The Cockatoos

by Patrick White

  When Harold announced he had booked a room for a week at the Currawong Palace, Evelyn felt it her duty to disapprove and produce reasons why he shouldn’t have, while secretly aware how relieved she would be to escape from the little box which contained too many confused emotions.

  ‘But isn’t that extravagant,’ she protested, ‘to say the least? When we are leaving for Cairns in July. And autumn,’ she said, ‘in the Mountains, can be depressing. Besides, nobody I can think of ever stayed at the Currawong Palace. Well, perhaps one person – a typist – though quite a decent girl.’

  Harold said, ‘Anyhow, I’ve done it, so we’ll leave on Thursday.’

  The weeks left to their departure for Cairns would be easily countable after their return from Currawong.

  The Currawong Palace was one of those follies built in the shape of a castle by somebody who went broke from it. Business enterprise had extended the castle by trailing more practical wings through a conflicting landscape, and by dotting pavilions amongst the evergreens intended to daunt the native scrub. There were guests who patronized Currawong in spring, briefly to admire rhododendrons, or in autumn to be dazzled by a splendour of lit maples. But such individuals were too few and discreet to count as clientele: the honeymoon couples who stared speechless over food, gathering strength for the next clinch; the young lady typists (typistes was perhaps nearer the mark) who perched on gilt in the ballroom while the business executives stalked up and down, rigid in their dark-suits-for-evening; and the foreigners – the foreigners were everywhere, lamenting Vienna and Budapest, filling all the most comfortable chairs.

  After one glance the first evening Evelyn could see what a mistake Harold had made.

  ‘We shall just have to put up with it,’ she sighed, ‘and close our eyes – and ears – and enjoy each other’s company.’

  She gave him one of those consuming looks she sometimes managed to construct when she was feeling consumed.

  ‘Do you suppose there will be anyone?’ she asked as they were changing into fresh things for dinner. ‘There must be someone.’

  ‘I expect so,’ Harold said.

  His thinning shanks ached as he pulled on the too–expensive socks he continued to buy out of habit.

  As they prepared to go down she patted his back. Harold’s back, she was pleased to think, would be the most presentable in a roomful of riffraff. Modesty prevented her dwelling on her own donkey brown under the musquash stole – once a coat – jolly smart; she only glanced obliquely at the wardrobe door in passing.

  Downstairs, antlers presided; the velvet had worn off by now. The melon was terrible. There were some splinters of fish done in sawdust. She refused to wrestle with her cartilage of mutton. Over their helpings of marshmallow and tinned pineapple-ring the honeymoon couples were beginning to uncoil.

  But afterwards, in the lounge, during the rite of coffee essence – ugh! – Evelyn discovered old Mrs Haggart, the widow of a grazier.

  ‘Delicious coffee,’ said Mrs Haggart, fitting her mouth to the space above the cup.

  ‘Yes!’ Evelyn gnashed a smile.

  But found the old lady innocent.

  She was one of those elderly Australian ladies innocent of a great deal, in particular the manifestations of their wealth. (Evelyn became at once passionately devoted to what she recognized as the kolinsky cape.) Yellowed by the sun, Mrs Haggart’s skin had the texture of a lizard’s. Her voice, as though thinned by drought, persisted not much above a whisper in the same dusty monotone. But she was kind. She would smile at the rudest waiter, asking, it seemed, for his forgiveness. The old thing was so kind it was a wonder she had managed to hang on to the kolinsky cape and the Cadillac.

  ‘We used to drive out of the city’, she confessed to Evelyn after clearing her throat of dust, ‘always – while my husband was alive – and even now I drive out with Bill –’ Evelyn did not think she would have liked to refer to her chauffeur as ‘Bill,’ but Mrs Haggart was so democratic, ‘we drive around the outskirts, looking for a fresh cabbage, or any other vegetable. I do enjoy a fresh-picked vegetable.’

  Evelyn was entranced by the strangeness of it. She held her head brightly on one side, and gurgled for her new friend.

  ‘Don’t you?’ asked Mrs Haggart, turning quite vehement.

  ‘Oh, indeed, vegetables are very important!’

  Evelyn was fascinated by the string of naked diamonds hanging innocently round Mrs Haggart’s slack neck.

  The old lady looked down, and was reassured by the sight of her own interlock cutting across the velvet V.

  Then she raised her head and said, ‘My husband was not so fond of vegetables.’

  Suddenly for no reason Evelyn felt angry.

  ‘Harold – my husband and I,’ she said, ‘have more or less similar tastes. Where –’ she asked, ‘where is Harold?’

  Mrs Haggart glanced over the arm of the sofa at the floor. She almost toppled. But recovered herself. At once it became obvious that she had contributed enough to the search.

  ‘Perhaps he isn’t feeling well,’ she said.

  ‘It would be most unusual,’ Evelyn replied. ‘Harold is never ill. I am the one.’

  Mrs Haggart couldn’t stop looking at Evelyn’s arms. Then she suggested something quite horrid, but senile of course.

  ‘Perhaps he’s looking over the partners for the dance.’

  ‘Oh, but there’s only dancing on Saturday. I understood.’

  ‘I thought there was dancing every night at Currawong,’ said Mrs Haggart, introducing slight colour into her monotone. ‘Every night,’ she repeated. ‘But I can’t say for certain, as I don’t know where I put the brochure.’

  She resigned herself to the kolinsky cape.

  ‘Now, my husband,’ she sat twangling faintly.

  ‘Ah, there he is!’ Evelyn said.

  Some kind of expectation was making her tremble.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Harold. My husband.’

  Mrs Haggart’s washed-out curiosity flickered behind her thickish glasses, investigating the cause of her new acquaintance’s agitation. Mrs Fazackerley was sitting on the edge of the sofa trembling like a young girl.

  Then Mrs Haggart made out the husband – there was no other possible candidate in sight – a cut above most in more distinguished company, still plenty of wear in him too, advancing on them in no hurry. While Mrs Fazackerley waved those gold bracelets. Egyptian, hadn’t she said?

  ‘There, you see, you didn’t lose him,’ Mrs Haggart consoled. ‘And probably won’t. Unless in an accident. If an accident has been arranged there’s nothing you can do about it.’

  But Mrs Fazackerley didn’t hear, or else she had heard too much. Her neck had grown stringier. Now that she had attracted his attention, and he was picking his way through the Jewesses, she sat forward further still, gathering her knees into her arms, her throat straining red.

  Mrs Haggart was not a woman who cultivated undue luxury but did enjoy a good stare.

  ‘I’d begun to worry. Where on earth have you been?’ Mrs Fazackerley almost called.

  ‘Nowhere,’ he said.

  Staring luxuriously out of her moon-shaped glasses Mrs Haggart saw that he was smiling at his wife as though he only half-remembered her.

  ‘Just wandering,’ Mr Fazackerley said.

  He had not, in fact, wandered any distance. Why he had not gone farther, he would have been too embarrassed to admit. Nor could he bring himself to accept Evelyn’s girlish intensity as she craned up at him from the sofa trying to penetrate his thoughts. A nonchalance protected him, which he found rather agreeable.

  The hotel, which should have desolated, mildly pleased. As he strolled, it had muted his footsteps with enormous flesh-coloured roses. He had easily navigated the gilt islands on which stranded typists sat, plumping out their mouths in anticipation, combing their hair with opalescent fingernails. There had been no sign that a chunk of the ornamental mouldings, which had obviously crumbled over the years,
would be aimed at him deliberately if it should happen again.

  Only when he stepped outside into the still more impersonal dark, with its solider, blacker rhododendrons, and the disembodied voices, did Harold Fazackerley begin to have doubts for his safety. Or not exactly that. To feel he might be in danger, without having earned the right to regret it. Evelyn had been sensible enough to advise against autumn in the Mountains. The mist, for one thing, had begun to finger between him and his clothes.

  Not all the ritual passion of lovers could warm the beds of rotten leaves or humanize the undergrowth as he advanced towards the line of native scrub. Where, on the edge, he knew he still wasn’t ready for disclosures which might be made. To his shame, he felt he had been gone too long, and that his wife would be waiting for him. So he went back to the lounge, stepping over any bodies which lay in the way.

  Evelyn had turned to the old lady beside her on the sofa.

  ‘It has been so charming,’ his wife was saying. ‘But the journey has given me a headache. I think it is time we went to bed.’

  With as much interest as she seemed capable of, Mrs Haggart examined the man who had been included in her friend’s decision. Well, it had never been altogether unusual to include. Which perhaps decided Mrs Haggart to smile one of those filtered smiles, less for the present than for the past.

  ‘I shall stay a little longer, and watch the people enjoying themselves,’ she announced. ‘I shall listen to the community singing.’

  Then the Fazackerleys became aware that Click Go the Shears had started up at the end of one of the spokes which radiated from the hub of the lounge. A plaster shell encrusted with coloured electric bulbs increased the volume and fanned it outwards.

  Enclosed in their varnished bedroom Evelyn could let herself go.

  ‘As I expected,’ she said, ‘It’s all perfectly ghastly.’

  She took off her imitation pearl ear-rings, the increased weight of which was threatening to pull her under. Her string of real pearls she wore day and night for safety.

  ‘Even the old lady.’ She sighed. ‘Although to some extent refined. Wasn’t it a gorgeous kolinsky cape?’

  She let her own tired musquash draggle across the ottoman.

  ‘Can’t you see Nesta – Nesta Pine,’ said Evelyn Fazackerley, creaming herself at the dressing-table, ‘sitting with an old creature like that in a whole series of ghastly hotels.’ In its gulf the mirror was breeding other mirrors. ‘Mrs Haggart is straight out of Nesta’s stable. Nesta would have been just the thing for Mrs Haggart.’ Evelyn could have been working it up, a fresh phase, in Elizabeth Arden, on her own face. ‘If Nesta were ever to recover. Lots of people do, you know, from nervous disorders. Nesta – now she’s a widow … Oh, no, Harold, don’t please! Not when I’m all covered with cream.’

  In any case passion with the lights on, she had always found it embarrassing. But Harold’s hands, she realized, were heavy cold outside the film of warm grease with which she had begun to revive her throat.

  ‘Why must you start on Nesta?’

  As she sat at the flimsy dressing-table he was addressing her reflection in the glass.

  ‘She was our friend, wasn’t she?’ Evelyn replied, also in reflection. ‘It’s natural that she should crop up. Never more natural than in a place like this.’

  ‘But Nesta is suffering,’ Harold said, ‘we can’t begin to guess, in what kind of hell.’

  Because his hands were so gentle in the angles of her neck it made Evelyn angry.

  ‘It isn’t my fault, is it, that Nesta Pine went round the bend? It was you – your – that man – that dead weight – that Dowson. I caught him reading a book once when he was staying with us at Kafr el Zayet. A book – oh, I can’t explain it. Did it ever occur to you that red-haired men have a most distinctive smell? Oh, there’s nothing I can accuse him of. Nothing of which you can say, that was the root of the trouble. He sort of seeped. We had several talks – you couldn’t call them conversations because he was incapable of expressing himself. On one occasion we were strolling, I remember – one evening – through that mango grove – I can never see, let alone smell the beastly fruit, without getting the horrors – Dowson was not exactly telling but hinting. Poor old Nesta! I can just imagine! With that orange orangutang! And after all she’d gone through with someone as cold and egotistical as Addie Woolcock Fernandini Thingummy.’

  ‘Don’t shriek,’ he advised. ‘They’ll think a peacock … Yes, Addie and Nesta’, he said, ‘must have burnt each other up. But what does it matter, provided you blaze together – but blaze,’ he was searching, ‘– in peacock colours.’

  He ended up sounding ashamed.

  It made Evelyn turn round. ‘Harold how loathsome! And why peacocks? It means,’ she said, ‘you must have been reading my private papers!’

  It was no longer a matter of reflections. They were facing each other in the flesh.

  ‘Ever since the day we read how Clem Dowson died I think I’ve been trying to forgive you, Evelyn.’

  ‘Oh,’ she shouted, ‘indeed! I suppose I pushed Dowson under the bus! As well as putting Nesta where she is. Blame me, my dear. After all, I’m your wife.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m to blame. We never got a child. But I got you. I made you – more than likely! My only creative achievement!’

  She looked at him.

  ‘Oh, my darling,’ she said, coughing up a noise which normally would have worried her in case anybody heard, ‘my darling,’ she spluttered, coughing, ‘if you wanted to kill me, you couldn’t have done it more effectively.’

  But in front of this scraggy woman his wife, death, he felt, was no longer such a threat.

  He hated what he was looking at, what he had caused. He took hold of the string of pearls, which, in the beginning, when it had been one of several strands wound into a rope, had given joy out of proportion. To both of them. He took the pearls, and twisted and jerked. And jerked. The string broke easily enough. He listened to the pearls scamper skittishly away against and behind lacquered veneer.

  Evelyn didn’t resist. She was too terrified. Not to recognize her husband. She had never known Harold. Was there also, possibly, ultimately, something hitherto unsuspected to recognize in herself? That was far more terrifying.

  So she could not stop her dry cough, or retching. If she had been more supple she would have flung herself on the floor, but as she wasn’t, she got down groggily, on all fours. She found herself, like some animal, on the hotel carpet.

  It could have been that death no longer appeared so very important to Evelyn either.

  ‘The pearls,’ she whimpered, and it was a relief to admit her practical nature.

  He looked down at her. Inside the slip her breasts continued shrivelling. The hotel lamp, rose-shaded to assist the diffident, couldn’t help Evelyn’s breasts: they remained a shabby yellow.

  Nor himself: an old brittler man.

  Or animal down beside the other rootling and grovelling after pearls.

  ‘Poor Evelyn!’ he found himself beginning again, to encourage them both in a predicament. ‘We’ll come across them. It was my fault. Better when it’s daylight. Move the furniture. So that the maid won’t sweep them up. Mistake them for beads. Throw them out. Or tread on them.’

  They were at times kneeling, at times trampling on the pearls themselves, in the indiscriminate business of picking their way through what remained of their life together.

  When she finally got to bed, the grit was still in Evelyn’s knees, but she could not bother about it.

  She said, ‘I could do with a good stiff brandy. If I could face the staff. If they would come at this hour of night. Anyway it would cost the earth.’

  He fondled her breasts a little, but suspected she didn’t realize it was happening, just as it wasn’t happening to him.

  So he went out, unable, besides, to embrace the ritual of undressing. Evelyn did not protest. She was lying on the bed, half revealed by the hotel linen. She had star
ted to give a performance of sleep, looking, he noticed, like a badly carved serving of steamed fowl.

  Harold heard the beige roses responding to his footsteps in the passages. Although life was being lived spasmodically, at times even violently, behind closed doors, the passages were deserted and only economically lit.

  In an open doorway Mrs Haggart in a black kimono was putting out her shoes as though she believed something would be done about them.

  ‘In Harrogate,’ she said to the one guest who offered himself, ‘we used to see bottles of spa-water standing outside the doors with the boots. We had gone there, my husband and I, for the cure.’

  Something shook her.

  ‘Melon’, she said, ‘is the worst gas-maker of all.’

  Her neck still flickering with blue fire, Mrs Haggart covered up her combinations with the rather elusive black kimono before withdrawing.

  The whole hotel was beginning to subside into a detritus of pleasure: the stuffed egg someone had trodden into the carpet, shreds of lettuce and mauve Kleenex, the click of slow ping-pong balls, last phrases of The Little Brown Jug. None of it held Harold up. Reaching for the glass doors. Bursting out. Finally running. He couldn’t help hearing himself: youth would have given it a sound of cattle, whereas age transposed it into the dry scuttle of a cockroach.

  His movements emphasized the intense stillness of the shrubberies. Moisture was dripping from the rhododendrons. The animal intruder scattering gravel and tearing beaded spider-web did not interrupt the dripping bushes. He was the least of that cavern of dark which night was filling with the stalactites of silence. Realization spurred him to blunder deeper in, to try to shake off something which, by light, could only have appeared an exhibition of panic.

  Harold Fazackerley’s teeth confessed, I am an old man with the wind up looking for what.

  And then he began to come across it. Where the congested shrubberies gave out, he plunged across the boundary into the scrub. In which the whips lashed. In which the rocks sprang up under his papery soles. A rapier was raised to slash his cheek. He could feel the flesh receding. Or he was freed of some inessential part of him as he blundered on, no longer troubling to tear off the cold webs of mist. The mist clothed his fingers, and clung to his bared cheekbone.