a Breed of Women

by Fiona Kidman

  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.

  ‘Language,’ said a nurse reprovingly.

  Emma emerged to a torrent of abuse, reproaches and weeping. No wonder she was such a shy nervous little girl, Harriet thought later. At least she had the stamina to stay alive, she refused to die, though her life hung in the balance for two days. Harriet knew she had no right to have a favourite child, but Emma had demanded a larger space in the scheme of things than the others. While she was still in hospital, Max broke his leg, a ridiculous classic accident in the home, standing on one of the children’s toys with wheels on it. One foot had shot out in front of him, the other had buckled underneath. When Harriet heard, she felt a certain smugness that she had been tucked up safely in her hospital bed when it happened. She knew she would have been blamed if she’d been around. Don broke the news to her, calling in to see her on the way to work. She was in the mood for dire news, with Emma still a fragile little bundle when she fed her. Don shambled in, looking awkward, as if suddenly wondering what on earth had prompted him into such an unlikely errand of mercy. She sat up, feeling starry-eyed and alarmed.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘don’t look like that, it’s only a broken leg.’ He was trying to give her as much reassuring information in one breath as possible.

  She fell back on the harsh hospital
-linen pillows. ‘You’re sure it’s nothing worse than that?’

  ‘I promise. I called into casualty on the way up here and they said it wasn’t a very bad break. They were just putting him in plaster.’

  ‘I’ll have to get out of here,’ she said looking frantically round the ward.

  ‘No, you don’t. Come on, relax, old girl, you’re as jittery as they make them.’

  Harriet started to snuffle. ‘Oh, bloody hell. Get me a tissue, will you Don? Somebody should have told you I’m a weepy bird. Don’t worry, look the other way if you want to, it’s just the baby being such a sickly little thing. They tell me she’s going to be all right though.’

  The nurse marched over, ready to take charge. ‘Come on, Mrs Taylor, your friend here said it was nothing serious.’

  ‘Would you pull the curtains, please?’ said Harriet. ‘Go on,’ she ordered as the nurse hesitated. ‘We’re not getting up to anything, you can just imagine how much fun we’d have with the condition I’m in.’

  ‘You are a one,’ said the nurse, whisking the curtains round the bed with a steely clatter.

  ‘You are a one,’ mimicked Harriet, half under her breath.

  Don looked anxiously around at the enclosure they were sitting in. ‘You’re cruel to her,’ he said, watching her malicious look.

  ‘Nurses ought to have babies as compulsory military training for their jobs. They’ve got no heart.’

  ‘And you’re all heart,’ he said, attempting cynicism. He looked at her wan face, and relented. ‘What is it, Harriet?’

  ‘I don’t know, Don,’ she said, continuing to snuffle into her handkerchief. ‘I’m tired, and things are going wrong, and I was damn scared over the baby, I still am, and my milk’s not coming properly, and now Max, and everyone keeps saying everything will be all right and expecting me to believe them.’

  ‘Why don’t you try?’ said Don gently.

  ‘Because things do go wrong. You see, I know. Did you know I had a baby that died before I married Max?’

  She was astonished to hear herself say this.

  He was silent for a time. ‘Are you sure you want to tell me this?’ She shook her head. ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know why I said that to you.’

  He took her hand and started to stroke it distractedly. ‘Your milk, is it clogged up?’ She nodded. ‘Has it happened before?’

  ‘No, that’s why it’s making me so miserable. Besides, this baby needs it more than the others.’

  ‘You should get them to give you hot flannels and express it very gently. You know how to express?’

  ‘Of course. I fed the others. Anyway, how do you know?’

  ‘Oh, it happened to Miriam,’ he said, surprised that she should ask. ‘Oh, and get them to give you some cream to rub on your nipples, they’ll get cracked if the baby suckles and there’s nothing there.’ He blushed, dull crimson seeming to seep even up to his high forehead, as they realised how closely they were studying her breasts, pushing blue-veined and swollen above her nightdress. He let go of her hand and got to his feet.

  ‘It took us a long time to find out what the trouble was,’ he mumbled. ‘They don’t always tell you in these places, but it’s simple, really, if you know what to do. I’d better go.’

  ‘Thanks for coming, Don. Really.’

  With his back to her, he asked, ‘Would you like me to come again? If there’s anything you want, now with Max laid up?’

  ‘Yes, that would be very kind.’ She stared at him, helpless. ‘There’s nothing I want … I mean, need.’

  Suddenly he smiled. ‘I’ll see if I can think of anything you might need,’ he said and disappeared.

  ‘He won’t come back,’ she thought all that day and the next It was just as well, perhaps, because in the afternoons nearly everyone in Weyville seemed to turn up to see her. Amazing how a disaster drew them, even a minor one. She tried to reject the uncharitable thought. Kind, that’s what they were.

  The second evening, Don arrived. It was raining outside, a bleak, sleet-filled Weyville night The summer should have come, but spring had lingered on, retreating back into winter every week or so. His old brown mackintosh was dripping soggily.

  ‘I got in as a representative for your husband,’ he said, glancing at the other fathers in the ward, for only fathers were admitted at night. ‘They weren’t going to let me in.’

  ‘It should make a good item for the town crier.’

  ‘D’you mind?’

  ‘Do you mind?’ she repeated, inviting him to sit beside her.

  He half-shrugged, and extracted a pot of jam from his pocket. ‘Japonica jelly, left over from last year. Miriam said it’s better for you than the jam they give you here, too sweet. She said you should keep off chocolate and stuff. For your — you know, your chest.’

  ‘Miriam knows I don’t eat chocolate,’ said Harriet indignantly.

  ‘I expect she means just in case. You could get a craving, couldn’t you?’

  ‘That’s before the baby, not after,’ she said crossly, beginning to wish he hadn’t come.

  They sat saying nothing while he pushed a non-existent piece of dust round the floor with the toe of his galosh.

  ‘It was nice of Miriam to think of something you could bring.’

  ‘It was, wasn’t it?’ he said, brightening. ‘Actually, I was so pleased she suggested I come up. It was at tea time, and I was just thinking, “How on earth shall I tell Miriam that I’m going up to the hospital?” because if I say you need anything she’ll probably offer to come herself. She had some marking to do, and she said one of us should come and see you, so I said I’d come. She said if I was sure it wasn’t too much trouble, because I’d been in to see Max earlier. Did you see him before he went home?’

  ‘No. He rang me and said he’d come up if I wanted him to, but it seemed silly, that wing’s so far away. By the time he’d thumped through here on crutches he’d have woken every baby in the hospital. So you were going to come up?’

  ‘Oh yes. I had this for you.’ He fished through another coat pocket, and produced the Oxford Anthology of Modern Verse.

  They pored over the book. Don had marked poems he thought she should read with pieces of paper.

  ‘You don’t know what trouble you’re inviting,’ she said.

  ‘It’s a calculated risk,’ he said.

  ‘Do you always have to tell Miriam where you’re going when you go out?’ she said curiously.

  ‘There’s never any reason not to tell her,’ he said. ‘Habit, I suppose. Don’t you and Max tell each other where you’re going?’

  ‘Ye-es. Only I’ve just decided we’ll stop. It’s unnecessary, really, if you think about it.’

  ‘Much safer if you do.’

  ‘Safe? In case of accidents? You don’t have to worry. Miriam always makes sure you have clean underwear, just in case. She’s told me.’

  The next evening she had a present for him. It was a poem about Emma’s birth. ‘Women’s trash,’ she said, averting her face.

  She had never shown anyone a poem before.

  ‘It’s good,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Rubbish,’ she said. ‘You’re just saying that because you see yourself as my mentor.’

  ‘Had you rehearsed that? What if I’d said it was bad?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I — it did take an effort, you know … to show you.’

  ‘Yes. I should know that. All right, it’s not perfect, but I think it’s very good. I’m probably biased, you’re right of course, but for what it’s worth I think it’s good. Why don’t you get it published?’

  ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’ she asked curiously. When he nodded, she added, ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘That’s not good enough. Look, I’ll get it typed up at work, and you could send it away. I’ll bring you a list of addresses you could try. What d’you say?’

  ‘I say, do you seriously think you could get your typist to type up something like that? She’d think yo
u were round the twist.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, avoiding her eye, ‘I’m not a bad hand on the typewriter myself. I thought maybe in my lunch hour

  ‘You’ve convinced me,’ said Harriet. ‘I must be mad.’

  As he was leaving he said, ‘That’s not the first poem you’ve written, is it?’

  ‘No. I took your advice.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘Before you go —’ She called him back once more. ‘If you type it up, when you come to my name … could you put Harriet Wallace on it?’

  When he brought it to her the next evening, she hardly recognised it as her own work. ‘Did I write that?’ she said, in wonder.

  ‘I told you it was good.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that, though it’s better than I expected, somehow. But disembodied. It doesn’t seem to belong to me any more.’

  ‘It won’t if I send it away for you,’ he said seriously. ‘Are you certain it’s all right?’

  ‘It was your idea.’

  ‘I’m bad at taking responsibility. Ask anyone, ask Miriam.’

  ‘I’d rather not. Does she know where you are tonight?’

  ‘No. Nor last night, either. You won’t tell her, will you?’ he said unhappily.

  ‘She’ll know,’ said Harriet.

  ‘I find it difficult, telling her I’m working late, you know.’

  ‘Never mind, you’ll be relieved of the terrible strain of being my surrogate husband as from the time you leave tonight. I’m going home tomorrow.’

  She detected a note of disappointment in his voice as he said, ‘I was getting used to it.’

  ‘That’s as bad a habit as the one you’ve just broken. Go on, go home and take my poem with you. Don’t forget to post it … husband.’ She enjoyed watching him colour.

  ‘Take care of your tits,’ he said, boldly paying her back for his discomfiture. As all the other husbands were kissing their wives goodnight, he pecked her on the cheek.

  She didn’t speak to him alone for a long time after that Her poem was accepted by the magazine he had sent it to, and she rang and told him. He said he was pleased and looked forward to seeing ‘their baby’ in print.