The Love Apple

by Coral Atkinson

  Oliver didn’t look up.

  ‘Be a sport. You can tell us, Hastings,’ said Tobias.

  ‘Did you do it with her — did you go to the knocking shop?’ said Jefferson.

  Oliver grasped the hoof pick lying on the stool. ‘Shut up and get out,’ he said, pointing the spike at Jefferson. ‘If either of you say another word about her you’re a stuck pig.’

  ‘Hold your bloody hair on,’ said Tobias.

  ‘I said get out,’ said Oliver.

  The fierce grip the boy had on the hoof pick, the tone of his voice and the way Oliver’s eyes had narrowed convinced the others that he meant what he said. They backed away.

  ‘Piker,’ said Tobias from the safety of the doorway.

  ‘Probably couldn’t get it up,’ said Jefferson.

  They ran off laughing.

  The next day a parcel for Oliver was delivered to the school: a soft cardboard box full of creamed meringue swans and a deckle-edged card with fancy writing.

  Hope you like these. Please, please see me again.

  I’ll be at the Adelphi Tea Rooms today at 4.30 p.m.

  If you can’t come, write care of the Christchurch Post Office.

  Your loving Mother, Huia

  Oliver threw the box and card on the floor, smashing it with his boot. He fetched a bottle of Indian ink from his locker and poured the contents on top of the card and the broken heap of white confection. Later he took the dark, sodden remains into the park and buried it under a heap of leaves.

  Huia hadn’t really expected Oliver to meet her in the tearooms but she waited until five-fifteen just in case. The encounter with the boy had upset her. Distraction and upsets were bad for Huia’s performance and she wondered how she would manage to banish Oliver from her thoughts on stage that evening. Again and again she went back to how he looked: the shape of his face, the colour of his skin, the way one eye seemed ever so slightly different from the other. The long arms and caramel-coloured hair. Huia couldn’t remember the colour of his eyes and that vexed her. Sometimes she saw them blue, sometimes brown. She didn’t think he looked like her, not a bit, and yet …

  She put a threepenny-bit tip under the saucer of her teacup and went out into the street. She walked about, not thinking where she was going. When she found herself in Cathedral Square she dodged between the cab ranks and went into the cathedral. Huia, who had scant experience of religion, had seldom been in a church. The height of the roof was impressive and she instinctively looked up, figuring where she would hang the trapeze if she were to perform there. The choir was practising; boys’ voices swooped about the building.

  Huia sat down and thought of Oliver. She had left him as a child, never gone back, never even tried to see him, and now it was his turn to reject her. Rough justice, she supposed. Yet though she had never sought Oliver out she had carried the hope of meeting him throughout the passing years. The possibility had tied her to New Zealand, although she knew she could find more glittering companies and opportunities overseas. Seeing Oliver yesterday brought all that to an end. The boy didn’t want her, didn’t need her. He even had another mother: someone called Pearl. There was nothing to hold Huia any more. Tomorrow she would gather together her newspaper clippings and reviews and write to Australian theatrical agents, inquiring after work.

  The building filled with the fierce, pure sound of a boy soprano; the voice rose higher and higher and — just when it seemed it would shatter — vanished into the matai beams of the roof. Huia dabbed at her tears with her handkerchief. The truth is, she thought, I’m no longer a mother. I can go where I like. I’m free.

  She took off her gloves and reached upwards to the back of her neck. Trembling slightly, she took off the locket with its curl of Oliver’s baby hair and put it in her reticule.

  It was almost dusk when Huia stepped back into the Square. She walked briskly beside the cathedral railings, heading towards the theatre.

  Chapter 19

  The dressing-table top was crowded with bottles, jars and tubes. Orange-flower skin food, cream of pond-lilies, almond lotion. There were the curling combs to heat and apply, and the belladonna drops to make her eyes sparkle. Huia made a point of never appearing in public without looking her best. No matter that she would change and be made up all over again when she got to the theatre. Painted, powdered, perfumed and dressed with style, she liked to think of herself stepping out of the cab at the stage door a goddess. The days of mending costumes and sharing flea-infested back rooms and boarding-house beds with other female members in the company were over. Huia now demanded and got not only increased payment for her performances but a maid to dress her and a room of her own. She was the leading lady of the company: McCaskey denied her nothing. His other innovations — such as Margarita, who danced in diaphanous clothing while a lantern illuminated her garments with portraits of the royal family, or Danny and Cheeko, the double-cycling act — brought polite applause from the audience. But it was Huia who kept the company in business, brought the engagements in proper theatres in towns and cities. It was Huia who drew the crowds.

  In front of her on the dressing table was an opened letter. Destiny, Huia said to herself, glancing at the letter for the hundredth time. Mossman and Adcock, Theatrical Agents of Sydney, were sending someone to watch her perform.

  Our partner, Mr Ellis, will be in New Zealand next month. If your performance appears compatible with the impeccable standard demanded by our Clients, Mr Ellis will seek the honour of attending you in your dressing room at the conclusion of the Entertainment …

  The letter made Huia half wish she’d sent her photographs, press cuttings — one called her ‘the colony’s exquisite lady Léotard’ — and particulars to Mossman and Adcock sooner. She pulled one long strand of hair fetchingly over her shoulder.

  ‘You’ll show them, Hu,’ she said to her reflection. ‘Take Australia by storm, you will. And the world will follow.’

  The thought made her smile. She’d worked hard enough, and now finally the future had arrived. Almost. Huia daydreamed of gilded railway carriages and suppers with besotted princes. Fashion houses copying the length of her gloves and the tilt of her hat, and risqué fruit bowls supported by copies of her flying figure appearing on elegant sideboards. There would be polkas and towns named in her honour. Princess Huia of Maoriland would be the greatest female aerialist of all time. She knew it.

  Huia had a new routine: Soldier of the Queen. She would perform it tonight when the Mossman and Adcock agent was in the audience. She had choreographed it herself to show off her new triple-trapeze act. The black-and-silver costume flattered her figure. It also amused Huia that along with the smartly tailored doublet and hose with the embroidered VR front and back, and the suede bootees, she would perform wearing the soldier’s cap that Birtwistle had given her years ago.

  Stan Birtwistle, Huia thought. Would he follow her to Australia? She would never ask him to go with her but she hoped he would. There was something about the man’s dogged devotion, his grovelling for her sexual favours, not to mention his blond, rippling body that she craved. Huia kept Birtwistle in a state of oscillating hope and uncertainty, refusing all his overtures for weeks on end and then, when he reached an extremity of passion, permitting him to come to her. Birtwistle would arrive in her room and fling himself on her with a desperation that Huia found both satisfying and flattering.

  ‘Like peas in a pod, hand in glove we are, you and me,’ Birtwistle would sometimes whisper in her ear in the languorous moments following love. Huia offered no answer but she’d heard what he said. She had never forgiven Birtwistle for betraying her with other women in the cast, or for his indifference when she left Geoffrey. She punished him relentlessly and Birtwistle adored her.

  Huia glanced sideways at herself in the mirror. Her hair, which was down preparatory to brushing, fell about her face in a boa. She liked to think of the distinguished black beauty she was named after, the dark-sheened huia with their magnificent white-tipped ta
il feathers — feathers that her old people, chiefs of great mana, once wore. It was Nanny Rina who’d told her that. Huia thought of her dead grandmother. ‘Do your best’, ‘Be brave’, ‘Don’t take cheek from anyone’ — that was what she used to say. Huia hoped that Nanny Rina — wherever she was — was proud of her.

  It was early when Huia got to the theatre but already there was a small crowd at the stage door awaiting her arrival.

  ‘Are you a real princess?’ a little girl asked, pushing an autograph book and a propelling pencil into Huia’s hand.

  ‘Princess of flight, queen of the air,’ said Huia, signing her name with the practised scrawl she believed elegant.

  ‘Do you get scared?’ said an older girl.

  ‘No need to be scared if you practise enough,’ said Huia.

  ‘Saw you in Murchison two years ago,’ said a man who looked like a miner. ‘Coming again tonight. Name’s Perry, Bill Perry. Would you fancy a drink with me after the show?’

  ‘Let the lady past,’ said Hale, who had handed Huia out of the cab when it pulled up.

  In Huia’s dressing room, Madge, the twelve-year-old girl who worked as maid and dresser, was brushing the Soldier of the Queen costume. Madge was slow and a bit clumsy. She knocked into things with her skirts, and could never remember if a corset should be laced first and hooked afterwards or the other way around. She frequently infuriated Huia by laying out the wrong-coloured stockings or unmended garments with missing buttons or broken ties. The worst time for Madge was just before a performance, when everything was bustle and Huia was tense with nervousness and excitement. Then Huia would shout at Madge, tell her off, call her stupid, lazy, a fat cow. Once when Madge spilt cocoa on Huia’s eau-de-nil tea gown, Huia had slapped her. Madge accepted it all with resignation. ‘Artistes are excitable, temperamental,’ she told her mother, ‘not like the rest of us.’

  Madge knew as soon as Huia arrived that it would not be an easy evening. First nights in new towns with new routines were always difficult. Huia had pulled off her hat and was taking her hair down as soon as she came through the door. On good days Huia would sit quietly in front of the mirror and let Madge remove the pins, or even lie on the divan while Madge massaged her feet. Not tonight. Huia fussed about which hair combs to wear, sending Madge to look for three different sorts and then rejecting them all in favour of the original tortoiseshell ones. She insisted Madge measure her waist after the corset was on and when the tape said nineteen and a bit inches, rather than Huia’s usual nineteen, she got angry and made Madge relace the whole thing. Huia complained at the way Madge pinned the soldier’s cap, said it looked like a dropped pikelet, and the maid had to take it off and refix it four times before Huia was finally satisfied.

  Huia was nervous. The thought of Mossman and Adcock’s Mr Ellis watching perturbed her. It was silly, of course. She was good, very good, she told herself. Everyone said so. She had natural talent and a hunger to succeed. Hadn’t she gone on training day after day, week after week, despite muscle strain, tiredness, blisters and pain? And it had paid off. She was fitter now than ever before, her upper body extremely strong. Didn’t McCaskey himself always say she had the endurance and dynamism of a man, coupled with a woman’s touch? The three trapezes she would take on tonight were no more than anything she had done and redone a hundred times. There was no reason for apprehension. And yet there was a feeling of tension in her stomach, like a rat gnawing on a door.

  ‘Watch me, Ma,’ she said to herself as she stood ready in the wings.

  The drum rolled, the crowd roared and Huia was on stage, throwing somersaults, walking on her hands, marching, doing the splits. She climbed the high end of the ropes and hung upside down. There was loud applause. She slipped, and seemed to fall. The audience caught its collective breath. Huia, who had spent hours perfecting this toe-hang trick, pulled herself up on the bar, smiled and saluted. The audience cheered.

  Then it was the big trapeze act, the most difficult part of the routine. Huia would swing on one trapeze and launch herself to the next. She pumped the swing. Back and forth, back and forth she went. It was like singing a song, over and over. The rhythm calmed her. Huia imagined herself on the swing she’d made as a child under the bridge at the Forks. It was a good swing: if you jumped at just the right instant the momentum carried you over the water to the shingle bank. It was like that now; she could feel the impetus building, the heady familiarity as the moment approached. Nearer, nearer. Now! Huia leapt. She felt the thrill of danger, the sweet onrush of air, the bliss of flying. Earth and gravity were as nothing: she was free, an enchanted black-and-silver bird parting darkness, heading into the void.

  Effortlessly Huia made the first catch, and started to swing again. Below her the audience were silent as rocks. Huia thought of Mr Ellis, watching. Concentration flickered; she felt it happening. She knew something was wrong. Focus, focus she told herself, preparing to jump.

  Huia leapt, but the moment was imperfect. This time there was no sweet, swinging rhythm underpinning flight. Fear caught her as she flew. The second trapeze was close and coming closer. Would she make it? Would she? Desperate fingers sought the bar. Air filled her palms, not metal. She had swung short.

  Huia fell. The audience gasped.

  ‘A trick,’ a voice said.

  ‘Bloody convincing, too.’

  Hale dropped the lime-stick follow-spot. The beam of abandoned light ran like a stain over the floor of the stage and touched the bright badge on the soldier’s cap.

  The crumpled figure, arms outstretched, lay still.

  Birtwistle was the first to get to her.

  Geoffrey Hastings, in waistcoat and straw hat, laid the stencil carefully on the box and pulled the brush over the blond wood. There was a pleasure about the tomato-growing operation. The colour and smell of the fruit, the neat rows of boxes being stacked on the wagon ready for market, the knowledge of having produced the crop from his own glasshouses, all gave Geoffrey satisfaction. Stencilling the cases was a job he liked, though with several labourers in his employ he knew there was no reason for him to do it.

  ‘Sure, what do you want down there getting your hands dirty?’ said PJ, who frequently tried to divert Geoffrey with work in his office. When PJ came running along the gravel path from the house that afternoon, Geoffrey was sure his young clerk had once again manufactured some alternative, more sedentary task.

  ‘There’s a fellow to see you,’ PJ said. ‘He’s big, like one of them gorillas. Very insistent.’

  Geoffrey pulled on his jacket and followed PJ into the house. A large blond man was standing in the hall, eyeing himself in the mirror and fiddling with his moustache. He looked to Geoffrey like an American or someone wanting to sell something.

  ‘Yes?’ said Geoffrey.

  ‘Hastings?’ the man said.

  Geoffrey nodded. ‘And you?’

  ‘Birtwistle, Stan Birtwistle. Look, you’ve got a kid, a boy, Oscar or some such.’

  ‘Oliver,’ said Hastings.

  ‘Is he about?’ said Birtwistle.

  ‘No,’ said Hastings. ‘He’s at boarding school.’

  ‘These are for him,’ said Birtwistle, holding out a pounamu pendant and a small silver locket.

  Geoffrey recognised both pieces. Huia had once offered him the pendant in return for taking her photograph, and the locket was the one he had given her before Oliver was born.

  ‘Where did you get these?’ asked Geoffrey, flicking the locket open. A coil of misty baby hair lay inside.

  ‘From her,’ said Birtwistle.

  ‘Huia?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Birtwistle. ‘Worked with her. She always said if something happened …’ Birtwistle’s voice faltered. ‘Just give them to the kid, will you?’

  ‘Has something happened?’ said Geoffrey.

  ‘A few weeks back. She … she fell …’

  ‘Fell?’

  Birtwistle nodded.

  ‘Serious?’

  Birtwistle
pulled a newspaper cutting from his waistcoat pocket. ‘Here,’ he said, handing it to Geoffrey.

  Lady Aerialist Dies in Fall

  News just received from our Nelson correspondent tells of the untimely death of the Lady Aerialist known as Princess Huia of Maoriland, in an accident on Saturday night. Princess Huia, who enjoyed a reputation for her daring Trapeze acts, fell when attempting …

  ‘Were you there? There when it happened?’

  ‘I picked her up … all broken … like a little bird.’

  Hovering above one of the stiff mahogany hall-chairs, Huia swayed in the dim interior light. Geoffrey could see her skin in the mist, the black tide of her hair on her shoulders, the dark fern-frond eyes. ‘Mr Battle,’ she said.

  Geoffrey caught hold of the side of the hall-stand.

  ‘Better be off,’ said Birtwistle out of the haze. ‘Just see the kiddie gets it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said a voice Geoffrey thought was his own. ‘Thank you. Most kind of you to come.’

  Geoffrey heard rather than saw PJ and Birtwistle move across the hall; there was the sound of speech, the front door opened and closed.

  ‘You all right?’ said PJ.

  ‘Yes. No. I’m not sure,’ said Geoffrey, sitting heavily on one of the bog-oak chairs he had had sent out from Ireland. He remembered how often he’d thought about it, longed to be free of her, wished her in hell. Now she was dead. Geoffrey imagined a tent, a circus, lions prowling on the sawdust floor, men with whips; Huia, her face garishly painted, swinging about in the tawdry light and then … it was his own hand that reached out and pushed her.

  He looked down at the jewellery he held. He particularly remembered the silver locket, the front heavily decorated with roses and ferns, surrounding a panel intended for a name or message of love. The day he bought it, the jeweller had drawn Geoffrey’s attention to the panel: the man had wanted to engrave it on the spot.

  ‘Just a few words to keep the lady happy.’