a Breed of Women (24 page)

‘It must be as I imagine the Mediterranean to be,’ she said at last.

‘It is,’ he said. ‘Or like Greece. Haven’t you been there?’

‘I’ve never been out of New Zealand,’ she said.

‘Really?’

‘Really. You’re shocked?’

‘Surprised. You constantly surprise me. You seemed more — international.’

‘Perhaps it’s only a comparative thing, while you’re here in New Zealand, I mean. After all, the only advantage not having travelled gives me as a New Zealander is that I don’t talk about my overseas experience.’

‘True. And it had me fooled. I thought you did it standing on your head.’

Almost alongside them, the ferry bound for Picton loomed up seeming to come straight towards the car. It veered off and slid away across the water.

‘That’s my overseas experience,’ said Harriet, and laughed bitterly. ‘I’m sorry, my favourite joke. It starts to fall a bit flat when you’ve made it as often as I have. Still, it’s true. A few trips to the South Island is as far as I’ve ever been.’

‘You mind? But of course you do, or you wouldn’t talk like that.’

‘Yes, I mind. But I settled for being married and kids and … oh a lot of other things.’

‘And it satisfies you?’

‘I comfort myself with the thought that someone has to stay here and record what is going on here. Who can do that better than someone who’s stayed here and been part of it, all her life? Some day I’ll do it properly. Or so I tell myself.’

‘A rather glum rationalisation?’

‘I fear so.’ She sighed. ‘And yet … it doesn’t always seem to matter so much. Less at some times than others.’

She looked down to her hands folded in her lap. Cars were passing them constantly, people on their way home from work, or others just picking up some sunshine at the end of the day. ‘I could go now,’ she told herself inside, ‘I could stop this thing that’s happening. Or I could take a chance and travel another dimension.’

When he did kiss her, the cars passing and honking didn’t matter, and the absurd schoolgirlishness of the situation didn’t matter either, as she might have thought they would. Looking back afterwards, it seemed silly and rash, and daring because it could have been embarrassing to them both. Only it wasn’t, and she didn’t want to stop kissing him.

At last they drew apart, and he said quietly that perhaps they should
think about going to the airport for that drink; they agreed that the airport bar wasn’t such a bad place after all.

They sat together in the deserted bar, a converted hangar, barely disguised in its ugliness under gaudy lamps and some big blown-up pictures of old aeroplanes. He told her about places he had been to, about his father’s recent death, how bad it was to be away when something happened that really mattered, how he had gone tearing across the world to be at the funeral, only to get there in time to see the coffin being lowered, in an old grey churchyard. ‘A long way to go across the world to see a box going into a hole in the earth,’ he said. And then he’d come back a day or so later, there being little for him to do and everything to come back to, especially with his child due in a few weeks. Harriet started, remembering the child that had made her leave him so hastily on their first meeting. It must now be some months old, she reflected. And however his personal life was reordering itself, he had still come to find her again. She suspected now that the proposed political column would never eventuate. Possibly he didn’t believe it either.

They talked about books. She found him better-read than she had expected; he had read some of the women writers whom she much admired. This surprised her greatly, though on reflection, it was not as unlikely as it seemed, for if he were good at his job he would have done some sort of market research into women’s tastes and ideas. He had read Drabble, Lessing, Mortimer, all people she liked.

‘The trouble is, they do write about such miserable marriages,’ he said.

‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Don’t most people have them?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, in what seemed like genuine astonishment. ‘Do they?’

‘Most of the people I know do.’

‘Do you?’ he asked.

‘I said most people,’ she said uneasily.

‘I’ve never thought about it,’ he said. She didn’t know whether to believe him or not, yet he seemed so direct and straightforward that she almost did.

A drunk at another table came over and interrupted their conversation. It was someone she knew slightly, who wanted to criticise her performance on a recent programme. Failing to penetrate her well-rehearsed defences, he asked if he could sit with them, preparing to insinuate himself into the conversation and
looking for his companion, an equally drunk businessman, to applaud his effrontery.

Michael asked him to leave. The man’s eyes flicked from one to the other. Harriet sat very still, holding him steady on a faltering eye. He smirked, and got to his feet again. ‘So good to see you again, Harriet,’ he said, stumbling a little as he returned to the other table.

‘Bastard,’ said Michael under his breath.

‘He’s harmless,’ said Harriet.

‘He was being insulting. Couldn’t you see that?’

‘Of course I could, but does it matter?’

Beside her, she could feel an enormous suppressed energy, some vibrant quality that matched her own. She suddenly remembered that long ago up the Hokianga she had divined water. Her father had told her that a man would come to decide where a new well should go. When she had asked how the man would do this, he had explained, cutting a piece of green branch with a fork in it, and shown her how to hold it by each prong while walking over the ground. When the man held it, he had told her, the stick would point down when he came to the place where water would be found. She had done as he had said, walking backwards and forwards over the ground, a small child intent on the thought of water beneath the earth. And then in her hands, the stick had started to turn. At first she had been frightened, about to drop it, then in extraordinary fascination she had tried to fight it, to wrestle the living thing in her hands, but it would not be stopped.

Now, sitting beside Michael, she felt the same strange pulling. It was almost as if energy was being transferred from one to the other. The fibres seemed to be drawing, and like the green stick, she was fighting it, and feeling joy and satisfaction that it could not be stopped.

The voice on the intercom announced the departure of his flight for Auckland.

‘I have time to walk you back to your car,’ he said.

‘Oh no, you’ll miss your plane.’

‘I don’t think so. If I was on a losing streak, there would have been a lot of things I would have missed these past months, wouldn’t there?’

It was one of the last flights of the day out of Wellington, and the travellers bound for Auckland were already emptying out of the terminal in the opposite direction, as they walked through the
echoing high-domed building. Harriet and Michael made little sounds to each other about seeing each other early the following year when he would be down again in Wellington — loving small exchanges, as if they were indeed already lovers. In the last few minutes between them they parted as lovers might do — careless, close, holding each other till the last possible moment. When he left her she sat in the car waiting to see him out of sight, but at the entrance to the building he turned and stood stock still, looking at her in the car. She waved, panicking suddenly, because it seemed essential then that he catch the plane, that he mustn’t stay. Enough had already passed between them. Then she was longing for him to stay a second longer, so that she could see him in his fine beauty.

She drove home exulted, light-headed, and so happy that she was sure it must show.

It seemed that it did, and this condition lasted all through the summer. Her friends noticed that she was beautiful and seemed younger. She began to lose weight. The sun was intermittent, yet she stayed in it enough to get brown and berry-like, her skin ripening each day until she was like the girl who had roamed summer fields at Ohaka long ago.

In the long holiday the family travelled north for the annual visit to the Wallaces in their Whangarei flat. Mary was nearly blind now, worn and cowed with years of Gerald’s fretting, but she touched Harriet’s face, and held it saying, ‘You’re happy?’

Harriet had told her that she was indeed happy. As she and Mary had grown older, things that had been difficult before had relaxed between them. They never spoke much in words, but over the years the two women had come to understand each other. Mary knew better than to ask her daughter what made her happy; Harriet knew Mary was aware that her happiness extended to some area beyond her success, her public life, or Max and the children. She guessed that it gave Mary some quiet satisfaction, although it was difficult to analyse why, for the more disastrous areas of Harriet’s life had caused Mary such distress in the past that it seemed hardly likely that she might be pleased by any new gambles. Possibly, Harriet thought, it was because she had come to understand happiness as an end in itself. She, Harriet, had done so, too.

Without expectation, without hope, but in a certain quiet knowledge that he would come to her, Harriet was living out the summer, until Michael returned.

The family moved on up north beyond Whangarei to stay at a long curving yellow beach, where the sun beat down each day with a steady white heat. They ate sand with their mussel fritters and blackberry pies, made from fat and unbelievably swollen berries collected by dusty paths, lived in bathing suits and swam daily, sometimes hourly, in a sea as original in its clarity as a beginning. The children roamed for miles, returning exhausted and golden to be with Max and Harriet when they were tired. None of them was really a child any more, except Emma, who seemed more childlike than childish, yet during that holiday they were her children again. Genevieve spent time away from the others, talking to boys who ranged themselves around as near to her as they could, but none of it seemed to matter. She was still Harriet’s baby, her first — well, not quite her first, but that too was another matter that had no place in this summer — and she saw her with love and pride, a young splendid creature whom she and Max had made together. In the rare times when they could be sure that they were alone, they made love, she through a dreamy haze, his face a blur as if the sun had come between them.

When they went home the family said that it was the best holiday they had ever had, and implicit in their pleasure was gratitude that Harriet had created an ambience of harmony around them.

Michael rang her early in February to say that he would be down at the end of the month. It was the first time she had heard from him for over two months, but it didn’t seem as if she had been waiting, nor did she feel that she had time to wait until he came to her. There was work to be done, there was more sun, and there was more of the certain joy of knowing that he would come. She didn’t want to relinquish any of it through hurry or impatience.

On the day he rang through, her status among her friends changed slightly. She went to a party that evening and a woman friend said to her, ‘You must be in love. You can’t look like that all the time without there being someone.’

And Harriet, a little drunk and longing to share her secret, had said, ‘Yes. Yes, of course I’m in love.’

The next day Lynley and Joan rang and said in effect, ‘Welcome to the club.’ They were pleased that Harriet had strayed at last. Of course her rapport with men, particularly older men, was widely known, but women, like men, had never been able to place her in a context in which any of these relationships had the sort of validity they understood.

At first Harriet thought to try and explain that her love for Michael was still an affair only of the heart, but explanations seemed pointless. So she accepted their phone calls, but did not enlighten them any further than was necessary. His name was Michael and he lived in Auckland, she said. The women tapped away at her marriage. Had anything happened between herself and Max, had she always been unhappy and kept it hidden from them? She had no answers, only those inside her.

This seemed very odd to her, for over the years she had been seen with so many men, had cultivated her free-wheeling image and proven them all wrong time and again. To be the centre now of curious and respectful attention seemed very strange indeed.

Possibly this changed, charged atmosphere finally created tension within her. She began to await Michael’s coming; the days took on the colours of reality once more, and she counted them one by one.

Leonie studied Harriet across the table. The lunchtime crowd had ebbed away, and the restaurant was quiet. She lit a cigarette, and fine blue smoke rose lazily above them.

‘Well!’ she said to Harriet. ‘And did he come to you?’

Harriet looked back to Leonie. One could say that there was no turning back, that she had committed herself. But it needn’t be so. There was still time to withdraw, to make some polite noise to cover her tracks. Perhaps this was the point to which she had been leading Leonie, in order to help her, only she had gone a little too far.

But she knew that this was not true. Leonie was firmly a part of her life, even if the time she occupied had been brief.

W
HEN
H
ARRIET
RETURNED
to Weyville, there was little outward evidence of change in the time she had been away.

Leonie’s departure had been a blow when she first heard about it, but in a way she also saw it as a blessing. There would have been the difficulty of re-establishing the friendship if she had still lived there, or worse still, having to live with her hostility. As it was Harriet was spared both these difficulties, and Leonie’s absence made it easier to resume the role of Harriet Wallace. Many people had speculated about her and Denny’s disappearance the same weekend, and she knew without being told that the old football crowd assumed that she had gone away to have a baby on the quiet, and that Denny had been suitably chastised. That their marriage had never been revealed soon became obvious too. Leonie had never told anyone, nor had Cousin Alice, or Mr Whitwell, and they were the only people who knew, so that with Leonie’s going there was no need to pretend to anyone.

Mr Whitwell’s disappearance was a different matter, and she bitterly regretted his absence. He had been sent to jail for incest with his sister. What had become of the quiet plain sister nobody knew, as Mr Whitwell was considered the villain of the piece. He had been suitably dealt with, as far as the residents of Weyville were concerned. His house stood shut up and neglected. It was said that he planned to come back when he got out of jail, but it was hard to imagine how a man could have such a cheek. Nobody really believed he would return. They were right, for he never did come back, and whenever Harriet thought of him, she hoped that he and his sister had found some peace to settle down together with their books.

He had been replaced at the library by a tight-lipped spinster called Amy Mullins, who, it was reported, ran a tidy ship. Certainly, some sages remarked, she had cleaned up the shelves of some of its less desirable literature. Miss Mullins took Harriet back on her staff somewhat grudgingly. Her record wasn’t very good, as she had gone away without notice, (a recurring problem of Harriet’s employers, if
Miss Mullins only knew it) but one had to take into consideration her marks from library school. Having gone through herself, and having a profound respect for all opinions emanating from this august body, Miss Mullins could hardly overlook the very favourable view they held of Harriet’s work. Heaven only knew, it was difficult to find a girl in Weyville who knew how to catalogue a book. Harriet would have to re-do the year she hadn’t completed, but since Mrs Harrison had explained that Harriet had been called away by family trouble there didn’t seem to be any real objection. The really black mark against her was implicit. That ogre Mr Whitwell had written a very good report on her. Harriet knew that Miss Mullins would therefore keep a close eye on her for any signs of frivolity or immorality.

When Harriet had collected her first pay, she went out in the lunch hour trying to find a good linen skirt that would fit her, as her waistline still hadn’t settled down to its former size, and she had few summer clothes suitable for the library. Armed with several parcels, and considerably lighter in pocket than she had intended, she was turning down the main street when a woman pushing a pram hailed her. She was a blonde, rather tubby person in her twenties, and it took Harriet a few minutes to register who she was. It was Julie Simmons, now married to Dick. She’d come back to town about the same time that Harriet had left after ‘bumming around down south’ and getting thoroughly fed up with the life. She and Dick had met the first week she was back; he had still been mourning Harriet’s absence, according to Julie.

‘He had a real shine for you,’ she said mischievously. ‘Not that he ever thought you’d take him.’

They’d hit it off like wildfire, and been married more than a year. She glowed with a lovely warm self-confidence.

‘You ought to come and see me and Dick sometime,’ she said. Harriet thanked her, knowing that she probably wouldn’t go. In a way she was sorry about that, because seeing someone like Julie who’d been through the mill, so happy, was a kind of revitalising energy source that Harriet now badly needed. But it was too close, too raw. It was hard to know how much Julie might know about her, or think she knew, but of all people in the town now, Dick was the one most likely to have gone fossicking into what had happened to her. That was a risk she wasn’t prepared to face. She told Julie how happy she was for them both, and that was the truth. She said that when she was settled she’d give her a ring perhaps, which was rather
less than the truth. The encounter had clarified one thing for her, though, and that was that she would never return to the old crowd. In a way it was like severing the last link.

Later that month, Wendy Dixon, with whom she’d been at school in Ohaka, wrote suggesting that they go to England that year. Again, Harriet had no way of knowing how much Wendy knew of the past two years, but she guessed people like the Colliers had talked a bit in Ohaka. And why not? They were part of a closely knit community, and they would hardly be to blame if they did talk among themselves. Harriet wrote back, warmly thanking Wendy for her kindness in thinking of her again, and said that in a year’s time she would certainly go, but at the moment she had no money and she hadn’t completed her library training. Wendy replied almost immediately, saying that she really wished that Harriet could go with her but that she was very restless. Harriet wouldn’t be surprised to know that she wasn’t all that keen on teaching, so she felt she couldn’t wait any longer now that she’d served out her bond. She hoped Harriet would eventually go, but she was off on the very next ship she could find.

Harriet thought of the ship she had seen leaving Auckland on her first trip to Weyville, and how it had made her miss the bus. To be sure, she’d missed every bus that was going in the end, she thought grimly, still prone to fits of black despair. She was overwhelmed with longing to be on a ship going somewhere, anywhere. But instead, Weyville had to be faced; sometimes it seemed a daunting prospect.

One of the good things about it was how well she and Cousin Alice got on together now. Cousin Alice’s own little wells of quiet unhappiness had grown deeper in Harriet’s absence. Both her successful children had taken themselves overseas, both more or less permanently. Her daughter had come back to stay before departing for an indeterminate stay abroad, and her son had visited her several times before taking up a position as an engineer in the Middle East. The prospects of promotion were so good that it was unlikely that New Zealand would ever have much to offer him. Cousin Alice wrote to them zealously every Sunday, but although she heard from them both occasionally, it was obviously she who made the effort to keep in touch. It was to be several years before Harriet met either of Cousin Alice’s children, and Cousin Alice never met some of her grandchildren.

Harriet’s return had filled an enormous gap in Cousin Alice’s life, and they lived together like any two sensible adults.

The year passed quietly with Harriet studying hard and passing her exams without difficulty. At the end of the course she was required to go to Wellington for a six-week block course before she could be formally awarded her Certificate. She looked forward to this with mounting anticipation. It was a step further than she had ever gone before, and the thought of a new place excited her more than anything she could remember.

She had had little social life in Weyville in the past year, apart from learning to play golf with Cousin Alice and sitting round making small talk with older women after the Saturday afternoon games. She had been out with one or two young men, remainders of the old boarding school dances, who were still single. She herself was almost the only single woman left from those times.

She found to her surprise around the middle of the year that she was legally single. A letter arrived from Denny’s lawyer. She didn’t know he had one until then, though she was aware that her parents had got one on her behalf and that he was trying to organise a legal separation. She gathered that she would be legally married for years to come. It didn’t seem to matter much, but the lawyer had been very irritated by the difficulty of his dealings with Mr Rei, who had not seemed co-operative, or even interested. Harriet had pressed no claims for maintenance, which had apparently annoyed the lawyer too. He didn’t seem to understand that so totally was she trying to exorcise the past, for Denny as well as herself, that to haggle over money had been the last thing she wanted.

Still, a large legal letter was waiting for her one day when she arrived home from work. Cousin Alice didn’t ask her what was in it, as she didn’t ask questions like that any more, but Harriet gave her the letter to read anyway. She handed it back in silence.

Denny wanted to remarry, and as he was aware that evidence for a divorce on the grounds of his adultery had been obtained, he was anxious to know whether it was going to be used or not. The tone of the letter suggested that he hoped it would be. As well as general distaste for proceeding with such a divorce, Harriet felt that perhaps she should protect Gloria from the ignominy that being named in court would bring. She knew that if she were to voice such an objection to anyone in the family, they would be horrified — Gloria was a scarlet woman. But Harriet wondered if she was any worse or any sillier than she had been at times. She had a feeling that Gloria might have started having an affair with Denny without even knowing
about her at the outset. Denny certainly hadn’t been in any mood to broadcast her existence when he went to work at that office. Of course Gloria must have known fairly soon, as Denny couldn’t hide a wife forever, but perhaps by that time she had slipped too far down the precarious path towards loving Denny. After all, Harriet had loved him once; why should she not expect another person to feel as she had done. She thought her feelings towards Gloria must be odd or unnatural, but she continued to think that she would protect her, until the letter from Denny arrived.

For a few nights after that she lay awake, hot-eyed, weeping from time to time, remembering the tiny boy and her loneliness and fear. For the first time she began to hate Gloria, with a bitterness that surprised and exhausted her. She even considered withholding the divorce to punish them.

A week or so later, worn out, she wrote to the lawyer who had been acting for her, saying that as far as she was concerned the divorce could proceed as quickly as possible. Shortly before Christmas she was advised that she was free. Free. The word had a mocking ring about it There were things she would never be free of, but try telling a lawyer that.

When she was putting the rubbish out one evening, she was surprised to see that Cousin Alice had wrapped it up in
Truth
,
a paper that her relative didn’t usually deign to read. Harriet asked her lightly what had brought about her change in reading habits. Because of the way that Cousin Alice coloured up and stammered, Harriet immediately knew the answer — she was afraid that the divorce had been publicised. Harriet started to worry about it too and got back copies of the paper, and watched the ones that came out each week, but before many weeks had passed it became obvious that there were bigger and more salacious divorces than theirs to report.

She was told, long after, that it was not Gloria whom Denny wanted to marry, but some girl from up north. Whether she was from Kaikohe or not Harriet never found out, nor did she try. With the divorce, her relationship with Denny was over.

These events made her long for a total change of scenery more than ever. There had been no trip to Ohaka this year, now that the Wallaces had left the farm. Instead, her parents came down and spent Christmas with Cousin Alice and Harriet, their first break away since they had gone to the farm when Harriet was thirteen. Gerald was grouchy and lame because of his back, which still hadn’t healed;
Mary was worrying about their new place and whether Gerald would have to be permanently on sickness benefits, or whether he would eventually be able to do a light job. It was clear to Harriet that Mary didn’t relish the thought of being at home all day with Gerald, and she talked somewhat fearfully of getting a job herself, ‘if anybody would have her’. Through it all Cousin Alice was an excellent hostess, and if her guests proved trying at times, she didn’t show it. At least, as she remarked quite frankly to Harriet afterwards, it was better than sitting round staring at the wall on Christmas Day.

Still, Harriet had badly missed the break that Ohaka had provided before. Wellington began to seem like the Promised Land. She hoped it wouldn’t be as hot as Weyville, which was locked in a blistering heat wave day after day, the sun reflected off iron roofs, the tar bleeding in the streets, the lake almost drying up.

When she finally arrived in Wellington to complete her library course, she was delighted to find it refreshing, with pleasant sea breezes cooling even the hottest days to a bearable level. She boarded at an unobtrusive but adequate guest house on Oriental Bay Parade, and her bedroom faced the ocean. In the morning she woke to the bluest, crispest sea she could imagine; in the evenings she walked beside it and sometimes waded in it. The city enchanted her, with its houses seeming to cling to the hills in a primitive effort to survive. It wasn’t lush like Auckland, or as sprawling or crowded. There was a vigour in the air, a purpose to the place. Others on the course asked her whether the public service atmosphere of the city irritated her, and she could only look at them. To her, it was the loveliest place she had ever seen.

One Sunday afternoon she decided to climb the hill behind the bay, and an hour or so later she found herself at the top of Mount Victoria. The impact was devastating — the sea seemed to stream away from the land as far as she could see. In one direction she could see far away across Cook Strait, and she imagined she could glimpse the distant Kaikouras of the South Island. The opposite way, she could see up into the industrial Hutt Valley area, snaking away into the hills. The Orongarongo Range across the harbour appeared so close she felt as if she could lean over and touch it. It is as if all the world is opened up, she thought, and realised at the same time that it was the first time she had ever been truly alone in all her life, the first time she had ever been accountable to no one else in the world but herself. This was the beginning of the world.