Mrs Bannister hugged the telephone and moaned.
‘Yes, Madge? … Yes … Ye-ehs – I know what girls are like nowadays. I know there’s all this sleeping around. But I’m certain – from her upbringing, and the little one’s own child confides – I’m pretty sure Felicity was chaste. And John I suspect of having the highest principles.’ Here Mrs Bannister used her ‘ethical’ tone. ‘Of course a decent man might persuade himself on the wedding night that everything was as it ought to be. But wouldn’t the most decent of them feel reproachful, anyway, by twinges? And Felicity is my child!’
So utterly hers, for one bleeding moment Mrs Bannister almost underwent the shocking act of violation to which her daughter had been subjected. Though a fairly solid woman she tottered at the telephone, but recovered enough of her balance and voice to cough and grunt farther through the moral labyrinth in which she found herself astray.
‘Do you know, Madge, what I’ve decided?’
Because she had. Now. It was as though the moment of empathy with her ravished child had recharged her with the powers of decision.
Moist-eyed with inspiration, Mrs Bannister continued, ‘Felicity herself must tell. What could be more touching than for a young girl to confess the most shameful experience of all to her future husband? No honest man could fail to respond, and cherish her for life. What might rankle and turn to disgust if the parents told – you know, “soiled goods” and all that – can only convince as frank courage if the girl herself takes the plunge.’
Mrs Bannister was so carried away she knocked off a silver salver left over from the days of visiting-cards and parlour-maids.
‘Of course … everything depends on Felicity. But I know my child, Madge!’
The crash of metal had made her reckless; till Humphrey coming in so quietly – it was those wretched rubber soles – quenched the Roman matron in her.
‘Bye now, dear,’ she chirped, if it wasn’t croaked. ‘I must organize my morning.’
‘Who was that?’ Humphrey could only have known.
‘Madge Hopkirk.’
She clothed her reply in lead; she aimed it at the back of her husband’s skull, which on this of all mornings he might have been at pains to burnish: its nakedness shone so aggressively. Mrs Bannister felt contempt for what had often been an object of compassion, and sometimes, she shuddered to think, desire.
Humphrey said, ‘I hope you’ve left nothing to that woman’s discretion – nothing she could make the worst of.’
Because Humphrey had always been jealous of loyal old Madge she ignored his remark, and asked in an imitation of kindness, ‘Aren’t you going to the office, dear? You know how it upsets you when others don’t rise to their responsibilities.’
Humphrey answered, ‘Yes.’ Its submissive tone made her flinch by playing on her own helplessness.
As if this weren’t enough, he followed it up by doing something appalling: he sat down so heavily in one of the royal-blue armchairs he might have been relinquishing the Stock Exchange for ever, and worse, he covered his eyes with a hand – bald Humphrey was a hairy man – and began making sounds such as his wife had never heard, so dry, dusty, torn, she couldn’t associate them with his familiar fleshy body.
‘Oh, darling!’ she whimpered in conventional terms; herself an old blowing rag, she moved to touch him, then didn’t, for fear of letting loose some more terrifying cataclysm. ‘This won’t help Felicity!’ she blubbed.
But who was Felicity today? Or, for that matter, who was Felicity ever?
To correct her feelings the mother began running at the curtains: she let light into the house; and at once regretted doing so. Almost worse than what had happened that night, her religion of orderliness and taste was disputed: by the broached bottle of Courvoisier, cigar-ash like noblets of neat excreta (the detectives had carried off the butt), smeared glasses from which two crude knockabouts had guzzled their beer. (By this present brooding light, all thought of the nice little staghorn man became a blasphemy.)
When the sound of somebody moving through remoter rooms froze the foreground in its every anarchic detail.
‘That’s Felicity,’ the father said, as though hoping somebody might contradict.
In her desire to return to the rhythmic past, the mother reminded, ‘It’s garbage day, Humphrey. Did you remember to put the bin out?’
He was doing what, normally, she disliked to hear: clearing his throat of morning catarrh. Now it was almost a comfort.
‘I rang Mrs Pomfrett,’ he said, ‘and told them not to expect her at work. I told them she’d sprained an ankle.’
His wife pleated her forehead and drew in her lips. If it had been herself, she would have made an excuse that was more vague, less a lie: she abhorred lies, while respecting the ways of getting round them.
As the sounds of movement increased, if not approaching appreciably, the lights in the parents’ faces grew more hectic.
‘I wish John wasn’t such a decent bloke. It would mean less to someone with a touch of the shyster in him.’
‘Oh, dear Humphrey – virginity isn’t a sheet of iron!’
‘In my day it was.’
‘But isn’t any more. Virginity isn’t fashionable.’ She was quoting Madge Hopkirk, but decided it might be imprudent to mention the source.
‘A man isn’t all that impressed by his wife’s following the fashion. Not when it makes him look a fool.’
‘Nobody, surely, will laugh at an outrage?’ But she knew it wasn’t true, however shocked she tried to sound: given a different target, she and Madge might have enjoyed a laugh on the phone; so she took a chance, ‘I expect it will bring John and Felicity closer together. They’ll try harder to please each other.’ She wasn’t sure, but thought she had received another inspiration.
Humphrey only sucked his teeth, before snapping them shut.
What they had both been dreading had begun to happen: Felicity was coming into the room. For the first time since the night of their common disaster they were face to face with their changed child. Each hoped she might say something to relieve them of the responsibility of speaking first.
But Felicity abruptly lowered her eyelids, more from distaste, it appeared, than out of modesty or distress. She didn’t hesitate in her progress, except to diverge slightly where the living – became the dining-room, to pick up the salver which was still lying where it had fallen. She replaced it on the mahogany console, and continued with a firm heaviness – she was barefooted – towards the kitchen.
‘Where are your slippers, darling? You might catch cold, mightn’t you?’ Mrs Bannister almost seemed to wish it might happen.
‘I don’t think so.’ It wasn’t unusual for Felicity to act a bit lumpish before she had drunk her coffee.
Humphrey Bannister looked at his watch: for an instant he could have persuaded himself that this was one of their normal mornings.
Certainly the mother was trying hard. ‘Would you like me to boil you an egg? Or two? Or grill you a kidney? There’s such a nice-looking kidney.’
‘You know I don’t eat breakfast.’
‘I only thought’, Mrs Bannister babbled, ‘you might be – hungry.’ At once she wished herself dead of her own foolishness.
Her daughter either didn’t, or wouldn’t let herself, see the point. She was in any case engrossed by her immediate activities: warming up the coffee, choosing an apple, deciding whether the milk had turned; while the parents, who had followed her in on mechanical legs, stood around, large and noticeably useless.
Healthy rather than pretty, Felicity herself was fairly large. Her complexion, considered her greatest asset, was somewhat muddy by the present light, her pale-pink dressing-gown crushed, not to say grubby. She almost always dressed in pink – or blue – to show off the fair complexion, and because they were the colours she had been taught by Mummy to wear.
This morning, the mother noticed, her child wasn’t wearing anything underneath her gown. Thought of the ripped nighti
e reduced her own throat to a hank of grey tatters.
The coffee plopped over on the stove, and at once there was something for somebody to do: Felicity got there first, and unfairly did it.
She sat peeling, then eating her apple: it sounded and looked. cool. The very pale-pink dressing-gown only half hid the shapes of her breasts, their nipples not at all: these might have appeared less chaste if it hadn’t been for a certain candour of the whole body; the mother was not exactly hanging on the nipples, but nearly.
Humphrey Bannister on the other hand began his move towards the office. The sight of his girl’s breasts made him feel shy, almost virginal. What he murmured was full of half-formed endearment, of ‘ptt-ptt’, or ‘pet-pet’, as he planted the ritual kiss.
She must have felt his lips trembling on her forehead. An already acute situation was intensified by the scent of crunched apple. He was positively glad to steal away from it on rubber toes; while his wife stood dabbing at what might develop into a cold. There was so much they had failed to make together: not even a child; this one was less than ever theirs.
Because he was always expecting something of them, his withdrawal inspired the women to behave more naturally at least: Mrs Bannister even began scratching one of her buttocks, a luxury she would never have allowed herself in any presence but her daughter’s.
‘What I’d do if I were you, I’d take myself to the hairdresser’s,’ the mother suggested practically; ‘I’d treat myself to everything – facial, manicure – everything. It would do you a world of good, dear.’
‘But I don’t need good done to me’ – in spite of the fact that her hair, a light mouse, was looking a mess.
As she shrugged off her mother’s advice, the pale pink fell farther open.
‘I’m only thinking of your happiness, darling,’ the mother mumbled to disguise the fascination her daughter’s breasts were exercising.
She had hardly caught sight of them since they were formed, and now these were not only Felicity’s breasts, they were also what ‘that man’ must have done to them; even more fascinating than the flesh of her flesh were the shadows on it, or could they be horrid bruises?
‘Cover yourself up, Felicity.’ It was as much an order to her own imagination. ‘It isn’t nice.’
It probably suited Felicity to do so, but Mrs Bannister liked to think she had been obeyed. She had always congratulated herself on having a reasonably tractable daughter, till remembered details of the ghastly Business they had just been through made her wonder whether her luck had left her.
‘There’s something I’ve thought and thought about, and still fail to understand.’ She was returning in bitter triumph to a subject she might not be able to bear.
‘Don’t harp on it, Mummy. There’ll always be the things which you – or anybody else – won’t understand.’
‘But why, why, wouldn’t you let kind old Dr Herborn examine you when it came to the point?’
‘I know! I know!’
She threw the apple core into a corner. More from habit than disapproval, her mother went and picked it up.
‘Apart from anything else,’ Mrs Bannister was clutching the retrieved core, ‘it makes us all look ridiculous. I could see that nasty big detective immediately begin laughing up his sleeve. If they catch the beastly pervert, we shan’t have a case, don’t you see?’
‘I know! I know! But they won’t catch him.’
Over her shoulder Felicity threw the apple skin she had peeled in one long skilful streamer. She glanced round to see what it spelt, but the ribbon hadn’t survived: it lay in pieces. She laughed slightly, down her nose.
This time Mrs Bannister let the rubbish lie. ‘They have every chance of tracing the man. So I feel. You described him so vividly – horribly. Then to refuse our own doctor!’
‘Can’t you understand that what happened was humiliating enough? without a doctor messing about.’
‘Oh, but darling – what if there are consequences?’
‘I don’t think I’m so helpless I can’t deal with consequences.’
So the mother no longer knew what she might say, or do, but cry. She even wished her husband back: she would make use of him at least.
‘Daddy was so upset by your strange behaviour. You know what you mean to him.’
‘Oh, Daddy! My virginity means more to him than anything else about me. All those lectures! Thank God I’m rid of the rotten thing.’
Outrage made Mrs Bannister’s sobs knock against her teeth, almost battering them down.
‘I can’t believe, Felicity, you’re the girl Daddy and I brought up.’
‘No. It’s unbelievable.’
‘Who agreed to marry an honourable man like John.’
‘John’s so honourable – so kind – so perfect – I couldn’t live up to him. I’ve been writing to him this morning.’
She brought the envelope, less cool than it should have been, out of her dressing-gown pocket, and stood it against the empty cup.
Mrs Bannister could hardly prevent herself pouncing. ‘What have you written? Felicity? While your mind’s disturbed!’ Fortunately she didn’t say ‘unsound’.
‘I’ve written breaking off the engagement. For a number of reasons. The least of them being the loss of Daddy’s old virginity.’
They looked at each other: each seemed to dread the sound of something still more delicate tearing; they would have liked to hold the moment off. Then they were tottering, most ungainly, towards the inevitable thwack of flesh. They were melting together, clawing after something they might still grab hold of and share, while the aseptic kitchen reverberated with their cries of helplessness, the skin from the peeled apple browning in coils around their ankles.
Early in their married life Humphrey and Doris Bannister had established themselves on the edge of the park. It was a comfortable rather than a fashionable quarter: its large, undesirable houses, in Sydney Tudor, late Victorian Byzantine, Bette Davis Colonial, suggested wealth without flaunting it, just as the inhabitants seemed agreed by the smiles in their eyes never to mention money, and the odd Jaguar or Daimler silently apologized. It suited Humphrey Bannister down to the ground: solid, and only ten minutes’ drive from the GPO; Doris, who might have liked to cut a dash, hedged her enthusiasm with reservations. She had married late; she had time to make up for; but settled down to solidity and quiet, and park air. On the occasions when she arranged a bridge luncheon for some of her more fashionable friends, she allowed them to turn her neighbourhood into no more than a mild, party joke; no one could accuse her of disloyalty.
And when their only child Felicity was born, the near-by park was such a blessing: to push the pram through the ragged grass around the silted lake (you couldn’t expect upkeep of parks with a war on and the men away); to sit on the balding slopes under the araucarias, and look deep into her little girl’s eyes; to surprise each other’s cheeks with the delicious flicker of eyelashes. Exchanging the breath of laughter and contentment it was as though they were still one; in the drowsy park, there seemed no reason why they should ever be anything else.
Every other week Doris Bannister took a snap of their child to send Humphrey in New Guinea, and Humphrey described in return a formal nostalgia for home which failed to persuade her he wasn’t a fairly fulfilled adjutant.
Humphrey was a man’s man: though he mightn’t have known what to do about a son, he would have preferred one. A girl was breakable, you felt, while he held theirs in his large hands. ‘Do you think’, he might ask, ‘she’s making the right kind of noise?’ or ‘I don’t feel she’s happy about the way I hold her. I haven’t the right touch. Oughtn’t you to take her back?’ as he held her out and away from himself.
In the beginning Humphrey usually referred to Felicity as She. It was absurd, touching, his attitude to the child, but also gratifying: it convinced Doris that Felicity would always be hers. So she could afford to be generous; she would make it up to poor old Humphrey.
When he came b
ack for good, and the little girl was staggering about she used to say, ‘Run to Daddy, darling. You’ve forgotten the kisses you’ve been saving for him. He’s waiting, Tchitchy. He does think the world of you.’
Once or twice she persuaded him to give Felicity her bath. It was never a success, if amusing to watch: Humphrey worked almost despairingly, dribbling the water from the sponge over the little flowers of flesh, powdering the self-absorbed wrinkle.
The mother would receive her child back, give her a playful slap or two, and quickly slip the nightie on, to demonstrate how skilful she was.
Of course it was never her intention to claim all Felicity’s affection. The child obviously loved her father. She would lie in ambush for him, and spring out of the salvia after he had locked the garage. She would fasten her arms round his legs, and even try to climb higher up: as though she were a cat and he a tree. Once as he was lying in his big squelchy leather chair relaxing after a busy day, she flung herself on his chest, and lay curled, eyes closed waiting for somebody to make a move.
‘Oh dear,’ the mother protested, ‘I’m sure Daddy’s too tired and hot to enjoy a heavy girl on his chest.’
But at least, if he didn’t act, Daddy didn’t resist.
The Cockatoos Page 12