The Paua Tower

A tarot-reading Frenchwoman and a paua-shell memorial to a dead soldier play an important role in Coral Atkinson’s latest novel. Set in a central North Island town during the 1930s Depression,
THE PAUA TOWER
explores the relationship of a group of people struggling to survive and make sense of a bitter time. It is the story of Vic Cowan, unemployed activist, and Stella Morgan, the sweetheart who must save herself; it tells of Jack Baldwin, the disabled bank manager who sees visions; and Roland Crawford the doubting clergyman. Faith is lost and found, corruption is rife and innocence destroyed, but through it all love blossoms and hope endures.

This is a novel set in New Zealand at a pivotal moment in our history. It is about how we once were, or might have been.

I would like to acknowledge support, assistance and inspiration for
The Paua Tower
from a number of people and sources.

My parents, the late Cyril Atkinson and Pixie Atkinson, with their stories of youth in ‘the thirties’, introduced me to the decade. It was, however, the late, incomparable Nelle Beck’s
autobiographical
tales of courage and compassion in small-town Depression New Zealand that first made me think of writing a novel about this time and place.

I am very grateful to Ian Daniell, who so magnificently acquainted me with the way in which an early electrician like Vic Cowan would have turned off the Matauranga streetlights; Ross Broadbent, who lived through the period and, at ninety-one, checked the manuscript for anachronisms; Max Broadbent and Christine Bush of the Macmillan Brown Library, University of Canterbury, for their help with research; Mary Fitzgerald for
assistance
with French; and Pip Tremewan for her advice on riot injuries.

I would also like to thank Harriet Allan and the other staff of Random House, along with Anna Rogers and Rachel Scott, all of whom contributed to this manuscript; also my friends Linda Hart,
Tanya Tremewan, Paula Wagemaker and my sister Tania Connelly, for their support, encouragement and interest in my writing.

And special thanks to my husband, Wolfgang Kreutzer, for the way he sustains me and the flowers he brings.

In writing
The Paua Tower
I am indebted to a number of books. Outstanding among these is the classic New Zealand novel
Man Alone
by John Mulgan (1939–1971) and the magnificent oral history account
The Sugar Bag Years
by Tony Simpson. I found
Break Down These Bars
, by Jim Edwards as told to David Ballantyne, edited by Graham Adams with an introduction by Michael King (1987) very useful; some of Vic Cowan’s experiences are based on those of Jim Edwards. Readers will also see that I have drawn on Mary Findlay’s moving autobiographical account
Tooth
and Nail: The Story of a Daughter of the Depression
(1974).

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the men and women of New Zealand’s past whose stories of the 1930s Depression I have read and been told — humble, ordinary, largely forgotten people who confronted poverty, exploitation and injustice, determined to build a fairer, more kindly society. They were an inspiration.

R
oland Crawford, incipient migraine jangling in his head and clerical collar chafing the stiff back of his neck, pounded down the path among the rhododendrons. The notice artfully placed in a tree fern on the brink of the shrubbery said, ‘Know your future. Readings threepence’, with the outline of a hand and a frilled cuff pointing towards the woodland path. The writing in green ink was ornate, and obviously foreign, quite unlike the timid Department of Education-approved script common in New Zealand.

The vicar felt a deadness grow in the right side of his forehead. Splinters of light fallen between the leaves came at him in small prickly shards. The air was hot and gusty.

Behind him, beyond the trees on the lawn, came sounds that were somewhere between a belch and a sigh. It was quarter of an hour before the fête started, and members of the Matauranga Brass
Band were trying out their instruments. A lone cornet played a few bars of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, interrupted by a sudden crash, then a voice with a megaphone counted, ‘One, two, three.’

Stella Morgan, seventeen, member of the church choir, hair like an angel, greeted Roland from behind the toffee apple stall.

‘Want one, Mr Crawford?’ she said, smiling across the rows of glistening rosy fruit. ‘You look as if you could do with
something
sweet.’

‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ said Roland. ‘A bit busy to stop just now. Ask me again later. I really love your toffee apples, as you well know.’

Nice girl, Stella, always willing to help, never made trouble, not like some.

Roland thought again of his errand and wished it done. Church fêtes stirred up such silly quarrels and petty jealousies. He thought of Jesus walking on a beach saying, ‘Follow me!’ — a command Roland had tried, more or less successfully, to obey for the past ten years, but which seemed impossible given the minutiae of clerical life. Just in the last week he had adjudicated on whether Mrs Jackson or Mrs Ellis was the rightful judge of the preserves section, eventually backing Mrs Ellis on account of prior experience, though it seemed his decision was unpopular with the Mothers’ Union; and given permission to have both a ‘Guess the number of jelly beans in the jar’ and a ‘Give the weight of the fruit cake’ competition, despite the fact that the stall leaders of both Sweets and Cakes felt there should be only one such event — run under their individual jurisdiction. And now, even worse: there was a Tarot card reader. The vicar’s warden, Ces Nesbit, fiddling with his watch chain, red in the face and spouting words like ‘abomination’, ‘hocus pocus’, ‘sorcery’ and ‘witchcraft’, had ended with the final injunction to ‘Turn that blasted woman out’.

Roland’s headache was growing stronger. He could feel it begin to spread from behind his left eye into his head, like a spill on a tablecloth. He thought longingly of lying on his bed on top
of the eiderdown, the dark holland blinds swaying slightly at the window, the single light suspended from the ceiling, surrounded by its porcelain frill. The path lurched about in some inexplicable deliberate attempt at extending the distance, and ended in a blurry dell of bluebells. An aura like a narrow gas flame smudged the edge of everything he saw.

Amélie Baldwin sat on a marble seat. The chair momentarily took Roland’s attention; it was huge and ornate like a throne, the arms elaborately carved. The woman had a baize card table in front of her and a kitchen chair. At the moment Roland came through the rhododendrons she was dealing out cards.

‘Mrs Baldwin,’ said Roland, slamming a social smile on his face and holding out his hand.

The woman was wearing a cap with long beaded tresses that fell over her short curled hair. Thea Barra as Cleopatra, Roland thought. He had only ever seen headgear like that at the pictures. The woman stood up, smiling. Her dress was a drift of greenish chiffon, her arms naked almost to the shoulder and a gold serpent, head grasping tail, twinkled on one upper arm.

‘Bonjour,’ she said, smiling. ‘The big man himself.’

She didn’t take his outstretched hand but extended her own for him to kiss. Roland grasped it and shook it vigorously,
immediately
feeling oafish.

‘Roland Crawford, the vicar. I’m delighted to meet you, Mrs Baldwin. Such a small town and yet the first time our paths cross.’ Roland felt the words pour out of him on some tide of their own. ‘Generous, very generous for you to help, especially when perhaps you are …’ he hesitated, ‘not of our persuasion.’ Roland has heard rumours that the bank manager’s wife is Catholic. ‘It’s not that we’re ungrateful for you giving up your time — heaven knows it’s kind, very kind — but I’m afraid, awfully sorry about this of course, but I’ll have to ask you to, you know, fold your tent and steal away.’ Roland wondered why on earth he had said that. ‘You need prior permission from the fête organising committee to offer
an attraction. We can’t just have people coming in on the day setting themselves up. Not just you, of course — any new
stallholder
, and then there’s also the whole question of the suitability of what you are offering.’

‘Pouf,’ said the woman, blowing upwards at her Marcel-waved fringe. ‘Organising committee, what fuss. They always fuss, these Kiwi people.’

‘You must understand, Mrs Baldwin, this is a church fête run by St Peter’s and fortune-telling has never been …’

Perfume floated in Roland’s direction. Not the cheap Arabian Nights or Tickety Boo that large girls in taffeta dresses wore at church dances, or the honest-voiced lavender water that his wife, Lal, dabbed on neck and wrists for Sunday services, but something different. Different entirely. The smell was like sunlight and roses and lying on your back on a summer day looking at the sky. It seemed to have a sound, too, a soft rolling sound like small waves folding in onshore, though Roland thought that might be his migraine. He felt dizzy.

The woman sat down. Roland gratefully did the same.

‘You want to raise money for the poor. No?’

‘Of course,’ said Roland. ‘The St Peter’s Coal and Comforts Fund, but we have to be careful. It’s not just the church having problems with being seen to support what you’re doing. I’m not even sure the law allows charging for fortune-telling.’

Roland had no idea of the law relating to such things, but experience had taught him that appeals to a worldly authority, however tenuous, were sometimes better received than those invoking Christian traditions.

‘The law, the law,’ said the woman. ‘You English, how you love the law. No wonder you burnt Jeanne d’Arc. Now it is a crime to raise money for poor children.’

‘I’m not English, I’m a New Zealander, and I never said that,’ said Roland. ‘I said that it wasn’t only the church that was against fortune-telling.’

‘You think I’m a criminal,’ Mrs Baldwin laughed. ‘I tell a few stories to some shop girls and housewives, make them forget their plain faces, drunken husbands and fathers, their shoes stuffed with cardboard. I give them a little hope, tell them Providence is good and how they can do better. I raise some smiles and make some money for your little fund. Is that so very sinful? Isn’t that what you do every Sunday, Monsieur le Vicaire?’

Roland knew he should speak, tell her she was utterly wrong, proclaim his loyalty to Christ, mention the resurrection, the living God, St Paul’s letter to the Galatians, but the words that had come so abundantly seconds before had suddenly halted. He looked at Mrs Baldwin’s face smiling at him and thought how pretty she was. Her eyes hazy as the bluebells, her teeth a fringe of petals, the swirl of her scent a balm counteracting the growing pressure in his skull. Colours ran together like oil-splashed water.

‘You have nothing to say?’ asked Mrs Baldwin. ‘Is it that you agree with me? Here, I will show you. Watch!’ Her long fingers shuffled, cut and dealt the cards. ‘Pick one,’ she said.

Seemingly of its own volition, Roland’s hand reached out.

‘And another,’ she said, pointing to the next row. ‘And another.’

Mrs Baldwin took the cards and turned them over.

They were not ordinary playing cards. There was a woman wrestling with a beast, a figure in a chariot, and there was a devil.

‘I knew it,’ said Roland as he glanced in horror at the hideous leering creature crowned with a pentacle, its goat-like haunches sheltering a horned man and woman chained together.

‘The devil,’ said Roland. ‘As a Christian I can’t countenance that.’

‘Ssh!’ said Mrs Baldwin. ‘How can I read the cards with you making this chattering?’

‘I have renounced the devil and all his works,’ said Roland, feeling himself a pious prig as the words came out.

‘Prettily said,’ said Mrs Baldwin, not looking up, ‘but so
literal. The cards are wiser than that, for haven’t you some dark side, some shabbiness of your making? I doubt even a holy man like Monsieur le Vicaire has got rid of — how do you say? — “the natural instincts”. Buried in the soul are always secret lovers chained to each other, desperate for the escape from guilt and anxious feelings.’

‘Tosh,’ muttered Roland.

‘See, this is also what you picked.’ Mrs Baldwin held out the card of the woman with the beast. ‘Strength, endurance, patience. You have set out well but there are difficulties. Eventually you will overcome, you will come through. And this …’ She turned another. ‘Ah, as I thought. See the chariot: change, a new
direction
. Maybe the work of Christ is different from what you thought, or not for you. Maybe the world calls. There are many roads to the mountaintop.’

There was the sound of heavy hurrying feet and Ces Nesbit was among them.

‘I came looking for you, Vicar,’ Nesbit said, his hands in his waistcoat pockets as if holding himself together.

Roland got up.

‘Mrs Baldwin, my vicar’s warden, Mr Nesbit, or maybe you’ve already met.’

Nesbit nodded at the woman then looked at the up-turned card and began to shout. ‘See!’ he said. ‘Sorcery, necromancy! Practised under our very noses, just as I said!’

‘I’m dealing with this,’ said Roland.

‘Dealing, dealing — there is only one way with wickedness. In the name of Christ drive it out!’

With a dramatic gesture Nesbit swept his arm over the cards, knocking most of them onto the ground.

‘And let me tell you, Mrs Baldwin, I’ll see your husband knows. A respectable citizen like Jack Baldwin letting his wife spread this foreign filth about.’

‘You silly, silly man,’ said Mrs Baldwin, standing up.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Roland, stooping to pick up the cards.

Mrs Baldwin ignored him. She unhitched her reticule from the arm of the stone chair.

‘Stay, please,’ Roland put his hand out as if to catch her arm but clutched only air.

‘Go,’ said Nesbit, ‘you enemy of righteousness, perverter of the straight ways of the Lord.’

Mrs Baldwin tossed her jewelled head and walked away; Roland was aware of her scent as it surged over him, thinned and vanished. Her heeled kid shoes made twittering noises as she hurried off down the path. Roland’s head felt like a pumpkin hit by an axe.

In the bedroom over the bank Amélie Baldwin used her silver button-hook to open the catches on her shoes. Her feet hurt after walking back into town. Then she took off her dress and put on a satin kimono, the fabric satisfyingly thick and luxuriant against her skin. She thought of men’s hands on her naked body and sighed.

Looking down into the main street, she saw her husband Jack walk past the draper’s. Gillmans were offering cheap Japanese sandshoes, which hung like pallid bananas around the shop door. Amélie’s son Christophe, whom the town knew as Tad, for Tadpole, on account of his having a French mother, dodged past a cart and crossed the road at a run to join his father. Jack Baldwin smiled as the boy came to him. Father and son were going to the fête. The boy was in his shirtsleeves, his jacket tied by its arms around his hips — a terrible Kiwi habit that Amélie had never managed to break him of.

At the end of the street, just beyond the Adelphi cinema, Amélie could see the silver bonnet of Jim Maguire’s Buick. Maguire owned the tannery, the abattoir, the freezing works and God only knew what else besides. He was the one — these days the only — solidly rich man in the town. Was he coming to visit?
Amélie hoped so. They would drink tea, talk of the weather, what was on at the pictures, where you could buy foreign chocolates in Wellington, while beneath the polite talk their eyes would explore more intimate matters as Maguire’s glance lingered on Amélie’s body like a lascivious tongue.

He was coming. Amélie felt a tightness in her throat, a flutter like a feather meeting blood. Yes? No. The car passed the bank and continued on. Ah well.

Jack and Tad had stopped outside the post office. They were talking to a rough-looking man, probably a swagger. Jack collected such people, offering an old suit, an odd job and a square meal.

Amélie took a cigarette from a silver case, put it in her ivory holder and lit it.

She had been smoking that long ago afternoon, though then it was secretly, of course, and afterwards it was the chair she remembered more than the cigarette. Louis Quatorze, the silk brocade still visible in bands of colour across the torn seat, the white-and-gold arms chipped and scuffed like decayed bones. They were staying at Le Manoir, and she had found the chair in the stable and carried it into the small wood that bordered the property. No one except Amélie went through those trees — no one came or went anywhere those days.

If only they had, Amélie thought. She’d endured two years of this exile in her great-uncle’s house with only her mother, the servants and eighty-five-year-old Grand Oncle Henri for company.

Every day after déjeuner, while her mother lay upstairs in her bedroom with cucumber slices on her eyelids, Amélie went to the chair and smoked. The trees brushed overhead with small chafing motions; the sky was blue. Far away, over the hum of bees and the scissors snap of crickets, was a dull boom that clung to the air like fat rising to the top of good meat stock.

To the north-east lay the war, which Amélie and her mother
had been sent away from, because their house lay in the path of fire. The war, the war — Amélie hated the very words, not so much for the danger, the maiming and the death, of which she knew little, but the boredom of it. Amélie was hungry for parties and young men and dancing to gramophones. She longed for dresses like waterfalls and running on wet-dawn grass laughing with some handsome stranger.