a Breed of Women

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘Are they all right? You wear lovely shirts when we go out.’ Her voice sounded high-pitched and anxious.

  ‘They’re beautiful, the most beautiful present I ever had. Here’s the rest of yours.’

  ‘Oh no, Denny, not more presents,’ she cried as he put another box on the table.

  ‘That one’s really for you,’ he said, watching her intently.

  Inside the box there was another box, a musical box covered with blue velvet and gold wrought birds. The interior was lined with blue velvet too, and as she lifted the lid, the box started a reedy rendition of ‘The Blue Danube’.

  They both stared at it, entranced. A waitress came over and said, ‘Excuse me, but if you don’t mind there’s a whole queue what’s waiting to get in here, and would you mind picking up the paper on account of our litter bins are all full up.’

  So they made their way to the bus, due to leave at noon, Harriet completely forgetting to go to the post office. Even if she had remembered, time was running short. Denny made her look at herself in shop windows in the white Breton, and she had to admit it did look good framing her pale and rather weary-looking face.

  She loved him, she loved him, nothing could ever part them. The morning’s doubts fell away — how could she ever have thought not to love him? She would love him forever and have his children and lie by his side every night for the rest of her life.

  At the bus stop she clung to him, wordlessly trying to convey this to him, until the bus driver was ready to leave, and said that whichever one of them was coming with him had better get aboard. Leaving him there on the footpath was like leaving part of herself.

  At Ohaka, Gerald and Mary were both out waiting for the bus though it was right in the middle of milking time. She guessed they must have milked early.

  Mary clutched her with such fierceness that she felt she would break, and Gerald seemed gruffly pleased to see her. Nothing seemed to have changed on the farm, nor had her parents.

  Possibly they had grown quieter than before, and goodness only knew, that had been quiet enough. It was almost as if her absence had imposed on them a habit of silence. She had taken away their need to converse, and they went about their chores wrapped in their private inner selves. She felt that they seemed to have difficulty re-establishing familiar conversational habits. However, she knew that she rekindled all the warmth and love that lay dormant in Mary, that her mother would have taken her in her arms if she had known how, but that it was not possible. Gerald was obviously pleased with the progress she was making, and claimed a good part of the credit by assuming responsibility for her decision not to go to Training College. She would, he said, show those teachers a thing or two. He always knew his daughter had it in her. If this was so it was a revelation to Harriet, but she didn’t say so.

  There wasn’t much news in Ohaka. Harriet had wondered if she might see Jim, but it seemed that he was taking a season off the farm, and labouring in the South Island. The Wallaces suspected that he was looking for a wife. His last prospect had fallen through to everyone’s dismay, and he was on the market again, though nobody seemed very keen. They supposed that he was getting a bit old for most of the local girls. She visited Ailsa, and inspected the baby, which was suitably fat and doing all the right things.

  Ailsa looked older and rather tired. She was frankly envious of Harriet’s appearance, and said how lucky she was being a working girl, but then some people never knew when they were lucky. There was a tinge of frank resentment in her voice, which Harriet thought a little unfair, as Ailsa had been so elated about her own successes only a year before.

  After Ailsa, there were Wendy Dixon and Marie Walker to telephone. Marie was enjoying Training College and felt she’d make a good teacher. Wendy thought it was all right, but was vaguely dissatisfied. She thought she might travel in a year or so — how did Harriet feel about going with her? To England of course, but maybe they’d go up through India and the Middle East.

  Harriet said she’d think about it. It all depended on her own studies, and it would take them a while to save, so she suggested that they should just keep it in the back of their minds for a bit. Privately she thought that if she went anywhere it would be with Leonie, but on the other hand, would she ever go anywhere without Denny? Nevertheless, she repeated the conversation to Gerald and Mary and they were impressed with the idea and said it was something to work for. They didn’t know if they’d ever get back to the Old Dart, though the price of butter fat was up that year. Things had been a bit easier, but their unit was too small to ever make them a fortune, however much prices rose.

  When she telephoned them, Wendy and Marie had both asked her to visit, but the trip to Ailsa’s had depressed her, and the depression seemed to be getting worse. She felt herself tense and brittle as the days wore on, and now that they had settled back to something like the old days, she could see that Gerald was more overbearing than before, and harder on her mother. Harriet, on the other hand, had become less tolerant and ready to accept his absolute authority, and the situation flared suddenly into a quarrel between them.

  It was resolved after she had wept and said she was sorry. The old order didn’t really change. She was furious at herself for having cried in front of him, and the thought that she could return to Weyville in a few days became increasingly attractive. The only thing that made her pleased to stay on the farm was the fact that she’d spared her mother a bit of milking, but she hated doing it so much that she hated herself.

  One day she went down to the old poplar tree. There had been a flash flood down the river during the winter that had swept branches downstream, covering the poplar with flotsam, which made it impossible to sit in.

  She sat on the edge of the river. There was a flick in the water and an eel slithered away. She shuddered. It was time to leave.

  Coming home was to have been a cleansing for her, a putting of her house in order from the events of the past year, but it wasn’t really possible. Perhaps if her period had come on time it would have been better. One didn’t need to look far to know that this was the real problem. She and Denny hadn’t taken precautions during their night in Auckland; or rather they had the first time they’d made love, but neither of them had anticipated the demands they would make on each other, and they’d simply given up.

  Terror that she might be pregnant was building up inside her. There was no way that she wanted to be forced into decisions she wasn’t ready to take. Some of the doubts and fears of the morning in Auckland returned.

  The weather turned humid. Mary wanted to talk to her, but a barrier was building up between them. It had always been there, of course, but now it was an almost tangible wall, so real that Harriet felt as if she could touch it, and woke from a dream one night crying because the wall was crumbling and falling on her.

  A day or so before she was due to leave, her period came. With it some of the tension was dissipated, the bloated discomfort she had been feeling melted away, and her sense of relief lightened the atmosphere all round. But it was too late to be of much help. She was due back at the library at the beginning of the second week of January, and the time had come for her to leave again. Her leaving was in itself a new strain to be borne by them all, until the bus collected her from the roadside on the Saturday morning.

  Cousin Alice was pleased to see her back. The house had been lonely without her, she said.

  She rang Leonie, who was elated at her return. It was arranged that they should meet that night and go to the lake-front fair, which had only another couple of nights to run.

  The girls linked arms as they wandered past the candy-floss caravan and the shouting hawkers.

  ‘It’s been terrible without you,’ said Leonie. She had been back to the orphanage for Christmas Day.

  Harriet told her about Wendy’s proposal that they should go overseas together.

  ‘Would you go?’ asked Leonie sharply.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ said Harriet. ‘But not with her. I wondered
what you thought about us going together in a year or so.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘You know I wouldn’t want to go with anyone else.’

  ‘It’d be marvellous. Oh yes, Harriet, let’s go.’

  ‘There’s only one thing,’ said Harriet. ‘I think Denny might want to marry me.’

  Leonie stopped, pulling them both to a halt. The expression Harriet remembered from the first time she had told Leonie about Denny was close to the surface.

  ‘You’d be a fool,’ said Leonie bitterly. ‘After all we’ve tried to do!’

  ‘You mean our crowd, the football club and everyone?’

  ‘Who do you think I mean?’

  ‘It looks to me as if everyone was doing just the opposite; trying to get us together.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Leonie, beginning to walk again. ‘Maybe they were, I don’t know. Only I wasn’t and Dick wasn’t You’re wilful, Harriet, d’you know that?’

  ‘I could be. I don’t see what that’s got to do with it.’

  ‘You want to be with him because it would put people’s backs up.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, don’t start crying. I’ve got no patience with it Chas and Denny said they’d meet us here tonight. I should have said I didn’t know where you were.’

  ‘Denny’s back?’

  ‘Three days ago. He’s been ringing me every day. I kept saying I didn’t know when you’d be back, but he rang the library yesterday and found out you were starting again on Monday.’

  And as she spoke, Denny and Chas appeared at the other end of the fairground, waving out to them.

  ‘Back with Chas,’ said Leonie impatiently.

  ‘Back with Chas?’

  ‘Oh fuck Chas,’ said Leonie impatiently.

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘Of course. But I tell you, Harriet, it’s not worth the candle. I don’t know what you see in it.’

  Later, as dusk was descending, Harriet and Denny rode the ferris wheel together. At the very top of the arc it stopped, so that people at the bottom could get aboard. They were hung suspended over Weyville, the lights coming on in the ugly flat little town. Away over to their right, they could see the pine plantations and beyond that again, the hills, blue smudges on the sky.

  ‘Look over there, Denny,’ said Harriet pointing.

  ‘Nice, eh?’

  ‘Where would you like to go?’

  He looked surprised. ‘Same place as you, I expect. Back to our little bed like we had in Auckland.’

  ‘I don’t mean that. I mean go. End up. No, not end up, one shouldn’t end anywhere, but find some place to go, as far as possible.’

  ‘Hey, you carry on a bit, don’t you? You’re raving, woman. I’ll start rocking this boat if you keep on.’ And he jiggled the seat so that they swayed at the top of the machine, pitching perilously. She screamed and hung onto him.

  ‘That’s better,’ he said, his arm around her. The ferris wheel started to move forward slowly, then picked up speed. Music was piped shrilly up to them, Bing Crosby singing, ‘True Love’ …

  There is no escape, Harriet’s mind whirled, except if I stand up in this swirling crate and leap out into space. Maybe I would fly into space, and soar on and on and on — like some great bird. Or will I fall from this great height like a sparrow, crashing earthwards?

  The year crept forward, summer lapsed into autumn again, and then it was time for the long winter season. The football boots were brought out, the first party of the year took place, the old crowd reformed.

  For a few months, Harriet and Denny had seen less of each other. Without the cohesion of the group, seeing each other was not so easy. Leonie and Harriet had taken to going to dances together on Saturday nights without partners, and although Denny almost always turned up and took her home, the permanence of the relationship seemed to be fading. Chas had been busy on the farm, Dick was rarely around. At Easter Denny had gone north, and Harriet had refused to go to Ohaka and meet him in Auckland en route.

  Instead she stayed in Weyville, and went to the out-of-towners’ dance. Later, she went to the lake front with the theological student of the year before. He made love to her very inexpertly on the back seat of the car, and afterwards prayed that God might forgive them both, then proposed to her.

  As she had shown him how to remove himself from her vagina before he ejaculated, she assured him that this would not be necessary. He seemed at once profoundly grateful that she should have thus delivered him, and righteously angry that she knew such a technique.

  Cousin Alice seemed well pleased with her, although she asked her rather quietly at breakfast the next morning if it was true that she had been seen around town with a Maori boy from the mill on a number of occasions. Someone had mentioned it to her at the dance the night before.

  ‘Quite possible, Cousin Alice,’ said Harriet, buttering toast. ‘There is a Maori boy called Denny Rei in the Rovers’ team. The other boys think a lot of him.’

  ‘But what are you doing with him?’

  ‘If they accept him as a friend, what sort of person would I be if I snubbed him? I always walk downtown with him if we run into each other.’

  Cousin Alice looked reflective. Despite the worthiness of the football team (and some of the lads from very nice families who played with the team), there were obvious difficulties. Her forbearance with the now absent Dick had seemed quite enough to handle. However, Harriet was able to conduct herself graciously in a variety of company, she noted, and her exemplary behaviour of the night before was a very hopeful sign indeed. She scarcely had cause to complain, particularly in view of Harriet’s departure with the theological student.

  Harriet smiled inwardly. How disappointed Cousin Alice would have been. But then, she herself was also disappointed. She had actually hoped that the theological student might have provided her with a little divine guidance in certain areas too. There was the hope in the back of her mind that sex might be as delightful with him as it was with Denny. It would solve a lot of problems if the excellence of the act was proven to be universal. As her encounter with the student had been so disastrous, she felt an urgent need for Denny’s return.

  As the team reassembled, so did the order of things. Dick reappeared, Leonie started going steady with a boy called Selwyn, the team’s lock, and Denny and Harriet began to see each other again almost daily.

  At the same time, she and Leonie were laying more positive plans for their trip overseas. Harriet was in to her second year of library training, doing cataloguing, which she didn’t find nearly as interesting as her first year of essays and research into such diverse areas as library architecture and children’s books. Nevertheless it went well, and she was now Mr Whitwell’s deputy. Harriet had become a popular figure with Weyville’s reading public, for she knew books better than any assistant the library had ever had, and would keep aside the right book for the right person. It was a busy and convivial place, and Harriet guessed that the number of approving comments from the library patrons probably swamped less flattering utterances that might have come Cousin Alice’s way.

  Perhaps she had even created a mystery round herself. Maybe people really did give her the benefit of the doubt, the people who had seen her round with Denny, or going into the flat on party nights.

  Whatever the facts of the matter, Cousin Alice didn’t comment adversely on much that she did, and she and Harriet were what amounted to friends.

  With the end of her library course in about eight months, Harriet looked forward to a substantial pay rise, in addition to the one she had had when she became deputy. She might even be able to go abroad in about a year. Leonie was not as well paid, but she’d been working and saving for longer than Harriet, and thought she might be able to scrape up enough to go by then as well. Together they had gone to see a travel agent to start planning bookings.

  Neither o
f them had mentioned this to Selwyn or Denny. Leonie’s feelings towards Selwyn were ambivalent. She liked him because he was good company, he liked being seen around with her, and didn’t ask very much. Although Harriet liked being with Denny regularly again and also enjoyed being part of the crowd, the doubts of the summer and the cooling of their relationship in the few months that followed were hardening into a resolution. Denny would have to go.

  She hadn’t made up her mind when to tell him this, and was still turning it over in her mind when Cousin Alice announced that she’d like to go to a wedding in Gisborne, and thought that Leonie would like to spend the weekend with Harriet. She was quite happy to leave the two girls in the house alone if they thought they would be all right.

  Having their agreement and assurances that all would be well, she set off on Friday morning. That night the girls slept together in Cousin Alice’s big double bed, as there was only one bed in Harriet’s room.

  They hadn’t meant to sleep together, but Harriet had sat on the edge of the bed for so long, shivering in her nightie while they talked, that in the end it seemed silly to sit out in the cold.

  ‘For God’s sake, cover yourself up, Harriet,’ said Leonie, opening the bedclothes so she could get in.

  They talked on and on, about the places they would go to, how they would go to Greece, and join grape harvests in France, what clothes they would need, whether they would have enough money, and what they would do if they didn’t.

  Eventually Harriet said, ‘Shall we put the light out?’

  ‘Yes, it’s stupid to go out in the cold again now that we’re so warm.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Harriet when they were settled. ‘It’s Denny. I’m going to have to break with him soon if we’re going to go away. He just takes it for granted that I’ll go on being there.’

  ‘Mm, not like Selwyn, thank goodness. He knows marriage is the last thing on my mind. Still, I think you’re right You and he have had some good times haven’t you? It can’t go on forever.’

  ‘It could,’ said Harriet ‘but that’s just the thing, I don’t it want to. I don’t even know how much he wants it If only we could have talked …’