The Cockatoos

by Patrick White

  On the morning of the day, as Evelyn was discovering the Nile Cold had forgotten to include the pâté and the police were beating up a beggar in the street, the heavy man she remembered as Dowson the engineer appeared in the driveway. At his heels a second man. Evelyn froze inside her perspiration. Not, possibly, the Greek? Each of the men was carrying a small case.

  Dowson shook hands much too firmly. The Greek, it was, pronounced his own name. Determined not to listen, Evelyn heard it going off like fireworks.

  Then Evelyn, not with the assistance of her will, but in a gust of dizzying, and equally pyrotechnical, inspiration, began to say her piece, ‘Oh, but what an embarrassing, such a terribly distressing mistake! Oh, but Harold surely, Mr Dowson? Or can it be another instance of the appalling Alexandrian telephone system? For Harold not to have made it clear that, much as we’d have liked it ourselves, we’re hardly the masters in a lent house. It is kind of Sir Dudley and Lady Burd to allow us our friends –’ here she turned with evident graciousness to the engineer ‘– but for us to go farther would, I feel, only be to impose on the Burds. Will Mr Dowson explain?’ she appealed to Harold. ‘More clearly? To his friend?’

  In a morning which had already grown merciless enough to allow no shadows, she had stood the solid Dowson, like a wall, between herself and the situation.

  Evelyn was smiling. Everyone was smiling. Harold was making noises as though somebody had punched him in the ribs. The Greek was smiling most of all. He was a small and, in every way, insignificant man. His necktie, which he had been in the habit of knotting always lower, and tried to restore for the occasion to even lengths, was looking chewed and stringy.

  Evelyn turned away after that, but did just glance back once. Dowson had retreated along the drive with his friend, to where the hedge of blue plumbago was broken by the gateway. They were standing together in the white dust. Dowson’s hand was on the Greek’s shoulder.

  ‘We’ve behaved rottenly,’ Harold was saying. ‘I expect we’ve hurt both of them.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘People are thicker-skinned than you think.’

  All the same, she was determined to be particularly nice to the Dowson man during his few days in the Delta.

  She began already on the way. As Harold drove she would turn round towards the engineer, who was sitting on the edge of the rear seat, his hands firmly grasping the back of the one in front of him. It made them an intimate trio. Such a very simple man could only, she was certain, have forgiven her. Even so, she felt her face flicker with light and wind, also possibly with remembrance of a recent, if unimportant, ‘scene’.

  However she might be looking in the Egyptian glare, at least she would not see, nor, probably, would Dowson. Though she half-closed her eyes – a trick learnt from the mirror – whenever she turned to address their guest. Confidence seduced her mouth, the face she turned full on at him.

  She was making that kind of conversation for visitors passing through: the water buffaloes and ibises, together with some of the cotton jargon and statistics picked up from listening interminably to experts.

  When suddenly she was forced to remark, ‘I do hope your friend wasn’t hurt by the stupid mistake Harold – we, all of us, made.’

  Dowson smiled his sandy smile.

  ‘I don’t think he’s one who ever expects too much.’

  Evelyn did not expect that.

  ‘I’ve always been told the Greeks, the modern Greeks, that is, not the real ones,’ she said, ‘are practically orientals.’

  ‘Protosingelopoulos is real enough,’ Dowson answered.

  The windborne sun had set fire to his suety face.

  ‘You should know,’ said Evelyn. ‘He’s your friend. Have you known him long?’

  ‘Three and – yes, half a day.’

  ‘Oh, but really – are you always so sure?’

  Dowson answered, ‘Yes.’

  She realized then that his sitting forward on the edge of the seat and clutching the back of theirs had not been to bring them all more closely together, but to help him coil more tightly inside his secretive mind. How repulsive the backs of his fingers were, with their tufts of reddish-blond hair. She had turned after that and watched the long, straight, boring road.

  Dowson, surprisingly, seemed at home in the Burds’ house. When he was not listening to, or out driving with Harold, the thick-walled rooms provided him with a silence the equivalent of his own; their rough proportions might have been designed to contain his crude form. As he strolled about the grounds, the landscape was perhaps more indifferent to his presence, though he appeared unaware of it, planting his heels firmly as he walked, in no particular direction but the one in which his thoughts were leading him.

  She had to admit she was put out by what Dowson was becoming, so she looked for any weakness which might compensate for his rejecting the mould she had decided must be his. As in the case of so many visitors passing through from other climates, his clothes were quite unsuitable. When Dowson abandoned his blue serge coat, and went walking in his wrong shirt and serge trousers, she was more than amused: she was glad to see him look so out of place, hence vulnerable.

  Sometimes as he wove thumping through the mango grove, or past the beds of reedy carnations, he would be carrying a book under his arm. There were occasions when she came across him, a core in the shadow of one of the closely shuttered rooms, at least sitting with, if not actually reading, the open book.

  At last she reached the point where she couldn’t resist taking it from him. To satisfy her curiosity.

  ‘You’ll ruin your eyes,’ she said, not without gentleness, ‘reading in such a dim light.’

  It was a translation from the Greek, she discovered. Poems. By somebody called Cavafy.

  ‘Surely you’re not an intellectual!’ She smiled a healing smile.

  ‘Not exactly,’ Dowson said.

  ‘Harold has moments of fancying himself as an intellectual. Oh, I’m not trying to belittle him. He’s much cleverer than I. I’m only a scatter-brained woman.’

  She waited for him to handle that, but he didn’t.

  ‘What very difficult-looking, not to say peculiar, poems!’ She handed back something she would have to make up her mind about. ‘If you understand those, then it makes you most horribly intellectual, and I shall have to adopt a different attitude towards you.’

  Dowson sat rubbing his hands together as if working tobacco for a pipe. The head on the bull-shoulders was averted, so that she found herself looking at his clumsy profile. Though she had been wrong in her assessment of his character, it was gratifying to know that his physical coarseness could not dissolve, and that his shirt, in keeping, smelt slightly of sweat.

  ‘You don’t have to understand,’ she realized he was saying, ‘not everything, not every word. I don’t pretend to. It’s something the professor gave me,’ he added.

  ‘Which professor?’

  ‘Protosingelopoulos.’

  ‘That little man a professor? You amaze me! Though I wonder why. When life is all surprises.’

  Their talk was almost making her feel intellectual herself. But Dowson didn’t seem aware of it, or was sensitive only to his own problems and reactions.

  ‘Aren’t I causing you trouble by being here?’ he suddenly asked.

  ‘Whatever put that into your head? I’m only afraid you may be bored. I think I know what forced unemployment must feel like to an active man. At least today Harold will be driving over to Mansoura, to look at a crop he’s interested in. You’ll be able to go with him. And talk about all the things you have in common.’

  ‘What are those?’ he asked unexpectedly, and tried to make it sound less strange by laughing.

  She wondered whether he was cunning.

  ‘If I knew,’ she answered, ‘then you might trust me more.’

  Just then Harold flung open the door, and said, ‘That idiot of an Arab tells me only now that the pump stopped working yesterday, and we’re practically without w
ater. Instead of going to Mansoura I’ll have to drive over and fetch de Boisé. Do you want to come with me, Clem, on this errand, not that it’s an interesting one?

  ‘No, Harold,’ said Dowson. ‘I’ll see what can be done about the pump. It’s probably something just in my line. Then you can drive to Mansoura as arranged.’

  A practical man, he was again happy, she saw, at the prospect of making himself useful. She was only scornful of the ease with which he and Harold called each other by their Christian names. What should have strengthened seemed to make them weak.

  After Harold left, and Dowson had started tinkering with the pump, there was nothing to fill the morning but the steam which rose from the Delta. She sat down and again began looking through the book of poems, from which an occasional carved image formed glittering in her mind. First a word here and there, then whole phrases, breathed disconcertingly. Love was exchanged on terms she knew existed in theory, and which now in the half-light of poetry were too palpably fleshed, too suffocatingly scented. She remembered hearing of an English-woman raped by an Arab in Nouzha Gardens. Evelyn put the book down. There was no rape, she felt, which could not be avoided.

  But the perfume persisted, of overblown words, sweat, and the dark red roses growing out of Delta silt the other side of the shutters.

  In the course of the morning Dowson came and asked her for some rags. He looked so content and unselfconscious.

  ‘What a mess you’ve made of your shirt,’ she said, but completely detached.

  ‘I’ll give it a wash,’ he said, ‘afterwards.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ she said. ‘They will give it a wash.’

  As she went to rummage for a suitable rag, her self-possession sat most agreeably on her. She came back with an old silk slip of Lady Burd’s.

  ‘Isn’t it too good?’ he asked.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ she replied, and laughed. ‘Or if it is, it won’t be missed.’

  Not by Win. Who flew a hat from Paris for a wedding, and sent it back, and flew another.

  ‘How is the pump?’ she asked, deliberately impaling the word on her tongue.

  ‘We’ll fix it,’ he said earnestly.

  But she had not listened for his answer. She was fascinated by Win’s silk slip hanging from his bare arm, and the skin of his arms dribbled with black machine-oil and daubed with greyer grease.

  They met only briefly at lunch.

  When she lay down for her siesta she could hear the intermittent sound of metal, tinny in competition with the dead weight of heat. He had been ill; he might get a sunstroke, she thought, but you could not persuade a man against what he wanted. How glad she was she had married Harold, whose wanting had less conviction in it. She wondered how she had found Harold, and where in sleep she would find him again.

  For an instant she came across him or, no, Dowson, seated at a round, iron, slanted table. Dowson was stuffing his mouth with a mouse-trap variety of cheese. Why must you eat like that? she asked. Because, he mumbled through his bread, you are starving, aren’t you, Mrs Fazackerley? She resented hearing her name, as much as she disapproved of the steadily falling crumbs.

  On waking, she found that her right cheek had a crease in it. She was feeling irritable, but by the time she had bathed and powdered herself, she might have offered pity to anyone who asked for it. Old tangos persisted in her head, and the smell of a liner’s deck at night. It was only natural. Half the life of so many Australians was spent at sea, getting somewhere, she reflected.

  When she met Dowson she asked through her brightest lipstick, ‘Hasn’t my old Harold got back?’

  ‘No,’ said Dowson.

  He was looking a caricature of himself, in a fresh shirt, and those blue serge trousers which, apparently, were the only ones he had with him.

  ‘What a bore!’ she said. ‘The dinner will be awful. It would have been awful anyway.’

  After pouring his whisky she asked, ‘Are you glad to be an Australian?’

  ‘I’d stopped thinking about it.’

  ‘I’m glad I am,’ she said, whether he believed it or not.

  She was truly glad, though, for the reality of her healthy Australian girlhood. She was thankful for the apple she had bitten into, but thrown away extravagantly.

  ‘Do you think Harold could have had an accident?’ she asked.

  ‘No. Why?’ he said. ‘There are too many reasons why he shouldn’t have. People usually get back even when you’re expecting them not to.’

  It was the gin, she suspected, giving her morbid ideas. Although normally it was not the kind of thing she did, she had another one to quell them.

  ‘You don’t understand’, she said, ‘what Harold means to me. Although’, she said, ‘you can talk to him, or not talk, and arrive at something I can never get at.’

  Dowson looked puzzled and stupid.

  He said, ‘But, but?’

  She suggested they stroll a bit. It was healthier than sitting drinking and having morbid ideas about car accidents and marriage.

  ‘We didn’t mention marriage,’ said Dowson.

  He was that kind of man.

  Anyway, they began to tread the darkness down. Though the magic slide of the Delta had been withdrawn, the smell of it was there: exhausted clover and dung fires. When they told her it was dung, when she was newly arrived in Egypt, it had been one of the things to resent. Till by degrees it became a comfort of the nomadic existence, which was what the life of any foreigner in Egypt remained. Tonight there were also the stars, at which she used to look in the beginning, before she got into the habit of taking them for granted.

  ‘Didn’t we’, she continued, tripping over something in the darkness, ‘discuss marriage? I thought we were discussing it practically continuously.’

  She could not help limping at first from the momentary pain in her ankle, but he did not attempt to support her.

  ‘Not to my knowledge, Mrs Fazackerley,’ he said, ‘though I gather you’re pretty obsessed by it.’

  ‘Then you have never been married!’ She shot it out.

  ‘No,’ he agreed.

  She wondered whether the darkness would disguise the shape her mouth was taking.

  ‘They say that if a man isn’t married by the age of thirty, he’s either very selfish, or very immoral. I wonder which you are!’

  That at least convinced her she need not limp.

  ‘Married or single,’ Dowson said, ‘most men seem to be moderately selfish and moderately immoral.’

  ‘But you don’t want to see!’ she cried. ‘It’s the immoderate bachelors I’m talking about.’

  ‘I don’t see, Mrs Fazackerley,’ he said, ‘why it should interest you all that much. When you have what you want.’

  ‘Oh I know! I know!’

  Her face bumped against a mango in the dark. She was spattered with leaves and her own protests.

  ‘But we are talking, aren’t we,’ she persisted, ‘to keep our spirits up? And to get to know each other. Why don’t I know you?’

  ‘That I can’t answer,’ he said. ‘If we are meant to know a person, then we do.’

  In a glitter of starlight she saw a little of his face, and the expression had nothing for her. It was frightening.

  ‘You are a man who strikes me as never being frightened,’ she said. ‘That in itself is frightening to anyone who is frightened.’

  ‘What are you frightened of?’ he asked.

  ‘Almost everything. Living in this country.’ Her mind lurched. ‘English accents. Scorpions!’ She pounced on the scorpions. ‘Even now, after years in Egypt, I’m terrified I shall forget to think, and step into a shoe which has a scorpion inside.’

  And her hand, surprising to herself, seized his rough arm. It was as though she had never touched a man before, and the experience drew her towards him, closer still, to deeper experience of night and horror. Lurid and unconvincing in themselves, the scorpions had been necessary as a starting point. Just as Dowson’s coarse and clumsy bo
dy might prove the kind of debasement she would return to in sober moments with all the drunkenness of remorse.

  They had come out on the edge of the plantation, where a black water flowed through the greenish-silver light, and the raised Arab voices were splintering the cubes of village houses. Only Dowson remained solid.

  ‘Did you ever find one?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’ she spluttered.

  ‘A scorpion.’

  He laughed like a boy. With his free arm he was holding on to the trunk of a young mango tree.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But it isn’t any less frightening to expect.’

  Although in the several light-years of their journey she had flattened, plastered herself against him according to the instructions she had somehow learnt, they both remained curiously objectiveless. Dowson might have withdrawn from his solid body, except, she realized, he was very slightly trembling.

  ‘You expect death, don’t you?’ he was chattering, ‘without even putting on your shoe. But you stop thinking about it. You’d never get on with living.’

  ‘Oh yes, I’m silly, I know! It’s my fate always to be reminded of it!’

  She was retreating by shivers of self-mortification.

  ‘I know!’ She gulped repeatedly.

  She was standing crying beside him in the green Egyptian night. Now that her lust, it had not been lust, was no more than a tingling of coarse hair against her memory, she badly wanted him to believe in something more than her sterility.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ From a great distance she was listening to herself. ‘I’m upset. Our little boy. You know we lost our child.’

  ‘No!’ said Dowson with the full weight of his astonishment.

  He was looking at her too heavily, too.

  ‘Fell into one of the canals.’ She was whimpering helplessly by now. ‘You see, Mr Dowson? You will understand?’

  Still the desire spurted in her to embrace her child’s great stubbly head. Her lost child.

  ‘What age was the little boy?’