The Paua Tower (15 page)

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 activities 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.

‘Merci beaucoup,’ said Baldwin, taking the flowers and smiling. ‘When I am well, when all this is over I will come back, that is if Madame and Monsieur Durand permit me to visit. Meantime I will write to you.’

R
oland didn’t normally wear slippers to meals. He had been brought up in a family where such things weren’t done and, like most people, he continued as an adult to live largely by the mores of his youth. He wore the slippers this morning to please Lal. They were sensible, conventional male slippers of bright red tartan. Lal said she’d chosen this pair specially because of the fluffy lining — real wool, not just that cheap flannelette or something. It was Roland’s birthday and Lal had given him the slippers as a present.

Roland let the brown sugar disappear into the milk on his porridge and looked at the cards he’d been given and sent. He’d opened Lal’s first, along with the slippers. It had a picture of chrysanthemums and the inscription ‘Happy Birthday to my husband’. In blue fountain pen Lal had added ‘and soon-to-be daddy’. It made Roland smile wearily, for since Lal’s pregnancy had
been confirmed, two months before, it seemed everything must be made to include the happy news. She talked and chatted about ‘our child’ and how they would soon be ‘a proper family’. She was constantly occupied with pastel knitting wools as tiny garments grew out of her hands. When Lal wasn’t knitting she was
repapering
the nursery, mending a cot, or cutting out scraps and pictures to decorate the baby’s room. Her efforts weren’t only for herself. Inspired by her own situation, she started the Busy Fingers Club, which made layettes to give to all expectant mothers in the parish. She also encouraged the Young Wives to invite the Plunket nurse and matron from the Matauranga Hospital Maternity Wing to address their meetings and speak about their work.

Lal’s new happiness made Roland’s own life and work easier and more pleasant. Gone were the monthly bouts of disappointed grief and the depressing hours spent trying to cheer Lal up as she cried despairingly into the side of the bed. Her edgy look and pinched features disappeared and as the pregnancy advanced Lal returned to the smiling, rounded girl Roland had married. He knew he should be grateful for all this and thank God for it. The difficulty was that as the date of the baby’s birth crept closer he felt increasingly
uncertain
whether he wanted a child, or whether he was ready for such a momentous event in his life. Looking back, it seemed to Roland than no sooner was he married than Lal had become obsessed with motherhood and grief at its being denied; except for his
honeymoon
and the few meagre months that followed, there had been too little opportunity to enjoy the married state.

Roland thought wistfully of those early days of coupledom, when Lal had made a sponge cake for him every afternoon and how often, after eating, he would laughingly chase his wife into the bedroom and they would make love as the sun slipped across the walls and the winter afternoon was transformed into darkness. Now, when Roland came home from parish visiting or some other clerical duty, Lal would be lying with her feet elevated on the
sideboard
or in the kitchen dosing herself with carrot juice or spinach
water. When he reached across in bed and touched her, she was keen to hold his hand over the foetus so he could feel it moving, but when he began to kiss her mouth and run his hand over her naked breasts, she would hold her breath and whisper, ‘Careful, careful,’ the way she did when Roland unpacked the antique glass icicles they used on the Christmas tree.

‘I thought,’ said Lal, ‘that you need a really good pair of slippers for getting up at night when baby comes.’

Roland nodded. He hated it the way Lal said ‘baby’ rather than ‘the baby’, though he couldn’t decide why it annoyed him. He was thinking he should say something encouraging about the slippers, when there was the sound of a car stopping and a ring at the front door. Lal went to answer it. She came back quickly.

‘It’s for you,’ she said, smiling.

Lal followed Roland back down the long hall to where a neatly dressed man, holding a trilby hat, was standing in the open doorway.

‘Reverend Crawford?’ the man said.

‘Yes,’ said Roland.

‘Would you mind stepping out to the gate, sir?’ said the man.

‘Of course,’ said Roland, ‘but why?’

‘You’ll see,’ said the man, leading the way down the path.

Outside on the street was a car, a small baby Austin, black and gleaming like a dark biscuit box.

‘I’m Ray Gascoigne of Gascoigne Motors,’ the man said, taking a bunch of car keys out of his pocket and handing them to Roland. ‘The car’s yours. A birthday present, I understand, from your mother, Mrs Olive Crawford, in Christchurch.’

‘Mine?’ said Roland, taking the keys and looking from Gascoigne to the car and back with astonishment. ‘Are you sure, quite sure?’

‘Course,’ said Gascoigne. ‘And I must say, sir, your mother made an excellent choice. A real sturdy little model, this one. Great for visiting some of your country parishioners.’

‘Oh, Roland, isn’t it wonderful?’ cried Lal, running her hand along the roof of the car.

‘It’s extraordinary,’ said Roland, feeling a wave of excitement at the thought of sitting behind a wheel again, purring off along the road as he’d done as a young man driving his father’s car in Christchurch.

‘We can go for picnics — we’ll be able to take baby!’ said Lal as Gascoigne opened the door of the passenger seat to let her in.

‘Come on, sir, how about taking your wife for a spin? I
understand
you do have a licence. I can walk back to the office and you can pop in at your leisure to sign the paperwork.’

‘I’ll just shut the house up,’ said Lal.

Roland sat in the car, looking at the dashboard. He’d dreamed of having a car of his own ever since he was a boy, and suddenly here it was. He looked down at the pedals and saw his feet in the slippers and thought of Lal, and he thought of his mother giving him the car. He knew he should be more grateful for his life and for the people who loved him. He supposed one day the baby would love him too, and he it, but that seemed too far off and impossible to imagine. ‘You may find the handbrake a bit tight at first,’ Gascoigne said, bending to speak through the open side window. ‘If you’ve any problems just pop in the showroom and I’ll fix you up.’

‘Thanks,’ said Roland, rolling his hands lovingly around the steering wheel. ‘I certainly will.’

Stella loved the arrival of the new stationery. The boxes with their smells of ink and paper and unsullied contents seemed like personal presents. She laid out the pencils, rubbers, staples, paper, cashbooks and typewriting ribbon that the office used, before ticking them off in the order book and putting them away in the cupboard.

‘Morning, ladies,’ said Maguire, appearing at the door wearing a dark double-breasted suit. ‘How’s tricks?’

There was a chorus of ‘Good morning, Mr Maguire.’

‘No whines or grizzles?’

Everyone said no.

Maguire made a habit of popping in. He would take a look at the girls’ work, tell a few jokes, and make a few comments about what they were wearing.

‘Nice jumper that, Betty,’ he’d say. ‘Leaves nothing to the imagination!’

Recently he’d taken to asking Stella to do small jobs for him — make some tea for a visitor, go down to the cobbler with a pair of shoes, fetch the invoice books out of the car.

‘And you, Twinkle,’ said Maguire, coming over to her, ‘what are you up to?’

‘Checking the stationery,’ said Stella.

‘All hunky dory,’ said Maguire, taking the order book from her and looking at it. ‘I’ve been hearing some nice things about you. Davies tells me you’re a real Trojan for work, and good with figures too. How’d you fancy a bit of an outing over to the cinema at Haikai? There’s been a hell of a balls-up with the pay there. I need to fix it and you could give me a hand. What do you say?’

‘Course, though I don’t really know anything about pay. Betty always does it,’ said Stella.

‘Betty’s needed here,’ said Maguire. ‘Leave the stationery. Get your coat. I’m on my way now. I’ll wait for you out the front.’

Stella felt pleased as she went to the pegs in the corridor and took down her jacket and beret. Mr Davies was usually so grumpy that she was surprised he’d noticed her, but it was nice all the same, and now Mr Maguire had asked her to help — not Betty or Gertie, though they were much older and knew heaps more about the business and everything to do with paying the men.

The air rushed by their faces. The hood of the car was down and the breeze blew in eyes and tugged at clothes, making Stella laugh. Maguire laughed too. He honked the horn and waved when they
passed a group of Maori children on the side of the road and sang ‘Daisy, Daisy’ as they drove along. He put his arm around Stella’s shoulders as he sang and pinched her. It was a bit of fun, as if he were doing a number on stage and Stella was up there with him. It wasn’t as if he meant it or anything, so Stella didn’t mind.

‘Fancy a drink?’ said Maguire as they came into the main street of a small settlement.

‘Drink?’ said Stella. ‘You mean in a hotel?’ No one had offered her that before.

‘Course,’ said Maguire. ‘Quite fancy a beer myself.’

‘I don’t drink,’ said Stella primly.

‘There’s always a first time,’ said Maguire, pulling up in front of the Empire.

‘I think I’ll just stay in the car,’ said Stella.

‘Suit yourself,’ said Maguire, getting out. Stella felt he was annoyed, but fronting up to a public bar with a man, even if he was her boss, would be dreadful. Only bad women did that.

Maguire wasn’t away for long. He came back with a tawny drink in a long glass and handed it to Stella.

‘Here,’ he said, ‘a shandy — what nice girls drink.’

Then he went back into the hotel.

Stella looked at the glass with its myriad bubbles rising and bursting. Should she drink it? Should she throw it away? But that would be rude. She wished she had asked Maguire for a lemonade, or a ginger ale — something safe that she had before — but did hotel bars sell softdrinks? She didn’t know. A shandy — she’d never heard of that. When he was in work Stella’s father would go to the pub on Saturday nights and sometimes his mates would come around and there’d be a keg in the kitchen. Stella’s mother never drank, not even at Christmas. But surely there was no harm in taking a sip, just a little sip. Stella put the glass to her mouth. Cold, bubbling, teasing, the drink was delicious.

‘Want another?’ said Maguire when he came out and saw the empty glass.

‘No thanks,’ said Stella.

‘Course you do,’ and before she could stop him he’d gone and got her a second.

‘Bottoms up,’ he said.

Maguire stood by the car and watched Stella drink. There was a feeling in her head as if it were bobbing off somewhere different from her body. It was a good feeling. Friendly. She wondered if she was drunk.

When they got to a lake Maguire turned off the road down a track. The car bumped over the stones and stopped beside a broom thicket.

‘Where’re we going?’ asked Stella.

‘Lunch,’ said Maguire. ‘Brought a picnic. Can’t have you wasting away.’

They sat on the rough grass under the trees near the water. Maguire opened the hamper he’d taken from the boot of the car and pulled out a checked tablecloth, which he spread on the ground. Then he brought out the food. There was bacon-and-egg pie, cold chicken, meat paste sandwiches, tomatoes, madeira cake and milky tea in a flask. Stella had never seen such a spread. It was like a party. Maguire opened a bottle of beer on a rock and sat looking at Stella. It made her fidget. She moved further away.

‘You’re a nice-looking sheila,’ he said as he chewed on a chicken bone.

Sheila tugged at the strap of her shoe and thought of work. She imagined Betty smoking the stubs of cigarettes she collected, and Dorothy combing her eyebrows with the special tiny comb she kept in her handbag. She wished she were back with the others in the office, not alone here with Maguire.

‘Suppose all the jokers are after you,’ said Maguire. ‘Hands up your knickers, panting for a slice of the action.’

Stella blushed.

‘Got a boyfriend?’ Maguire knocked his hat off with his hand and sleeked his hair back.

Stella nodded.

‘Anyone I know? Go on, tell me his name.’

‘Vic, Vic Cowan,’ mumbled Stella.

‘Cowan. I know him. An electrician, one of those commie bastards. Won’t do you any good mixed up with reds like him.’

Stella said nothing. There was silence except for the sound of birds and on the main road the clip-clop of hooves as a cart went by.

Maguire took off his jacket and waistcoat and threw them over a bush. Stella saw that his braces had pictures of scantily dressed women on them. She looked away.

‘Like the braces?’ said Maguire, twanging them with his thumbs.

‘They’re …’ Stella hesitated.

‘Only pair in New Zealand,’ said Maguire. ‘Came from the States. Saw them in a magazine and sent to San Francisco for them.’

‘Don’t you think we should be going now?’ said Stella, starting to gather up the food.

‘Why?’ said Maguire. ‘Not good rushing about on a full stomach.’

He reached over and drew his finger down Stella’s face and nose.

‘You could be a real smasher, you know,’ he said. ‘A bit of lippy, a nice Marcel wave and some decent clothes, not that godawful dress.’

‘It’s about all I have,’ said Stella, looking down at her
hand-knitted
jacket and green plaid dress with the darned burn hole near the hem.

‘Easily fixed,’ said Maguire. ‘Next time I go to Wellington you could come with me. How’d you like that, kiddo? I’d buy you a real smart costume, a fox fur maybe, kit you out, show you a good time.’

Stella could think of nothing to say.

‘Let’s see what you’re really like. Take the dress off.’

‘What?’ said Stella. ‘Here?’

Maguire nodded.

‘I couldn’t.’ Stella felt embarrassment rise through her in a hot, red tide.

‘Go on, be a sport.’ Maguire’s lips twitched upwards under his moustache.

‘It’d be rude, and anyone might come along,’ said Stella in a small voice.

‘They won’t,’ said Maguire, tossing the stripped bone he’d been holding into the bushes. ‘But since you’re shy I’ll help you.’