a Breed of Women

by Fiona Kidman

  Harriet decided to wander round the city, as she hadn’t been there for so long that she felt like getting the feel of the place back again. Helen left her with instructions about meeting them in Tory Street soon after eleven, and Harriet set off.

  Lambton Quay was quiet and almost deserted. She felt disorientated, wondering where to start, and not quite knowing what she wanted to do. She had very little money to spare. And what did she want to shop for? Unless … the idea took hold of her. It was the most irresponsible thing she could think of doing and it wasn’t very difficult to persuade herself, once she started. She hurried over to the post office on the far side of the street and wrote out a telegram at one of the booths. At the counter she very nearly turned and ran, but the woman was holding out her hand impatiently and calling, ‘Next, please,’ so Harriet handed over the telegram to Max’s parents saying that she had decided to stay a few days in Wellington and then return home.

  Her next mission was to the airlines office to cash in her ticket to Christchurch. She was to have flown from Wellington and then, on her return, right through back to Weyville, which had just recently opened its new airport. She turned the money over in her hand with delight It had been so easy. It was after ten and she didn’t have a lot of time before meeting the others, so she found a toyshop and bought some presents for the children. She supposed that was silly if she was going to stay a few days, but it seemed necessary to justify the wad of money she had in her hand. Immediately she had bought them she remembered that she would have to carry her parcels all the way through town on the march.

  On her way up Manners Street she spotted a canvas carry-all bag in a craft shop window. It was the sort you slung over your back if you were a very casual person, and was ideal for the things she was clutching in her hands now. The only trouble was, she wasn’t a casual-looking person. But ideas seemed to be flowing thick and fast. She looked round and saw what she was looking for, a tiny shop, wedged in amongst the larger shopfronts, that sold modern gear.

  Ten minutes later she emerged in a long embroidered cheesecloth garment with a sleeveless suede jerkin over the top of it. The clothes she had been wearing had been done up in a neat parcel for her by the sales assistant, a fey-looking teenager with blonde hair down to her waist The parcel was tucked up in the canvas bag with the others. She felt comfortable and daring at the same time, then downright scared when she saw someone walking towards her whom she thought she knew, and it was herself reflected in a shop mirror. If that’s me, I don’t know whether I can get on with me, she thought. I hope that woman I just saw is an okay person. She told herself sternly that it was merely a token gesture, though she knew it wasn’t.

  Helen had difficulty recognising her when she got to Tory Street. Harriet had run frantically the last part of the way, afraid she was late because she had stopped to buy some sandals. High heels looked ridiculous with her caftan and her feet were sore already, so she guessed she would have had trouble marching all the way back with the demonstration.

  ‘We don’t need any more revolutionary activity today,’ Helen said when they’d found each other. ‘You’ve done it all.’

  ‘Like it?’

  ‘You look terrific. You’re still feeling good, then?’

  Harriet assured her that she was. She saw what she thought was a flicker of concern cross Helen’s face, but the crowd was building up and there was no time for chat.

  The air was charged with urgency. People were starting to converge from all points, pouring up the side streets in swarms like ants. Stephen and Rex made their way over to Helen and Harriet with Wanda in tow, a vivid eccentric-looking Maori girl, with a shock of wild black hair across her shoulders; her hair was decorated with a single white feather. A sort of procession was forming, straggly and uneven round the edges, but still a recognisable column. At its head young men were using loud hailers to instruct the crowd, and Stephen broke away and joined them. Then Wanda threw her head back, and in a voice usually reserved for chants she cried, ‘Let my people free.’ The crowd answered back with one voice.

  The march was on the move. Wanda began to sing ‘We Shall Overcome’, and again the huge procession responded, singing along with her. So they passed down through the streets, singing and chanting, surging like one great moving, weaving serpent. Harriet raised her voice with the others, emotion sometimes drowning her voice in her own ears. ‘I am one with them, this is how I am meant to be,’ an inner voice was saying to her.

  In Lambton Quay, a counter group was waiting for the marchers. Their mood was ugly. ‘Get back to work,’ they screamed. ‘Bloody commies! Stirrers! Troublemakers!’ they howled as the procession kept on down the street. A bottle landed among some of the marchers up near the front, splintering on the road. Stephen called out on his megaphone, ‘Keep on marching, don’t respond, just keep moving.’ Lambton Quay was no longer deserted, but a great seething mass, from one side through to the other and right down its whole length.

  Outside Parliament Buildings, the police stood in a solid phalanx. ‘Don’t antagonise them,’ Stephen bellowed at members of the march who had started to shout ‘Pigs!’

  Outside Parliament the crowd swelled with lunch-hour workers who hadn’t been able to take part in the march. There must have been another two or three thousand waiting there. It was impossible to tell how many people there were altogether, but news reports later in the day estimated eight thousand. ‘One, two, three, four, we don’t want your bloody war!’ The chant swelled, erupting in a great chorus out of the crowd.

  A man broke away, running for Parliament steps. A policeman hurled himself at him and brought him down with a flying rugby tackle; a minute later he was dragged bodily off to one of the nearby police vans. The demonstrators’ mood changed, and the dense mass started pushing towards the police. Chaos broke out all around Harriet, who found herself being buffeted from side to side. Someone hit her on the side of the head, and she screamed at whoever it was. The police were in among the crowd. One policeman was hitting Rex, or Rex was hitting him, it was hard to tell, but he had blood streaming down his face. Harriet made her way across to him and started pulling at the policeman’s arm. Rex saw her, and shouted, ‘Fuck off, you stupid bitch! Go on, piss off, Harriet — you don’t have to be a bloody martyr.’

  Another policeman closed on her from behind, locking her arms behind her. She collapsed passively to her knees and waited for the handcuffs to encircle her wrists, but miraculously he let her go, diverted by a new fracas close by. As she was trying to get to her feet, panic-stricken lest she be trampled, someone grabbed her by the arm, and she was pulled up and away to clear space outside the crowd. It was Stephen.

  ‘Come on, let’s move it, this crowd’s turned nasty.’ His face was white. ‘Can you run?’

  She shouted yes, above the noise, and they ran down towards the junction of Molesworth Street and Lambton Quay. At the corner he allowed her to rest a moment and then forced her on, turning up Bowen Street, past the Turnbull Library, and turning up on to The Terrace. She could feel a stitch developing in her side. ‘I can’t run any further,’ she panted. ‘Please, you go on up to the house without me, I’ll be all right.’

  He didn’t leave her but instead guided her up Bolton Street, where they slowed down to a trot. They pushed their way into the old Bolton Street cemetery, a wild overgrown place, full of pioneer graves and gnarled trees. Only then would Stephen let her rest, as they collapsed on to a grave.

  She huddled there, her breath coming in rasping sobs. At last she said, ‘Did you start that diversion when the policeman had me?’

  ‘Yes, I had to get you out of it, or they’d have come back and nabbed you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what I’d have done.’

  He appeared not to be listening. ‘Silly bastards,’ he stormed. ‘They shouldn’t have fought, it doesn’t help. Non-violent demonstration, they’ll close us down, we won’t be allowed to demonstrate if they do this. I told them, I
told them.’

  ‘Are you going back?’ she asked him.

  ‘What’s the use?’ he asked wearily. ‘They’ll have to sort it out for themselves now.’

  The sun soaked into them, and for a while it was good just to sit there peacefully, away from the noise. Stephen was lost in his own thoughts and Harriet was trying to come to terms with the sort of person she had been that day. She’d changed her appearance, she’d thrown out careful family plans as of no importance whatsoever, she’d marched in a radical protest movement, she’d nearly been arrested. The whole thing was bizarre. Her elation grew.

  Finally a small cold wind sneaked up on them. They both shivered, and Stephen, holding out his hand to help her up, said, ‘Come on, we’d better go and find out what’s happening to that lot’

  Harriet offered to buy some food, and he didn’t refuse. She noticed that her money was dwindling. She’d have to watch that she had enough for the bus fare home.

  He took her hand absently as they ambled up The Terrace, their flight no longer urgent.

  Up at the house, there seemed to be general confusion. People were milling round aimlessly from room to room. Wanda had been taken into custody, and people were looking for Stephen to get some money out of their funds so they could post bail for her. Helen and Rex were nowhere to be seen, but it was said that Rex was at the hospital and Helen was with him. Everyone was hungry and dejected.

  Stephen told Harriet that he’d have to go and do what he could for Wanda, and asked her if she’d be all right till he could come back and arrange some food. Harriet asked him if she could start feeding people, and he said that would be marvellous.

  It was nine o’clock that night before she finished ladling out mountains of stew and mashed potatoes to the army of people who were going through the house. Stephen didn’t appear for hours; there seemed to be more people in trouble at the police station, and he was trying to help as many as he could. Wanda turned up, but didn’t stay for long, nor did she say whether she would be back or not. Helen brought Rex in, his head bandaged. He was frantic with anxiety because he hadn’t been able to see out of one eye, but no one at the hospital would listen when he tried to tell them. None of the injured demonstrators had been given much sympathy; several officials had told them they were a pack of troublemakers who’d brought it all on themselves, and keeping them busy when more deserving cases needed their help. Rex had nearly been thrown out of the hospital when he’d started to tell a doctor that it would be a jolly sight worse for him if he had to go and look after the wounded in Vietnam, and he ought to be grateful that people were trying to protect him.

  A few people wandered into the kitchen and started helping Harriet to clean up, and at last Stephen arrived. She’d saved him a meal, which was going hard around the edges in the oven. He didn’t seem to notice that, and sat at the kitchen table wolfing the food, before helping her to finish off the cleaning. Helen came through and said she’d put Rex to bed in her room, as he was feeling so bloody. Because Wanda’s room was full, she asked whether Harriet would mind bunking down in Stephen’s room. From the look on her face, Harriet guessed that she probably loved Rex.

  There was an unmade bed in Stephen’s room and a camp stretcher with a sleeping bag on it. Harriet asked Stephen if Rex had moved out of Helen’s room the night before to make way for her. When he said yes, she asked why on earth Helen had invited her if it was going to be so inconvenient Stephen simply said that they were always making accommodations like that for each other — it was the way things were there. She believed him.

  As he prepared to get into the sleeping bag, she said, ‘That looks awfully uncomfortable. D’you want to get in with me?’

  He climbed in beside her without comment, and put out the light. He had let down his hair, and as he turned beside her it swung across her face and she felt immersed into the fur springing from his body. He seemed to be dressed in a great coat of hair, his beard softer than she had expected against her shoulder. She lay tense as he put his hand across her.

  ‘Cuddle me,’ he said, against her ear.

  She rolled towards him, putting her arm round him.

  ‘I won’t do anything, you know,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t mind if you want to,’ she said, quite truthfully, for it had been she who had invited him.

  ‘It’s all right love, I can’t, I’m hopeless at screwing,’ he said.

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’ she asked, committed now to the bed.

  ‘Just holding me would be nice,’ he murmured.

  In the night she woke to find him masturbating against her thigh. She pretended to be still asleep, and, contented, he rolled back away from her and fell asleep again, leaving her wet and dismayed.

  They sat around much of the following day in a desultory anticlimatic way. Nobody had much energy, and there was talk in the air of the government clamping down on demonstrations. It was a case of back to the drawing board, putting forward ideas for better crowd control, and so forth. Rex seemed better. He’d slept solidly till nearly midday, and when he woke up his vision was normal. In the middle of the afternoon, someone caught a news bulletin. Lyndon Johnson had decided not to run for a second term as president of the United States, in view of the growing opposition to the Vietnam war. There was a stunned silent disbelief amongst them all, then joy. Somewhere, the protest movement was becoming effective, it wasn’t all in vain. The mood of the place changed, the talk livened up. Stephen wanted to tell Harriet about the whole scope of the liberal movement throughout the world; these were things she must know. Later in the afternoon she decided she should go and see about arranging to get home. She had a growing feeling that if she stayed here much longer she might never leave. It was hard to recall that she had three little children and a husband and a quarter-acre section in Weyville. Halfway down the street, the nameless, shapeless dread descended on her again, but this time there was no resisting it It was so overwhelming that she had to lean against a lamppost, she felt so weak. And at last she could see it for what it was. These people had irrevocably changed her life. She was not like the other people of Weyville, or she would have run a mile, a hundred miles, from her new friends. She could never go back and be exactly as she had been before, because now she knew she was different. The fabric of her life had been stripped bare. In a desperate attempt to hold on to the Harriet she had been, she found herself running down the street. She ran all the way to the railway station, and instead of arranging a seat on the bus for later in the week, she bought a ticket for that night’s train. With the last of her money, she got a taxi back to the house on The Terrace and kept it waiting while she threw her things together, then had it drive her back to the station, after a round of hurried goodbyes. Stephen said, ‘Too much, too soon?’ and when she nodded, he added, ‘Take care, you’re one of us.’ Then she left them all behind.

  She got into Weyville in the early hours of the morning, and sat huddled in the station waiting-room until morning broke, then she rang Max, and asked him to come and take her home.

  It was nearly ten years since Mr Whitwell had offered her the less-travelled road. At last, she had set foot on its narrow and dangerous way.

  13

  FOR NEARLY A month after her return, Harriet lived in a state of profound shock. For days at a time she sat, listless and withdrawn.

  Max clearly resented the money spent on her adventure, whatever it was. She had told him little about what had happened in Wellington. She had said that at Helen’s place she had simply felt homesick and decided not to go on to Christchurch, that she had wanted to come back to him and the children. In a sense, it was the truth, and it was also inarguable. Her new clothes had been put away in a drawer, and she moved from day to day, doing what had to be done for the children, like a sleepwalker. Max would enquire if she was still ill, and she had said that she supposed so, but that it would go away.

  And she did feel as if she had some sort of sickness. There must be something wrong fo
r her to reject her surroundings so completely. She had helped to make this home, she had borne these children, chosen to marry this man. What aberration was she suffering, that she now felt out of place? Some days she would shout at the children, as she had never done, and afterwards she would sit rocking backwards and forwards with one of them in her lap, particularly Emma, who was too small to resist and the most amiable about her mother’s strange behaviour.

  Slowly she began to feel better, to accept that she was a changed person and must face who she really was. She took out her new clothes, started to wear them, and, as winter was coming on, she made herself a couple of warmer garments, fashioned like the one she had bought in Wellington. She took up the skirts she already had, for women were now wearing either long dresses or minis. Genevieve and Peter were both going to morning kindergarten and Emma slept well during the day, so that she began to organise her time better. The first day that the house was quiet she got out her typewriter and laboriously typed out some new work, the first she had tried for a long time. A neighbour rang while she was working to see how she was — she had heard, she said, that Harriet wasn’t quite herself these days. Harriet told her that she was very well indeed, thank you, and that she was working at the moment. The woman at the other end sounded mystified, and said how dreary it must be. Housework did get to you, and she’d pop down and have coffee with her to give her a break. Harriet had replied firmly that she was working at her writing, and that it really needed absolute quiet. Though she was grateful for the offer of company, she said she would rather be on her own. As her caller was quite unaware that Harriet had this ‘little interest’ as she later called it, she hung up somewhat offended. Harriet had been amazed at how easy it was.