by Fiona Kidman
‘I should like to speak to you alone,’ she said loudly, too loudly. Michael looked pained.
‘Excuse me a moment,’ he said to one of the men. They were looking at her, faintly embarrassed at being involved in some obviously personal crisis, but intrigued none the less.
Michael drew her over to one side. ‘What is it, Harriet? I thought you wanted to hear about the arrangements to wind the company’s operations up.’
‘You know perfectly well I want to see you. I don’t give a damn about the company,’ said Harriet. ‘Why are you pretending like this? How can you try to behave exactly as if there’s never been anything between us except a business arrangement? Or perhaps that’s all it was, eh? While you wanted a little publicity, was that it?’
‘Please keep your voice down,’ hissed Michael, his careful charm starting to disintegrate. ‘Look, I’m sorry, these people stayed longer than I expected, but I thought you’d like to meet them.’
‘I think they’re all revolting,’ she said. A few of the men looked over.
‘They heard that,’ Michael said.
‘Good. Shall I betray my origins a bit more? You were really slumming it with me. Your bit on the side down under. Like missionaries, Bibles and balls and shouldn’t we be grateful.’
She knew he would have liked to shout at her to be quiet or hit her, or both. Instead he said quietly, ‘If you don’t keep your voice down I’ll ask the management to have you leave. If you choose to go and sit through in the other bar I’ll join you in a few minutes.’ His face was scarlet under the sickly lights in the hotel, as she turned without speaking again, and went through to the bar he indicated. She found a chair by herself, and collapsed into it, drink slopping over her dress. Oh, she’d blown it now, she really had.
After about five minutes he sat down opposite her. ‘Was that necessary?’ he said.
‘Something was. It seemed appropriate.’ She felt crumpled, dejected. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror behind the bar; she looked quite ghastly, even if one made allowances for the fact that they were sitting under a large pot plant lit by green light.
‘I want to go to your room,’ she said standing up.
‘No you don’t,’ he said, violently.
‘But I do, I know what I want,’ she said. He sat, refusing to budge. ‘Look,’ she said, exasperated, ‘for God’s sake, I feel rotten, I’m half boozed, I suppose that’s obvious, I look revolting, and I’m going to cry. I can’t help that, you don’t owe me a thing, but at least couldn’t you offer me some privacy to talk to you for a few minutes. I won’t tear my clothes off or make a scene, if that’s what you’re afraid of.’
He looked doubtful about that as he followed her to the lifts. And well he might, she reflected, having just been part of the scene she had made. She wasn’t at all sure that she had told the truth herself. She didn’t know what she was going to say to him when she got to the room.
She didn’t think she had anything left to say, but when they were in the room, she heard her voice, whining at first, rising to a torrent of abuse. She swore at him, and shouted, feeling a tide of anger of which she didn’t know she was capable, as if he was every man who had ever betrayed her. And he was. Why should he look for devils? He was the devil himself, the one she’d waited for, to turn up through her bedroom floor when she was a child, the eel that crept through the dark pools, all the things she had ever been afraid of. He stood stunned, and at last, so was she. Her voice trailed away, and broke off.
They stood staring at each other. ‘Why me?’ he said at last. ‘Why did you have to choose me to love?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, tiredly. ‘I don’t even like you very much.’ It was her last reserve of unpleasantness. She was totally drained.
‘Neither you should. I’m a horrible man.’
She glanced at him quickly. ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d say you believed that.’
‘I don’t know what I believe,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what it was like for me.’
‘You could have let me try. If I’d understood
‘I tried, but you didn’t want to know. Besides,’ and he was accusing her a little now, ‘you told me you’d be all right. That you had nothing to ask.’
‘Except being with you. I wanted that.’ She put her hands out to touch him, wrapping her arms about his neck. She felt him go rigid, as if he was disgusted. Her arms fell, and she gathered her handbag and handkerchief together. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She opened the door and walked down the passage towards the lifts.
They seemed to take forever to arrive. ‘Harriet,’ she heard him calling after her. He ran down the passage towards her, the lift stopped, and he put his finger on the button to send it on.
‘Don’t do that,’ she said, ‘I’ve waited long enough for the bloody thing.’
‘I can’t let you go like this,’ he said.
‘You should have thought about that sooner,’ said Harriet coldly. The scene was over, Michael was over, she wanted him go to away.
‘Look, I’ve got a man coming up soon, we’re going to have dinner together. But we could talk this over sensibly. I can’t have you going off through the hotel looking like that.’
‘I don’t think my appearance should worry you particularly. I promise I’m not going to go and tell all to your mates down there.’
‘I didn’t think you were. I just don’t want to stand here in a hot lobby quarrelling with you.’
‘Appearances. You keep them up so well, don’t you? Well you have nothing to quarrel about. There’s nothing. Simply nothing.’
He took her elbow. The lifts opened and a man got out recognising and greeting Michael as he did so. Michael dropped her elbow.
‘For Christ’s sake, piss off,’ she said to him. He looked at her as a man might look at a woman who had just dropped her sanitary pad at an Embassy reception.
And serves him bloody well right, she thought as she walked out on to The Terrace. To appear to be molesting unescorted females in hotel lobbies was poetic justice for the likes of him. Though who was to blame him for being revolted by a loud-mouthed abusive drunk middle-ageing woman slobbering over him?
Somehow, she felt she could.
After she left the hotel, she drove up The Terrace and headed away from the direction of home, not quite knowing where she was going. When she headed out of the Mount Victoria road tunnel she guessed that she must be making for the sea. She followed the road out towards the airport, and at the turnoff from Cobham Drive, veered left towards Shelley Bay. She had known where she was going all the time, she guessed, as she parked the car on the sea front. It was the place where she and Michael had sat, nearly a year before. It could have been ten years, so much of her life seemed to have been expended in him.
She got out of the car, and climbed down to the beach and sat down. It was a harsh little strip of coast, and sharp stones bit into her as she sat. Why, she wondered, had she been willing to fall so helplessly before this irritable, rather arrogant, but decidedly beautiful young man? Looking back, she supposed that there were a great many things about him that she really didn’t like particularly. But surely it had been more than his physical attraction. She thought it was, but it was hard to define. She would never know now, not even in retrospect, because she would never truly know him. He had killed that possibility in that one act of rejecting her. However shocked he might have been by his handiwork a moment later, the act had still been performed. He had killed any feeling between them.
And he was right to have done it. Through all the people that she had been, she had never learned to stand alone. Even with Max, with whom she had defined so many terms, she still tended to stand against him, rather than with him. They would go on, they had become indestructible it seemed, but if she was wrong and he were to go away, or to die, what then happened to her emotional dependence? From Michael, she might at least have learnt a measure of independence. It should be like that, she would have to work to mak
e it so, as one always did in any new situation. She would like to think that she had taken one thing of value from it all.
There was so much to learn. She wondered if there would ever be enough time for her to learn all the lessons that were required of her.
When she was calm, and the cold sea air whipping in the wind at her face had restored her to some sort of order, she made her way home. She must have sat by the water for longer than she had realised, for it was past nine, and the family had turned in for an early night. She went to the bathroom, and washed her face and cleaned her teeth. In the mirror she looked passable now, her face bleached of colour, but otherwise composed. There would still be some bad times to come out of this, but for the moment she would present the familiar face that carried her through from day to day.
Max was still awake and reading. She told him briefly that it had been a hard session with a recalcitrant businessman who’d wanted to make life difficult for her. The best thing she could do would be to get some sleep, especially as they had to go out the next evening. Max groaned, and switched the light off, saying, ‘Couldn’t we possibly get out of it?’
‘I wish we could,’ she said, rolling over to him, ‘but I can’t see how.’
In the meantime, Hamish, Leonie’s husband, was raising objections to friendship between Harriet and Leonie. He had watched Harriet’s performance on television a few times, and suspected her line of questioning. He felt that he and Leonie would be better off if they were not mixed up in her politics. Leonie protested that broadcasting people were required to demonstrate political impartiality, to which Hamish replied that that did not stop them belonging to organisations that had leftist and radical inclinations. Take organised women’s groups, for instance. They invariably had a bias towards the left, whatever their apparent motivations. Leonie wondered about the Country Women’s Institute but didn’t like to say so as one didn’t argue with Hamish. She wondered how Hamish knew what groups Harriet might be associated with, as she hadn’t told him, but it wasn’t too difficult to deduce when he told her one night after watching a television programme featuring Harriet, that ‘a friend’ had told him that Harriet Wallace had been involved in anti-Vietnam demonstrations in the late 1960s. There were photographs in existence to prove it, he’d been told. There was a subversive side to Harriet’s nature, which it would be well for people like themselves to avoid.
When Leonie told Hamish that she had invited Max and Harriet to dinner, his face darkened in anger. ‘Why have you done this to me?’ he said. ‘I give you a good life, don’t I? What hold has that woman got over you?’
‘No hold,’ Leonie said. ‘I simply want to choose a friend of my own for once.’
‘What about the husband? He might turn out to be frightful,’ said Hamish.
‘I would have thought that you would have found out about that,’ said Leonie.
He hesitated for only a moment. ‘I believe he’s all right,’ said Hamish smoothly. ‘A pleasant enough chap from what I’ve heard, puts up with his wife’s exhibitionism. Not much to him, I would imagine.’
‘That’s something we’ll just have to find out then, won’t we?’ Leonie replied.
‘Very well,’ said Hamish. ‘If you’re quite determined to go through with this, I’d like to ask a couple of friends around too.’
‘Why?’ said Leonie, startled.
‘Why not? If these people are coming, I’m certainly not going to be a poor host to them. Make it a party. Do the thing properly. We’ll invite the Smythes. Would you ring Liz tomorrow, please?’ And he buried his head in the paper.
The Smythes. Good, reliable, up-themselves Liz and Neil. Close enough to Hamish to keep their mouths shut if things got out of hand, and to form a front. Oh, Hamish was a clever bastard. It was a masterly stroke, giving himself party lines on which to do battle. And of course, he would expect her, in the final analysis, to join ranks with him — hadn’t she always? Not to do so would be treachery beyond his worst expectations. She was curious to know just why he saw Harriet and Max as such an explicit threat, though. Was he really afraid of them, and if so, why? Or did he really consider himself so superior that he was going to rout them once and for all?
Maybe he read more into her than she believed. Women are always doing that, she mused, hiding things and feeling guilty, and analysing how much men read into their actions. Really, it was nothing, Hamish was just so used to the same kind of people, that he did not enjoy the prospect of meeting others without back-up. Such a conservative. Well, they would see.
As the hour for their arrival drew closer, Leonie decided that if the Smythes were coming it would be unsuitable for Harriet to bring up the subject of working wives. But getting to the phone was virtually impossible because Hamish had come home early. It was clear that he was going to spare no effort in entertaining his guests. When, finally, she was able to snatch a moment, it was too late. Genevieve Taylor answered the phone and said that her parents had already gone out.
The Smythes arrived first. Liz, amiable and placid, had earned her good service medal years ago and was comfortably installed in her seat of power. If she had an overbearing manner, at least it was not competitive. She had no need to be. Leonie felt reasonably at ease with her, though she knew well enough that Liz could cut the ground out from under her feet at a moment’s notice if it proved necessary. Neil was the suntanned, iron-grey-haired type who looked as if he spent his life in swimming pools or on a Bermudan beach, and who kept a deceptive veneer over his knowledge of the industry he served. The couple were, in short, the kind of people Hamish would most like the Coglans themselves to be in another ten years.
By the time Harriet and Max arrived, they were into their drinks. Leonie took Harriet through to the bedroom to take off her coat. She was about to ask Harriet not to discuss anything controversial, when Harriet turned to her and said, ‘I saw Michael Young yesterday. Last night.’ Leonie looked at her face. It was pale and strained.
‘It’s over,’ said Harriet flatly.
‘Why didn’t you ring me today? How long have you known you were going to see him?’ said Leonie.
‘I was busy today. I’ve known … a week or so.’
‘I see.’ Only Leonie didn’t quite see. She had thought she and Harriet had become closer, but perhaps that had been an assumption on her part. Maybe Harriet had regretted her confidences.
‘I’ll talk to you about it tomorrow,’ said Harriet. ‘I couldn’t before.’
The two women went through to join the others. Leonie noticed that Harriet had made a special effort to be conventional. She and Max looked exactly like anyone else they might have been entertaining, and Leonie silently thanked them for that. Though she was getting as bad as Hamish — had she expected them to come wearing love beads and jeans? she wondered. She accepted her drink from Hamish, her fourth already. It was easier to drink in private than to make phone calls.
Hamish seemed slightly nonplussed. He and Max were talking about the past rugby season in an amicable fashion and Max was giving sound advice on which clubs their son Brent might consider joining. Max had played for a couple of seasons in Wellington before meeting Harriet and going to live in Weyville.
It was sound advice too, Neil told Hamish. He didn’t know why they’d never talked about it before — after all, his boys played football. Harriet asked for a sherry; Leonie noticed that she sipped it very slowly. It was barely touched when Leonie asked Hamish to refill her glass. She glanced in the direction of Harriet’s drink and Max, following her look, smiled, and said affectionately, ‘I think it was a heavy night last night, wasn’t it, old girl? Business got a bit rough.’
Harriet turned her head towards him, a gesture of complicity. My God, thought Leonie, and she talks about other people as survivors. She’s a survivor from way back. Something I always knew, I suppose. Long ago I thought that I was the stronger one, but she has come through, not I. After what Harriet had said in the bedroom to her, the look she had cast at her h
usband was quite incredible. Perhaps she thought she was on television; surely she didn’t always feel as convincing as she looked on the screen.
The meal was almost dull — not in its presentation, for Leonie was a superb cook and hadn’t spared herself, but in its orderliness. She glanced at Hamish from time to time to see how he was taking his guests. Harriet was talking about television, describing the shooting of a particular documentary, discussing the logic of putting a certain emphasis on it as seen by the producer, agreeing politely with Neil that it showed a bias in some particular direction, but offering the alternative that was to follow and give it balance the following week. The Smythes were obviously fascinated by this inside glimpse into the studios. Equally clear to Leonie was the fact that Harriet was feeding them exactly enough to hook them without giving away her hand. She had been through this a score of times; this was far from the first time that she had been set up. Hamish and Neil were enchanted, and Leonie knew that Liz would repeat the information she had been given, like a seer, over coffee.
Leonie had underestimated the Taylors as a couple. If anything, she, Hamish and the Smythes were being set up. The whole thing was a clever game, and they were losing. For once, she was glad to be a loser.
About ten o’clock, they took coffee through to the lounge, where a small television set had been brought in. Hamish suggested that it be switched on, not that they usually watched it of course, but it was Harriet’s night on, wasn’t it? It would be nice to get the double image.
When the pre-recorded programme was over they sat discussing it idly for a while. Harriet’s had been a straightforward small item amongst a number of other meatier topics, a lightweight assignment that week.