The Paua Tower

by Coral Atkinson

  ‘What I told you is the truth,’ said Stella forcefully.

  ‘I didn’t say you weren’t telling the truth; I just said that there were aspects to be thought over and maybe the police and a doctor should be informed,’ said Roland.

  ‘I thought vicars were supposed to be loving and forgiving.’ Stella stood up and her voice rose. ‘In your sermons you’re always saying how people should sacrifice themselves for others — don’t you see that’s what my mother did yesterday afternoon? You didn’t have to listen to her scream and think she was about to die. She went through that not for herself but for us, her family, for Dad and me …’

  Stella’s tears started again.

  ‘Take it easy,’ said Lal, putting her arm around Stella.

  ‘I’m sorry, Stella,’ said Roland gently. ‘I realise it’s very distressing for you.’

  ‘If you don’t want it buried here,’ sobbed Stella, ‘just say, and I’ll take it somewhere else. But please don’t tell about Mum. Say you won’t.’

  ‘I don’t know. I need to pray, think it through,’ said Roland.

  Stella stood up and went to the door. ‘I’m going now,’ she said. ‘But if you ever tell anyone about this, or get Mum into trouble, I’ll never, ever come to church or sing in the choir again.’

  ‘How could you, Roland?’ said Lal as the door closed. Then she got up and followed Stella outside.

  It was now almost morning, the time of draining darkness, which always made Lal think of Mary Magdalene in the dawn mistaking Christ for the gardener.

  Stella was digging in the earth trying to uncover the recently buried bundle.

  ‘Leave it,’ said Lal. ‘You’re right, you know, and Roland’s wrong.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll tell?’ said Stella.

  ‘I’ll see he doesn’t,’ said Lal, ‘and I’ll plant something here so the plot isn’t disturbed.’

  Looking out the kitchen window, Roland could see the graveyard with its ragged line of marble crosses, angels and broken columns, and the mountain like a huge tent dominating the grey sky. He watched the two women moving together and embracing among the headstones. Lal was a better Christian than he was. She was always so certain of which way to go, so confident about what was right, while for Roland there were times like this when he found the way of the Lord impossible to fathom, and the demands of God and Caesar seemed inexplicably confused. Roland thought of Christ’s injunction to love one another and judge not. Yet how was he expected to comply with these in such a situation? Stella’s mother had done away with a child, or what would shortly become a child. Were you expected to forget and condone everything, even abortion, which was little better than murder?

  Chapter 10

  In his worst moments Roland wondered if the real reason he had become a clergyman was because of a set of brass monkeys. When he was very young he’d been taken each week to visit his grandmother, Granny Scott. The old lady lived in a steep, dark house on the lower slopes of Christchurch’s Cashmere Hills. The house, which smelt of laxatives and beeswax, had a great deal of stained panelling, inglenooks and faux-Jacobean features. On the top of the sitting-room chimney piece was a statue of three monkeys, which, given Roland’s diminutive size and the ornateness of the overmantel, appeared to hover above him at an immense distance. The three monkeys, with their unfamiliar gestures and menacing grimaces, both interested and intimidated Roland. He wanted to know more of them, yet at the same time their appearance frightened him. When in a moment of unusual daring he had asked if the curio could be taken down for him to touch, his grandmother had said, ‘You don’t look with your hands,’ a reply that Roland felt both shifty and dishonest, despite sounding plausible. So, fearsome and imperfectly perceived, the ornament continued to glitter tantalisingly in the timbered folds of the room. When combined with the other mysterious and alarming aspects of Granny Scott — rigid corseted body, hinged dentures and a sausage of false hair visible in the middle of her bun — it provided Roland with his first taste of what he would later call awe.

  At sixteen Roland had felt the same heart-in-the-mouth terrified wonder among the carved wood, candles and brass ornaments of the college chapel. Guilt ridden with fleshy dreams, sticky sheets and the confirmation class’s stricture against impurity, Roland had imagined himself on a tightrope. God glittered above, absolute and unreachable; below the wild unfathomable demands of sex spoke of damnation; while on the far side Jesus, like an emergency first aid worker, proffered pain relief and forgiveness.

  ‘Come to me,’ Jesus had said, and Roland came. His announcement that he wanted to study for ordination when he left school, though greeted with mild surprise, met with the approval of the Crawford family.

  With Jesus alongside, the riotous misrule of his body, if not vanquished, was at least more manageable, and previous temptations to eat all the cream buns regardless of others, along with the imperative to push Gibson down the house stairs when he urinated in your locker, no longer seemed so pressing. As the years of theological training and curacy passed Roland felt himself, or what was left of himself — though he was increasingly unsure which parts were original — merge with the expectations of others. The practical Christian, helping those in need, the man of prayer finding God in the blade of grass, the muscular Christian playing a sporting game on the rugby field, or the voice in the pulpit demanding repentance, took over.

  Now there was a problem. Roland found himself increasingly worrying at the character he wore — picking away as if trying to uncover the skin under a crusted scab. At the Eucharist he stretched out his arms in the surplice — carefully ironed by Lal — and pronounced: ‘This is my body, this is my blood,’ while the relentless interrogator within inquired whether he in fact believed it.

  The casual camaraderie he had felt with Jesus altered. It wasn’t that Roland had lost Him altogether, more that a crowd on a street or railway platform was constantly jostling the two of them apart. Once Jesus had been there, providing Roland with directions, but now, lacking such guidance, he didn’t know what he was supposed to do. He knew the times were harsh and unjust but had no clue how to mend them. He wanted to help others but didn’t know how. Worse still, the poor and downtrodden, whom Roland knew he should regard as his saviour incarnate in human form, seemed increasingly irritating, if not downright disgusting.

  Take the man with the cigarette looking for boots. Roland disliked people smoking in the depot but there was no notice forbidding it. Lal said it wasn’t up to them to judge, and life was tough enough for most people without imposing extra rules.

  Roland hated the careless way this fellow smoked. The white paper sheath of the roll-your-own unwinding, as tobacco, laden with saliva, lay on the man’s lips and slopped in and out the empty spaces made by missing teeth.

  The depot, established by the previous vicar, had been greatly expanded by Roland and Lal, who were proud of the amount of furniture they stocked and the way the store now looked. Set up in a room at the back of the parish hall, the place with its sagging curtains and stained walls had had a thoroughly dejected air when the Crawfords arrived. Roland and Lal had begged paint and fabric from local shops and, assisted by Bible class members, painted the walls a bright primrose and hung new curtains at the windows. Lal made a corner with a playpen on a rug, so young children could be kept safe when their parents browsed, though, despite the toys provided, the small occupants of the enclosure usually spent their time at the rails roaring to be released.

  St Peter’s depot didn’t stock food, though Roland sometimes thought they should. The Charitable Aid Board offered groceries and you could get meat over at the hospital, but it was never enough for the demand and the quality was poor. The thought of chops dripping blood on the floor, sacks of flour full of weevils, milk turning sour, not to mention the inroads of rats that already made their dark presence felt in the parish hall, discouraged Roland and Lal from expanding in that direction. And yet … what possible use was a chest of drawers or a bentwo
od chair when your stomach was bending over with hunger like a dead leaf?

  ‘Got any size thirteens?’ the man with the roll-your-own cigarette asked.

  Roland took down a pair of boots from the shelves that Lal had carefully labelled.

  ‘Better try them on,’ suggested Roland.

  The man hesitated.

  ‘You can sit down here.’ Roland nodded towards a chair.

  ‘Think I’ll just take them, if that’s okay.’

  ‘You’ll need to try them first,’ said Roland, waving the boots.

  ‘She’ll be right,’ said the man.

  ‘We don’t like to let things go unless they fit.’

  ‘Ah, forget it,’ growled the man in a low voice as he moved to the door.

  ‘Please yourself,’ said Roland annoyed.

  At that moment Lal appeared from behind the aisle of wardrobes, holding a pair of grey work socks and smiling. Since the night of the dance Lal had done a lot of smiling.

  ‘Would you like some socks?’ she said to the departing man. ‘I find socks such a problem, always going in holes.’

  The man immediately turned and sat down. Lal handed him the socks.

  ‘Thanks, Missus,’ he said, unlacing his boots. ‘’Fraid my socks aren’t anything to skite about.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Lal pleasantly, ‘we’re all friends here.’

  ‘Can we have the boots?’ she said to Roland.

  When the man took off his shoes, the holes in his socks were so big half of his feet were bare. He put on the new socks and boots.

  ‘Fit like a dream,’ he said, grinning at Lal.

  Roland felt angry, excluded. How was he to have known the wretched man was ashamed of his socks?

  The hours he spent with Amélie Baldwin were the one time Roland felt perfectly himself. Between lessons he crammed his head with lists of vocabulary, irregular verbs, adverbs, phrases, smiling at his own enthusiasm, hungry to hear Amélie say ‘Bon’ or ‘Très bon’, or to watch her propelling pencil, with the little silk tassel, flick as she ticked the work he had done at home. When Roland sat at the Baldwins’ oak dining table, looking at Amélie’s lips saying ‘pardon’, ‘difficile’, or ‘consomme’, all he could think of was the coral pink O of her mouth and the way the muscles in her neck quivered ever so slightly. Roland loved to hear Amélie speaking in both French and English, even though he suspected that her enchanting French accent, when conversing in English, was something of an affectation and surmised that she was actually much better at speaking his language than she pretended. He had noticed the way her speech could fluctuate disarmingly from voluptuous Gallic breathiness to standard British vowel sounds and how, when she was engaged in a more serious discussion, the charming French words and constructions would often be miraculously replaced by more conventional English ones. The part of the class Roland enjoyed most was the time of refreshments after the lesson. He watched fascinated as Amélie dropped squares of chocolate into cups and poured boiling water on top. It seemed marvellously exotic.

  Amélie asked Roland questions he’d never thought of before. She quizzed him about the Bible. ‘Did Rebecca fall off her camel when she saw Isaac because she knew he’d be her husband?’ ‘Why wasn’t Jesus married?’ She sought his advice: ‘Should they send Tad away to boarding school?’ She told him things he knew (that his life was at a turning point), and things he half knew (that the world had its own timing). She talked about Lal as if she, Amélie, lived in the vicarage and saw exactly what was going on. ‘Your wife,’ she said, ‘is preoccupied because she’s on a journey between one world and the other. She can’t be properly with you now, but when the child comes everything will alter.’

  Speaking to his parishioners Roland felt constrained, like King Wenceslas’s page walking in snow, forced to step into existing footprints. With Amélie his thoughts and speech spilled out carelessly, floating or falling as they chose. Roland told her about the man with the unravelled socks and the brass monkeys in Granny Scott’s house. Amélie smiled. ‘Wisdom starts here,’ she said. This made Roland enormously bold and he asked daring questions about how women felt, and even what she thought about abortion, a subject he had never broached with anyone before. Amélie didn’t reply; instead she got up and fetched her Tarot cards. She dealt a single card. It was the star reversed. ‘Damaged innocence, broken hopes, misleading solutions,’ she said, showing the card to Roland.

  At first Roland had felt embarrassed and anxious whenever Amélie mentioned Tarot, but with time he became increasingly curious.

  ‘These cards,’ he said, looking at the star, which showed a picture of a girl emptying pitchers of water. ‘I thought it was only gypsies who told fortunes. Where did you learn about it?’

  ‘Gypsies, parvenus,’ said Amélie, smiling. ‘My great-uncle taught me the cards and he’d say, “Remember, ma chérie, Tarot does not belong to the Romanies, it is much older than any fairground sideshow. It goes back to Ancient Egypt, to Pythagoras, to Moses, but it is also French.” My countryman Court de Geblin, a man of the eighteenth century, saw the wisdom it held and, though the cards had been about for hundreds of years, he taught Tarot to Europe.’

  ‘But the cards?’ said Roland. ‘They’re not like ordinary playing cards. And there seem so many of them.’

  ‘In Tarot there are seventy-eight cards,’ said Amélie. ‘The Major Arcana are the trump cards and the Minor Arcana are the suit cards, though they are not your aces, diamonds, hearts and clubs. They are staves, cups, swords and coins. “The cards of the social order,” Oncle Henri called them. He would say, “The staves or wooden poles are for the workers on the land, the chalice is for the clergy, swords the aristocrats and coins the merchants.” But it is the Major Arcana that are the important cards — they are the crème de la crème. Together with the Minor Arcana they tell you whatever you need to know about life and the universe. My great-uncle would say, “The Tarot contains all knowledge. If you understand it, you understand everything.”’

  ‘Whew!’ Roland said. ‘Sounds a rather staggering claim. Don’t think many people would swallow that.’

  ‘But why?’ said Amélie, spreading out some cards face up on the table. ‘Don’t you believe some staggering things too? The virgin birth? The resurrection?’

  ‘That’s different,’ said Roland. ‘They’re part of Christian teaching, revealed truth.’

  ‘And are Christians the only ones permitted this truth? Is it not possible there are different ways to knowledge — more than one truth?’ said Amélie. ‘Look,’ she said, indicating the cards, ‘these are the Major Arcana. You see many pictures are of people like the fool, the lovers, the high priestess, the hanged man; some are of qualities like temperance, strength; and some of things like death, the wheel, or the world. Each has its own place, its story, its special message. Together they are like a journey through life.’

  Roland peered down. He could see dogs howling at a moon, a benign-looking sun with a naked child on a horse. There was a falling tower with two people plummeting to the ground, an angel — was it Gabriel at the world’s end? — blowing a trumpet, and there was the devil that had alarmed him the day of the fête. Roland felt uneasy. There certainly seemed no harm in the cards, and what Amélie said was interesting and made good sense, yet part of him felt he had no business being curious about such things, no right to be looking at these images of sorcery and taking them seriously. He wondered if in some way the appalling Ces Nesbit was right in his condemnation.

  As if reading Roland’s thoughts, Amélie pointed to three cards and said, ‘The emperor, the empress and the magician. The wise, stern, all-powerful father; the loving queen mother, who gives always of herself; and the man who is a magician, who lets the power of the universe move through him. Your Christian truth is here, too, for aren’t these just other names for God, Our Lady and Jesus Christ?’

  ‘You think the Tarot is Christian?’ said Roland, feeling a little reassured.

  ‘Christi
an, Jewish, Egyptian. The Tarot is everything.’

  The congregation sat down with a soft satisfied sigh, like air expelled from an ample cushion. The sermon. A time to take the weight off bunioned feet, a chance to doze, consider who was in church and who wasn’t, engage in heady fantasy about the turn of a leg in a silk stocking, an appealing male wrist in a clean white cuff; for the lucky few who still had the wherewithal to think of the Sunday roast and whether the maid had remembered to put the vegetables in on time and if she would manage the gravy today without lumps.

  From the pulpit, Roland searched among the felt hats for Stella. Ever since her visit on Thursday morning he had tormented himself with what he should or shouldn’t do. Lal was unequivocal in her support of remaining silent. When she spoke, Lal’s words seemed to Roland to be sensible and right, but as soon as he was alone doubt assailed him. A crime had been committed — surely his silence was tantamount to complicity? Hadn’t he even allowed the evidence to be buried on church property? He had a responsibility to take action. And then there was Mrs Morgan. What of infection, complications? Shouldn’t she be seeing a doctor? If she died would it be his fault? Twice Roland had started out, determined to see her, talk to her, but each time he had got no further than the corner of Constance Street when he had turned back. Mrs Morgan was an occasional parishioner — in fact he’d done no more than shake her hand on a few occasions — so how could he knock on the door and say … say what? Distress had brought on one of Roland’s headaches. He’d spent Friday with his head thumping like someone beating a carpet, and indecision chasing round and round.

  Roland had been giving a series of sermons on Jesus and his encounters with people. This week it was the woman taken in adultery. Working on the sermon, sitting with a cold flannel on his head thinking about what he would say, brought a decision about Stella. Roland imagined himself like Jesus writing in the dust, apparently not paying any attention to the proceedings, and then at the critical moment speaking of mercy rather than law. There was no need to condemn what Mrs Morgan had done, but there was no reason to condone it either. Once Roland had come to this conclusion his spirits lifted. He looked out of his study window at the mountain and saw how bright and well scrubbed it was.