a Breed of Women (9 page)

Somewhere she suspected that there were other things besides poverty, work and the isolation of her life for which she would come to resent her parents; that they held concepts, motivations and
deep-rooted
prejudices that she did not share, and that in time she would evolve a set of values of her own that were in conflict with theirs. She knew that all was not right with their world, and yet now she felt so sick with longing for them that she was physically nauseated. What acts of comfort could they perform for each other, she wondered; what might somehow ease their hurt, their loss? What rumblings in the old oak bed would be repeated tonight to hold them together against the loneliness outside? What was it all about, what was the whole purpose of their lives that they went on enduring and suffering and losing and were finally left alone on the arid farm? None of it made sense.

Harriet was aware that someone had come into the room and knew that it must be Alice. She turned her face away from her towards the window which faced a high wooden paling fence.

‘It’s natural to be upset when you leave home. You haven’t been away before, have you?’ said Alice.

Harriet shook her head.

‘You’ll feel better when you’ve had something to eat Why don’t you wash your hands and face, and come into the dining room? I left a meal prepared when I went to get you — I was sure you’d be needing something.’

Harriet realised that she hadn’t eaten since early that morning and even then it hadn’t been much. She nodded gratefully. ‘Thank you, Alice,’ she murmured.

Alice paused at the door. ‘I think that’s something we should talk about,’ she said, turning back. Intuitively, Harriet knew whatever had disturbed Alice in the car had happened again.

‘I notice you call me Alice.’

The girl studied her cousin’s face with care. ‘What should I call you?’

‘You’re a great deal younger than I am. It seems a little … shall we say — impertinent.’

‘You are my cousin,’ said Harriet, and repeated, ‘what should I call you?’

‘It’s true you’re my cousin, second cousin to be accurate. But I really think … to have a child, a child,’ she emphasised, ‘call me by my Christian name, is really … not good form. A lot of my friends visit here. They would find it … most odd.’

Will I call you Mrs Harrison, then?’

‘Oh dear, no. No, my friends would find that most peculiar, too, if I explained that you were a relative, as of course I shall have to.’

Harriet started to feel mildly exasperated, but it seemed a poor time to let it show. She said, as reasonably as she could, ‘Then I’m sorry, but I can’t see what I should call you. You’ll have to help me.’

Apparently this was the opening Alice had been waiting for. She said sweetly, ‘I think Aunt Alice would be best, don’t you?’

Silently she withdrew from the room, leaving Harriet seething.

Ten shillings, that was all she had, just ten shillings, and somehow she had a feeling that ten shillings would not buy her a bed in any of Weyville’s hotels. At least she was beginning to feel like herself again.

After she had washed, she went out and joined Alice at the table. A
meal of cold meat and salad had been prepared and Harriet grasped her knife and fork eagerly.

‘Gently, dear,’ said Alice with mild reproval. She bowed her head and murmured with seemingly endless emphasis, ‘For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful.’ She raised her head, and observed Harriet, whose eyes were fixed straight ahead. ‘You don’t give thanks, I see.’

‘Not till I know what I’m giving thanks for,’ said Harriet. ‘And then I like to say it to people’s faces.’

Alice made no comment, and Harriet started her meal. As she ate, she felt herself recovering completely. The history teacher’s face flashed in front of her. It was possible that Alice was made of sterner stuff than the history teacher, but on the whole, although a cursory examination of the situation didn’t make it immediately apparent, she herself held most of the cards.

Putting her knife and fork together on the plate, she said deliberately, ‘Thank you, Alice. That was very nice. I was very hungry.’

The forget-me-not eyes looked as if they’d been left in the frost overnight. ‘I thought we’d discussed the subject of my name,’ said Alice.

‘You made a suggestion, I’ve considered it. Now I’ll tell you what I think of your suggestion.’

Alice looked as if she was about to fling Harriet straight out into the street on the spot. ‘Please go on. I’m fascinated.’

‘Thank you. Well … the point is, you are my cousin, as I said before. Only my second cousin, I know, yes, you’ve reminded me of that. So I should prefer to address you correctly. I’ll call you Mrs Harrison if you like, I’ll call you Cousin Alice at all times if you like, or I shall address you as Alice in private and by no name at all in the company of your friends if you like. Or I shall simply leave here tonight. I have money. I know you didn’t expect my parents to provide me with any money, but they have. I’ll find a room in Weyville for the night and leave for Auckland in the morning. There should be work there for me. After all, what’s the difference between a factory in Weyville and a factory in Auckland?’

‘You couldn’t do that,’ said Alice.

‘Yes, I could. Easier than I could call you my aunt when you don’t happen to be my aunt. I might be a child by your standards but I’m not a baby.’

‘You may be excused,’ said Alice coldly.

In her room Harriet sat shivering. Trust her to make such a total idiot of herself, she thought. As if she had enough money to get herself from here into the middle of Weyville, let alone Auckland. She couldn’t do a thing except shiver in this unlovely room. But there was no way she was going to go home. However bitterly she might have missed her parents a short time before, however attractive Ohaka might seem from this distance, there was no going back. She’d laid herself on the line. Is this to be the story of my life? she wondered. Always sticking my neck out, taking chances, not weighing up the outcome of things.

There was a tentative knock on the door. Harriet didn’t reply. Slowly the door opened, and her cousin’s voice said, ‘It’s Cousin Alice. May I come in?’

She came in, and sat down beside Harriet. For some minutes neither said anything, then they turned to each other at the same instant. ‘I’m sorry,’ they said together.

A faint awkward smile crossed Alice’s face. ‘I suppose we had better try and get to know each other a little better, hadn’t we?’ Harriet nodded.

Taking a deep breath, Alice continued, ‘I’ll help you find a job. You’ll need to have a little attention paid to your appearance if you don’t mind my saying so. I expect a little help round the place, not much, no more than I expected from my own family when they were your age, the dishes, the garden, that sort of thing … board will be a lot less than you’d get anywhere else, you know. Apart from that, I won’t interfere in your life, provided you don’t interfere in mine. Do you understand?’

‘Not entirely,’ said Harriet.

‘You’re not my child, but I’ve got a responsibility for you, and I’ve got a position in this town. Whether you approve of that or not is of no great interest to me, providing you do nothing to bring my position into disgrace. I don’t want any scandals round here. Do you understand now?’

‘I think so.’

‘You’re a great deal cleverer than I’d expected,’ said Alice. ‘I apologise if I treated you … less than civilly. Now tell me, what do you want out of life?’

‘I want …’ began Harriet, and stopped. What did she want? ‘I want to do well. I want to do better than my parents.’

It was a betrayal, a sellout to this woman; still, it had to be said. And
it was the truth. Again, Alice measured her with a long look,
re-evaluating
, re-estimating.

‘That’s up to you. If you mean that, I think we should get on very well. In the meantime, shall we say three months’ trial for both of us? Do you consider that fair?’

‘Yes. Extremely fair. If I were you, I’d have sent me packing tonight.’

‘I know. That’s why I find you so much more interesting than I had anticipated.’ A real smile crossed her face for the first time. ‘Don’t consider the battle won on the strength of one victory.’

‘How could I?’ said Harriet. ‘I’m not at all sure that I have, anyway. Only a splendid tactician could turn a retreat to such advantage.’

If that remark nonplussed Alice, she didn’t show it. ‘I think you should get some rest … Cousin Harriet. We’re going to be busy tomorrow.’

The upshot of this was that Harriet, somewhat better groomed, with her thick brown hair layered into the back of her neck, a fresh new linen skirt and light print blouse covering a properly constructed brassiere, took to the job circuit, a day or so later.

Finding a job proved no easy task. Weyville had its problems. While the surrounding forests were beginning to provide some employment, particularly for young men, it was limited. Most young people who displayed any ability at all had been smartly shipped off to Auckland or Wellington to find better jobs or to go teaching, particularly if they were girls. Harriet quickly realised that her fury about Ohaka’s policy of doing exactly the same thing was rather futile; Weyville simply did it on a much larger scale.

What was worse, she also realised that Alice knew this and that she held very little hope for her prospects, long or short term. Alice might be curious, perhaps even bewildered, by some conflicting aspects of Harriet’s personality, but basically she saw her as an indifferent scholar from a whistle-stop Auckland farming village, whom she had taken off Mary’s hands out of the goodness of her heart, so that she could find some employment, however menial. To underrate Alice’s knowledge of the local scene was unrealistic, as she had been through job placement for her own children years before, not long after the war. They had proved no particular problem for her, because they were clever and diligent, and Alice and Ted, her late husband, had sunk the appropriate amounts of money into seeing that they were justly rewarded with a place in the academic
sun. Alice thanked God (a very important figure in her life) that she’d never been placed in the position of some parents, and felt that it would break her up if she’d ever had to try and place a child of hers in Weyville. Of course as Harriet wasn’t hers, she felt a certain challenge in trying to find her a position, without the emotional trauma that would have attended the matter if Harriet had been her own child. Harriet discovered this by surreptitiously listening to equally surreptitious telephone calls, to people whom ‘Ted used to know’ and who might be able to help.

Alice’s general view of Harriet seemed fairly depressing, and within a couple of days, despite the confidence that her appearance now engendered, Harriet felt herself slowly slipping. It had never occurred to her that she wasn’t good. Of course, she was going to be very good. Not good at anything specific, just good — the question of her ultimate goodness was never in doubt. But serious doubts were forming in her own mind, and she was beginning to see very little reason to challenge Alice’s view of her.

To make matters more difficult, the previous year’s school leavers who had stayed on in Weyville already had the available jobs.

Finally, when things were starting to seem fairly desperate, and Alice was going around with a distracted expression, the phone rang. The caller was a friend of hers who had gone back to work in a local department store when her children had left home. Elsie had rung to pass on a bit of gossip. Julie, who worked on the haberdashery counter, was having a baby. And she wasn’t married, either. An awful tragedy for her mother, but there you were, and now wasn’t that the end?

Alice agreed, and they commiserated over Julie’s mother for some minutes. Then, with a gleam in her eye, Alice pounced.

‘Who is going to take Julie’s place?’ she asked.

It seemed that Elsie hadn’t thought about that, and supposed that they could really get by without a replacement After all, Julie hadn’t done much work round the place, and now all she could think about was weddings. The little hussy was actually thinking about getting married in white, could you believe it?

Within half an hour Alice and Harriet were being interviewed by the store manager. With considerable deference to Alice, whom Harriet guessed had probably been a very good customer for many years, he said he could really see no reason why Harriet shouldn’t start the following day. Mr Stubbs looked remarkably like his name,
being short and thickset, with tufty gingery hair round his
coarse-skinned
face, yet with oddly tiny white soft hands. He blew his nose, mopped his face with a handkerchief and said that the sooner this other girl got on her way the better. Not that he could exactly sack her, but he wouldn’t encourage her to stay any longer than a week or so. It would not hurt her and Harriet to be on the counter together for the time being, either. Julie mightn’t be much use, but at least she knew where the buttons and hooks and eyes were and what size was kept in what drawer, and what with having her School Certificate and all, Harriet was certainly a better sort of girl than some they employed.

Alice asked if it would be possible for Harriet to leave five minutes earlier on Thursday nights so that she could go to her typing class at night school.

Mr Stubbs’ eyes narrowed. ‘Doesn’t Harriet intend to stay?’ he asked.

‘Oh, yes,’ Alice assured him hurriedly. ‘But Harriet could find it useful to have a bit of typing, you know. And,’ she added with a flash of inspiration, ‘she is the sort of girl who might work herself up in your organisation. After all, you do have quite a large office staff, don’t you?’

Mr Stubbs scratched the back of his thick neck, causing an explosive-looking pimple to start suppurating. He flinched at the pain of it, but finally agreed that this was quite a laudable ambition. However, he would have to take two shillings a week off Harriet’s pay.

‘What would the total be, then?’ faltered Harriet, feeling that after such an enormous concession she should be grateful for anything that came her way.

‘Three pounds eighteen clear.’ His look challenged her to take it or leave it.