a Breed of Women (20 page)

‘We haven’t enough money. You might get the welfare back on you.’

‘Excuses.’ Leonie’s mask fell.

‘Have you been crying?’

‘I don’t cry.’

‘I wish I was like you, then,’ said Harriet.

‘But you’re not, are you?’ said Leonie. ‘Now please leave me alone.’

‘Is that all you’ve got to say to me?’

Leonie rolled back towards the wall, her fingers white round the edge of the blanket. After a few moments, Harriet left without either of them speaking again.

Denny and Harriet drove out of Weyville, past Cousin Alice’s house, and headed north. There was no movement behind the lace curtains. They had said their goodbyes, quiet and polite on Cousin Alice’s part, but as implacable as she’d been when she had telephoned the Wallaces to tell them their daughter would be coming back the following day.

At Ohaka, Denny went in with her and met Gerald and Mary. He promised to return on the Thursday with the arrangements made.

On the Thursday afternoon, he, Harriet, Gerald and Mary went to the church together. The spring was coming earlier here in the north than down in Weyville. Little had changed since the year of Harriet’s confirmation, except that the lichen on the graves had grown a little longer. A faint wind stirred the grasses and blew a shower of petals from an early flowering tree, the same one where she had leaned her bicycle years ago when she was a girl. A girl? Now it seemed she was a woman.

That was what Father Dittmer said. As though in a trance Harriet heard him say, ‘We are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation …’ He faltered, his eyes resting on Gerald and Mary, the whole congregation, ‘to join together this man and this woman …’ and she knew that the woman must be her. She had graduated to fullblown adult status. She would follow the responses through, there was no turning back. ‘I, Harriet Wallace, take thee, Dennis Matiu Rei …’ She hadn’t known his full name till that morning. ‘I pronounce that they be man and wife together …’ Catching her eye in a fleeting glance, she thought she could feel him saying, ‘And who wouldn’t have known it.’

When they emerged from the church she knew that she was now Mrs Rei.

Nobody had discussed what would happen next. Very little of any substance had been discussed since Harriet’s return the previous Sunday. During the week she had sat dully in her bedroom, while her equally uncommunicative mother had sat in the kitchen, or dragged herself to do what had to be done round the place. On the Wednesday she had gone through Harriet’s suitcase, mended and ironed her clothes and repacked them. When she spoke her voice
had been monotonous, seemingly without emotion. Harriet hadn’t offered to help, nor had she been asked to.

Gerald spoke to give orders and to tell them what arrangements had been made. They didn’t sound like arrangements — more like military drill. The night before the wedding Harriet had caught him alone.

‘Dad,’ she’d said, and then, hesitantly, as he didn’t reply, ‘Father.’

He’d turned towards her with fierce contempt in his face. ‘Bitch,’ he said, and walked away. And she’d started crying. Oh, she always cried in front of him, he was the master of her tears.

Now, as they stood outside the church, he said stiffly, ‘I think your mother and I will be getting back to the farm, Harriet. We don’t want to be late with the cows coming in and all.’

It was a dismissal. Not that Harriet altogether blamed him for that. If they returned to the house, sleeping arrangements might have to be made for them, and even Harriet, dazed as she was, could see that this would be a quite impossible dilemma for them all.

They shook hands all round. Harriet ached to have her mother hold her, but already Gerald had shepherded her away, and she saw them drive off, a cloud of dust following them up the metalled road towards the farm. Denny and Harriet climbed into the pick-up and he said, ‘Where to, now?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Harriet. ‘Do you?’

‘We could go to Kaikohe, but it’s a long drive.’

‘To your parents?’ She recalled what he had said about them, possibly having reservations about her too.

‘We’ll leave it for today, I think. I rang a mate of mine in Auckland and he said he could jack up a job for me to tide us over till something else turns up. I reckon he might put us up for a couple of nights while we have a look around. What d’you say?’

So they headed for Auckland and arrived late, when the diamond sky was alight.

T
HE MARRIAGE
OF
Harriet and Denny lasted fifteen months. It might have lasted longer, but a number of factors contributed to its collapse.

They had difficulty finding accommodation. After the episode at the hotel the Christmas before, this hardly came as a surprise to either of them. Harriet assumed that it wouldn’t have surprised Cousin Alice or her parents either, but then, like everything else, no one had discussed anything like that with her. In fact, Denny’s race had not been mentioned by anyone. This seemed quite extraordinary, when Harriet considered it, as she did more and more often during the following months.

She sometimes wondered if she had imagined their wedding, people having said so little at the time. It even passed through her mind sometimes that her own inertia had led to all this. After all, she had simply followed a series of tacit assumptions that she would adopt a certain course of action.

Denny’s friend put them up on a creaky sofa in his three-roomed Auckland flat for a week. Neither of them slept, and Denny was
bad-tempered
and tired out with his job at the freezing works at Otahuhu.

Harriet looked at flats, agreed to take one or two rather pleasant ones, and then found there had ‘been some sort of
misunderstanding
’ when she turned up with Denny. It was finally agreed that she should take what she could get without Denny showing up. The place she took near Parnell wasn’t marvellous, because the owners wouldn’t risk letting you have the really nice ones without looking you over as a couple, but it wasn’t too bad either. It was furnished, but without linen. Gerald had pushed a ten pound note into her hand before they left for the church, so she bought a pair of blankets, and Denny had enough money over from his pay for a pair of sheets.

They seemed to need a lot of other little things. A lot of towels, for instance, because Denny needed a bath every day. He came home
clean, but the smell of the meatworks seemed impregnated into his skin within a week or two. She would have liked a bath every day too, but there wasn’t enough hot water unless they shared it. That was something she couldn’t get used to because she’d never had to share anything in her life. Spoilt, some might call it. Looking back over her life, she couldn’t quite see that it was so. But she supposed that’s what people would call it. Denny did.

In bed at night Harriet would feel her stomach heaving at Denny’s smell, and often she would turn her head away while he made love to her. He, offended, rolled sullenly over to the other side of the bed and sank into a weary sleep.

She did think of going to see Wendy and Marie at Training College, but the idea was unattractive. She represented failure, they success. Later she thought that everything was her fault for being so negative. She could have tried harder. If guilt were to be the price, she would pay it in full.

The decision that she should take a job was made after Denny came home one evening and found her with a pile of library books. At least reading seemed a sensible refuge, and coming back to books, she had been spellbound all day. When he came in, exhausted as usual, dinner was not ready and she hadn’t even shopped.

He was grim and angry when they went out to find somewhere to eat After their meal, he told her, ‘If you want to play fancy games, you’d better help me pay for them.’

She took a job the next day in a Queen Street milkbar. Let the punishment fit the crime, she thought.

Every night after that they both came home tired, and there was little to talk about. They could have talked about something, she thought later. If they’d really wanted it to be good, they could have told each other what they had been doing and about the customers that came into the shop, and about the men that Denny worked with.

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 taking 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.