a Breed of Women (39 page)

The boys came in, and she wondered if they knew anything of the events of the night before. It was hard to tell. Laurence’s face was totally non-committal. She would never read that boy. Brent seemed gentle and distracted.

She got steaks out and started to prepare one of their favourite meals. They would sit and eat together, in front of television.

‘Will I get you a drink, Mum?’ Brent said.

‘Not tonight, son,’ she said.

The boys laughed uproariously at the comedy programmes, and shushed each other through the news so that their mother could hear it properly. It all seemed very normal. Afterwards they took the plates out and stacked them in the dishwasher. Laurence went to his room to do his homework, but Brent came out and sat with her on the sofa. She put her hand on his and he returned her grip.

‘Everything all right, son?’ she asked.

‘I’ve decided what I want to do when I leave school,’ he said.

‘That won’t be for a long time yet.’

‘I’ll be fifteen next year,’ he reminded her.

‘That still doesn’t mean you’ll be leaving school.’

‘Not for a year or so. But I had a talk to the careers advisor today. About getting a farm cadetship. I want to go on to a farm.’

She was startled. ‘A farm? Here in New Zealand?’

‘Yes.’

‘Dad won’t like that much.’

‘No, I know, but it doesn’t matter. I can cope.’ Looking at him she felt that he could. She loved him, but he was breaking the cord. He was telling her that he no longer needed her.

In the morning she tried to ring Harriet again, but the phone continued to ring unanswered. It was becoming strange. By afternoon, she had still received no response, and she still hadn’t rung Liz. She wanted to talk to Harriet before she spoke to Liz. But why? It was all some strange nightmare. Hamish would be home in a few hours, and she had done nothing. It was nightmare, it was reality, she couldn’t turn the clock back on everything that had been said, and done, had still to be dealt with. What did she want to say to Harriet? How crazy to have delayed ringing Liz in favour of some nebulous conversation about the past. If this was facing up to things she must be crazy.

She would try one more time. A woman answered when she dialled Harriet’s number. Mrs Taylor had gone away up north that morning, she told her. Away? For how long? She didn’t say, the woman, she came in to help. Gone to some place called Ohaka she thought, right away up the island.

So Harriet had gone. Gone without even ringing to find out how she was. Wrought all that havoc, and gone away. She was on her own again. Fear nearly choked her.

She lifted the phone once more, and called Toronto.

After the dinner at Leonie’s, Harriet was upset. It had ended badly. Max had tried to comfort her, but coming so close to her own disaster, she felt as if her world was falling apart. It was impossible, of course, to explain this to Max. Nor did she care to tell him how she had thought it was just like the old days in suburbia. These people couldn’t see themselves like that, but that’s what they were. When you break the pattern, no one can picture the pieces. These people
are no better at holding on to the pattern than anyone else. And Leonie, poor bewildered Leonie, had seen her sadness and thought that she was pitying her. She had read her face. In fact, Harriet pitied them both, they were more sisters under the skin than either of them could possibly have realised.

‘We’re instruments of our own destruction,’ Max was saying. ‘I’ve heard you say that. She did it to herself.’

‘I stood by and helped her make a good job of it, then,’ said Harriet.

She was a destructive force in Leonie’s life. Leonie had been right in accusing her of that, she had been playing games in a far more complex situation than she had known. She would ring her to wish her well, and leave her to work out her own destiny. There might have been a time when they could have helped each other, but that moment seemed to be past. Fleetingly, she wished that she could simply confide in Max all that had happened to her in the past year, that he would relieve her of thinking of the causes and effects of her behaviour in other people’s lives, as well as her own. But by doing this, she would add to the destruction. Max was, after all, a human being. As was Michael. And Leonie. As she was herself. There was a point at which one could ask too much, and she kept silence.

She intended to ring Leonie briefly and casually from work the next day.

On her way to the office, she stopped in town. She had remembered that it was Mary’s birthday soon, and she would have to get her present away that day if it was to arrive in time. Her mother depended more and more on her contact with her daughter. Harriet often felt guilty that she could not see her more often, especially as Mary wrote to her that Gerald’s health was failing and he was becoming more cantankerous. It was becoming more difficult to buy a present for her, but she expected she would find something. She settled for a pair of fluffy slippers, and made her way to the greeting card section. She stood, hovering undecided in front of the section labelled ‘Mother’s Birthday’, remembering that Mary and Gerald actually read the words inside the cards she sent them.

A voice behind her said, ‘Harriet Wallace? It is, isn’t it?’

She turned round, expecting to see someone who had watched her on television. She was quite sure she had never seen the man before in her life and, expecting to have her assumption confirmed, she composed a polite but firm dismissal. He was tall with a beard
shot with grey, and his slender nervous hands reached to take hers.

‘I’ve always hoped I might meet you again somewhere,’ he was saying as she avoided his hands. ‘I’ve heard you’re quite famous now. Who would have thought it? But of course I should have known. You don’t remember me do you? Francis Dixon.’

It took seconds for the name to register, then it came flooding back. Francis. Beautiful remote Francis, Wendy’s brother, had walked, stooped and withdrawn, round Ohaka School. It was almost unbelievable. Francis of the dark secrets, the one who had gone away.

‘I can’t believe it’s you,’ she said, accepting his hands now. They stood like that in the shop, transfixed, trying to roll back the years and find points in each other’s features with which they could identify.

‘Come on, we can’t stand here all day,’ he said. ‘Let’s go some place and have coffee.’ He had a slight drawl in his voice.

‘Please. But first,’ she indicated her mother’s parcel, ‘I have to send a birthday present to my mother.’

‘Your mother? How is she?’

After all these years, here was someone she could tell about her mother, here in a Wellington department store. All the people she had met, who had passed through her orbit, and not one of them had ever been able to say, ‘How is your mother?’ knowing her as a real person.

She started to tell him, and at the same time he was agreeing of course the parcel must be sent. He chose wrapping paper and said that she held the nicest card in her hand. She always chose things well. In the same breath he demanded of the shop assistant all the requirements for wrapping the parcel, and he did the job right there on the counter, as beautifully as if wrapping parcels was the special task for which his long well-manicured fingers had been designed.

There was news to exchange as they made their way along the street Wendy was married and lived in England, though she had been back to New Zealand a couple of times. That’s how he knew about Harriet; Wendy had seen her on television, and had thought of getting in touch but supposed Harriet got besieged by people like her and hadn’t liked to bother her. ‘I’d love to have seen her,’ Harriet cried, and found that she meant it.

‘I’ll write and tell her that, she’ll be pleased,’ said Francis as they settled themselves in a coffee bar.

‘You’ve been out of the country, then?’ said Harriet.

‘Almost forever,’ he said. ‘Australia. I fiddle for a living.’

‘A musician?’

‘Not a very illustrious one. Symphony orchestra, second violin. I thought I was going to be great, I was quite promising, you know, but I’d left it too late to be a prodigy. My parents never approved of me.’

‘I remember that. I remember so much about you now. Mind you, I’m surprised you remembered me,’ said Harriet. ‘You never let on that you even knew I was alive when I was a kid.’

‘Oh, don’t worry, I was most aware of your existence, Harriet. I admired you intensely.’

‘Good heavens, did you really? I wish you’d told me. It might have changed my life.’

‘I doubt it. And anyway, would you have had it changed?’

She reflected. ‘Funnily enough, no. Though lots of things have gone wrong in it.’

‘I’d heard that. Wendy told me about your first marriage. I take it you’re married again?’ he said, looking at her hand.

‘Oh, yes. I’ll regale you with all the domestic details. But tell me, why didn’t you ever speak to me if you didn’t mind me too much?’

‘I was terrified of you.’

‘Why?’

‘Hard to explain, really.’ He thought back over the years. ‘I think it was perhaps because I felt trapped. I could see all the other people around me at school going straight into the cowsheds, marriage, or off to training college —’

‘Like Wendy?’

‘Exactly. You do understand that then? That’s right, I remember she told me years afterwards how cross you’d been with her over that, and quite right too. Whatever she did, Wendy said to me, Harriet had a capacity for living. And that’s what I was sure of. You had that energy, that restless, seeking vitality, that made the other girls in Ohaka look pale beside you, and I was sure if I stayed I’d drift into marrying you, especially as you seemed to rather like me, and that we’d destroy each other.’

‘Plenty of people have tried to do that I seem to attract disaster,’ Harriet said.

‘I’d have been a bigger disaster to you than most,’ Francis said. I was clear-sighted enough to know that it would have been a frightful mistake, but in those days I didn’t know myself enough to ask why.’

Harriet, looking at him and meeting his eye, guessed that he was
homosexual. He smiled gently in assent, without the question being asked aloud.

‘I miss not having had children,’ he said. ‘That’s all, really. So tell me about yours.’

Later, she said, ‘It’s wonderful sitting here talking to you. I had this strange feeling that I’d known you all my life, and of course, then I realised, it’s true, I really have, well most of it anyway. All of it that seems to matter. You know there aren’t many people I can say that about.’

‘Roots, we all need them,’ he said. ‘How does Ohaka look these days?’

‘I haven’t been there for a good eighteen years. Strange isn’t it, we pass the turnoff on our way north every year, but we never go there. Introducing one’s past to the people in one’s present seems to get harder every year.’

‘I’m going up there tonight. I haven’t seen my parents for about three years.’

‘They still live there, then?’

‘Oh heavens, yes. They’ve had share milkers on the farm for years, but they’ll never leave there now. Why don’t you come with me?’

‘To Ohaka?’

‘Why not?’

And indeed, she thought, why not. ‘We could take my car,’ she offered. ‘It’s a bit beat-up but it’ll get us there, or I could take Max’s, I guess.’

‘Marvellous. I was going to fly, but that would be nicer.’

‘Then I could go on up while you’re staying at the farm and deliver mother’s birthday present to her. It’s a splendid idea. And I’ve got leave owing, and Max thinks I need a holiday.’

Late that afternoon the road unwound beneath them, stretching far away to the north. With Francis, it was like exploring a new country, one which she knew so well that she could name every strait, every range of hills, and yet one which she had only begun to explore. They talked as they drove, and Harriet found in Francis a willing and uncritical listener. She left nothing out in recollecting her days since their childhood in Ohaka, and that too was like looking for the first time at a chart that mapped out the progression of her life.

They swept on past the little towns, stopping at Taihape and eating stale pies and drinking fizzy orange, all that they could find at that
hour, and pushed on up towards Hamilton. The lights of Weyville, lying in the hills away to their right floated past them, and Harriet thought of Cousin Alice, and was glad that they had decided to circumnavigate the town. For all that she cared for the old lady, Cousin Alice was for another time, another journey, living out her life as she was, a frail little ghost in a Weyville old people’s home, calling for her children to return.

They had taken turns with the driving, and were able to make good time without feeling the effects of the journey. It was nearly midnight when they made Hamilton.

‘We must be mad,’ said Harriet. ‘We should have stopped at Taupo instead of coming up round the back of the lake, and got a bed there. We’re never going to find a place to sleep.’

But night staff in one of the large hotels rather grudgingly said they could have two rooms, looking at them as if to say who’s fooling whom, and ostentatiously put them in adjacent rooms. Francis noticed too, and amused, advised her to lock the door.

They were on the road again before nine, Ohaka only a few hours journey away. Through Auckland, spread in a giant pincer movement across the land, across the harbour bridge, peeling away the cities, only remembering that Michael lived in Auckland when they were off the motorway and miles beyond the city.

Freedom, on the road at last Set free. The day blue, the sea dazed with light, flashing beside them, Whangaparaoa stretching in the far distance, and then through the farmland, and then coming to meet them again as they spilled over the top rim of the Brynderwyns, and away down the other side, Bream Tail and the Hen and Chickens lying nestled on the blue floor of the world. Along through Waipu, and then the turnoff, the one she passed and avoided for so many years. The road was sealed all the way in. How things had changed. Perhaps the local bus wouldn’t be such a boneshaker now, but then on the last strip up to Dixons’ farm the tar seal gave way to gravel, so that coming on to it they almost skidded off the road.