey. Geoffrey spoke to her only when he had to, and they were never alone together. Bluett was cross and in pain. Huia was desolate, her mood fluctuating from self-blame to anger at Geoffrey. They had parted formally at the livery stables in Hokitika. Geoffrey bowed slightly to Huia and said, ‘Thank you very much.’ It was as if they had just come off the floor at some fashionable ball.
In the days and weeks that followed, Huia had told herself that absence made the heart grow fonder. If she were patient and made no move, Geoffrey would have second thoughts and contact her again. But he didn’t. As time went by, Huia thought of her mother and of Stan Birtwistle, and wondered if abandonment was just what happened. Nothing could be trusted: love least of all. And then she became aware of the other matter.
Huia was late with the meal. She had pulled the gloves on and off a hundred times, tried them on with various items of clothing, done and undone the buttons. She had examined and re-examined the card, even copying Hastings’ signature over and over onto a piece of the brown paper. All this used up a large part of the afternoon. Huia had stoked the fire, made a rice pudding and was just about to put the potatoes on to boil when her father came in.
‘What have you got there?’ Bluett asked, unlacing his boots.
‘Nothing,’ said Huia, hastily shoving the gloves down the front of her sacking apron.
‘Don’t bloody lie to me, girl,’ said her father. ‘Show me what you’ve got.’
Huia held the gloves out to him. Bluett took them.
‘Where did those come from?’ he said, turning them over.
Huia could think of nothing except the truth. ‘Mr Hastings sent them to me.’
‘Hastings?’ said Bluett. ‘Since when did he start giving you gee-gaws? Have you been acting the trollop with him?’
Huia was silent.
‘Cat got your tongue?’ said Bluett.
‘I’ve done nothing,’ said Huia.
‘Why’s he giving you bloody tart’s gifts, then? Answer me that?’
Huia hung her head.
‘Answer me, girl.’ He caught her arm in a painful grip.
‘Maybe he just wanted to say thank you for my cooking up the Routledge. He might have noticed I don’t have any gloves.’
‘Humph!’ said Bluett, getting up. ‘Who does Hastings think he is anyway? Buggered my bloody leg going after his horse and what thanks did I get? And now he’s throwing his money around on you. Suppose he thinks I don’t provide well enough, can’t clothe my own kin. Is that it? Well, there’s only one place for this sort of fancy muck in my house.’
‘Please, Da, please,’ said Huia, who had seen her father destroy things before. ‘I’ll put the gloves away. I promise I’ll never wear them if you give them back.’
‘Likely story,’ said Bluett.
‘Please, please,’ said Huia.
Bluett went out, banging the door behind him. Huia knew it was no use arguing; she’d only get a hiding and he’d still get rid of the gloves. Through the window she saw her father cross the rough grass and go into the privy. He came out quickly, the gloves no longer in his hands.
Huia sat on the planks over the long drop. She had locked herself in and didn’t want to come out. Ever. The privy was dark, draughty and smelly. It was also home to several weta, whose armour-plated insect bodies and evil-looking heads had greatly alarmed Huia as a child. Now she watched one scuttle about in a corner and felt a grim satisfaction in its malevolent appearance.
Far below her in the stinking tide of urine and excrement were the gloves: her gloves. The gloves Geoffrey had chosen for her, gloves his fingers must have touched. There was no way of rescuing them but at least they were there. Geoffrey had sent them. He remembered her. There was comfort in that. Hope.
And Lady Luck did smile, or at least Huia thought so. Two days later Alf Bluett said he was heading north for a night or two. He was going up to Nelson’s Creek with his mate to look at a bit of land Mathias was thinking of buying. Ever since the gloves had arrived, Huia had tried to find a way of getting to see Geoffrey. It had to be concealed from her father but there was no way she could walk to Hokitika and back in a morning, or an afternoon. To be away from home for longer was impossible, as Bluett expected his meal brought up to the forest at midday and a hot dinner waiting when he got back. It would, of course, be possible for Huia to get to see Geoffrey when she and her father went on their next trip to town, but having to wait almost two weeks seemed an additional agony.
Bluett’s departure was a godsend. The gloves gave Huia the perfect reason to visit Geoffrey, and when she was there … her thoughts trailed off at this point. She was sure she loved Geoffrey. She was also confused, frightened, alone, and there was something bewildering and strange happening to her body.
Huia knew that her good dress, the dress she had from her mother, would be crushed again by the time she had carried it over her arm the six miles to town but she was still going to iron it. She raked up the stove and set the heavy flatiron near the coals to heat, then sat at the table polishing her fingernails with her mother’s nail buffer. Huia’s nails were bitten and had bled in some of the corners. She wished she had Geoffrey’s gloves to hide their ugliness.
Taking the iron off the stove, she brushed off the ash with a cloth and spat on the plate. If it sizzled you knew it was ready — this was something she had learned from her mother. Huia thought of Florrie’s small brown hand holding this same iron as the saliva shrank into fizzing liquid balls. Her mother, Ma. The thought made Huia feel faint. She stood there holding the upturned iron, unable to move, unable to breathe. Her stomach hurt; she felt dizzy and sick. The walls of the kitchen came pressing in, closer, closer. They were going to meet — to catch and squash her between them. Then a voice — Huia thought it was her own — began sobbing over and over: ‘I want Ma. I want Ma now.’ It was the first time Huia had ever let herself think or say such a thing, but as the words came she knew that in spite of all pretence, the feeling had always been inside her: cunningly waiting, insidiously growing every day of the eight years that had passed since her mother had left.
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.
Geoffre
y 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?
The Love Apple Page 9