The Paua Tower

by Coral Atkinson

  ‘I’m going to be sick,’ said Stella.

  ‘Christ almighty,’ said Maguire as he stopped the car and pushed Stella out on the running board.

  Acrid-tasting bile, with its vile parody of the shandy, surged through her mouth. Stella clasped her arms around her body as the contents of her stomach fell among the stiff tall flowers of the roadside grasses.

  A few hours later Stella lay at home in bed under the quilt made out of pieces of old dresses stuffed with cut-up jerseys. She was looking at a square of bright blue cotton covered in a design of white squirrels. Stella had never seen a real squirrel but she remembered the dress. The fabric had come from a sale remnant and Peg had made the dress, which Stella had worn at an end-of-year concert at school. Her class had sung ‘Green Hills of England’ and ‘Men of Harlech’, and afterwards their teacher, Miss Anderson, gave each child a raspberry bun in a brown paper bag. Stella got jam on the front of her dress. She’d tried to get the red mark off with water from the drinking fountain but the stain remained and even Peg’s subsequent vigorous washing did nothing to shift it.

  Stella went on stroking the blue square and thinking about the afternoon. Maguire hadn’t gone on to Haikai as he’d intended. Instead, as soon as Stella got sick, he’d turned the Buick around and headed back to Matauranga. Neither spoke on the way. At the corner of Constance Street Maguire stopped the car, leaned over and opened the door.

  ‘Go home,’ he said to Stella. ‘Remember, no blabbing, and if you want your job you’re to be there at work tomorrow, usual time, with a bloody good smile on your face.’

  ‘You’re back early,’ said Peg as Stella came into the kitchen. ‘It’s only twenty to three.’

  On seeing her mother, Stella, who had stopped on the path around the house and dried her tears, began sobbing again.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ said Peg, pausing, a towel she was folding in her hand. ‘Been laid off or something?’

  Stella shook her head. ‘I’m not feeling good,’ she said between sobs.

  ‘No need to put on the Niagaras just because you’ve a touch of the flu,’ said Peg. ‘Get on off to bed and I’ll get you some baking soda and water, that’ll help.’

  Stella smoothed the blue eiderdown square with her finger. She wished she were eight again and in Miss Anderson’s class. In the kitchen Peg was making mince. Stella knew what her mother was doing because she had heard the mincer’s loud grasping thud when Peg bolted it to the table, followed by the distinctive noise as the handle turned. In her head she could see Peg feeding bread into the mincer, along with scraps of meat. The thought of this happening on the other side of the wall started Stella crying again. Making mince was one of the rituals of her childhood; now she felt distanced from it and everything in her life that had gone before.

  Stella shifted position in bed and the pain between her legs momentarily flared. She felt as if the old kitchen potato peeler had been there inside her going round and round. There had been blood on her pants when she’d taken them off and put on her pyjamas but she didn’t think she was bleeding now. Stella looked out the window. She could see the old rope swing in the branches of the fir tree, the clothesline with the sagging cretonne peg bag, and the sky pale as greaseproof paper stretching over the iron fence. Stella thought of how she had been in that sky, high and floating, looking down. She thought of herself and Mr Maguire on the ground and the sudden spasm of pain as she was forced open, like a shell prised apart with a stone.

  ‘Mum!’ cried Stella, though she hadn’t intended to shout.

  Peg came in, wiping her hands with the dishcloth. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Stella in a faint voice.

  ‘Honest, Stell, I don’t know what’s got into you this afternoon. You’d think all I had to do was run in and out,’ said Peg.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Stella, looking back at the sky.

  Chapter 14

  Vic ran his fingers along the Bakelite sunbeams of the wireless case and wished he felt pleased. The scheme for getting the thing had worked magnificently: the chopping blocks had sold in Wellington, his cousin Fred Chatterton had made a small profit, and now here was the wireless on Vic’s camp table.

  ‘Looks a real beaut,’ said Gilchrist, twiddling the knobs.

  ‘The blokes will be over the moon,’ said Legatt, picking up the instruction leaflet and reading it.

  ‘Wonder what old Forster will say when we ask to plug it in over in the dining room,’ said Miller, frowning.

  ‘Probably come in to listen himself,’ said Gilchrist. ‘He and his missus haven’t got one.’

  ‘Can’t see Forster lining up to hear Uncle Scrim and The Friendly Road,’ said Legatt.

  ‘Just hope to God he doesn’t ask too many questions about where the thing came from.’

  ‘Whip-around among the men, and Vic’s cousin knew a joker who got it dirt cheap — that’s the line,’ said Gilchrist.

  ‘Let’s take it across now and check the reception.’ Legatt picked up the wireless, but Vic continued to sit on his bed. ‘Aren’t you coming for the big moment, Vic?’ said Gilchrist.

  ‘No,’ said Vic. ‘You go and set it up; think I’ll give it a miss.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Gilchrist, hanging back, ‘what’s the matter with you? This whole wireless deal was your idea. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened in this bloody camp and you’re going on like a wet week. You’ve been the same for days.’

  ‘Leave me alone,’ said Vic, hugging his bent knees with his arms.

  ‘Trouble with Stella?’ said Gilchrist, dropping the tent flap and coming back towards the bed.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Vic, ‘you could say that.’

  ‘Want to talk?’ said Gilchrist.

  ‘No,’ said Vic, ‘but thanks.’

  Left to himself, Vic took off his boots and socks and rubbed his feet with his hands. It was a dour grey Saturday afternoon, and cold like a frozen breath rose from the tramped earth floor of the tent. With the onset of winter Vic had taken to wrapping his feet in newspaper before he put his boots on, though he couldn’t decide whether it helped or not. The leak in his boots meant the paper was quickly sodden, which did nothing for his comfort or his chilblains.

  ‘Stella, oh Stella,’ he sighed to himself, as if the recitation of her name might mend the hole in his heart. Something had happened to Stella and Vic didn’t know what. He had considered it from every angle but there seemed no reasonable explanation for the way she now treated him. Three weeks before he’d taken her to see Greta Garbo in Queen Christina. Got the tickets free from Arnold Pratt, who’d been given them the day of the pageant and passed them on. Going to the cinema usually cost money and now with the ending of the work from Maguire there was no way Vic could afford extras like that. He had looked forward to taking Stella to the pictures and to the promised seats in the dress circle.

  ‘Stella’s a bit off colour,’ Peg Morgan had said when Vic arrived at the house. ‘Not herself at all.’

  ‘Definite you want to come?’ said Vic as he and Stella walked down the path to the street.

  Stella nodded but Vic felt she wasn’t sure.

  ‘We could stay home if you’re feeling crook,’ he suggested, taking her hand in his.

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Stella. ‘Right as rain.’

  All week Vic had thought about having Stella beside him in the dark of the movie theatre, the drift of her hair beneath his lips, the feel of her shoulder as he held her under his arm. When the Movietone news started he pulled her towards him but she didn’t relax and cuddle into his jacket as she usually did; instead she was stiff and jumpy. There was something wrong and Vic knew it. In the light from the screen he looked at Stella’s face and thought she looked sad. Later, in the main picture, when Queen Christina walked around the bed chamber where she’d spent the night with her lover, and touched each item of furniture in order to hold it in her memory, he saw tears on Stella’s cheeks.

  ‘Don’t cr
y, love,’ Vic whispered, drawing her close. ‘It’s just pretend.’

  Stella pulled away.

  On the walk home Vic stopped and asked what was wrong.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Stella, looking down at her feet in their strapped shoes. ‘I just think maybe we shouldn’t see each other again.’

  ‘What?’ Vic felt as if someone had thrown a pan of boiling water into his face. ‘Why?’

  ‘I just do,’ said Stella, starting to cry again.

  ‘You’ve met someone else?’ said Vic. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘No, no of course not,’ said Stella as she wept.

  ‘You don’t fancy me any more then?’ said Vic.

  ‘That’s not true.’ Stella shook her head.

  ‘Well then,’ said Vic, sounding relieved ‘you’re just not feeling too good, as your mother said. I’ll take you home and I’m sure you’ll feel different after a night’s sleep.’

  Stella didn’t answer.

  There were none of Stella’s usual letters to Vic that week, though he wrote to her from the camp as often as he could afford the stamp. When he came down to see her the following Saturday she was in the garden hanging out the clothes. There had been a slight frost in the night and, though the morning was clear and the sky blue, the grass still held an icy sheen. Stella was wearing an old overcoat that had once belonged to her father and she had socks on her hands. The sight of the bright-blue paws at the clothesline filled Vic with tenderness. He resolved to buy her a pair of gloves as soon as he could afford it.

  ‘Stella!’ Vic ran to greet her, his arms outstretched.

  Stella jumped back as if caught in some guilty act.

  ‘Can’t I even touch you now?’

  Stella looked at the frosty ground. ‘It’s no good, Vic. Just go,’ she said, glancing quickly up.

  Then, to Vic’s horror, she picked up the laundry basket, which still had some wet clothes in it, and went back into the house.

  Vic’s first impulse was to follow her, bang on the back door and shout, but the thought of her parents coming and asking what was wrong dissuaded him. He wandered back down the path to the street, wondering how he could endure the loss of Stella. He thought of a tree stump he and some of the other blokes had pulled out the day before, when they had been working on the road. It had been very difficult to dislodge because the roots went back and back into the bank. When the thing was finally dragged clear, it left a huge gaping hole of sliding mud; without Stella, the gap inside him would be like that.

  Vic pulled on his socks and lay back on his bed. He felt worse — more miserable than at any other time in his life. The endless slog of the work on the road, the damp clothes, the mud, the cold, the lack of a hot bath or a warm bed, all endurable because of Stella, now seemed too wretched to bear. Vic had always imagined the current economic depression lifting, the lot of working men growing steadily better, life becoming good again. He was no longer sure. Maybe there were no silver linings — maybe this bleak dreariness was how the world was going to be for his entire life. In the past Stella’s letters and their meetings had buoyed up his spirits, carrying him through each working day. She gave him a belief in the future, a future he imagined they would share. The enthusiasms Vic once had for bettering the lot of the others, for the camp newspaper, getting the wireless, for saving people from evictions, seemed to have evaporated. Without Stella everything had become pointless. He looked at the tent walls as they slumped towards him. He wished he still believed in God. At least God was someone you could talk and complain to, someone on your side; now there was no one. Vic reached out and hit the sagging canvas with his fist.

  When Stella had worked at the Railway Tearooms she was responsible for making the Neenish tarts. ‘Best I’ve ever had,’ the customers would say as they bit into the little cakes.

  Stella was thinking of the tarts as she scrubbed the kitchen floor. She remembered how pleased she had been when people said they liked them, and the way the tops were always neatly divided between chocolate and lemon. It seemed to her that her life had become like that. Pale was the happy time with Vic; dark was everything that followed after she went to the lake with Maguire.

  Stella had forbidden herself to think about Vic or Maguire; in fact recently she had tried not to think much at all. After the numb shame of the first few days she had invented things to do and not do, ways to get through each day. Thinking was what she dreaded most, so she crowded her waking hours with tasks to block thought and tire herself out. She scrubbed the floors with sugar-soap, dragged the family mattresses into the garden and beat the lumpy kapok, she blacked the coal range over and over, cleaned the windows and washed and ironed all the curtains.

  ‘Don’t know what’s got into you, girl,’ Peg said, frowning. ‘It’s not spring yet, far too early for all this cleaning.’ But Stella was not to be stopped.

  When she let herself dwell on Vic, and despite her punishing regime her mind returned to him frequently, she found herself at a loss. She yearned for him every minute of the day and yet she couldn’t bear being with him. The thought of him asking questions — worse still, seeing her disgrace, as she was sure he would — made her desperate to avoid him. She had to scrub very fast to stem the tears as she thought of Vic and remembered the wounded expression in his grey eyes when she’d told him to go.

  And then there was Mr Maguire. Stella felt overwhelmed with shame at the thought of her boss. This thing that had happened, the thing at the lake, which Stella couldn’t bring herself to name, was her fault. Must have been. People said it was always the girl’s fault: they led men on and it was up to a woman to call a halt. Perhaps, Stella thought, it was because she had let him put his arm around her in the car — or was it drinking the shandies? She thought of Mr Maguire telling her to take off her dress: surely he wouldn’t have done that unless he’d decided she was cheap and easy?

  It was her hair, perhaps that was it. Stella sometimes went about with her hair loose without making it into a plait or bun. Her mother didn’t really approve of it like that, said it should be bobbed or up or people would take Stella for some blowsy actress or someone’s scruffy fancy-woman.

  Stella dropped the scrubbing brush into the bucket of soapy water and put her hand to the back of her neck. She fingered the thick queue of hair, which she’d tied back with a ribbon, and began to cry.

  The pair of kitchen scissors lay in an old tin biscuit box on the windowsill. Stella picked them up and ran her finger along the blade, then she reached back and, where the ribbon held her hair together, began to chop. The scissors made a disgruntled, rusted sound but they cut well enough.

  The swatch of hair lay in Stella’s hand, pale and soft like the body of a small animal. She turned it over and over as if it were something foreign and unexpected, then held it against her face and felt the silky texture touch her skin. Turning to the coal range, she took the lid off the firebox and dropped the hair in, watching the strands sizzle and vanish in the darting flames.

  ‘Had a fight with the lawnmower?’ Dorothy said when Stella came to work next day, her hair short and inexpertly cut. Peg had done her best to even up the ragged ends but the result was hardly successful.

  ‘Suits you,’ said Gertie kindly, though she thought Stella looked a sight.

  ‘What’s up with you, anyway, Stell?’ said Valerie, as Stella went silently to her desk. ‘You used to be our little ray of sunshine and now you’re nothing but a real misery guts. Boyfriend gone AWOL or something?’

  Stella shook her head.

  ‘Leave the kid alone,’ said Gertie. ‘She’ll tell us if she wants.’

  Stella took out a file and shuffled through the papers. It was over a week since she had gone to the lake with Maguire and she had done nothing in the office since then but stare blankly at receipts and invoices and move things around her desk so the others would think she was working. Her greatest dread was that Mr Maguire would come and speak to her. On the third day she saw his shadow through the opaque pan
el of the door and thought she would die of fright and shame. Red and shaking, she kept her head bowed and her eyes lowered as Maguire came in and talked to Gertie. He didn’t stay long and he ignored Stella; none of them had seen him since.

  At the end of the day, when the tannery whistle blew, Stella stayed at her desk and waited for the others to go home. Everyone was always cheerful, putting on their coats by the pegs in the corridor, looking in their powder compact mirrors, fiddling with lipstick and talking about what they planned for the evening. Stella wanted no part of it, so she pretended she was still busy at her desk.

  ‘You still here?’ said Gertie, coming back into the office.

  Stella nodded.

  ‘There’s something wrong, isn’t there?’ said Gertie doing up the buttons of her coat.

  Stella blushed.

  ‘Look, Stell,’ said Gertie, coming over and leaning on the desk. ‘If you’re, you know, I might be able to help.’

  ‘What? What do you mean?’ said Stella.

  ‘You know — a baby. Has Vic knocked you up?’ asked Gertie.

  ‘Oh that,’ said Stella, feeling hot all over. ‘It’s nothing like that.’

  ‘Good,’ said Gertie, turning her collar up as she’d seen glamorous women do in the pictures.

  ‘So long as you’re okay.’

  Chapter 15

  Maud Hildred was a big woman who favoured fox-fur pieces and a great deal of jewellery. She had a rich throaty voice that reminded Roland of apricot jam, and a wealthy retired farmer husband. The Hildreds lived in Grey Gates, a large house in big grounds on the outskirts of the town. They were stalwarts of the church congregation and Mr Hildred was on the vestry. Mrs Hildred, with her loud contralto voice, was a longtime choir member and the annual St Peter’s fête was always held in the garden of her house.