a Breed of Women

by Fiona Kidman

  Two days later, Mary Wallace tried to telephone her daughter while her husband was cleaning out the shed after morning milking. The phone kept ringing and ringing when tolls put her through and eventually they said it was no good trying any more. It was too early for Denny to be at work, so she decided he must be at the hospital.

  Gerald Wallace came in from the shed as his wife was plonking her old pudding-basin hat on her head and putting a pile of things in a large canvas carry-all that they’d brought from England. Mary faced him defiantly. He just said, ‘I’ll carry your bag to the bus,’ and waited with her to flag it down as it passed the farm. Mary sat with her daughter through the long and savage labour, for as long as the staff at the hospital would allow her to. She rubbed Harriet’s back at the point where the strain imposed by being half-suspended with her legs in stirrups was most intolerable. She and Harriet were allowed to see the little cream-caramel coloured boy briefly before a nurse took him away. The doctor suddenly seemed nicer and more concerned.

  Denny never saw his son. When he checked in the hospital the next morning, three days after leaving Harriet there, the baby had given up its struggle for oxygen. Mary had tried to find her son-in-law all through the night before, but all her enquiries had met with blank walls of silence. A protective wall, she thought grimly, when she tried to reach him through his office.

  Sitting on the paper-white bedspread beside her that day, he took her chalky face in his hands and said, ‘What I’ve done to you, girlie.’

  ‘To each other, Denny, to each other,’ she said, returning his look.

  ‘Will you ever come back to me?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll need some time to think.’

  Ohaka was sliding into summer when she returned. The river banks had never been more beautiful. The Wallaces watched their daughter when she went down to the water, covertly, fearing for her safety. There seemed to be little to fear, however. She sat quietly, spoke little but sensibly enough. She did not say very much about the previous year and what it had meant to her.

  The Colliers called in from time to time, Jim coming too. He was a heavy man now, fast fading into middle age, but he was good and gentle to her, understanding what she’d been through without it having to be talked about. He still hadn’t married, and it almost seemed as if he was going off the idea.

  Shortly before Christmas, Harriet wrote to Cousin Alice, and on receiving a reply a few days later, she told her parents that she would be returning to Weyville at the New Year.

  The Wallaces told her that they had obtained evidence for a quick divorce. It wasn’t an ideal Christmas present, but it was the best they could do. They understood if she didn’t want to use it, but it was there if she did.

  Harriet sat on the river bank for a long time the day before she went away. The eels seemed to have increased in recent years, sliding across the rocks in ever greater numbers, and the wild duck population had decreased.

  It was her last summer there. The following year Gerald Wallace injured his back beyond repair as far as farmwork was concerned, and the farm was sold.

  For years afterwards, she would wake in the night from deepest sleep, wondering whether she had dreamt her first marriage. Often it would take several moments of consciousness to work out whether or not it had really happened. When her children woke crying in the nights too, she would wonder which child it was, as she groped her way through the house. When she put the night light on, she would start in terror, because she did not recognise the child, but saw instead some other one.

  She was returning to the world of Harriet Wallace. For many years, no one knew that she had ever been married. There were rumours, of course, but they were so nebulous and she seemed so self-sufficient that nobody dared to ask. Many years later, a reporter interviewing her after the publication of a book, threw in a question. He’d gleaned some chance information and checked it out. She answered truthfully, for it didn’t seem to matter then, that she had been married in her teens, and yes, her name had been Mrs Rei, and yes, her husband had been a Maori.

  ‘Why did it break up?’ the reporter asked.

  ‘There were a lot of pressures on us in those days,’ she’d answered.

  The story was published and she became a kind of martyr. She was expected to become part of various movements, to make declarations about having been a 1950s victim of discrimination against people who had Maori partners in marriage and relate it to the present. Editors who had previously rejected some manuscripts of hers with Maori emphasis as being ‘not truly ethnic’ now discovered implications they had overlooked before. She withdrew all these manuscripts.

  Nobody ever asked her what the pressures were that she had mentioned. She supposed it was partly true that they existed because she was a Pakeha and Denny was a Maori. But the main thing was that they were two people who’d got married for the wrong reasons, and who hadn’t got on. Denny and Harriet. Harriet and Denny. Always too late, just too late.

  It seemed the saddest thing that nobody, nobody at all, ever saw them as anything but a Maori and a Pakeha, rather than a couple. Until people like her and Denny could be real instead of peepshows, no statement of hers seemed to bear any relevance to what they were talking about.

  Perhaps it went deeper and was even worse than that if people were going to insist on seeing things in terms of race. She was the culprit because she had rejected a Maori. Nothing could change that; only she knew that she had been rejected by a man. Her rejection as a woman was less significant than his rejection as a Maori. She had understood and accepted rejection as a woman since birth, but her oppression counted as nothing. Because he was a Maori. And that, in the end, was worse for Denny than it was for her. If only her critics could see that they were making allowances for him. If he had been a typical white male of the 1950s, they might have condescended to view her oppression with compassion. Because he was a Maori, they made allowances. She had to be the one who was wrong and ugly.

  No wonder the hatreds spread. Denny would come back to haunt her in the 1970s on new battlefields. He would serve to remind her that in the scale of oppression, it would be women whose claims were the largest, and who were the last to be considered.

  She returned to Weyville on New Years Eve. She and Cousin Alice sat talking into the night, for the first, last, and only time, about Denny. Cousin Alice talked to her about her marriage, too. She said that Ted had been a good man, but living by his rule book had been hard sometimes. She was set in her ways now, there was not much she could do to change what she was, or what she had learned to be for him. Yet there were times, she said, when things puzzled her, she was uncertain of her ground. It seemed to keep shifting. What had happened to Harriet had filled her with grief. If the old rules held good, she shouldn’t have felt as she did. She should have gone on believing that Harriet had got what she deserved, still felt the self-righteous anger that had filled her on the night that she had caught Denny and Harriet together. But she didn’t feel these things, and she was confused. Some of the blame must rest with her. Out in the world beyond Weyville, she thought there might be change in the air for women, at least for those who were strong. It was too late for it to mean much to her, but she hoped good things were about to happen, and she hoped that Harriet had strength to be part of them.

  When midnight struck, it was 1960. The 1950s were over. Harriet was about to pick up the threads of her life again. As they were on their way to bed, Cousin Alice remembered to tell Harriet that Leonie Tregear had left town nearly a year before.

  1978

  8

  THERE WAS A message for Harriet at the studio one day, saying that a Mrs Leonie Coglan had called and left her number.

  Harriet was late for makeup, and she was not particularly interested in people who left messages without giving details. She resolved to phone at the end of the day, but by that time her interview schedule had been messed up by an incompetent cameraman, then by a difficult subject who was nervous and had to be
fed large amounts of coffee before being sufficiently relaxed to give a coherent performance. She was called away to check the editing of some work she’d done the day before, and by the time it was all over, she had forgotten.

  The following day there was another message from Mrs Coglan. Harriet sighed. She expected that it was a member of the public who wanted to praise her too fulsomely, or abuse her to the point of obscenity. Still, there was always the chance that it could be a lead on a story.

  ‘Did she say if it was business?’ she asked the girl in the office.

  ‘She said she knew you personally,’ was the reply.

  ‘Oh nonsense,’ said Harriet irritably. ‘In that case, she’s a nutter. The only Leonie I’ve ever known …’ She stopped. Impossible? Of course it was.

  She sat at her desk thinking. Leonie Tregear? After all these years? Nearly twenty since she had last seen her. And it was unlikely that she would get in touch with her. Not the Leonie she knew. Only of course she didn’t know her now. She wondered what she’d be like. If it was her …

  When the office girl had gone out for lunch, she dialled the number.

  The voice that answered was tentative, fragile.

  ‘Mrs Coglan?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘Harriet Wallace. You called me.’

  ‘Harriet. I’m afraid you must think it an awful cheek. I saw you on television. I suppose you get all sorts of remnants from your past cropping up.’

  Leonie apologising? It seemed preposterous. ‘It really is you? Leonie Tregear?’

  ‘Yes. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Over twenty years. I was trying to work it out before I rang … supposing it was you. Where have you been all this time?’

  ‘Oh — all over. I mean around the world, dozens of places, we’ve only just come back to New Zealand to live. It’s rather strange after sixteen years abroad.’

  ‘You’ve — good heavens, then you did go away?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said the woman at the other end, rather too brightly. ‘And you, I suppose you must have travelled a great deal?’

  ‘Afraid not, Leonie. I’ve never even made it across the Tasman; you were always the adventurer at heart.’

  Again there was a careful brittle note. ‘My husband’s work’s taken us to a great many places. He’s in oil, you see.’

  Harriet thought she did begin to see. The upshot was that she visited Leonie for coffee one morning a week or two later on the way to the studio.

  Like her voice, Leonie was fragile, and much more beautiful than when she had been a girl, in a cultivated international sort of way. Her hair was superbly cut and styled, her makeup flawless on a skin that had long ago lost its freckles, and her clothes, so obviously casual morning coffee gear, were so expensive that Harriet was moved to think that the young Taylor children (hers and Max’s) could be fed for a month on what they alone might have cost.

  Leonie’s home exuded wealth, good taste. Was it simply to show it off? Harriet wondered later. It seemed unlikely, for surely there must be many women among the oil clique who would find it attractive. But then, possibly they all had homes like this, so it wouldn’t make any particular impression. Then she thought that it could be retaliation for that early betrayal.

  But if there was any reflection on the past, it was not mentioned. Leonie did say that she’d heard before she and Hamish left New Zealand that Harriet had returned to the library in Weyville. Presumably she knew why, if she’d taken the trouble to find out that much.

  Harriet hazarded a guess at some sort of loneliness, but that too was hard to pin down, and Leonie was determinedly elusive. She talked about her children, about Hamish’s job, the places they’d visited. Harriet, for her part, took up her story from the time she met Max, and told her about the children.

  ‘There must be so much more to your life, though,’ sighed Leonie, a trifle theatrically. ‘You seem to have made so much of it.’

  ‘Perhaps life made me,’ said Harriet in what she hoped was a cryptic manner, but that too came out stagey, and wrong.

  It had been the end of the coffee break, anyway. They’d said all there was to be said, and left it at that. When Harriet left, she determined to avoid seeing Leonie again, although there had been a vague murmur about dinner.

  After that, Leonie rang her twice, with tentative invitations that Harriet managed to dodge. Instead they had some desultory conversation about what Harriet was doing, discovered with some surprise that they both still enjoyed books, and Leonie had asked Harriet what people in New Zealand were reading these days. But that was as far as it went.

  Harriet eventually accepted an invitation to lunch in a moment of weakness. She did not really want to see Leonie again; their last meeting had been a disaster, stilted and uneasy. They had avoided political confrontation and talk about money, and worst of all, they had pretended to have no past in common, although their shared past was the reason for their renewed contact. If in an odd unguarded moment they did recognise and recall the time they had spent together, their memory had been carefully veneered. Despite all this, suddenly Harriet was talking, in a great torrent of confession, talking as she had not done in years. She was talking as she had done long ago in a street in Weyville. She told Leonie about Michael, about the phone calls, about his youth, and his beauty, and her love for him, and how it was slipping away. There was nothing she could do to hold on to him.

  Harriet had met Michael at a book launching party. She went to a great many of these functions, since she had left Weyville and moved to Wellington. At first she had been a minor talent, then she had moved into television, which made her a highly public figure. Whether her talent for writing poetry was minor or not, she was sought after by a great many people.

  Afterwards, she had no idea what book had been launched. However, she remembered when the party had taken place — late in October. The chill, light air that signified a Wellington spring evening still lingered over the concrete canyons of The Terrace.

  It was Harriet’s almost invariable habit to arrive at parties unescorted. Her husband Max Taylor was a draughtsman with the Ministry of Works who did not share her interests. They had three children and, as they both said, they had a happy family life. That was their common meeting ground — they had no need to make public appearances. Harriet still called herself Harriet Wallace, as she had done since the end of her first marriage, and particularly since she had begun to write, so that Max was not embarrassed by her activities and he was hardly ever asked if he was Harriet Wallace’s husband. That they went their separate ways in public life seemed to need no explanation to anyone else or to each other. Or so they said.

  Because rumours circulated about her ‘reputation’, Harriet made a point of entertaining her male friends at the most improbable times of day or night whenever she was away from home. A reputation like that, as she explained to Max, was worth money. And he, loyal and patient with her flamboyant excesses, had agreed that this was so. Sending out for breakfast champagne in her room and summoning some man of her acquaintance to share it with her at eight o’clock had made her reputation much easier to handle. The men always came running. And well they might too, she thought with a glimmer of satisfaction, catching a look at herself in the mirror above the bar. Her dark hair was beautifully cut into a long free-swinging bob to her shoulders, her wide eyes were as tawny and clear as they had ever been. To be sure, there were signs of wear and tear on the skin beneath her eyes. And yes, she was overweight, but she wouldn’t even be without that — it was a sign of maturity. She had reached the point where her plain and rather conventional clothing had a significance of its own.

  She specialised in current affairs programmes with a bias towards the arts, but she was known as a writer, a minor one, of course, with a big name and thus she was expected to take a particular interest in book topics. Which, to be fair, she did. And damn well too, she thought grimly, surveying the all-too-familiar scene with distaste.

>   She scanned the room for the last time to make sure that she had not missed anybody who might be a valuable contact. She was just deciding against an aspiring politician when she noticed a very tall man standing in a far corner. He stood a good head above any other man in the room, and across the room he challenged her. Or did she challenge him?

  As it turned out, they had already met three months before. He remembered, but she had forgotten. It seemed unbelievable, but it was so. He had been determined, this time, to make her see him. Really see him, not just look through him with her cool stare, analysing his profile for a television shot.

  He was the editor of a large, Auckland-based international magazine that was trying to establish itself in New Zealand. The market was wide open for an intelligent women’s magazine. He had come out from England for eighteen months to see if he could establish it with an all-New Zealand staff. He’d already been in the country for six months. His name was Michael Young.

  ‘You’re from Canterbury?’ he guessed, after they had made themselves known to each other.

  ‘No. Why on earth should you say that?’

  ‘Then you’ve lived in New Zealand since you were, oh let me see, five or six years of age, about the time you were starting school?’

  ‘I’ve lived here all my life.’

  ‘Hawke’s Bay?’

  ‘Is it my accent?’

  ‘Yass,’ he said in the pleasantly light and cultivated English voice that she at once despised, admired, and classified. ‘I find I can’t place it at all.’