a Breed of Women Page 7

  It seemed to have taken only a moment, but when the sky cleared of the sparrows, Harriet was out of sight of the farm and her parents, and Ohaka was dropping behind her.

  3

  AT FIRST ALICE Harrison seemed to be as formidable as her letter. Harriet barely knew her, for she had come to New Zealand many years before the Wallaces had done, and was considerably older than Mary. She had met Mary and Gerald off the boat from England and, in their first years before they moved to the north, some sort of contact had been maintained between them as the Wallaces had straggled from one run-down farm to another. There had been one or two visits south during Harriet’s early childhood but the trip to Weyville had finally proved too costly. Besides, they had little in common except family ties, though sometimes Harriet had detected a wistful note in her mother’s voice when she spoke of cousin Alice. Alice’s name was usually introduced into conversation after talk of ‘home’. There was no longer any point in going ‘home’, and there was no point in going to see cousin Alice. There was no longer any point in going anywhere, it seemed, just staying on in Ohaka.

  Thus Harriet’s image of her second cousin was very vague indeed, though she still had a rough mental picture of her outward appearance at least.

  She had spent a lot of the school holidays wishing that she could think of some dashing way to leave home, having made so many brave statements about her future. It seemed a bit ignominious to be docilely trotting off to her elderly cousin’s home for an unspecified job and the possibility of a typing class at night school armed with a second-rate School Certificate. But when it boiled down, there wasn’t much else she could do. There had been wild moments when she had even wished that she was joining Wendy and Marie at Teachers’ Training College. The feeling would pass quickly when she considered the implications, but obviously there was little she could say to anyone on the subject of her departure while the Ohaka community sat back with pride and considered their latest candidates for success. She was quite definitely not one of them.

  ‘The bus to Weyville trundled south till they reached Auckland, where after midday the driver announced they would stop for half an hour.

  Harriet started to push her way through the crowd to the counter, to collect grey buns and muddy tea. The crowd was very thick, and the food looked unappetising. It occurred to her that she really wasn’t very hungry — besides, she had a whole thirty minutes to spend in Auckland. She must be mad wasting her time on lunch.

  Auckland! She’d never been there, or not that she could remember. It was a mild overcast day, the humid midsummer sky sitting low on the city.

  Outside the bus depot, Harriet looked up and down the street. She walked a little way along, and to her left was a long wide street with more people in it than she had ever seen before. Not far away on her right lay the wharves. With a lifting heart she turned, and walked down towards the sea.

  The port was full of boats, large and small, but few people seemed to be about. She leaned on a railing and stared down into the listless water. Then, quite suddenly, an edge of cloud lifted, and the sun came out. All the sea shone and twinkled at her, and the boats seemed to rock more easily at their moorings. A ship was drawing out to sea, and for the first time Harriet noticed that crowds of people were standing together on the dock, waving, cheering, crying, hanging onto streamers. They were some distance away from her, which was why she had not seen them immediately. The ship was tall and white and proud and its decks were lined with people, hundreds and hundreds of them it seemed, and they clutched their streamer ends, some of them as if their lives depended on it, and when the streamers broke they hung onto the remaining ends as if they were the last things left in life. Their faces, laughing a moment before, broke into weeping like those on shore. The ship uttered a long wailing note, as if taking up the moment’s grief.

  Harriet had stood transfixed throughout the scene, which seemed to have lasted only a few moments. As quickly as it had lifted, the shutter of cloud fell again, and the sea resumed its sullen look. A woman walked towards her, her face set in harsh white lines.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Harriet.

  The woman looked at her and through her.

  ‘Where is the ship going?’ asked Harriet.

  In a long sigh, the woman replied, ‘It’s going to the other side of the world.’ She walked on.

  Harriet turned away, wondering with a sudden quick fear just how long she really had been standing there.

  Crowds of people were now coming towards her from the docks. As she hurried back to the bus depot, they seemed to engulf her on every side. She started to run, tripping and falling amongst them.

  When she had freed herself from the throng, she ran up the street, her breath sobbing in her chest. The depot had a deserted air. A man wearing a khaki coat with NZR initialled on the pocket was sauntering around.

  Harriet raced over to him and grabbed his arm.

  ‘The bus to Weyville,’ she gasped. ‘Where is it?’

  The man rolled a fat cigarette with the tip of his tongue from the centre of his mouth to the side. He poked a finger in the direction of the nearest corner. ‘Reckon that’s its back end,’ he said.

  So it was. The bus was just vanishing.

  ‘I’ve missed it, then.’

  ‘Looks like it, miss.’

  ‘My luggage, will it still be on it?’

  ‘No reason to take it off.’

  Harriet’s heart somersaulted. A fine start this was to life with cousin Alice, her luggage turning up, and no sign of her. She only had a rough idea of what Alice looked like, but her letter had hardly been an encouraging testimony to the gentleness of her spirit. She looked around wildly. Across the road was a taxi rank, and a taxi had just cruised up to it. She had read about people hailing taxis in emergencies, and this seemed a crucial moment in which to take command of her life.

  Within seconds she had slammed the door of the taxi behind her, and was perched on the edge of the front seat beside the driver. ‘Follow that bus, please,’ she ordered.

  ‘Which bus?’ said the driver, for it had now disappeared.

  ‘The bus to Weyville,’ said Harriet. ‘Mind you,’ she added lamely, ‘I don’t quite know where it would be, because I don’t know the way to Weyville.’

  The taxi driver almost appeared to be in the habit of pulling up at bus stops just after buses had left, because he seemed quite unconcerned.

  ‘Right,’ he said, as they eased into gear and picked up speed. ‘No trouble.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Should pick it up round Newmarket.’

  ‘You think so?’ Harriet was overwhelmed by the possibility that her crazy reaction might pay off.

  ‘Sure thing. Depends of course on whether it gets the lights and we don’t or the other way round. The first way it’ll take longer, or we might miss it altogether; second way, we might pick it up at the top of Khyber Pass.’

  Faced with such a gamble, Harriet had second thoughts. She reached for the purse in her pocket, knowing exactly how much was in it.

  ‘And that is,’ Harriet said woefully, ‘we might catch it provided we don’t go more than two pound ten’s worth.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said the driver, ‘now there’s a thing, isn’t it. Are you sure you really want to catch this bus?’

  ‘I have to,’ she said desperately. ‘You see, I’m going to live with my cousin Alice.’ Her voice trailed away; there was too much to explain to this stranger upon whom she was suddenly so reliant.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he said, after a sideways look at her. ‘Two quids worth and the rest’s on me.’

  ‘You mean it?’

  ‘Got a coupla daughters myself, haven’t I? Now go on kid, watch out for that bus. We’ll catch it.’

  That was how Harriet came to ride into Weyville on a Road Services bus, some hours later, to face cousin Alice and the wide world with exactly ten shillings in her purse.

  Cousin Alice stood at the Weyville bus station, waiting for her protegée. As soo
n as Harriet saw her she recognised her, a spare woman with beautiful white hair drawn back into a bun at the back of her head, not a tight bun, but a big soft one, surrounded by expensive waving. Alice Harrison had been a beauty, there was no doubt about that. Her eyes were blue, as close to forget-me-not blue as it was possible to get, and pleasantly bright, soft, rather than piercing, or so it might seem to the casual observer. Her skin was aged of course, for she was in her sixties, yet fine and immaculate like bone china, and her hands reminded Harriet of an iris that had been pressed between the covers of a book, with faintly blue veins pressing against the translucent petals. Her nails were painted a soft pink. She wore a tailored linen suit, nipped into a waist that was still amazingly small.

  As the bus drew in, Harriet was overwhelmed with relief that she had managed to catch the bus again. To have disappointed this elegant lady at their very first encounter of any consequence was unthinkable. Her second reaction was to feel totally ashamed of her own gracelessness. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the driver’s rear vision mirror as she stood in the queue of people waiting to get out of the bus. Her cotton dress was baggy and ill-fitting over the home-made bra, which she hadn’t worn from confirmation day until now, but which she had put on that morning in a rush of loyalty towards Mary. Her brown hair was shaggy and rough and badly needed cutting. The eyes in the mirror stared back at her, brown flecked with green, in a sunburnt face. Not bad eyes, she thought, but I look like a heathen.

  The queue shuffled forward, and the moment had come.

  Alice was straining forward, searching each face. Her eyes lighted on Harriet and travelled over her. Harriet’s heart sank. Obviously she was looking for a different sort of person. Alice’s eyes returned to her when all other possibilities had been exhausted.

  Hand extended, she moved forward. ‘My dear Harriet, how like your father you’ve grown. No wonder I didn’t recognise you.’

  Was this the lady who had written such a strong letter to her mother? The disciplinarian? The mother of two successful children, who wasn’t going to be put out by a girl with a poor pass in School Certificate, and who believed what they said about her on her report? The blue eyes appraised Harriet from head to foot. Later that night Harriet wondered if the reference to her father was a studied insult. Of course the relationship between Alice and her parents had lapsed when Gerald had failed to be successful.

  Alice said, ‘My dear, you must be starving.’

  Harriet’s suitcase was stored away in the back of Alice’s Morris Minor and in a few minutes they were driving through the streets of Weyville towards what Harriet realised with a pang she must now regard as home. In the late afternoon, a few people meandered down what she took to be the main street. It was very wide, and lined with shops, a mixture of small old frontfaces and large expanses of glass. Milk bars stood on a couple of corners, and outside loitered boys and girls, the boys with drainpipe trousers and slicked-back hair, the girls wearing wide circular skirts halfway down their calves and a great deal of makeup.

  ‘I’m afraid we have a rough element here,’ sighed cousin Alice as they drove past, and Harriet was aware that she gave her a sidelong glance. ‘Still,’ she continued, ‘there are some nice young people here. Of course, a great deal will depend on the sort of job we can get you.’

  ‘Yes, Alice,’ said Harriet meekly. Cousin Alice shot her a very sharp look indeed. Harriet didn’t know what she had done to offend, but she felt the woman stiffening beside her. Little else was said on the rest of the drive, except for her cousin pointing out some of the streets and a park which bounded the edge of a small sulky lake.

  However, Alice seemed to regard it as one of the town’s beauty spots and described it as a nice place for a walk on a summer evening after work. Warming a little, she also said she was very lucky that she and her husband had bought property near it those years before, as of course now it made her place quite valuable. What value meant when you were perfectly happy where you were and never intended to shift, she had no idea, she said, though she supposed that her children would do quite nicely out of it one of these days. Not that she intended to die soon enough for them to make any plans about the sale of the property. Of course she wasn’t mean in her treatment of them; she didn’t want to be one of those well-off parents who actively encouraged their children to wish their death upon them, by sitting on all the money and not handing any out. Still, she was careful, one needn’t go throwing money around, and Harriet’s board would go into one of several trust funds she had. It all added up you know.

  And on this note she lapsed once more into silence, leaving Harriet to contemplate the job that would be of such assistance subsidising the future of the younger Harrisons.

  The car pulled up at Alice’s house. It was a tidy brick bungalow half-hidden behind well-trimmed shrubs. At the gate was an arch of hedgeway, apparently shaped by a topiarist, who had provided some elaborate angles for them to walk under. A monkey-puzzle tree stood on the front lawn. Several perfectly aligned gardens were full of marigolds and summer roses, dahlias and lobelia borders. It was more colourful than any garden Harriet had ever been in. Farmers’ gardens, if they existed, were almost invariably a tangle of free-standing self-sown seeds sprung from long attempts at establishment when the farms had been opened; that’s how it was up north, at any rate. At the same time, there was something formidable about the regularity of this one.

  ‘Well, what do you think of it?’ asked Alice, watching her.

  ‘It’s awfully pretty,’ said Harriet. ‘It must be a lot of work. Do you have a gardener?’

  ‘Good heavens, no,’ said Alice briskly. ‘Does your father have someone in to milk his cows?’

  ‘No, but that’s different, that’s his work,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Quite so, and the garden is mine. We shall plant the asters out at the weekend.’ From which Harriet divined that gardening had become a joint project in which she was involved. Things didn’t change much, wherever you were.

  Inside, the house was like the garden, well-appointed and immaculate. Harriet’s bedroom was at the back of the house, a rather dark room, away from the sun, but carpeted and with a soft eiderdown on the bed. It was quite the nicest room she had ever occupied. But she thought of the plum tree at Ohaka, and suddenly she was sitting in the tidy room, crying. The whole weight of the day pressed down on her. She felt alone and totally inadequate. Right now Mary and Gerald would be putting the last of the cows down to the river paddock, and Mary would sluice the yard down until he came back, then she’d go up to the house and start preparing a meal, just for the two of them. And Harriet knew that they would sit in silence, having nothing new to add to the day except her going, and that was a subtraction, an absence that they could never fill. She thought of the time when Mary had lost the baby, and she wondered how many other children had escaped her mother’s womb, and wished for the first time that her mother could have had another child to take away the pain of losing her.

  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.