The Paua Tower

by Coral Atkinson

  ‘Seen the tower?’ asked Peg, smoothing a piece of thread where the petal of an embroidered flower had come adrift.

  ‘Not yet but I’m quite keen to see it, hear it’s something of an attraction, and now it seems Maguire’s in on it as well,’ said Vic.

  ‘If there’s money to be made, Mr Maguire’ll be there,’ said Peg.

  ‘Snouts in the trough,’ said Doug. The two men laughed.

  Stella and Vic stood on the veranda. It was almost twilight. The sky had a hectic vividness; the grass and marigolds in the garden were vehement with colour.

  ‘How long will it take to walk back to camp?’ asked Stella, keen to keep Vic with her.

  ‘Two hours or so,’ said Vic, ‘but I met a friend, Tiny Mulcock, and he asked me to kip at his place. I thought maybe if I stayed there tonight you’d walk out with me tomorrow. I don’t have work at the camp till Monday.’

  ‘We could go to the tower,’ said Stella eagerly. ‘Not in the morning, ’cause I work, but the afternoon would be fine.’

  ‘Corker,’ Vic said, smiling. ‘I’ll be round at two o’clock. And thanks for the tea.’

  At the corner of Jubilee Street he turned. Stella was still standing in the lighted doorway, darkness contracting around the house. Vic wished he could go back.

  ‘Hooray!’ he shouted.

  Stella waved in return.

  Stella with her bright hair and hands like small birds — those little fantail fellows he liked in the bush. In less than a day he’d see her again. Vic fondled the thought as he walked, finding it warm and welcome.

  Chapter 6

  Roland and Lal Crawford were having a row. Not that you would have guessed. It wasn’t done for a clergyman and his wife to fight openly, as they both well knew, and neither of them was a battler anyway. So instead of angry words, slammed doors and thrown crockery they had substituted an elaborate code of sighs, grimaces, and an assortment of interjections of the ‘So?’ ‘So you say!’ and ‘Really’ variety. If conflict took place at mealtime, as it sometimes did, the dialogue of anger could be supplemented with the peremptory way dishes were handled, meat carved (Roland) or custard poured (Lal).

  This argument was ostensibly over Roland’s French lessons but, though Roland didn’t know it, the origins lay much earlier in the morning. Lal had opened her eyes to the new day, checked there was no bleeding in the night, touched her husband’s pyjama-clad arm and said: ‘I’m three days late, Roly, and I feel kind of strange. I think maybe — you know. Wouldn’t it be wonderful?’

  ‘What?’ Roland had said, opening his eyes.

  ‘I think I might be.’ Lal rolled across the bed to face him.

  ‘Oh, that,’ said Roland, who had heard similar pronouncements on numerous occasions and every time Lal’s conviction of pregnancy had been proved wrong.

  ‘You don’t sound as if you’re very pleased,’ said Lal, removing her hand.

  ‘No point getting all excited when you don’t know. It just makes for disappointment,’ said Roland, shutting his eyes again.

  ‘You don’t think I am,’ said Lal, sitting up in the bed and pulling the eiderdown off Roland’s side as she did so.

  ‘Didn’t say what I thought,’ said Roland, pawing the cover back.

  ‘It’s pretty obvious,’ snapped Lal.

  ‘We’ve been through this before,’ said Roland, scrunching a pillow behind his head.

  ‘But I feel different this time.’

  ‘You always say that.’

  ‘No I don’t.’

  Roland had spent the morning in the vicarage garden, snapping the dead heads off the roses, trimming the cotoneaster hedge. He knew he should be preparing his sermon but the warm air and bright sky kept him outside. He had arranged to have his first French lesson with Amélie Baldwin on Monday afternoon and still hadn’t told his wife.

  ‘Think I need a bit of something new,’ he said to Lal as he cut into a sausage at lunch.

  ‘New?’ Lal lowered her fork.

  ‘Yes, feel a bit stale, need to keep the old brain working.’

  ‘I thought the boys’ club you were suggesting would keep you occupied. Fit, too, if you start coaching a rugby team.’

  ‘Thought I might take up French again.’

  ‘You want to learn French? Whatever for?’ said Lal, the water jug in her hand.

  ‘I just do,’ said Roland.

  ‘And who’s going to teach you?’ said Lal, putting the jug down without filling her glass.

  ‘Mrs Baldwin, the bank manager’s wife. She’s French, you know.’

  ‘And you’re going to pay her?’

  ‘Something; it’d only be small.’

  ‘Really,’ said Lal, picking the jug up again.

  ‘Come on, Lal, what’s wrong with it?

  Lal sighed.

  ‘Tell me,’ insisted Roland, wiping his mouth with a napkin and adopting what he hoped was a look of full attention.

  ‘Where do you want me to start? We’ve little enough ourselves — we can only have a maid because the government helps pay Mavis, half the parish is out of work, almost starving …’ Lal stopped to put the water jug down again with an exaggerated bump. ‘And presumably you haven’t thought that there may be a child.’

  After lunch Roland sat at the table in his study playing with the bobbles that decorated the edge of the tablecloth. He knew Lal was furious, though, as ever, she had said little, just spooned up her queen pudding and helped Mavis clear the table without saying a word. When the maid had taken the tray out of the room Lal had said, ‘Go ahead. Have the lessons if they’re what you want. It will mean less money going somewhere else — to the poor probably. And I won’t be here this afternoon. I’ll be out sorting linen at the depot.’ Then she was gone, shutting the door with sufficient extra force to indicate anger, without resorting to a proper slam.

  Maybe Lal was right; maybe it was unreasonable to expect their limited resources to cover the two shillings Roland had agreed to pay, and if the money was going spare its rightful place, as Lal implied, was surely with the poor, not indulging some personal whim. Roland thought of Jesus saying ‘The poor, they are always with us’ and wondered if the maxim offered some justification for what he wanted to do. Perhaps being human brought with it permission for occasional indulgence; maybe there was even a sermon in it: ‘God’s expectations and how much denial is required’. Having to go on, week in, week out, with nothing he really enjoyed, nothing achieved, nothing uniquely his, seemed too much of a burden for anyone. Roland had imagined that in Matauranga he’d find a sense of place, leadership, people coming to him for advice, counsel, help, but it hadn’t happened. He’d done his best, encouraged the parish to support those in need, and worked to see the St Peter’s depot was accessible and generous with furniture and bedding, while the town rolled in on itself, and Roland was ignored. Sometimes he felt jealous of the Salvation Army with their simple messages and catchy tunes. People listened when the Sallies spoke. When Roland stood in the pulpit there was tired attention, but he doubted anyone was touched or had their lives set on fire.

  Then there was the matter of Mrs Baldwin. There was a wrinkle in Roland’s thoughts when it came to Amélie. He pushed the matter aside. His response to the bank manager’s wife was not something he wanted to investigate; easier to focus his guilty musings on the morality of spending the weekly florin.

  Roland was sure he should pray. He folded his hands and tried to concentrate on The Light of the World, which hung above the sofa. He remembered how the image of the saviour with his gentle rat-ta-tat on the sin-choked door of the human heart once moved him. Now the androgynous-looking Christ, with his fearful, shifty eyes, stared at Roland with disdain.

  Roland sighed and picked up his Bible. He let it fall open randomly, hoping for inspiration.

  ‘How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights!’

  Roland had no doubt it referred to Mrs Baldwin. Better not to try to unravel what the words might tell hi
m.

  The Paua Tower rose out of the surrounding paddocks, a solitary spire bright as the burning bush. And its colours … Some described them in terms of feathers and birds — kingfisher, peacocks, a hint of the military plumage of kea and the ascorbic greens of mountain parrots. Others, the skites, keen to show their knowledge of precious stones, were all for jewels — sapphire, iolates, turquoise, emeralds, lapis lazuli, amethysts.

  But regardless of metaphor, there was general agreement that the tower was spectacular.

  The New Zealand Tourist Wonderland, after declaring it ‘breathtaking’ and ‘a must for every visitor’ to the region, went on to explain how:

  The 65-foot tower, built by townspeople, honours a brave Matauranga lad, Corporal Melvin Carey, First New Zealand Contingent, who died of wounds in Slingersfontein in January 1900. The structure, which is entirely covered in polished fragments of the iridescent paua shell (Haliotis iris), has always occupied a special place in the hearts of Matauranga people.

  The guidebook, while correct in general, was wrong on particulars: the tower was in fact an entirely private enterprise, solely constructed by a disabled farmer, Andrew Carey, as a memorial to his dead son. Far from being supportive, local opinion had, for the entire thirteen-year construction, pronounced both the project and its instigator mad, with the result that Carey spent much of his time labouring on the tower, surrounded by urchins who threw clods at him from behind the stand of cabbage trees and called derisive comments about ‘Loony Andy’, as he was still known.

  Carey had suffered a serious accident when a piece of fencing wire whipped back under pressure and partially severed his neck, leaving his head perpetually on an angle and slightly injuring his vocal cords. He had neither sought nor welcomed the support of the community. The tower was his obsession, built on his own land, and in the early years he threatened with prosecution anyone who ventured over the fences. As years passed, both those fences and Carey’s own possessive energy sagged. The tower became public property by default, a destination for afternoon walks, a place for lovers. Visitors took to writing initials, drawing hearts, engraving words between the shells. Like some Latin declension, the language of love, lust and copulation sprouted from between the glowing blue shards. On the ground floor of the tower the words materialised as physical objects: semen-sticky handkerchiefs, used condoms, lace and rayon knickers, cigarette butts were all frequently strewn about.

  Now, when Carey heard lovers at the tower, rather than taking his rifle out of the kitchen cupboard and shouting invective, he merely smiled at the predictability of it all. Lonely in his advancing age, he had come to appreciate his uninvited guests, drawing a vicarious pleasure from the rituals of their courtships. The preliminary giggles, the little pretend cries of female modesty followed by the noises of pleasure, primitive and feral. When he went down there, wished the couple the time of day, they would grasp their clothes about them — Adam and Eve caught in the garden. The women would look sheepish, peering into handbags, dabbing their noses with powder puffs. As if he didn’t know.

  Carey’s farmhouse was on a ridge overlooking the tower and the river. Built by his father on confiscated Maori land in the late 1860s, the house was rough and poky. A veranda had originally run along the front but the boards on one end, under a broken drainpipe, had rotted through, leaving only a small sound area to one side of the front door. This was where Carey kept an old fireside chair. The chair, like the veranda, had seen better days. A spring pushed through the seat at the back and the hessian lining had come adrift between the legs and hung down in torn flitters. Carey sat on the chair thinking of love. The way it gripped and hung on, like ticks in sheep. He remembered the urgency, too. Once known, now long gone. He thought of being with his wife Ellie in the double bed with the broken slat and the missing castor, making the boy the tower would commemorate. Time, which had taken both Ellie and the boy, was now after him and the tower as well, and would get them both in the end. Carey had no regrets about his own demise, but the decay and eventual destruction of the tower bothered him. Thirty years after it was built, the structure was beginning to subside, the elaborate wooden staircase rotting, the shells falling out, leaving patches on the concrete like mange on a once handsome animal. Too old now to reverse the process, he watched the changes and felt overcome with sadness.

  Carey heard Stella laugh as he sat on the broken armchair, looking at his hands and thinking of death. He liked to hear a woman laugh. He could see her down there, hanging over the gate. A girl wearing a grey felt hat, her back covered in long pale hair, plaited like a skein of the yarn that Ellie used in her fancywork, and a young man standing beside her. They were staring at the tower.

  ‘Gee whiz,’ said Vic. ‘It’s beautiful.’

  ‘Marvellous,’ said Stella, pleased Vic liked it.

  Neither spoke for a moment, both gazing at the tower, though they were each thinking of the other.

  ‘Look at me,’ said Vic, moving closer to Stella, his arm on the top of the gate, his long fingers, with their prominent joints, resting on the wood.

  Stella turned her head.

  ‘Your eyes,’ he said, gazing tenderly into her face. ‘Their colour. So blue, like those shells.’

  Vic put his arm around Stella’s shoulders. She didn’t draw back as he gathered her towards him. Her head felt comfortable against his chest.

  ‘Can I kiss you?’ Vic whispered.

  Stella smiled and nodded.

  Vic kissed her once very lightly, and then again. Stella felt the rough intimacy of his skin, and caught the newness of his smell as their lips met. In that instant, it seemed, the sky swayed, the sun slipped and the world altered. It was as if her body had woken up and reached out, though she hardly knew how or for what. All she was sure about was that she wanted Vic to go on kissing her.

  ‘So what do you think?’ said a slurred voice close by.

  Stella and Vic jumped apart as a man with a lopsided mouth and a twisted neck came out of the bushes and waved towards the tower with a manuka stick.

  ‘The tower, oh great,’ said Vic, wiping his lips with his knuckle.

  ‘Made it, every inch, with my bare hands,’ said Carey. ‘Least I could do so my boy wouldn’t be forgotten.’

  ‘You must’ve loved him a lot,’ said Stella.

  ‘Could say that.’ Carey picked up a piece of paua and looked at it. Holding the fragment in his hands made him think of getting the shells. Hadn’t had a lorry in those days so he’d had to go off to the coast with Bess and the cart. Took him the best part of a year to use up a cartload of the stuff. Carey remembered the paua-collecting days with pleasure: the long slow journey to the beach, the nights he’d spent sleeping under the cart with Bess companionably munching close by. Got the shells from Dave Parata, whose kids cleaned them. Carey couldn’t recall what he’d done about payment. He doubted money was exchanged — more likely he gave the Paratas a couple of sacks of spuds or a side of mutton in return.

  ‘Hear they’re going to build a picnic spot and a playground out here,’ said Vic, breaking in on Carey’s memories.

  ‘Who told you?’ asked Carey, moving his body around so he faced Vic.

  ‘Dunno,’ said Vic. ‘Just heard Maguire’s were in it as a Works scheme.’

  ‘Fact is, you’re right, son. I’ve agreed to let this bit of land go to the council, if they repair the tower and make a playground. Can’t manage it on my own; better to give it to someone who’ll look after it.’

  ‘That’s really kind,’ said Stella. ‘Think of all the people, little kids too, coming out here, enjoying it.’

  Carey smiled at her. How angry he had been that first time Maguire and the joker from the council had come sniffing about, trying to persuade him to give the place up. Impudent, too, they were, driving up in the big flash car, leaving the gate open, letting two of the chooks out and flattening the young lettuces. He told them to clear off, stuff their plans for tenders and relief projects and feathering their ow
n nests up their jacksies, but it didn’t make any difference. Maguire wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  ‘See reason, Mr Carey,’ Maguire had said, flicking cigarette ash into a saucer on the kitchen table. ‘None of us getting any younger and after you go, well, I mean … who else coming to the place would keep the tower up? As it is the structure’s becoming more unsafe by the day. At this rate, won’t be long before it’ll be condemned.’

  ‘He’s spot on, you know,’ the councillor added. ‘Hate to do it, of course, specially when the tower’s precious to us all, but if the place is unsafe the council would have to act. It might even insist on demolition — can’t have public safety jeopardised. If you pass ownership over, the tower will be maintained in perpetuity and your son’s memory kept alive.’

  Carey knew they were right, of course he did, but he wouldn’t give in. Not then. He let them come out to the farm over and over, led them a fine dance. He wanted to see what they’d offer, how far they’d go, watch them bargain, squirm: that’s how the promise of the floodlights came about.

  ‘Tell you what,’ Maguire said, ‘you sign over the tower and the land to the council, and I’ll throw in the floodlights and all the fittings buckshee.’

  Floodlights. Illumination. The tower carrying its message of fire and loss in dark as well as light was something Carey, even in the grip of his first incoherent passion planning the project, never considered — never dreamed of. Yet floodlights were what the tower should have had from the start. It was irresistible.

  ‘Could be up here myself,’ said Vic, ‘doing a bit of the electrics on the place. I’m working a bit for Maguire at present. Heard there’d be some lighting going in.’

  ‘Want my advice?’ said Carey. ‘You watch that Maguire.’