The Love Apple Read Online Free PDF Page B

it?’
    ‘No, sorry.’
    ‘Bastard!’ said Huia and regretted the word immediately. It was an expression Geoffrey had never heard on a woman’s lips before.
    ‘Sorry,’ she said, but it was too late. Geoffrey had turned and gone into the house, shutting the door behind him.
    Bugger, bugger, bugger and buckets of shit, Huia said to herself. I’ve ruined everything.
    It had never crossed her mind that Geoffrey would refuse. Ever since their meeting the previous week she had thought about little other than the Irish photographer and an image of herself captured by his camera. Being unable to pay had been a slight worry but she knew her pendant was precious. He would surely accept it. Huia was not clear on the details of the transaction or what she really expected to happen but she had hadfaith that with the taking of the photograph the rest would slip into place. Hastings would most certainly fall in love with her.
    She had thought about the photograph so much and so ardently that the portrait had assumed its own reality. She saw herself as one of the pictures in the Argus Annual or the odd copies of the Illustrated London News that her father sometimes brought up from town. Sad and lovely as the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, hair undulating about her throat in entrancing ripples, perfect sloping shoulders, eyes like a night of stars.
    ‘Miss Katarina Huia Bluett, famous New Zealand beauty, who is now visiting London’, ‘Miss Katarina Huia Bluett on her way to Buckingham Palace’, ‘The engagement is announced of Miss Katarina Huia Bluett, of Westland, New Zealand, and …’
    The photograph was the key, the stepping stone, the talisman that would transform her life. But now, before any of this had happened, with hardly a glance or even a proper explanation, Geoffrey Hastings had not only refused to let her sit for a portrait but gone off in a huff. He might never speak to her again. Who could blame him? It was all her own fault.
    Huia absentmindedly scratched Adolph under his chin. ‘I wish you could come and live with me,’ she said to the kitten. ‘If Nanny Rina was alive I’d take you and give you to her.’
    Nanny Rina with her hair foaming around her face and her big-sounding laugh. Nanny Rina in the house that once stood down by the river. The house was a bit like the old woman herself: every spring you expected it to be carried away in the raging torrent, but for years it managed to remain. Frequently the rough grass at the doorstep was a quagmire, and when the rains were heavy and the river rose, water would trickle in under the weatherboards and run among the whariki . The floor was beaten earth and Huia and her cousins would pick at it with sticks and make little mounds of clay when they were supposed to be asleep in the back of the hut. It was hard to sleep with thesound of Nanny Rina and the other adults talking and singing in front of the blanket that hung over a rope separating the bedroom and the living area. Not that you let Nanny Rina see you picking at the earth, because you’d get a hiding with the razor strop that hung menacingly on a nail by the door.
    The razor strop had once belonged to the shaving gear of Jack Delahunty, Nanny’s husband, but he had died or disappeared long since, so all that was left of him was a greenish piece of leather that made your legs sting, and the legend of his boots. As a girl, Nanny Rina had run away with a deserting sailor, and ended up working in a hotel in the new town of Auckland. Sent to collect the guests’ boots one day for cleaning, she had come on a pair of exceptionally fine ones — ‘real Morocco leather’, she used to say as she told the story.
    ‘So I said to my friend Anna, “I’m going to marry the man who owns these boots”, and do you know what?’ she’d say, pausing for effect and looking around the group of grandchildren on the floor around the fire. ‘I did, too right I did, because who did those boots belong to?’
    ‘Jack