The Paua Tower

by Coral Atkinson

  ‘You bet,’ said Cowan. ‘Back Friday.’ He paused for a moment, swinging his cap by the brim. ‘Did you mean it about looking at my foot?’

  ‘Yes.’ Stella smiled. ‘If you’ve got a splinter maybe I could get it out. I’ve got a needle and thread in my bag, just in case a button pops off at work or something.’

  ‘Being prepared, like a good boy scout.’

  ‘You just sit here.’ Stella pulled out a chair.

  Vic took his sock and boot off and Stella knelt in front of him, holding his foot in her hands.

  ‘This is really kind,’ said Vic, enjoying the feeling of the girl’s fingers on his ankle. ‘Hope my foot doesn’t stink.’

  Vic’s foot was very white, his toes straight, the hairs on his leg blond as butter. Stella felt an urge to stroke the pale flesh.

  ‘I can see it,’ she said, looking at a red weal on the sole of the foot where Vic’s boot must have had a hole. There was a splinter in the centre of the inflammation. ‘No wonder it’s sore.’

  Stella began probing with her needle. ‘Sorry if this hurts. Here, I’ve got it — a real big one.’

  ‘Feels better already,’ said Vic. It didn’t really, but he wanted Stella to know he appreciated her kindness.

  ‘Hope so,’ said Stella, pleased.

  Vic put his sock and boot back on.

  ‘When I’m down Friday can I come in and see you again?’ he asked, as he tied the laces.

  ‘Do,’ said Stella.

  ‘Promise I won’t eat any more of your sandwiches or expect emergency operations.’

  Stella laughed.

  ‘When do you knock off on Fridays? I could walk you home. That is, if you wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ said Stella, not wanting to sound as keen as she felt.

  ‘You don’t seem very sure,’ said Vic.

  ‘I am,’ said Stella more firmly. ‘I’d like it.’

  It was afternoon. Barefoot children ran about the streets. The boys played marbles, kick the can; girls skipped on ropes tied to fenceposts or flicked jacks — using bones begged from the butcher. Myrtle Perkins proudly clutched a new colouring book sent for her birthday, Trevor Hood found threepence and bought sherbet fountains for all his cobbers. Nutty Richards thrust a mutilated cockabully down Sally Norris’s front and Sally wet her pants. Bill Malone was pushed in the creek and had an asthma attack. This was the time of day Roland Crawford called on parishioners, not a job he enjoyed. In spite of the ‘Come in, Vicar, good of you to call’ and the innumerable cups of tea offered, he knew most people had little enthusiasm for his visits. Out-of-work husbands and fathers disappeared into backyards or bolted for other rooms as he knocked on the front door. ‘And how’s the baby? Goodness, hasn’t she grown since the christening?’ ‘Glad to see young Archie’s arm out of the sling.’

  ‘And the rheumatism, Mrs Wilcox?’ Roland would say, a litany of well-meaning inquiry and good fellowship. It was harder when it came to the daily struggle, hungry mouths left unfed, unemployment. The vicar’s ‘The Lord will provide’ and ‘We are never sent more than we can carry’ just didn’t seem to do. In the middle-class sitting rooms of Christchurch such phrases had rolled Roland’s conversation about on well-oiled castors; here in Matauranga they were received in sullen silence. Wives turned away, fiddling with kettles and teapots.

  The Wheelers had seven children. Dan Wheeler, a bricklayer, had been out of work for months. As Roland passed on his way to the front door, two small boys pulled aside a torn net curtain and looked out of the bedroom window. Their faces were scarlet with fever and covered in spots.

  ‘Measles.’ Mrs Wheeler held the apron she’d just taken off. ‘They’ve all had it.’

  Roland and Mrs Wheeler were standing just inside the front door. The hall was dark and narrow, with a large hole in one wall where a vigorously kicked football had gone through the wallpaper and plaster. The sound of crying came from behind a closed door.

  ‘Have the boys seen the doctor?’ said Roland.

  ‘Doctor?’ said Mrs Wheeler. ‘We haven’t enough for a square meal — how do we pay a doctor? We sold the carpets off the floors last week; there’s nothing else.’

  ‘I could speak to Dr Cunningham,’ said Roland, wanting to offer something useful.

  ‘No point,’ said Mrs Wheeler. ‘Even if he came we’ve no money for medicines or whatever.’

  ‘But the children look really ill.’ Roland fiddled with his diary.

  ‘It’s work for Dan we need, not doctors and pills.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Roland, ‘but is there anything I can do?’

  ‘Dan’s been making up bath cleaner out the back — sold a bit, too, at the start, but no demand now. Everyone’s just skint. You might take a jar or two for your wife.’

  Roland walked down the short path to the road holding three jars of newly purchased bath cleaner and skirting a homemade go-cart, a board nailed to two pram wheels. He wondered what Jesus would have done in the Wheelers’ house, with its rank smell of urine and relentless making do. Raising Lazarus, having a word to Mary and Martha, or the woman at the well — simple, somehow, compared with this. Nothing Roland said seemed to find a mark and when he’d suggested to Mrs Wheeler they could have ‘a word of prayer together’ she’d shaken her head, looking at him as if he’d suggested some gross indecency. What am I expected to do? thought Roland petulantly. Of course he had suggested that Mrs Wheeler drop into the St Peter’s depot in case there was anything there she might want. He’d get Lal to visit, bring the sick children beef tea or something nourishing, and proper sheets — from what he’d seen the boys were lying under old coats on uncovered mattresses on the floor. But such things were transitory, stop-gap measures.

  In the back of his shiny black leather diary Roland kept a list of parishioners divided into three columns: easy, moderate and difficult. On visiting days he called on one of each. Easy were already committed. They came to church regularly, attended prayer groups and choirs, worked for fundraising events and welcomed the vicar when he called. Moderate were more erratic in their attendance, though keen enough for christenings, weddings, funerals. The Wheelers were moderate. Then there were the difficult ones: doors slammed in his face, broken bottles lying in beaten-down front gardens, foul-mouthed fathers, children crying.

  Roland had intended visiting the Phipps next, but today the Phipps, who belonged in the difficult column, offered a challenge he couldn’t face. He flicked open his diary and saw Amélie Baldwin’s name at the bottom of the page. When Roland had added her to the list he couldn’t decide which group to put her in. The thought of visiting Amélie was appealing; he’d go there straight away. Roland was glad he still had her Tarot cards in his jacket pocket. Gave him a good excuse to call.

  Tad Baldwin, hanging upside down in the oak tree in the back garden looking at a rainbow, saw Roland come to the bank house door. The boy had seen the vicar in the street but couldn’t ever recall him visiting before. Tad’s father was an Anglican but only occasionally went to church. His mother had made him take his first communion at the Catholic St Joseph’s, and since then had sometimes insisted he came to Mass. The boy spent a lot of the time at St Joseph’s examining the soles of shoes. It surprised and interested him what you could learn when people were kneeling in prayer — not just whether they’d walked in dogshit but what size shoes they took and whether their footwear was new or old or even, sometimes, how much it cost. But attendance, however erratic, at one church was bad enough: Tad hoped Roland’s arrival didn’t presage his being made to go to St Peter’s as well.

  The sitting room of the bank house was one of the numerous grievances Amélie had against New Zealand in general and Matauranga in particular. Living over a bank on a main street was bad enough, smacking as it did of petty shopkeeping, but had the accommodation been larger, grander, more gracious, Amélie might have adjusted in time. Instead, the Southern Bank in Matauranga was a simple two-storey wooden building, devoid of
style or pretension. In the initial flush of enthusiasm, when the Baldwins had first moved to the town, Amélie had tried to overlook her new home’s limitations. Her intention was to make the sitting room a place of elegance and beauty, a room where you could receive successful, wealthy, influential people without feeling humiliated and ashamed. Dipping into Oncle Henri’s small inheritance, she arranged for furniture from Le Manoir, which her great-uncle had left her, to be shipped to New Zealand.

  Amélie had known as soon as the packing cases were opened that it was a mistake. She looked at the antique pieces and saw how refined they were — arched and balanced, limbs poised and perfect as a dancer. She grasped immediately that the furniture was wrong in this place: every object cried out for generously proportioned surroundings, airy rooms, double doors opening onto courtyards. Instead, the bank house sitting room was a square cube of space, ugly sash windows like two goggling eyes on one wall and a bulky plaster rose, an upturned pudding she called it, in the middle of the ceiling.

  Amélie had Perkins, the bank messenger, and Adams, the young cashier, who certainly didn’t see it as his job, heave and push the newly arrived furniture around in a dozen different combinations and arrangements. None worked. Regardless of position, the walnut commodes, cherrywood chaise longue, carved gilt console tables and directoire chairs looked ill at ease and affronted in their new environment.

  And then there was the light, for, despite the lace curtains, the strident New Zealand sunshine gnawed into the furnishings, bleaching the fragile-coloured silk of the chairs and making ugly patches on the walnut commode. Amélie wished she had left the furniture in France and furnished the room in the new, fashionable chrome and black leather. She thought such brutal modern design well suited to the harsh reality of New Zealand. But she had imported the French furniture and it stayed.

  Amélie, wearing a new green dress with rather smart brass buttons on the hips, was playing Chopin when the maid showed Roland into the room. Swinging her legs over the piano stool, she turned to face him.

  ‘Ah, the vicar. I was expecting you. Do sit down.’

  ‘I brought your cards back, Mrs Baldwin.’ Roland laid the deck on a gilt table. ‘Want to apologise, too. Very unfortunate what happened at the fête.’

  Amélie gave a little trill on the piano. She said nothing. Her silence was unnerving.

  ‘Frightfully sorry, of course — a mix-up, really,’ said Roland, glancing about the room.

  ‘Mix-up, Monsieur Crawford? I doubt that, but do sit down.’

  Roland took a chair.

  ‘So?’ said Amélie looking straight at him. ‘What word of inspiration have you brought from the mountaintop?’

  Roland laughed nervously. ‘Nothing much, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Nothing?’ said Amélie, arching her eyebrows. ‘How disappointing. I thought you clerics specialised in proffering inspiration. Why else do they pay you?’

  Roland felt a blush on his neck and face. The woman was teasing him. He wished he hadn’t come.

  ‘Now I have offended you. Tell me instead what you have done today,’ said Amélie leaving the piano stool and coming to sit by Roland in an adjoining chair.

  ‘Said the Office, wrote up some minutes, made notes for the Men’s Fellowship, been visiting. The usual things.’

  ‘And when you go visiting what do you tell your flock?’

  ‘I minister to them as best I can,’ said Roland, twisting the gold signet ring he wore on his little finger.

  ‘And sometimes you worry that what you say is not right or not enough.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Roland, his admission surprising even himself, ‘I suppose I do.’ He’d never had a conversation like this with a parishioner before, but of course Mrs Baldwin wasn’t a parishioner.

  Amélie smiled at him. ‘I like you,’ she said. ‘You’re not a humbug.’

  Roland felt as if she had given him some unexpected but totally desirable gift. He smiled back, reassured, elated.

  ‘Actually, some days, like today, I feel a failure. What can you say to people who have no work, barely enough to eat, who are so … defeated?’

  ‘You tell them the truth,’ said Amélie.

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘That is for you to know,’ said Amélie picking up the pack of cards, ‘or perhaps to find out. We will have tea now.’ She got up and touched the bell. ‘Le five o’clock, a good English custom.’ Her movement brought a waft of perfume to the seated vicar.

  Roland hadn’t intended asking — in fact he’d barely thought about the idea — but as he drank his fourth cup of tea for the afternoon the words slipped out as if they had been gathering for days.

  ‘I was wondering,’ he said, ‘if you would give me lessons. French conversation, that sort of thing. I’d pay, of course.’ Roland had a brief moment of worry about how he would tell Lal. He thought of Lal diligently dividing the weekly housekeeping money into a series of little cough lozenge tins she kept for the purpose: coal, doctor, groceries and meat. Which tin could be plundered for French lessons and whatever would Lal say?

  ‘You want to learn French?’ said Amélie, putting her cup and saucer on the table.

  ‘Yes,’ said Roland, ‘I think I do. I didn’t pay enough attention at school and have regretted it since. We’re so far away in New Zealand, makes you pine for culture, history. Feel I need something to get my mind off things here.’

  ‘I would be enchantée,’ said Amélie. ‘Sometimes I teach schoolboys, the parents send them, they are dull pupils. But with an educated man like you it would be a real pleasure.’

  Roland walked down the street, feeling light, joyful, strong and male, packed with energy like a bottle of pop. So taken was he with the sensation that he didn’t see Mrs Jenkins, an elderly parishioner, wave to him from the opposite side of the road, and he narrowly missed colliding with Mr Pollock, the postmaster, walking in the opposite direction.

  ‘Penny for them, Vicar,’ the postmaster said. ‘Seem in a bit of a dream today. Thinking of higher things, no doubt.’

  Roland smiled. Higher or lower, he wasn’t sure.

  When Roland got home, Lal was at her treadle sewing machine in the little den beside the kitchen they used when alone. Roland came into the room from behind her, put his arms around her and kissed the top of her head.

  ‘Roland,’ she said, ‘what’s that for?’

  ‘Aren’t I allowed kiss my wife?’

  ‘Course.’ Lal let the curtain she was making slip out of the machine’s maw and onto the floor.

  Roland touched Lal’s breast with his finger. ‘Come into the bedroom. We’ve the place to ourselves.’

  He pushed Lal gently onto the quilt.

  ‘Lie down,’ he said.

  ‘In my shoes?’

  Roland leaned over her, unstrapping her shoes, then he ran his hand up under her skirts to the naked flesh of her thighs. Unfastening her stockings, he drew them down. He pulled her skirt back and began to kiss her feet, her legs, further and further up. He ran his tongue over the crotch of her rayon pants, slipped his hand inside them and took them off.

  Roland tasted the tangy dampness of the tufted pubic hair, the warm folded flesh; he pressed his tongue deeper, the taste strong and sweet like yeasty buns. His own clothing constrained and encouraged him in some titillating manner.

  When Roland had taken Lal’s hand and brought her into the bedroom she had felt pleased. It was unusual, of course — nothing like that had happened in years, since the early days of their marriage, but any chance of conception made her glad. Now, as she lay across the white crocheted bedspread, knickers around her ankles and Roland touching her with his tongue, she wasn’t thinking of gates and opening. She was lost in a slippery dense pleasure, a place of damp trees, lichen falling from branches in green veils, orchids on tree stumps and leaves packed and heavy beneath the feet. She wanted to stay in that place.

  Roland could bear it no longer: his whole body seemed to be swelling, ready to explode. He
pulled off his jacket, his waistcoat, his braces, fumbled with buttons, freed his troubled flesh. Then he went into her, big and smooth, in and in.

  Lal made a little sound as she clutched his shoulders and gave a long wide shudder. Pleasure ricocheted through Roland like a stone thrown at glass. Looking down, it seemed he saw Amélie’s face.

  The late afternoon was hot and bright. It shone on the rough square of grass under the Morgans’ clothesline and on the black boy peach tree, heavy with fruit, that grew against the fence. Doug Morgan, Stella’s father, was sitting in the back porch. A broad-shouldered man with greying hair, he was fiddling with a leather punch and a wallet he was making, when he heard the slam of the fly-screen in the house next door and knew his neighbour, Ken Scanlon, was home from work. ‘Bugger the bastard,’ Doug muttered under his breath, anger and hurt curdling together.

  Doug thought of coming home in the old days, walking in the gate pleasantly tired, grateful the day was over, perhaps with a few plants, pansies, African marigolds, in damp paper parcels as a present for Mum, for she liked her bit of garden. He thought of meat every night on the kitchen table, then a shave and a scrub before leaving for lodge, band practice, a bit of a do at the RSA, or maybe an illicit drink with some mates at the Albion or in the tin shed behind Flo Drummond’s boarding house. All that had changed, the daily structure lost. There was no homecoming for Doug now, no money for grog, no male camaraderie at the end of a working day, and what bloke wanted to parade poverty and shame before his cobbers? He’d even sold his cornet, not that he felt like playing in the railway band any more.

  Doug wasn’t old — nearer forty than fifty — but the last few years had aged him. He felt himself drawn inward, contracting like a stale apple, the youthful swinging body he’d once had replaced by a clenched stoop. He had bought some leather tools for next to nothing from a mate and Stella got him cheap off-cuts of leather from the tannery. The articles he made were supposedly going to supplement the Morgans’ income, but Stella doubted it. Her father, with his large labourer’s fingers, found fine work difficult. The lumpy wallets, bookmarks, belts and Bible covers he’d made looked unlikely to find buyers.