Paula

Paula is Rodney Tucker’s lover and employee, a single woman who seeks a larger share in the prosperity expected to follow Banfield’s transformation into a pilgrimage destination. Her story moves from calculated accommodation within a secret affair to an explicit demand for business ownership, then to a violent rupture with Tucker. At the shrine’s final catastrophe, she is caught in the crowd with her mother; after the older woman dies, Paula’s earlier grievances against Tucker converge with the disaster, and the two plunge together into the chasm.

Position in Banfield

Paula’s introduction places her inside the commercial life beginning to gather around the alleged miracles. She is Tucker’s employee, and she understands both his plans and the way Banfield’s new prospects may redistribute opportunity. While he washes before joining her, she thinks about how to manage his mood: she has worried him in recent weeks and decides that this encounter should reassure him. Her conduct is not presented as simple submission. She treats the relationship as a situation requiring judgment, timing, and negotiation, even while Tucker’s position as employer gives him greater practical power.

The village’s changing fortunes supply the material stakes of their relationship. Tucker is buoyed by his plans and by Southworth’s efforts to move local councillors toward development. Paula understands that a successful shrine could bring substantial tourism and money, and expects Tucker to put himself near the front of the commercial opportunity. Her hopes are therefore tied to a public transformation whose benefits are being pursued by local business interests, not only to private intimacy. The same boom that animates Banfield also gives Paula a concrete basis for asking what place she will occupy in its future.

The affair and the demand for ownership

Paula’s relationship with Tucker is an affair conducted alongside his marriage to Marcia Tucker. Paula is aware of the imbalance and resents being treated as a disposable sexual partner. At times she has threatened that Marcia might learn of the affair; Tucker sees this possibility as a source of anxiety and suspects that Paula’s changing moods may involve more than ordinary frustration. Their intimacy is thus entangled with bargaining and resentment rather than offering a stable private refuge. Paula tries to keep Tucker interested while avoiding a confrontation that could jeopardize what she wants from him.

When Paula asks whether Tucker has seen Southworth, the conversation turns toward the prospect of a much larger supermarket. Tucker explains that local decision-makers are beginning to listen to Southworth and that the development might exceed the scale of his existing business. Paula responds by proposing that she run the new enterprise herself, allowing Tucker to concentrate on organizing the expansion. He does not commit; he says the plans are at an early stage and that circumstances could change. Paula reads the opportunity more decisively than he does: she expects tourism to expand and wants to be included in the wealth it may generate.

The later argument makes clear that she is not seeking only a personal gift or a vague promise of reward. In Tucker’s car, she presses him about running the existing supermarket and insists that he has promised her a meaningful opportunity. When he says he has not found a suitable business to give her, the narration reveals that he has already made tentative offers on two adjacent shops but is withholding that information until the sales become certain. His concealment sharpens the gap between what Paula believes she has been promised and what Tucker is privately preparing to do.

Paula names the supermarket as what she wants. Tucker reacts with disbelief, then rejects her claim to be his business partner. He reduces her abilities to sexual availability and limited competence with figures and stock, while denying that she can run a business. The exchange exposes the gendered terms on which he has kept her close: he values her service and usefulness but does not accept her as an equal commercial actor. Paula attacks him in response, and the conflict becomes physical. Tucker then begins strangling her, releases her, and apologizes as she struggles away. She tells him not to tell anyone and disappears into the night. The episode ends their immediate confrontation without resolving the affair or the commercial question; its clearest consequence is that Paula has experienced the danger beneath Tucker’s earlier placating manner.

Paula and Tucker at the shrine disaster

Paula reappears during the final disaster at the shrine, now accompanied by her mother. As the congregation breaks into panic, Paula pulls the older woman upright after they fall. In the confusion, she sees the altar’s light and the distorted tree, with figures silhouetted before it. The scene makes the terror more than a response to the shaking ground: Paula understands that the presence before the altar has exposed and condemned the private cruelties and desires of those who encounter it. She tries to lead her mother toward the central aisle, negotiating the surging crowd and the unsteady earth.

The two are knocked down when someone collapses against them. Paula searches for her mother and finds that the older woman is unresponsive. When Paula calls out, the earth becomes still and the crowd’s cries subside. She recognizes that her mother is dead, but at first feels numbness rather than grief, with an accompanying sense of release. That response is immediately displaced by hatred when she sees Tucker collapsed nearby. The sequence links a family loss to the unfinished personal conflict between them, without suggesting that Paula has time to process either before the next danger arrives.

As the earth splits open, Paula sees figures climbing from the depths and witnesses Tucker trying to escape with his wife, who is caught at the edge of the opening. Tucker pulls her hands away rather than risk being dragged down with her; she falls into the chasm. Paula then rushes at him, driven by hatred for his betrayal, use of her, and lies. She collides with him, and he cannot keep his balance. Locked together, they fall into the opening earth. The ending turns the earlier struggle over whether Tucker would grant Paula a place in his business into a final, literal confrontation: she does not escape the catastrophe separately from the man she holds responsible for exploiting and deceiving her.

Narrative role and significance

Paula’s arc connects the anticipated economic boom to intimate power and, finally, to the collapse of the world that boom was meant to enrich. She recognizes the commercial promise of the shrine and wants more than a marginal reward from Tucker’s plans. His refusal to treat her as a partner reveals that prosperity does not automatically loosen the relationships of dependence already governing the village; in their case, commercial ambition reproduces the unequal terms of the affair. Paula’s insistence on the supermarket gives her a specific objective, while Tucker’s secret offers and contempt make the conflict concrete.

Her final scenes also place private grievance inside a collective reckoning. She first tries to protect her mother amid the panic, then sees that mother die and turns toward Tucker with renewed fury. The narrative thereby gives her a role that is both personal and structural: she is one of the people drawn into Banfield’s pilgrimage economy, but she is also a witness to how greed and exploitation persist beneath its celebratory mood. When the ground opens, the commercial future promised by the shrine gives way to destruction, and Paula’s unresolved struggle with Tucker ends in their shared fall.