a Breed of Women

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, I was most aware of your existence, Harriet. I admired you intensely.’

  ‘Good heavens, did you really? I wish you’d told me. It might have changed my life.’

  ‘I doubt it. And anyway, would you have had it changed?’

  She reflected. ‘Funnily enough, no. Though lots of things have gone wrong in it.’

  ‘I’d heard that. Wendy told me about your first marriage. I take it you’re married again?’ he said, looking at her hand.

  ‘Oh, yes. I’ll regale you with all the domestic details. But tell me, why didn’t you ever speak to me if you didn’t mind me too much?’

  ‘I was terrified of you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Hard to explain, really.’ He thought back over the years. ‘I think it was perhaps because I felt trapped. I could see all the other people around me at school going straight into the cowsheds, marriage, or off to training college —’

  ‘Like Wendy?’

  ‘Exactly. You do understand that then? That’s right, I remember she told me years afterwards how cross you’d been with her over that, and quite right too. Whatever she did, Wendy said to me, Harriet had a capacity for living. And that’s what I was sure of. You had that energy, that restless, seeking vitality, that made the other girls in Ohaka look pale beside you, and I was sure if I stayed I’d drift into marrying you, especially as you seemed to rather like me, and that we’d destroy each other.’

  ‘Plenty of people have tried to do that I seem to attract disaster,’ Harriet said.

  ‘I’d have been a bigger disaster to you than most,’ Francis said. I was clear-sighted enough to know that it would have been a frightful mistake, but in those days I didn’t know myself enough to ask why.’

  Harriet, looking at him and meeting his eye, guessed that he was homosexual. He smiled gently in assent, without the question being asked aloud.

  ‘I miss not having had children,’ he said. ‘That’s all, really. So tell me about yours.’

  Later, she said, ‘It’s wonderful sitting here talking to you. I had this strange feeling that I’d known you all my life, and of course, then I realised, it’s true, I really have, well most of it anyway. All of it that seems to matter. You know there aren’t many people I can say that about.’

  ‘Roots, we all need them,’ he said. ‘How does Ohaka look these days?’

  ‘I haven’t been there for a good eighteen years. Strange isn’t it, we pass the turnoff on our way north every year, but we never go there. Introducing one’s past to the people in one’s present seems to get harder every year.’

  ‘I’m going up there tonight. I haven’t seen my parents for about three years.’

  ‘They still live there, then?’

  ‘Oh heavens, yes. They’ve had share milkers on the farm for years, but they’ll never leave there now. Why don’t you come with me?’

  ‘To Ohaka?’

  ‘Why not?’

  And indeed, she thought, why not. ‘We could take my car,’ she offered. ‘It’s a bit beat-up but it’ll get us there, or I could take Max’s, I guess.’

  ‘Marvellous. I was going to fly, but that would be nicer.’

  ‘Then I could go on up while you’re staying at the farm and deliver mother’s birthday present to her. It’s a splendid idea. And I’ve got leave owing, and Max thinks I need a holiday.’

  Late that afternoon the road unwound beneath them, stretching far away to the north. With Francis, it was like exploring a new country, one which she knew so well that she could name every strait, every range of hills, and yet one which she had only begun to explore. They talked as they drove, and Harriet found in Francis a willing and uncritical listener. She left nothing out in recollecting her days since their childhood in Ohaka, and that too was like looking for the first time at a chart that mapped out the progression of her life.

  They swept on past the little towns, stopping at Taihape and eating stale pies and drinking fizzy orange, all that they could find at that hour, and pushed on up towards Hamilton. The lights of Weyville, lying in the hills away to their right floated past them, and Harriet thought of Cousin Alice, and was glad that they had decided to circumnavigate the town. For all that she cared for the old lady, Cousin Alice was for another time, another journey, living out her life as she was, a frail little ghost in a Weyville old people’s home, calling for her children to return.

  They had taken turns with the driving, and were able to make good time without feeling the effects of the journey. It was nearly midnight when they made Hamilton.

  ‘We must be mad,’ said Harriet. ‘We should have stopped at Taupo instead of coming up round the back of the lake, and got a bed there. We’re never going to find a place to sleep.’

  But night staff in one of the large hotels rather grudgingly said they could have two rooms, looking at them as if to say who’s fooling whom, and ostentatiously put them in adjacent rooms. Francis noticed too, and amused, advised her to lock the door.

  They were on the road again before nine, Ohaka only a few hours journey away. Through Auckland, spread in a giant pincer movement across the land, across the harbour bridge, peeling away the cities, only remembering that Michael lived in Auckland when they were off the motorway and miles beyond the city.

  Freedom, on the road at last Set free. The day blue, the sea dazed with light, flashing beside them, Whangaparaoa stretching in the far distance, and then through the farmland, and then coming to meet them again as they spilled over the top rim of the Brynderwyns, and away down the other side, Bream Tail and the Hen and Chickens lying nestled on the blue floor of the world. Along through Waipu, and then the turnoff, the one she passed and avoided for so many years. The road was sealed all the way in. How things had changed. Perhaps the local bus wouldn’t be such a boneshaker now, but then on the last strip up to Dixons’ farm the tar seal gave way to gravel, so that coming on to it they almost skidded off the road.

  It had been agreed that Harriet would go with Francis to the Dixons for lunch and leave him there while she went up to explore the old farm and the little town. She would be welcome to stay the night, he told her. The Dixons had always had a soft spot for her but if she wanted to go on up to Whangarei that night she should do so. This journey should have no constraints on her, he told her she must take it at her own pace. When she had seen her parents for a day or so she would come back to Ohaka and pick Francis up, to take him back as far as Auckland so he could to fly Australia.

  Harriet spent a pleasant hour or so with the Dixons. They were pleased to see her, and would have held her there all day if Francis hadn’t intervened. She pored over photographs of Wendy’s children, far away in England. The grandparents sighed wistfully over them — they’d seen the children once, of course, but it wasn’t the same. Perhaps they would go over some day, but they were getting old, they told Harriet. They felt they hadn’t had much luck with grandchildren, what with Francis never having married and Wendy over there all that way. Still, there was another daughter who had done all right by them; a couple of nice kiddies and her husband a good chap, settled on a farm down Kaiwaka way.

  At last they let her go asking whether she intended to see the Colliers. Harriet had almost forgotten that they existed. Surely they were not all alive up there still? No, the old man had been gone a good few years back, but old Doris was still up there and the boy was too, though very poorly, they’d heard. They were sure they’d be pleased to see her.

  She drove slowly towards Ohaka township. Ohaka. A hard place to describe, though there was little enough left of it. There had been three main stores, and the stock and station agency and the bank and two churches and the school, standing in the middle of the paddocks with the road threading away through them. But what was it, really? A place where she had lived. It was a special place that only those who had lived in it could understand. She was coming home.

  The three general stores were closed now with boards across their gaping fronts, unp
ainted and collapsing. Now there was a big building trying to imitate a city supermarket, brightly lit and vulgar, and alongside that a chemist’s shop. Apart from that nothing seemed much changed. Children were starting to dawdle from school. They could have been the same children of twenty-five years ago; she could have been one of them. Something was missing, though, and at first she could not place it.

  Then she realised that the church wasn’t there any more. She stopped the car, and walked over to where it had been. The trees were still there, the same old apple trees, and they showered petals on her as they had done in the spring of her confirmation. Where the church had been was now just a pile of rubble and charred foundations. It had been burnt down, and that shook her. The devil must have had his way. Amazing how he kept rearing his ugly head. There must be some sort of symbolism in the destruction of the church. Perhaps she just wished God might have His way once in a while. But then, with friends like Father Dittmer, who needed enemies? She recalled that moment when the Bishop had spoken of heaven being home and home being heaven, and how she had felt excluded. There were no magic keys and possibly she would always be locked out.

  Along at the end of the road was an old barn close to the road, one she remembered passing regularly. It appeared to be opened up to the road now with a gateway leading in, and a sign outside. She wandered along to it, curious. The sign read CRAFTS. How odd, she thought, crafts in Ohaka, forgetting the many pottery shops that she and Max visited when they holidayed in the north. That was one thing, but crafts in Ohaka, that was something else. She went in, the barn had had a floor put down in it, and trestles were suspended around the room, displaying indifferent artifacts, second-rate pottery and homemade knitted garments. A pasty young woman with her hair pulled back greasily into a rubber band was sitting in charge, knitting. A toddler whimpered round her feet, and she pulled it off the wares, with irritable exclamation from time to time. The room was buzzing with flies. Harriet found it dispiriting. The mother had a strangely familiar look.

  ‘Are you from round these parts?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘Yep. All me life.’

  It was hardly possible, yet she had to ask her. ‘Are you related to Ailsa Wilson that was, by any chance?’

  ‘My mother. Know her?’

  ‘Oh, long ago. I lived here when she was a girl. I haven’t seen her in a long time.’ Harriet told the girl who she was, and asked to be remembered to her mother. For a moment she entertained a thought of going to see her, but she guessed she knew the story of Ailsa’s life without being told. A grandmother already. The girl said laconically that she’d pass the message on. She didn’t seem particularly interested, though she did say, ‘Not been back for a while then?’

  ‘Eighteen years.’

  ‘Long time. You’ll see a few changes, then.’ The girl was perfectly serious.

  She drove on up through the valley, to the old house where she had lived with her parents. But it too had gone. A new place stood on the old site, a shiny solid modern brick farmhouse. This was something she hadn’t bargained for. The woman was right after all, there were some changes. It made it more difficult to approach the occupants of the place than she had imagined. It was one thing to walk up to a door she had entered thousands of times, but she felt intimidated and out of place, confronted by this new house. The occupants might think she was idiotic wanting to go sauntering round their paddocks.

  She decided she would go up to the Colliers to break the ice. She drove carefully up through the paddocks to the old house, glad to see that it at least was unchanged. Across at the shed a man was bringing in the cows for milking. She waved, expecting it to be Jim, and the man responded, uncertainly, not knowing who she was. From this distance it was impossible to decide whether it was Jim or not.

  Doris Collier met her at the door, a big thick old woman, her legs swollen purple and folding over the edge of her slippers. She looked at Harriet without comprehension. ‘I’m Harriet, from across the road,’ Harriet said at last.

  The old woman put her arms out and folded her against her spotty apron. ‘Of course it is, of course it’s Harriet. You’ve come to see him, then?’

  She led her inside, closing the door behind her. The smell of must and decay impregnated the air and something else again, sickly sweet, which she could not define. The wallpaper was curling off the walls, the floral carpet, once the envy of Ohaka, was worn thin, with great brown threads actually showing through near the doorways.

  ‘It’s not been the same since Dad died,’ said Doris, seeing her looking around. ‘We miss him, Jim and me, you know.’

  ‘I’m sure you do. He was a very …’ Harriet sought for a word, ‘a very kind man.’

  ‘Aye, he was that,’ agreed Doris. ‘You don’t get the heart to do things the way you did, girl. That’s the truth of it, and nursing Jim day ’n’ night I don’t get much time to look to things beside him. Come along then, you’d best see the boy.’

  The boy, whom Harriet now took to mean Jim, was propped up on a great pile of white pillows. The room was very neat, and clean in contrast to the rest of the house, as if all of Doris’s energies centred round this one spot.

  Some of the smell was explained in this room, too. It was the smell of sickness, of cancer and of approaching death. The burly Jim she had known was a tiny bundle of a man now, only a huge distended stomach showing any size at all. His eyes were sunken deep in a luminous waxy face.

  ‘You’ve got a visitor, Jim. The lass has come to see you,’ said Doris, as if they had been expecting her.

  ‘Might have known,’ said Jim. ‘She was a good ’un, eh? Always was.’

  ‘And to think I didn’t know her on the doorstep! I should have, seen you often enough gawping out of that box at nights.’ She indicated the television set in the corner of the bedroom. ‘There’s one that made good in spite of herself, I say to Jim at nights, don’t I, Jim?’

  ‘Aye, Ma, you do too.’

  ‘It was the shock of seeing you on the doorstep instead of in the corner, I reckon,’ said Doris. ‘Well, girl, you’d better have a cuppa. You sit here and have a natter to the boy while I put the kettle on.’

  The boy was nearly fifty, if Harriet’s calculations were right. He was always the boy, she supposed, when a mother saw her own flesh and blood dying before her eyes.

  ‘I’ll not get better, you know,’ said Jim.

  Harriet had nothing to say.

  ‘You were a good bit of a kid to me. We got on all right, you and me, didn’t we?’

  ‘Yes we did, Jim. And you were good to me. Looked after me. I’m grateful for that.’

  ‘Grateful, eh? Well I dunno about that. You needed looking after. You get that Maori joker off your back all right, then?’

  Strange how one is caught, Harriet thought. If anyone anywhere else had said that, I’d have bitten his head off. Yet what can I say to this man, locked far away from the rest of the world in a diseased body and his old prejudices, the prejudices of Ohaka.

  And yet, hadn’t Jim once defended Maoris to her father? A strange mixture, these people of the land, a blend of practical tolerance and intellectual reaction. She wondered what Jim would say to that comment, and smiled.

  ‘What you smiling about then? It’s not funny,’ he said crossly.

  ‘Just that it’s good to see you.’

  ‘Aye, and you. Got kids?’

  She spread photos of the children out across the bed, and he plucked feebly at them, admiring them.

  ‘You done right to get away from here,’ he remarked. ‘There’s no way outa Ohaka, ’cept by flying young, or dying here.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Harriet. ‘The trap is if you try to fly too high, and don’t quite make it. I’ve got a long way to go yet. I’ve no way of knowing that I ever will.’

  ‘You got outa here,’ he said stubbornly. ‘I died here long ago, long before this lot hit me, girl.’

  It was getting on for evening when Doris rang the people across the road and as
ked them if Harriet could go down to the river. She wanted to give her a meal, but Harriet said that she was expected in Whangarei. This was not quite the truth, but she’d decided to push on to her parents’ place, rather than sit round at the Dixons’. Francis would understand how she felt, but the Dixons themselves would want to lay claims on her, and ask her what she thought of this and that that she’d seen, and she felt she could cope better with Gerald tonight.

  She wished she had something to give Jim, something that said thank you for being a good man, having led as good a life as you knew how to, but there was nothing. His and Doris’s eyes seemed to say that her coming was enough. She wished that she had been as good as they believed.

  Doris’s phone call had eliminated the need for her to see the people on the old farm; they were quite happy for her to wander round as suited her. With a rare and surprising tact, Doris had simply said she was a girl who used to live across the road, without saying it was the girl on telly, or anything that would make them offended if she didn’t go and say hullo.

  The spring growth was coming away nicely and she wondered if they’d make hay this year. The trees were alive with buds and the breaking hawthorn. A living landscape and a dying people.

  She didn’t stay as long as she had expected. The air was full of ghosts; her own ghost was strung between earth and sky on a fallen poplar branch, full of hope and dreams. She wasn’t that girl any more, but someone different, a stranger in a foreign land. The channel of the river had been cleared of willows and it flowed cleanly between the banks. A dark flash nicked through the shadows on the water. The eels, always the eels.

  At least she still recognised the perils beneath calm surfaces.

  She walked thoughtfully away, back up to the car. Perhaps some day she would bring Emma here. She might know what to make of it. The others would make their way here of their own accord, if they wanted to. It was hard to know what it all meant. Now she would go to her parents, to their old age, and their pride, and their loneliness, to their talk of ‘home’ and ‘the old Dart’ which had become a dream that went the way of most dreams.