a Breed of Women (40 page)

It had been agreed that Harriet would go with Francis to the Dixons for lunch and leave him there while she went up to explore the old farm and the little town. She would be welcome to stay the night, he told her. The Dixons had always had a soft spot for her but if she wanted to go on up to Whangarei that night she should do so. This journey should have no constraints on her, he told her she must take it at her own pace. When she had seen her parents for a day or
so she would come back to Ohaka and pick Francis up, to take him back as far as Auckland so he could to fly Australia.

Harriet spent a pleasant hour or so with the Dixons. They were pleased to see her, and would have held her there all day if Francis hadn’t intervened. She pored over photographs of Wendy’s children, far away in England. The grandparents sighed wistfully over them — they’d seen the children once, of course, but it wasn’t the same. Perhaps they would go over some day, but they were getting old, they told Harriet. They felt they hadn’t had much luck with grandchildren, what with Francis never having married and Wendy over there all that way. Still, there was another daughter who had done all right by them; a couple of nice kiddies and her husband a good chap, settled on a farm down Kaiwaka way.

At last they let her go asking whether she intended to see the Colliers. Harriet had almost forgotten that they existed. Surely they were not all alive up there still? No, the old man had been gone a good few years back, but old Doris was still up there and the boy was too, though very poorly, they’d heard. They were sure they’d be pleased to see her.

She drove slowly towards Ohaka township. Ohaka. A hard place to describe, though there was little enough left of it. There had been three main stores, and the stock and station agency and the bank and two churches and the school, standing in the middle of the paddocks with the road threading away through them. But what was it, really? A place where she had lived. It was a special place that only those who had lived in it could understand. She was coming home.

The three general stores were closed now with boards across their gaping fronts, unpainted and collapsing. Now there was a big building trying to imitate a city supermarket, brightly lit and vulgar, and alongside that a chemist’s shop. Apart from that nothing seemed much changed. Children were starting to dawdle from school. They could have been the same children of twenty-five years ago; she could have been one of them. Something was missing, though, and at first she could not place it.

Then she realised that the church wasn’t there any more. She stopped the car, and walked over to where it had been. The trees were still there, the same old apple trees, and they showered petals on her as they had done in the spring of her confirmation. Where the church had been was now just a pile of rubble and charred foundations. It had been burnt down, and that shook her. The devil
must have had his way. Amazing how he kept rearing his ugly head. There must be some sort of symbolism in the destruction of the church. Perhaps she just wished God might have His way once in a while. But then, with friends like Father Dittmer, who needed enemies? She recalled that moment when the Bishop had spoken of heaven being home and home being heaven, and how she had felt excluded. There were no magic keys and possibly she would always be locked out.

Along at the end of the road was an old barn close to the road, one she remembered passing regularly. It appeared to be opened up to the road now with a gateway leading in, and a sign outside. She wandered along to it, curious. The sign read CRAFTS. How odd, she thought, crafts in Ohaka, forgetting the many pottery shops that she and Max visited when they holidayed in the north. That was one thing, but crafts in Ohaka, that was something else. She went in, the barn had had a floor put down in it, and trestles were suspended around the room, displaying indifferent artifacts, second-rate pottery and homemade knitted garments. A pasty young woman with her hair pulled back greasily into a rubber band was sitting in charge, knitting. A toddler whimpered round her feet, and she pulled it off the wares, with irritable exclamation from time to time. The room was buzzing with flies. Harriet found it dispiriting. The mother had a strangely familiar look.

‘Are you from round these parts?’ Harriet asked.

‘Yep. All me life.’

It was hardly possible, yet she had to ask her. ‘Are you related to Ailsa Wilson that was, by any chance?’

‘My mother. Know her?’

‘Oh, long ago. I lived here when she was a girl. I haven’t seen her in a long time.’ Harriet told the girl who she was, and asked to be remembered to her mother. For a moment she entertained a thought of going to see her, but she guessed she knew the story of Ailsa’s life without being told. A grandmother already. The girl said laconically that she’d pass the message on. She didn’t seem particularly interested, though she did say, ‘Not been back for a while then?’

‘Eighteen years.’

‘Long time. You’ll see a few changes, then.’ The girl was perfectly serious.

She drove on up through the valley, to the old house where she
had lived with her parents. But it too had gone. A new place stood on the old site, a shiny solid modern brick farmhouse. This was something she hadn’t bargained for. The woman was right after all, there were some changes. It made it more difficult to approach the occupants of the place than she had imagined. It was one thing to walk up to a door she had entered thousands of times, but she felt intimidated and out of place, confronted by this new house. The occupants might think she was idiotic wanting to go sauntering round their paddocks.

She decided she would go up to the Colliers to break the ice. She drove carefully up through the paddocks to the old house, glad to see that it at least was unchanged. Across at the shed a man was bringing in the cows for milking. She waved, expecting it to be Jim, and the man responded, uncertainly, not knowing who she was. From this distance it was impossible to decide whether it was Jim or not.

Doris Collier met her at the door, a big thick old woman, her legs swollen purple and folding over the edge of her slippers. She looked at Harriet without comprehension. ‘I’m Harriet, from across the road,’ Harriet said at last.

The old woman put her arms out and folded her against her spotty apron. ‘Of course it is, of course it’s Harriet. You’ve come to see him, then?’

She led her inside, closing the door behind her. The smell of must and decay impregnated the air and something else again, sickly sweet, which she could not define. The wallpaper was curling off the walls, the floral carpet, once the envy of Ohaka, was worn thin, with great brown threads actually showing through near the doorways.

‘It’s not been the same since Dad died,’ said Doris, seeing her looking around. ‘We miss him, Jim and me, you know.’

‘I’m sure you do. He was a very …’ Harriet sought for a word, ‘a very kind man.’

‘Aye, he was that,’ agreed Doris. ‘You don’t get the heart to do things the way you did, girl. That’s the truth of it, and nursing Jim day ’n’ night I don’t get much time to look to things beside him. Come along then, you’d best see the boy.’

The boy, whom Harriet now took to mean Jim, was propped up on a great pile of white pillows. The room was very neat, and clean in contrast to the rest of the house, as if all of Doris’s energies centred round this one spot.

Some of the smell was explained in this room, too. It was the smell
of sickness, of cancer and of approaching death. The burly Jim she had known was a tiny bundle of a man now, only a huge distended stomach showing any size at all. His eyes were sunken deep in a luminous waxy face.

‘You’ve got a visitor, Jim. The lass has come to see you,’ said Doris, as if they had been expecting her.

‘Might have known,’ said Jim. ‘She was a good ’un, eh? Always was.’

‘And to think I didn’t know her on the doorstep! I should have, seen you often enough gawping out of that box at nights.’ She indicated the television set in the corner of the bedroom. ‘There’s one that made good in spite of herself, I say to Jim at nights, don’t I, Jim?’

‘Aye, Ma, you do too.’

‘It was the shock of seeing you on the doorstep instead of in the corner, I reckon,’ said Doris. ‘Well, girl, you’d better have a cuppa. You sit here and have a natter to the boy while I put the kettle on.’

The boy was nearly fifty, if Harriet’s calculations were right. He was always the boy, she supposed, when a mother saw her own flesh and blood dying before her eyes.

‘I’ll not get better, you know,’ said Jim.

Harriet had nothing to say.

‘You were a good bit of a kid to me. We got on all right, you and me, didn’t we?’

‘Yes we did, Jim. And you were good to me. Looked after me. I’m grateful for that.’

‘Grateful, eh? Well I dunno about that. You needed looking after. You get that Maori joker off your back all right, then?’

Strange how one is caught, Harriet thought. If anyone anywhere else had said that, I’d have bitten his head off. Yet what can I say to this man, locked far away from the rest of the world in a diseased body and his old prejudices, the prejudices of Ohaka.

And yet, hadn’t Jim once defended Maoris to her father? A strange mixture, these people of the land, a blend of practical tolerance and intellectual reaction. She wondered what Jim would say to that comment, and smiled.

‘What you smiling about then? It’s not funny,’ he said crossly.

‘Just that it’s good to see you.’

‘Aye, and you. Got kids?’

She spread photos of the children out across the bed, and he plucked feebly at them, admiring them.

‘You done right to get away from here,’ he remarked. ‘There’s no way outa Ohaka, ’cept by flying young, or dying here.’

‘Maybe,’ said Harriet. ‘The trap is if you try to fly too high, and don’t quite make it. I’ve got a long way to go yet. I’ve no way of knowing that I ever will.’

‘You got outa here,’ he said stubbornly. ‘I died here long ago, long before this lot hit me, girl.’

It was getting on for evening when Doris rang the people across the road and asked them if Harriet could go down to the river. She wanted to give her a meal, but Harriet said that she was expected in Whangarei. This was not quite the truth, but she’d decided to push on to her parents’ place, rather than sit round at the Dixons’. Francis would understand how she felt, but the Dixons themselves would want to lay claims on her, and ask her what she thought of this and that that she’d seen, and she felt she could cope better with Gerald tonight.

She wished she had something to give Jim, something that said thank you for being a good man, having led as good a life as you knew how to, but there was nothing. His and Doris’s eyes seemed to say that her coming was enough. She wished that she had been as good as they believed.

Doris’s phone call had eliminated the need for her to see the people on the old farm; they were quite happy for her to wander round as suited her. With a rare and surprising tact, Doris had simply said she was a girl who used to live across the road, without saying it was the girl on telly, or anything that would make them offended if she didn’t go and say hullo.

The spring growth was coming away nicely and she wondered if they’d make hay this year. The trees were alive with buds and the breaking hawthorn. A living landscape and a dying people.

She didn’t stay as long as she had expected. The air was full of ghosts; her own ghost was strung between earth and sky on a fallen poplar branch, full of hope and dreams. She wasn’t that girl any more, but someone different, a stranger in a foreign land. The channel of the river had been cleared of willows and it flowed cleanly between the banks. A dark flash nicked through the shadows on the water. The eels, always the eels.

At least she still recognised the perils beneath calm surfaces.

She walked thoughtfully away, back up to the car. Perhaps some day she would bring Emma here. She might know what to make of it.
The others would make their way here of their own accord, if they wanted to. It was hard to know what it all meant. Now she would go to her parents, to their old age, and their pride, and their loneliness, to their talk of ‘home’ and ‘the old Dart’ which had become a dream that went the way of most dreams.

Harriet rang Leonie Coglan on her return, but Laurence, the younger of her sons, told her that Leonie had left for Toronto the previous week. He would give her a forwarding address if she liked, and she listened while he read out an address. It was care of someone who she recognised from the name as being Leonie’s lover. So he was real after all.

‘When will she be coming back?’ she asked, and was not surprised to hear that she wouldn’t be back at all.

This time, Harriet knew she would not see Leonie again, unless through some fateful accident. She thought that in the back of her mind she had always expected to see Leonie again, after returning to Weyville and finding her gone. This time it was final.

In part, she supposed that she must be responsible, and was sad, but really thought that there was little that she could have done. She and Leonie had tried to resurrect some common bond, and it had failed. Someone was bound to be hurt. She was sorry that it must be Leonie’s children, and presumably, through her parting with them, Leonie herself. She hoped the compensations of flight warranted what she felt she must do.

Harriet believed she might have loved Leonie once, and again, twice. But it was too late. As she might love Max. Leonie had been right to suspect them of complicity. Harriet had seen the flash of suspicion in Leonie’s eyes. And it was true, she and Max were in some kind of collusion, but now Max had become a watcher and a waiter. He waited for her when he might have gone away. He saw her when she thought he did not He waited for her to see him, through the eyes of other men, as if they were the field of discovery, and he the object of her exploration. Leonie had been wise to go away; perhaps Max was wise to stay. But that was his business. Harriet had come to a point where what she most wanted was to see herself.

To be sure, there were times when she would wonder how Leonie was, and if her going had been worthwhile, but it didn’t do to dwell on the subject too much. One thing she believed she had learnt was that she and Leonie belonged to a breed of women who were indestructible. They were survivors. As Wendy was. Or Julie.
(Remember Julie?) Or her daughter Genevieve, or her mother. Mary might prove her triumph only by outliving Gerald, but Harriet knew she would do it.