a Breed of Women (35 page)

‘And you’ve been more than a mother,’ Harriet said. ‘Better and worse.’

‘You’ll come back?’ Cousin Alice said.

‘Someday, to see you,’ Harriet said, ‘but not for a long time. Weyville seems to have got a bit small for me.’

‘No,’ said Cousin Alice. ‘You’ve got too big for it. You’re like a lizard, you couldn’t go on splitting and shedding your skins forever.’ Strange how age changed one, Harriet thought. Who would ever have believed that this was the voice of the Cousin Alice she first knew?

The two older children were strapped firmly into the back seat of
the car and Emma was sitting on Harriet’s knee when they finally drove away from the stripped house. The moving vans had gone before them. They drove away past the houses of the people they had known. Past Nick Thomas’s place. ‘You’re an idiot,’ he had said to Harriet, meeting her in the main street of Weyville a few days before their departure. ‘I could have done much better for you.’ It was impossible to tell by his ambiguous smile what he had meant. She understood that he was acting for Roy Mawson in his divorce against Elaine. Nick added she was bad for business. Mawson would probably drop his suit, if he knew anything, since Harriet was whipping his victim out from under his nose. ‘You must love that streak of tap water you’re married to,’ he said sardonically. ‘Well, good luck to you. At least you must know by now that marriages aren’t made in heaven.’

They drove on, past the library, past the sleeping morning houses of Julie and Dick, and of wicked Nance, past the lake, clad in vapour, the ugly little lake, thick with the steaming shapes of ducks, and the bristled rushes. On, on to the far side of Weyville, past all the other places they knew. They had left the Everetts’ house behind too, almost the first place they had passed but the hardest one to put behind. Miriam and Don were survivors in suburban warfare. They might have land mines planted round the house, they might have dug trenches in which to hide from each other, but in the end they’d come over the hill, brandishing their hats and calling for more, laughing at the game. Survival of the fittest.

But Harriet and Max were not done yet. That was something to think about. Like the rest of Weyville, the Everetts were already dropping into the past, as the road opened up before them. This time Harriet knew she would not return, except as a voyager on her way to other places. They were heading for Wellington and the 1970s. Their life was about to begin again.

H
ARRIET DESCRIBED TO
Leonie the long slow haul of years after she and Max and the children had migrated to Wellington, the struggles with money, which had been tolerable in Weyville, but were sometimes almost impossible in a larger city; the realisation that if she was going to follow a path that had any meaning for her, it had to be lived through herself, and not vicariously through men; the understanding that she had made a commitment to her marriage which had not been present before, and which demanded hard work and courage. Courage to express hurt and resentment in terms that they could mutually understand, not through violence and destruction. They must heal the wounds they had inflicted on their children through their apartness.

Harriet’s work had become high on her list of priorities, this seemed essential from many points of view. A job would relieve some of their immediate financial anxieties, it would channel the energies that she had used to create havoc in the past into some sort of meaningful form, it would stop her relying too heavily on Max for emotional support Starting life over, yet again, didn’t mean using each other as crutches. Both of them were in no condition for it, anyway. If each had leaned a little too heavily on the other, either was likely to fall over in those first years.

At first Harriet had looked for library work, but it was not easy to get in the capital. Many of the library graduates who had trained in Wellington liked to stay on in the city, and they got first pick of the jobs. One or two vacancies had come up, but they looked dreary when she had gone to look at them. She decided to take a straight clerical job until something turned up, and ended up as a receptionist in television. She fitted in, got on with the people there,
and after a year or so, people noticed that she could be good at other things besides answering telephones.

The publication of her first book drew attention to her. At morning tea one day a producer had asked if anyone knew Harriet Wallace who had just had a book of verse published. She had admitted her identity, been interviewed that day for the evening’s
Town
and
Around
programme, and, a few days later was invited to audition as an interviewer. It had fallen together so easily that Harriet often wondered at first when it would start to fall apart. But it didn’t. She wasn’t always in front of the camera. Thanks to her library training, she was a competent background researcher and she put together good workmanlike documentary scripts. They often let her work at home, and if one of the children was sick she could simply take a pile of stuff home. Life was much easier than it had been in the first year when she’d had to take a clay’s sick leave to stay with a sick child, and then when that time had been used up, she’d eaten into her annual leave. There were school holidays when she had to pay to have someone look after the children, and that was her salary gone for three months of the year. So when she did get her break, there was no stopping her.

She became caught up in the feminist movement, marched for Germaine Greer and joined radical groups, without displaying obvious party affiliations. She came to believe in her own life. She continued to be known as Harriet Wallace, and her way of life didn’t conflict with Max’s. Only their small inner circle of friends, mainly the parents of their children’s friends, knew the connection. Harriet emerged as an entity in her own right. Max asked for, and was given, a quiet life. Harriet’s work took her away from home quite often, but now she was better organised and managed absences with a minimum of fuss for all concerned.

She was thrown into the company of many men, and cajoled her way among them without giving away anything of herself. A number of men became her friends, and she came to treasure the knowledge that real friendship could exist between men and women without their having to go to bed to prove it.

She was happy, and it showed. One morning Max woke up and said to her, with quiet wonder, ‘Harriet, I love you,’ and she had been able to respond in kind. He told her that he had come to accept her difference as the quality that had first drawn him to her, and not a symbol of her failure to conform. The person she was now was a new,
better and more whole human being than she had been before. She loved this person with whom she had fought such desperate battles. They were united in a common aim. The question of mutual trust didn’t need to be raised, for it was a mutual assumption. Besides, their meeting ground was home territory, and what worked there was important. If Max strayed she didn’t want to know about it, though she doubted that he did. He was an excellent sounding-board for her when she had new ideas, or if things went wrong, which of course they did from time to time.

Harriet’s new life still created problems; she was slighted by academics who considered her an impostor (a few became her friends, but it took a long time), she had had her fingers burnt on occasion by courting too enthusiastically the people she admired, thinking at first that some people were godlike, and finding them merely mortal. Wanting to try everything, she would overextend herself in fruitless pursuits and have trouble extricating herself. Only now, the problems had solutions.

Two things became apparent to Leonie, over the months that followed her first lunch with Harriet. One was Harriet’s belief that work solved all. The work ethic had transformed her life — she was sure it could change Leonie’s. At times Leonie thought Harriet resented her because she didn’t have to work. It would be nice, Harriet said, if one were in a position to choose, but if she had to choose between a life of working or not working, then she would choose to work. Leonie had the benefit of choice, and quite clearly she would be happier if she worked. When she had heard Leonie voice her dissatisfactions, her loneliness, her rootlessness, and her love for Todd Davis in Toronto, Harriet had said briskly that the best thing for her would be to get off her backside and find herself a job.

She tended to be impatient when Leonie raised objections. Her husband Hamish would not tolerate the idea of a working wife. It would discredit him in the eyes of the oil company executives who were his colleagues. Besides that, the Coglans had a position to maintain, and Leonie was the domestic caretaker of that position. All the more reason to demonstrate her identity, Harriet maintained.

The arguments were circular and resolved nothing. However, Leonie was beginning to think that Harriet might have something. And, if she was ever going to work or express any kind of independence, New Zealand could be the place to do it, knowing the territory; the people, even if unreal from this distance in years, were
recognisable; the society, at least on the surface, sufficiently egalitarian to absorb her without raising too many eyebrows among the oil community.

The second thing that Leonie divined about Harriet was more intuition rather than a spoken thing between them. Harriet, she thought, was terrified of any romantic attachments that might shake the foundations of the world she and Max had built. Leonie believed in Harriet’s commitment to her marriage; it was profound in a way that hers was not. Harriet and her marriage had gone in the fire too often; now she needed to hold on and to believe. She suspected that Harriet was afraid of her attachment to Michael Young, that perhaps, even, she had chosen him more deliberately than she realised. In finding someone who seemed to offer a fixed relationship, she had been prepared to enter into it, longing, impulsive, a romantic, despite her liberal labels, believing that she could survive it and come through with her world intact at the end simply because there was an end. A beginning, a middle and an end. Like a good storybook. And Harriet, being the person that she was, would demand that it was very good. Only the story seemed to have stopped in the middle.

Through the winter, Harriet waited for Michael to come back to her. She believed that he would. She cocooned herself in a world where his existence was as real as if she had seen him yesterday. It was easy to believe that he would return, knowing that he was ‘abroad’. One didn’t have to wait for the phone, wondering if it would be him, or for business trips that might take either of them north or south. One had only to wait for the date of his return.

During those months of his absence she built up a fantasy world about him. She had to build the magic for herself. At nights when the fierce southerly winds lashed the house and woke her, she would lie thinking of him, surrounding him with the aura of her belief, invoking his body in her imagination, stealing her hand between her legs, then holding at bay the breaking wave, holding his face above hers, sliding quietly away into safe waters, before she turned to stretch herself against her husband’s back. And he, tender, would turn in his sleep, and hold her. How many people dwell inside me, she would wonder, that I need, must live this double life?

A little magic. A passing miracle, that is all, she would tell herself. But the longing started to grow different dimensions. When asleep again, she would dream of pleasant lands, far away, places she had never been to, only to wake once more, as morning broke, and lie,
dry, gritty-eyed and resentful. There were gaps in her life, things she had never done. She had allowed herself to drift along. From time to time, over the years, she had tried to take her destiny into her own hands. Some might say she had succeeded, that she was a successful modern woman. Yet she asked for more, and the things she had asked for, looking back, did not seem unreasonable. If only, somewhere, she had had the courage to say yes, that will happen, and no, that will not happen. Only it hadn’t been like that. When events had crowded in on her, she had let them, and she had let other people take her along with them. She wanted distance and space, she needed a place to look at herself, rather than to have people looking at her.

For so long now, she had said confidently, believing the lie, I don’t mind staying here, not going abroad, not seeing the rest of the world. There are some who must go and there are others who must stay and record what is here. But how much did she really do?

Mediocrity, small jealousies were too often the scope of the work she had to record, and, hemmed in, she began to fear that they were claiming her.

Now the world had come to her, in the shape of Michael. A stray eagle on a farming Antipodean outcrop. Already the bird was preparing his flight, and who could blame him? When he came back from England, she knew that he would have already made the arrangements for the family’s return, that he would have found them a new house, that soon there would be nothing to keep him here in New Zealand. And she had had so little of him. Ideas began to take shape in her mind. She would go away for a while. She would flee these shores too. Other people went all the time, why not her?

At first the idea was a tantalising nonsense, but gradually began to assume possibilities. Perhaps not this year; the children, particularly Emma, were too young to leave, but in another year’s time. She would take extra work and save. Perhaps while she was overseas Michael would give her work. The idea wasn’t too absurd after all. He had asked her to work for him before. Maybe she expected him to rescue her — but no, she was rescuing herself.

How pleased he would be with her, breaking out of the confines of her life, being prepared to take her fate so firmly in her hand. She would go and live on the edge of the Mediterranean somewhere, as she had always imagined she would do, and he would come and join
her in Italy, or Greece, and they would have a month in the sun. She would write, and he would help her.

The idea was becoming a reality. To her friends, she began to say, with mysterious little smiles, ‘I am thinking of going overseas for a few months, oh not right away, but within the next year or so.’ It seemed quite a reasonable proposition and no one seemed surprised. After all, most of them had been overseas long ago, or were still going every few months or so — there was nothing sensational about the idea of going abroad. They were surprised she hadn’t done it long ago, a person like her. It would be good for her, they said. She even told Max she was giving the matter some thought.

‘Your time’ll come,’ he said.

The date for Michael’s return came and went. The weeks rolled by. Then slowly she began to understand that she was not going to hear from him again. Perhaps he had never returned to New Zealand, she had no way of knowing. She was assailed by anger. He had promised, he had said that he would let her know if things changed between them. But perhaps that was all he had tried to do at the end of the summer, that day in Auckland, and she simply hadn’t listened. Then why had he agreed to her promise? Had it simply been to get her out of his hair? Her dreams of flight began to fade, evaporating as easily as they had appeared. The treachery of her imagination dismayed her. And having created a reality out of those dreams, she was now landed with them. Friends would ask her about her plans, and she would say, yes, yes, of course they were going ahead. But her heart was no longer in them.

When she calculated he would have been back a month, or maybe a little longer, her producer called the weekly programme conference to discuss ideas and plan content. There seemed to be a programme gap. These gaps usually gave Harriet her opportunities to promote her special interests, to throw in an item about the arts or books, rather than to accept assignments developed by the whole team. Did she have anything in mind? Terry asked her, pushing his little blue denim cap back on his head.

She tried frantically to think of one of her bandwagons but there was an awful blank in front of her. What about that story she’d brought up months ago about the man who wanted to start up a New Zealand edition of that magazine? Was there still something to be had there? She explained that she thought the company might not have found the market particularly propitious, and, as no magazine
had resulted, she assumed that they were not going ahead. One of her colleagues reminded her of the enormous splash that the company had started with in Auckland, nearly eighteen months ago. Surely there must be some sort of story there, even if it was to illustrate how financially hostile New Zealand was at present. Harriet said that she thought they had covered that fairly thoroughly and fairly regularly, and everyone must know they only had to go to the supermarket and, good God, groceries had cost her over sixty dollars that week. Did they want to do a week in the life of Harriet Wallace? That should cover the economic climate pretty thoroughly.