The Cockatoos

by Patrick White

  He sat pinching up the skin on the backs of his hands.

  ‘Although I’ve rung the last three mornings,’ Evelyn said, looking at the ridges of his blue skin, ‘the Gas Company doesn’t seem to realize it is under obligation.’

  She continued watching the hands with which she had been familiar.

  ‘Harold? It’s the front left burner. If only you were handier.’

  Harold said – at times he sounded like leather, ‘Ought to send for old Clem Dowson. Clem could fix it.’

  She shied away from what was less easy to avoid on a morning in one of the canyons progress had ground into their city. She would not be allowed, it seemed, to sidestep the Dowsons. Though it was only Clem present in the flesh. Under his coat he was wearing one of those tweed waistcoats she had not noticed for years. At least it gave her a certain advantage. And the face. Something had been subtracted from it.

  ‘You’re the last person, Clem, I’d imagine meeting in the city,’ Evelyn said in the rakish voice she put on for masculine but harmless men.

  He mumbled about his solicitor. Or was it Nesta’s solicitor?

  ‘I must tell you,’ she said, ‘I’m so happy to know Nesta is in your hands.’ She looked away from them at once, however, the red fingers plaited helplessly against the tweed waistcoat. ‘Poor Nesta has made so many homes for others, to say nothing of the suitcase life she led round Europe with Addie Woolcock, it’s a joy to see her make a home of her own.’

  It was a neat, even a pretty speech, and Evelyn felt she could be proud of it.

  ‘She didn’t make it. The home was there already,’ said Dowson.

  ‘But a woman adds those little touches.’

  A wind, not the one which rocked the house on the cliff, had sprung up along the concrete canyon, and was creaking between them.

  ‘She was not that kind of woman,’ he said. ‘No frills. Just as I’m not the kind of man who enjoys a fuss.’

  ‘It has turned out perfectly! I’m so relieved.’ Evelyn was glad to be sincere.

  Till realizing Dowson had related Nesta to the past. She got the gooseflesh then.

  Dowson’s lips seemed to reach out; the tendons were stretched like wire in the contraption of his neck. He was like, she saw, one of his own inventions, or a piece of that disturbing modern sculpture. A piece which moved, without escaping by its own motion.

  ‘Nesta is ill,’ he was saying.

  His lips still reaching for words under the bristly orange moustache gave the whole situation a permanent look.

  She was the one who must make an attempt.

  ‘There is so much sickness about,’ she agreed. ‘The virus ’flu. What did we suffer from, I sometimes wonder, before they discovered the viruses? The wind’, she said, casting down her eyes, ‘is so treacherous at this time of year to anybody in any way bronchial.’

  She couldn’t remember whether Nesta was. But she gave a cough for all those who were bronchially afflicted. While sympathizing, she was determined to keep her sympathy general. She wouldn’t look at Dowson’s fixed, watery eye.

  ‘What I would like you to understand –’ he was begging for something, ‘Nesta herself asked to go in. For treatment. The treatment alone must be hellish. I would never have put her there – not otherwise – though we did have the argument on the way to the pit – she’d put the pieces in the wrong bin. That, I suppose, was the last touch. For both of us. Both too conscientious. And quiet. Two silences, you know, can cut each other in the end.’

  Again she was staring at his hands. He was not peacock enough to have thought of slashing his wrists. He was suffering instead in some more corrosive, subterranean way.

  ‘I am so – so – sorry,’ Evelyn said. ‘Which hospital – home, is it?’

  He told her the name. Which she would forget. In fact, she had already forgotten.

  If only Harold had been there. Harold was useless in a crisis, but somehow gave her the power to act more brilliantly.

  As for Dowson, his grief, remorse, whatever it was, had grown embarrassing in its crude importunity. The rims of his eyes might have been touched up, to glitter as they did, with such an intensity of raw red.

  As there was nothing she could do, Evelyn left him. She trod very softly along the street, as though it were carpeted, as though all the doors were locked, as though the unfortunate, yet fortunately helpless patients were sitting the other side, listening, in their trussed or shocked condition, for further reprisals.

  When she got in she announced ‘I met Dowson. Nesta is suffering from some kind of nervous collapse. She is in the – he told me the name, but I forget.’

  She gabbled it, not to make it unintelligible, but to get it over.

  Harold, who was usually astounded, didn’t seem to be.

  ‘Don’t you think it odd?’ she asked when she could bear it no longer.

  ‘No,’ he said slowly. ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘I hope you are right,’ Evelyn said. ‘So many people have breakdowns today. It’s the strain we live under – always the threat of war – the pace,’ she said, ‘and no servants.’

  Harold sat pinching up his skin.

  ‘Dowson himself,’ she said, ‘had that breakdown, when they dropped him off in Egypt.’

  It was about this time that Harold Fazackerley took to going farther afield, on his own, without telling Evelyn where. Perhaps if she hadn’t had a fright she might have grown peevish, cross-questioned him, wondered whether he had started a mistress. Because she had had the fright and didn’t want another, she kept quiet. So Harold was able for the time being, to make these solitary expeditions. He would turn up on deserted parts of the coast, amongst rocks and lantana. Once he came across a rubbish dump and got his breath back sitting in a burst armchair on the edge of a gully. He was greatly moved by the many liberated objects he discovered, in particular a broken music-box from an age of more elegant subterfuges. Sometimes sunsets overtook him, and their impersonal rage did him good.

  None of it meant there was any question of his being disloyal to Evelyn. She was his wife. If long association had turned that into an abstract term, it had not prevented the abstract from eating in as unwaveringly as iron.

  He was attracted also to those iron-coloured evenings which bring out the steel and oyster tones in the sea. He was drawn to the wind which swells a sea while coldly slicing the flesh off human bones. With motion not direction his motive, he liked to take a ferry in the late afternoon. The wind-infested waters of the harbour matched his grey, subaqueous thoughts. Nor would any other mind intrude. Of the race of ferry passengers, one half was too dedicated to its respectability and evening papers, the other sidled instinctively after those it recognized as fellow rakes.

  Often as an older man Harold Fazackerley had been embarrassingly told he was ‘distinguished-looking’. If he had been less conscious of his inadequacies, he might have basked in the flattery of it. As things were, he had to laugh it off. There was even a trace of disgust in the gesture of protest with which he drew the no longer fashionable overcoat of English tweed closer to his ‘distinguished’ figure. The mannerism became finally a tic, which would break out on his solitariness, as on the afternoon when, without any reason, he remembered the ridiculous tweezers Nesta Pine had used for holding her cigarette.

  He was standing alone on the deck of the plunging ferry, above waves drained of their normally extrovert colours. It was too blustery, too rough, for the majority. They preferred to huddle, coddling their mushroom skins behind glass. Some of them had evidently looked to drink for additional protection. The only other venturesome or possessed human being besides Harold Fazackerley himself was hanging over the rail at the bows. This large, spread character, staring monotonously at the waves, was probably bilious, Harold decided, until, as he passed behind the leaning figure, he realized they were responding in much the same way to the motion of the ferry, that they were sharing the smell of ships at sea, and that the stranger was no stranger, but his friend Dowso
n.

  Dowson looked round. He was dishevelled by the head-on wind, but not drunk. Like a schoolboy he had rolled up his hat and crammed it into the pocket of his coat, which was starting to break free of the single button holding it. His fiery stubble stared in the blast. His mouth looked loose, from the draughts of air he must have swallowed.

  The meeting was too unexpected. Harold would not have chosen it. In spite of his long, and delicately intimate relationship with Dowson, he could not think how to open a convincing conversation.

  ‘I’ve been over to see my wife,’ Dowson plunged straight in, as though he had been waiting for the opportunity to tell.

  ‘She must have been pleased,’ Harold said, and at once heard how fatuous it sounded.

  ‘I don’t think she was,’ said Dowson. ‘She was in a pretty bad temper. And she never used to be bad-tempered. That was one of the things we were up against. But today she was, I won’t say – spiteful. She kept complaining about the screech of peacocks. Of course the traffic does make a hell of a noise out there. And to anyone in her condition. She must have meant the traffic.’

  Harold Fazackerley would have liked to inquire into the peacocks, if only of his own mind, but this wasn’t the time. What he did understand was that Dowson had shrivelled inside his indestructible body. It was a shocking discovery, the more so because you felt yourself the stronger for it.

  Such a state of affairs might have become repulsive if it hadn’t been so temporary. Dowson, or the genius of his fleshy body, had decided to resume the wrestling match. He who had turned round to face an accusation, locking his arms through the rail, exposing his chest, his belly, to whatever thrust, his unguarded face to the fist, had heaved himself back in the direction they were headed. And at that moment the sun struck, slashing the smudgy drifts of cloud, opening the underbelly of the waves, so that the peacock-colours rose again in shrill display out of the depths.

  ‘My God,’ Dowson was gasping and mouthing, ‘one day, Harold, when we meet – in different circumstances – I must try to tell you all I’ve experienced.’ He was speaking from behind closed eyes. ‘That was the trouble between us. Between myself and that woman. We had lived at the same level. It was too great a shock to discover there was someone who could read your thoughts.’

  Harold Fazackerley did not look but knew the tears were running from under the red, scaly eyelids, the orange, salt-encrusted brows.

  ‘That put an end to what should never have happened in the first place.’

  Soon after, they were received into a calm, into a striped marquee of light. Passengers were walking up the gangways of gently swaying matchwood. Somewhere a brass band was rather tackily playing.

  The two men shook hands out of habit. One of them went on, to catch the bus, to the house which was ostensibly his, the other returning in the same ferry, as he could not remember having any further plan.

  Harold began by not mentioning he had met Dowson on the ferry, and once he had begun, it was easy enough not to mention; it was his own very private experience.

  ‘Have a good walk?’ Evelyn asked on his return, and bit through the silk with which she had just threaded the needle.

  Needlework had been considered one of her accomplishments as a girl, but she had soon put away something which might have made others doubt her capacity for sophistication. Until latterly, in what she was amused to refer to as her ‘old age’, she would start, half ironic, half nostalgic, some piece of elaborate embroidery to occupy herself on occasions of neglect.

  Seeing his wife at her work Harold felt appropriately guilty. All that evening his eye was on her needle rather than on what he was trying to read. He would have liked to be able to talk to her, but couldn’t. At least winter was not far off, when they were due to leave for Cairns.

  The following evening he bought her a bunch of roses.

  ‘Oh, dearest, how sweet!’ Evelyn said with a spontaneity which overlooked the bruised condition of the buds inside the tissue cornet.

  Harold grew guiltier than ever on seeing he had chosen such a bad bunch, and to realize he had been swindled again.

  He had also brought her the evening paper.

  ‘I don’t know why we waste our money,’ Evelyn Fazackerley always said.

  But she read the evening papers. She liked to look at the horoscope, ‘just for fun’, and she enjoyed – you couldn’t say ‘enjoyed’ because it would have sounded too sick – it was because she took an interest in the ‘quirks of human nature’ that she read, or at least glanced at, the murders.

  ‘Any good murders tonight?’ Harold asked as a matter of course.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Murderers,’ she said, in that voice she used to put on to amuse them on board ship, ‘murderers are running out of ideas.’

  When Evelyn’s paper began to rustle.

  ‘Harold,’ she said, ‘Clem – Clem Dowson is dead.’

  It ripped into Harold Fazackerley.

  ‘What?’ he said stupidly. ‘How – Clem?’

  ‘An accident – it appears.’ She was holding the paper as far away from her as possible. ‘How shocking!’

  She was determined to make it anybody’s death, and Harold should have felt grateful.

  ‘“… walking yesterday evening from the direction of the ferry, Clement Perrotet Dowson”’, she read aloud, ‘“was knocked down by a passing bus. He is thought to have died instantly …”’

  But the muted voice did not spare Harold any of it.

  ‘Instantly! What a mercy!’ Evelyn said.

  It was incredible to him the strength some women had, or the convention they obeyed, which could transform an apocalypse into a platitude.

  ‘Apparently,’ said Evelyn, still dealing with it, ‘the driver put on his brakes, and at least two pedestrians tried to prevent poor – Clem, who didn’t seem to realize. Apparently,’ she clung to the word she had recently discovered, ‘he walked on, stumbled, they say, and fell under the bus.’

  The paper escaped from her hands in so many disordered sheets.

  ‘Crushed!’

  ‘Did they write “crushed”?’ Harold asked.

  Because he wanted to visualize Clem’s great fiery head still glaring, blaring a revelation, not rubbed into pulp like a melon dropped on the tarred road.

  ‘No,’ said Evelyn. ‘Not precisely.’

  The walls of the flat were threatening them.

  ‘Oh dear, the poor man! What can we do?’ Evelyn protested.

  She was wiping her hands on the little guest towel she had been embroidering so exquisitely.

  ‘Is there any family?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Evelyn was desolate, because who would break it to Nesta in the cell to which her absence of vocation had withdrawn her

  ‘Did you know Clem was a Perrotet?’ Evelyn asked.

  It was the hour when night began to take over in foreign tongues.

  ‘Harold?’

  Harold had not known, nor did they hear how Clem Dowson’s remains were tidied up.

  Or not until Evelyn received a note from the Perry woman.

  Dear Mrs Ferzackly,

  I have been in and done all I can do, all clothes to Salvation Army and such like, because the poor thing is too sick and will stay there they say. The young solicitor has been lovely. He and Mr Tompson have arranged, so now the house is shut up till Mr Tompson finds a buyer, it may take long, it isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. (Mr Tompson is Estate Agent Bandana.) So that is how it is, and if you would like to have a look, I thought I had better inform you where to find the key.

  Knowing of the long friendship with the late Mr D. I am enclosing a snap I took after they was married. I would be happy for you to keep the snap. Sorry if the snap is blurred, I think the camera isn’t up to much, but it is always a bit of a gamble.

  Yours as ever,

  E. PERRY (Mrs)

  Evelyn would have preferred to ignore the snapshot, but took a quick disapproving look. The ba
dly developed photograph was already discoloured. The figures of two large and shapeless people were arrested in the middle of nowhere. Although they might have been connected they were standing rather apart, undecided whether they should face each other or the camera. At least the photographer acted as some kind of focus point for smiles which might otherwise have remained directionless. Blur and all, she had caught her subjects wearing that expression of timeless innocence approaching imbecility, of those on whom the axe has still to fall. Like the photographs of murdered people in the papers.

  Evelyn could not have kept Mrs Perry’s snap. She would have torn it up immediately if Harold hadn’t been there, not exactly watching, but knowing.

  ‘A letter from that woman,’ she said, because there was no way out, ‘from Mrs Perry. She doesn’t add anything – or nothing of importance – to what we know.’

  How could she? There was nothing left.

  Harold, Evelyn suspected as she made for the bathroom cupboard, was going to settle down to a prolonged sentimental-morbid session with Mrs Perry’s snapshot. Well, men were less sensitive.

  Harold did, in fact, allow himself to be drawn into the photographic haze. And read the letter several times. If he had had the courage – he realized late in life he was no more than physically brave – he might have gone down to Bandana, collected the key from the estate agent, and had a last look over the house. But – Evelyn might have got to know. He couldn’t have borne that. Any more than his entry into the still warm, the gently creaking house – or hutch, they had perhaps rightly called it, in which some soft but wise primeval animal used to turn gravely on his straw, absorbing from between the wooden bars a limitless abstraction of blue, and a giant satiny bird had settled and resettled her wings, her uncommunicative eye concentrated on some prehistory of her own.

  Fur and feather never lie together.

  Harold Fazackerley made the noise with the mucus in his nose which his wife Evelyn deplored. He put the letter, together with the snap, inside his wallet, where the heat of his body had united many other documents by the time they were forgotten.