a Breed of Women (11 page)

‘Would it matter so much?’

The other girl stared out onto the ugly manmade stretch of water. Her face had a sparseness that Harriet had not noticed before, a kind of paring back of flesh to the essentials. Harriet had an odd sensation that Julie was, if not beautiful, at least fine, and that sitting here with her was good and that she wouldn’t forget it.

‘Yes, it would matter,’ Julie said. ‘I’m thinking about the kid. Someone’ll take it in that can afford to look after it, and who’ll really want to look after it properly, as much … as much as I could, if I could.’ She started to cry hard, sobbing and shaking and snuffling, the fine spare look dissolving puffily into her sodden handkerchief. ‘Jesus, Harriet, I won’t even get to see what it looks like, they don’t even let you see it, but I will. Honest, I’ll fool them. No matter how much it hurts I’m not going to give in, I’m going to have a look at it before they take it away. They’re not going to fill me up with dope so as I can’t see anything. I want to see my baby. Wouldn’t you want to see your baby?’

‘Yes, oh yes,’ said Harriet fervently. ‘Couldn’t you keep it? D’you have to give it away?’

Julie got to her feet, still trying to mop up her face. There was air of finality about her.

‘No,’ she replied shortly. ‘Don’t you understand what I’ve been saying? I got to do what’s best for it. That doesn’t count keeping it. I love it too much. Always wanted a baby, all the time Mum didn’t want me, I used to think, well, some day I’ll have my own baby and then I won’t have to worry about anyone loving me because the baby’ll love me. Of course I knew I’d have to have a husband. Maybe I should have thought more about that part. Anyway, I’ve got my little baby inside of me, and I’m not going to be rotten to it.’

They walked along in silence. There didn’t seem much for Harriet to say. At Cousin Alice’s gate, they stopped.

‘Well …’ Harriet began awkwardly.

‘I’m finishing up at the shop tomorrow,’ said Julie. ‘Told old Stubbs to make up my pay for me. Should have seen how relieved he was, almost made me laugh. I’ll be around for a couple weeks till there’s a vacancy in the home up in Auckland. You want to go round with me?’

Harriet looked at her questioningly.

‘Well, go on, don’t look like that. You worried about your reputation?’

‘Of course not. I don’t have one.’

‘You might if you stick round with me. Well … seems to me you don’t have that many friends.’

‘I don’t have any.’

‘Didn’t think so. The kids liked you. You could stick around with them after I’ve gone. Think about it anyway. There’s a party Saturday night.’

Inside the house, Cousin Alice said, ‘Who was that girl you were with?’

Harriet told her. Cousin Alice pursed her lips and said, ‘I thought as much. When does she finish at the shop?’

‘Tomorrow,’ said Harriet.

‘Just as well. I wouldn’t like you to been seen walking home with her too often.’

‘She introduced me to some of her friends on the way home. They seemed nice.’

‘Did you go into that milkbar?’ said Cousin Alice sharply.

‘No,’ said Harriet, quickly. ‘Of course not.’

‘That’s all right then.’

‘But she did ask me to go out with her on Saturday night.’

‘She didn’t! The cheek! Where to?’

‘Oh … the pictures.’

‘Really,’ said Cousin Alice. ‘You told her what to do with herself I hope.’

‘I thought I might quite like to go.’

‘You what?’

‘Well I don’t know anybody, do I?’ Harriet said defensively.

Alice looked shrewd. ‘So she’s not getting married, eh?’

‘How should I know?’

‘Because she wouldn’t have you in tow if she was.’

‘She hasn’t got me in tow. I like her, that’s all.’

Alice shook her head. ‘You won’t be going anywhere with that one. Not from this house.’

Harriet could see that she was deadly serious. It didn’t even seem worth an argument. She wondered what to tell Julie the next day, and settled for the truth. Julie didn’t seem at all surprised; in fact, she behaved very much as if this was entirely as she had expected, and Harriet was relieved that she had told her. She felt she would have seen through any lies.

That evening, when Harriet would dearly have liked to walk home with Julie, Cousin Alice was waiting in her little Morris Minor outside the shop. She had ‘just been passing by’ and thought Harriet might like a lift home. Julie hung back.

‘Could you drop Julie off, too?’ asked Harriet as boldly as she could, thinking that things had gone far enough, and after all it had been Julie’s last day at the shop.

Cousin Alice was obviously nonplussed, but her immaculate manners came to the fore. ‘Certainly,’ she said smoothly, opening the back door.

Julie hesitated a moment, then tossing her head defiantly she got into the car. ‘Drop me off at the corner milk bar, please, Mrs Harrison,’ she said, as she settled herself.

And that was really that, for the time being anyway. The day being pay day, Harriet bought herself a tight pointy brassiere, turned her cardigan back to front, pushing it up to the elbows, put a deposit on a tight skirt on store discount, and started training her hair into a pony-tail.

If Cousin Alice noticed, she said nothing, but she ‘just passed by’ the store more frequently. The risk of meeting her was great enough to make Harriet avoid the milk bar. On the days Cousin Alice didn’t pick her up, walking past was something of an ordeal. Julie vanished within a week or two, as she had intimated to Harriet she would. On the day before she was due to leave, Harriet had been walking home. Julie had ducked out of the bar to say goodbye, but when the two girls stood in the middle of the street, there didn’t seem much to say. They looked at each other awkwardly and Harriet said, ‘Good luck’. It seemed limp and inadequate, and from where she stood the whole situation looked decidedly unlucky.

From time to time, in the weeks that followed one of the milkbar crowd would call out, ‘Hullo, Twanky Doll’ as she passed. At first the greeting seemed friendly, but before long she detected a mocking note.

Easter came and went, and with it a small triumph for Alice. An
ex-boarding
school pupils’ reunion dance was held in the town, so that when the top brass returned to pay their respects to their parents, they were able to mix in seemly company. Cousin Alice’s own children had once belonged to such a group, and her contacts were still good enough for her to organise an invitation for Harriet.

Harriet suspected that Alice had said that poor little Harriet was so far away from her parents that she couldn’t get home for Easter. The
thought of going home at Easter had loomed in Harriet’s mind but her finances were still precarious. They had been so severely hobbled, as her feet had been, by the purchase of a pair of
stilletto-heeled
shoes, that a trip home seemed more and more difficult. By the time her mother had written and offered her the fare home, the buses were fully booked and there was no retreat from Weyville.

Faraway Ohaka had never seemed more beautiful or tantalising, and the thought of the effort it must have cost her mother to find the fare quite desolated her. Yet, a small warning bell sounded inside her head, telling her that if she were to go back to Ohaka now she might never return to Weyville — and Weyville, limited though it was, still held vague promise of things to come.

So as Easter approached, Harriet and Alice found themselves companionably sewing and hemming some green chiffon stuff to be set over paper-stiff taffeta, Alice delighting in Harriet’s response to her instructions.

The dance was surprisingly successful from the point of view of Harriet’s social conquests. The accent which had dogged her for so long proved an advantage. She danced well, despite the fact that Noddy’s lesson in the milk bar had been her only contact with rock and roll. Music gave her feet wings, and dancing seemed as natural as breathing. The mothers of the young elite were enchanted, and told Cousin Alice, who was watching in the wings adorned in pale grey crêpe, that her relative was delightful, and what a pleasure it must be for them both to be living together. Alice smiled benignly and nodded her head, eyeing Harriet with brand-new approval.

Unfortunately Harriet found the company itself intolerably boring, as it was composed of aspiring and perspiring undergraduates, student teachers, and a trainee Presbyterian minister whose assumptions about God she made the mistake of challenging. He was a dark man with a long upper lip and a great deal of Brylcreem on his hair, and he managed to hold himself away from Harriet’s crotch in a way that clearly stated that he was doing social duty and no more.

After they had danced, an uneasy little knot gathered at one end of the room, and Harriet presumed from the sidelong glances in her direction that her conduct was being discussed.

However, the moment soon passed, for supper was approaching. Cousin Alice took her aside and said in a gentle reproving tone, ‘Harriet, dear, you’re doing beautifully, but don’t be intelligent will you? There’s a good girl.’

‘Of course not,’ said Harriet, understandingly.

The rest of the dance went well.

The following week, Cousin Alice was able to say with satisfaction that the dance had paid off well; one of her friends said that when Harriet had learned typing for six months, there might be a place for her in her husband’s office.

Harriet’s heart sank at this. There was a small matter which she had overlooked discussing with Cousin Alice. She and typing didn’t seem to get on very well, so much so that she had feigned headache twice in the past month and sat outside during the class. Worse, and much more dire in its implications, during the week after the dance she hadn’t gone at all.

On the Thursday night, instead of going on to the College and her typing class, she had suddenly balked in front of the milkbar. Music streamed out of the milkbar. The pale Weyville day was drawing to a close, lit by the neon interior of the shop. The jukebox shone with its row of numbers lit up, and cigarettes moved and glowed in circles in people’s hands, or just marked stars in the air. Like the weight of sorrow, loneliness overwhelmed Harriet She could never return to Ohaka and she was not a part of Weyville that made any kind of sense. She would never belong to the boarding school set, or to this crowd, who, with equal assurance, ran their own secret society. There was no halfway house, and she was alone.

Yet she had briefly been admitted, and perhaps they would have her back. Tentatively, almost furtively, she went in, and without looking left or right, she walked up to the counter to ask for a Coke. She paid for it, took a straw and stood sipping it, eyes downcast. The place had gone quiet, she was being watched.

‘Well, hi, Twanky Doll,’ said a voice at her elbow. It was Noddy. ‘We thought you was never coming back.’

‘I’m just passing by,’ Harriet said nervously.

‘You’re always passing by,’ said Noddy, ‘only difference is, this time you’ve stopped. That’s real friendly. What say you come and say hi to some of the others?’

Nance was the only one who didn’t seem especially pleased to see her. Nance’s hair was now a sight to behold. It had been teased up and up to the highest, biggest bouffant that Harriet could imagine. Her own hair, which still wasn’t long enough for anything but a scraped-back unbecoming knot, seemed shabby by comparison. She
couldn’t take her eyes off Nance’s hair.

‘Something wrong?’ enquired Nance.

Harriet shook her head dumbly.

‘You’d think so.’

‘Your hair looks fabulous, Nance,’ Harriet offered at last.

Nance was obviously pleased, and relented. ‘Want a cig?’

‘Er, I don’t, thanks,’ said Harriet.

It had occurred to her that she probably should take a cigarette if she was to make her mark on the world, but the idea of beginning here was somewhat intimidating.

‘Ah, not to worry,’ said Noddy. ‘You’ll get round to it. You still the rock’n’roll queen?’

‘Me?’ Harriet was flattered. ‘I’ve only ever danced once. Oh, and last week, but that was different.’ She told them about the dance, and the careful young man who had held himself away from her so discreetly. This pleased them enormously, as she had guessed it would, although she was not quite sure why, as she still had private information charts of her own to fill in. They all knew the young man she was talking about, because he’d been at primary school with some of them.

They were so delighted that they suggested she should join them ‘for a bit of fun’.

‘When?’ she asked cautiously, knowing with a sinking feeling even before they answered her that the answer was, ‘Now’. Her knees shook so violently under the chrome table that she felt it must start to wobble and betray her, but she knew that she would go.

The ‘fun’ turned out to be visiting the local camping ground where there were still a few holidaymakers from the Easter break.

The game was to shine torches on the canvas tents and to catch couples doing ‘interesting things’. They caught quite a few people although there was never any time to study ‘interesting things’ because, as the strong torch beam hit the wall of the tent, there would be a flurry of activity. Whatever was happening stopped, a tent flap was thrown open and shouts of abuse were hurled into the night.

After half a dozen tents had had these attentions bestowed on them, Noddy said, ‘Right, that’s it. One more, and then they’ll send out for the cops.’

So they did one more which looked like a good one. Shadows were excitingly graphic and as the people inside jumped to their feet,
curses burst forth from the tent. Noddy and Nance shouted in unison, ‘A one, a two, a sing,’ and they all broke into ‘Silhouette, silhouette on the shade, oh ah, two silhouettes on the shade’, then Noddy started the car and they all jumped in and headed back towards town. They passed a police car at a point where the road narrowed, and by the time the police came into the milk bar ten minutes later, everybody was sitting inside with milkshakes.

Nobody batted an eyelid. Burping onions after his evening meal the middle-aged policeman asked them what they’d been up to.