The Paua Tower Read Online Free

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 thenursery 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