a Breed of Women Read online

  Mary looked at Harriet, obviously hoping that she would come home, for to challenge Doris’s promise to look after her would have seemed ungrateful, to say the least.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Harriet suddenly. ‘I’d love to stay.’

  ‘Good,’ said Doris. ‘Jim’ll walk her home, won’t you Jim?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said her son stolidly, staring ahead and forgetting his talk about his balls. Aced by this suitably convincing demonstration by all concerned, Mary and Gerald could only nod mutely in agreement.

  ‘Well, that’s all right then,’ said Mary. ‘I wouldn’t like her wandering round in the dark.’

  Oh, if you only knew, thought Harriet. The nights by the river had become a part of her life. She had never again had anything but quiet night prowls after the first contact with God, and although she had been disappointed that it hadn’t happened again, she was more than a little relieved that she had not been lumbered with a permanent Bernadette or Lourdes undertaking.

  Probably just as well. Lately she’d begun thinking that ‘it’ had got something to do with the voice from the sky, though she failed to see the connection. Nowadays when she went for her walks at three or four o’clock in the morning, she contemplated the mysteries of ‘it’ more than she thought about God. When she considered the whole subject, Jim entered her thoughts more often than she supposed he really should.

  After her parents had gone home she continued to sit quietly. The party started to liven up and old man Collier, who was getting a bit shaky these days, started up a few rounds of ‘Mockingbird Hill’, after which Jim got them all singing ‘Roll Me Over in Clover’.

  When they were all going strong, Harriet went over to him and said she wanted to go home.

  ‘Bloody hell, kid,’ said Jim, annoyed. ‘Why didn’t you go with your folks if you wanted to leave this soon? We’re just starting to warm up.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, then,’ replied Harriet. ‘I’ll say goodnight to your mother.’

  ‘Now wait a minute — I said I’d walk you home and walk you home I will. I don’t go back on my word.’

  Outside, the night was soft and fluttering. They walked alone in silence. At last Harriet said, ‘I’ll be leaving here soon.’

  ‘Go on, where you heading then?’

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Your folks’ll miss you.’

  ‘They don’t know yet. You won’t tell them, will you?’

  ‘What’s it worth?’ asked Jim automatically.

  ‘I never told on you,’ said Harriet.

  Jim stopped in his tracks. He was quiet for a minute, then said, ‘You was supposed to forget that ever happened. I was in a bad way right then, what with being left high and dry like then by my missus. You got no right to go reminding a man he done it like that.’

  ‘But I didn’t forget, did I? And I have reminded you.’

  ‘You’re not trying to be smart, are you? Remember I told you, you don’t want to be smart. From what I hear, you never listened to me. You gone and got smart with everybody round here.

  He paused, then added, ‘You don’t have a boyfriend, do you?’

  ‘No-o,’ Harriet admitted.

  ‘Goes to show then, don’t it,’ Jim said triumphantly. ‘I told you blokes don’t like smart-aleck sheilas.’

  ‘I’ll try and remember,’ said Harriet humbly.

  ‘Right, then we’d better get you home.’

  ‘Only I want to do it again,’ said Harriet.

  Jim started walking. ‘Oh, no you don’t.’

  Harriet pulled at his arm. ‘But I do. Please, Jim. I wouldn’t …’ and she took a deep breath, preparing to maim the English language, ‘I wouldn’t never tell nobody.’

  Jim stopped, obviously impressed. ‘Say,’ he said with awe, ‘you really mean it, don’t you?’

  ‘I — I want to hold onto your … dong again,’ said Harriet desperately.

  ‘Yeah, well … er … okay,’ said Jim. ‘Best lie down, then. Er — mind the cowshit.’

  Harriet agreed doubtfully, and reminded him that the first time they hadn’t lain down.

  ‘You want a bit more than that, don’t you?’ said Jim.

  ‘Oh yes, yes, please,’ Harriet said hastily. The thought that she might not find out about ‘it’ was terrifying. God and ‘it’ were now on a collision course. Not only was she about to make a remarkable discovery, but she was also about to place herself in the position of having to confess.

  At the moment, her position was rather uncomfortable. The paddock in which they found themselves was in the direct path taken by the Colliers’ cows when they went to the cowshed each day, and the grass was thin over a crust of dried earth. The sharp little points dug into Harriet’s back as Jim, on his knees, proceeded to push her down still further into the clay. She moaned as a nasty little edge dug into her kidneys. Taking this very well, Jim uttered an inarticulate cry and flung himself upon her, his mouth sucking hers like a limpet. For several minutes they ground their way through an exercise that seemed to involve Harriet in swallowing Jim’s tongue. It felt like the largest tongue in the world, and she had a quick vision of the ox tongues her mother cooked and served cut up with salad for Sunday lunch. She often had to skin them when they had finished cooking. The skins were very thick, with a great furry grain over them. She had never thought that her tongue might be the same, but now she began to wonder — Jim’s was obviously very similar to those she was used to handling.

  ‘Ah,’ sighed Jim, lifting his head at last. ‘You’re not such a bad kid after all.’

  Fortified by this praise, Harriet tentatively felt around for the object she had been asked to hold the time before. It was positively mountainous through the cloth of Jim’s trousers, and she was very impressed. When she had peeked through the bathroom window at her father, his had seemed a very tame, droopy little affair. She wondered how Jim managed to hide his splendid equipment.

  He plunged his hand down the neck of her dress and clutched her nipple between his thumb and forefinger, rolling it round experimentally. The sensation was rather painful, in fact, the whole operation seemed more complicated and uncomfortable by the minute. With a profound sigh Jim collapsed on top of her so that she was ground into the crumbling earth, pierced from below and above.

  ‘Ooo-wah,’ wailed Harriet, unable to contain herself any longer. With a great effort Jim pulled back. In the moonlight, she could see that he was still bulging against his trousers.

  ‘Ah, yes, you want it real bad, don’t you kid?’ said Jim hoarsely.

  Harriet, not at all sure that she wanted ‘it’ any more, or whether in fact that might be all there was to ‘it’, could only mumble.

  ‘You know I wouldn’t hurt you, don’t you?’ he demanded.

  Again Harriet could only mutter, feeling thoroughly bruised and mutilated. Jim apparently took this for a sign of assent.

  ‘I couldn’t touch you, you know that, don’t you? Christ, I’d like to, but nah, I couldn’t do it. You’re too good a kid. Too good a kid. Muck up your life, I would, that’s what I’d do to a smart kid like you. Old man’d shoot me.’

  All this sounded suspiciously like a marriage proposal to Harriet, which was a great deal more than she had bargained for. Or was it? Were other mysterious elements involved? Had she done ‘it’? She was pretty sure the answer was no, but it seemed embarrassing to ask. Crestfallen, she got to her feet, straightening her clothes as she did so.

  ‘Come on,’ said Jim, quite solicitously, it seemed. ‘I better see you home.’ As they walked over the paddocks he said, ‘I coulda got mad with you, you know. Not really fair, what you done to me.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said penitently, her heart momentarily leaping at the thought that she might have accomplished her aim after all.

  ‘You haven’t been playing round with any of them fellas down at the high school, have you?’

  ‘No,’ said Harriet indignantly. ‘Of course not.’


  ‘That’s all right then, that’s what I thought.’

  ‘Was your wife very pretty?’ asked Harriet suddenly, not knowing why.

  He was silent for a minute. ‘Not that you’d notice, I guess. She went to that same damn high school, that’s all. We was doing it from the time …’ He glanced sideways at her. ‘Come to think of it, I guess since we was about your age. Put her up the duff first year out of school. Took our kid when we was both twenty and made off with this other fella.’

  ‘Oh Jim, that’s awful,’ cried Harriet, genuinely moved.

  ‘I dunno, kid,’ said Jim, more thoughtful than she’d ever known him. ‘I was awful mad at first, and I felt a right Charley, I can tell you, but you know, there’s some things I dunno, an’ I guess I won’t ever be able to figure ’em out all that proper, but I reckon I don’t blame her all that much. Some things we hadn’t kinda worked on when we was fuckin’ our way through high. See, that’s why I couldn’t a done it to you.’

  ‘Married me?’

  ‘Married you?’ He was bewildered. ‘You wouldn’t want to marry the likes of me.’

  Harriet was humiliated. Why had she ever said that? she wondered. One moment he was talking about marriage and the next he wasn’t. The whole thing was impossibly mixed up.

  They were nearly at her gate. Unexpectedly, Jim drew her close to the hedge. He put his hand on hers and pulled her to him, just gently kissing her face, the tip of her nose and her forehead, very carefully. No tongues, no bumps. He let go her hand and stroked the side of her face.

  ‘You’re a real sweet kid,’ he said. ‘I wish …’ He was silent. ‘Thanks, kid,’ he said finally, and then he was gone, loping through the shadows as catlike as could be.

  When she was in bed, Harriet wept, shaking, silent tears. Much of what had happened she didn’t understand, so many questions were still unanswered, and so much emotion choked her up that it was almost more than she could bear. Why had he thanked her at the end? Had ‘it’ happened at last, and was there more to ‘it’ than that? Should she have thought about marriage before they started the whole performance? And that bit about Jim’s wife having a baby — well, of course, she knew that some girls started having babies before they got married, and you had to do whatever ‘it’ was first, but did that mean that if she had done ‘it’ she might have started a baby too? She hadn’t thought about any of that before. There was so much to think about that it was terrifying.

  One thing she did know, and that was that your periods stopped if you were going to have a baby. Everybody knew that. Even her mother had by now parted with this bit of information, and there’d been a big scare at school when one of the girls hadn’t got her period for two weeks, and it seemed that she’d been up to something. Everyone had been scared stiff, and at every interval a covey would retreat to the school lavatories to make an inspection. One day her period came, and the girl cried all the rest of the day, which Harriet didn’t understand either.

  Anyway, Harriet’s period came two days later, and she took the arrival as a sign that whatever the facts of the matter had been the night Jim walked her home, she was loved by God, and should thank him most sincerely.

  The last confirmation class before the actual service took place on Thursday. Father Dittmer hurried them through the responses, which now came automatically, and he said that they were all now fully prepared as people who had come to the years of discretion, and he thought they should do very well as members of the church.

  Then everyone filed out except Harriet, who now saw quite clearly that an act of contrition was required of her.

  Father Dittmer was busily packing up his little suitcase of books when he saw that she was still sitting there.

  ‘What is it, Harriet?’ he asked testily. ‘I have to be at the next church down the line at five o’clock.’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Father Dittmer. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. I suppose, young lady, that you are about to tell me that you are not going to be confirmed. I suppose you are now going to set about disclaiming God and all His mighty works. You will no doubt be on the verge of discrediting the holy apostolic chain to which we of the cloth subscribe, to prove to me that St Peter, St Paul and St Mark and St Luke and all the others did not tell the truth, that they were just scribes who wrote down folk tales on behalf of the illiterate peasants of the time, and that all the sciences and philosophies of our times have progressed beyond that of the first century AD, except for theology, and what was all right two thousand years ago will not do for you. Am I right?’

  ‘I’d forgotten all that,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Ah!’ Father Dittmer pounced. ‘Then you admit that you have thought such things?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I did at one stage,’ said Harriet.

  ‘And were you not about to discourse on such matters now?’

  ‘No. I came to confess.’

  ‘Confess!’

  ‘You said, Father, some should, none must, and all may.’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ he said, sitting down suddenly in the first pew. He took out his handkerchief and mopped his shiny dome. ‘And,’ he asked, ‘which category are you, my dear Harriet?’

  She hesitated, about to choose the first edict, then said sweetly, ‘The optional, Father.’

  He shot her a reproachful glance but merely said, ‘Then you had better kneel down, hadn’t you, my dear girl?’

  ‘Right here?’ asked Harriet.

  ‘Oh no. In the vestry, I think.’ He led the way over the motheaten carpet and opened the creaking vestry door for her.

  ‘Now,’ he said sitting heavily on the high-backed wood and leather chair. ‘Now, you shall confess, my dear girl.’

  ‘Where shall I kneel?’

  ‘Oh just here, just here in front of me,’ said Father Dittmer. ‘Near enough for me to place my hand upon your head … for comfort.’

  Harriet knelt obediently.

  ‘What was it you wanted to tell me, Harriet?’

  ‘We-ell,’ started Harriet cautiously, ‘it’s about this — boy I know.’

  ‘Ah,’ breathed Father Dittmer. ‘A boy. I see. And what have you been doing with this boy?’

  Harriet was silent.

  ‘I see. Did you go … all the way?’ Father Dittmer leant forward anxiously.

  Harriet looked up, perplexed. She hadn’t bargained for this. In fact, the question seemed a downright insult, considering that she had come here to gain some enlightenment on physical as well as spiritual matters.

  ‘I don’t know, Father,’ she said truthfully.

  ‘Come, come, girl, you must know.’

  ‘But I don’t. I thought you might tell me.’

  Father Dittmer gave a strangled gasp and half rose from his chair, then sank back again.

  ‘Then … where did he touch you?’ he asked hoarsely.

  ‘Pretty well everywhere,’ said Harriet.

  ‘There?’ asked her confessor, suddenly stabbing a finger in the general direction of her vagina.

  ‘Oh — sort of.’

  He stretched out a trembling finger towards her chest. His finger had an overlong horny tobacco-stained nail, Harriet noticed as it rested lightly on her breast.

  ‘There?’

  ‘Oh yes, yes,’ she nodded, happy to be able to oblige him with something positive.

  The nail hooked the corner of her blouse, pulling it aside.

  ‘Underneath?’

  Harriet felt mesmerised, unable to stop what was happening. She nodded, silent now.

  ‘How?’

  ‘He held — the bit on top,’ she muttered desperately.

  The nail descended on her nipple. To her amazement, she felt it go rigid. That hadn’t happened with Jim. They both looked at this phenomenon in silence. Father Dittmer’s hand dropped away.

  ‘Did he — penetrate?’ he asked. His voice sounded as though it came from ten thousand miles away, so loud was the roaring in he
r ears. Both her nipples were standing up like beacons, and there was a beat like the sea under her panties.

  She looked at him and through him, trying to answer. She didn’t recognise her own voice. ‘Penetrate? I suppose so. He … put his tongue inside my mouth.’

  ‘And what else did he put inside?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not even his finger. Like … this?’ The wicked-looking fingernail was following down the line of her body.

  ‘No. No,’ she cried out, jumping to her feet, and cowering back. ‘Nothing at all.’

  The hand dropped. She and Father Dittmer looked at each other as across a great distance.

  ‘I think we should kneel side by side in the church and pray,’ he said at last.

  They went back into the church, and knelt some distance apart in the front pew.

  ‘We don’t have a strict order for confession in the Church of England,’ said Father Dittmer shakily.

  ‘Can you not forgive me, then?’ said Harriet.

  ‘I can pray for you,’ said Father Dittmer, avoiding the question. ‘And I think you should repeat the Fifty-first Psalm after me. I’m sure you’ll find it a great comfort.’ His normal voice was reasserting itself.

  The late afternoon sun struck coloured light through the tiny stained-glass window as they knelt muttering one after the other, ‘Wash me thoroughly from my wickedness, cleanse me from my sin … I acknowledge my faults … my sin is ever before me.’

  Harriet sneaked a glance at him from between tightly clasped hands. ‘Against thee, thee only have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight,’ he murmured, and she saw a tear winkle its way down the side of his face.

  ‘Against thee, thee only, have I sinned,’ repeated Harriet, and slipped quietly from her place. He didn’t seem to notice her, his head didn’t turn, as she hurried out into the sunlight.

  Outside it seemed bright and clean and calm. An apple tree showered a profusion of petals over her, as she picked up her bike leaning against it. A keen lemony fragrance came from the cups of the magnolias in the trees by the church and the headstones stood upright as ever with their green-grey beards of lichen. Did it ever happen? she wondered. Then with a great burst of energy, she jumped on her bicycle and began pedalling furiously towards home.