The Paua Tower (2 page)

While her three elder brothers served their country, and her father, a provincial wine and spirit merchant, sold brandy to the English army, Amélie and her mother had been in this hole, waiting. Waiting, waiting for Christmas, Easter, summer, winter, waiting for the war to end, waiting for something to happen — turning into turnips, more like.

Most days Amélie had walked the four miles to the village with the cook, Jeanne. Occasionally, very occasionally, as the village was out of the way and there were better roads to the front further north, there were soldiers, marching, singing, driving by in lorries. Sometimes they waved, but they didn’t stop — none of them stopped. Sometimes there were ambulances, going in the opposite direction, their muddy canvas sides stippled with blood; once when one slowed down where the road narrowed by the blacksmith, Amélie had heard the sounds of sobs and groans, soft private embarrassing noises that made her hurry on.

When Amélie asked her mother why the war was going on so long, why the French and English hadn’t won against these dull Huns, Madame Durand had just shrugged and said, ‘Men, they are all the same, pig-headed and stupid.’ Oncle Henri, an enthusiast for the occult, who had taught Amélie to read the Tarot, mumbled how ‘above is always as below’, and how age taught you ‘past and present were spokes of the same wheel’. Maybe, Amélie thought, she could be a nurse. At least she might understand the war then, and it would be better than this. Hadn’t her mother said she was pretty, and that white suited her? But her parents would never permit it, and at seventeen she had to do as she was told.

One day a cough had come from the trees, but it wasn’t like any cough Amélie had heard before. This was more of an agonised roar — a crashing, breaking noise, like someone heaving a chest of drawers in a small space. Amélie stubbed the cigarette out with her shoe as she saw the sullen flick of khaki, the glint of a brass button, the belt of a soldier, an officer, an Englishman.

The coughing man was stumbling about waving his arms, crashing against trees, his boots floundering on the leaves as if they heaved in some bucking earthquake, rather than lying flat and orderly underfoot. Amélie stared at the soldier’s face covered in blood and dirt, the eyes tiny red slits behind fat crusted lids. Each time the officer coughed, his army tunic, torn from below one armpit and dark with stains, heaved up and down and, as his mouth opened in frenzy, blood and something foamy spewed from his lips. He seemed a creature possessed, like the baker’s dog that had gone rabid and screamed and thrashed about, jaws dripping, until a man had taken a brick and killed it, under the boot of Monsieur Bastide’s charabanc.

‘Bonjour!’ Amélie said.

The man stopped. Jerking his head about as if to focus on the direction of her voice he said, ‘Qui est-ce?’, his French heavy with the accent of a foreigner. ‘Who is there?’

It was then she realised the officer couldn’t see.

‘Mademoiselle Amélie Durand.’

‘Baldwin, Captain Baldwin of the …’ but as he spoke his voice wavered and he fell with a soft thud.

Afterwards Amélie came to regard the sound of the thud as marking a dividing line in her life. Like the midnight chimes of a clock at New Year.

Amélie pulled the curtains. She had no desire to look at the grubby, threadbare New Zealand town with its failed hucksters’ shops and scarecrow people. How dreary it was, how insufferable that she should be here in this vile, despairing place, so far, so very
far from family and from France. It was as if she had dropped off the world altogether.

Maybe she would rest.

Amélie lay in the semi-darkness and forced herself to think about other things. She considered whether her pearl ring looked its best on her left or right hand. She had it on the left that
afternoon
but was considering changing it. Holding the cigarette in her lips, she took her ring off and put it on the other finger. Her newly decorated hand looked elegant holding the cigarette, the fingers long and slim. Iris leaves, that’s what one of her father’s friends had said years ago when she had been called in to play at an evening party. Twelve, thirteen, a child, but Amélie still remembered the compliment and wondered about the irises.

She thought of Jim Maguire the first time he had come to afternoon tea. When he was leaving he had taken her hand.

‘I hope I may call again, Mrs Baldwin. I think you and I need to know each other better, much better.’ As he said this he had winked and squeezed her fingers. All rather vulgar, yet Amélie remembered the feeling of his flesh on her palm.

She thought of her fortune teller’s cards abandoned at the fête. They were a Rider-Waite-Smith set, ordered specially for her from London by Oncle Henri. He had given her the deck for her
fourteenth
birthday. Amélie had always loved those cards, with their bright sunflower colours and swirling lines. She knew that Arthur Waite, the man who designed them, belonged to a magical order called the Golden Dawn and thought the name suited the deck. Amélie hoped she hadn’t lost these favourite cards for good, that wretched man Nesbit could well have destroyed them. But she doubted the vicar would have let him. Maybe the Reverend Crawford would return them to her; maybe he would call in person. She smiled at the idea, just a little.

R
oland Crawford arrived in Matauranga the previous winter, stepping off the Limited into a night crackling with frost and stars. The railway station was bigger, grander than he had expected. Built to celebrate Matauranga’s position as a railway town, the building, with its mock-Gothic turrets and wooden finials, belonged to another, more prosperous era. Now, with railways projects closed, services cut and
unemployed
former workers walking the streets, the railway station’s size and pretentious flourishes made it seem like an over-large schoolboy in short pants. Alongside the station was the town; on the opposite side, the mountain.

‘Look, Lal,’ said Roland. He stamped up and down on the platform, trying to keep his feet warm as they waited for their
suitcases
to be unloaded from the guards’ van.

Lal followed Roland’s pointing finger. There, glistening in the
moonlight, was the mountain, huge and white. Lal said nothing.

‘It’s so good to be here at last,’ said Roland, smiling at her, or rather smiling at her nose. There had always been something immensely appealing to him about the upturned tilt of his wife’s nose. Roland felt a surge of tenderness as he looked at Lal, brown hair fluffing out from under her felt beret, and her soft pink cheeks.

‘I’m cold,’ she complained.

Roland took her hand in his. ‘Won’t be long now till we’re there,’ he said. ‘Home. Our parish. I can hardly wait.’

It had been several days since the Crawfords left Christchurch, where, amid obedient gardens and corseted souls, Roland had spent an uneventful curacy. Months before, on the day the letter of appointment to the parish of Matauranga had arrived, Roland had looked in the mirror as he shaved and wondered at himself. The person who stared back was thoroughly unremarkable — fawn hair just starting to recede, middling brown eyes, medium height. Yet this very ordinary-looking twenty-nine-year-old man was to be the Lord’s servant for a whole town, bearer of the Kingdom, instrument of Christ’s peace. ‘The time has come,’ Roland told his reflection, ‘to roll the sleeves up and get down to real work, man’s work, God’s work.’ And wasn’t Matauranga widely known for its problems of unemployment and poverty? Roland had gone through the motions of praying for guidance before submitting his application to the bishop: the minute he’d seen the vacancy, he wanted this parish to be his.

Having asked directions from a porter pushing a barrow, the Crawfords came out of the railway station carrying their suitcases. They would walk alone to the vicarage — Roland had deliberately not told the vestry the precise day of their arrival, wanting to escape the formalities of an official welcome. It was late and few people were about. An outburst of shouting came from an alleyway but stopped as a door closed. A man passed on an unlit bicycle and a cat jumped off a fence.

Lal, who had stomach cramps, hoped they didn’t have far to walk. Roland, happier than he could ever remember, looked about in rapture. Roughly boarded-up shops and staggering wooden structures like blinded comrades, arms on one another’s shoulders, lined on both sides of the main street. Mostly there were verandas over the pavement, though on one corner a detached
two-storey
building proclaimed itself a bank; on another a hotel, where lighted windows and a muffled din of shouting suggested after-hours drinking. Further on, a stone soldier on a plinth stared stiffly across the road at a Salvation Army hall, his back discreetly turned on a bunker-like building emitting sounds of running water. The public lavatory, Roland guessed. This, then, was Matauranga: poor, unredeemed, and crying out for Christian consolation. Roland, eager to immediately dispense faith, hope and love, desperately wished for morning, when at last his ministry could begin.

Along the main street, around the corner and down Sebastopol Street, and there beside the church was the vicarage, an ample villa with a veranda on three sides and a clump of cabbage trees in the front garden. Once inside, Lal went to the kitchen, fussing over the coal range, the kindling, looking for the matches. And weren’t they parched for a nice cup of tea?

Roland left her to it, going out again into the moonlight. The mountain hunched close by. Roland looked at the pale snowy height and resolved one day to climb it. He thought of Moses on Mount Sinai, the prophet coming down from the heights carrying the stone tablets, bursting with God.

He crossed over the little bridge, for a small creek ran through the vicarage garden, and went into the church. He turned on the lights and the interior was transformed by brightness. The kauri walls and pews shone with a woody glint, the brass cross and lectern glowed.

Roland knelt on the chancel steps and considered his new responsibility for the spiritual nurture of a couple of hundred
parishioners. He thought of poverty and despair and his role as the harbinger of light and hope. The idea made him momentarily anxious, but he knew he was not alone. Hadn’t God called him to this place, and wasn’t the whole dazzling company of heaven stationed at his elbow? Roland imagined the celestial throng crowding up the aisle behind him, like guests at a fashionable wedding. He thought of the angels and archangels, the cherubim and seraphim, a mêlée of wings brushing wings, and laughed from sheer joy.

Lal, cup of tea in hand, was in one of the vicarage bedrooms. The house came with rudimentary furniture, and the iron cot and the paper scraps of puppies and little girls with watering cans and frilly bonnets pasted to the cupboard door suggested that this room had belonged to a child. A baby.

Lal wanted a baby with greedy passion. After five years want had turned to need, a need feeding on itself, voraciously devouring her sense of self, of being a woman. She lived for the future life that would come through her, while the present grew increasingly veiled and mute. Once she had stood in front of an altar, a pretty bride, orange blossom in her hair and around her hips, and promised to love her husband forever, but love had been mislaid. The previous night, in the hotel in Wellington, Roland had stroked her shoulder, kissed her mouth, burrowed into her waiting body as if into a tightly made bed. Lal thought of him rocking above her, his eyes liquid with pleasure. She was in another place, willing herself open, imagining doors, windows, gates and apertures in hedges so that no obstacle stood in the way of conception.

‘Put your arms around me,’ said Roland. ‘Hold me.’

She did as he asked but there was no heart in it.

Lal thought of a poem she had learnt at school about a girl calling cattle home and getting lost in mist and tide. As Roland clenched and thrust, Lal saw only the opaque light and herself calling, calling. She imagined a baby out there, up there, like the
nursery rhyme of the cradle on the bough, ready to come to her, waiting to fall through the mist.

She had made a bargain with God. She would not just be good, she would do even better. She had agreed to come to Matauranga without a murmur, even though she hadn’t wanted to leave Christchurch for this dismaying place. She hated abandoning the garden she had created, her widowed mother, and the neighbours’ cat. But it was required of her and she would go. She would work for the Lord, she would support Roland, she would organise bazaars, wash choir surplices, teach Sunday School children with dirty faces, ringworm on their limbs and nits in their hair. She would welcome all manner of people to the vicarage with date scones and tea, convene Bible classes, prayer groups, young wives, missionary supporters. She would cheerfully do all that was required of her and more. And in return God would give her a child.

Lal could feel the blood beginning to ooze into her knickers, her thighs and her stockings. There had been the backache in the train, the pain deep in her belly as if she had swallowed a rock and now the bleeding had begun, as it did every month. Lal saw her life divided into months like marks on her enamel measuring jug, each one repeating the one before. The hope, the gathering wild hope that grew more intense every day she was overdue, then the creeping knowledge that all was not well, followed by the red threads, the scarlet nesting for some future child escaping her body in a bloody flux.

She should get up, wash, rummage in a suitcase and tear some new rags, make herself clean and presentable. Lal sat and looked at the iron cot, strong and unequivocal, its black sides pillars dividing dark and light.

Roland heard the heavy scrape of the door opening and the sound of feet. He didn’t look up but he knew Lal had come into the church. There was the footfall of her shoes, the soft noises of her clothing as she sat down, the scuffling up her sleeve for a
handkerchief
. She was crying.

‘Lal, Lal,’ said Roland, going to her. He sat down, putting his arm about her shoulders and drawing her to him. He could guess why she was crying: it had happened so often.

‘Is it?’

His wife nodded.

‘I’m sorry.’

And he was sorry, not because she wasn’t pregnant but because she was crying. He wanted her to stop. He couldn’t go on being happy with her weeping. The exaltation he knew minutes before had fled.

‘Don’t cry, it does no good, makes things worse. We’re here together, a new place, a new life. Who knows what will happen? Everything will work out. Maybe it’s here a baby will come,’ said Roland, squeezing Lal’s arm with his fingers.

The mention of the word baby threw Lal into louder grief. It was always like that, though Roland had momentarily forgotten. He took Lal’s handkerchief from where she kept it in her sleeve, wiped her nose and dried her eyes. ‘I hate you crying — it makes me feel bad, guilty,’ he said.

Lal made a gulping sound and the sobbing eased and stopped.

‘But you want it as much as I do, don’t you?’ said Lal.

‘Of course, very much.’ Roland had the glib responses of a catechism, for this often-repeated conversation travelled well-worn paths.

‘I want it for you too,’ said Lal, blowing her nose.

‘I know,’ said Roland, looking at a brass memorial on the wall extolling some former parishioner whose children would ‘rise up and call her blessed’. He hoped Lal didn’t see it.

Roland, though personally indifferent about becoming a father, had expected a family as inevitable. Marriage brought babies, children, the full quiver — some God-given stamp of approval. Lal’s inability to conceive surprised and confused him. Her subsequent hysterical grief seemed selfish, annoying,
frightening
. The smiling, agreeable girl he had married had been
replaced by a sad woman wearing forced cheerfulness like an
ill-fitting
dress. Gone was the wife who pressed her hand into his, hugged him in the kitchen, or surprised him with a kiss as he polished his shoes. In bed was the worst, for Lal had grown
gluttonous
, relentless in pursuit of conception. Roland felt like a machine, an animal at stud, and it sickened him, put him off; increasingly he turned away when she clutched him. He wondered how other childless couples coped, but his parishioners had never shared such confidences. Roland was a clergyman and clergymen knew how to manage such things. He didn’t.