a Breed of Women (21 page)

When they had gone, he looked at her bitterly and said, ‘You sent them away. You sent my parents away.’

She turned her face from him. He was making her cry, just as her father had always done. There was no answer for his anger.

She started to recover, and the doctor kept a closer check on her, giving her special diets, and iron injections because she was anaemic. Gradually she began to cope again. Her stomach was huge by late May, and she was only halfway there. The days seemed long but she had taken to reading again, careful now not to neglect Denny’s meals, and she was painfully teaching herself to knit. The serials on the radio were quite good, too.

One evening Denny came in and said that some of the chaps at work were in a football team, and he’d like something to do besides just go to work, come home, go to work. He thought he’d join up with them.

That was the beginning of the end — if one didn’t count the end as having started at the beginning. Several times she asked him if she could go and watch the game and once he said yes, the other times he said it was too cold for her to be out watching. The time she did go, it was to a field a bit like the ones at Weyville where you could park the cars near enough to the sidelines to see what was going on without getting out. Denny suggested she’d be more comfortable sitting in the pick-up.

He was still splendidly fit and played a good game. Seeing him like a panther amongst the scrum she felt the old pride and something of the old longing. For months she had been unable to bear him to touch her sexually. She was sure that this was wrong, and with great embarrassment had asked her doctor about it

‘Sex?’ he’d boomed back at her. ‘Perfectly natural. Not too close to when the baby’s due, that’s all.’

So she’d tried, and it was hopeless. Denny, rejected and frustrated, left her alone. She said she’d ask her doctor what was the matter,
which was a lie because she had already asked him. A few days later she told Denny that the doctor said it might be best to leave it alone for a while because of the way the baby was lying.

At the end of the game when he came back from the showers, some of the men he’d been playing with followed him to their cars. ‘See you at the club room, Denny,’ they called.

‘Are we going out?’ she asked with momentary elation.

‘I thought I’d have a few at the club rooms,’ he said.

‘Not me?’

‘I don’t know that they have birds at their rooms the same as the Rovers.’

Thinking back, she guessed he meant wives. The wives never got much of a look in, even in Weyville. They were a forgotten race, people of whom you occasionally thought if one of the married boys started playing up a bit.

Saturday nights it started, then it was Friday nights as well. Harriet wrote to her mother and told her when the baby was due and gave her her phone number. There was no reply to the letter, as to all the others she’d sent.

In early September, she guessed he’d been with a woman a couple of times. He moved onto the sofa for good, and she enjoyed the luxury of the whole bed to herself. Once there were telltale lipstick marks on the shirt when she washed it, but she didn’t mention them.

The phone rang one evening when Denny was in the bath.

‘I’ll get it,’ he called.

‘Don’t be silly, you’re in the bath,’ she called back and picked up the phone. There was a hesitation at the other end when she answered.

‘Is Mr Rei there, please?’ said a girl’s voice after a moment.

‘He’s in the bath. Can I give him a message?’

There was another pause, then the girl replied, ‘Could you tell him Gloria from the office rang? I forgot to give him a message today from … from Mr Peters.’ Mr Peters was the boss, Harriet knew.

‘Well, I could pass it on to him if you like,’ said Harriet.

‘Oh, not to worry … it’s probably not important. I expect it can wait till the morning.’

She gave Denny Gloria’s message. Later in the evening he said he had some gear in the pick-up that he was supposed to drop off for one of the boys from the office, and he wouldn’t be long. At one o’clock he still hadn’t returned, nor was he home when she woke in
the morning. She phoned the office at mid-morning and spoke to him.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘The boys were having a few drinks and I got talking, bit boozed. Fell asleep on the sofa.’

That night she asked as she put his dinner in front of him, ‘What did Gloria think about the hotel in Symonds Street?’

She thought he might strike her, but his hand dropped away to his side as quickly as he’d raised it.

Instead he sat down beside her, fingering the knitting she’d been labouring over. ‘What’s the matter with us girlie?’ he said dully.

‘It’ll be all right,’ she said, and put her arms round him. He dropped his head on her swollen stomach, and she cradled him, soothing him. ‘It’ll pass, everything’ll be all right.’

He caught her hand and held it. ‘I do bad things for you. I was going to do good things for you. What say we go up home and live near Mum and Dad and the kids, somewhere up the Hokianga, after the baby’s come?’

‘You know you wouldn’t really want that,’ she said. ‘You want to get on, you always have.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘You and me getting on’s more important than that. Why don’t we just get up and go now?’

The prospect was enticing. Perhaps it could work. But it was now into October and the baby was due in less than a fortnight. She’d been so sick and she was booked into National Women’s Hospital. For the baby’s sake perhaps they had better stay where they were. It was only two more weeks, and they’d be able to travel pretty soon after that. It was something to look forward to, something to keep them going.

The baby didn’t come on time, though. It was, said Denny at first, ‘keeping Maori time’. When the second week came with no sign of the child, things started to be strained between them again. The phone rang several times, and the caller simply hung up if Harriet answered. When Denny answered he sounded curt and businesslike, as if the calls were from the office. Gloria, Harriet supposed.

The doctor decided to put Harriet into hospital.

On an impulse, Harriet scrawled a note to her mother, telling her she was being admitted. She had resolved not to communicate with her parents again, but at the last moment she weakened. She posted the letter at the posting-box on their street, near the flat, before Denny drove her to the hospital.

Outside the hospital, she said to him, ‘Denny, I don’t want to go in. I don’t want to have a baby.’

To be so totally helpless, so out of control, was terrifying. She was committed to this situation. Nothing could take the baby away except the act of birth itself.

Inside the hospital, women cried and screamed and whimpered and begged for their shots. Harriet did not know what shots they meant It didn’t seem to do much good because the women in white mostly ignored their entreaties. They shaved Harriet’s pubic hairs with cold soapy water and they talked over her about other women as if they were cattle. It was hard to believe that they shared the same genital patterns as Harriet and the other women in labour. Harriet felt sure they must belong to a third sex. Perhaps, with the doctors, they were eunuchs. Whatever it was, they were united against sweating, heaving, grunting women in childbirth. Doctors came around, two or three of them together, laughing and chatting about their golf handicaps. One of them had a hangover. He put his finger up Harriet’s rectum and the pain was so appalling that she started to cry. The doctor raised his eyebrows at the nurse and said, ‘Another sniveller. Give her a shot if she’s awkward.’ He looked at her card and tossed her a contemptuous look. Harriet heard him say, ‘Another little black bastard,’ as he walked away. They thought she was not listening. She didn’t get her shot. A woman died of a haemorrhage in the night. The nurses were embarrassed, but the patients were given to understand it had been the woman’s own fault.

Two days later, Mary Wallace tried to telephone her daughter while her husband was cleaning out the shed after morning milking. The phone kept ringing and ringing when tolls put her through and eventually they said it was no good trying any more. It was too early for Denny to be at work, so she decided he must be at the hospital.

Gerald Wallace came in from the shed as his wife was plonking her old pudding-basin hat on her head and putting a pile of things in a large canvas carry-all that they’d brought from England. Mary faced him defiantly. He just said, ‘I’ll carry your bag to the bus,’ and waited with her to flag it down as it passed the farm. Mary sat with her daughter through the long and savage labour, for as long as the staff at the hospital would allow her to. She rubbed Harriet’s back at the point where the strain imposed by being half-suspended with her legs in stirrups was most intolerable. She and Harriet were allowed to see the little cream-caramel coloured boy briefly before a nurse took him
away. The doctor suddenly seemed nicer and more concerned.

Denny never saw his son. When he checked in the hospital the next morning, three days after leaving Harriet there, the baby had given up its struggle for oxygen. Mary had tried to find her son-in-law all through the night before, but all her enquiries had met with blank walls of silence. A protective wall, she thought grimly, when she tried to reach him through his office.

Sitting on the paper-white bedspread beside her that day, he took her chalky face in his hands and said, ‘What I’ve done to you, girlie.’

‘To each other, Denny, to each other,’ she said, returning his look.

‘Will you ever come back to me?’ he said.

‘I don’t know. I’ll need some time to think.’

Ohaka was sliding into summer when she returned. The river banks had never been more beautiful. The Wallaces watched their daughter when she went down to the water, covertly, fearing for her safety. There seemed to be little to fear, however. She sat quietly, spoke little but sensibly enough. She did not say very much about the previous year and what it had meant to her.

The Colliers called in from time to time, Jim coming too. He was a heavy man now, fast fading into middle age, but he was good and gentle to her, understanding what she’d been through without it having to be talked about. He still hadn’t married, and it almost seemed as if he was going off the idea.

Shortly before Christmas, Harriet wrote to Cousin Alice, and on receiving a reply a few days later, she told her parents that she would be returning to Weyville at the New Year.

The Wallaces told her that they had obtained evidence for a quick divorce. It wasn’t an ideal Christmas present, but it was the best they could do. They understood if she didn’t want to use it, but it was there if she did.

Harriet sat on the river bank for a long time the day before she went away. The eels seemed to have increased in recent years, sliding across the rocks in ever greater numbers, and the wild duck population had decreased.

It was her last summer there. The following year Gerald Wallace injured his back beyond repair as far as farmwork was concerned, and the farm was sold.

For years afterwards, she would wake in the night from deepest sleep, wondering whether she had dreamt her first marriage. Often it would take several moments of consciousness to work out whether
or not it had really happened. When her children woke crying in the nights too, she would wonder which child it was, as she groped her way through the house. When she put the night light on, she would start in terror, because she did not recognise the child, but saw instead some other one.

She was returning to the world of Harriet Wallace. For many years, no one knew that she had ever been married. There were rumours, of course, but they were so nebulous and she seemed so self-sufficient that nobody dared to ask. Many years later, a reporter interviewing her after the publication of a book, threw in a question. He’d gleaned some chance information and checked it out. She answered truthfully, for it didn’t seem to matter then, that she had been married in her teens, and yes, her name had been Mrs Rei, and yes, her husband had been a Maori.

‘Why did it break up?’ the reporter asked.

‘There were a lot of pressures on us in those days,’ she’d answered.

The story was published and she became a kind of martyr. She was expected to become part of various movements, to make declarations about having been a 1950s victim of discrimination against people who had Maori partners in marriage and relate it to the present. Editors who had previously rejected some manuscripts of hers with Maori emphasis as being ‘not truly ethnic’ now discovered implications they had overlooked before. She withdrew all these manuscripts.

Nobody ever asked her what the pressures were that she had mentioned. She supposed it was partly true that they existed because she was a Pakeha and Denny was a Maori. But the main thing was that they were two people who’d got married for the wrong reasons, and who hadn’t got on. Denny and Harriet. Harriet and Denny. Always too late, just too late.

It seemed the saddest thing that nobody, nobody at all, ever saw them as anything but a Maori and a Pakeha, rather than a couple. Until people like her and Denny could be real instead of peepshows, no statement of hers seemed to bear any relevance to what they were talking about.

Perhaps it went deeper and was even worse than that if people were going to insist on seeing things in terms of race. She was the culprit because she had rejected a Maori. Nothing could change that; only she knew that she had been rejected by a man. Her rejection as a woman was less significant than his rejection as a Maori. She had
understood and accepted rejection as a woman since birth, but her oppression counted as nothing. Because he was a Maori. And that, in the end, was worse for Denny than it was for her. If only her critics could see that they were making allowances for him. If he had been a typical white male of the 1950s, they might have condescended to view her oppression with compassion. Because he was a Maori, they made allowances. She had to be the one who was wrong and ugly.

No wonder the hatreds spread. Denny would come back to haunt her in the 1970s on new battlefields. He would serve to remind her that in the scale of oppression, it would be women whose claims were the largest, and who were the last to be considered.