a Breed of Women

by Fiona Kidman

  This became the pattern of her days. From time to time she emerged in what the locals of Weyville described as her ‘weird gear’. Harriet Taylor had always been difficult, they agreed, but now she was eccentric.

  Max’s behaviour in the face of these changes was strangely ambivalent. He made no comment, even appearing not to notice particularly. He took his trip to Rotorua, and came back as edgy and difficult as Harriet had been when she returned from Wellington. She supposed they had grown apart.

  One morning she was sitting at her typewriter, picking away, trying to recall what little she had learnt at the Weyville College night classes, when the phone rang. She cursed it, even though it rang little these days, for the word had gone out that she was not very approachable. It was Don Everett. She gave a guilty start knowing that she had been very neglectful of Miriam recently, who had been nothing if not kind to her through many trials.

  She could hear herself being over-effusive. ‘I’ve been meaning to ring Miriam for ages,’ she said. ‘She must have written me off. You must call in and have a drink with us some evening, both of you. I don’t know, Max and I seem to have been a bit preoccupied lately.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’ve been thinking about you a lot, that’s all. I’m very proud of all the work you’ve been publishing.’

  ‘And so you should be, it was you that gave me a push in the right direction. I was beginning to think you’d forgotten that. Anyway, where are you ringing from?’

  ‘Home, actually,’ he said, after a short pause. ‘I had a couple of clays’ leave that I had to use up or I’d lose them, so here I am. Why don’t you come round and see me? Have a cup of coffee?’

  ‘I can’t do that, Emma’s asleep.’

  ‘Oh yes. Emma. I shouldn’t forget her, should I?’

  ‘Why don’t you come round and see me then?’

  ‘Would you mind?’

  ‘Of course not I’d love to see you.’

  When she hung up she thought wryly, ‘Now there is a turn-up for the books, asking Don Everett round to have coffee in mid-morning, for all the women of Camelot to see. And why the hell shouldn’t I?’

  It was almost as if Don had been waiting in the wings, she reflected later. As if there was a point at which he had said to himself, ah, yes, now she’s ripe for the picking.

  She felt that Don’s arrival demanded some special effort on her part After the last time they had been alone together something was surely required. God, sitting up in bed in the hospital looking lumpy and tearful, with her great swollen boobs. There didn’t seem to be a lot to do besides taking her apron off and putting some lipstick on. She wondered if he would prefer her crouched over the typewriter or looking domestic. A bit of both, perhaps. She left the typewriter out on the table, and started grinding the coffee.

  She let him in a few minutes later, wearing the same battered mac that he had worn to the hospital. ‘I’ll take your coat,’ she said, assuming that he’d stay a long time.

  As she hung it in the hall rack he said, ‘And how is Emma?’

  ‘All right. She’s different to my other babies. Would you like to see her?’

  ‘We won’t wake her?’

  ‘Not a show, she keeps her waking up bits for the middle of the night You don’t really want to see her though, do you? You were just being polite.’

  ‘I think I would like to, actually. After all, I stood in as her dad.’

  ‘Oh … you’re not going to let me forget that, are you?’

  ‘How could I? It’s something I can’t forget’

  He followed her into the child’s toy-strewn bedroom. No wonder Max broke his leg, she thought And I bet Don thinks so to. Miriam would never leave a room littered like that. Emma slept peacefully, sucking the edge of the grubby blanket that she always kept with her.

  ‘Is she walking?’

  ‘Just.’

  ‘She’s lovely,’ he said. ‘I’d have liked a daughter.’

  ‘Well,’ said Harriet as they closed the door, ‘what a pity we don’t give our children godparents, you could have been hers. Max would like it if I suddenly started bestowing godmothers and godfathers on all our children. It would make them more respectable.’

  ‘But you’re not, are you, Harriet?’

  ‘Respectable? Probably not. Though I tried it for a while.’

  ‘And didn’t like it?’

  ‘I did it badly. I suppose you know I had a … crack-up, I think Max calls it.’

  ‘Well, I did hear something.’

  ‘I’ll bet you did. What are they saying about me out there in the wasteland?’

  ‘You’re hard on them. They do like you, you know.’

  ‘Oh I know,’ she replied impatiently. ‘I like them, too. I just don’t want to do the same things that they want to do.’

  ‘You’ve changed,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I’ve changed. But don’t tell me that’s a brand new discovery.’ She poured coffee into pottery mugs.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ he asked.

  ‘You know perfectly well you wouldn’t have come round here in the middle of the day like this to sit and have coffee with me if I was just the same as before.’

  ‘Am I that transparent?’

  ‘I don’t know, Don. All right, I’ve changed. I can’t gauge how much, except through other people’s reactions to me. I suppose I watch them a bit harder now. Narcissism. I expect to see a reflection of my own behaviour.’

  She shifted a pile of yesterday’s unfolded washing so that he could sit down. ‘I’m a slack housewife,’ she observed. ‘Miriam’s a much better doer than I am.’

  ‘It’s not the be-all and end-all.’ He stirred his coffee more than was necessary. She saw that his hand was shaking. ‘There was something I wanted to ask you,’ he said miserably.

  ‘If it’s about going to bed with me, don’t sound so unhappy about it. The worst may never happen. I might say no.’

  He shook his head. ‘I really don’t understand you.’

  ‘No. Well, that can’t be helped. The point is, you want to, don’t you? All right, I can see the answer’s yes, but you feel really bad about it, and terrible about Miriam and Max. If I said no, you’d be awfully relieved and you could go on lusting innocently after me, if there is such a thing as innocent lust. I suppose not, what’s the Bible say? He who commits adultery in his heart is just as guilty …’ she broke off.

  ‘Then how do you feel about Max?’

  ‘Oh, all right We’re just not — very together at the moment.’

  ‘I wouldn’t help that then, would I?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know, do I? I don’t know what you’re like.’

  ‘Where would we …?’ He searched round desperately, seeking an escape. Serves you right, she thought, serves you darn well right if I do go to bed with you.

  As she helped him undress, she reflected that so far she was making a fairly conventional mess of being different There wasn’t much she could do about it, though — she had to start somewhere. He got his zip caught in the corner of his singlet, and they had to perform a delicate operation to get it undone without breaking it completely. She knelt on the floor so that she could get a better grip on it, and thought she might lose an eye in the process. They were in Peter and Genevieve’s bedroom and a rubber toy squealed as they collapsed on a bed.

  ‘You’re so maternal,’ Don panted as they began their exertions.

  It turned out to be much more successful than either of them had anticipated. The difference between herself and Miriam turned out to be quite simply that Harriet enjoyed making love and Miriam didn’t, according to Don. Judging by the initial urgency of their encounter, it was probably true that Don had a fair bit of lost time to make up.

  Being a scarlet woman in Weyville proved easier than Harriet had imagined, at least for a while. Don would take an early lunch, park his car down the road and walk up to Harriet’s. She kept the curtains closed in the children’s bedroom unti
l he came so that the neighbours wouldn’t see them being drawn after his arrival. Not that she had any illusions that they didn’t notice him mooching towards her place at regular intervals.

  They tried to devise different ways for him to come; some days he parked his car in the opposite direction so that he had to pass a different set of neighbours, then they thought of the back way, but that was more obvious than subtle. The people at the back certainly had food for thought when they saw Don Everett climbing the Taylors’ back fence.

  There was always the terrifying thought that Max might slip home for some reason or other. He was not in the habit of doing so, and yet there was always the nasty thought in the back of her mind that he might forget his wallet, or spill coffee over his trousers and have to come back and change them. There were endless variations on this theme, but Max never appeared, and as the affair continued and prospered, these thoughts receded and were finally shelved.

  Difficulties arose when Emma decided to take her nap in the afternoons. Harriet had been afraid of this, and was surprised that she had taken so long to conform to the others’ pattern in this respect This meant that there was nearly always a child awake in the house somewhere. The first few times that Emma woke up from her morning sleep, if they were still in bed, Harriet would say that she’d be all right in her cot. She started to get nasty suspicions that there might be a God lurking around somewhere, despite her attempts to exorcise Him (or Her, a recent notion). Surely there must be some just being who would strike down such a wanton woman as herself, fornicating in the house where her child was. Don found it difficult to resist Emma’s urgent pleas for Mum-mum to come and rescue her, and Harriet, too, would begin to imagine that she might have her fingers jammed or be choking to death with her head through the bars. With sighs and embraces they would extricate themselves, and Harriet would go through to rescue her child. Then they would sit around the kitchen table like any good family, and Harriet would make coffee while Don fed the child pieces of biscuit and baby-talked to Emma. There were times when she thought he really did believe he was Emma’s father.

  Harriet had alienated herself from the neighbourhood to the point where asking people to have the children was difficult except in emergencies, and she didn’t think it would be clever to draw more attention to her activities by inviting any of the women round about to look after her children at the same time that Don was beating a track to her door.

  The whole matter demanded an unexpected amount of ingenuity and resourcefulness. On the weeks that it was her turn to do the kindergarten run, for she did still have that link with a few nearby families, she took to spending quite large parts of the morning helping out at kindergarten and chatting amiably to other mothers. People were generally surprised. Harriet was coming right again, they said, she’s making an effort In the rush to be supportive, a number of them responded to Harriet’s rediscovered warmth. Some of them had children who were friendly with the two older Taylor children. It took only a week or two for Harriet to come up with the idea that what they all needed was a proper break from the children every now and then. A whole day would be wonderful. Absolute heaven, agreed the other mothers. Then why, Harriet suggested, with a low cunning that astounded even her, did they not arrange a day or so a week when she took someone else’s child, or children, home in the afternoon, and they could do the same for her on other days? As they said, only Harriet could have thought of an idea like that.

  It meant of course that Don couldn’t come quite so often, but it worked. Instead of having an early lunch hour, he took a late one on the afternoons that Harriet’s children were playing in another part of Weyville, and Emma had been put down to sleep.

  Harriet also rejoined the theatre group that she had belonged to before her marriage. This meant that she could leave the theatre early and Don could meet her for an hour on the way home.

  His problems about telling Miriam where he was going seemed to have vanished. After all, with the effort Harriet was putting into their affair, it was only right that he should try to be as inventive as she was. Though, to be sure, in the back seat of his car down at the Weyville lake front, she found that she needed to be a little more inventive than in the old days of her escapades on that same spot. ‘Ah,’ Don would sigh, ‘you make me feel very young again.’ She wondered if he realised just how young. Some might have called it juvenile, but she didn’t think she really cared.

  That was possibly because she thought that she might be in love with him. They often said that they loved one another, and late in 1968, Harriet began to think that it might be true.

  It had been a strange year. She and Max were ambling along more amiably than they had done in a long time. The fact that she had to be generally expansive to people in order to get her way and her freedom, (the two were not necessarily synonymous, but that was how she saw them) seemed to spill over into their relationship. Before her trip away, Max had seemed to have a hunted look, but now he seemed more assured, less jumpy. Harriet congratulated herself in having managed to live so comfortably with two men, though she felt twinges of guilt about having deceived Max. There seemed little point in labouring this point, though; it seemed far better for everyone concerned to leave things the way they were. Even Miriam looked happier when she saw her. Harriet imagined that she and Don must be more contented, now that Don was not putting pressure on Miriam.

  When the two couples met from time to time, as they still did, Harriet would catch herself out every now and then, taking up some point that she and Don had been discussing the day before, forgetting that the others didn’t know the background to the conversation. Don would flush and catch Miriam’s eye, as Harriet broke off in mid-sentence, but Miriam would smile tolerantly and say, ‘You two are simpatico, you can read each other’s minds,’ and pour everyone another sherry.

  Yes, it seemed cosy, here inside Camelot. The world outside had been thundering with disasters, and Harriet followed them with keen interest. Don professed himself a closet radical, and seemed glad to have someone to talk to when the second Kennedy murder took place and then the assassination of Martin Luther King. Talking to him made Harriet feel less isolated. He also continued to take an interest in her poetry, and by and large, people in Weyville were beginning to be rather proud of their strange prodigy, even if Harriet’s nearest neighbours did shake their heads darkly as if they knew of dark deeds that they were not prepared to discuss. Whatever the rumours, Harriet, being a little different, must have allowances made for her, the more enlightened souls of Weyville thought. At the theatre group she was very much favoured, despite the fact that she confined her talents to play readings and refused parts in major productions because of the children. She had been tempted, to be sure, but as the theatre was a means to an end, she felt that such a wholesale commitment might hinder rather than help her efforts on behalf of Don.

  She and Max agreed that each would have one night out a week. He had taken up with the local gun club, and seemed to derive a great deal of pleasure from it. His evenings out were idyllic for Harriet. When the children were down to sleep she would put her feet up, turn the television off, unless Julie Felix happened to be on, and read till her eyes were dropping out of her head, or else she would get on with some of her work. Since the children had changed their routines, Max’s evenings out were the only times she had the house to herself, unless one counted the time she made for Don’s visits. She was content with this bit of borrowed time, now she was beginning to see that things would improve, that she would not always be tied to the same timetables. Genevieve was due to start school at the beginning of the next school year, and that fact opened up new prospects. A year after that Peter would be at school, and then Emma would be at kindergarten. Of course things became easier, even if it was sometimes hard to keep on believing that.

  Sometimes, just occasionally, she looked at herself, and wavered.

  The theatre group held a demonstration of mime all one Saturday. The artist and instructor was a
Frenchman visiting New Zealand, and by a rare stroke of cultural good fortune, he included Weyville on his itinerary. The theatre was blacked out, the stage bare, he was lit only by a single spotlight, yet he created magic. He walked for miles, an old man getting tired towards the end of some journey that had started with meaning and lost its point by the end, without ever leaving the place where his feet thlip-thlopped out the rhythm of the old man’s footsteps. He made them cry, he made them laugh, without so much as a sound from his lips. He was a trapped man in a cage, his hands flat and frantic on the invisible walls until he found the exit. Harriet watched, spellbound.

  In the afternoon, he invited the group to learn some basic principles of his art. They followed him with enthusiasm engrossed in the emotions he drew from them, revealing more of themselves to each other than they knew was there to tell. The session was closing, he suggested that they escape from a cage as he had done. Utterly outside of herself, Harriet knelt on the floor, her hands in her armpits, beating her elbows against her body. The man came over, and stood watching her.

  ‘You are a bird then, not a person, yes?’

  ‘I am a bird,’ she replied.

  ‘Why can you not get out of the cage then, little one?’

  She looked up at him in real anguish. ‘Because I have fallen out of the sky. I never learnt to fly properly, don’t you see?’

  ‘Ah, poor, poor bird,’ he said turning away.

  She sat on the floor weeping, her arms wrapped around her legs. Why had she done that? In the recesses of her mind, a cloud of sparrows appeared, falling away from a great soaring bird. She knew she had seen them before.

  So the year slid away, with Don and Harriet unresolved in their feelings towards each other. In August Miriam was away on a ten-day course and the boys went off on holiday. This period had greatly enhanced Don and Harriet’s activities, for it meant that Harriet was able to get away to his house once or twice. ‘There’s nothing like a change of environment,’ she said, and he laughed, looking at his all-too-familiar striped flannel sheets and the pictures on the wall that he saw every morning when he awoke.