The Paua Tower

by Coral Atkinson

  Sunday evensong finished and Roland was keen to go home. He was looking forward to eating the Kentish cheese pudding he knew Lal was making, and he had set aside the evening to catch up on his French for his Monday lesson.

  ‘Could I have a word with you, Vicar?’ Mrs Hildred said as he shook her hand after the service.

  ‘Course,’ said Roland. ‘Just wait until everyone else has gone.’

  ‘Maybe I could pop over to the vicarage and wait for you there.’ Mrs Hildred hitched up a slipping paw of her fox fur and flicked it back over her shoulder. ‘It may need a bit of time.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Roland, feeling tired. He always felt worn out on Sunday evening, and the thought of having to deal with Mrs Hildred griping about the organist or the choice of hymns, which she did periodically, didn’t please him.

  When Roland got to his study Mrs Hildred was already sitting in the chair in front of his desk, holding a sheaf of typed paper in her hand.

  ‘I’m so excited about this,’ she said in her full fruity voice.

  ‘Excited about what?’ said Roland, sitting down opposite her.

  ‘Well,’ she boomed, ‘I belong to a little writing group. Just six or seven of us. We call ourselves The Lady Quills. You may have heard of us.’

  Roland shook his head. ‘I didn’t know you were a writer, Mrs Hildred.’

  ‘Oh, indeed I am, Vicar.’ She smiled. ‘We write poems, short stories and sketches, and recently we had a competition for a one-act play. I wrote one based on something I saw when my husband and I were on our overseas trip. And do you know what?’

  ‘What?’ said Roland, smelling the cheese pudding and wishing she’d get to the point.

  ‘I won it. So exciting — you can imagine.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ said Roland.

  ‘Now, what I’m suggesting is that we get up a group — call ourselves the St Peter’s Players or something like that — and we put on my little play as a fundraiser for the parish comforts depot. Everyone would love it and it’d be such fun. I’d be the producer. I’ve produced one or two plays in the past. I’m happy as a sandboy doing that. And there’s even a role in the play for you, Vicar. Mr Reginald Winterbottom. I thought of you when I wrote his part.’

  ‘Goodness,’ said Roland. ‘Never imagined myself as an actor.’

  ‘You’d be perfect,’ said Mrs Hildred. ‘But you mustn’t say anything — not a word until you read the script. It’s called Tea for Two. Just let me know what you think when I come to early service on Wednesday.’

  Lal was dead against the idea of the play when Roland told her about it at dinner. He hadn’t even read the script for a start; they all had enough to do without him getting himself and the parish involved in something new; and surely he wanted a bit of quiet family time when baby arrived rather than being gobbled up by some silly theatrical?

  ‘I don’t have to be involved. Mrs Hildred could organise it on her own,’ said Roland, unfolding his table napkin.

  ‘If she wants you, she’ll have you,’ said Lal as she scraped the crusted cheese off the rim of the pudding dish and put it on top of Roland’s helping. ‘That woman always gets her own way.’

  ‘That’s the trouble, Lal,’ said Roland. ‘I could refuse to take part but I can’t really tell Mrs Hildred the parish won’t support her play. You know the heavy artillery she can bring to bear when she wants.’

  ‘I do indeed,’ said Lal wearily, thinking of several skirmishes they’d already had with Maud Hildred.

  Later that evening Roland read the play script. ‘Not bad, not bad at all,’ he said to himself, sucking the end of his fountain pen. The play, which took place in a London teashop, revolved around a young man endeavouring to propose to his sweetheart but being constantly interrupted by misunderstandings with an Italian waiter and a French lady who had mislaid her umbrella. A bit heavy-handed but it would certainly raise a laugh. It was then the idea struck him: if they did perform the comedy, who better to play the French lady, Madame Forgeron, than Amélie Baldwin? Of course he had no idea if she’d accept. She wasn’t a member of the parish, wasn’t even an Anglican, but … Roland thought of how Amélie had come to read the Tarot cards at the church fête last summer and how he’d always felt guilty about the way she’d been so rudely dismissed. Maybe this was the chance to show a bit of Christian charity and invite her back.

  No sooner had Roland thought this than the whole project assumed a new and exciting aspect. The St Peter’s Players was just what was needed to bring some light and gaiety to the parish in this dreary winter. Tea for Two would be an ideal play to perform, and if Amélie agreed to take part he, Roland, would play Reginald Winterbottom, just as Mrs Hildred wanted.

  Amélie was stroking the black-silk card pouch where she kept her Tarot cards and thinking about the symbol of the hanged man. She had a particular liking for that card. In her mind she was sure the figure was a Frenchman, young, charming and adventurous. She liked the way the man seemed to spring rather than hang, as if adversity provided him with an incentive. She appreciated the way the noose was around his foot rather than his throat, and agreed with the interpretation that he symbolised giving something up and moving on. Amélie had been dealing the cards a great deal recently and seeing rather a lot of the hanged man. She was sure he was telling her to forget what had happened with Maguire, to free herself from rancour and reach out into life.

  Amélie loved the richness the Tarot offered. The way the cards spoke to her, throwing up new ways of seeing, possibilities she had overlooked, different things to ponder. Years ago, when she left France for New Zealand, Oncle Henri told her that, though he once believed it was wrong to do your own readings, he had reconsidered this and, provided you used the Tarot respectfully, you would always receive wisdom and direction from the cards. In the excitement of the time Amélie had thought little of this, or of doing readings, either her own or those of others; it was much later that the cards became her solace and her guide. At first she had tried to interest Jack in the Tarot, but, though he listened politely to her explanations, and occasionally allowed his cards to be read, Amelie could tell he was neither engaged nor convinced.

  Henri had taught her well and Amélie knew a number of different spreads. These were the pattern you laid the cards out in, with each position having a special worth. The spread was like the beams of a building, with the resulting reading dependent on the structure. Amelie took great care to choose spreads that harmonised with the information she sought. She knew how best to ask the cards for direction on love, fortune, wishes, health. She liked three-card readings, where the position of the card defined past, present and future. Her favourite spread was the Celtic cross, but she also modified others and invented some. Often she would pick a card at random from the Major Arcana to see what it would say.

  ‘Someone for you, Ma’am,’ said Eunice, opening the sitting-room door without knocking, which Amélie had instructed her a number of times not to do. ‘It’s that clergyman, though I told him his lesson wasn’t until four o’clock and it’s only quarter to.’

  ‘Show him up,’ said Amélie, gathering the cards together and returning them to the bag. She regretted that she didn’t have time to go to her bedroom and put on some more lipstick.

  ‘Amélie,’ said Roland, coming into the room carrying a bunch of gladioli. ‘These have just flowered in our garden and I immediately thought of you.’

  ‘Très beaux,’ said Amélie, taking the flowers and smiling.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind about me being early but I have something to ask and I just wanted to come along,’ said Roland.

  ‘The new direction, the good hanging man told me,’ said Amélie.

  ‘Pardon?’ said Roland looking startled.

  Amélie laughed. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Tell me about the new request. But first sit down.’

  Roland sat on one of the very elegant, very uncomfortable chairs and told Amélie about Tea for Two and how there was such an i
deal part for her, and that though there might be auditions for the other parts, this one would be hers and he so hoped she’d take it.

  ‘And this Madame Forgeron, does she dress well? Is she chic?’ asked Amélie.

  ‘Très chic,’ said Roland.

  ‘Then,’ said Amélie fiddling with her pearl necklace, ‘I will consider your play-acting. Meanwhile there is work. Let me see your cahier.’

  Roland handed her the exercise book. Amélie hadn’t said no to the play; rather, it sounded as if she might well agree to take part. The idea excited Roland. He looked at her hand with the pencil, her wrists on the table appearing out of the cuffs of her suit jacket, the swell of her breasts under the short open coat, and suddenly Roland was undressing Amélie in his mind. He was taking off the jacket, undoing the blouse, touching the lace of a petticoat and putting his hand to the back fasteners to undo the brassiere. He could see Amélie’s breasts as they swung forward, freed from restraint. He imagined them satisfyingly rounded, the aureole coloured like the underside of mushrooms; then he was fiddling with her skirt, opening the buttoned placket and pulling the garment down to her ankles. He thought of Amélie’s knickers and how they would feel smooth and satiny as he put his hands inside and lowered them down. Amélie before him in nothing but corset, stocking and suspenders — he would bend forward and kiss the tuft of hair visible where the corset veed above her thighs.

  ‘Save me, Lord,’ said Roland to himself, but even as he thought it he knew he didn’t want to be saved, not just then, and not from this.

  Jack Baldwin was no gardener but he felt a compulsion to pull up dandelions wherever he saw them, and at that moment he was scrabbling in the small lawn at the back of the bank removing a very recalcitrant plant. His desire to uproot the weeds was at variance with his respect for them — he rather admired the flaring yellow flowerheads and thick white root. It was afternoon and by rights Jack should have been at his desk in the bank manager’s office but sometimes the high ceiling and chill interior of the room, along with the piteous financial state of many of the bank’s clients, depressed him so much that he sought brief comfort in the garden. It was a grey winter day and the leaves of the dandelion were wet and cold in his hand.

  Jack was thinking of Amélie. He supposed she was upstairs in the house. Maybe today was the day she gave French lessons to the vicar — he couldn’t remember. When Jack considered Amélie he felt guilty. He knew she was unhappy and was sure he bored her, but felt too tired and ill to do much about it — and what could he do anyway?

  He thought about the first time he’d seen her, after he’d been gassed in France. He had little recollection of getting to her house, but he did remember coming to consciousness in a bed with ornate wicker ends.

  There had been light, incredible brightness of colours flowing about, and there was a young woman in a pale dress like a white candle. She came and went along with other people and sometimes she did his hair, making a parting with the heel of the comb as his mother had when he was a child. At first Jack wasn’t sure if Amélie was real or a vision, but he liked her touching his hair. He lay very still in case movement would frighten her and she would disappear.

  When he was better Jack would go into the woods in the early morning, walking with the aid of a stick. It was spring. The air had a freshly rinsed feel and the trees were alive with the sound of birds. One morning Jack found a dell covered in flowering primroses. He looked at the hazy drift of brightness and thought of Amélie, and as he did so he became aware that she was the woman he would marry. He was sure Amélie had been sent to him to bring joy out of the abomination of war, a rainbow in the place of desolation. Looking at the primroses, Jack resolved to take her back to New Zealand as his wife.

  He knelt awkwardly and began picking the tiny flowers, hundreds and hundreds of them until he had far too many to hold. He took off his great coat, laid them on it in a heap and carried them back to the house in a rough bundle. Amélie was sitting at the long table drinking café au lait when he came into the dining room.

  ‘Bonjour,’ he said, kissing her hand and tumbling the flowers out at her feet.

  After leaving Le Manoir, Jack had been sent to convalesce in England: he got back to France within weeks of the Armistice. Two days after the war officially ended he returned to the Durands’ house. He remembered the naked black trees and the hard cold fields and the antique ruby engagement ring he carried in the breast pocket of his uniform. Three months later, as a married couple, Jack and Amélie sailed for New Zealand on a troopship.

  Jack thought of Amélie in Auckland exclaiming over the iron roofs, the barefoot children, and the homes flimsy as sheds or summerhouses. He remembered her dismay as she searched the rough colonial streets for outdoor cafés, shops selling long sticks of bread and fragile pastries. When she crossed the uneven gutters, her little scuttling feet made Jack’s heart ache.

  In those early months and years Amélie was always cold, and though Jack would wrap his arms around her and rub her gloved hands, she still shivered as if craving no ordinary warmth. Jack took her on a tour of the South Island, as a second honeymoon. Amélie looked out of the car at the mountains, lakes and rivers and drew her scarf close to her face. ‘Trop de neige et trop d’eau,’ she said. The snow and water made her nervous.

  Jack dropped the dandelion on the rubbish heap and continued walking back up the garden to the bank. His fingers fiddled with the pounamu fob on the end of his watch chain, an ornament that Amélie had bought him in a shop in Hokitika on that first New Zealand holiday. Jack had read of a legend that said pounamu was a fish in the water but turned to stone on land. Sometimes he thought that was what had happened to his wife. Amélie belonged in France, not here in New Zealand. He had taken her from her home as a child heedlessly raids a rock pool and had robbed her of something he could neither fathom nor replace.

  When Jack opened the door that led to his office he could hear the sound of Amélie laughing upstairs.

  Chapter 16

  It was the third time in four days Stella had vomited at breakfast. Peg looked out the kitchen window at her daughter coming back up the frosty path from the dunny, her face the colour of flour, and knew immediately what was wrong. The girl was pregnant. Peg was furious. Hadn’t she and Doug done their best to bring Stella up decently, yet no sooner did she have a boyfriend than she got herself into trouble. Vic Cowan had seemed a nice bloke, responsible — mature, too — and now this. Fools, bloody young fools, the pair of them, Peg thought. Well, they’d made their bed and they would certainly lie in it. Vic would marry Stella, she and Doug would see to it, or the girl would just have to suffer the alternative. Wasn’t pleasant, of course, but if she, Peg, a respectable married woman, could find the courage to take the knitting needle to herself then so could a little tart like Stella. There was no way Peg would see the Morgans disgraced by having an unwed mother in the family.

  ‘This is an nice how do you do,’ said Peg, wiping her hands on her sacking apron. It was evening, the meal finished and mother and daughter were washing up in the scullery.

  ‘What?’ said Stella.

  ‘You know, girl,’ said Peg, with a stony look. ‘You’re not that stupid.’

  Stella paused as she wiped the cloth around the rim of a plate.

  ‘You’re expecting,’ said Peg. ‘That’s what.’

  Stella, still holding the plate and cloth, sat down heavily on the broken chair by the back door. The shadowy fear that had confronted her night and day for the past few weeks had suddenly leapt into a spoken reality.

  ‘Why?’ said Stella. ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘Pretty plain from the way you’ve been acting, and now this throwing up at breakfast,’ said Peg. ‘There’s a baby on the way, you can bet your boots on it. And you’d better get that Vic Cowan to marry you darn quick before the whole town knows.’

  ‘It’s not Vic’s,’ said Stella. ‘We never did anything like that.’

  ‘Not Vic’s?’ said
Peg. ‘So you’ve been playing around with some other joker? Well, whoever it is, you better get married smartly. I’m not having you shame the whole family. Tell this other bloke he’s about to be a father and he’d better face up to his responsibilities.’

  ‘He wouldn’t marry me,’ said Stella. ‘And I wouldn’t want it.’

  ‘Should have thought of that before.’ Peg squeezed the dishcloth.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ said Stella. ‘He made me. I didn’t want to.’

  ‘Who made you?’ said Peg, turning to face her daughter.

  ‘Mr Maguire,’ said Stella. ‘He forced himself on me. It’s his.’

  ‘Maguire, the bastard,’ said Peg, her eyes flashing.

  Stella started to cry.

  ‘Stop that,’ ordered Peg. ‘It’s not the end of the world. If what you say is true, you’d better get down to your boss first thing tomorrow and tell him. He won’t want a scandal. He’ll fix you up somehow. Have it adopted or get rid of it — he’ll know what to do. Give you some money, even.’

  ‘I want to keep it,’ said Stella, dragging the tip of the tea towel along the floor. ‘It’s my baby.’

  ‘Keep it?’ said Peg. ‘Not here you won’t. If you want to keep the child you’d better get Vic to marry you and give out it’s his, though what you’d live on beats me.’

  ‘I couldn’t do that,’ said Stella. ‘It wouldn’t be fair to Vic.’

  ‘Look here, girl,’ said Peg angrily. ‘It’s not a question of what you want or don’t want or could or couldn’t do. Those things are luxuries that people like us don’t have. I’m telling you, either get rid of this baby or get married, simple as that, or you’ll be out of this house on your ear.’

  Stella sat on her bed hugging herself. Peg was right — there was a baby on the way. Even at that moment Stella could feel a strange trickling sensation in her breasts like sand moving through the timer her mother used when she boiled eggs. Stella thought about Vic and how she longed to see him. She wanted to push her head into the folds of his jacket and feel the scratchy hair of the old tweed beneath her face. But Vic would hate her if she told him what had happened, and he would certainly never marry her now.