The Love Apple

Tomatoes were little known in New Zealand in the late nineteenth century, but those who had encountered the fruit often called it the ‘love apple’ and considered it a symbol of love and lust. Anglo-Irish gentleman photographer Geoffrey Hastings is in danger of confusing the two as he agonizes over the past. Huia, the hoydenish, part-Maori sixteen-year-old, knows just how to use lust for her own ends. The orphan PJ, meanwhile, follows any chance of love wherever it might take him. Like Geoffrey, he arrives in New Zealand from Ireland, but unlike the older man PJ has Fenian sympathies and pines to right the wrongs of his native land. Their shared heritage is one of conflict, but can they forget the past in this new country?
The Love Apple
is a novel about risk and freedom, desire and love.

I
n 1864 the town of Hokitika, on the West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island, leapt into existence like some trick from a conjuror’s repertoire. No sooner was the magic word ‘gold’ uttered than miners poured into the area and the settlement sprang to life. One day there was nothing but a forested river mouth and a beach covered with driftwood. The next, a calico encampment littered with sardine tins and broken bottles. Out of this rough chaos, buildings of corrugated iron and weatherboard quickly emerged and within months the place boasted houses, shops, livery stables and well over a hundred places where you could get drunk.

As it grew, the wild adolescent town sobered up. Gold became harder to find and many of the miners — who had arrived on the West Coast dreaming of fortunes fossicked from rivers and gullies — stayed on to build roads, clear paddocks, run cattle or fell trees.

By the early 1880s Hokitika has an indoor roller-skating rink, a waxworks display, a hospital, a lunatic asylum, a choice of places to worship, and a town hall complete with Renaissance classical motifs. The town also boasts a variety of shops, together with jewellers, watchmakers, physicians, barbers and several photographers.

T
he strip of flesh between the open edges of the kimono was still visible as the flames gnawed in uneven scallops. The pale angles of thighs, the dark smudge of pubic hair, the endearing little hollow of the navel, the spreading fullness of the breasts disappeared behind the satin folds, and embroidered pansies lingered in front of him. Her face had gone, chewed by the encircling band of black and the thin buttonhole line of fire. The neck was still there, though, and her hair: ragged sprays of curls scrolling her throat and touching what was left of the shoulders. There were no arms now.

The loss of the hands had been the worst part. He’d grabbed the tongs and was just about to do something when the flames began so delicately to consume her fingers. He loved those hands, the elegant upholstery of flesh over bone, the way the little fingers struck outwards by themselves, the slight puffiness around the wedding ring that he himself had put on the third finger of her left hand. All had crumbled and disappeared.

Geoffrey Hastings sat back on his heels on the hearth rug and drew another photograph from the stiff cardboard pages. He remembered the time in London on his honeymoon when he had bought the album. Half-crazed with her smell, her touch, her glimpsed nakedness, he had felt overwhelmed with the need to
capture and confirm with his camera, using light to make desire and pleasure permanently visible on paper. Walking the streets, seeing the sights, Vanessa on his arm and all the time consumed with a passion to be in his studio at home in Dublin to take the photographs that he could already see in his mind. Buying the album had been a distraction, a consolation for having to wait, a symbol of the act still to be consummated. He had pored over the choices: embossed leather, carved wood, pressed metal, velvet, and finally settled on this one, a half-circle volume that opened into round pages. Mother-of-pearl cover, ivory
watered-silk
endpapers, the hint of moon and ocean — the colours of her flesh, swirling and incandescent.

He held the next photograph into the flames as if offering the fire a titbit. Vanessa half-kneeling on the mahogany chair, drawing on a single black stocking. God, it was a cliché, and yet at the time he’d had to have it. He’d seen the pose a hundred times — French courtesans and maidservants with dirty feet, furtively shot, bought, handed about, ogled over. Lumpish women posing for a few francs, photographed by hack practitioners. But not Vanessa. It was an act of love to capture her like this, to hold her in the eye of the lens, floating and serpentine. Viewed from behind, her naked back caught in a liquid movement that ran from shoulder to hip, buttocks soft and rounded like magnolia flowers. Her skin was hand-tinted so perfectly that even now, years later, he congratulated himself on it. Not that it was difficult with Vanessa: a little auspicious heightening of the creamy sepia of the albumin print and you had her warm skin tone precisely. He was good as a colourist, always had been.

It was ironic, Geoffrey thought bitterly, that the best work he had ever done was this collection of images rapidly being transformed into ash. A cache that no one other than his subject had ever seen.

When Geoffrey looked at the photographs for this last time he was overcome with an abject sense of how his wife, his vision and his art blended together. The eroticism of the pictures was not just in the titillating poses. The photographs laid bare his need and his fulfilment more explicitly than if he had captured on paper the sexual act itself. Having permitted Vanessa literally to slip out of his hands to her death and to have reiterated his perfidy by infidelity, Geoffrey felt himself utterly condemned. Vanessa had been the gift, the light that transfigured darkness in the miracle of his craft, the creation that he himself had part fashioned — and destroyed. Burning the photographs was the final rite.

He glanced down at the album and thought of Prospero drowning his enchanted book. The frame of the page hung empty. Cherubs, roses and garlands swam moronically around the aperture. Behind the hole he could see back to the beginning of the album: a succession of pages once full of Vanessa’s body, now gaping and open.

And now this last picture and the album would be stripped. ‘Renaissance Madonna’, he called it to himself. Vanessa’s left hand holding a closed book across her naked belly, the other cupping her breast, the thumb pressing downward on the nipple.

‘Do I have to? I really hate it,’ she had said when he positioned her in front of the plush curtains and drew her hand to her bosom. ‘I feel so embarrassed and cheap.’

‘Darling, darling,’ he said, disappointed by her reluctance, yet too much in love to persist. ‘Of course you don’t have to, not if you dislike it so much, but it is the last. I promise. After these, it’s neck-to-ankle covering for the rest of our lives and you as respectable as you wish.’

So she agreed and he’d stuck with his promise — almost. There was one other series years later, taken naked on the velvet sofa here in Hokitika, but it didn’t amount to much: it lacked the
passion of that first glimpse. Afterwards he’d destroyed those pictures, along with the others taken in New Zealand.

But he had kept the mother-of-pearl album, hiding it even from himself in the bottom of a cabin trunk in the attic, disciplining himself, until today, never to look at its contents after Vanessa had gone. The more recent photographs of her, and their glass plates, he’d put in a pillowcase and lugged up to the gorge. Moderately drunk at the time, he’d had difficulties keeping his footing.

‘Take her, bitch that you are!’ he’d said to the river as he balanced unsteadily on the trunk of a fallen tree. ‘Now at least finish what you bloody began!’

Geoffrey had thought of Vanessa lying up there in the cemetery under the sugary marble angel, which he’d chosen with care and come to hate, as he let the heavy linen bag drop into the churning flood. Much better if Ophelia-like she vanished with the current, cast into the flow, to be one with the stones and indifferent water. It was the river, after all, that had killed her — he and the river, in spite of all that was said. The doctor was so cocksure that diphtheria would have taken hold, even without the wetting, but Geoffrey knew otherwise. His heart insisted on guilt.

He’d never take another photograph of a woman, clothed or naked; he was sure of that. Oh, he had tried to — had at least hung out his slate again, got the photographic studio re-established when the first paralysis of grief had passed and he was left sifting the ashes of loss, over and over, in the awfulness of desolation. But each occasion had been the same. Strong in determination to master the demon, he would position the subject — ‘Arm a little this way’, ‘To the left’, ‘Head more to one side’, ‘Relax your fingers on the chair back’ and then, as he arranged a ringlet on a shoulder, or picked up a dropped glove, the drift of woman’s scent, maybe mixed with lily-of-the-valley bath salts or lavender water, or the sight of the soft bloom on a
cheek, or light on a buttoned boot, would take hold again and, impossible to dislodge, it would stab at his entrails over and over.

Brandy was the only opiate. A quarter of a bottle and the pain mellowed, half and it was almost gone, more and there was oblivion. And next morning waking with a hangover that seemed to have cracked his skull in half, and mouth hot and dry.

Somehow Geoffrey had dragged his way out of it, refusing to take any more portraits of women, avoiding what he called to himself ‘the occasions of sin’ — those blistering moments when some trivial sight or smell reminding him of Vanessa unleashed the furies.

Landscapes for postcards were his speciality now. They were photographed in New Zealand, printed in Germany, sold in Westport, Hokitika and Greymouth and despatched around the world. The public appetite for the curious and awe-inspiring seemed insatiable: huge mountains drenched with snow, rivers spilling into waterfalls, rocks that looked like giant pancakes dazzling with spray, beaches consumed by surf, lakes overflowing with mirrored images. Geoffrey sometimes felt as if the whole of New Zealand was awash in a torrent of snow and moving water.

The round album lay open like a broken dinner plate on the tiles of the hearth. Frightful, vulgar affectation, that shape, Geoffrey thought, picking up the book and heaving it into the grate. Don’t know what possessed me to buy it.

The heavy shell cover opened protectively over the burning photographs and the pages smouldered. He took up the poker and with all his force pushed the iridescent cover further and further against the flames as the tears ran down his cheeks and into his moustache.

There was the sound of a woman’s boots running on the stairs and the door of the drawing room opened. Geoffrey turned. The first thing he saw was
the
dress.
Her dress. Vanessa’s
evening dress, soft gold taffeta. Quince jelly with cream, he’d called it. Watered fabric, subtly hued, tight-waisted with tumbling folds. Vanessa was at her most alluring when she wore that dress. It revealed and concealed. It lapped against her body, reflecting and enhancing. Music and song.

‘Vanessa?’ Geoffrey said. But of course it was not Vanessa.

The girl in the dress was very young: fifteen, sixteen. Her mass of dark hair and naked brown wrists were a glass-plate negative of Vanessa’s careful pale curls and kid-gloved arms.

My God, thought Geoffrey. Vanessa’s dress. The taffeta was crumpled. The skirt, intended to subside in a waterfall of fluid frills over a bustle, dragged on the floor. The bodice, its back lined by covered buttons, hung open at the top. The
neckline
gaped over uncorseted cleavage. The effect was grotesque. Monstrous. Sluttish.

The girl pirouetted around the room, bobbing about among the plush armchairs with their lace antimacassars in a poor imitation of a waltz. She skirted around the papier-mâché table with Vanessa’s work box on the lower shelf and did a little hop over the leather footstool.

Anger gripped Geoffrey’s belly and chest. He felt it rising like the soft lick of fresh fire, steadied himself against the carved wood of the mantelpiece and searched for words. None came.

The girl stopped dancing. She laughed and said the room stank. She glanced at the fireplace and asked what he’d been doing.

‘How dare you?’ said Geoffrey at last. ‘Get that dress off this instant.’

The girl was reluctant. She reminded him that his wife was dead, the dress was fashionable, expensive, going to waste. And, she added, looking in the mirror, it suited her.

Geoffrey had never struck a woman in his life but he wanted to now. He knew she thought he wouldn’t dare, that he was too much a gentleman, too posh. But he would. He
would grip her thin arms with his hands. Watch his fingers branding her flesh. He would hit her. Hurt her. Knock her down. Make her cry.

‘Take it off!’ said Geoffrey, catching the girl by the shoulder and turning her around to face him. ‘Or I’ll rip it off.’

She looked at him, her eyes uncertain, defiance and ebullience gone. ‘I just want you to think I’m pretty,’ she said.

It was the truth and Geoffrey knew it. He felt his anger contract and die, doused like the gas flame on a quenched lamp. This girl — child, more like — capering around his drawing room was staging this travesty entirely for him. It was an entreaty for his approval, admiration, love. And she had a right to those things, by heaven she had. But all Geoffrey felt was a dull, repugnant horror. It was he who was monstrous, not the girl. He was a creature devoid of heart.

He sat down at the velvet-clothed table and buried his face in his hands. The thick embroidery of oak leaves and acorns pressed against his elbows. He felt powerless and desperate.

Tomorrow morning he would shave, dress, put on his best cambric shirt and frock coat and walk through Hokitika to All Saints as if it were the scaffold. There, in a chill church, before an absent God and a handful of disapproving mortals, he would tie with his tongue the knot that could not be undone with his teeth.

The old song was right: Geoffrey was caught, trapped, snared. It was his own fault, his own doing. He was guilty and deserved what came. He didn’t have to say he’d marry her. He could have refused — of course he could have. Just said no. Given her money, bought her off. Turned her out. He’d had that choice, and he chose what some call honour. This, apparently, was its price.

The girl was remorseful now. She subsided on the ground at Geoffrey’s feet, eager to please, to take the dress off, if that was what he wanted.

‘I do,’ said Geoffrey. He knew it must seem sentimental and stupid.

She asked if he loved her.

God, thought Geoffrey. He couldn’t bear another conversation like this — there had been so many. They always ended with her in tears and him hunched over a brandy glass.

The girl parted Geoffrey’s clenched fingers so she could see his eyes. Putting her mouth against his hand, she kissed the opening.

Geoffrey sat up and the girl squirmed onto his knees. She took his arms and arranged them around her waist. Her hair, caught in a rough chignon, brushed Geoffrey’s chin as she snuggled against his shoulder. He looked down at her dark head and thought of the black pools of water in the peat bogs he knew as a boy in Ireland. It was her hair that had impressed him that first time he saw her. Magnificent, full hair, falling almost to her waist, incongruously topped, on that occasion, with the peaked cap of the Canterbury Yeoman Cavalry.

Geoffrey remembered the scene. At the time it had seemed like a greeting-card picture. One moment he was riding through the solemn darkness of bush and forest; the next he was in a clearing overwhelmed by light. There was a small house
surrounded
by burnt tree stumps, and a muddy path to the edge of the trees. Hens pecked at scraps thrown by a barefoot girl from a black iron pot. She wore a striped shirt, its sleeves rolled to the elbow, and a short, full skirt over what appeared to be a pair of men’s trousers. On her head was a soldier’s cap.