The Cockatoos

by Patrick White

It might have made her shriek with laughter if she herself hadn’t created the solemnity. The green light was glittering in Dowson’s earnest eyes.

  ‘Five,’ she calculated.

  But he did not notice it was dragged out of her, and for a moment she got possession of his blunt, sweating fingers, which she no longer very much wanted, of which, in fact, she had a horror, as of herself.

  ‘You must never –’ she was remembering how to give a command, ‘never bring this up with Harold, who was more upset than I can tell,’ she continued very rapidly. ‘We don’t talk about it ourselves.’

  Dowson the fish was still goggling, and she still dissolved in the misery of deceit.

  Shortly after, the headlights were approaching down the long straight road.

  ‘Sorry, Evelyn darling,’ Harold said, ‘there’s no excuse I can offer. I’m just late.’

  She couldn’t even feel badly used.

  ‘We were beginning to worry about you,’ said Dowson.

  ‘Why?’ asked Harold.

  Neither could answer.

  ‘No harm is done,’ said Evelyn. ‘Except in the kitchen. I can’t be responsible for the dinner.’

  Sweeping a spider out of her hair, she went into the house to restore her face.

  In the morning Harold came to her and said, ‘Dowson has decided to return to Alex. He wants to send for a car. But I told him I’d drive him over.’

  ‘Oh?’ she said. ‘How peculiar he is! When he still has several days to put in.’

  ‘Perhaps he wants to see something more of his friend before joining his ship at Port Said.’

  When she went out to the front, Dowson was trying to refasten one of the locks of his suitcase.

  ‘I’m so sorry you have to rush off,’ she began. ‘But I understand your wanting to see something of Professor Proto before you leave. I shall always feel he may have a grudge against me because it wasn’t possible to invite him too.’

  It was easier to sound sincere when obligations had been removed.

  Dowson could have been mystified by the obviously broken lock of his cheap suitcase. He continued fiddling with the rusty clasp.

  ‘Protosingelopoulos?’ he said. ‘I expect he’ll have left for Greece by this.’

  ‘But Harold said …’

  Harold was calling to the Arab to wipe the windscreen of the car. His back was turned. It was impossible to tell if he was aware of the snippet of conversation she was left holding with his friend. Harold was permanently preoccupied with the upkeep of cars. With cotton. Or, she admitted with a twinge, his wife.

  And Dowson, she realized, was not at all mystified. He was looking away to hide what he knew, and would go off in possession of her secret. Fortunately the man was too stupid or too honest to make use of it.

  ‘Goodbye, Mr Dowson,’ she said. ‘I hope you’ll soon feel perfectly strong.’

  He laughed oddly and, looking at his large feet, replied, ‘I never felt sick. Nothing you could put your finger on. Only they told me I was.’

  Then Harold was driving his friend or nuisance away. Dowson waved, or put up a blunt hand. Harold waved, and it was Harold on whom she focused, as he signalled that soon they would be uninterruptedly together. Sometimes she found herself wishing Harold might go down with a serious illness so that she could demonstrate a devotion which her surface concealed. She saw him lying in shaded light, in haggard, waxen profile, inside a mosquito net. While she drained the fever from him, into her own body.

  But it was she who suffered illnesses, unimportant, fretful ones. It was humiliating.

  At sixty Evelyn Fazackerley was tolerably preserved. Although she had looked skinny as a girl, by sixty her skinniness had become a figure, and she reinforced herself with hats. She was fortunate, the glass had told her, in having taste. Windows, the windows of buses, returned her conviction, as she allowed the motion of the bus to throw her lightly against her husband’s shoulder because, in his retirement, Harold was almost always at her side.

  Sometimes she wondered how much a man, a really masculine man like Harold, was aware of the part a woman’s softness played in his life. She wondered on the afternoon they were being carried back from that beach. She had on her coat with the smoky-fox collar, less fashionable than timeless, like something worn by the Queen Mother.

  ‘There’s the ironing,’ Harold was saying. ‘That’d be a bit of a problem. But you could pay a woman to do it. I expect that’s how old Clem gets round it. There’s still the shopping, though. I can’t stand the sight of a man with a string bag.’

  ‘You surprise me,’ Evelyn said, ‘taking an interest in a person so uninteresting as Mr Dowson.’

  ‘Clem interests me tremendously.’

  ‘There’s no accounting for tastes, I suppose. Those books you buy! I can’t remember the names in a Russian novel from one page to the next.’

  She laughed tolerantly, however. She often did the most boring things if Harold showed he wanted it.

  ‘That Dowson,’ she began afresh from behind half-closed eyes, ‘I remember seeing him with a book in his hands. But I wonder whether he can really read.’

  ‘Don’t expect he needs to.’

  ‘Oh, come, darling!’

  The light in which Harold saw his friend made her close her eyes completely.

  ‘Clem strikes me as being as self-contained as – as some object – take,’ he was straining at it awkwardly, ‘a chunk of glass.’

  Evelyn opened her eyes. Harold was positively sweating, as though from embarrassment.

  ‘But what was he?’ she asked. ‘A ship’s engineer! Who retired to an Australian beach. And what? And nothing!’

  ‘He probably hasn’t lived a life of any interest himself. But absorbs – and reflects – experience.’

  Harold was almost choking on his own words. In the end he took out his pipe.

  Evelyn felt most disturbed.

  ‘What was that illness he had?’ she asked. ‘When his ship dropped him off in Egypt.’

  ‘I believe it was a nervous breakdown.’

  Evelyn moistened her lips.

  ‘You didn’t tell me,’ she said.

  ‘Didn’t I? I don’t suppose I tell everything. Do you?’

  ‘I try to,’ she said.

  The bus was carrying them into the city. Now that they were looking at it again, each vaguely wondered whether they had chosen to live in it.

  ‘What I admire most in Dowson,’ Harold Fazackerly said abruptly, ‘is his ability to choose.’

  ‘You can’t say we don’t do practically everything we choose,’ Evelyn murmured, drowsy from the bus.

  But turned suddenly on her husband, and asked with the utmost earnestness, which was unusual for her, even when she felt earnest, ‘Harold, do you think Dowson is queer?’

  ‘What on earth makes you ask that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, shrugging. ‘The sea, they say, turns them queer.’

  ‘It wasn’t the Navy. On a liner the women don’t give them much opportunity.’

  ‘No!’

  She giggled. She liked the way he put things. How glad she was to be married to Harold, who seldom ignored the openings she offered for a slightly oblique exchange. He respected in her the subtlety which lots of men might have pinched out on recognizing.

  They were soon shut in the lift of the block in which they lived. Dust had settled on the branches of the iron roses, on the stems of originally gilded lilies, of the door which sometimes stuck. At different levels the same landing sank in striations of brown pine to meet the slowly rising lift. The Fazackerleys tried to count their lift among their blessings. But Evelyn always stood clear of its thicket of metal flowers, for fear of coming into contact with their slight fur, their greasy dew.

  Tonight on blundering into their practically functionless hall, she sighed and said, ‘There’s nothing like your own home, is there?’ without a qualm for the triteness of her own remark.

  At least it would be a relief to
relieve. Harold eased himself sideways into the lavatory’s narrow stall, and stood like a horse gone at the knees. From down the well the sounds of night began exploding in Hungarian. For Harold Fazackerley, emptying a full bladder, the iron veins on the neo-Tudor wall opposite became the arteries of life.

  ‘I expect even Mr Dowson feels attached’, Evelyn said, resuming, as she often did, a dialogue with which he failed to re-connect, ‘to that lonely little rickety house.’

  Evelyn his wife was doing something to her hair. She had already, it appeared, attended to that first necessity, her mouth. Her lips dripped with light and crimson. He couldn’t have done without Evelyn, of course. A vision of her death-mask on the last of the Egyptian pillow-slips made him switch on the radio.

  Actors were acting out a play to which neither of them listened; because after Evelyn had brought the sherry, which neither of them really cared for, she turned towards him, flickering her eyelids, and began, ‘I’ve had a brainwave – whatever you may think of it.’

  ‘Let’s have it, then,’ he said, knocking back the Amontillado Dry.

  Evelyn at first continued flickering her eyelids.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t want to meddle. But I suddenly thought of Nesta Pine – well, in connection with – now don’t laugh – the Dowson man.’

  Then Evelyn did exactly what she had told him not to: she tilted back her head and laughed, twiddling her surviving strand of pearls.

  ‘Nesta Pine? Good God! Whatever made you? Nesta Pine!’

  He could not join in Evelyn’s laughter.

  ‘There!’ she said complacently. ‘I knew you’d find it most peculiar, but I’m prepared to persuade you it makes sense.’

  She sat down, exposing those parts of her which had always been much too thin, but he loved her. Only Harold knew how Evelyn had envied Win Burd her legs.

  ‘Surely Nesta’, Evelyn was arguing, ‘deserves in the end a few of the good things of life?’

  ‘But in your opinion Clem Dowson is far from being a good thing.’

  ‘Oh, my opinion!’ She lowered her eyes. ‘What do you care about my opinion?’

  He was by now too interested to contradict.

  ‘Nesta’s too quiet,’ he said.

  ‘Isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Although the situation was grave she did not seem to notice it. Nor would he have expected her to. It was his concern. He had observed Clem very closely, right down to that ingrown hair which, Matron said, had caused the boil. Matron gave the boil her Aberdonian squeeze, and Clem stood it. But could he stand the kindliest, the cotton-wooliest intentions of Nesta Pine?

  ‘She’s a jolly good cook,’ Evelyn said.

  If he allowed her to continue, it was because he had dropped into the habit, from their being together so long. They still slept together, perhaps once a fortnight. He did love her.

  ‘I know,’ Evelyn said, ‘because I had lunch with them once when she was with Mrs Boothroyd.’

  ‘I wonder Nesta put up with that old bitch.’

  ‘I don’t know that the old thing was such a bitch,’ said Evelyn. ‘Nesta can be trying too, in her own way. But it would be different with a man. Anyhow, I was considering her cooking. And that is most important to an elderly man. A nice cook. The digestion is so important.’

  ‘Mm,’ said Harold.

  ‘Her mother trained her,’ Evelyn said. ‘I do feel sorry for Nesta. Once upon a time there was a place for a well-trained, practical, unmarried woman of good family and no income. Today there’s simply no call for them – like parlour-maids.’

  ‘She did pretty well with the Princess. No cooking in those days.’

  Evelyn kicked up her feet and giggled.

  ‘She had it good with the Princess!’

  Evelyn loved it. They had been through it all before. After the second sherry Harold, too, quite enjoyed it.

  ‘Lived on the fat of the land,’ Evelyn said. ‘Many lands!’

  She nursed her refilled glass.

  ‘And not a sign of it,’ she sighed.

  ‘You wouldn’t expect it,’ said Harold. ‘Half those Australian women come back looking as though they hadn’t been farther than Leura.’

  Evelyn smiled and nodded her head.

  ‘They were related, weren’t they?’ Harold asked. ‘Nesta and the Princess?’

  ‘What?’ Evelyn exploded. ‘But I told you, Harold, I told you!’

  It was one of those games they played.

  ‘Nesta Pine and Addie Woolcock were sort of cousins. On the maternal side. Melbourne. Old Mother Woolcock was most determined. Nobody was exactly surprised when Fernandini Lungo jumped at Addie their first season in Europe. A horrid little man, I believe, but he left her alone. Addie was happy with the title, and the Prince with her sausages.’

  ‘I remember about the sausages.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Very popular at one time. There was one variety had bits of tomato mixed with the beef. Horrid,’ Evelyn said.

  The Fazackerleys sipped their sherry and forgot the spirits it had replaced. They were themselves the spirits of a certain age.

  ‘I should go and get dinner,’ Evelyn sighed.

  Harold didn’t encourage her. Experience had taught him to lose interest in food. Besides, he was filled with his vision of Nesta Pine: a large, white, cloudy woman, usually carrying parcels. The parcels hung from her fingers like clusters of brown, bursting fruit. People allowed her to shop for them.

  Evelyn was growing dreamier.

  ‘I can see her knitting,’ she would have rocked if the chair had allowed it, ‘in that funny room above the sea. Such a comfort. Nesta was always a great knitter. She took to it as far back as school. None of the girls at Mount Palmerston liked her much. And I suppose the knitting was some kind of compensation. She used to offer to teach us stitches. It didn’t appeal to us at all. Nasty little things we were!’

  ‘I thought you liked Nesta.’

  ‘Oh, but I do! You get to like people like Nesta. Life wouldn’t be livable unless.’

  ‘I shan’t collaborate in any way.’ Harold might have been rejecting a knife.

  ‘I shan’t ask you to,’ said Evelyn. ‘I don’t propose to do an awful lot myself. You don’t have to push men and women. Only assist nature a little. See they drift together. Mingle.’

  She made it look like mist, and the remorselessly unconscious grey fingered coldly at Harold’s joints.

  While Evelyn sat forward, holding the points of her elbows. Smiling. A purposeful future made the lines in her face more distinct.

  ‘Now I must really see about getting our dinner,’ she said rather breathlessly.

  And went out into the kitchen to open a tin of salmon.

  It was the name, obviously, which helped Evelyn see Nesta sitting at the foot of one of the enormous pine trees which grew on the windy side of Mount Palmerston, or at least the trees had appeared enormous to the girls playing on the slippery needles underfoot. The scent, the sound of pine trees haunted Evelyn terribly as soon as she became involved again. She was haunted, too, by Nesta. Curiously, though, Nesta seated beneath the tree was not the older girl at school, but the large-breasted woman she had finally become, almost always in grey, straight, knitted dresses. Or twin-sets, with plaid skirts in other greys. Though time had had its way with her face, her hair had remained aggressively black without assistance from the bottle. Beneath the heavily-spiked branches her hair still glowed with startling lights, while the shade accoutred her thickening body with the greyish-brown armour of bark. She sat knitting, her smile filtering through her thoughts rather than directed outward at those who might be approaching.

  But on one occasion Nesta was wearing, in Evelyn’s mind, her older-girl’s hair and body. The other children had drifted away. The long dark fall of hair was gathered at the back of Nesta’s head by a thin brown-velvet ribbon. Or was it a snood? Evelyn couldn’t quite see. It might have been that she was concentrating on the attitude: of Nesta holdi
ng the knitting-needles as though preparing for a rite.

  ‘Why are you always knitting?’ Evelyn asked.

  Nesta did not seem to hear, though her broad face was beginning to offer itself from behind the web of her private smile. Evelyn noticed the fawn circles, of flannel, or chamois leather, in the whiter face. As Nesta suddenly leaned forward.

  ‘I’ve only just started,’ she said, fluffing out the knitted frill. ‘I haven’t decided. It could be for you, Evie.’

  She applied the frill to Evelyn’s bare, prickling neck.

  ‘I’m not called “Evie”,’ Evelyn protested.

  She was both fascinated and disgusted to see that Nesta’s breasts were already almost fully formed. Like milk buns.

  So she ran away. Through the scent of resin and the sound of pines. Her own footsteps chasing her over the slippery needles.

  ‘Hold hard!’ Harold was protesting from the other bed. ‘You’re shaking the whole room!’

  ‘Ohhh,’ she replied. ‘I must have been dreaming.’

  ‘Whatever about?’ Harold asked from the dry ground of wakefulness.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said pitifully. ‘Or was it about the Burds and their horrible service station?’

  Her neck felt stiff. After a certain age there was really little more rest in sleep than in waking. The great difference, or doubtful advantage, was that in sleep you were planned for, in life you planned.

  Whether she had dreamed about the Burds or not, and she was inclined to think she hadn’t, Evelyn returned to a plan she was forming: for sending Win the blue dress she was about to discard. After all, it was a nice dress, certainly nothing in gold lamé, but so much wear left in it. Evelyn hadn’t told Harold yet. She proposed to enjoy, to embroider her plan a little longer. Over and over again she visualized Win receiving the parcel, fiddling with the knots on a damp-cold morning in Surrey. She saw Win’s face, as she remembered it: that of a shrewd goat nibbling at gossip, jabbing seldom, but with skill. Win would be old by now, though. A Nellie Wallace smelling of petrol.

  Evelyn shivered on her corrugated bed.

  ‘They’re too short,’ she grumbled, pulling the sheet up.

  ‘Who?’

  Harold could sound so dry at night, and distant, hinting at other allegiances joined in sleep. In the days when they had shared a bed his toe-nails used to make a dry, scraping, almost a tearing sound, as he turned.