The Love Apple

by Coral Atkinson

  Book 3

  [CHRISTCHURCH, NEW ZEALAND, 1894]

  It is a city of pretence. Even the name belongs elsewhere. The people of the land call it Otautahi, after a chief; the colonists changed it to Christ Church, the name of an Oxford college. Dreamed half a world away, the town, with its toy cathedral, has been imposed on a swampy plain, bedfellow with an extinct volcano. The ancient trees — totara, kahikatea and matai — felled, the swamp domesticated. Weeping willows and soft lawns have replaced the ragged clumps of flax. Rowing boats and imported ducks paddle where once the pukeko flicked night-coloured plumage and the feet of Maori passed on the way to battle, or in search of pounamu.

  It was to be another England. Better. Jack as good as his master. But there are still masters. The Canterbury squirocracy, princes of the sheep run, men who own farms large as counties. They and their children, fleeing from the austerity of rural life, have built grand houses in the better suburbs of Fendalton and Merivale.

  Education, culture, learning. Christchurch prides itself on these. Within a half-mile radius of Cathedral Square are grouped the museum, a baby university, schools for the rich and the not-so-rich. The merchant classes make do with schools reflecting the grammar model: Boys’ High School, Girls’ High School — for education of girls is catching on. Down by the park, in an impressive set of Gothic buildings, a faux public school offers education for the sons of wealth and privilege. Gentlemen’s children, for the most part, though who can be entirely sure? Take that boy from Hokitika: father said to be Anglo-Irish gentry, now a tomato grower, and as for the mother … with some parents it is better not to enquire.

  Chapter 18

  There was something going on, Oliver Hastings was sure of it. The boy pulled the covers closer to his body and swivelled his eyes about. Light from a desultory moon outlined the rows of beds and the contours of the occupants. Down by the door there was the sound of whispers and the hint of footfall on the board floor. Night-time in the dormitory was full of threats: scamperings, shufflings and occasional sobbing and cries. Sleep left you vulnerable and unprotected.

  In daytime Oliver had his strategies. Never stick your neck out, avoid everyone older, trust no one until proved harmless, and run at the first sign of trouble. Nights were worse.

  He had been at boarding school for only a few weeks. He had survived the initiation house concert, in which every new boy was expected to sing. Trembling all over, he had managed a rendition of ‘Off to Philadelphia in the Mornin”. His offering, with its imitation Irish brogue, had gone down so well that Oliver escaped being pelted with mud or thrown in the river that time. The next morning he walked past a group of seniors.

  ‘If it isn’t the little pig-swilling Paddy,’ one of the older boys shouted.

  ‘Throw him in the bog,’ shouted another.

  The older boys caught Oliver and flung him in the air. They ran around the corner of the building with him. A master came out of a doorway and went to cross the quadrangle. The seniors stopped and tumbled Oliver into a very large rubbish tin with a metal lid, before they could be seen. The tin was almost empty. Oliver struggled in the darkness, too frightened to call or shout. French was next class and he would be late. He tried jumping. His fingers touched the lid over his head but it was firmly placed. He jumped and struggled; there seemed no way of escaping. It was very dark in the bin, and evil-smelling. The sides of the container, what he could see of them, seemed to be pressing in and Oliver had difficulty breathing. He began to panic: maybe he would have to stay there all night; maybe this was a bin that was seldom opened and he would be left to starve and die. He remembered a picture he had seen of the little princes in the Tower of London, their emaciated bodies all sharp-angled bones sticking out of their silky clothes. Oliver began to cry. He didn’t want or mean to, he just did. Tears brushed his face and dripped off his chin.

  ‘Hastings,’ a boy’s voice said. The voice was light and unbroken. There was the sound of something heavy, maybe a form, being dragged on the cobblestones outside. Oliver took a deep swallow to stop crying. The lid swung back and a small, pale face looked in. Oliver recognised the boy from his own dormitory. He thought he was called Duffy.

  ‘Jeepers,’ said Duffy, ‘you look a long way down. Saw them put you in but had to wait until the coast was clear. Here,’ he said, ‘can you reach my hand?’

  ‘Damn decent of you to get me out,’ said Oliver as he scrambled over the side of the bin with Duffy’s help.

  ‘Hate the place,’ said Duffy, ‘and those seniors. They’re just baboons. Have told mother I want to leave.’

  ‘Think your parents will let you?’ said Oliver, hastily wiping his tear-stained face with the sleeve of his jacket.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Duffy, as he picked up his books. ‘Father’s dead; I wanted to come in the first place. Not sure mother would mind if I quit.’

  There was a dull thump at the far end of the dormitory. It sounded to Oliver as if a large object had hit the floor.

  ‘Scrag him. Get him!’ a voice said in a loud whisper.

  Oliver, rigid with fear, pretended to be asleep. Whatever was happening was several beds away. Opening one eye, he saw a candle bobbing in the darkness and the clotted outline of moving figures coming towards him. The candlelight illuminated part of a nightshirt and the arms and torsos of two senior boys.

  ‘Here he is,’ McCutcheon, one of the seniors, said from the foot of the bed.

  ‘Get up, Hastings,’ said the other, Denis Powell, thrusting the candle towards Oliver’s face. The senior boy looked immensely tall in the darkness.

  ‘What for, sir?’ said Oliver in a small voice.

  ‘You’ll see‚’ said Powell, ‘and make it bloody snappy.’

  At the end of the dormitory a small figure was bent over a washstand. Two of the seniors were holding down the boy’s shoulders. Oliver couldn’t see who the victim was. He was obviously a junior, but who?

  ‘Here,’ said Powell, picking a razor strop off the washstand and pushing it at Oliver. ‘Six cuts, real hard.’

  ‘But why?’ said Oliver, taking the strop.

  ‘Don’t why me, you little shit,’ said Powell. ‘Do as you’re bloody told.’

  ‘And get cracking,’ said McCutcheon, pulling up the bent-over boy’s nightshirt to reveal thin, childish buttocks beneath.

  Oliver was trembling. His teeth were rattling. The light from the candle swam in a furred hood of brightness. The strop hung slack in his hand.

  ‘Get on with it, Charlie, or do you want to be next?’

  Oliver raised the strop. One of the seniors moved his arm and in that moment Oliver saw that the victim was Duffy.

  ‘No,’ Oliver said, his voice high and foreign.

  ‘Cheeky little squirt,’ said McCutcheon, going to grab Oliver’s arm. ‘Looks as if you need to be taught a lesson too.’

  Oliver dodged the grasp. Instinctively he whirled the strop against his attacker. Powell and McCutcheon went to grab it and in the tussle Oliver hit the candle. The light fell to the floor and went out. Oliver bolted for the door.

  ‘Get him!’ shouted McCutcheon.

  Oliver made a dash for the stairs, the seniors after him. His heart was bouncing in his chest, his mouth dry. He reached the first landing and the door into the housemaster’s rooms opened. Light fell. Oliver stopped. His pursuers stopped also. He had been seen.

  ‘Boy, boy!’ the housemaster shouted, waving a lamp. ‘Come here!’

  Oliver slowly came down the remaining stairs.

  ‘Well?’ said the housemaster, pulling his dressing gown firmly around his body. ‘And what have you to say?’

  Oliver was too terrified to speak.

  ‘Defiance won’t get you anywhere, boy. Out of the dormitory at night. You know the rules, don’t you? Eh?’

  Oliver hung his head. A board squeaked on the upper stairs. The housemaster looked up, sensing the other miscreants in the darkness.

  ‘All of you, here!’ he shouted. The seni
ors shuffled down.

  Predictably, Oliver and the seniors were caned; more surprisingly, Oliver gained in prestige from the incident. ‘Plucky little bastard, Hastings,’ the older boys said, and from then on largely left him alone.

  Looking out of the classroom window Oliver saw Duffy leave. He wished the boy wasn’t going. Oliver watched as a green tin trunk was loaded onto the cab and saw Duffy come out of the boarding house. Shielding his hand with a Latin book, Oliver waved; Duffy gave the thumbs up in reply before being driven away.

  Several months elapsed. The year had turned to spring. Oliver slid his fingers along the hitching rail outside the Government Buildings as he walked past with Jefferson and Tobias. There were no horses currently tethered but manure, lying where the animals usually stood, added a full-bodied odour to the thin September air. The lads were off to town to buy gear for a kite they were building. It was the season for kites and for the previous week the junior boys had been preoccupied by the business of flight. As with all such school crazes there was an intensity and universal devotion to the fad.

  ‘Isn’t it queer?’ Oliver said. ‘Crazes, the way everyone wants to do something at the same time and then no one wants to do it at all?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Jefferson.

  ‘You know,’ said Oliver, fingering a chestnut that had lain undisturbed in his pocket since the autumn, ‘things like conkers, and now kites.’

  ‘Time of year,’ said Tobias. ‘Conkers in autumn, kites in the spring, snowball fights in winter. Stands to reason.’

  ‘But what about marbles?’ said Oliver. ‘They’ve nothing to do with seasons.’

  The other two boys were silent; neither could find an answer and they didn’t much care. Some things just were: whites were better than blacks, men better than women, the British best of all, school crazes came and went. There were some certainties you didn’t question.

  The woman stood on the Armagh Street bridge peering over the rail at the water. She wore a dress of emerald, pink and black striped taffeta, and a fashionable high hat that street urchins called ‘four storeys and a basement’.

  ‘Look!’ said Jefferson, waving towards her. ‘A liquorice allsort!’

  ‘Do you think?’ said Oliver, taking in the startling brevity of the woman’s skirts, which permitted a view of soft kid shoes and matching pale-green stockinged ankles. ‘Do you think she’s, you know, kept?’

  The boys stared with interest.

  ‘A whore?’ said Tobias.

  Oliver nodded.

  Jefferson let out a low whistle. ‘Reckon she’s got a touch of the tar-brush, too.’

  ‘Quite a looker, though,’ said Tobias. ‘Nice knockers.’

  ‘Let’s ask her to fish them out,’ said Jefferson.

  ‘We’ll throw them back if they’re undersized,’ said Tobias.

  The three boys giggled. They were alongside the woman when Tobias said loudly, ‘Got your fishing licence, Hastings?’

  Immediately the woman turned towards them. Red-faced and confused, each boy raised his cap, quickened his pace and passed in an asphyxia of suppressed hilarity. They reached the corner and were waiting for a cart to pass when there was the sound of hurrying female feet and the froufrou of petticoats.

  ‘Excuse me,’ the woman said, catching them up. ‘But is one of you Oliver Hastings, the son of the photographer in Hokitika?’

  ‘That’s me,’ said Oliver, looking at the stranger with her made-up face and hat piled with pink feathers.

  ‘Could I …? Would you …? Can I have a word?’

  ‘Seems the lady,’ said Jefferson, winking at Tobias, ‘knows you, Hastings.’

  ‘Just for a minute, Oliver. Just a minute,’ the woman said.

  ‘Catch us up, Hastings,’ said Tobias. ‘We’ll be at Reece’s.’

  ‘Come,’ said the woman, taking Oliver’s elbow as if he were an escort of her own age. They turned down Oxford Terrace. Oliver could feel the woman’s glance as if she were about to eat him. He wished she’d stop staring. ‘We’ll walk by the river, or you could have tea with me. You’d like some tea and cakes or buns — maybe buns are what you’d like, or sweets?

  Oliver, sticky with embarrassment, wriggled his arm away. ‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ he said, ‘but who are you?’

  The woman stopped walking. In horror Oliver saw tears in her eyes.

  ‘This will be a shock to you. It is for me. Well, I mean I’ve thought and thought about this for years and suddenly you just walk past,’ she said, brushing her tears with her gloved hand and smiling at him.

  ‘What do you want?’ said Oliver wishing his friends hadn’t scarpered, wondering if the woman was mad.

  ‘I’m Huia, Princess Huia, Huia Hastings … I’m … I’m your mother.’

  It was like being thrown by a horse, Oliver thought. One moment feet firmly in the stirrups, the bridle safely in your hands, the next flung into the unknown earth with painful ferocity.

  ‘What?’ said Oliver. ‘You aren’t.’

  ‘If you’re Oliver Hastings, the photographer’s son from Hokitika, I am,’ said Huia. ‘Haven’t you heard of me, Princess Huia of Maoriland, the aerialist? We’re in Christchurch for a few nights, performing at the Theatre Royal. I could get you and your cobbers free tickets to the show — dress circle, box if you want. We could go to supper afterwards, your friends too.’

  Oliver looked at the chains that hung in loops along the riverbank. He was sure he was going to be sick. He thought of the boys who made the trees talk, the jeering about Huia he’d endured at school in Hokitika. The single luxury of coming to Christchurch was the freedom from the shame: no one in the city knew anything about his origins, or so he’d thought, until this painted woman appeared to grasp and claim him.

  ‘Pepe. My pepe, to think you’re so grown up,’ Huia said, putting her arms around him and pulling him to her. Oliver felt the sharp outline of the woman’s stays against his body, the smell of her perfume.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Don’t touch me. You’re not my mother. You’re a liar.’

  ‘It’s a shock, Oliver, of course. It’s a shock.’

  ‘Let me go!’ said Oliver, wrenching the green gloves from his arms. ‘You’re mad. A lunatic. You should be locked up. Put in the asylum. I have a mother and she’s not … she’s not you.’

  ‘I am your mother,’ the woman said. ‘Actually, I am still Mrs Geoffrey Hastings. I had you in Hokitika in 1882. Didn’t anyone tell you your mother was Princess Huia?’

  ‘Liar,’ said Oliver. ‘My mother’s not called Huia. She’s … she’s called Pearl.’

  ‘Pearl?’

  The boy tore himself free and began to run, back towards the school.

  ‘Oliver!’ the woman called. ‘Oliver!’ But she made no attempt at following.

  The boy kept running and didn’t turn.

  As a child of three or four Oliver had found a piece of pearly watered silk, endpapers of an old prayer book. The self-coloured, lightning-figured landscape of the fabric had fascinated him. He kept the scrap under his pillow, holding and stroking it each night before sleep. As time went on the silk became part of an evening dress, a dress his mother wore. Oliver had no conscious recollection of the real Huia: no one in his home ever mentioned her. Out of dreams and longing he constructed a replacement: a mother he called Pearl in reference to the silk. In his mind Pearl was the associate of all that was pale, translucent, fair. Waterfalls, sea foam, shells, lace. Her hair was moon-coloured, her skin white as hoihere flowers. She came to him at night. He sat on her silky knee, played with her necklace, which had opals, maybe even diamonds. She called him ‘Little O’, her ‘little man’.

  The years passed. Pearl visited Oliver less often, but he clung to the memory with passion. She was real for him — more real than anything of flesh and blood — but he told no one, not even Rosaleen Pascoe, who was his best friend. Oliver knew that everything to do with his mother was dangerous and precarious. Pearl was his: capture her
in words, offer her to others, and she might well disappear.

  Oliver rested his head against his pony’s flank. Tears and mucus dripped together on Chester’s hide. He had done it. Said the name, shouted it even, out there in the street. And now the reality of Pearl was starting to disintegrate. Maybe she had never existed. Maybe that painted circus creature Huia, with her tawny Maori skin and sweet-shop clothing, really was his mother. Maybe the boys in Hokitika were right after all.

  Oliver wiped his nose with the back of his hand and drew the wisp over Chester’s neck and onto the pony’s shoulders. PJ had made the grooming tool out of twisted hay as a going-away present for Oliver. The tight plait was firm and well constructed. Chester stood still, enjoying the attention and the massaging of his muscles.

  ‘Good chap,’ said Oliver, grateful for the pony’s accommodating warmth and kindly eyes.

  ‘Chester will see you right,’ PJ had said when Oliver confided his apprehension at being sent to boarding school in Christchurch. ‘The good Lord gave us them horses as friends, like; that’s what Mick Sullivan always used to say.’

  So it turned out. Having Chester in the boarding-house stables provided Oliver with both a place of retreat and an ongoing comfort. The boy spent a great deal of his free time with the pony, riding in Hagley Park, tenderly cleaning Chester’s hooves, brushing his chestnut body, or offering sugar lumps and carrots.

  The stable door was flung open and Tobias and Jefferson barrelled in.

  ‘Hastings, we’ve been looking everywhere,’ shouted Tobias.

  ‘What happened with the tart?’ said Jefferson.