Free a Breed of Women by Fiona Kidman Page B

morning she got up and dressed and had breakfast with her parents for the last time.
    Her father gave her an austere glance, and she knew he was looking at her lipstick. ‘Don’t come running to me when you get yourself into trouble, then,’ he said, and continued to eat.
    Mary had nothing at all to say. Her hands were permanently thickened and red from washing up at the shed, Harriet noticed. When they had eaten, she followed Harriet into her bedroom and helped tie down her suitcase, a battered relic dating from her immigration to New Zealand. When it was done, she went to the window and stood looking out.
    ‘You’ll miss the plums this year,’ she said.
    ‘Yes, another week and they would have been ripe.’
    ‘Just too soon.’
    Harriet looked at her mother and longed to put her arms around her and stroke her hair, once brown and thick like hers, nowstraggling and drawn back into a bun. But the Wallaces weren’t that sort of family.
    ‘Things always ripen in time,’ said Harriet, not knowing what else to say.
    Mary nodded. ‘But if the season goes wrong, then you lose it That’s the way it is.’
    Later the three of them stood together on the side of the road, awkward now that the time for parting had come, wishing to postpone it and at the same time willing it to be over. Before long a cloud of dust heralded the bus, which came trundling towards them. They shuffled together, touching, not touching, not knowing how to behave. The bus stopped, Harriet bought her ticket from the driver, the door slammed and they moved off. Down the long road she turned back to look and wave for a last time to the couple standing unusually close together, both smaller and somehow frailer than she had ever noticed. As she turned, a hawk spiralled from the river paddock. In the morning sun it looked as she imagined an eagle might. A great cloud of sparrows rose underneath it and then around it; they were attacking the larger bird. Almost like insects, they blotted out the world for an instant, then as the hawk rose high above them, they collapsed down towards the earth, and the big solitary bird, feathers gleaming, lifted higher and higher.
    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
    A T FIRST A LICE 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