a Breed of Women (29 page)

She was stung. In fact she had paid extra to come to such an expensive place, more than the television corporation’s standard accommodation allowance, so that he wouldn’t feel out of place. ‘It’s no worse than the places I come to you in,’ she retorted. ‘Come on, you’ll get used to it’

‘Not this time, I’m afraid.’

‘What do you mean?’ she said, although she knew already.

‘I’m really flat out, love … I had to make time this morning. And the evenings are difficult for me.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me before, then?’ she said. ‘I could have made other arrangements. Didn’t you know that I’d have made every moment free for you?’

He looked despairing, touchingly so, and she started stroking his face trying to translate her love into comfort She wanted to hold him like a child, he looked so unhappy.

‘When could I have told you? I didn’t know till you told me on the phone, and I haven’t seen you since.’

‘You could have rung me before I came up, so I wouldn’t have built on it so much.’

‘It seemed better to tell you to your face.’ Tell her to her face. Really, what did he mean?

‘Hadn’t you better get to the point?’ she said.

‘I don’t think I can go on with this,’ he said miserably.

‘Why? Why not?’ Her voice was a tiny whimper.

‘I’m no good at it. I’m hurting you too much.’

‘You’re not Please, Michael, you’re not, you’ve never hurt me until now. Only the thought of not being with you hurts me.’

‘Then don’t you see? It’s no good, because we can’t be together.’

‘Didn’t you believe me,’ she said slowly, ‘when I told you that I didn’t want to possess you? That I only wanted to be with you for as long as it’s possible? Do you think I want to take you away from your wife and children? That I want to — to marry you or something?’

‘I’m not that arrogant,’ he said.

‘Aren’t you! I don’t think you believe that it’s possible that I might want to give you something without asking for a tangible asset in return.’

‘That’s not true.’ He got to his feet, walking round the motel room in long agitated strides, bumping his huge frame as he went. ‘You said you wanted to be with me while it was possible.’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, I feel it’s impossible, that’s all.’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Because I’m no good at coping emotionally, that’s why.’ And his eyes seemed to retract into his skull again as they had done the moment before he had entered her the first time.

Her heart lifted. This, then, meant that he loved her. It must ‘Come to bed,’ she said, starting to tremble again. ‘Please, darling, it’ll be all right’

He looked like a man drowning.

She said again, ‘It’ll be all right’ She started to slip out of her clothes. Wanting her and showing it, he followed her. She lifted back the covers on the bed so that they might lie on the cool sheets. With sudden violence he turned to her, insisting that they make love dog fashion, as if to humiliate them both. Afterwards he lay staring at the ceiling with unshed tears behind his eyes.

It was nearly midday, and Harriet realised that she was due in the city in less than an hour for her first appointment She would have to dress and find a taxi.

Michael said that she need not worry, he would take her into town.
They dressed, hardly speaking to each other, he seemingly irritable. He felt a migraine coming, he said. He found the place
claustrophobic
.

The car was a handsome new BMW.

She wondered if it was the company’s, and decided that they surely couldn’t be out to make that big a splash on the New Zealand scene. She wished she was better at wearing riches. If he had to pick her as his woman, that was all very well, but surely he could have found someone to go with his image better. Mug shots on television every week hardly added up to the beautiful people, however much they, the performers, might sometimes like to project themselves as such. If she hadn’t been competent, she would have lost her job by now. Even so, a few pointed remarks had been made about her weight from time to time, and if she hadn’t been looking so well in recent months she would probably have been due for a general tidy-up. Her image had been due to slip sideways around the time she met Michael. She had been revamped by him, but it was an illusion. When he went, she would slide into middle age. For a little while he held her in aspic.

She didn’t want to keep him forever and had never anticipated doing so; she could wear his youth and his wealth for a certain amount of time, and then the affair would be over. The short time that they had together, its prospects, this was what she could cope with; something that would last for a specified time, never to be given too much time to disintegrate, to sour, for them to see through each other.

She remembered a conversation they had had in a restaurant some weeks before. She had been reading a contemporary English woman novelist, and told him about her. To her surprise, the next time he saw her he said that he had read a couple of the woman’s books.

‘They’re fun,’ Harriet had said, ‘but so unreal. All the women are rescued from their predicaments by money. They have inheritances or their mother’s jewels to flog off when the going gets rough. They cheat, they create honest situations and then find dishonest escape routes. Real life isn’t like that.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he’d replied, quite seriously. ‘I read one in which the girl was very poor all the way through. It was very good I thought.’ He named the book.

‘But don’t you realise, on the last page someone rich walks in and promises to rescue her, so she can get away from the disgrace of
being poor? The whole book’s a diatribe against people who aren’t rich.’

‘Well, being poor is rather boring, isn’t it?’ he’d said. ‘Why do you have to be so bloody virtuous about it?’

Perhaps that was how he saw himself in relationship to her; maybe that was what made him afraid. Of course she complained about money and the fact that it was getting harder and harder to live. She was afraid they were going to have to stop being a two-car family in spite of her job, and it was going to make things awfully difficult. He must have deduced by now that she and Max just made ends meet like most of the other people they knew. Maybe he saw in her someone who really was waiting to be rescued, and that as she didn’t seem to have found anyone else to do it for her, the price of his love would be to extract her from the depths. It was an awful idea, and, looking at him, not one that she cared to pursue now. There had been enough drama for one morning.

As they drove, he seemed calmer, as if he had settled something within himself.

‘I understand if you can’t see me,’ she said, as they drifted through the suburb and out onto the sea road. Her mind was already moving ahead to plan how she would spend her time in Auckland. She knew she wouldn’t see him again on this trip. It didn’t seem to matter, because now he had told her that he loved her. For the moment she believed she could live with anything, even his absence, if he loved her as she loved him. He took her hand, holding it in his lap as they drove.

‘There’s only one thing that I could ever ask of you,’ she said, ‘and it’s nothing that could hurt you.’

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘Of course,’ she said, ‘I told you I’d never ask anything, only this is different And it’s easy. But it’s the most important thing I could ask, I want you to understand how important it is, because if this is the most frightful demand I can make, you’ll see how easy I am on you.’

‘Try me,’ he said.

‘I want you to promise me that if it should be over, really over, before it’s time for you to leave New Zealand, you’ll tell me. That’s all. I’m too old to start making a fool of myself, making phone calls when you don’t want to hear from me, making arrangements like this that might never come off. Please save me from making an idiot of myself, Michael.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’d do that.’

‘You promise?’

He nodded, and in a few minutes they were in the city. ‘I’ll be down soon. Don’t worry about anything,’ he said, assuming the role of comforter.

And she was left in the street, watching the big shining red car draw away into the traffic.

But he didn’t come to Wellington again before he left New Zealand, nor did he get in touch with her. As the weeks passed, the silence was broken only by her calls to him. The secretary was always cool and polite, but occasionally firm.

‘Mr Young really does have wall-to-wall appointments today,’ she had said on one occasion. Harriet, on the other end of the phone, had spluttered with anger.

‘Do tell, when does Mr Young manage to roll up the carpet and have a little space to himself?’

‘Perhaps if you called him in the morning?’ suggested the secretary.

‘Kindly tell him I rang, and will be available to accept his call at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.’

At nine o’clock on the dot, the phone rang. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘what’s this I hear? My secretary tells me you sound like a subscriber who’s missed three copies of the magazine in a row.’

‘Tell her she sounds like a pain in the arse,’ said Harriet.

‘I don’t think I’m going to see you before I go, Harriet,’ he said. ‘I mean, it’s only a fortnight, and I’ve got so many people to see.’

‘Yes. I understand,’ Harriet replied dully. Two and a half months, you might as well say three, before she saw him again. The winter stretched in front of her forever. She was doodling on the telephone pad in front of her. She had drawn his initials in a squirly motif. M.S.Y. Michael Seamus Young.

‘Are you a Catholic?’ she asked.

There was a pause on the other end of the line. Then he said sharply, ‘I think my religion’s my own business.’

It was extraordinary to her that the question had never seriously occurred to her before.

‘I apologise,’ she said. ‘Politics and religion, taboo. Only we’ve talked about politics, how was I to know that it was a discriminatory process?’

‘Harriet, I’m in my office,’ he said. ‘Please.’

She hung up. Catholic guilt? It made sense, the sudden turnaround when she had arrived in Auckland. If it was simply sexual guilt, then he would never have become involved with her in the first place. But whatever strange torments he had put himself through on her account, he had come to her, away from home. From the way he had joked during their first meetings, she had thought that he was in the habit of taking women to his bed. Certainly he gave every indication that he had done so before his marriage, and nothing had changed her opinion on that point. But it had occurred to her after they became lovers that extramarital affairs were not his forte. He wanted her so desperately, or wanted someone, anyone maybe, that he’d been prepared to risk his conscience. What had he said? ‘God, I need this.’

So that was it. A frustrated playboy, hung up on religion. For which, measure for measure, she rejected, you could buy the cheap cynicism of a lapsing non-believer if you liked.

She wept hideously in private, over the next two weeks, stricken with grief and loss. In public, she saw friends again, went to the parties on the literary circuit, gossiped about men with Lynley and Joan, was more talkative about her lover, dropped reckless hints about him. Appraising her gaunt face they absorbed her back into the fold, guessing that she had now really joined the clan.

Their barely disguised sympathy made her angry with herself for ever having confided in them. She resolved to fight back with Michael. He had said — or seemed to say — that he loved her. He had promised her that when their affair was over, he would tell her. She had trusted him from he beginning, so why was she like this now? She was too analytical, which she had been told before, too unaccepting, so questioning that she spoiled things. She would not spoil this with doubts. Nothing had changed her love for him.

Before long, her anger began to dissolve and give way to compassion for him. She chose to call it compassion, not pity. She had been told somewhere that pity was the most disgusting of all emotions, that nothing more degraded the relationship of two people than if it were built on pity. She tried to relate into Michael’s situation how he must see the world if what she now believed of his religious background was in fact true. Did he see eels sliding over rocks? Were there black holes in the mattress at night?

Did Michael lie in the dark at nights awaiting the arrival of the devil? Did his bed crawl with snakes, and was she one of them? We all
have our darknesses, perhaps I have become his, she thought She mourned for him, and for herself as well. She could not absolve him but at least she could persist in asking him to trust her. But it seemed unlikely that he would.

H
ARRIET STARTED TO
come apart at the seams the year after Emma was born. It was a long period of disintegration, caused by several things. The baby had been fractious ever since she brought her home, and Gerald Wallace had stayed with them several times while a back specialist in Weyville was treating him. When Mary was in the house to keep a tether on him, Harriet could cope, but Mary had kept away, thinking that two women in the house would be too much trouble. Gerald had shared a room with Peter, and moaned and grumbled about his uncomfortable narrow bed. Max complained too, about having his father-in-law in the house. His attitude seemed unreasonable, particularly as his parents came to stay for an annual fortnight, up from Christchurch. There seemed to be months of simply having various grandparents to stay, with a camp stretcher put up in the main bedroom and no sex because there a restless wakeful child lay wide-eyed in the dark each night Max would become
tight-lipped
, pale and tense, no matter whose parents were visiting. When the Wallaces came, Harriet felt inordinately guilty, as though she had perpetrated some cardinal sin against him and their marriage bed. There was nothing wrong with their marriage bed when life was running normally; it was amazing how comfortably and satisfactorily they accommodated each other. They were so well suited that there seemed little to ask of each other. But denied that bed for any length of time, Max became very difficult.

And three children were harder to manage than two, even if Emma hadn’t been such a cross baby. Harriet would start the washing soon after seven each morning, and continue with it in between feeding them all, until ten or eleven, till she got the last of the nappies out They would lie dankly in the still soggy air of Weyville, sometimes drying enough to finish off in the airing cupboard, other times having to be strung around the kitchen.

Max had succeeded in one thing, certainly, they kept off the dinner party circuit now. Harriet was too tired even to think what to wear if
she went out, let alone to put something on and try to make herself look presentable. Max took a job three nights a week at a local petrol station so that this year they might have a proper holiday, seeing that she was so tired and rundown. She would often contrive to be asleep when he came home.

When he got some unexpected back pay, she said she guessed that would do for the holiday, and suggested he leave his part-time job. It seemed, however, that he had other ideas, and suddenly eager to bestow gifts on her, he said that he’d decided they should get a television set. It would give her something to look forward to in the evenings, and he’d stick with the job. Harriet said that it hardly seemed worth all the effort. She’d like the television set, but would probably feel better if he put some of his surplus energy into helping her fold nappies and tidy up the place in the evenings. He appeared to listen, but stayed at the petrol station all the same.

On one of his nights off there was an office party. Harriet said, ‘For God’s sake, Max, you know I don’t feel like going out at night lately. I’ll be happy in front of the television, it’s fine by me if you go.’

‘You’re getting too dependent on television,’ he said, and she thought, ‘Christ, isn’t he ever satisfied? He got me the bloody television set, let me get on and enjoy it.’

And indeed on many evenings he came home to find her slumped in front of the set, a glass of sherry in her hand. It was proving a bad winter.

‘I want you to come to the party with me,’ he insisted. ‘It wouldn’t look right if I went without you.’

‘Make up your mind, Max,’ she said, voicing her frustration over the television in a different way. ‘Either you want me to come with you, or it wouldn’t look right if I didn’t come. Which is it?’

‘Why do you have to split hairs all the time? Please. Just come with me.’

So she went while Miriam babysat By the time they left, Harriet was beginning to feel that the outing might have possibilities. She’d managed to lose a considerable amount of weight without even trying, she was back to the shape she had been when she married Max, her legs were all right, they suited the shorter skirts. During the day she’d had two good letters, one from a girl she was in library school with, forwarded from a magazine that had published a number of her poems the previous month, asking if it was really the same Harriet Wallace, and how good her work was. The girl, whose
name was Helen, still had a flat in Wellington — if Harriet was ever passing through, she was welcome to a bed. The other letter was an acceptance slip from still another magazine. These secret things kept her going.

Armed with these private thoughts and a couple of gins thrown down while she was putting the children to bed, she began to think that she might even enjoy herself.

The evening was a fiasco. The car had a flat tyre, and by the time Max had changed it, Harriet could feel herself getting flushed round the neck as she always did after a few drinks, and irritable at being kept waiting. It was cold in the car, and what with a hot face and cool feet, she felt decidedly uncomfortable.

The party was a smaller gathering than Harriet had expected; she had hoped that it would be a large group in which she could comfortably lose herself. Instead, Max’s boss was there, and the pecking order was clearly defined. Harriet was expected to take her place in the line. She would have given such a dinner party herself a year or so before, but she had slipped so far out of the Weyville social scene that she simply hadn’t bothered recently. Still, she could feel Max’s resentment that his junior, as their host was, should be entertaining their mutual boss.

The evening wore on. Harriet was careful and diligent in conversation to Mrs Pegler, the wife of Max’s boss, listening to her talk of travels abroad and grandchildren. Max watched Harriet carefully out of the corner of his eye. ‘Blast him,’ she fumed, ‘doesn’t he know that I won’t do anything? He’s safe. I’m not going to make any trouble, I wouldn’t dream of answering anyone back, even if they spat on me.’

She forced her attention back to Mrs Pegler. ‘I beg your pardon?’ she asked.

‘I said,’ repeated Mrs Pegler, ‘aren’t you the little girl who writes poetry under the name of Harriet Wallace?’

‘How did you know?’ said Harriet flatly.

‘Someone must have told me,’ said Mrs Pegler. ‘Yes, of course, Mrs Everett, Miriam … you do know her, don’t you?’

Miriam. The bitch. She had never once mentioned the poetry to Harriet. Had Don told her? But much did Don know? She hadn’t told him about any other poems since the first one. She supposed he might have followed them up. But telling Miriam wasn’t fair, nor was it right that Miriam had said nothing to her. Of course
Miriam might have found them at school — she did teach English, after all.

‘Yes, I know her,’ said Harriet.

‘How quaint,’ said the chief engineer’s wife, who was standing next to them. ‘Did you hear that? Harriet publishes poetry.’

‘So we’ve got a real writer in our midst,’ said Mr Pegler.

Their hostess, a nervous twittery girl, anxious to say the right things, said, ‘Really, you’re so modest, Harriet. Is it terribly hard to be clever?’

‘Must read a bit of it, eh? Let the cat out of the bag there. How does it feel having all the family secrets down on paper, Max?’ her husband contributed.

‘Of course, I took the trouble to look them up in the library. A trifle gauche, shall we say, but readable. It’s nice to see the young trying. You could be quite good some day if you persevere,’ said Mrs Pegler.

To the best of Harriet’s knowledge Mrs Pegler had never exhibited the slightest literary qualification in her life. Still, she supposed the same could be said of herself. Soon she told Max that she thought they should be getting along; she was very tired.

Their journey home was silent. They put away the car, and Harriet thought, ‘Not a fight, please not a fight tonight. I haven’t done anything, I behaved, I was on my best behaviour all evening. I tried for you, Max, please.’

Miriam was watching the late news when they got in.

‘Good time?’ she asked brightly.

‘All right, thanks,’ said Harriet. Max was checking the children in their rooms. ‘Mrs Pegler was there. She said you’d shown her some of my poetry.’

‘Did she? I hope she told you how much we both enjoyed it.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yes, we were both in the library having a chat a couple of day ago, and I picked some up. Good heavens, I said, Harriet Wallace, isn’t that what our Harriet’s name used to be when she worked here? We both read it. Well, I haven’t seen you since. I was going to mention it of course.’

Miriam was always so matter-of-fact that it was impossible to fault her. ‘Thanks ever so much for looking after the kids,’ said Harriet.

‘Fine, any time. I’ve always got something to do. Got a pile of marking done tonight before I sat down in front of your goggle box. We will get one, I suppose, Don’s always on about it, but y’know me,
so much to do, I simply couldn’t allow myself to get hooked on it. I can see how easy it is. Ah well, I’ll be off then.’

She stretched herself, tidy and sensible in her twinset and tweeds. ‘Come and see me one afternoon and we can have a proper talk. I see so little of you these days, I miss out on the important things.’ You couldn’t really doubt Miriam. She was a good friend.

When she’d gone, Max came through. ‘How much of this stuff is there, then?’ he said. His voice was hard.

‘What stuff?’

‘You know. Poetry.’

‘What do you mean, stuff? Are you ashamed of it? What’s wrong with writing poetry? It’s quite respectable.’

‘Only you don’t tell
me
about it.’

‘Do you tell me everything you do?’

‘That’s not the point. You choose to make a public issue of the matter, which is all right as far as I’m concerned. It would just be nice if I didn’t have to find out about it at my friends’ dinner parties and in front of the people I work for.’

‘You know,’ said Harriet, ‘that’s a side of you I never considered when I married you. Who would ever have thought that you had so much side? You seemed quite a mild unambitious person then, though I suppose following me up here was quite an ambitious move on your part. I think you did well enough out of the bargain.’

‘I didn’t ask for a bargain,’ said Max, in a strangled voice, ‘I asked for a wife.’

‘And all that that implies in the conventional sense of the word?’

‘Why is your poetry a secret? That’s what I want to know.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Harriet. ‘It’s something I can’t explain. I suppose it’s to do with keeping a part of myself intact. There are things I want to say aloud that are unsuitable, so I put them down on paper instead.’

‘So these things that you write …’ He turned away. She knew he’d been going to say that he supposed they were unsuitable, and equally that he knew how stupid it would sound to them both. ‘I’m trying, Harriet,’ he said. ‘I try to give you what I can, to make things easier. I don’t like seeing you like this. What are we going to do about you? Think you should see the doctor, old thing?’

‘What for? So I won’t write poetry? So I’ll be a better Mrs Ordinary Housewife?’ Her voice was rising.

‘Yes, if you like,’ Max shouted.

The bowl of marigolds that had stood on the mantelpiece landed slightly to the right of his ear, hitting the lampshade. It smashed in a shower of fragments, splattered water and bruised flowers.

‘Was that difficult?’ asked Max.

‘Don’t stand there trying to be God,’ screamed Harriet. ‘No, it wasn’t hard. I’ll show you how easy it was.’

She ran through to the kitchen and tore open a cupboard door. Her hands lit on a pile of cups, which she scooped up and hurled at the floor. She started to laugh, with tears running down her face, as they splintered upwards, the chips rebounding high. Max caught her arm as she hurled dinner plates through the glass panel of the back door. ‘Stop it!’ he shouted.

‘Not likely. I’m enjoying myself.’ She seized a bottle of tomato sauce and watched it explode on a wall, the contents splattering round the room like blood.

She suddenly found herself pinned against the far wall, both hands held behind her back. Max was deliberately hitting her face.

Shocked, she stood still. He didn’t seem to notice, but continued to hit her. She could distinguish him saying, ‘I’ve got to do it to you, Harriet, I’ve got to do it.’

‘No, you don’t, you’re enjoying it,’ she heard herself crying, in a voice coming out of some alien part of her.

They both stopped, panting and out of breath. Harriet reached up and touched her face as he freed her hands. ‘I must be crying,’ she thought, feeling the wetness. But it was Max who was crying — she was bleeding.

‘I’ll put you to bed,’ said Max.

‘Yes, please.’

‘And I’ll get the doctor in the morning.’

‘If you like.’

‘If I’ve marked you, I’ll tell him what happened. No lies.’

‘I won’t tell anyone, though.’

‘It’ll be all right, then. We’ll keep looking after each other,’ he said, leading her, limp and bedraggled, to the bedroom. Her head was thumping and splitting.

It was still aching in the morning, as if she had a hangover. Perhaps that’s what it was, she thought Maybe I was simply pissed out of my mind. But she hadn’t been, she was sure. She’d slowed down after those two drinks. Scared silly she’d do the wrong thing. No, it wasn’t alcohol. She went out to the bathroom.

‘What are you doing up?’ Max said, from the kitchen.

‘Just going to the loo.’ She put her head round the door. The kitchen was immaculate.

‘I’ll bring you your breakfast in when I’ve fixed the children’s. You’ll have to have your tea out of one of the best cups.’

‘Did I break all the breakfast cups?’ she enquired.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll get some more today.’

‘You’ll be late for work.’

‘I’m having a day off.’

The doctor examined her briefly, wrote out a prescription and went away to talk to Max. When he’d gone Max came in.

‘What did he say?’ she asked.

‘He’s given you a prescription for some sedatives.’