by Fiona Kidman
They could have made something, but they didn’t. She could feel herself getting thin and ugly. She didn’t think she’d ever really been pretty, but she had had something, she knew that. Shiny eyes, shiny hair, good skin, and a nice shape. All the shine was going, and the shape wasn’t what it had been, and it was getting worse all the time because her shoulders fell forward every time she sat down.
In the evenings Denny would sit reading the Herald. She knew he was looking for jobs, but the paper would be a day old by the time he read it, and two days old by the time that he could go out after the job. His resentment was deepening into permanent lines on his face.
Then without telling her he took a couple of days off, coming back to the house after she’d left for work and changing into his good clothes. A few days before Christmas he got a job in an office in town and would start after the Christmas break.
The atmosphere lightened. The job wasn’t as well-paid as the one he’d had at the mill, but he was working with figures, and there were prospects. You could work your way up if you were good. He’d told the people to ring the mill when he couldn’t produce a reference, and that had been better than a piece of paper. The manager of the mill did mention that he’d skipped off rather suddenly, but as the cause had apparently been family trouble, there was no reason to hold that against him. The new boss was obviously impressed, and he’d got the job right away.
He suggested that they go up to Kaikohe for Christmas. Harriet said that she only had two days off over Christmas because they’d be open right through the holiday break, it being a milkbar. Shove the job, he said, she could get another one when she came back; she was good enough to get any job she wanted.
Kaikohe was good for both of them. She’d been shy of the Reis at first, and they of her, but Denny was their prodigal son, and as far as Harriet could make out, there were fewer tensions about her arrival than she had expected. If anyone felt less than happy about her, it was certainly not allowed to show.
‘What d’you think of my skinny little Pakeha?’ Denny said, prodding her, there in front of them, and laughing with them all when she blushed. The drive north through familiar countryside, and the sun and the companionship between her and Denny, which had been missing for so many months, had put colour back in her cheeks. The night before they left, she had washed her hair and brushed it, sitting up in bed beside him, and he had taken a hand too, brushing it for her. It was long round her shoulders now, and in the morning she tied it back from her face with a ribbon. She felt more like herself than she had since she left Weyville.
At midnight on Christmas Eve they all went to church, and for the first time she saw Denny among his own people. For a fleeting instant she had felt like an observer, like someone at the pictures, her own old religious judgments hesitating at this participation. However, it was not real participation; she was playing a part in a play that was real for everyone else. Then Denny slipped his hand into hers as they knelt, and she was happy just to be part of them.
In the morning they went to church again, and she wore her Breton straw for him. Standing beside him, while he sang in Maori, like the rest of them, she thought, ‘He said he wanted me. Now he has me.’
Presents and Christmas dinner followed. Harriet had trouble with the Reis’ food, which was fattier and richer than she was used to. When she seemed not to be eating, Denny whispered to her, ‘Hey, what’s wrong with you? My mother’ll think you don’t like her if you don’t eat her food.’
The food was a continuing problem during her stay in Kaikohe, not helped by the fact that her plate was piled high at every meal. Denny’s mother said, ‘We’ll put some meat on her bones for you, Denny.’
She developed a technique of dawdling over her food, and then when everyone else was finished, rushing to help clean up, so that her own food could be scraped in with the other scraps. She knew that the deception hadn’t fooled Denny’s mother, but she kept her own counsel. It seemed to work with Denny, and for the moment that was what mattered.
Several times they drove to the sea, usually accompanied by a crowd from the family, and they dug for pipis and collected mussels from the rocks. These were happy times for them all, and Harriet could feel the glow of the north creeping back into her body, as well as her remembered love for Denny.
The day before they were due to return, he took her by herself over to the Hokianga. This was old ground indeed, going back to the days before Ohaka. She showed him the school where she had been in so much trouble when she was a girl, and he was astonished, wondering that they had been brought up so close to each other without even knowing it. The place where she had lived had gone, replaced by a shiny new house. Things seemed to be prospering round those parts.
Along the coast, in the grass near the sand dunes that went down to meet the sea, they made love in the midday sun. High midsummer sun beat down on their stripped bodies.
‘Denny, I’m going to have a baby,’ she said afterwards.
‘When?’ he asked, his face alight.
‘I don’t know. I’ll have to work it out won’t I?’
‘Why didn’t you say … Hey, wait till we get back and tell everyone.’ ‘We can’t do that,’ said Harriet. ‘We just started it.’
He looked at her. ‘Don’t be silly, woman, you can’t tell that soon.’
‘I can,’ she said. Maybe being back in the old place had done it, but whatever it was, her body knew.
Years later, other women told her that they, too, had known the moment of conception, though mostly they admitted that it was a retrospective thing. Men never believed it.
But she knew, she knew her body had been open to receive. Sand and sea and sun, a child, they went together.
The next day they travelled south again, passing through Ohaka without stopping, as on the way up. Denny had become edgy overnight. They’d been happy up north, happier than either would have thought possible a month before, but she thought he knew as well as she did that it was because of the support of his family. Group support — it was a bit like the days of the football club.
It was a sobering thought that they might always have to rely on other people for their comfort. Harriet suspected that he was thinking this, too. There might be little common ground between them, but she had never doubted his sensitivity or powers of deduction. He was smart in a different way from her, but he could work out the same things when he wanted to.
Well, there would be the baby, and that would make more people, Harriet thought. She didn’t say it, because the baby hadn’t been mentioned again; obviously Denny thought she had been sunstruck to say what she had. Possibly she had been, too, she wondered, not sure whether she herself believed what she had said.
For all that, she went back to her old job. It didn’t seem worth taking on something new if she wasn’t going to be at it for very long. The milkbar hadn’t been very pleased with her, taking off like that just before Christmas when they needed staff, but she was as good as anyone they’d had, and good staff were hard to come by. Denny wasn’t happy about her going back. She guessed it didn’t fit his new image, but she told him it was just for a few weeks until she could find something else. In a way she meant it too.
Two or three weeks later, they both began to take her pregnancy seriously. At the end of February it was confirmed by a doctor.
Every February day in the milkbar was virtually unbearable. Her feet swelled regularly, and she was limping so badly by the end of work that she could hardly make it home. She’d started to feel sick too, and what with the heat, it was all bad. In the weekends all Denny’s shirts had to be washed and ironed, he had a fresh one every day, now that he was in a city office.
Things were starting to drag back to the pattern they had followed before Christmas, until he told her one night to get the hell out of her job because he couldn’t stick it any more.
She asked whether she could give two weeks’ notice, when she’d have enough money for the baby’s things. The weather was t
aking a cooler turn, and she managed to see out the two weeks. When she stopped work, she hardly got out of bed for a week except to get Denny his meals and do the washing.
The doctor prescribed pills for her nausea but told her morning sickness was all part of being pregnant. It was impossible to convince him that she was sick all the time.
After Easter Denny’s parents arrived unexpectedly on the doorstep, saying they had come to stay for a couple of weeks. Denny and Harriet moved into the sitting-room, and his parents took over their bed.
Having them to stay was much less satisfactory than going to see them. If they didn’t go out, it meant that they and Harriet sat in the flat all day with little to say to each other. Denny’s parents tried hard to make themselves scarce, and Harriet could see that her mother-in-law knew she wasn’t well and was concerned, but they couldn’t just stay out all day in Auckland with nowhere to go.
The visit ended abruptly after about ten days, when Denny brought home some mutton birds for her to cook for his parents. The smell destroyed her. The thick oil stench was like nothing she’d ever experienced before. All night she vomited, sitting on the floor of the toilet, crying between bouts, too weak to stagger in and out to the sitting-room.
Denny’s mother came in and knelt on the floor beside her, rubbing her back to make the vomiting easier, bringing her boiled water to drink when she was reduced to bile, and washing her face.
‘I think you ought to get the doctor,’ she said to Denny. ‘I reckon this girl might lose her baby.’
Towards morning the doctor came. She’d be all right, he said, if she had total rest. He could put her in hospital but it was pretty crowded in there, and it was not really necessary if she was sensible. After he’d gone, Harriet heard Denny talking to his parents in the bedroom. His mother’s voice was calm and flowing. It was difficult to catch her words, but Denny’s voice carried clearly. He thought they should stay and care for Harriet It was lucky they were there, and they need not go home for a while longer.
His mother explained gently that what she wanted was no strain, and her own comfy bed to sleep in at nights. They’d be pushing off, because that was what Harriet really needed. Denny wasn’t to be angry with her. She was a brave girl, but not too strong. He’d have to do for himself a bit; it wouldn’t hurt him now that he had a fancy sitting-down job.
When they had gone, he looked at her bitterly and said, ‘You sent them away. You sent my parents away.’
She turned her face from him. He was making her cry, just as her father had always done. There was no answer for his anger.
She started to recover, and the doctor kept a closer check on her, giving her special diets, and iron injections because she was anaemic. Gradually she began to cope again. Her stomach was huge by late May, and she was only halfway there. The days seemed long but she had taken to reading again, careful now not to neglect Denny’s meals, and she was painfully teaching herself to knit. The serials on the radio were quite good, too.
One evening Denny came in and said that some of the chaps at work were in a football team, and he’d like something to do besides just go to work, come home, go to work. He thought he’d join up with them.
That was the beginning of the end — if one didn’t count the end as having started at the beginning. Several times she asked him if she could go and watch the game and once he said yes, the other times he said it was too cold for her to be out watching. The time she did go, it was to a field a bit like the ones at Weyville where you could park the cars near enough to the sidelines to see what was going on without getting out. Denny suggested she’d be more comfortable sitting in the pick-up.
He was still splendidly fit and played a good game. Seeing him like a panther amongst the scrum she felt the old pride and something of the old longing. For months she had been unable to bear him to touch her sexually. She was sure that this was wrong, and with great embarrassment had asked her doctor about it
‘Sex?’ he’d boomed back at her. ‘Perfectly natural. Not too close to when the baby’s due, that’s all.’
So she’d tried, and it was hopeless. Denny, rejected and frustrated, left her alone. She said she’d ask her doctor what was the matter, which was a lie because she had already asked him. A few days later she told Denny that the doctor said it might be best to leave it alone for a while because of the way the baby was lying.
At the end of the game when he came back from the showers, some of the men he’d been playing with followed him to their cars. ‘See you at the club room, Denny,’ they called.
‘Are we going out?’ she asked with momentary elation.
‘I thought I’d have a few at the club rooms,’ he said.
‘Not me?’
‘I don’t know that they have birds at their rooms the same as the Rovers.’
Thinking back, she guessed he meant wives. The wives never got much of a look in, even in Weyville. They were a forgotten race, people of whom you occasionally thought if one of the married boys started playing up a bit.
Saturday nights it started, then it was Friday nights as well. Harriet wrote to her mother and told her when the baby was due and gave her her phone number. There was no reply to the letter, as to all the others she’d sent.
In early September, she guessed he’d been with a woman a couple of times. He moved onto the sofa for good, and she enjoyed the luxury of the whole bed to herself. Once there were telltale lipstick marks on the shirt when she washed it, but she didn’t mention them.
The phone rang one evening when Denny was in the bath.
‘I’ll get it,’ he called.
‘Don’t be silly, you’re in the bath,’ she called back and picked up the phone. There was a hesitation at the other end when she answered.
‘Is Mr Rei there, please?’ said a girl’s voice after a moment.
‘He’s in the bath. Can I give him a message?’
There was another pause, then the girl replied, ‘Could you tell him Gloria from the office rang? I forgot to give him a message today from … from Mr Peters.’ Mr Peters was the boss, Harriet knew.
‘Well, I could pass it on to him if you like,’ said Harriet.
‘Oh, not to worry … it’s probably not important. I expect it can wait till the morning.’
She gave Denny Gloria’s message. Later in the evening he said he had some gear in the pick-up that he was supposed to drop off for one of the boys from the office, and he wouldn’t be long. At one o’clock he still hadn’t returned, nor was he home when she woke in the morning. She phoned the office at mid-morning and spoke to him.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘The boys were having a few drinks and I got talking, bit boozed. Fell asleep on the sofa.’
That night she asked as she put his dinner in front of him, ‘What did Gloria think about the hotel in Symonds Street?’
She thought he might strike her, but his hand dropped away to his side as quickly as he’d raised it.
Instead he sat down beside her, fingering the knitting she’d been labouring over. ‘What’s the matter with us girlie?’ he said dully.
‘It’ll be all right,’ she said, and put her arms round him. He dropped his head on her swollen stomach, and she cradled him, soothing him. ‘It’ll pass, everything’ll be all right.’
He caught her hand and held it. ‘I do bad things for you. I was going to do good things for you. What say we go up home and live near Mum and Dad and the kids, somewhere up the Hokianga, after the baby’s come?’
‘You know you wouldn’t really want that,’ she said. ‘You want to get on, you always have.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘You and me getting on’s more important than that. Why don’t we just get up and go now?’
The prospect was enticing. Perhaps it could work. But it was now into October and the baby was due in less than a fortnight. She’d been so sick and she was booked into National Women’s Hospital. For the baby’s sake perhaps they had better stay where they were. It was o
nly two more weeks, and they’d be able to travel pretty soon after that. It was something to look forward to, something to keep them going.
The baby didn’t come on time, though. It was, said Denny at first, ‘keeping Maori time’. When the second week came with no sign of the child, things started to be strained between them again. The phone rang several times, and the caller simply hung up if Harriet answered. When Denny answered he sounded curt and businesslike, as if the calls were from the office. Gloria, Harriet supposed.
The doctor decided to put Harriet into hospital.
On an impulse, Harriet scrawled a note to her mother, telling her she was being admitted. She had resolved not to communicate with her parents again, but at the last moment she weakened. She posted the letter at the posting-box on their street, near the flat, before Denny drove her to the hospital.
Outside the hospital, she said to him, ‘Denny, I don’t want to go in. I don’t want to have a baby.’
To be so totally helpless, so out of control, was terrifying. She was committed to this situation. Nothing could take the baby away except the act of birth itself.
Inside the hospital, women cried and screamed and whimpered and begged for their shots. Harriet did not know what shots they meant It didn’t seem to do much good because the women in white mostly ignored their entreaties. They shaved Harriet’s pubic hairs with cold soapy water and they talked over her about other women as if they were cattle. It was hard to believe that they shared the same genital patterns as Harriet and the other women in labour. Harriet felt sure they must belong to a third sex. Perhaps, with the doctors, they were eunuchs. Whatever it was, they were united against sweating, heaving, grunting women in childbirth. Doctors came around, two or three of them together, laughing and chatting about their golf handicaps. One of them had a hangover. He put his finger up Harriet’s rectum and the pain was so appalling that she started to cry. The doctor raised his eyebrows at the nurse and said, ‘Another sniveller. Give her a shot if she’s awkward.’ He looked at her card and tossed her a contemptuous look. Harriet heard him say, ‘Another little black bastard,’ as he walked away. They thought she was not listening. She didn’t get her shot. A woman died of a haemorrhage in the night. The nurses were embarrassed, but the patients were given to understand it had been the woman’s own fault.
