The Paua Tower (29 page)

Stella put her hand on the twisted metal circle that opened the latch and walked up the path to the back door. The kitchen was steamy and smelt of talcum powder, washing hung from the ceiling drying lines and tins of paint stood on the floor on pieces of newspaper. Lal, wearing a long white apron and with her sleeves pushed up beyond her elbows, was standing at the table bathing the babies in an enamel basin.

‘You’re just in time for the bath,’ said Lal, looking up as Stella came through the door. ‘The little ones both got grizzly so I thought this would cheer things along.’

‘Hope Alison wasn’t a nuisance,’ said Stella, coming to the table. ‘How’s my little cherub?’ she said as she looked tenderly at her daughter.

The infant, her head supported in Lal’s hand, stretched and kicked and gurgled with pleasure.

‘She was fine,’ said Lal. ‘How did you manage with the shopping? Any bargains?’

‘Yes,’ said Stella, putting her hands into the basin and taking Alison. ‘Got some felt for the bunnies’ clothes, a really big bag of offcuts for ninepence.’

Peter flicked the bath with his fist and water splashed into all their faces. Lal and Stella laughed. It seemed to Stella that since Alison was born and she had moved to Auckland, she and Lal were always laughing. Painting the walls, putting up curtains, taking the little ones out in the pram were all occasions of giggling mirth.

There was a knock at the hall door and Lal, leaving Stella to look after the babies, went into the front of the house. She came back carrying a large parcel.

‘It’s for you,’ she said, putting it on the linoleum floor beside the paint cans.

‘Whatever is it?’ said Stella.

‘Let’s get the kids out of the bath and you can open it,’ said Lal.

Stella, with Alison on her knee, cut the string and pulled back the wrapping paper. ‘It’s an old gramophone,’ she said, ‘and some records. Who would send me that?’

‘There’s a letter,’ said Lal, holding Peter in a towel with one hand and picking up a piece of paper out of the wrapping with the other.

Stella looked at the letter. ‘It’s from Vic’s mother,’ she said. ‘Vic wrote telling her we planned to get married and she’s sent the gramophone as an engagement present. She says she would have
sent it sooner but hadn’t got the money. Apparently she’s just managed to get a new job as a housekeeper, so she could afford to send it now.’

‘Isn’t that lovely?’ said Lal, smiling.

‘It’s the very first present Vic and I’ve been given,’ said Stella, running her hand along the shabby side of the case with pleasure. ‘He’ll be so chuffed when I tell him.’

Dust hung over the quarry like an ecru veil as the hot summer day wore on. Unlike the rich greenery that surrounded the road Vic had worked on at Punawai, the quarry was dry and monochrome. It was a place of rock and stone and shingle, a landscape devoid of colour. Vic and a dark, shrivelled-looking man called Hodder, both dressed in prison fatigues, were sitting on a plank breaking stones. It was called ‘napping’. The work wasn’t onerous but the boredom was excruciating — tap, tap, tap the little hammers went, over and over. Hodder, who was in prison for having killed a sailor in a pub brawl, seldom spoke and when he did it was to complain or criticise. At first Vic had tried to talk to him but eventually he’d stopped, preferring to whistle music hall songs or snatches of opera.

‘Can’t you bloody shut up?’ said Hodder sourly, dropping a handful of stones into the tin drum as if for emphasis.

‘Sorry it irks you,’ said Vic, hoping that on the next detail he’d get paired with someone he could at least pass the time of day with.

Vic had been sentenced to two years for the manslaughter of Maguire. He had served nearly five months of his sentence and was hoping to get something off for good behaviour. His interference at the substation had never been traced. Looking around the quarry as he continued to tap, he noticed some of the prisoners were
shovelling
shingle onto a lorry while others were working with the heavy spalling hammers. There was tall and lanky John Nicholson from Punawai, doing six months for allegedly striking a police
officer, a charge he denied, and a sprinkling of others Vic knew from the Unemployed Workers’ Association and other
organisations
, who had also got into trouble during the Matauranga riot. Most, though, were common criminals — safe-breakers, con men, fraudsters, perverts and fighters. Poor bastards, Vic thought, looking at them sweating and panting, each man, even Hodder, with his own little world of hope and fear, and his own pathetic dreams.

In the beginning Vic thought he’d never survive prison; the loneliness of being shut up for hours and hours on end, the dark, evil-smelling menace of the place, the constant fear of violence, the crippled, broken spirit of so many of the men. With Stella and Gilchrist and his other mates in Matauranga, and his mother in Wellington, Vic had letters but no books and few visitors, but things changed. One magic day the warder said, ‘You have a visitor,’ and when Vic got to the visitors’ room there was Stella, radiant as sunshine in the dour hall. He looked at her face, her lips, her eyes, her hair, longer now, and felt so overwhelmed with emotion he could scarcely speak. Every visiting time from then on Stella came. She was the compass point that drew Vic, safe and inexorable, through each dreary day, the promise of happiness in a future yet to come. She also improved Vic’s lot in other ways, persuading Sandy Armstrong and the International Bookshop in Wellington to lend him books: every few weeks the bulky parcels of Upton Sinclair and Jack London and other socialist writers arrived. Vic set himself to learn Pitman’s shorthand and got permission to teach reading to some of the illiterate men among the convicts. The abject horror of his first days in prison began to recede.

The last time Stella visited, Vic had said, ‘I’ve something to tell you.’ He looked through the separating grille into her eyes and their clear ceramic blueness almost made him forget what he intended saying. Seeing Stella so close and yet beyond his touch was an exquisite torture. Vic felt like a bird with a ring around its
throat, condemned to catching fish but never swallowing them. ‘I’ve decided that when I get out of here and we’re married, I want to put my name forward as a Labour candidate for the next election,’ he said.

‘You mean stand for Parliament?’ said Stella.

‘Yes,’ said Vic, ‘if they’ll have me. Sandy Armstrong seems to think I’d have a fighting chance of acceptance.’

Before Stella left that day she’d said, ‘And I’ve something to tell you too, a little thing. On Sunday afternoon when you’re out in the exercise yard, listen really hard.’

‘Why? asked Vic.

‘A surprise,’ said Stella, touching her fingers to her mouth and blowing him a kiss.

Roland positioned the wood on the block and swung the axe. The action brought him back to his boyhood, when he used to chop kindling for his parents in return for pocket money. Roland thought of the large two-storey home in Merivale where he’d grown up, and the paved backyard between the building and the detached washhouse where he’d go to split the wood. At the time he’d felt resentful at being expected to do the work. His family had maids and a gardener — why couldn’t they chop the kindling? But his father had insisted that such activity would do his son good. Roland smiled at the recollection: if only his dad were alive and could see him now.

He touched his face, feeling the stubble of several days’ beard growth under his fingers. His father would certainly not approve of that — ‘A gentlemen is never seen without having shaved,’ Bentley Crawford had often said. No matter, thought Roland, I’m no gentleman — certainly not now, dressed like this. His shoes, originally good-quality English brogues, were scuffed to a dusty nothing colour and there was a hole in the middle of the right sole. His trousers, which were now held up with string, had stretched so much around the knees that they ballooned in front of him
when he walked. His jacket was stained from where a tin had leaked treacle on him while he was sleeping in a whare down near Te Awamutu, and he’d long since given up wearing any kind of collar. Roland had started off with a felt hat but had lost it over a bank in a high wind, so he wore a cap a sharemilker’s daughter had given him. The front had ripped, with the result that you could see a strip of his hair between brim and crown.

‘Fill these two butter boxes with kindling and I’ll give you a meal,’ the farmer’s wife had said, standing at the back door, hair in curlers and her hands on her hips.

Roland thought longingly of the food. He caught a whiff of the roasting mutton coming from the kitchen and his stomach curled with anticipation and hunger. He had swagged a long way that day and the thought of a generous feed and the promised bed in the hay shed seemed everything he desired.

Since going on the road Roland had noticed how much his wants and his pleasures had altered. A good meal, a dry place to sleep, a sunny morning, a lift in a lorry, a friendly word — tangible immediate things were what now brought contentment. Walking the long shingle roads, climbing over fences or pushing through gorse and bracken, Roland felt himself part of the world in a way he had not known before. He met people — mostly men, young and old — tramping the country looking for work, and they talked to him but not in the respectful way he was used to. They swore and belched and groused, they said what they thought of the churches and the do-gooders, the government and the charities. They confided problems: wife’s left me, another kid on the way, couldn’t take it, won’t live on handouts, just walked out. He and they — men together.

When it rained Roland got wet; when it was sunny and warm he smelt the gorse flowers and the cabbage tree blooms, along with the stench of pigsties and the slurry of cattle farms. At night he looked at the stars and thought about God, and decided that beyond believing in the importance of Jesus’ Golden Rule, he
didn’t accept much as true any more. He mused nostalgically about Amélie, how she had come and gone in his life, like weather or a flower. Roland thought of the Frenchwoman with her
fortune-teller
’s cards and how she said that ultimately all religion, all belief, merged into one. Tarot, Christianity, communism — opposite poles sustaining a single truth. Could be, he reflected, chewing on a blade of grass, then spitting it out. Maybe she was right after all.

Each day Roland walked from farm to farm, offering to do odd jobs in return for a meal and a place to sleep, no different from any other swagger. At times his head ached, some days he felt depressed and desperate, willing to give up. He thought of being under the upturned boat in the hailstorm, famished with no knowing where the next meal was coming from; the time he’d torn his leg on a barbed-wire fence and the wound had festered,
throbbing
painfully for days on end. Once he’d slept in a church porch and, discovered by the vicar, he’d been rudely told to leave and get down to the charitable aid depot if he wanted a meal. Roland had considered drawing attention to the church’s noticeboard, which declared ‘All welcome’, but decided against it. Always he’d gone on.

He put another log on the block and split it. He could feel the muscles in his arm as he delivered the blow and felt pleased by his newly developed strength. He remembered the first job he’d been offered, clearing the bank. I could handle that slasher with ease now, he thought.

The first butter box was almost full of kindling and Roland started filling the second. He thought of Lal in Auckland and his son Peter.

‘A year,’ Roland had said. ‘I’ll come back after a year and we’ll see what we do then.’

‘Why do you think things will be different after a year?’ Lal had asked.

‘They will be,’ Roland had said. Now, with only a few months
to go, he knew he had been right. He was not the same person who had set out, though he had no idea who he had become or how he was different.

Roland let the axe fall as he thought of Lal and Peter. He looked forward to seeing both of them again. He now knew he wanted to be a father, wanted to be there to watch his son grow up. Would he and Lal be able to find a way forward together? Perhaps, Roland thought as the blade clove the wood in two, perhaps.

It had rained an hour before, and though the sun was now out, the grass was soft and wet. The young woman in the floral-print dress and felt hat wheeled the pram up the hill, slowing now and again as the wheels bogged into earth. There was no child in the pram, only a gramophone and a handful of records, which joggled and slipped about in their paper covers. Stella, who had left Alison at home with Lal, pushed the records down between the side of the pram and the gramophone before moving on. A little further on she paused, looking across at the grey grimness of the prison building, which stood like a smudged fingermark on the
brightness
of the afternoon. She wondered how close she could go before the authorities might stop her. There was no one about, but who knew what eyes were watching from the building.

She found a flat piece of ground and put the gramophone down. She wound the handle, put the record on the turntable and let the needle fall. For a moment all she could hear was the scratching sound of the rotating needle, then the thick, rich voice of Nellie Melba rose from the grass and billowed about the hill.

The prison yard was a forlorn place with high walls and little sunlight. On Sunday afternoon the men were permitted to
congregate
there; they stood about yarning or boasting, or just looking longingly at the square of sky. Vic, who at that moment was trying to snap a broken piece off his thumbnail — the prison authorities would not provide scissors — paused.

‘Listen,’ he said to Nicholson, who was leaning against the wall beside him, ‘I can hear music.’

Nicholson cocked his head to one side. ‘You’re right,’ he said.

‘Melba singing “J’ai perdu mon Eurydice”,’ said Vic
recognising
the aria as the music, so full of passion, of yearning, of waiting, poured into the afternoon. It sounded like the record he’d known from childhood, though heard in these circumstances made it more touching than ever before.