The Love Apple

by Coral Atkinson

  ‘You decide who takes part in the shows.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Would you watch me?’ said Huia.

  ‘For pity’s sake, Hu,’ said Birtwistle.

  ‘You’re an artiste,’ said McCaskey. ‘So pretty, I could have guessed. And what do you offer for our delectation?’

  ‘Tricks,’ said Huia, ‘on horses.’

  ‘A lady equestrian.’

  ‘I could learn other things, too. Dancing, wire-walking and that, if you wanted.’

  McCaskey whistled as Huia rode into the small cleared area that served as a ring. She had removed her veiled hat, her skirt and her horse’s saddle. She rode bareback on Fleur in her tight violet trousers.

  ‘Quite a looker,’ said McCaskey to Birtwistle, who was sitting beside him on an upturned gin box.

  Birtwistle snorted. He was already taxed keeping his relationship with Bubbles, one of the living statuary ladies, secret from Mademoiselle Ida, a high-kicking cancan dancer. He had no wish for the complexities of the situation to be further compounded by Huia. He was furious with her for following him to Charleston. Why couldn’t she stay at home in Hokitika? The idea of Huia fancying herself as a variety artiste added to Birtwistle’s annoyance. Hadn’t he slogged his guts out building himself up as strongman and stunt performer? What the devil did Huia, swanning about Hokitika dressed up to the nines, know about ‘tricks on horses’?

  Huia rode around the ring. She paused her horse and sprang onto Fleur’s rump. She faced backwards and flipped head over heels onto the ground. Neatly, she mounted again, standing on the horse’s back; now she trotted Fleur about, balancing on one foot, leg outstretched, arms clasped in an arch over her head. When she passed the seated men she pulled the violets off her bodice, brought the posy to her lips and tossed it to McCaskey.

  ‘Is that it?’ said McCaskey, standing up as Huia reined Fleur in.

  ‘Yes,’ said Huia, dismounting. ‘What did you think?’

  ‘Seen better and I’m not much fussed on animal acts — too much damn trouble,’ said McCaskey.

  ‘Told you, Hu. Go home,’ said Birtwistle.

  ‘You don’t want me?’ said Huia to McCaskey.

  ‘Didn’t say that,’ said McCaskey. ‘We might make something of you. Dancing with the new limelight, trapeze work. Don’t normally hire artistes on spec, but I’m keen on adding a few new acts and you might just be what I’m after. Tell you what, bed and board for three months while you train, and you help Ida with the costumes as well. After that we’ll see.’

  McCaskey was a realist. He knew that his shows were honky-tonk and third-rate, and that several of his performers were has-beens. He also knew the fortune he once planned to amass as showman and entrepreneur was slipping further away with every season. Dreams of hitting the big time were replaced by regrets for opportunities lost. Time was against him. The vaudeville that McCaskey had toured in the frontier towns of the United States and on the goldfields of Australia and New Zealand was rapidly being replaced by grander, bigger, more sophisticated imported shows. Tastes were changing: audiences that once had cheered delightedly at performing fleas and laughed uproariously at comedians with blackened faces telling ancient jokes now demanded full-scale Gilbert and Sullivan productions with trainloads of costumes and international leading ladies.

  In consequence, McCaskey’s Royal Variety Troupe now stuck to the smaller settlements and mining towns, where expectations were modest. Places where weary men who had spent hours underground chipping at a coalface or up to their thighs in water sluicing recalcitrant gold from rock walls hungered for a few hours’ distraction. They marvelled at Mr Hercules (Birtwistle) lifting weights with two men attached to either side; they cheered when McCaskey as Maximilian the Wonder Man sawed Beautiful Bubbles in two, they whooped and whistled when Mademoiselle Ida — who was on the wrong side of forty — kicked so high in the Parisienne Quadrille that you could see the very tops of her pink thighs. But you couldn’t go on trotting out the same old stuff forever. McCaskey wanted something popular, something new. He had recently rejected an offer of a pair of boxing kangaroos, and had toyed with the idea of engaging Lola and her trained snakes. But the animals involved in both acts put him off, though he’d heard that snake performers drew good houses.

  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.<
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  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.’

  Chapter 15

  [WEST COAST, NEW ZEALAND, 1889]

  Rosaleen 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 th
em. 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.