a Breed of Women

by Fiona Kidman

  He backed jerkily and very fast down the driveway, forgetting to put his lights on until they were some distance up the road. Then he accelerated away past the turn-off to their house, at the end of the block. Harriet lay back in her seat, dazed. They were heading away from the town in the direction of the mill. The car ran along a road bordered by the brooding spikes of pine trees. The windscreen wipers didn’t seem to be working properly so that the water bucketed across on to her side and she could hardly see where they were going, just moving into the great menacing dark outside with no relief, no holes in the black. He is going to take me into the forest and kill me, she thought. She wondered if she should jump out of the racing car, but she felt too tired. She might live, and then they might expect her to cope with pain. More pain. It might, conceivably, be worse than this.

  After what seemed a long time, but what was probably no more than ten minutes or so, Max pulled the car over to the side of the road, under a clump of pines that grew close to the road. They formed a shelter, easing away the rain, and Harriet could see that the car was on a rise overlooking Weyville. She supposed that he was going to be angry with her. It occurred to her that she could as easily be angry with him. Elaine Mawson, for God’s sake. That mousey permed little blonde. Still, she had spoken up for her at a dinner party on the night she and Nick Thomas had done battle. It seemed like a different lifetime.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Isn’t everybody?’ he replied.

  ‘Are you going to go with her?’

  ‘I wanted to.’

  ‘I won’t stop you.’

  ‘Past tense. I stopped, oh, a long time ago. It seemed to have gone too far. Meant to break it off after Christmas. After we’d been away.’

  It seems everyone meant to. The great summer reunion. What happened?

  ‘I got caught Very conventional — angry husband. When I was getting round to finishing it.’

  ‘Funny how they never cotton on until the fun’s over, isn’t it?’ Harriet said.

  He grimaced. ‘I thought you’d appreciate that Even before I knew about Don. Don!’ he repeated in amazement ‘For God’s sake, Harriet. You can’t want him.’

  ‘Probably not. It would mean more babies. He’s right. I don’t really want them.’

  ‘Babies. You and Don. Christ.’ They sat in silence for a while.

  ‘They won’t do anything,’ he said. ‘The Everetts. But I’m in trouble. I’ll go away if you want the house.’

  ‘D’you really want to go away?’

  ‘I don’t want to stay here.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ said Harriet.

  They looked at each other, the lights from the dashboard throwing them into profile. Harriet thought, you wouldn’t stand out in a crowd. But we noticed each other. Somehow we noticed each other. He spoke first.

  ‘Shall we leave Weyville?’ he said.

  She looked out across the flat plain below them. The lights were like smudges on the horizon. Somewhere down there her children were sleeping. She’d had the full toll extracted from her in that town.

  ‘It wouldn’t be the same,’ she said. ‘Things can’t be the same between us. There would have to be change.’

  ‘I could say the same. I can survive without you. I have been by myself before.’

  ‘What’s the price?’ he said.

  ‘Your life and mine.’

  ‘You strike a hard bargain.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but we don’t have much choice, do we? You no more than me. You can change the order, but in the end it’s much the same.’

  Max organised a transfer to Wellington; one presented itself as if by magic within days of their decision to leave Weyville. They lost heavily on the house. A tavern had been built nearby when they sold up and for the time being it had depressed values in Camelot. The buyers of their house were in a position to beat them low, and they had no idea what they would be able to purchase in Wellington. There was no other place that Harriet could conceive of going, once the proposition had been put to her. It was the right place for them; somehow they would contrive to begin again.

  Miriam and Don offered to have a farewell party for them, but after effusive thanks, they turned the proposal down. Cousin Alice was Harriet’s main concern in leaving the town. Very early on the morning that they left, she drove over by herself, to say goodbye. Her cousin, on sticks now, was wearing her dressing-gown. The monkey-puzzle tree, a little ragged these days, glimmered in one of the winter’s first frosts. Max and the children had been in for a meal the night before and they had all said their farewells then. The old woman clung to her, dropping her sticks. Harriet had been more than a daughter to her, she said.

  ‘And you’ve been more than a mother,’ Harriet said. ‘Better and worse.’

  ‘You’ll come back?’ Cousin Alice said.

  ‘Someday, to see you,’ Harriet said, ‘but not for a long time. Weyville seems to have got a bit small for me.’

  ‘No,’ said Cousin Alice. ‘You’ve got too big for it. You’re like a lizard, you couldn’t go on splitting and shedding your skins forever.’ Strange how age changed one, Harriet thought. Who would ever have believed that this was the voice of the Cousin Alice she first knew?

  The two older children were strapped firmly into the back seat of the car and Emma was sitting on Harriet’s knee when they finally drove away from the stripped house. The moving vans had gone before them. They drove away past the houses of the people they had known. Past Nick Thomas’s place. ‘You’re an idiot,’ he had said to Harriet, meeting her in the main street of Weyville a few days before their departure. ‘I could have done much better for you.’ It was impossible to tell by his ambiguous smile what he had meant. She understood that he was acting for Roy Mawson in his divorce against Elaine. Nick added she was bad for business. Mawson would probably drop his suit, if he knew anything, since Harriet was whipping his victim out from under his nose. ‘You must love that streak of tap water you’re married to,’ he said sardonically. ‘Well, good luck to you. At least you must know by now that marriages aren’t made in heaven.’

  They drove on, past the library, past the sleeping morning houses of Julie and Dick, and of wicked Nance, past the lake, clad in vapour, the ugly little lake, thick with the steaming shapes of ducks, and the bristled rushes. On, on to the far side of Weyville, past all the other places they knew. They had left the Everetts’ house behind too, almost the first place they had passed but the hardest one to put behind. Miriam and Don were survivors in suburban warfare. They might have land mines planted round the house, they might have dug trenches in which to hide from each other, but in the end they’d come over the hill, brandishing their hats and calling for more, laughing at the game. Survival of the fittest.

  But Harriet and Max were not done yet. That was something to think about. Like the rest of Weyville, the Everetts were already dropping into the past, as the road opened up before them. This time Harriet knew she would not return, except as a voyager on her way to other places. They were heading for Wellington and the 1970s. Their life was about to begin again.

  1978

  14

  HARRIET DESCRIBED TO Leonie the long slow haul of years after she and Max and the children had migrated to Wellington, the struggles with money, which had been tolerable in Weyville, but were sometimes almost impossible in a larger city; the realisation that if she was going to follow a path that had any meaning for her, it had to be lived through herself, and not vicariously through men; the understanding that she had made a commitment to her marriage which had not been present before, and which demanded hard work and courage. Courage to express hurt and resentment in terms that they could mutually understand, not through violence and destruction. They must heal the wounds they had inflicted on their children through their apartness.

  Harriet’s work had become high on her list of priorities, this seemed essential from many points of view. A job would relieve some of their immediate financial anxieti
es, it would channel the energies that she had used to create havoc in the past into some sort of meaningful form, it would stop her relying too heavily on Max for emotional support Starting life over, yet again, didn’t mean using each other as crutches. Both of them were in no condition for it, anyway. If each had leaned a little too heavily on the other, either was likely to fall over in those first years.

  At first Harriet had looked for library work, but it was not easy to get in the capital. Many of the library graduates who had trained in Wellington liked to stay on in the city, and they got first pick of the jobs. One or two vacancies had come up, but they looked dreary when she had gone to look at them. She decided to take a straight clerical job until something turned up, and ended up as a receptionist in television. She fitted in, got on with the people there, and after a year or so, people noticed that she could be good at other things besides answering telephones.

  The publication of her first book drew attention to her. At morning tea one day a producer had asked if anyone knew Harriet Wallace who had just had a book of verse published. She had admitted her identity, been interviewed that day for the evening’s Town and Around programme, and, a few days later was invited to audition as an interviewer. It had fallen together so easily that Harriet often wondered at first when it would start to fall apart. But it didn’t. She wasn’t always in front of the camera. Thanks to her library training, she was a competent background researcher and she put together good workmanlike documentary scripts. They often let her work at home, and if one of the children was sick she could simply take a pile of stuff home. Life was much easier than it had been in the first year when she’d had to take a clay’s sick leave to stay with a sick child, and then when that time had been used up, she’d eaten into her annual leave. There were school holidays when she had to pay to have someone look after the children, and that was her salary gone for three months of the year. So when she did get her break, there was no stopping her.

  She became caught up in the feminist movement, marched for Germaine Greer and joined radical groups, without displaying obvious party affiliations. She came to believe in her own life. She continued to be known as Harriet Wallace, and her way of life didn’t conflict with Max’s. Only their small inner circle of friends, mainly the parents of their children’s friends, knew the connection. Harriet emerged as an entity in her own right. Max asked for, and was given, a quiet life. Harriet’s work took her away from home quite often, but now she was better organised and managed absences with a minimum of fuss for all concerned.

  She was thrown into the company of many men, and cajoled her way among them without giving away anything of herself. A number of men became her friends, and she came to treasure the knowledge that real friendship could exist between men and women without their having to go to bed to prove it.

  She was happy, and it showed. One morning Max woke up and said to her, with quiet wonder, ‘Harriet, I love you,’ and she had been able to respond in kind. He told her that he had come to accept her difference as the quality that had first drawn him to her, and not a symbol of her failure to conform. The person she was now was a new, better and more whole human being than she had been before. She loved this person with whom she had fought such desperate battles. They were united in a common aim. The question of mutual trust didn’t need to be raised, for it was a mutual assumption. Besides, their meeting ground was home territory, and what worked there was important. If Max strayed she didn’t want to know about it, though she doubted that he did. He was an excellent sounding-board for her when she had new ideas, or if things went wrong, which of course they did from time to time.

  Harriet’s new life still created problems; she was slighted by academics who considered her an impostor (a few became her friends, but it took a long time), she had had her fingers burnt on occasion by courting too enthusiastically the people she admired, thinking at first that some people were godlike, and finding them merely mortal. Wanting to try everything, she would overextend herself in fruitless pursuits and have trouble extricating herself. Only now, the problems had solutions.

  Two things became apparent to Leonie, over the months that followed her first lunch with Harriet. One was Harriet’s belief that work solved all. The work ethic had transformed her life — she was sure it could change Leonie’s. At times Leonie thought Harriet resented her because she didn’t have to work. It would be nice, Harriet said, if one were in a position to choose, but if she had to choose between a life of working or not working, then she would choose to work. Leonie had the benefit of choice, and quite clearly she would be happier if she worked. When she had heard Leonie voice her dissatisfactions, her loneliness, her rootlessness, and her love for Todd Davis in Toronto, Harriet had said briskly that the best thing for her would be to get off her backside and find herself a job.

  She tended to be impatient when Leonie raised objections. Her husband Hamish would not tolerate the idea of a working wife. It would discredit him in the eyes of the oil company executives who were his colleagues. Besides that, the Coglans had a position to maintain, and Leonie was the domestic caretaker of that position. All the more reason to demonstrate her identity, Harriet maintained.

  The arguments were circular and resolved nothing. However, Leonie was beginning to think that Harriet might have something. And, if she was ever going to work or express any kind of independence, New Zealand could be the place to do it, knowing the territory; the people, even if unreal from this distance in years, were recognisable; the society, at least on the surface, sufficiently egalitarian to absorb her without raising too many eyebrows among the oil community.

  The second thing that Leonie divined about Harriet was more intuition rather than a spoken thing between them. Harriet, she thought, was terrified of any romantic attachments that might shake the foundations of the world she and Max had built. Leonie believed in Harriet’s commitment to her marriage; it was profound in a way that hers was not. Harriet and her marriage had gone in the fire too often; now she needed to hold on and to believe. She suspected that Harriet was afraid of her attachment to Michael Young, that perhaps, even, she had chosen him more deliberately than she realised. In finding someone who seemed to offer a fixed relationship, she had been prepared to enter into it, longing, impulsive, a romantic, despite her liberal labels, believing that she could survive it and come through with her world intact at the end simply because there was an end. A beginning, a middle and an end. Like a good storybook. And Harriet, being the person that she was, would demand that it was very good. Only the story seemed to have stopped in the middle.

  Through the winter, Harriet waited for Michael to come back to her. She believed that he would. She cocooned herself in a world where his existence was as real as if she had seen him yesterday. It was easy to believe that he would return, knowing that he was ‘abroad’. One didn’t have to wait for the phone, wondering if it would be him, or for business trips that might take either of them north or south. One had only to wait for the date of his return.

  During those months of his absence she built up a fantasy world about him. She had to build the magic for herself. At nights when the fierce southerly winds lashed the house and woke her, she would lie thinking of him, surrounding him with the aura of her belief, invoking his body in her imagination, stealing her hand between her legs, then holding at bay the breaking wave, holding his face above hers, sliding quietly away into safe waters, before she turned to stretch herself against her husband’s back. And he, tender, would turn in his sleep, and hold her. How many people dwell inside me, she would wonder, that I need, must live this double life?

  A little magic. A passing miracle, that is all, she would tell herself. But the longing started to grow different dimensions. When asleep again, she would dream of pleasant lands, far away, places she had never been to, only to wake once more, as morning broke, and lie, dry, gritty-eyed and resentful. There were gaps in her life, things she had never done. She had allowed herself to drift along. From time to
time, over the years, she had tried to take her destiny into her own hands. Some might say she had succeeded, that she was a successful modern woman. Yet she asked for more, and the things she had asked for, looking back, did not seem unreasonable. If only, somewhere, she had had the courage to say yes, that will happen, and no, that will not happen. Only it hadn’t been like that. When events had crowded in on her, she had let them, and she had let other people take her along with them. She wanted distance and space, she needed a place to look at herself, rather than to have people looking at her.

  For so long now, she had said confidently, believing the lie, I don’t mind staying here, not going abroad, not seeing the rest of the world. There are some who must go and there are others who must stay and record what is here. But how much did she really do?

  Mediocrity, small jealousies were too often the scope of the work she had to record, and, hemmed in, she began to fear that they were claiming her.

  Now the world had come to her, in the shape of Michael. A stray eagle on a farming Antipodean outcrop. Already the bird was preparing his flight, and who could blame him? When he came back from England, she knew that he would have already made the arrangements for the family’s return, that he would have found them a new house, that soon there would be nothing to keep him here in New Zealand. And she had had so little of him. Ideas began to take shape in her mind. She would go away for a while. She would flee these shores too. Other people went all the time, why not her?

  At first the idea was a tantalising nonsense, but gradually began to assume possibilities. Perhaps not this year; the children, particularly Emma, were too young to leave, but in another year’s time. She would take extra work and save. Perhaps while she was overseas Michael would give her work. The idea wasn’t too absurd after all. He had asked her to work for him before. Maybe she expected him to rescue her — but no, she was rescuing herself.