a Breed of Women

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘He said he’d look after me,’ said Harriet, hanging her head. ‘He said he’d get things so nothing’d happen to me. Honestly Leonie, he was really upset last night because … he hadn’t taken care of me properly. It’ll be all right, nothing’ll happen, you see.’

  Leonie impulsively slipped her arm through Harriet’s.

  ‘Oh, Harriet,’ she said softly, ‘You are a mess, aren’t you? What am I going to do with you?’

  She and Harriet had reached the seat under the war memorial, where they had sat on the day of their first meeting. They sat down together. Harriet started to cry in great anguished sobs. Leonie, who was not a weeper, sat observing, saying nothing.

  Finally she said, ‘All right, all right, that’s enough of that. I guess we’re just going to have to see you through it if that’s the way it is.’

  ‘Dick said he’d always be around if things got tricky.’

  ‘You mean about Denny?’ As Harriet nodded, Leonie said, ‘Wow, you really have moved things along, haven’t you? All right then, just promise me that we’ll keep it between ourselves. When you’ve got it out of your system, it won’t have done any harm.’

  Harriet snuffled into her handkerchief, wiping her eyes.

  ‘Hey?’ said Leonie.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Is it really nice?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Lucky old you. I’m tempted to try it again.’

  Eventually she did, without such good luck. Despite numerous conscientious efforts, Leonie seemed doomed to failure in this department.

  The football club became the centre of both girls’ lives. Every Saturday saw them bundled up in heavy coats on the sidelines, cheering themselves hoarse for the Rovers, and in the evenings they would go on to a party, almost invariably at an old house where three of the boys, including Denny, lived together. Dick took to calling at Cousin Alice’s house often enough for it to appear that he and Harriet were keeping company.

  He was not really suitable from Cousin Alice’s point of view, but she seemed to sense in Harriet a lack of any great interest, and on the odd occasion that she had queried her about the seriousness of the relationship, Harriet’s light-hearted answers reassured her. The ball season was nearly over; Dick only called once as if he were taking her out Having deposited her in Denny’s pick-up, he then carried on to the latest of Chas’s unsuitable arrangements. Chas was not a permanent fixture in Leonie’s life and her boyfriends varied, but they were always Rovers.

  So the winter lengthened into spring, and the double life continued. It was almost a triple life, for Harriet had another secret inner life developing, which only she and Mr Whitwell knew about. They both loved poetry, and Mr Whitwell would take her aside almost daily to air a new book, a new poem, or even a line he had discovered; she rewarded him with similar gifts. She was reminded of the long-ago teacher who had read to her in the school shed. Every now and then, she wondered why she and Mr Whitwell had to make such a secret of it, and the thought must have occurred to Mr Whitwell too. He said as much one day, when he had called her into his office on the pretext of going over one of her papers to go off to library school, and then flourished a book of Robert Graves under her nose. ‘Read “Star Talk”, my dear. Go on, go on, read it, it’s all about the stars, and goodness knows you’ve got enough of those in your eyes these days.’

  Her eyes scanned the page, and she laughed with the pleasure of the poem. ‘Aloud, aloud,’ cried Mr Whitwell.

  ‘Are you awake, Gemelli / This frosty night?’ Harriet read.

  ‘Ah yes,’ cried Mr Whitwell. ‘We’ll be awake till reveille / Which is Sunrise, say the Gemelli. Tell me, Harriet, have you ever watched the sunrise?’

  ‘Only through my windows before I went to the cows, up home,’ said Harriet. ‘But I’ve often seen the stars. Only I never knew their names until you showed me this.’ And she told him about the nights when she had wandered by the river bank in the dead of night, back at Ohaka. He nodded.

  ‘Yes, yes, I can see you doing that.’

  Pleased, he handed her another book. ‘I’ve only just discovered this one. Collected Poems. They’ve been out since 1953, never even heard of the woman till now, but she seemed to be like you.’

  She turned the book over. Charlotte Mews. The pages fell open, and as her eyes lit on a page, she exclaimed sharply.

  ‘Sensual, yes, I knew you’d like it, I knew you wouldn’t prove me false. It’s for you. Yes, you must take it, I insist. It’s never been my pleasure to give a book of poetry to anyone before, let alone such a very young lady. Oh,’ he sighed, ‘but I should have liked to. It’s our secret, of course?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  He looked away, embarrassed. ‘You understand, your pleasure is my indulgence. I should dislike anyone to think it more. People have strange ideas about people who like poetry.’

  ‘I do know what it’s like,’ Harriet assured him. She toyed with the idea of telling him about the teacher, but it seemed inappropriate. ‘So you think I’m sensual?’

  ‘You’re a brazen lass, that’s what you are. I should have you turned out of my office.’

  ‘But you trust me enough to answer me.’

  ‘Mmm. Yes, I do.’ He began pacing round. ‘A bad thing, a body and a mind, Harriet. They don’t go together. A curse more damaging for poets and those who would follow them than for most. They, poor devils, have to follow the flesh and the brain. It should not be allowed to happen. It’s a cruel God, one who invites partisans to afflict mortals in such a way.’

  ‘If there is a God.’

  ‘And you think that there may not be?’

  ‘Until someone proves that there is.’

  ‘Aren’t you afraid of the fact that nobody ever has proved that?’

  ‘Some would say that they have.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘So you doubt, too?’

  ‘Harriet, I’m too old to be certain of anything now. Three years to a pension. I love my books, I love my work, I might have done greater things but my life didn’t allow for conflicts …’ He paused. ‘Yes, the conflicts. I know the problems, Harriet … why should I have anybody come in and ask me to spell out what I believe? Once I would have said there is no God, now I can only say that some may know God, and others may not. You must make up your own mind, neither be deceived by charlatans nor fail to choose the truth, even if it’s unfashionable. Now go, I want the returns on last week’s issues by midday. You’re wasting my time.’

  When Christmas came, Harriet wrote and told her mother she would be arriving in Ohaka on 23 December. She left Weyville on 22 December.

  Denny was waiting for her at the Auckland bus stop. He’d brought a curtain ring for her to wear on her finger, and they set off in search of a hotel. They tried three private hotels before they came to one that would take them. At each place the eyes at reception had flicked from Harriet to Denny then shuttered down, with the formula reply, ‘Sorry, booked out.’

  The fourth place was run by a derelict old creature with thick bandaged legs.

  ‘Four pounds in advance,’ she said, scarcely looking at either of them. She put the money in a dirty apron pocket and wandered off, saying through a sticky wet fag caught on her lip, ‘Room six, third on your left down the corridor.’

  Harriet shivered as they went down the dank passage. A dining room was on one side and it looked as if it hadn’t been used for years. A few tables covered with stuck-on plastic stood fly-speckled and ugly, waiting for diners who never came. Or if they did, they probably risked food poisoning, Harriet thought grimly. On the other side, as they continued, was a row of open lavatories, not proper ones either. Judging by the smell, they had to be emptied every day, or should have been, and hadn’t.

  Their room was just about as unprepossessing as the rest of the hotel. Wallpaper curled off the walls, the furniture was utilitarian and beaten up, the bed-cover stained. Harriet collapsed on it, worn out. The bed crackled.

  ‘What
on earth is it?’ she exclaimed.

  They lifted the covers, feeling around, and discovered the source of the noise. Under the bottom sheet was a layer of newspaper.

  Harriet pulled it out ‘What sort of place is this?’ she demanded.

  Denny rubbed his chin. ‘I reckon it’s a quickie joint,’ he said.

  ‘You mean a place where prostitutes take their men?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘We can’t stay here, then.’

  ‘Doesn’t look like we’ll find anywhere else much, does it?’ he said reasonably.

  She sighed, agreeing.

  ‘You want me to put you on the bus for Ohaka?’

  ‘I can’t go home today, you know they’re not expecting me. Somebody’d guess something was up. Besides,’ she said, crumpling, ‘I wanted to sleep all night with you.’

  ‘Let’s have another look.’

  They turned the bed back. Miraculously, the linen was crisp and snowy white. It appeared that at least it was laundered regularly, perhaps something that even prostitutes and their men had standards about, heaven knew. Denny pushed up the creaky window. Outside oak trees pushed green against the building, a branch even springing its leaves through the open window. Pale gold light fell in a bar across the room. Denny looked at her, asking her to say yes.

  ‘It’ll do,’ said Harriet.

  For the first time she was able to show him all her body, and they were able to do things to each other that hadn’t been possible before. He ate her cunt with her legs around his neck till she came, and then, holding back on her, he begged her, ‘Blow me, girlie, please,’ and showed her how to fellate him. Limp and exhausted, hours later, they went to sleep in each other’s arms.

  Harriet woke before him the next morning. She realised she was frantic with hunger as they hadn’t had a meal the night before.

  She raised herself on one elbow, wondering whether she should wake him. The morning light was filtering green through the leaves, they had left the window open all night. It threw his dark face into relief. She supposed that his appearance was unusual for a Maori. His face was thin, almost hollow-cheeked, and his nose aquiline and proud, the forehead very high, so that his hair seemed to be on the point of receding. Only his skin, stretched tight on his face, told anything of what, or who he truly was. It was so dark that around his mouth it was almost blue-black. She touched his mouth with her finger; he stirred in his sleep and settled back against her again.

  She wondered how they would spend the day until it was time for her to leave on the bus for Ohaka. He was travelling on up to Kaikohe where he came from. There had been talk of him driving to Ohaka, which was scarcely out of his way, but she knew that as her bus passed the farm she would have to join it somehow, and if she missed the connection she was in trouble. The effort didn’t seem justified. Denny had accepted without comment or query that he would not be welcome at Ohaka, just as he had accepted the need for Dick to play the role of her suitor in Weyville. There was a tacit understanding between them that this was the order of things.

  Perhaps they would talk. What about? She and Denny seemed to have talked about everything and nothing. Would he like the poetry she loved? Did he read? And what about him? There seemed to be nothing that she did not know about him, and then there was virtually nothing at all. Only the week before had she found out where he lived, and that he was going home to his family for Christmas, just as she was. They’d talked about football, and whether Dick or Chas, or one or other of the rest of them had been beaten by the whistle, or the ref, about which record to play next, about how many pigs’ trotters to take back to the flat with them when the party got hungry, about whether her period had come all right. All that, but not much else, thinking back.

  Of course she knew that he worked at the mill office, as a clerk in the accounts department. He’d always been good at figures, they fascinated him. She wondered why, for she herself could never understand them. Perhaps he could explain them to her. He’d told her once with pride that an office manager had suggested he should go for his accountancy exams. Maybe he would one day. One day? What was one day, and what did it need to make him reach out for that goal? He was twenty-three, how did he plan to spend the rest of his life? She knew, too, that he had wandered south looking for work, and ended up in Weyville, answering an advertisement in an Auckland paper. Why had he left home? For the same reasons as she had, or because of some different wanderlust? They could be like each other, but again, maybe they were nothing like each other at all.

  So where did they begin? Maybe it was all between their bodies. She shifted restlessly. It couldn’t be like that, it couldn’t The movement half awoke him. At her breast, like a child, he caught her nipple in his mouth and began suckling her. She felt him hardening against her leg. Before he entered, once more he said, lazily releasing her nipple, ‘Will you let me do that when you’re full of milk, eh? Will you let me share with our babies?’

  And as they coupled, she thought, ‘Am I too late? Are we already committed? Is there no turning back?’

  They wandered round Auckland hand in hand all morning, after finding a place to eat breakfast. The boarding house had repelled them both once they ventured out of the room, and Harriet felt doubtful that breakfast was part of the service, anyway. A greasy cooking smell came from somewhere in the building, but then she supposed that the proprietress must eat She didn’t even dare look in the dining room.

  With Harriet’s suitcase safely deposited at the bus depot, they found a café that served a handsome breakfast Full of double helpings of bacon and eggs and chips, toast and coffee, the day seemed to hold promise again.

  Denny asked her to help him buy presents for ‘the little fellas at home’. She would have liked to buy presents for her parents in Auckland too, but that wasn’t possible if she were not to give away her secret.

  There seemed to be a hundred people for whom Denny had to buy presents. At least she got to look around in the shops, though not much at the places she would really have liked to spend time in. Mostly it was toy shops; nobody in Kaikohe seemed to need pretty clothes from the dress shops.

  By eleven o’clock she was tired out, and her hand hung heavy in Denny’s. He looked at her, worried. ‘You all right?’

  ‘Just tired.’

  ‘We’ll have a cuppa, all right?’

  They found an Adams Bruce shop, smelling top-heavy with chocolate and ice cream. It was packed out with families as tired as they were, all of whom had been doing their Christmas shopping. When Harriet and Denny had fought their way through to a table, he sat her down, without sitting down himself.

  ‘I want to get something. Don’t you go away now.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ she asked in a panic, having a sudden vision of him disappearing into the crowd and not coming back without her having a chance to say goodbye.

  ‘Hopping back to a shop. I want to get something. You get us some tea and stuff, okay?’

  She nodded and watched his back disappear through the throng.

  Goodbye? Was that what she really wanted? Perhaps they were coming closer together, but she felt adrift on an alien sea, not knowing where to head for the shore. Denny got what he wanted. Dick had said that Was she really what Denny wanted, and if so, was he what she wanted too?

  Harriet felt around in her purse for the little box that held the present she had bought for him. The cufflinks had cost her twenty-five and six at the main jewellers in Weyville. The jeweller had helped her choose them with care, saying with a wink as they went through the trays together, ‘My word, young Dick’ll be getting ideas above his station.’

  That had comforted her considerably. Obviously Cousin Alice was talking around, and putting a good face on things as far as Dick was concerned, fully believing the lie. The crowd had stuck close together that year. It was amazing, when one thought about it, that word hadn’t filtered back to Cousin Alice.

  Now that the time had come to give Denny his Chris
tmas present, she was shy, wondering whether he’d like the cufflinks, whether the paua shell in them might seem too ostentatious or too much catering for the fact that he was a Maori. Maybe she shouldn’t have even bought him anything at all; he’d be sure to be embarrassed, particularly if he hadn’t bought her anything, and there was no sign that he had.

  Denny arrived as tea and cakes were brought to the table. She was frantically counting out change from her purse, having a horrible feeling that she would arrive in Ohaka penniless. How on earth was she going to get to the Ohaka post office to draw some money without her parents finding out? With a bit of luck she’d be able to slip into the big post office at the bottom of Queen Street before the bus went.

  Denny put a pound down on the table, and pushed her money back towards her.

  ‘Not much of a housekeeper, are you?’ he said, sitting down. ‘Have to teach you not to spend all my money.’

  She felt faint. ‘That’s my money I was counting, not yours.’

  ‘No, but it will be mine some day, eh?’

  He put a huge balloony paper bag down on the table between them.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Go on, open it and see.’

  She opened the bag carefully. Inside was a white Breton straw hat. ‘For me?’ she asked.

  He nodded. ‘Put it on, girlie. Happy Christmas.’

  So she put the hat on, there in the middle of the Adams Bruce place, with people staring at her.

  ‘You like it?’

  ‘It’s — it’s lovely, only I can’t see myself in it Do you like it on me?’

  ‘You look like a lady.’

  ‘Is that why you bought it?’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘Who’d you buy it for, you or me?’ she said, laughing at him a little.

  ‘Me,’ he said complacently, without a trace of remorse.

  She opened her purse and got out the little box. ‘These are for you. Happy Christmas to you too, Denny.’

  He stared at the contents for a long time. ‘You got these for me?’