Read Online The Love Apple by Coral Atkinson - Free Book Online Page A

fried bread were put on the bar in front of them. Geoffrey, who felt that the crowd would have been just as happy to see him shot as fêted, lacked appetite for both the praise and the enormous breakfast.
    ‘You showed the old bitch’, ‘Took the baggage for a real ride there’, ‘Do her good to cool off for a bit in the clink’, the miners said approvingly. Geoffrey, who knew too well the lonely hell of inebriation, felt only pity and a sense of kinship with Bridey. The danger over, he had watched, sad and embarrassed for her, as she was taken off in handcuffs by a policeman, her errant toe sprouting tuber-like from her boot.
    Geoffrey, Huia and Bluett rode out of Ross and continued through the clustered bush. At times the road was well defined, at others it floundered in undergrowth and almost disappeared. There were rivers to cross, with water almost up to the horses’ chests. Sometimes the bush fell back, revealing a rolling ocean of interlocking hills, or a patch of cleared land with a tiny house like a pale crumb in the relentless green. At other times they rode on the beach.
    All the rest of that day Geoffrey thought about the incident with Bridey. ‘Death and damnation,’ she had said. The words haunted him as he rode south.
    Huia worked fast when they stopped to boil the billy. She had gathered the sticks and got a fire going in the time it took the men to attend to the horses. After they had drunk tea and eaten bread and jam, Geoffrey went a little way into the forest to take a closer look at a fall of white clematis hanging in a tree. He was reaching up to snap off a piece when he heard Huia’s voice behind him.
    ‘Pretty, eh?’ she said.
    ‘Yes,’ said Geoffrey.
    He turned, with some flowers now in his hands.
    ‘You were really brave this morning,’ said Huia.
    ‘Stupid, more like,’ said Geoffrey.
    ‘And also,’ said Huia, and paused, ‘I want to say sorry. Sorry I swore at you the other day and that.’
    ‘Don’t mention it,’ said Geoffrey. ‘It was nothing.’
    ‘You’re not angry?’
    ‘Of course not,’ said Geoffrey, ‘though you won’t catch me changing my mind about taking your photograph.’
    ‘I know.’
    ‘Here,’ said Geoffrey. ‘Have the flowers.’
    Huia took the long spray of whiteness. She made a loose plait of hair at the side of her face and began to weave the clematis into it. Eve, Geoffrey decided as she stood there in the slivers of forest sunlight, fiddling with her hair, which fell dark and marvellous to her hips. This was where the girl belonged. Her shadowy colouring and lush hair perfectly fitted the voluptuous greenness of the bush. And, Geoffrey thought, why don’t all women leave their hair loose like that, rather than forcing it up with pins and pads?
    ‘Someone once told me,’ said Huia, remembering Stan Birtwistle twisting her long curls around his hand when they made love, ‘that my hair was my best feature. What do you think?’
    ‘I think,’ said Geoffrey, starting to walk back towards the fire, ‘some things are better left unsaid.’

Chapter 5
    I t was the light that woke him. Pure white brilliance, like coming to consciousness in the midst of a snowstorm or the centre of a rose. Geoffrey had forgotten that extraordinary pleasure of waking in a tent on a sunny morning. He was uncertain for a moment where he was and why he was being confronted by an avalanche of brightness and the whirling sound of surf.
    The night before, they had left the track that ran through the bush. Despite the huge deposits of wood brought down by rivers from the forest and the difficulties of getting around the moraine bluffs, it was easier to ride on the foreshore than along the more difficult stretches of so-called road. As dusk fell they had made camp in a sheltered elbow of headland where the flax swamps gave way to sand and coastal grasses.
    Geoffrey pulled back his blankets and opened the flap of the tent. The new day was ravishing, the whole landscape