a Breed of Women (26 page)

Everyone agreed that they certainly would but Harriet did not answer. ‘Don’t you agree, Harriet?’ asked Nick, leaning eagerly over the table.

‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re simply trying to turn aside an ethical dilemma you can’t answer with courtroom tricks that make you appear to be reasonable and make people afraid of challenging you in case they make fools of themselves.’

‘Dear Harriet, forgive my saying so, but I’m starting to find this tedious.’

‘Then let’s simply finish the topic by proving whether or not it’s possible to cry for help and go unheard in Weyville. Why don’t we all, on the count of five, scream help as loudly as we can, and see how quickly help arrives? As there are eight of us here, then it should test the validity of your theory eight times more effectively.’

The hostess said nervously, ‘But then we might have the police around.’

Max said, ‘Shouldn’t we be ringing and checking the babysitter, Harriet?’

She looked around at them, all flushed, all more than a little embarrassed, unable to cope. She was enjoying herself very much at that moment. Suddenly Elaine Mawson, giggling palely, said, ‘It can’t hurt can it? After all, Nick could say he was testing a theory. They wouldn’t arrest us, would they?’

Nick, piqued, but unwilling to prolong the scene further, suggested tersely that he give the count. On five, Camelot resounded with a crescendo of shrieks. For fully two or three minutes, they
continued to shout and scream, then, one by one they fell silent, astonished. The silence continued, somebody laughed nervously. ‘Nobody’s coming,’ they started to say to each other. And it was true. Nobody did come.

Harriet and Max left early. In the car Max was quiet and cold. As they parked the car in the garage he said, If you can’t control your drinking, I’d prefer we stayed home at the weekends.’

‘I wasn’t drunk,’ said Harriet calmly. ‘I simply wanted to wipe the smug look off Nick Thomas’s face.’

‘And mine too?’ he asked bitterly.

‘Did you think I did that to make a fool of you?’ Harriet said, in real surprise.

‘You know I wanted you to stop. Surely that was enough.’

Harriet started to cry softly, her face streaming with tears in the dark. ‘Max, Max,’ she said, ‘hold me, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.’

After he’d paid the babysitter, he led her to bed and made her hot cocoa. When he joined her, he held her against him for a long time, stroking her hair. She drifted off to sleep, and woke towards morning, aware that he was still lying awake, holding her in the same position as when she had gone to sleep. Why? she wondered to herself. Where am I taking us? Or is it me, it must be me, because I cried and said I was sorry. I always cry though, that’s my weakness, once I cry I’m lost. Thank you, Father, you gave me that. That, and always saying I’m sorry. Thank you for nothing.

‘You must be uncomfortable lying like that,’ she said to Max.

‘I didn’t want to disturb you,’ said Max, removing his arm with relief.

‘What are you thinking?’

‘Oh … this and that. Would you like us to have another baby?’

‘Would you?’

‘It could be a nice idea,’ he said.

‘Of course,’ she said gratefully. It seemed to make perfect sense.

The next time Harriet visited her, Cousin Alice looked at her shrewdly. ‘You’re becoming quite a celebrity my dear.’

‘What have I done this time? No, don’t tell me, I don’t want to be reminded.’

Cousin Alice shook her head. ‘I wish I’d been you,’ she said.

Harriet looked at her in astonishment. ‘You don’t mean that.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Cousin Alice lightly, ‘I must say you seem to
make life extraordinarily difficult for yourself … I don’t know whether I’d have had the constitution for that. But at least you’re living.’

‘Hmm, nappies and squashed crayons, that’s about all there is.’

‘They’ll grow up, and then, a person like you, there’ll be the world at your feet, you’re still so young. You’ve got spirit, girl, I could see it at the beginning. Why do you think I put up with you.’

‘You were hard on me at times.’

‘Hard or wrong? Eh? No, you don’t want to answer me that any more than I want to myself. But you learnt from it, didn’t you? Some people never learn from any experiences, good or bad. You have.’

‘You credit me with too much,’ said Harriet. ‘Anyway, Max wants us to have another baby, so it looks as if I’m not going to be quite as young as you think when they’re grown up.’

‘Do you want it?’ asked Cousin Alice.

‘Why not?’

‘Don’t have it,’ said Cousin Alice. ‘You’ve got enough. You’re a good mother now, you’ll end up hating the lot of them.’

‘Probably too late,’ said Harriet. ‘I threw my pills away last week.’ She said more or less the same thing to Nick Thomas when he rang her a few days later and suggested they have an affair.

‘It’s unethical,’ she said, laughing it off.

‘Not at all,’ he replied. ‘Neither of you is my client.’

‘Then you’re touting for business. You want to handle my divorce.’

‘I want to handle you, my dear,’ he said.

She burst out laughing. ‘Oh Nick, you’re so subtle,’ she said.

‘Listen to me,’ he said fiercely into the telephone, ‘I haven’t stopped thinking about you, damn you, since you made an idiot of me. I’ll tame you — you’ll like that!’

Thinking about his grey-shot hair, the soft velour of his folded face and his immaculate energetic hands, she thought that, yes, she just might too.

‘No good,’ she said, ‘I’m off the pill. Max thinks a baby might keep me quiet in public places.’

‘Damn Max, you’re not going to have a baby.’

‘Give me a chance, the idea’s quite new.’

‘You’re not pregnant. Get back on that pill, and we’ll wait till you’re safe again.’

She laughed again and hung up. Odd how she’d felt towards the man. She really disliked him. When he won the case they had been
discussing, her dislike deepened, though she supposed she was unreasonable to the point of irrationality over the whole matter. She felt for the woman whose character he had so soundly assassinated in court It emerged finally that she was Nance, now Noddy’s ex-wife, from the days of the milkbar. Old Nance, she wouldn’t have stood a chance Harriet thought. Come to think of it, she wouldn’t have had the brain to invent a story like that in the first place. Poor bitch, poor cow.

Nick was right, as it turned out. She wasn’t pregnant then; it took a couple of months of trying. Really, having a child seemed the safest and most sensible course of action.

She was drinking wine one Saturday afternoon with Don Everett, who had called to borrow their lawn mower. Later, she couldn’t remember where Max had been, though she thought he might have been helping a friend to build a fence. Things like that appealed to Max on a Saturday afternoon, and she thought that he must have taken Genevieve with him, because the house was very quiet. Peter she could account for; he would be sleeping, for he only needed to be shown his bed to fall asleep on it. An excellent being, young Peter. She could forgive him a few scatological deviations. From time to time he would defecate in a corner of the house, and stand calmly unmoved while she cleaned it up. He had learnt early that cleaning up shit was women’s work. It seemed a small price to pay for peace.

Don and Miriam were older than the Taylors, but Miriam, remembering Harriet from her library days, had seen her as a welcome addition to the Camelot circle. It was to Miriam that Harriet turned when things became rough; Miriam had once even lent her money when the grocery account had skyrocketed and Harriet had been afraid to tell Max. She didn’t know why she had been afraid to tell Max, who rarely criticised anything she did, but in recent years she had had a strange feeling that he was watching her and waiting for something to break inside her. When she behaved as she had done with Nick Thomas at the dinner party, Harriet felt, rightly or wrongly, that Max saw this as a manifestation of what he most feared in her; for her part, hiding extravagance or having a baby were the price she paid for peace.

Miriam was a willing listener, sometimes acid in her reactions, behaving as Harriet imagined a strong-minded middle-aged schoolmarm would. The couple had two teenage boys, who seemed happy, affable children. Miriam was a schoolteacher, and was
teaching one of them, who seemed not to have any resentment towards her on this account. If anything, the Everetts had a better relationship than most teenagers and their parents. It was a pleasant well-run home, and Miriam, brisk and efficient, appeared to accomplish miracles of housework in the shortest possible time, as well as doing her job. Harriet was impressed and envious, for Miriam could do effortlessly what it took her all day to do, and keep her hair set and her clothes well-pressed at the same time. She didn’t yearn to be like Miriam, sensing, despite their friendship, some gaping chasm in their personalities, but she did wish she could do certain tilings as well as she did. There was no doubt that Miriam was the dominant partner in the marriage; one hardly noticed Don when she was around.

To be sure, he turned a barbecue as slickly as anyone in the suburb, he tramped with the boys and organised holidays for them all, from which they would return brown and ebullient each year.

Holidays were a luxury for the Taylors, despite their pleasant house and a degree of style. It took them a long time to pay off their house and, like many other people, they had to endure the long summers by the small, brackish lake of Weyville. There was, of course, the occasional pilgrimage to the Wallaces, but in those years, when the children were little, the Wallaces more often came to stay with Max and Harriet.

So Don had his uses, as Miriam would say, and when Miriam was caught up in conversation with other people, he proved to be good company, too. He was an industrial scientist at the mill, though it was hard to fit him into any context of mill life. Yet he loved it. It was the wood, he’d told Harriet once, he loved wood, and had learned to carve it into beautiful shapes. Once he showed her some of the carvings he had done. They were beautiful, curving with a silky sheen where he had tried to capture light, erupting with rugged force in those pieces where he had set the elements against matter.

Harriet had once asked him for one, and he had asked her what she would do with it ‘Put it on a shelf, I’ll find a place,’ she had said. ‘Somewhere where I can look at it regularly, every day.’

‘We’ll see,’ he’d said, and it had then occurred to her that none was on display in the Everett household. He never gave her one.

But the times that they talked to each other were rare. Details of that Saturday afternoon were hard to remember, because one didn’t
recall details with Don. However, it seemed important to remember the afternoon because she saw it as a turning point.

They talked about poetry. She told him that the men who talked to her about poetry were always banished from her life. It was just a coincidence that they were men, and there’d only been two of them anyway, but still they had been sent on their way, so he’d better be careful. Again she didn’t recall how the conversation had started exactly, but she thought that she had made some chance remark and he’d replied with a quotation that she had recognised. He’d been excited by that and said he had known all along that she was a kindred spirit. The thought that Don should be warned off was a bit ridiculous, she mused later, but suddenly she had felt it was necessary, she did not know why.

He said she should write poetry. It would be good for her. ‘Why should I do something that would do me good?’ she asked him.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, shrugging and smiling. ‘Try it. New life.’ He indicated her stomach. ‘It might be the time to try.’

Just then the phone rang; Miriam wanted to know where Don was. ‘Drinking wine and talking about poetry,’ said Harriet gaily. ‘I’ll send him home with the lawn mower.’

She wrote her first poem that night in secret. Over the next months poems came to her, emerging unbidden when her hands were full, when the children needed her, when Max was expecting a meal. Some poems she caught, others seemed to be lost forever. She fretted and raged with herself and with whatever had stood between her and the poem. Often though, when she was sitting down, weary as the birth drew closer, the lost poem would come back, and, grateful, she would commit it to paper.

She told no one about this, and though she sometimes wished that Don would appear again so that she could talk to him, she didn’t pursue him. When the poems were done, she put them away at the bottom of the mending cupboard, one place that Max probably wouldn’t find them. She supposed that eventually she would show them to him, but she thought they weren’t particularly good; did it really matter whether he saw them or not?

For the time being, they were a part of her, like this baby kicking fretfully away in her womb. She’d never known a child carry on the way this one did. She was sure it knew when she was desperate to write a poem down, and was frustrated. She could have sworn it cowered and put its hands over its head to keep out the noise when
she shouted at the other children, but when she was quite exhausted she knew that it was crouching down, trying to keep very still and quiet so she could get some rest. She more than half resented its presence, but when it did things like that for her she felt inordinately tender, and would place her hand on her stomach and say, ‘There, there little one, it’s all right now.’

However, the poems, like the baby, were not ready for independent life. Unlike the baby, they could be forgotten if they became unmanageable, and so she put them away.

Emma’s birth was the only difficult one she experienced with any of the three children. Struggling and exhausted, she kept remembering the first baby she had had.

‘It’s going to die,’ she shrieked at the doctor.

‘Don’t be so silly,’ said the doctor. ‘Really, a grown woman like you.’ The scenario hadn’t changed much. She had been praised for being a good girl with Genevieve and Peter, but then they hadn’t hurt. Being good meant not hurting, not causing trouble.

‘Fuck you, I tell you it’s going to die,’ she shouted.