The Cockatoos

by Patrick White

  ‘Cheap sheets,’ she said bitterly. ‘When all the good Egyptian ones wear out we’ll have to decide which to sacrifice – our chests, or our feet.’

  Harold was escaping her. She turned her head.

  ‘Harold,’ she said, ‘I was dreaming about Nesta Pine. I suddenly remember.’

  Her voice filled the room with the hopelessness, the helplessness of honesty in darkness.

  ‘I thought I ought to tell you,’ she said.

  He was buzzing. His voice made an attempt, but remained disintegrated.

  ‘Do you think Nesta is a lesbian?’ she asked.

  Harold was bundling, scraping the sheet.

  ‘I don’t believe there’s any such thing. I don’t believe it’s possible,’ he said.

  He laughed. Evelyn did too.

  ‘They say there are ways and means.’ She yawned rather crooked. ‘I was only wondering,’ she managed between yawns. ‘All those women she lived with. Most of them pretty harmless. But Addie Woolcock – the Princess – she was taken to Europe so early. And moved in more unconventional circles. She had the body of a boy. I can remember she had on a dress. Hand-painted by a famous artist, they said. A Futurist, I believe he was called. He was a kind of Movement. Well, he had done a hunting scene on Addie’s dress. Some goddess or other. If you could fool yourself. They explained it to me. With Addie inside the dress. Like any common mannequin. She enjoyed that sort of thing. And took up with poor old boring Nesta. Who used to make the hotel reservations, and book the tours.’

  Evelyn yawned.

  ‘Of course it was only a matter of convenience. And even those who are successful cling to bits of the past.’

  The room had filled with thickest darkness. Evelyn Fazackerley would have liked to wash her hot hands. And anoint them with Dreaming Lotus. A nice drink of Alka-Seltzer.

  ‘Are you awake, Harold?’

  She slept.

  On mornings when she left him to buy their chops and look round David Jones, Harold Fazackerley used to go to the parks, until suspecting that the elderly men seated on benches presented the more negative aspect of retirement. He must get a job, at least a part-time job. Until he made up his mind – strange, when so many had depended so long on his immediate decisions – he sometimes tried spending the morning in the flat. He took down a book. Or he simply sat in the creaking silence of shoddy woodwork, in the suffocating silence of Evelyn’s blazing blue cushions.

  Above the blaze of sea Harold would distinguish Clem Dowson clambering animal-wise amongst the flat rock-plants and combed-out scrub. Or Clem, similarly silent and intent, in the bare room built of silence. There were definitely those who could make use of silence, just as there were those who knew how to use tools. Harold had never made anything with his hands, and silence only used him up.

  Half embarrassed he wondered whether Dowson believed in God. Probably didn’t need to. He, Harold, had never needed or, when he had begun faintly to need, was diffident about embarking on a relationship of such large demands.

  Instead he took down War and Peace, and although appalled by its length, was on several occasions about to return to its half-remembered riches. On the morning when he came closest, or at least had glanced through the list of characters involved, Evelyn burst in on him with that string bag which tried not to look like one.

  ‘You’ll never guess!’ Haste and excitement had turned her pale under her complexion. ‘I ran into Nesta – Pine – in the haberdashery at Jones’s. She’s living at – oh, some boarding house. She’s promised to look in. So, all that looks more or less pre-ordained!’

  Perhaps it was her happy choice of a word which gave her a look of triumph.

  ‘You don’t believe you’re going to foist that woman on poor Dowson, do you?’

  ‘Not really,’ Evelyn said, and laughed. ‘I’m not so presumptuous.’

  Out of the string bag she emptied the reel of silk which had been her morning’s mission, and went to put it away.

  On the afternoon Nesta looked in on them it was fortunate they weren’t away on one of their expeditions. Too vague, or too discreet, she had not been persuaded to choose a date. However, when she did appear, she came in almost with the air of being expected, and when she had arranged her parcels within sight, settled down as though the friendship had been a deeper and unbroken one.

  Nesta, stirring her tea, said to Evelyn in that dead quiet voice which some remote part of her released, ‘That day you lunched at Mrs Boothroyd’s there was quite a little scene after you left.’

  Nesta laughed to relive it in the depths of her inward-looking eyes.

  ‘When you had gone, she said, “Do you think she liked me?” She attached great importance to being liked.’

  ‘Isn’t that natural?’ Evelyn said. ‘To me it’s important. Though I don’t imagine many people do like me,’ she added expectantly.

  Nesta continued since she had begun.

  ‘I forget what I said to reassure her. In any case one never could. She started on the pork. You remember we had pork.’

  Evelyn did not remember.

  ‘Mrs Boothroyd said, “Anyway, your pork didn’t turn out too well. Your crackling. A cuirass! When it’s usually one of your star turns.”’

  Harold Fazackerley was about to yawn, but stopped himself, to be incensed.

  ‘Wonder you didn’t walk out on her.’

  ‘After all,’ said Evelyn, ‘it was you who were doing the favour.’

  The rather horrid little cakes in paper cups, all she had for Nesta Pine – it was Nesta’s fault – looked, she hoped, better than they were.

  ‘Oh, she needed me!’ Nesta protested. ‘And when you are needed.’

  Evelyn looked up as though she had found the scent again.

  Nesta was lighting a cigarette. They had forgotten about Nesta and the cigarettes. She had taken to a pair of tweezers in the days of their fashion, and had continued to smoke her cigarette with tweezers long after the fashion had passed. Evelyn remembered how strangers used to nudge one another as Nesta sat smoking in public places. Always oblivious of her silver tweezers. Now she was sitting, at a deliberate distance, the tweezers attached by their ring to an index finger, the cigarette slightly quivering, like a hawk on the falconer’s wrist. As Nesta, the mistress of her cigarette, sat fastidiously smoking. Quietly absorbed. Smoke flowing, wreathing, through every crevice, it seemed, of her large face, white against white, except where the fawn circles round the eyes broke or emphasized the scheme.

  Evelyn looked at Harold. She was so delighted with the apparition she had conjured up.

  ‘How wonderful to be needed,’ she said. ‘Not only by Mrs Boothroyd. By all of them.’

  Nesta looked as though Evelyn might have gone too far, but did not deny that ministering to the needs of others was her profession. She continued smoking. Only the cigarette in the grip of the little silver tweezers quivered more.

  ‘Even the Princess,’ Evelyn persisted.

  Nesta’s stomach rumbled from its distance.

  ‘Addie didn’t need anybody,’ she said. ‘But from time to time imagined she did.’

  Harold should have felt sorrier for this large woman, all in black, whose hips were filling the narrow scuttle of a creaking rosewood chair. But Nesta’s turnip flesh had not craved for sympathy.

  ‘To imagine you need somebody is surely the same thing as to need.’ The frills of the property cakes twitched as Evelyn manipulated them. ‘And Addie was so fond of you besides.’

  Then Nesta released her half-smoked cigarette from the silver tweezers. She got up. She was turning, searching for her only too obvious heap of parcels, presenting at moments the view of her broad black hips, at others her full white, goitrous throat. Evelyn could not remember ever having seen Nesta in black.

  ‘She was not fond.’ Nesta wrenched it out. ‘I irritated Addie. I maddened her.’

  Her throat was swallowing, her white cheeks were munching on the words, as she took up the parcels, and q
uickly bound them to her fingers with the string which cut.

  Harold did not want to look.

  Evelyn was made so nervous she laughed.

  ‘That too’, she giggled, ‘can be a kind of necessity. Perhaps Addie needed someone to irritate her.’

  Nesta was again composed. She stood smiling for the long comforter life had knitted, unevenly, but acceptably enough.

  ‘Next time you come,’ Evelyn said, ‘you must warn us, and we shall be better prepared.’

  She rubbed her cheek against Nesta’s for an instant, as though ratifying something secret.

  Evelyn was glowing, Harold saw, when they were alone.

  ‘Next time I won’t be caught,’ he said.

  Evelyn was laughing in little chugging bursts.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Harold dear. Dowson isn’t a rabbit. And you see what a victim poor Nesta’s always been.’

  ‘You wouldn’t do it!’

  ‘No! No! No!’ She threw back her head. ‘Hasn’t Dowson a will of his own? No man is compelled.’

  She was looking at her husband whom she needed as much as any of those women had needed Nesta Pine. She could feel herself perspiring round the eyes.

  ‘Not compelled,’ Harold said. ‘Compulsion is easier to resist.’

  Unlike smoke. Smoke would drift in, suffocatingly at times, where the windows stood innocently open.

  ‘You forget’, he said, ‘that Addie Woolcock, on at least two known occasions, slashed her own wrists.’

  ‘Addie – what?’ Evelyn was horrified; then she mumbled, ‘I did – I suppose – know. I’d forgotten.’

  To Evelyn Fazackerley, suicide, even of the half-hearted kind, was one of the great immoralities. Why, murder was more pardonable; murder showed guts.

  ‘But all this’, she said, ‘is beside the point and my few harmless words.’

  ‘All right, darling!’ he said, laughingly kissing her.

  She was reassured by his moustache.

  That night while cleaning her teeth she called across the expanse of their intimate flat, ‘I do remember about Addie – on one of the occasions. They said she did it with a little mother-o’-pearl penknife which had been a present from somebody. There was a picture of her in one of the papers, waving from the deck of a liner, leaving Southampton. There was a bandage round her wrist, under the bracelets. Nesta had come back. She was standing beside her.’

  Evelyn had cut some remarkably thin, for once remarkably professional, cucumber sandwiches. When not too wet, they tasted so cool and refined. There was also one of those old-fashioned tea-cakes, extravagant with melted butter, made by Evelyn, as well as a really expensive Viennese Torte, which she had brought in, and admitted to it. She couldn’t apologize enough for not having made the Torte.

  Evelyn did the talking. Harold looked for the most part coerced, and began at once to get indigestion from the cucumber. Dowson and Nesta Pine addressed their hosts from time to time, and once Miss Pine, through these intermediaries, her fellow guest.

  ‘Does Mr Dowson know,’ she asked, averting her face, lowering her beige eyelids, ‘does he know – living as he does in an exposed position – that geraniums stand up to wind better than pelargoniums?’

  Dowson moved, and moaned, it sounded – low, however.

  Nesta Pine blew the smoke through her nose.

  ‘Pelargoniums’, she said, ‘are far too brittle.’

  But Evelyn did not allow any more. Everyone should remain in character. She was doing her virtuoso stuff, and on such occasions Harold Fazackerley couldn’t help admiring his wife.

  ‘The little exquisite flowers of the Dolomites –’ they made her close her eyes as though in exquisite pain – ‘the year we went there on leave from Egypt! One felt frustrated, not being able to transplant such masses of vivid, but pure, colour. Fatal in Egypt. Sydney would be almost as bad. Almost all alpine flowers are scorched by the heat of Sydney.’ Acceptance of the fact made it appear more brutal. ‘Mr Dowson,’ she said, ‘I shan’t force, but suggest, another piece of this soggy tea-cake. Of course I’m not an expert cook.’ Here she glanced at Nesta. ‘But get away with it at times. And know what men like. Unless Harold is chivalrous. Or dishonest.’

  Dowson had dressed himself up in clothes which did not belong to his body, but which were obviously his best. He looked orange inside them, except for his eyes, which might have blazed if they hadn’t been so innocent.

  They were so intensely blue, it was this, probably, which prevented Nesta looking at them.

  She had been persuaded to take off her hat, and a vagary of smoke from her fastidiously held cigarette made the coils and mats of dark fern-root hair and the brooding, chamois-leather eyelids appear separated from the rest of her. Today she was dressed in grey. To Evelyn’s satisfaction. Grey was in keeping.

  But Harold would have felt uneasy even without cucumber. He wished he was alone, like Clem Dowson knew how to be.

  Dowson was sitting with his thick fingers stacked together, the orange tufts visible on the backs of them.

  Then Evelyn Fazackerley, drawing down her mouth, asked, ‘And what have you been doing with yourself lately, Mr Dowson?’

  Because she had felt the thread of continuity sagging.

  Dowson hoisted himself up and replied, ‘As a matter of fact, I’ve been making cumquat jam.’

  Suddenly Nesta Pine was writhing – yes, writhing – in Harold’s mother’s rosewood chair, which she had continued to favour although it was scarcely able to contain her.

  ‘Not cumquat?’ she rasped.

  Evelyn had forgotten Nesta’s eyes. They were topaz colour, glistening, even glittering.

  ‘I have had failures with cumquat,’ Nesta gasped.

  The Fazackerleys realized Nesta Pine and Clem Dowson were addressing each other directly, as well as publicly.

  ‘I almost always burn it,’ Nesta was confessing.

  ‘Not if you throw in three two-shilling pieces.’

  ‘Ah!’ She breathed out smoke. ‘If you can remember to do it. My Aunt Mildred Todhunter taught me the trick with the two-shilling pieces.’

  Then they sat looking at each other a while. When they realized they were being observed, they composed their clothes. Nesta’s cigarette-tweezers ejected the extinct butt. Dowson’s eyes dispensed with practically the entire room.

  The chill had come too suddenly into a hitherto humid day.

  Evelyn was saying, ‘Of all the things these Egyptian devils think of, the submerging of temples is the most difficult to accept.’

  Evelyn allowed several weeks to elapse before sitting down to a letter she had spent most of that time composing.

  It began:

  Dear Mr Dowson,

  To my mind, we who have reached a certain age are very dependent on our friends, and should foregather more frequently under the roof-tree …

  – she paused to admire it –

  … of one or another of us. Actually, I am writing to suggest you come here to a little informal lunch …

  – those she feared and admired would have written ‘luncheon’, but on giving it thought she rejected the word on psychological grounds –

  … if the prospect of deserting your beloved house and planned routine does not altogether bore you …

  ‘What are you doing, Evelyn?’ Harold asked.

  ‘Writing a letter.’

  He did not inquire further because he knew.

  Evelyn was disgusted on receiving no reply to her letter, while telling herself it was foolish to expect civilities from anyone so uncouth.

  When a note arrived:

  Dear Madam,

  I am writing for Mr Dowson who is sick. I go there Tuesdays for the ironing and he asked me to write the letter. He is real sick. It is his heart sort of. They say he will recover and he will, because he is not going not to. I am only writing because he asked me and you are a person he respect. But he does not want you or anyone else to come. It is a long way.

  Yours since
rely,

  E. PERRY (Mrs)

  Evelyn said, ‘Dowson is seriously ill. His heart.’

  ‘Poor old Clem,’ said Harold, working his knuckles. ‘We’d better go down to him.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘That kind of man, when sick, can’t bear people pouring in. But he’s got to eat. To live. Perhaps I could take him something.’

  They both saw him trussed on his sickbed in that house of the winds. So Harold agreed. Evelyn was, after all, the woman.

  She bought a boiler, and took the soup in a billy-can which slopped over on her blue skirt in the bus. It was in the best cause, she had to remind herself all the way down that road as her heels went over on the stones.

  The gangway through the wind, down the side of the cliff, over the passive succulents and nervous, wiry clumps of thyme, led her at last to a still house. In the kitchen she heard the drip of a tap, and regretted Harold’s absence. The egg-boiling invention stood out far too sculpturally.

  And Clem Dowson lying on his bed. He opened his eyes very briefly but distinctly under the orange brows.

  He said, ‘I didn’t expect anybody.’

  The wind off the sea howled amongst the mauve-fleshed rock-plants.

  Her hair no doubt was looking terrible.

  ‘But we can’t desert you. Look, I’ve brought you some good nourishing soup.’

  He did not look, however. He had resumed lying with his eyes closed, probably one of those men who sulk when they are ill, and must be wooed.

  ‘Would you like me to warm some up?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Well, then,’ her charity refusing to be extinguished, ‘I’ll put it in the refrigerator, and you can take some when you feel inclined.’

  She went back into the kitchen, which she knew well enough by now. It was the bedroom she longed to examine. On the first occasion its owner had not taken them there.

  The refrigerator was neither too well nor too poorly stocked. After pouring her soup into a bowl, Evelyn stood it amongst the usual necessities. There was a fish pudding, she noticed only then, of rather too professional a texture, delved into, as you might have expected, by a sick, clumsy man.