a Breed of Women (33 page)

Harriet also rejoined the theatre group that she had belonged to before her marriage. This meant that she could leave the theatre early and Don could meet her for an hour on the way home.

His problems about telling Miriam where he was going seemed to have vanished. After all, with the effort Harriet was putting into their affair, it was only right that he should try to be as inventive as she was. Though, to be sure, in the back seat of his car down at the Weyville lake front, she found that she needed to be a little more inventive than in the old days of her escapades on that same spot. ‘Ah,’ Don would sigh, ‘you make me feel very young again.’ She wondered if he realised just how young. Some might have called it juvenile, but she didn’t think she really cared.

That was possibly because she thought that she might be in love with him. They often said that they loved one another, and late in 1968, Harriet began to think that it might be true.

It had been a strange year. She and Max were ambling along more amiably than they had done in a long time. The fact that she had to be generally expansive to people in order to get her way and her freedom, (the two were not necessarily synonymous, but that was how she saw them) seemed to spill over into their relationship. Before her trip away, Max had seemed to have a hunted look, but now he seemed more assured, less jumpy. Harriet congratulated herself in having managed to live so comfortably with two men, though she felt twinges of guilt about having deceived Max. There seemed little point in labouring this point, though; it seemed far better for everyone concerned to leave things the way they were. Even Miriam looked happier when she saw her. Harriet imagined that she and Don must be more contented, now that Don was not putting pressure on Miriam.

When the two couples met from time to time, as they still did,
Harriet would catch herself out every now and then, taking up some point that she and Don had been discussing the day before, forgetting that the others didn’t know the background to the conversation. Don would flush and catch Miriam’s eye, as Harriet broke off in mid-sentence, but Miriam would smile tolerantly and say, ‘You two are simpatico, you can read each other’s minds,’ and pour everyone another sherry.

Yes, it seemed cosy, here inside Camelot. The world outside had been thundering with disasters, and Harriet followed them with keen interest. Don professed himself a closet radical, and seemed glad to have someone to talk to when the second Kennedy murder took place and then the assassination of Martin Luther King. Talking to him made Harriet feel less isolated. He also continued to take an interest in her poetry, and by and large, people in Weyville were beginning to be rather proud of their strange prodigy, even if Harriet’s nearest neighbours did shake their heads darkly as if they knew of dark deeds that they were not prepared to discuss. Whatever the rumours, Harriet, being a little different, must have allowances made for her, the more enlightened souls of Weyville thought. At the theatre group she was very much favoured, despite the fact that she confined her talents to play readings and refused parts in major productions because of the children. She had been tempted, to be sure, but as the theatre was a means to an end, she felt that such a wholesale commitment might hinder rather than help her efforts on behalf of Don.

She and Max agreed that each would have one night out a week. He had taken up with the local gun club, and seemed to derive a great deal of pleasure from it. His evenings out were idyllic for Harriet. When the children were down to sleep she would put her feet up, turn the television off, unless Julie Felix happened to be on, and read till her eyes were dropping out of her head, or else she would get on with some of her work. Since the children had changed their routines, Max’s evenings out were the only times she had the house to herself, unless one counted the time she made for Don’s visits. She was content with this bit of borrowed time, now she was beginning to see that things would improve, that she would not always be tied to the same timetables. Genevieve was due to start school at the beginning of the next school year, and that fact opened up new prospects. A year after that Peter would be at school, and then Emma would be at kindergarten. Of course things became
easier, even if it was sometimes hard to keep on believing that.

Sometimes, just occasionally, she looked at herself, and wavered.

The theatre group held a demonstration of mime all one Saturday. The artist and instructor was a Frenchman visiting New Zealand, and by a rare stroke of cultural good fortune, he included Weyville on his itinerary. The theatre was blacked out, the stage bare, he was lit only by a single spotlight, yet he created magic. He walked for miles, an old man getting tired towards the end of some journey that had started with meaning and lost its point by the end, without ever leaving the place where his feet thlip-thlopped out the rhythm of the old man’s footsteps. He made them cry, he made them laugh, without so much as a sound from his lips. He was a trapped man in a cage, his hands flat and frantic on the invisible walls until he found the exit. Harriet watched, spellbound.

In the afternoon, he invited the group to learn some basic principles of his art. They followed him with enthusiasm engrossed in the emotions he drew from them, revealing more of themselves to each other than they knew was there to tell. The session was closing, he suggested that they escape from a cage as he had done. Utterly outside of herself, Harriet knelt on the floor, her hands in her armpits, beating her elbows against her body. The man came over, and stood watching her.

‘You are a bird then, not a person, yes?’

‘I am a bird,’ she replied.

‘Why can you not get out of the cage then, little one?’

She looked up at him in real anguish. ‘Because I have fallen out of the sky. I never learnt to fly properly, don’t you see?’

‘Ah, poor, poor bird,’ he said turning away.

She sat on the floor weeping, her arms wrapped around her legs. Why had she done that? In the recesses of her mind, a cloud of sparrows appeared, falling away from a great soaring bird. She knew she had seen them before.

So the year slid away, with Don and Harriet unresolved in their feelings towards each other. In August Miriam was away on a ten-day course and the boys went off on holiday. This period had greatly enhanced Don and Harriet’s activities, for it meant that Harriet was able to get away to his house once or twice. ‘There’s nothing like a change of environment,’ she said, and he laughed, looking at his all-too-familiar striped flannel sheets and the pictures on the wall that he saw every morning when he awoke.

At Christmas there was a break of six weeks or more because of school holidays, but it was not intolerable, they agreed. The Everetts went away on a family expedition to the South Island, and the Taylors went north to Whangarei to see the Wallaces for the first time since Emma’s birth. Mary and Gerald were pleased to see their daughter looking so contented and Gerald went so far as to take his son-in-law aside and compliment him on taming his daughter, ‘after all the trouble we had with her, you know.’

After their return, towards the end of January, something upset Max. He suddenly became profoundly irritable and morose. Harriet treated it as of no consequence at first, but after a few days she began to panic. Had he found out about her? she wondered. Had someone talked? She had come to take her luck for granted. She was unfair and she should be made to pay. It didn’t matter how one might toy with the concept of emancipation; she was a cheat and the penalties were bound to be extracted.

She tackled him one evening in early February. They had been gathering plums from one of the first trees they had planted on the section, and in the gold, still evening, life looked peaceful enough on the surface. Had she done something, she asked him? Why was he so unhappy?

He turned on her with a look of what she read as pure hatred.

‘For Christ’s sake, leave me alone,’ he said.

She heard the car backing out of the garage a few minutes later and he didn’t return till late that night. She had gone to bed but was lying awake, tensed and waiting for him to come back.

‘Are you awake?’ he said, as he came into the room.

‘Yes.’

He switched the light on. His face was wan and he looked old. ‘Harriet, it’s nothing to do with you. Please believe me, I can’t say anything more than that.’

‘Are you in some sort of trouble?’

He hesitated briefly. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Let’s just say that I’ve got a few of my ideas mixed up.’

‘Like I did last year?’

‘Something like that.’

The next morning he behaved as if nothing had happened, although he still looked pale. The matter wasn’t mentioned again, and he made what she believed to be a deliberate attempt to be pleasant to her. His expression in the garden that evening continued
to trouble her. That was not her only problem. Don hadn’t been in touch with her since the Everetts’ annual holiday.

She was in the butcher’s shop one day, and just as she was buying her weekend roast, she glanced sideways and saw Miriam and Don sitting in the car outside, watching her. They waved when she turned around, but had driven off by the time she paid for the meat. It was disturbing and she decided to ring Don at work the following week, now that Miriam was back at school.

But it was Miriam who rang her first, on Monday after school. ‘You haven’t been down for such a long time,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you pop over and tell me how Genevieve’s getting on at school.’

Genevieve was, in fact, tired, and Harriet wasn’t enthusiastic about trundling everybody over to Miriam’s, but on the whole it seemed to be a good idea to go. Miriam appeared delighted to see her. She talked with great enthusiasm about what they had done on their holidays. It all sounded terribly energetic. Harriet thought that if she were married to Don it would be a terrible effort to keep up with him on holiday. Marry Don? What on earth was she on about? ‘I beg your pardon?’ she said to Miriam, having missed entirely what she had been saying.

‘I said, we saw you in the butcher’s shop on Friday.’

‘Yes, I saw you too, you’d gone when I came out.’

‘Such a pretty outfit you had on. You’re getting quite daring, taking your skirts up as high as that, aren’t you?’

‘They do seem to be the fashion.’

‘You’ve got the legs for it, but my dear, if I may say so, I think you may be going a little far. Your suspender was showing underneath the hem. You can get those panty hose now. If you’re going to wear them quite as short as that, I really think you should see what you can do about it.’

‘Is that what you were looking at?’ She had nearly said ‘staring’.

‘Well, yes, actually it was. Don noticed first, he said she can’t get away with that, someone should tell her. So I thought, well, for your own good Harriet, better for me to tell you.’

Harriet rang Don the next day in a bitter fury. ‘How dare you discuss me with your wife like that?’ she shouted into the phone.

‘Hush, I can’t talk to you now.’

‘Don’t you want to talk to me at all?’ He hung up. A few minutes later as she was preparing another onslaught, he rang her back.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m in someone else’s office now. I couldn’t talk to
you before. Don’t take any notice of Miriam, she was putting words in my mouth and she repeated them back to you to be a bit spiteful.’

‘Why should she be? Does she suspect us?’

‘Well … she did say one or two things on holiday.’

‘I see,’ Harriet whispered. ‘Can’t you come over and see me? I need to see you terribly. I could make a bit of free time tomorrow.’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he promised as he hung up. She rang Cousin Alice and asked her if she could bring the children over. She rarely did this, for it seemed as if she was imposing on her ageing relative. Cousin Alice said she loved to see the children, but Harriet knew she couldn’t cope with them for long. She had given up golf the previous year, and her step was much slower than Harriet remembered it from the days when she lived with her.

However, on this occasion Harriet was desperate enough to ask her to have Emma for an hour or so in the morning. Just one child didn’t seem too great an imposition.

After she had left Emma with Cousin Alice, she rang Don and told him that she was free. He appeared furtively at the back door twenty minutes later.

‘What did Miriam say?’ Harriet asked almost immediately.

‘Nothing much. She just threw out a few hints that she had her eye on us. I thought I’d let the dust settle a bit before I came back.’

‘You could have told me.’

‘I was going to, but it sounded cold over the phone, so I thought when it was safe I’d come and tell you.’

‘Everything’s safe now,’ she said.

In bed, she said, ‘Would you like to be married to me?’

‘Is that a proposal?’ he asked, trying to turn away the question.

‘Would you like to be?’ she persisted.

‘Well of course I would,’ he said, ‘but you don’t want an oldie like me.’

‘I do, I do,’ she said. It all seemed so sane, so reasonable; she didn’t know why she hadn’t been able to see it before. She and Don had lovely times together. Max didn’t love her any more, he might even hate her, and she gave Don a better time than Miriam did. Obviously they should be married to each other.

‘I’m serious, Don,’ she said. ‘Please, the children would love you.’

‘Yours might at their age, but mine wouldn’t. They’re too old.’

‘You’ve thought about it, then?’

‘Dreams are free.’

‘You dream about being married to me? Then we could, don’t you see?’

Don shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t work. You’d get tired of me and we’d get pulled apart by our children.’

‘We could have some more. I could have a baby with you.’

‘Is that your answer to everything Harriet? Just have another baby?’

She sat up, as hurt as if he’d slapped her. ‘I thought you liked my babies.’

‘I do,’ he said. ‘But sooner or later you’d have to stop having them when things went wrong, and I’m sure there could be plenty to go wrong with us.’

‘Are you breaking it off, then?’