‘That looks a jolly appetizing fish pudding,’ she said on returning with her brightness to the bedroom. ‘It looks so light. And such a creamy sauce. I expect your Mrs Perry, who wrote to us, made you that, didn’t she?’
Dowson blew down his nose.
‘Never cooked anything eatable in her life. Judging by what she brings me to try.’
He spoke with such vehemence Evelyn found it hard to believe he was seriously ill.
‘No,’ he said, and hesitated. ‘Miss Pine brought the pudding,’ he said.
‘Ohhh?’
She was quite put out. But as she had started the thing, it was surely logical to accept it.
‘I am so glad you have found something in common,’ she said, to follow through. ‘Food, anyway. Most important. Nesta’, she said, ‘is such an excellent person. So reliable.’
As she sat on her upright, hospital-visitor’s chair, intent on her wedding and engagement rings, she heard herself sound as though recommending a brand of goods from a store.
‘Miss Pine’s all right,’ said Dowson, his eyes still closed, his nose swivelling to elude a non-existent fly.
Evelyn Fazackerley could imagine Nesta’s visit. She could hear their joint silence. Yet, why should it not seem natural? Mushrooms congregate. And spawn together. Horrid expression.
In her unbalance and distaste she glanced round the room, which she had looked forward to exploring before this unpleasant discovery. Pathetic the inner rooms of solitary males. Chaster even than the cupboards of elderly virgin women. The darning egg, naked today. An almost used-up carpenter’s pencil. Saved string, wound in impeccable hanks. A kerosene lamp, with opalescent shade, still in use. The Conquest of Peru. A pair of mittens which on winter mornings by the sea would half cover the raw, the knotty hands of Dowson.
The name, she saw, could have been carved into him by a knife.
Then he opened his eyes, and looked at her, and said, ‘Miss Pine is a good sort.’
Evelyn Fazackerley sat moistening her lips. She had intended to offer to take on the mending. Instead she coughed and looked at her watch.
‘I mustn’t forget my bus.’
On the way back through the kitchen to collect her billy she reopened the refrigerator door, and gouged out with her index finger a little of Nesta’s fish pudding. It tasted most delicate, flavoured with something she couldn’t identify.
She went back into the bedroom and took him by that meaty hand.
‘Oh, Clem dear,’ she had never called him by his first name before, ‘Harold and I would do anything for you – anything – for the sake of old times – if only you would tell us.’
Dowson half-smiled – he might have been falling asleep – turning his face to the wall, which had been washed a flat white.
She left him then, with the suspicion that she was the innocent one. As she stumbled back along the unmade road the forms of the yellow furniture remained solidly with her, together with the knowledge that on neither occasion had she managed to unlock anything in that ostensibly open house, and that she had never experienced the slightest response from his hand.
Evelyn put off telling Harold about Nesta Pine’s visit to Dowson, and soon it was rather too late to tell. She waited instead for Nesta to give some shape to her intentions; the rules of friendship demanded it. But Nesta did not come. She has used us just enough, Evelyn began to see, and now that she has met this man she is off to the races on the sly. Well, if she wished to humiliate herself. The mystery of the woman’s face, behind the smoke, the uneven powder, and web of sentimental loyalties, or of the precociously mature girl in the ugly Mount Palmerston tunic, knitting up wool at the foot of the armoured tree, was a mystery no longer: it was the expression of congenital cunning.
On an incongruous occasion – but the whole business was incongruous – Evelyn Fazackerley allowed herself a vision of the elderly Nesta in one of the more convulsive attitudes of love: a great jack-knife of sprung flesh, the saucered rump, breasts heaving and plopping like a pot of porridge come to the boil.
‘How revolting!’ Evelyn said out loud.
And her breath snapped back elastically.
Harold Fazackerley turned from the urgent operations of a gang of men tunnelling into a mountain-side, towards the state of rapt unreality his wife had trailed with her into the open, out of their neo-Tudor cocoon. For the Fazackerleys were off on one of their ‘jaunts’, as Evelyn used to refer to them. They were doing the Snowy Scheme by coach.
‘What is revolting?’ Harold shouted.
Competing against a passage for men’s raised voices and splitting rock, he sounded angrier than normally.
‘I forgot to tell you,’ Evelyn shouted back, at the same time looking over her shoulder to see whether she could trust the landscape, ‘the day I went down to Dowson, I found that Nesta had taken him a fish – a fish pudding!’
She had eaten off her lipstick, and her lips looked pale. For an isolated moment Harold Fazackerley would have liked not to have been married to his wife.
‘I often wonder, Evelyn,’ he continued shouting, his voice as wobbly as an old man’s, ‘how you ever experience anything fresh for remembering what has happened already.’
But the drills, he realized, had fallen silent, and he regretted his voice, his crankiness.
That night at the hotel he ordered a bottle of claret to accompany their not-so-mixed-grill. To make a little occasion.
‘Well, it isn’t much chop, is it?’ he apologized. ‘None of it!’
‘What did you expect?’
She smiled at him out of the worldliness which had returned to her with a change of dress. Glancing round the room at the other couples, thin and fat, moist and dry, their fellow-passengers from the coach, she tried to create the impression that she and Harold at their own little table – she always insisted on their own table – were brilliant lovers who had sailed the Nile.
When he shattered her attempt.
‘That fish pudding of Nesta’s,’ he said, ‘I wonder if it was any good.’
Her mouth, blossoming again with the glamour of their past, wilted abruptly on her face.
Then she said, ‘Actually, I did taste it, and have to admit, it wasn’t at all bad.’
At least it cracked the ice which had frozen her relationship with Nesta Pine and Clem Dowson. She began to refer to them again. Both during what she remembered as ‘that ghastly trip’, and after, Evelyn found she was able to make jokes at her own expense, especially with the assistance of the fish pudding, the soft white ludicrous substance of which clogged Nesta’s cunning and diminished its power.
With melancholy reserve Harold talked about going down to see ‘poor old Clem’. Evelyn said yes they must, both of them, it was their duty, however touchy and impatient his illness might have made him. But they were overcome by a paralysis. They would go when it was cooler, warmer, or when the patient would be sufficiently recovered to enjoy their visit. They did not go. That woman, that Mrs Perry, Evelyn said, no doubt came in to do for him, and sounded an excellent person.
Their debate might have continued if Harold hadn’t received Clem’s letter:
Dear Harold,
This is to let you know Nesta Pine and I decided to make a go of it. We were married last month. We came straight home, because we both felt, at our age, it would have looked foolish to trip off somewhere on a honeymoon. Our habits have formed, I shan’t go as far as to say ‘set’! Neither of us expects too much.
You know I have never been a great hand at expressing myself, Harold, but can’t let this opportunity pass without wondering how different it might have been if we had met more often – or if we hadn’t met in the beginning. I suppose I have always been most influenced by what can never be contained. The sea, for instance. As for the human relationships of any importance, what is left of them after they have been sieved through words?
Funny sort of letter, I can hear you say! But you can forget it, and next time we meet, nothing will
be changed.
Miss Pine – he had crossed it out – Nesta sends her regards to your wife, for whom she seems to have a deep affection.
If the Fazackerleys weren’t stunned, at least their ears rang.
‘How grotesque!’ said Evelyn.
She kept returning to the letter, as though in search of a window through which she might catch sight of recognizable attitudes. It was grotesque. If she did not say ‘obscene’, that would have been going too far. When she herself was, however innocently, involved. For Evelyn Fazackerley affection meant something, not exactly material, but demonstrable. And Nesta Pine, of cloudy features and brooding breasts, had begun to demonstrate. She was reaching out a shade farther, from under the giant trees, offering the frill of grey knitting. Evelyn wondered, poundingly, how she felt about it. But she would not allow herself for long, or not after her skin began to prickle. As in childhood she was running away, over the slippery needles, back into the living room.
‘I don’t know what they “expect”,’ she said, hitting the letter and laughing hoarsely. ‘Only they may find’, she added hopefully, ‘that it is more than they imagined. Most people do.’
But Harold Fazackerley had become a sieve through which the words ran like water, and experience, or more specifically, that which has not been experienced. The little boy crying in the fetor of disinfected latrines. What’s up, young Fazack? The square, warty hand gently thumping his sorrows. Nothing. Then the exquisite bliss even of maggots seething through the dusk and urine-sodden sawdust. The wind at sea, scouring the skin, sweeping out all but the farthest corners of the mind. The burning-glass of a blue eye. The stationary question-mark of a white ibis amongst the papyrus. Dreams and prophecies beating on jerry-built pitch-pine doors.
But of course the implications of the letter with which he was vibrating as he sat in his appointed box were also the tremblings, the thunderings of age.
They were all, not what you would call old, but elderly, when, not so very long afterwards, the Fazackerleys were summoned to the house on the cliff. (They couldn’t very well avoid it, as Evelyn put it.) They were all either scraggy or bulging. Clothes of a past elegance and cut hung too loosely on the scraggy ones. Whereas Clem, as well as Nesta Dowson (yes, Dowson) appeared stuffed into what should have been the appropriate loose, practical garments.
The Dowsons were terribly alike, and unlike, Evelyn saw.
What Harold saw he wasn’t sure, beyond the sea still blazing through the windows. The wind blowing, of course. Through the windows of the Dowsons’ house the wind was always visible.
The Fazackerleys had been invited to a cup of tea.
‘I must say, Harold, it’s pretty mean of Nesta, considering she’s such a dab at cooking.’
‘Perhaps it didn’t suit Clem. Nesta’s not the only one – not now – to be considered.’
‘Oh, Clem!’ Evelyn’s head might have been mounted on ballbearings. ‘She’s a fool if she doesn’t make a stand.’
The Fazackerleys had taken them a plated toast-rack, though Evelyn was afraid it might shame them to receive a present after their neglect and deceit.
Anyway, there they all were, cups precariously positioned, bread-and-butter plates uncomfortably balanced. Evelyn noticed the crockery was no longer Clem’s common white, but a service Nesta had most probably inherited from one of the old ladies, or her mother.
The light touched the rather delicate cups and turned them into transparent eggshells from which the life was still only half-blown.
Harold’s cup was rattling in its saucer. The wind was rattling the loose-fitting windows.
‘Oh, what a lovely little brooch!’ Evelyn’s voice could not resist pouncing.
For Nesta had pinned a little bunch of mosaic flowers, most vivid on its black marble background, against the grey jumper of her twin-set, below the thick white goitre of her throat. Certainly not a wedding present. Evelyn could not visualize that man’s meaty hands offering anything Italianate.
‘Is it something the Princess – did she leave it to you?’ she asked.
‘Oh, no!’ Nesta, lowering those beige eyelids, sounded shocked. ‘Addie had nothing Italian to leave. She only wore the jewels. They belonged to the Fernandini Lungos. Besides,’ she said, softening the rest of her reply, ‘this little brooch is of no importance. Something I picked up. A souvenir shop. On the Ponte Vecchio.’
Her hands were suddenly too full of china.
‘But it is pretty,’ she apologized.
‘Lovely,’ Evelyn emphasized, though there was no cause for further interest.
There was no reason why she should feel screwed-up inside. The incident was far too trivial. Nesta herself had admitted to the ordinariness of her brooch while correcting a mistake anybody might have made. But Evelyn could have screamed, for her gaffe, for the Dowsons – no, the four of them.
Nesta broke one of the inherited cups. Distress froze her above it a fraction too long, in an attitude of knock-knees. She was wearing grey ribbed stockings, no doubt knitted by herself. Her legs, below the shaggy skirt, looked like those of a born misfit on the hockey field.
‘That was very clumsy of you,’ Dowson complained. (During the whole afternoon he did not once call her by name.)
‘But you know I am clumsy,’ she said – well, clumsily.
As he got down on his knees, on the boards, he was behaving as though the cup had been his, not his wife’s. Watching the hands deal with the fragments, Harold was again reminded of the maggie’s egg Clem had blown for him when they were boys.
‘Don’t forget – in the bin for the dump,’ Dowson warned. ‘We have three bins,’ he was explaining to guests, ‘one for the dump, one for the compost, and a third for the incinerator.’
Then they were silent for a little, except for the slither and chatter of the remains of Nesta’s cup, as she swept them into, presumably, the right bin.
That afternoon Nesta made no attempt to smoke. She brought out her knitting instead, and as she coaxed the grey, or faintly sage, feelers of wool, it provided something of the same effect.
Dowson sat frowning, listening perhaps to the sound of the needles. They were both listening
Evelyn felt herself drowning in a situation, the shores of which were concealed from her.
Battered by her ear-rings, she turned towards the view, and began in her high, light, deliberately superficial voice, ‘How perfectly marvellous the sunsets must look from up here. Out to sea.’
Dowson cleared his throat.
‘The sun sets in the west, the other side of the ridge.’
Nesta was smiling rather painfully at her knitting.
‘We watch the sunrise,’ she said, ‘most mornings. That is wonderful.’
‘You must be early risers!’ Evelyn gobbled her words, turning annoyance with herself into a comic disapproval of others.
‘Oh, yes. We are up early,’ said Nesta, with a proud inclination of the head. ‘Both of us.’
Dowson got up. He moved away from his wife and stood by the window looking out. The sun had already abandoned the sea for a world the other side of the ridge, leaving a distillation of perfectly white light on the corrugated water.
The Fazackerleys were left to listen to Nesta’s knitting-needles, the sound of which she accompanied with her head and a just visible motion of her pale lips. For Evelyn, who had always hated, not to say feared, the silences in empty rooms, the sound of the bone kneedles was another kind of silence, and she began to gather herself and Harold.
They looked back. It was extraordinary to see the Dowsons standing together, at the gate below road level, in the drained evening light.
Harold and Evelyn did not speak on the way home, blaming it on the sea air.
Evelyn should have written a letter of thanks on the thick white notepaper which was one of her extravagances. She was expert at such letters, dashing them off in a gallant hand. But this time she hesitated. It was the arthritis in her thumb.
Although s
he had never received more than one or two letters from Nesta, she recognized this one immediately it came, and saved it up till Harold should return. Then when he did, she thought better of it, and kept the letter until she was again alone.
Dear Evelyn [Evelyn herself would have written Dearest]
I don’t know why I am writing except to say, how fond I am of you. Clem is fond of you, I believe, but would never admit it. Neither of us says much, which makes our relationship a strange one: I have lived with peacocks all my life!
Most people do not know the peacock also redeems. I began to realize when we visited that church above Salonika – or convent, was it? – so deserted we could not decide – when the evening was suddenly filled with silent peacocks – never before had I seen them in the air – then settling to roost, their tails turned to branches of cedar.
Clem, I think, does not believe in redemption because he has no need of it. His eyes are perfectly clear. You couldn’t flaw them in competition with a crystal. Though he and I are in so many ways the same, there we differ.
Well, my poor Evelyn, you did not see the sunset! Let me tell you it mostly shrieks with the throats of peacocks – though sometimes it will open its veins, offering its blood from love rather than charity.
NESTA PINE
The signature alone was a hammer blow to Evelyn Fazackerley. She did not know what to do with Nesta’s letter. If there had been an open fire she could have reduced the thing immediately. In the absence of one, she put the letter in a box, and there it burned, but continued burning.
Evelyn had never been so frightened. The dreadful part was: she would never be able to tell Harold; she had never told him anything, nothing of importance. If it had been possible to ring the police, or better still, the fire brigade, they might have carried her down out of her panic. But it was not possible, in spite of the telephone book, and the numbers she had drawn circles round. Instead of the clangour of approaching engines, what she had to listen to was the frightened clapper of her dry heart.
Harold came in only to say, ‘See somebody about my back. At our age I suppose we must expect a certain number of aches.’
The Cockatoos Page 6