a Breed of Women (22 page)

She returned to Weyville on New Years Eve. She and Cousin Alice sat talking into the night, for the first, last, and only time, about Denny. Cousin Alice talked to her about her marriage, too. She said that Ted had been a good man, but living by his rule book had been hard sometimes. She was set in her ways now, there was not much she could do to change what she was, or what she had learned to be for him. Yet there were times, she said, when things puzzled her, she was uncertain of her ground. It seemed to keep shifting. What had happened to Harriet had filled her with grief. If the old rules held good, she shouldn’t have felt as she did. She should have gone on believing that Harriet had got what she deserved, still felt the
self-righteous
anger that had filled her on the night that she had caught Denny and Harriet together. But she didn’t feel these things, and she was confused. Some of the blame must rest with her. Out in the world beyond Weyville, she thought there might be change in the air for women, at least for those who were strong. It was too late for it to mean much to her, but she hoped good things were about to happen, and she hoped that Harriet had strength to be part of them.

When midnight struck, it was 1960. The 1950s were over. Harriet was about to pick up the threads of her life again. As they were on their way to bed, Cousin Alice remembered to tell Harriet that Leonie Tregear had left town nearly a year before.

T
HERE
WAS
A
message for Harriet at the studio one day, saying that a Mrs Leonie Coglan had called and left her number.

Harriet was late for makeup, and she was not particularly interested in people who left messages without giving details. She resolved to phone at the end of the day, but by that time her interview schedule had been messed up by an incompetent cameraman, then by a difficult subject who was nervous and had to be fed large amounts of coffee before being sufficiently relaxed to give a coherent performance. She was called away to check the editing of some work she’d done the day before, and by the time it was all over, she had forgotten.

The following day there was another message from Mrs Coglan. Harriet sighed. She expected that it was a member of the public who wanted to praise her too fulsomely, or abuse her to the point of obscenity. Still, there was always the chance that it could be a lead on a story.

‘Did she say if it was business?’ she asked the girl in the office.

‘She said she knew you personally,’ was the reply.

‘Oh nonsense,’ said Harriet irritably. ‘In that case, she’s a nutter. The only Leonie I’ve ever known …’ She stopped. Impossible? Of course it was.

She sat at her desk thinking. Leonie Tregear? After all these years? Nearly twenty since she had last seen her. And it was unlikely that she would get in touch with her. Not the Leonie she knew. Only of course she didn’t know her now. She wondered what she’d be like. If it was her …

When the office girl had gone out for lunch, she dialled the number.

The voice that answered was tentative, fragile.

‘Mrs Coglan?’

‘Speaking.’

‘Harriet Wallace. You called me.’

‘Harriet. I’m afraid you must think it an awful cheek. I saw you on television. I suppose you get all sorts of remnants from your past cropping up.’

Leonie apologising? It seemed preposterous. ‘It really is you? Leonie Tregear?’

‘Yes. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?’

‘Over twenty years. I was trying to work it out before I rang … supposing it was you. Where have you been all this time?’

‘Oh — all over. I mean around the world, dozens of places, we’ve only just come back to New Zealand to live. It’s rather strange after sixteen years abroad.’

‘You’ve — good heavens, then you did go away?’

‘Oh yes,’ said the woman at the other end, rather too brightly. ‘And you, I suppose you must have travelled a great deal?’

‘Afraid not, Leonie. I’ve never even made it across the Tasman; you were always the adventurer at heart.’

Again there was a careful brittle note. ‘My husband’s work’s taken us to a great many places. He’s in oil, you see.’

Harriet thought she did begin to see. The upshot was that she visited Leonie for coffee one morning a week or two later on the way to the studio.

Like her voice, Leonie was fragile, and much more beautiful than when she had been a girl, in a cultivated international sort of way. Her hair was superbly cut and styled, her makeup flawless on a skin that had long ago lost its freckles, and her clothes, so obviously casual morning coffee gear, were so expensive that Harriet was moved to think that the young Taylor children (hers and Max’s) could be fed for a month on what they alone might have cost.

Leonie’s home exuded wealth, good taste. Was it simply to show it off? Harriet wondered later. It seemed unlikely, for surely there must be many women among the oil clique who would find it attractive. But then, possibly they all had homes like this, so it wouldn’t make any particular impression. Then she thought that it could be retaliation for that early betrayal.

But if there was any reflection on the past, it was not mentioned. Leonie did say that she’d heard before she and Hamish left New
Zealand that Harriet had returned to the library in Weyville. Presumably she knew why, if she’d taken the trouble to find out that much.

Harriet hazarded a guess at some sort of loneliness, but that too was hard to pin down, and Leonie was determinedly elusive. She talked about her children, about Hamish’s job, the places they’d visited. Harriet, for her part, took up her story from the time she met Max, and told her about the children.

‘There must be so much more to your life, though,’ sighed Leonie, a trifle theatrically. ‘You seem to have made so much of it.’

‘Perhaps life made me,’ said Harriet in what she hoped was a cryptic manner, but that too came out stagey, and wrong.

It had been the end of the coffee break, anyway. They’d said all there was to be said, and left it at that. When Harriet left, she determined to avoid seeing Leonie again, although there had been a vague murmur about dinner.

After that, Leonie rang her twice, with tentative invitations that Harriet managed to dodge. Instead they had some desultory conversation about what Harriet was doing, discovered with some surprise that they both still enjoyed books, and Leonie had asked Harriet what people in New Zealand were reading these days. But that was as far as it went.

Harriet eventually accepted an invitation to lunch in a moment of weakness. She did not really want to see Leonie again; their last meeting had been a disaster, stilted and uneasy. They had avoided political confrontation and talk about money, and worst of all, they had pretended to have no past in common, although their shared past was the reason for their renewed contact. If in an odd unguarded moment they did recognise and recall the time they had spent together, their memory had been carefully veneered. Despite all this, suddenly Harriet was talking, in a great torrent of confession, talking as she had not done in years. She was talking as she had done long ago in a street in Weyville. She told Leonie about Michael, about the phone calls, about his youth, and his beauty, and her love for him, and how it was slipping away. There was nothing she could do to hold on to him.

Harriet had met Michael at a book launching party. She went to a great many of these functions, since she had left Weyville and moved
to Wellington. At first she had been a minor talent, then she had moved into television, which made her a highly public figure. Whether her talent for writing poetry was minor or not, she was sought after by a great many people.

Afterwards, she had no idea what book had been launched. However, she remembered when the party had taken place — late in October. The chill, light air that signified a Wellington spring evening still lingered over the concrete canyons of The Terrace.

It was Harriet’s almost invariable habit to arrive at parties unescorted. Her husband Max Taylor was a draughtsman with the Ministry of Works who did not share her interests. They had three children and, as they both said, they had a happy family life. That was their common meeting ground — they had no need to make public appearances. Harriet still called herself Harriet Wallace, as she had done since the end of her first marriage, and particularly since she had begun to write, so that Max was not embarrassed by her activities and he was hardly ever asked if he was Harriet Wallace’s husband. That they went their separate ways in public life seemed to need no explanation to anyone else or to each other. Or so they said.

Because rumours circulated about her ‘reputation’, Harriet made a point of entertaining her male friends at the most improbable times of day or night whenever she was away from home. A reputation like that, as she explained to Max, was worth money. And he, loyal and patient with her flamboyant excesses, had agreed that this was so. Sending out for breakfast champagne in her room and summoning some man of her acquaintance to share it with her at eight o’clock had made her reputation much easier to handle. The men always came running. And well they might too, she thought with a glimmer of satisfaction, catching a look at herself in the mirror above the bar. Her dark hair was beautifully cut into a long
free-swinging
bob to her shoulders, her wide eyes were as tawny and clear as they had ever been. To be sure, there were signs of wear and tear on the skin beneath her eyes. And yes, she was overweight, but she wouldn’t even be without that — it was a sign of maturity. She had reached the point where her plain and rather conventional clothing had a significance of its own.

She specialised in current affairs programmes with a bias towards the arts, but she was known as a writer, a minor one, of course, with a big name and thus she was expected to take a particular interest in
book topics. Which, to be fair, she did. And damn well too, she thought grimly, surveying the all-too-familiar scene with distaste.

She scanned the room for the last time to make sure that she had not missed anybody who might be a valuable contact. She was just deciding against an aspiring politician when she noticed a very tall man standing in a far corner. He stood a good head above any other man in the room, and across the room he challenged her. Or did she challenge him?

As it turned out, they had already met three months before. He remembered, but she had forgotten. It seemed unbelievable, but it was so. He had been determined, this time, to make her see him. Really see him, not just look through him with her cool stare, analysing his profile for a television shot.

He was the editor of a large, Auckland-based international magazine that was trying to establish itself in New Zealand. The market was wide open for an intelligent women’s magazine. He had come out from England for eighteen months to see if he could establish it with an all-New Zealand staff. He’d already been in the country for six months. His name was Michael Young.

‘You’re from Canterbury?’ he guessed, after they had made themselves known to each other.

‘No. Why on earth should you say that?’

‘Then you’ve lived in New Zealand since you were, oh let me see, five or six years of age, about the time you were starting school?’

‘I’ve lived here all my life.’

‘Hawke’s Bay?’

‘Is it my accent?’

‘Yass,’ he said in the pleasantly light and cultivated English voice that she at once despised, admired, and classified. ‘I find I can’t place it at all.’

‘I’ve never been out of New Zealand in my life. I’m not the daughter of a founding father, in fact I’m really nothing at all.’

‘Oh come on, Harriet,’ he said, with a blend of old-fashioned reticence at such familiarity and a touch of arrogance, as if she were in fact the serving-wench class that she was caricaturing for him. ‘You’re certainly something. I know a great deal about you.’

‘Everything and nothing. I’m a first-generation New Zealander. My father has delusions of grandeur and the feudal estate was a small stretch of barren land with only one rather excellent stand of growth
beside a river, where he ran the absolute minimum of cows on which to make an economic unit.’

‘Past tense?’

‘They live in a pensioner flat in a town called Whangarei.’

‘Why are you trying to make yourself sound so insignificant?’

‘Because,’ she said, ‘I have so consistently to wage war against those who believe they’re significant. And are almost invariably wrong.’

‘I’m suitably humbled,’ he said, bowing his head.

‘Oh no, you’re not.’

‘No,’ he said, inclining his head again. ‘But I wish I were.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she found herself replying. ‘You may be as arrogant as you wish.’

‘You must never like me,’ he said, quite gravely, she felt. ‘I’m dissolute by nature, and I intend to be dissolute all my life. Look at me, I’m thirty-five and I intend to be very rich by the time I’m forty, and live in Paris and keep a French mistress.’

‘Look at me,’ she replied, ‘I’m thirty-nine and going to seed and my reputation is a mixed bag of inferior glory and manufactured stories about myself, and by the time I’m forty I’ll probably be starting to think about becoming a grandmother. That is to say, with respect to nature and the law, there would be no objection to my becoming a grandmother.’

‘A telling saga. Do you mind?’

‘I should mind if my daughter made me one. For her sake,’ she added, more than a little defensively.

‘I’m sure I would, too. I’ll be nearer to fifty than forty when my daughter faces me with such uncomfortable prospects,’ he said. ‘But that’s a long time away.’

Somehow it seemed as if fifty was, for him, considerably further away than the four years that divided them.

‘You have children, then?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘How many? And how old?’

‘A son and a daughter. My son is three.’ He hesitated perceptibly. ‘And my daughter is just — a month old. Now shall we have dinner?’

As they stood talking, neither noticed that the rest of the party was quietly melting away. They were the only two people left in the room, except for waiters trying to tidy away glasses and ashtrays.

‘I don’t know.’ She looked round distractedly, suddenly thinking that she ought to retreat. The man was quite unbearably attractive.
His mouth was full and sweetly drooping, almost childlike in its appeal that she should please him. And she wanted to do whatever he suggested.

How old was his newborn child? A month, he had said. Old memories came back, of herself, long ago in childbirth. Of loss. Of betrayal. What did this man mean asking her to bed with him? But of course this was a nonsense, for she who had always known how to handle any situation. There was no need for her to bed with him.

‘Why do you want me to have dinner with you?’ she asked weakly. She prayed he would be honest.

‘I’d like to hear about your work, and maybe we could talk a little business together.’

She sagged inwardly. It was a sane approach, yet she wished that it had been otherwise.

‘I have to go home,’ she heard herself say dully. ‘The children … I didn’t leave them anything for … my husband’s working late …’

‘You become more admirable by the moment. I find it quite extraordinary that anyone who looks like you, and does the number of things for which you’re so famous, could also be such a totally nice human being.’