a Breed of Women

by Fiona Kidman

  They saw each other as a fact of their everyday lives, practically day in and day out He would be passing her house or she would be passing his, or they would have drinks together on Saturday afternoon, a beer after all the lawns were done, or lunch on Sunday. Harriet would wheel the baby down to Miriam’s in the afternoon when her friend arrived home from school. Miriam would throw the washing on, talking as she went, lighting cigarettes, leaving them to burn on the bench and catching them just as they were about to scorch the formica, throwing Don’s grimy underclothes into the machine. Then Harriet could see him, sweat, grubby crotch, the lot, or their striped flannel sheets lying on the floor. Miriam and Don. An unlikely combination.

  The poem’s publication had a strange effect on Harriet Nobody in Weyville appeared to notice it, so she went through some of the other verses she had stored in the mending cupboard, and now some of them seemed better than they had before. She asked Max if she could have a second-hand typewriter for her birthday. She felt compelled to show him the poem that had been published. He looked at it for a long time, and said at last, ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

  ‘Thought you might laugh at me,’ said Harriet, carefully arranging chrysanthemums.

  ‘When have I ever laughed at you?’ he said angrily.

  ‘Never, but I thought there might be a time to begin.’ She inserted the fifth flower into the arrangement and added greenery at the back.

  ‘You don’t trust me much, do you?’

  ‘Do you like it then? The poem?’

  ‘I don’t understand it. But that doesn’t matter. It’s the showing that matters.’

  ‘Have you tried to understand it?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s like asking me to understand you.’

  ‘And that’s hard?’

  ‘I don’t know … can’t explain …’ his voice faded away into the distance. Realisation through flowers, something she had been taught, an acquired skill, nearer my God to thee. Max, where are we going?

  1978

  11

  MICHAEL CAME TO her when he said he would. On the evening appointed in late February, she had met him at the same hotel where they had first introduced themselves to each other. Harriet, who worked on contract and was not required to report daily, had spent much of the day in a state veering between lethargy and frantic activity to ensure that she would be prepared for the evening’s encounter. She bathed in the morning, shaving her brown legs and afterwards rubbing oil into them till the skin shone like silk. A man had once told her her skin was like silk. That man. Yes, well he was better forgotten about, he belonged in yet another place again, somewhere in the gap between Denny Rei and Michael Young. That was a big country to cross. It didn’t bear too much thinking about, not on a day like today.

  Then she lay in the sun again, knowing that in a way it was the last day of the summer as he had created it for her that year. From that evening on, they would enter a new phase of this relationship. Yet those past months had been so beautiful that now at the last moment she didn’t really want to give them up. After she had lain in the sun, she decided to shower, then decided against that and bathed again, this time pouring lavish amounts of scented bath oil into the water. She’d washed her hair in the morning. Was it right? She wondered now, standing in front of the mirror. Surely this was how teenagers went on. Genevieve came to the door of her bedroom and irritably demanded what had happened to all the hot water. She’d had physical education at school, and on a day like this was she expected to go without a shower? The girl flounced to her room, and Harriet felt guilt-ridden and anxious.

  Would they be all right tonight, the children and Max? It was a ludicrous thought from someone who came and went as she was in the habit of doing. And yet, during one of the active frenzies of the day she had prepared a handsome meal, made special things that all of them particularly liked.

  Now, her daughter made her angry. She had no right to make her feel guilty. She must have noticed something about her mother, something that made her insolent She knew how to get under Harriet’s skin, did Genevieve.

  She walked through to the sitting room. Emma was trying to do her sums. Her small face was frowning with effort and unhappiness. ‘Oh God,’ thought Harriet, ‘don’t tell me I’m going have to sort this one out I can’t, I don’t have the patience.’ But despite herself, she tenderly looked down at this most vulnerable and most gentle of her children. Don’t let me make her a target, Harriet begged of herself.

  The child looked up. ‘You look pretty tonight, Mum.’

  Harriet dropped on her knees beside Emma, persevering with the sums that neither of them could do. But it was a help. Emma stopped frowning and seemed to care less whether they were right or wrong.

  ‘What a thing to feel grateful for,’ Harriet’s inner voice nagged her.

  But at last she was away from them all, her conscience as clear as possible. With luck, she would relinquish it altogether by the time she got to the hotel.

  As she parked, she gathered together her armoury of small talk. Much as she had waited for Michael, now she was in a state of acute nervous tension. They were to meet in the bar, and she assumed that they would have a drink, then make their way to a slow and leisurely meal, and then? Well, she’d thought so much about that, now she wondered how she could go through with it.

  Books, politics, plenty to talk about there. The summer had been rank with discontent on the political scene; the country’s sour mood was continuing. Her cocoon of the past few months hadn’t excluded the influences that had started to colour people’s thinking. And reading, she’d done plenty of that Indeed, she kept finding things in books that had made her think ‘I must tell him about this’, or ‘I wish he were here now, so that I could tell him that’. She had thought out whole conversations dealing with his imagined responses — he’d disagree here, concede ground there. It had all been very interesting.

  Now she supposed they would talk, but was it to be a carefully charted course that would lead to the bedroom? If that was the sort of conversation it was going to be, she was sure she didn’t want to have it For a moment she thought of not going in. In panic, she decided that he wouldn’t be there, that he might have missed his plane and not been able to get in touch with her, been ill, or never really meant to see her at all. His presence in the bar was, after all, something of a shock. She walked in looking for him, and somehow he was behind her and she hadn’t seen him.

  ‘Hullo.’

  He wore the air of someone vaguely exasperated, as if she were late, perhaps. ‘Am I late?’ she asked uncertainly, sure that she wasn’t, but needing to have it confirmed that there had been no mistake.

  ‘Of course not. I’m just very hot and tired. I really didn’t think Wellington could be such a miserable hole in the summer, it’s usually so bloody cold. I need a shower. Are you going to sit here and have a drink, or come up to the room?’ he asked abruptly.

  As she hesitated he said, ‘Good. I’ve got a pile of manuscripts, for the magazine, you know. I wouldn’t mind you looking at them.’

  In the bedroom, he threw her a bundle of papers and said, ‘There you are, amuse yourself with those.’ His tone was downright rude.

  ‘What do you expect me to do with them?’ she called as the shower began to run in the bathroom a moment later.

  ‘Tell me what you think of them,’ he called.

  She flicked through them. Perhaps she had imagined the summer and their meeting the time before. He could be just a rude, rather arrogant young man trying to leech a bit of her time and energy into something she had no desire to do.

  ‘They’re junk,’ she called.

  The shower was turned off. ‘If you say so.’

  ‘When are you going to get this magazine off the ground, anyway?’

  ‘Possibly never. As you say, that’s a pile of junk. About the standard of the average New Zealand manuscript. If there’s no talent here, how the hell am I supposed to put together a New Zealand-orient
ated periodical?’

  ‘That’s arrant nonsense,’ she retorted. ‘You simply haven’t approached the right people.’

  ‘Well, maybe the right people aren’t very co-operative. Too damn scared of their own skins, from what I’ve noticed.’ His mouth was apparently full of toothpaste.

  He emerged, bare to the waist and barefooted, and started scrummaging around in a suitcase, apparently for a clean shirt and socks, not looking at her.

  ‘D’you feel better?’ she asked coolly, wondering how soon she could leave.

  He swung round. ‘Don’t go away. Please.’

  ‘How did you know I was thinking that?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to put you through that. Nerves, I suppose.’

  Somehow she found herself flat on her back with him between her legs. Most extraordinary. He was such a very large man that she found him quite discomfiting physically. Her legs wouldn’t encompass him, and waved feebly in the air like those of a praying mantis. She saw, to her dismay, that the heel of one of her best summer shoes was coming adrift. It really looked quite tatty. She tried to shift, but it was impossible under his weight. ‘I wonder if I’ll be able to iron my skirt,’ she thought. ‘I can’t possibly go out to eat looking like this.’ And then, ‘How appalling if this is merely going to turn out funny.’

  ‘Would you mind if I took off my shoes, please?’ she asked him aloud.

  ‘Do you mind about all this?’ he said. There didn’t seem to be anything much to mind so far, so she said that she did not.

  ‘Before dinner or after?’ he asked politely, in his creamy English voice.

  ‘Can’t we do both?’ she said, and that was the first moment that it stopped being ludicrous.

  So the summer began to make some sense, as their voices and their touch turned to tenderness. He undressed her, and she, loving him, helped him, taking off her bracelets and watch so that they would not catch on his beautiful skin, standing still for him so that she could reveal her breasts with pride, lying down and opening out her arms to him, and lying there, looking up into his face, seeing for a moment his blue eyes receding into a skull that seemed to be covered with translucent parchment, as if some terrible storm was taking place within.

  ‘God, I need this,’ he said.

  Only long afterwards did she remember that he had said ‘this’ and not ‘you’.

  Later that night, when they returned to the hotel room after dinner he lay waiting for her, and she, astride, came, calling on him to join her. So they had entered the lovely and treacherous sea, and she was abandoned to it, her blood singing Michael, Michael, Michael, in all the cadences that water or blood might sing.

  ‘You’re so beautiful,’ she whispered to him.

  ‘So are you,’ he replied, not challenging his own grace.

  Let the tide stay high, we have such a short time, Michael, my golden eagle. You are only a passing visitor to these shores. I will say goodbye when the time comes without weeping.

  ‘I love,’ and his voice faltered, ‘I love to watch you come.’

  ‘I love you. I just love you.’

  ‘Do you?’ he had asked alarmed.

  ‘Don’t be afraid.’

  ‘How will you cope, then?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Emotionally? Will you be hurt?’

  Harriet had rolled over onto her stomach, her arms pushed up under the hotel pillow. ‘He has a right to ask me,’ she thought, and remembered how long it had been since she had surrendered herself without reservation like this, feeling a part of her slipping out of her control. Oh, she’d loved, yes, but she’d been the dominant one. Nobody owned Harriet Wallace. They might have thought to, but there was always a reserve, a part that stood back and said well, well, well, Harriet Wallace, so here you are and there you are.

  ‘You’ve nothing to fear from me,’ she said fiercely.

  ‘I’m not afraid of you,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, you are,’ she said. ‘listen, I tell you, there’s nothing to worry about in me. I wouldn’t try to possess you. I won’t ask anything of you, I don’t want my life changed, my patterns are made, do you understand that? Nothing changes anything, only death, and I ask nothing, there are no demands to be made or met. I only want you to come to me for as long as you can.’

  ‘Can you be like that?’

  ‘Can’t you?’ she said.

  ‘I’ll try, if you can.’

  ‘I don’t want to hurt anyone. I don’t want to know about your family, I don’t want to tell you about mine. I only want to exist in the time we make together.’

  ‘Why this?’

  ‘You came to me, remember?’

  ‘Yes. I remember.’

  ‘Then why you, any more than me?’

  ‘Oh God, then what sort of an animal does this make me?’

  ‘You mean that?’ said Harriet, frightened for him again.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’

  As they rose to shower together, she glanced at the initials on his suitcase, M.S.Y.

  ‘What does the S stand for?’ she asked while he was finding spare towel for her.

  ‘Seamus.’

  ‘Michael Seamus Young.’ She fitted them together. ‘You’re Irish, then.’

  ‘You could say so, Colleen,’ he said, trying to make light of it ‘A distant ancestry.’

  ‘You don’t sound it.’

  ‘I’ve never lived there.’

  ‘Which side do you belong on?’

  ‘You ask a lot of questions.’

  ‘My interviewing technique.’

  ‘Interview me under the shower, then — or, better still, let me interview you. What would you like to do next week?’

  ‘You’re coming next week?’

  ‘Mm-hmm, and the one after that.’

  ‘Make love,’ she said, the water splashing over her face. The top of her head was level with his shoulder.

  In the following weeks they continued to see each other, as he had said they would. When they were together they lived in a private world of great pleasure and intensity, tempered from time to time with anxiety about his work. At first she let his concern flow round her, happy to listen and talk, but not to suffer it.

  It assumed a greater importance, however, as the implications of what was happening to him began to sink in. It was starting to look as if the market was wrong for the magazine. The financial situation was tightening, potential advertisers were not as enthusiastic as they had been when the idea of the magazine was first mooted, and with the prospect of increasing inflation it appeared unlikely that many prospective buyers would be prepared to spend money on a quality magazine. He talked anxiously about cutting production costs. He was visiting Wellington to pursue possible leads with different printers, but lower pricing invariably indicated an inferior product. It was becoming more and more evident that the magazine simply might not eventuate. Bleakly Harriet faced the prospect that this might involve his early return to England. He would feel that he had failed.

  They talked for hours over this point at dinner on his third visit. It was not, she insisted, a personal failure. He couldn’t have foreseen the decline in the economy and it hadn’t been his idea to come out here in the first place. His bosses might at least have realised that New Zealand, behind the rest of the world in most things, had been behind other Western countries in its economic recession, and must now be hit at a time when the rest of the world was starting to recover. Michael accepted this at a rational level but rejected it at a personal one. ‘He’s so young,’ Harriet thought ‘I forget how young he really is, the difference in our ages is more than years. He has the smell of success on him. He doesn’t understand what it is to accept defeat and start again.’

  She sensed that he was rich. Whether or not he had always been rich it was hard to say. He had told her more about his background in their earlier meetings the previous year. She inclined towards the idea that he had been brought up in a co
mfortable middle-class atmosphere, where strong ambition prevailed. He had accepted the patterns of hope, and there had been enough money for him to receive a sound classical education. Nothing had been really difficult. The right doors had opened for him, and marriage to a very rich young woman had followed.

  That was what Harriet understood, indirectly. She tried not to let the rich and beautiful young wife prey unduly on her mind. If she did, she was afraid that she might even begin to feel guilt. She ought to know about betrayal. But I want nothing of him, she would tell herself, nothing — except of course she wanted everything. She found out bits of information about him by asking people elaborately casual questions. She had asked one day round the studio whether anyone had met Michael Young, the man who wanted to start up this magazine. A producer had said yes, of course, they were the crowd that threw the big party up in Auckland when they opened up their offices there. A wonder she hadn’t been invited to it. Yes, sure he remembered the guy. And his missus. What a smasher. What knockers. The sort of bird you didn’t cross — not that it mattered, she looked down her straight little nose at you all the time anyway. Poms, bloody Poms. You wondered what a crowd like that really wanted out of the country. They weren’t here to put anything into it, whatever they said.

  Harriet, although inclined to agree in principle, didn’t comment beyond saying that she thought there was a programme in it somewhere. ‘Not likely now,’ said the producer. ‘Sounds as if the outfit’s about to go broke.’

  ‘Then perhaps I should document its decline and fell,’ Harriet had said, changing the subject, but nonetheless feeding greedily on the information.

  Waiting for Michael between his visits to the city had become an agony of suspense. She would wait for the telephone to ring, to hear his voice, to be ready to go to him again.

  She was sure that people around her must notice. Her family seemed to present problems, but she knew they were only in her mind. Only when they threatened to stand in her way did her calm falter in front of them.