The Paua Tower

by Coral Atkinson

  The camp was in a paddock surrounded by gorse hedges, which opened onto a track leading to the main road. Fifty or sixty men moved around three lorries parked on the site. Some of the men stood around open fires cooking with billies on trivets.

  Sandy Armstrong, a muscular man in his forties with a battered hat and reddish moustache, was sitting on the grass, his back against the wheel of a lorry, eating rice pudding off a tin plate when Gilchrist and Vic arrived.

  ‘Come and join us, comrades,’ he said convivially, waving his spoon. ‘Cowan and Gilchrist, the bad boys of Punawai, eh? Not just unemployed but kicked out of a slave camp as well — pretty good achievement, by my reckoning. Here, have some tucker. One of the locals brought us in a sack of rice and a kerosene tin of sugar this morning, so it’s rice pud for lunch. No currants, mind, but not bad all the same. Hey, Ted, get these two gents some grub.’

  A barefoot boy of about thirteen, who had been sitting on the bonnet of the lorry, slid to the ground.

  ‘My son Ted,’ said Armstrong by way of introduction. The boy vanished behind the truck and came back with two plates loaded with rice pudding and a couple of spoons, which he handed to Vic and Gilchrist.

  ‘How’s it been going?’ said Vic, hunkering down on the grass beside Armstrong. ‘Sounds like a bad business for you lot last week in Kakati.’

  ‘Bloody awful,’ said Armstrong. ‘We had to leave my mate Dave Pim in the hospital up there. The good news is that it seems he’ll be okay, but we still don’t know about the local Kakati bloke, Peter O’Rourke — he took a terrible hammering from one of the Specials. Head injury, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Barbarians,’ said Vic. ‘Supposed to be a democracy and you get your brains bashed in for taking part in a peaceful march down the main street. Heard the bosses were putting pressure on men to join the Specials and swell the numbers, as if they didn’t have already enough farmers and property owners happy to join up and thump the unemployed. Mrs Mulcock knows a bloke working for the county council who was told his job would be on the line if he didn’t volunteer.’

  ‘Bloody fascists,’ said Gilchrist, his mouth full of pudding.

  ‘At least we’re giving the Wellington bastards the shits,’ said Armstrong. ‘We’ve had spotting planes and police chasing all over the country after us. The cops lost us for three or four days — how’s that for a joke?’

  ‘Pretty good,’ grinned Vic, spooning up the rice. He and Gilchrist had pretended to Mrs Mulcock, where they were staying, that they had friends who supplied them with food, so they weren’t a burden on her meagre larder. In fact neither men had eaten anything that day and little the day before, so the food tasted particularly delicious. ‘None of us want a repetition of what happened in Kakati in Matauranga tomorrow night,’ Vic added.

  ‘You can say that again,’ said Armstrong. ‘I wouldn’t worry. Our men won’t cause trouble — we don’t believe in provocation, as you know. So long as the Matauranga unemployed don’t start anything, we should be okay.’

  ‘No rotten fruit, catapults or broken windows,’ said Gilchrist. ‘We’ll make that clear.’

  ‘Do that.’ Armstrong swatted at a sandfly that was biting his hand.

  Lal had pains that afternoon. She hugged her side under her corduroy smock and her pale brown eyes glistened with excitement. At last the baby was coming. Stella wanted her to lie down but Lal insisted on walking about the house.

  ‘It feels as if it’s started! It’s only two weeks to go, so I suppose it could be,’ she said.

  ‘Will I get Dr Cunningham?’ asked Stella, who was on her knees in the hall dusting the ornate skirting boards that ran through all the rooms in the vicarage.

  ‘No, better wait, at least till Roland gets back,’ said Lal, pressing her fingers to her big belly as if she were playing the piano. ‘I don’t want the doctor coming and it being a false alarm.’

  Lal lay on the bed partly undressed and looked at the mirror on the wardrobe door. She didn’t want to catch Dr Cunningham’s eye or see the hairs that sprouted in his ears as he bent over examining her. What he was doing hurt badly and it was really embarrassing, especially since he was one of the parishioners. Lal wondered how she would ever be able to offer him an asparagus roll or a rock cake at a church social again. Still, she thought, clenching her teeth together and shutting her eyes, if this was what you had to put up with to get a baby, it’d be worth it.

  ‘Seems fine to me,’ said Dr Cunningham, pulling Lal’s tweed skirt back down to indicate he’d finished. ‘Though I can understand why your husband wanted me to check. Many women get these latent-phase contractions for weeks before the actual labour. Wouldn’t worry about them; expect you’ve some way to go yet.’

  Lal felt she was about to cry. Silly, of course, but she’d been waiting for the baby so long that the thought of holding out even a few more days seemed hugely disappointing. Be sensible, she told herself. Say something, distract yourself, ask the doctor a question.

  ‘Does it hurt a lot when the baby comes?’ she said, pulling up her stockings as she sat on the side of the bed.

  ‘No good thinking about that.’ Dr Cunningham picked up his bag from the ottoman. ‘Used to be a bit rough sometimes, but since we’ve got the new Twilight Sleep you just go to sleep and when you wake up there’s your baby.’

  ‘A false alarm,’ said the doctor to Roland, who was waiting outside the bedroom door in the hall.

  ‘You think it’s some way off still?’ Roland handed the doctor his hat and felt pleased that maybe he’d get to rehearsal that evening after all. ‘Should I stay home tonight just to be on the safe side?’

  ‘Please yourself, but don’t imagine there’s any need just yet,’ said the doctor, running his hand over his curly red hair. ‘Everything seems fine with your wife, which is more than can be said for what’s going on out there in the town. Don’t like the way things are shaping up, what with that crowd coming in from Otway and the Specials been sworn in. We could be in for something nasty.’

  ‘I sincerely hope not,’ said Roland, opening the front door.

  At dusk they marched into Matauranga six abreast. The men in the front had megaphones; behind them came a small band — a drum, two trumpets and a bugler. The Otway marchers formed the party at the front, followed by Vic, Gilchrist and the members of the Matauranga Unemployed Workers’ Association. The various trade unions and sympathetic political parties walked behind. Each group carried a painted banner made from an old sheet, which flapped above the marchers’ heads. Some of the men, old soldiers used to parade-ground drill, brought a sharp precision to the march as the band played ‘Tipperary’ and ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’.

  Vic, shoulders back and head held high, felt exhilarated. The presence of Sandy Armstrong and the Otway men with their easy camaraderie, experience of demonstrating and efficient organisation cheered and encouraged him. The number of people on the street was also heartening. Not just the idle sightseers or men standing outside pubs, beer in hand, but the ordinary people who crowded the pavements ready to join the march. There were husbands in stained trilbies, youths in their fathers’ old jackets, mothers in cloche hats that had long since lost their shape, shabby ill-fed people smiling at him and the others.

  Some gave the thumbs-up sign, or shouted support. ‘Good on you, mates!’ ‘When you get to Wellington give those bastards hell!’ ‘Tell them they’ll have to reckon with me if they take my husband to a slave camp!’ Lorries had brought people in from surrounding areas and the workers of Matauranga, both in and out of employment, had turned out in force.

  ‘Plenty of police but don’t see any of the Specials,’ said Vic to Gilchrist as they marched past the war memorial and saw two police vans parked behind it.

  ‘Probably safely locked up at the moment. I heard the cops can’t stand them. They think they’re undisciplined scum — no idea about anything but cracking skulls,’ Gilchrist replied.

  ‘Let’s hope they stay in their cages,’ said
Vic, and the two men laughed.

  The public meeting started well. The cinema was packed and every space was crowded with people sitting or standing. Enthusiasm for the event was such that the doors of the Adelphi had to be shut to prevent more people forcing their way in. Vic, sitting on the stage behind Sandy Armstrong and the other speakers, just hoped there wasn’t a fire, as he couldn’t imagine how people would escape in the crush.

  The walls of the theatre were covered in pleated gold fabric decorated with gigantic silver stars and cardboard figures of movie goddesses. Vic let his gaze wander around Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson, Vilma Banky and Mary Pickford with their perfect features and luscious clothing, then his gaze dropped to the seats below. He looked at the rows of worn faces, sagging shoulders and work-stained hands. My sort of people, Vic thought. He scanned the seats, hoping Stella was there, but supposed it was most unlikely given her condition. Outside the cinema the crowd was chanting. ‘Tell the bastards we want work!’ ‘Jobs, jobs, we want jobs!’ ‘No more slave camps!’

  Sam Langdon, the mayor of the town and headmaster of the central Matauranga primary school, had agreed to take the chair. A tall man with dark brilliantined hair and faint blue eyes, Langdon was a popular figure in the town, widely respected for having set up free lunch and other schemes to help the children of the unemployed. He seldom raised his voice and he spoke now in the low humming tone that made people strain to hear. After welcoming the audience, Langdon paid tribute to the marchers and the Unemployed Workers’ Association members, who were doing sterling service supporting those out of work and endeavouring to find new ways to solve the terrible problems facing New Zealand. He spoke of his interest in the various programmes that had been set up by the unemployed in Otway, and his desire to see similar things established in Matauranga. He commended the marchers on their willingness to put personal comfort aside in order to bring their grievances to the law-makers in Wellington. Then he introduced Sandy Armstrong.

  As Armstrong pushed his chair back from the table and stood up to speak, the noise outside the Adelphi turned to a roar. Vic saw the back doors of the auditorium heave open and a crowd of men erupt into the cinema. ‘The Specials!’ one of the men shouted wildly. ‘There’s blood on the street!’ Confusion followed and everyone was on their feet. From outside the hall came the sounds of shouting and chaos and inside the crowd pushed backwards and forwards. Men climbed over seats and rushed for the exits. A woman in a brown coat stood on her seat and began to scream hysterically.

  From the stage Sandy Armstrong shouted, ‘Sit down, sit down! Keep calm! No violence!’ but his voice was lost in the uproar.

  Sam Langdon banged his gavel. ‘No need to panic,’ he said, but that, too, was ignored.

  ‘Better get outside and see what’s going on,’ said Vic to Armstrong. ‘There’s a back way out behind the curtain.’

  Armstrong grabbed a chair off the stage. ‘My soap box,’ he said as he followed Vic. ‘If I can get out there, I’ll try to calm things down.’

  Together the men crossed behind the curtain and went down the short flight of stairs that led to the street.

  Grey Gates, where the play rehearsals were being held, had a large wood-panelled entrance hall with a substantial staircase at one side. Mrs Hildred, who fancied the idea of being the chatelaine of a manor house, had scoured Wellington antique shops for baronial-looking furniture, ornately carved chairs, hunting prints, brass fire irons, and standard lamps with parchment shades and barley sugar pedestals. The extemporised play furniture consisted of a Jacobean table and an assortment of chintz fireside chairs. Roland and his on-stage sweetheart Eleanor Mathews — the nineteen-year-old daughter of Matauranga’s newspaper editor — were sitting on a pair of leather-and-wood thrones, pretending to be in a London café.

  ‘Darling,’ said Roland, leaning across the table, looking straight at Eleanor’s eyebrows without seeing them and thinking of Amélie, ‘since I met you the world has turned —’

  ‘Stop, stop right there,’ called Mrs Hildred from her commanding position on the stairs. ‘Passion, Vicar, more passion, that’s what’s required. I want to see you really look at Eleanor. I want to hear the romance, the heartache, the fervour in your voice. Let’s have it again from when Giovanni and Philip come in and Giovanni says, “It is my duty”.’

  Roland tried to concentrate, focusing his gaze on the stark white skin of Eleanor’s neck and the curls frizzed around her face like a heap of crisp bacon rashers. He must think of the play and stop thinking about Amélie, he really must. Amélie was behind him, standing in the doorway of the drawing room waiting for her cue. Roland could smell her perfume, which was an almost constant torment for him. After she’d been in the car he’d smell it for days and it made him desperate. He thought of the biblical quote about the wind blowing where it listeth — terribly profane, blasphemous he supposed, but nowadays any sense of what was sacred and what profane was utterly jumbled in his mind.

  ‘No, Vicar, no,’ said Mrs Hildred, coming down the few stairs into the hall, letting her fringed, embroidered shawl drag on the floor behind her. ‘I just don’t think it’s your night — maybe it’s worry about that dear little wife at home. Let’s take a break. I’ll get Lizzy to bring in some tea.’

  Roland stood holding a teacup and listening to Des Syme, a small cube-shaped man in a dark brown suit, talk about the various estimates he’d got for repairing the St Peter’s organ. Mr Syme played the part of the café owner in Tea for Two.

  ‘McLaughlin’s, they’re the ones to go with,’ said Mr Syme, pulling down the front of his waistcoat. ‘Not the cheapest or the dearest, just the best.’

  ‘Sounds all right to me,’ said Roland, watching Amélie light a cigarette in an ivory holder. She was wearing a dark red dress drawn tightly across the hips. Roland wondered if she had on one of those new American rubber girdles he’d read about, rather than the usual cotton and bone corset. The thought was exciting. ‘The vestry …’ he said vaguely.

  ‘The vestry,’ said Mr Syme, scratching his ear, ‘don’t have the foggiest about organs, as you well know. Take it from me, Vicar, if you and I press for McLaughlin’s the vestry will support us.’

  ‘Good, good,’ said Roland, following Amélie with his eyes. ‘And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d better see if Mrs Baldwin wants another cup of tea.’

  ‘You are distracted tonight, Roland.’ Amélie tapped her cigarette into the waist-high brass cigarette stand.

  ‘I am.’ Roland looked at Amélie’s hand extending from her red cuff and longed to circle her wrists with his fingers.

  ‘Pourquoi?’ said Amélie.

  ‘By you,’ said Roland, not intending to say it and feeling himself blush.

  Amélie raised her eyebrows and smiled. Simultaneously, Mrs Hildred clapped her hands. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she said, as if she were making an announcement to hundreds of people, ‘my husband has just telephoned from town. It seems there are crowds moving about the streets on account of this unemployed march. Nothing to be alarmed about, of course, but he suggests it might be wise if we curtailed our rehearsal and you went home.’

  Chapter 20

  The dining room at the bank house was unofficially a male preserve. It was the room where Jack Baldwin read the paper, did the crossword, had his mahogany bureau with the pull-down flap, and kept his school rowing cups. Jack’s painting of a Sopwith Camel hung over the fireplace, above the inlaid wooden clock presented to him from his bank colleagues on the occasion of his marriage, alongside the pair of Belleek jugs he’d inherited from his mother. It was also the room where Tad did his homework (when he wasn’t reading comics), fiddled about with his crystal set, and kept a stash of uneaten crusts on a ledge hidden under the table.

  Amélie had already left the house for the rehearsal and Jack was sitting at the dining-room fire reading the newspaper. Tad, who was supposed to be doing his long-division sums, was inking in the Os on the cover of his exercise book, feeling aggrieved t
hat his father had forbidden him to go out to watch the unemployed march through the town.

  ‘But why, Dad?’ said Tad for the second or third time.

  ‘I’ve told you,’ said Jack wearily. ‘It could be nasty. I don’t want you out there on the street getting your head knocked in.’

  ‘But Mum’s gone out. Why didn’t you stop her?’ said Tad, seeing ink on his thumb and wiping it on his school pants.

  ‘Your Mum’s a grown-up,’ said Jack, folding the paper. ‘It’s up to her to decide what she does.’

  ‘Don’t you care if she gets knocked on the head?’ asked Tad.

  ‘Really, son, you’re just being provocative. Of course I care, but your mother’s with Mr Crawford. They’ve gone in a car and they’re heading out to the Hildreds’, not into the town.’

  ‘Mum’s always going out with Mr Crawford.’ Tad put his face close to the exercise book so he could fill in a very small O with greater accuracy. ‘Has she got a crush on him or something?’

  ‘That’s quite enough,’ said Jack. ‘Time you were in bed. Books away and up you go.’

  Grateful to be freed from homework, or rather the pretence of it, Tad crammed his books into his satchel. ‘Can I get some cocoa?’ he said from the doorway.

  ‘Provided you’re quick,’ said Jack, taking the fountain pen out of his breast pocket ready for the crossword. He looked at the black and white squares of the puzzle and thought of what Tad had said about Amélie and the vicar. It was absurd, unthinkable really, yet they certainly saw a lot of each other these days. But then again, that’s what happened if you were both in a play. Jack thought of how he’d suspected something a few months back between his wife and Jim Maguire and obviously been wrong about that. Wasn’t good to be suspicious and jealous, he thought. It could eat you up, make you bitter.

  But the idea of Amélie and Crawford lingered in his mind, putting him off the clues, so Jack put the newspaper aside. He felt tired — not the ordinary, run-of-the-mill tiredness he felt every day, but a worse, dragging feeling in his limbs. It was his damaged lungs that were doing it. If he could have just a few proper breaths of good clear air he’d no doubt feel better but that was impossible. Just have to live with it, the doctors told him. Nothing to be done, the air sacs in his lungs damaged beyond recovery.