The Paua Tower

by Coral Atkinson

  As soon as they arrived at the hotel Amélie was hustled up to the second floor. Worse still, when they crossed the hall, Maguire, in full view of the bar and the drinkers, dropped his hand to one of her buttocks and gave it a playful pinch. The gesture, so obviously proprietorial and vulgar, made Amélie cringe.

  ‘I’ve arranged for the food to be sent up,’ Maguire said as he took her elbow and steered her up the stairs behind Wilkinson. ‘Imagine you’d prefer that.’

  Amélie certainly did not, but the dining room on the far side of the bar was hardly what she would have liked either.

  ‘C’est ridicule!’ said Amélie, coming through the door of the honeymoon apartment and stopping.

  ‘The wife did it on her sewing machine,’ said Wilkinson, taking her remark as a compliment. ‘Wanted something with a bit of class.’

  Amélie drew in her breath as she looked about the rooms swimming in purple and cream satin, the effect magnified by a series of ornate gold mirrors decorating the walls. Swathes of violet fabric fell on either side of the windows, ran along the mantelpieces and draped the bed as if it were a catafalque. Round bloated cushions like giant tam-o’-shanters slouched on the black leatherette sofas and splattered the shining pallor of the bed. In the corner of the living room was a table set for two.

  ‘Suppose you want to freshen up before we eat,’ said Maguire, shutting the door behind the retreating hotel owner. ‘There’s a handbasin over there in the corner of the bedroom by the window. The Metropole’s not the Ritz, mind, but it’s still got a few luxuries.’

  Amélie went and sat down at the dressing table, feeling too bewildered to speak. She removed her hat and looked at her reflection. Her face, framed by the wild liquorice-allsorts colouring of the room, looked small and anxious. In the mirror she saw Maguire behind her. He took his jacket and waistcoat off and flung them on chair, then casually loosened his tie. The intimate way he did it was disconcerting, as if he were making all sorts of unwarranted assumptions. Amélie stood up and as she did so Maguire reached from behind to grasp her breasts.

  ‘Leave me alone!’ said Amélie, struggling to free herself.

  ‘Come on, Tinkerbell — bit late to play the bashful virgin.’ Maguire turned her to face him. Roughly he pushed her head back and kissed her hard, his teeth sharp against her lips, making Amélie think of rats. Then, as if to add emphasis to the act, he rucked up Amélie’s clothing, pushed one hand between her legs and squeezed. It was unpleasant and brutal. Amélie wrenched herself away and ran into the other room.

  ‘You’re a savage!’ she accused from behind the comparative safety of the couch. ‘Bringing me to this terrible, common place, treating me like this.’

  ‘For God’s sake, woman, what do you want?’ said Maguire, following her into the living room.

  ‘I want,’ said Amélie, close to tears, ‘I want to be treated properly, with finesse.’

  ‘Going all hoity-toity, are we?’ said Maguire. ‘What did you expect, lovey? Maurice bloody Chevalier?’

  ‘I thought at least you would be a gentleman, not a gorilla.’

  ‘You bloody frigid or something?’ said Maguire, pulling a slim silver box out of the pocket of his trousers and fiddling with a cigarette. ‘Most women like a bit of the rough stuff.’

  ‘Is that all you know?’ said Amélie. ‘“Rough stuff”? Love is a dance, an elegant thing between men and women; it is not this, this wrestling match.’

  ‘Ah, don’t get your knickers in a twist. Calm down and I’ll order the lunch. Nothing like a plate of grilled trout and couple of glasses of vino to make a lady fancy a bit of nooky.’

  ‘No.’ Amélie was very formal as she picked up her handbag. ‘I have reconsidered our little adventure. I do not want you or your fine trout luncheon, Monsieur Maguire. I am not sure what this nooky is, but I think maybe I do know, and I don’t want that either.’

  ‘Bitch,’ said Maguire. ‘Bloody cock-teaser!’

  Amélie could hear him shouting the monstrous words as she ran down the stairs without her hat.

  Tad Baldwin and his friend Bill Cunningham, the son of the Matauranga doctor, were playing truant. Their regular teacher was in hospital with appendicitis and the reliever, Mr Edison, was notoriously slack about calling the roll. It was the second consecutive day the boys had gone down to the river rather than to school.

  There wasn’t much in that part of Matauranga, just the railway line with a tin shed where the train sometimes stopped before going over the bridge, a few houses scattered about, and a couple of goats tethered alongside shelters made from corrugated iron. Maguire’s tannery was down there, and the abattoir, which backed onto the river.

  ‘This place stinks,’ said Tad, swinging down one of the ropes the boys had tied to a tree and jumping to the ground.

  ‘It’s the pong from the slaughterhouse,’ said Bill.

  ‘Think of all those millions of cows shitting themselves in the yards ’cause they know they’re to be killed. Makes you want to puke,’ said Tad.

  ‘They don’t know they’re for the chop,’ said Bill, picking at a scab on his arm. ‘How could they?’

  ‘They’d know,’ said Tad. ‘They just would.’

  Bill was just about to start one of their arguments, which inevitably resulted in the two wrestling and rolling on the ground, when there was a din on the main road. The boys ran back towards the bridge and climbed up the bank. A herd of cattle was coming towards them on their way to the abattoir.

  ‘Hey, look at that!’ shouted Bill as a motorbike roared up the road towards the animals. ‘A Harley!’

  The animals scattered as the bike approached, and though none of them were hit, several doubled back and began to run in panic. The cattle drovers shouted and waved their sticks as they got the mob together again. Tad and Bill saw one beast dart off alone down the road and onto the track that led to the riverbed.

  ‘We’ll get him,’ bellowed Tad, though the drovers were too far away to hear. Tad and Bill slithered back down the bank the way they had come, and reached the track from the road just as the animal came towards them. Seeing the children, the beast changed direction and headed into the willows, crashing about in the undergrowth.

  ‘Send it to the Somme!’ shouted Bill as the beast charged through the broom. Spreading out, the two boys hunted it into the area of ditches where they sometimes played Anzacs and Huns. They were just passing ‘no man’s land’ when there was an almighty crash; just beyond a thicket of gorse the rusted corrugated iron that covered one of their more favoured trenches had collapsed under the weight of flying hooves.

  When Tad and Bill caught up, the beast was in the trench, surrounded by shattered brown iron. The animal’s bleeding front legs were distractedly pawing on the lip of the hole in a desperate effort to heave itself out. There was foam dripping from the creature’s mouth and its eyes rolled dark and terrified.

  ‘Well, you’re men’s shoes and leather wallets now,’ said Bill, poking the beast’s back with a stick.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said Tad, suddenly feeling sorry for it. ‘Come on, let’s get it out of here before the drovers come. All it needs is a bit of a push from the back.’

  ‘You’re mad, Tad,’ laughed Bill, but he didn’t argue, and after a lot of heaving and pushing the two managed to get the creature out of the trench and on its feet.

  ‘Go!’ said Tad dramatically as the animal galloped off across the stones. ‘Don’t let Maguire’s killers catch you!’

  ‘Where’s it heading?’ shouted one of the drovers, breaking through the undergrowth and coming towards the boys.

  ‘That way,’ said Tad, pointing in the opposite direction.

  ‘Do you think it’ll make it?’ asked Bill when the man had left.

  ‘Dunno,’ said Tad, feeling bored once the excitement had passed.

  ‘What’ll we do now?’ said Bill. ‘It’s too early to go home.’

  The autumn afternoon was growing chill and the multitude of activi
ties the boys had planned for the day seemed suddenly exhausted.

  ‘I’ve tuppence,’ said Tad. ‘We could go and buy some lollies.’

  ‘Where?’ said Bill. ‘If we go into town some telltale will see us.’

  ‘We could go to the garage at Murdoch Corner,’ said Tad. ‘It sells winegums and acid drops and things, as well as petrol. It’d be something to do.’

  The two boys walked along the road, pretending they were New Zealanders spying on the Turks at Gallipoli. When a car, cart, lorry or bike came into view they cried, ‘Reporting presence of Johnny Turk’ and, with a great deal of giggling, threw themselves into the long damp grass, or hid behind any convenient trees or bush and waited for the ‘danger’ to pass. There was little traffic on the road so the game wasn’t much good and was quickly fizzling out when something blue could be seen coming towards them.

  ‘Reporting presence of Johnny Turk,’ said Bill, flinging himself into the grass and rolling down a small bank. Tad was just about to do the same when he saw that the hatless figure walking towards him was a woman, and not just any woman either. The silhouette was unmistakable: it was his own mother. Tad had never seen Amélie outside without a hat before and her hair and face looked odd and untidy. The fact that she was walking alone in the country on the far side of town was equally extraordinary. Amélie seldom walked anywhere, certainly not here. What on earth was she doing?

  ‘Emergency, emergency!’ Tad whispered as he rolled down towards Bill. ‘Up there. It’s Mum!’

  ‘What?’ said Bill, standing up to get a better look.

  Amélie, seeing the bobbing blond head, came to the side of the road and peered down. There at the bottom of the bank lying in the grass were Bill Cunningham and her own son Tad.

  ‘Nom de Dieu! You two come up here at once! What are you doing down there clinging to the herbs and destroying your clothing?’ Amélie waved her little handbag.

  The two boys climbed up to the road, heavy with apprehension.

  ‘Look at you!’ said Amélie, noticing that Tad’s flannel collar was torn at the neck. Both children had muddy grass-stained legs, filthy shoes and Bill’s arm was bleeding. ‘And what about school? Why are you not at school?’

  ‘Our teacher’s sick,’ said Bill. ‘Got an appendix. He’s in hospital and my dad says he’s really crook.’

  ‘That is bad, very bad,’ said Amélie vaguely, as if she wasn’t listening.

  ‘What are you doing here, Mum?’ asked Tad, who felt a distraction might be helpful.

  ‘Walking,’ said Amélie. ‘Just taking a little walk.’

  ‘But you’ve no hat,’ said Tad.

  Amélie put her hand up and touched her hair.

  ‘Non,’ she said. ‘How silly of me. I came out and didn’t notice.’

  Tad didn’t believe her: when it came to clothes Amélie noticed everything.

  ‘Come,’ said Amélie, ‘we must all get home.’

  The two boys ran in front as Amélie — unsteady and limping slightly in her high heels — walked along the rough road back towards Matauranga. Just before they came to the town Tad dropped behind Bill, letting his mother catch up.

  ‘Are you going to tell Dad when he gets back from Wellington?’ said Tad, careful not to refer to school.

  ‘About what?’ asked Amélie.

  ‘Us being on the road by the river,’ said Tad.

  ‘Why should I tell your father about you playing in some ditch?’ said Amélie, then added, as if uncertain, ‘But Jack would not like to think of me walking alone that far from home, so you are not to tell him that either.’

  Amélie had trouble sleeping that night; much as she complained about Jack’s breathing and coughing, she missed his presence in the bed. There was agreeable animal warmth about sleeping with a man, a sense of comfort and protection. She would lie against Jack’s back as if resting against a sunny tree trunk; alone she tossed about, turned her pillow over. She scented her handkerchief with cologne and laid it on her forehead but still sleep was evasive.

  Amélie’s feet hurt from the four miles she’d walked back from the Metropole in her court shoes. Her soles blazed as if burnt and both of her little toes were blistered. She thought about the scene with Maguire and the fire of her feet seemed to spread all over her. She felt embarrassed, foolish, annoyed. She had previously not permitted herself to consider what would happen if Jack heard of her assignation, but now the thought worried her. Maguire wouldn’t tell — he would be too angry at her rejection — but there were always other eyes watching and tongues that could wag.

  When Amélie finally slept she dreamt of Jack in France, back in the time when he had come stumbling out of the trees and fallen almost at her feet.

  The others had come fussing and chattering. Madame Durand waved a bottle of sal volatile, Oncle Henri flapped his copy of the third volume of Le Monde Primitif over the unconscious man, and Jeanne pulled her apron over her head and called on the Virgin. It was Pierre, Jeanne’s husband, saying, ‘C’est le gaz,’ who had got the officer into a wheelbarrow, took him to the house and poured water over his face.

  Dr Brussiere said Pierre was right. ‘By the look of things le capitaine got gassed. Mustard gas, the worst sort — would have blinded him, and somehow he managed to wander back from the front. Not sure how long he’s been out there, must be days. Get him through a week or so and he’ll survive, though his lungs, mon Dieu, his lungs.’

  They took it in turn to sit by Captain Baldwin’s bed: Amélie, her mother and Oncle Henri. An hour at most was all any of them could stand with the terrible hellish barking cough and the officer’s constant moaning as he tried to gather breath. They wiped the man’s eyes over and over; there was nothing else to do.

  Amélie was excited. At last something had happened in her life, and despite his puffed-up eyelids Captain Baldwin was young, not bad looking, probably well off — weren’t all officers? — and, better still, a mystery. Surely it was providence that had guided this blinded Englishman from the front and brought him blundering out of the wood to her. The thought made Amélie smile and shiver. She dipped the cloth in the water and stared at the haggard face, the obscene overripe eyelids, the chin shadowed by days without a razor, and felt a sense of something lost and found, but in no ordinary way. It was as if a mislaid silver fork, when recovered, had become a spoon, a lost thimble had reappeared as a hatpin, objects altogether different from what was sought or imagined, but welcome all the same.

  The double doors into the cobbled courtyard had been bolted back and the long white curtains drifted in the spring air. Amélie sat beside the sick man’s bed, a comb in her hand. She looked at the way the stranger’s straight dark hair feathered on the pillow and gently began to comb it, dividing one side to make a parting.

  The captain shifted under the covers, his eyelids flickered and between the swollen lids Amélie could see a sliver of blue, like a bright carpet seen through the letter slot in a door.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said in English, and Amélie thought he smiled.

  Later, when the time of crisis had passed, the officer’s eyelids had returned to normal and his coughing was less intense, they found that Captain Baldwin was not an Englishman at all, though he spoke French like one. He came from an outrageously faraway country, a place further away even than Tahiti and that was far enough. He was from Nouvelle-Zélande, a smattering of islands floating about in the Pacific. A strange, contradictory sort of place, with savages who cooked in hot mud pools and birds that couldn’t fly.

  ‘Vous plaisantez!’ Amélie said when the captain told her about his home, but he would smile and shake his head and say, ‘No, scout’s honour,’ and Amélie was hardly sure whether to believe him or not.

  Captain Baldwin, whose first name Amélie soon discovered was Jack, was with a New Zealand regiment. He spoke about his men as if they were his brothers. ‘The boys,’ he said. ‘Must get back to the front — can’t leave them there on their own.’ When Amélie asked him to tell
her what ‘there’ was really like, he said ‘better not’, ‘can’t describe it’, ‘too horrible to talk of’ and diverted her by asking silly little things about a recipe or a French word. Other times he drifted into talk about some place he’d been, thought he’d been, or dreamed of — Amélie was never quite sure and Jack didn’t seem to know either — a place where men had eyes like the lids of pickle jars and heads of deformed children, and outlandish creatures crawled on your face, setting your skin on fire and stinging your gullet. ‘But in the end,’ Jack would say, ‘I came to the place of light, where good triumphs. In the end good always triumphs. We cannot fall out of the hands of the living God.’

  Amélie was embarrassed and confused when Jack spoke like that. It reminded her of priests and church and tedious, inexplicable things. Her mother said the captain’s strange ramblings were the result of the gassing and the man was shell-shocked. Amélie should not encourage his morbid talk; she must divert him with conversation about other, more pleasant things. Amélie wondered what ‘shell shock’ was and she thought of the hands of the living God and what it might mean to fall out of them. She imagined a nest in a tree and remembered the scrawny, featherless baby birds who had tumbled out: little ones, dead and trampled on the ground beneath.

  Jack began to recover. He walked about the house and courtyard, though he was frequently overcome by coughing and had to clutch the furniture each time an attack came. Each day as Jack got better he fussed and chafed more, eager to be off, back to his men and the war.

  ‘You are too ill to go anywhere just yet,’ said Dr Brussiere, but Jack didn’t listen and eventually persuaded Pierre to hire a car from the village so he could return to his regiment.

  ‘I have brought you some flowers,’ said Amélie, holding out a bunch of violets as the sick man went to the car. When Jack left, the house would return to the tedium of before and she thought she was going to cry.