The Cockatoos

by Patrick White

  All that needed to be done now was to slip the ring off and put it in the glove compartment of his car, which she did with the minimum of demonstration, and he was tactful enough not to notice.

  They sat for a while. Their talk was of Rome, which she could discuss intelligently because she had been reading it up.

  ‘The parasol pines,’ she was saying, when she remembered, ‘I ought to go, or my mother will draw the wrong conclusions.’

  ‘We’re the ones who could be wrong, couldn’t we?’

  ‘Oh, no! Not if that’s how you feel!’

  He did make a further effort to tempt her, with his eyes, which had grown clearer since release, and a kiss which even entered her mouth. She could feel a whimper forming in her throat, and had to force herself to strangle it, together with the longing for that eiderdowniness he had to offer.

  ‘Thank you – darling.’ She returned his kiss with such force their teeth collided uglily.

  She saw she had left a bad taste, and that they were both saved.

  When she got in, her mother came out to meet her in the hall, in the pair of rubber gloves she wore as protection against the nastier details of domestic martyrdom.

  ‘Oh dear, what have you done to me!’ Mrs Bannister immediately wailed.

  ‘But I’m the one who was engaged.’

  ‘I can only say, Felicity, you’ve done something wicked and perverse. Why, I wonder, do you want to destroy us?’

  Looking her mother in the face it was impossible to prevent herself shouting back, ‘Why – WHY? If I knew the answers! But I don’t! I’m not the record you’d like to play!’

  As soon as her daughter had slammed her door, Mrs Bannister tore off the flesh-coloured gloves. She must talk, she must tell Madge. But her finger slipped halfway through the number. She might have sounded too old, too ugly. The transparent, torn-off gloves were as distasteful to her as her own skin.

  In the past when she had run to the phone, it might have been to a lover’s arms. Now she began to dread the call. Those hours of blandishment, of flirtation with the reported woes of others, no longer titillated: what had begun as a delicious sensual luxury was turning into an inquisition. She had even begun to admit that Humphrey was right: that Madge Hopkirk made the worst of things. Certainly Madge put some hard questions.

  And the telephone continued to ring. And you had to answer, because it would have been immoral to pretend you were not there when you were: nobody would ever accuse you of disobeying the basic rules of the social code.

  ‘No, Madge … No. You are interrupting nothing – one or two little routine chores … Of course, dear, I shall be glad to hear it if you really feel you have to tell … With another young man? … Well, Madge, if it’s only another. If Felicity was with the same awful young man instead of the several you’ve seen her with, we might have something to worry about. As it is, I shan’t let worry enter my head … I know some of her friends are of doubtful character. It’s since she left her good job with Moira Pomfrett, and went to work at this place, this boutique, or old clothes shop. Whatever it is, it’s hardly my business … I told you – they call it Pot Luck … I’m sure there’s no significance in the name. It’s only a silly, tasteless joke. Everyone is tasteless nowadays … But Felicity’s a clean, healthy girl. If her appearance has changed – her clothes a bit “different” – it’s because of this set she runs around with. And because … yes … she’s changed – since … You don’t have to tell me, Madge. Humphrey’s suggested we get Dr Herborn to put her in touch with a reputable psychoanalyst. But she says she can psychoanalyse herself as well as anyone else could do it for her. Why not? An educated girl. And I always say, nobody knows a person better than she knows herself. It stands to reason … I agree there are people who don’t understand themselves. There will always be the simple ones. That is another matter … Whether she’s happy? Oh, really, Madge! I’m too discreet to ask her. I’ve learnt my lesson … I must go now, dear. Something’s boiling over. I can smell it …’

  When she had brushed off her accuser, Doris Bannister went straight into the dining-room and poured herself a tot of Humphrey’s brandy. It was in the wrong glass, but she didn’t care, or whether her breath would give her away if anybody came to the door …

  It was a wet night, no longer raining, though the rain was hanging about above the black, patent-leather leaves. If you opened a window, a cold, almost liquid air rushed in, and forced you to gulp it quickly down. It had the effect of making you feel you were standing inside a flannel tunnel with Daddy’s snores at the other end; Mummy, convinced she was awake, would be lying asleep in the twin mahogany bed. Between them in the dark hung the ticking of a clock which would restore them to life in the morning.

  Once or twice Mummy called, but it sounded of grey flannel. Once the word emerged, ‘Feugh – lisss?’ before being muffled by the overhang of sleep.

  Mummy couldn’t have twigged that the others called you ‘Liss’ unless she had picked it up somewhere in the bumpy tunnel along which she was being dragged. If so, sleep had lessened, or at least drugged, her disapproval.

  A tendency to disapprove was probably the most you had inherited from the parents. Nothing could be done about it, except to pacify the conscience by disapproving of yourself.

  She threw down the brush with which she had been sleeking her dank hair: it was the night, the damp. The brush contributed the one positive sound in all the sleeping, flannel house. The brush was in solid ivory, part of the set Daddy had given as a twenty-first, the FB in gold to remind you who you were – when names are the least part of it.

  Now that she had done her hair she went downstairs. Here and there, on the landing, and below, she barged against the shapes of furniture in spite of knowing the geography by heart; she might have wounded herself if the corners hadn’t been felted, or her flesh contemptuous of pain.

  In the street she became more purposeful, her mind less blurred by memory and the instincts. Her body grew muscular inside the protective skin of slithery leather, her face contracting with the spasms of wet leaves, in the currents of air, as she bowed her head to cleave the otherwise empty streets. All the normal, timid virtues had homed, though the ice-blue lights continued blooming, under civic instruction to protect stragglers from the kinds of violence they most expected.

  As she walked through the streets her ice-cold skin increased her sense of inviolacy.

  Those intruding on her separate existence, some old feeble derelict, or band of stumbling Masons, or even an occasional brute male, lowered their eyes. She had made a joke or game of it in the beginning; a pocket-mirror might have explained, but vanity hadn’t sold her one; she had ended by accepting the lowered eyes as part of the inevitable situation.

  One of her young men – Gary, was it? or Barry? had come out with the accusation, ‘You’ve got some idea, Liss, that you can make everyone dip their lights. Well, we’re bloody well not going to dip.’

  At first she hadn’t been conscious of the effect she had on others, except on the anonymous night faces. So she had laughed at the accusation, and the young man, the Barry or Gary her friend, hadn’t been able to avoid lowering his eyes, if only for an instant.

  All the young men and girls of her new acquaintance, whom she attempted so earnestly, at least in the beginning, to imitate, had similar names and interchangeable bodies. They were happiest in clusters on floors in a state of euphoria she found touching and enviable. She longed to conform, at the same time to illuminate their rather sleazy faces with some revelation of the love they believed in but couldn’t discover. Once or twice she had gone so far as to turn on with them, and take art in their childlike, almost sexless rituals. She must have been the only one who remained distinct: a menace in fact; some of them, on recognizing an outline which refused to melt into their common blur, started abusing her. There was nothing she could do about it. She was incapable of laying down her will in their field of flowers, or of calming their fear that she might engu
lf them in a flow of lava which would petrify their bliss.

  She herself couldn’t at first accept that frightening, still partly dormant, cone of her own will.

  It was on this night of suspended rain that it began erupting, not for the first, but for the second time. It was on this night too, that she faced, or began to accept, the other occasion. As she walked along the hillside, any of the pompous houses dumped there over the years would have opened to her if she had willed it; but she postponed the enjoyment of her strength till unable to resist a house not unlike their own in its ugly splendour and convinced inviolacy.

  A porch lamp had been left burning to show the occupants were away from home.

  One small stone, a splatter of glass, and her hand easily turned the catch. She hitched herself over the sill, and at once identified the familiar flannel smell of such houses at night. At first she went, not so much cautiously as experimentally, through the living-rooms: casually knocking on a goblet to hear it ring; gently enough, kicking a silly little footstool. There was the portrait of a woman in a fashionable dress no longer fashionable, smiling the smile of success and riches. Furniture overwhelmed an originally enormous room; for the moment you no more than combed the flesh-coloured upholstery with your nails, as an initiation.

  A second rich room smelt of male and leather. She lit a cheroot for company. She straddled a leather arm to inspect the prints of horses, calendars, paper knives, books of reference, bottles, and other aids to masculine authority. Then she spat out on the carpet a shred of the tobacco which was making her feel sick. Supposing she was? She would have liked to be.

  The rooms upstairs, because more private, seemed even more relinquished. They were also uglier, in that fantasies of youth and sex dangled in the wardrobes and clung to the muslin skirts of a dressing-table. In the hollow of a double bed a boy and a girl doll were entwined in a sawdust impersonation of lovers.

  Throughout the house there were the sounds of furniture, and clocks, and silence.

  So she began to revel in it. She lay down and rolled on a frizzed-out sheepskin rug till clouds of powder started her coughing. She bent a feathered mule double, and shot it at an alabaster shade which reacted like a donged gong. After disposing of the limp dolls she trampled on the great bed, up to the ankles in its blonde buttocks and breasts; the satin skin was easily ripped off. She turned her back on a photograph she would investigate, but later, and more seriously. Drawers and cupboards collaborated with the sheepskin rug to give her the secrets of the big powdery woman in the portrait below: because they were of little interest, in their trite luxury, and occasional grubbiness, and anxious hankering after sex, she let them fall with indifference. They flopped and lay, or skidded with metallic explosions into corners. A book of art photographs must have broken its spine: it looked so collapsed, exposed and passive; she ground a heel into the Twenty-Seventh Position of Love.

  She made a quick tour of several smaller rooms filled with the toys, the trophies and aspirations of youths, or boy-men: pennants; silver-plated cups; rows of footballers promoting their own muscles; sheets of technicolour girls, heavily mammiferous.

  Bursting into the bathroom she flung a cast-iron athlete at the mirror with shattering results: it was her own head transfixed at the centre of the crystal web. She might have stripped herself, and stretched out in the receptive bath, and experienced all kinds of guiltily voluptuous embrasses, if there had been time; but there wasn’t.

  She remembered the photograph in Florentine-style art-leather on the dressing-table of the master bedroom: the face of the man, the master, the owner of the woman, for whom his features would have grown too familiar to be any longer meaningful.

  She went running back her leather suit slightly gasping along the landing. She was longing to eat to devour something meat after a surfeit of Turkish delight.

  Snatching up the photograph from its place on the frilly dressing-table, she held it unnaturally close, as though her distended nostrils craved the rich, masculine scents of all such faces: of shaving lotion, brilliantine, alcohol, tobacco, which intermittently disguise the ranker smell of natural hide.

  God I look a starving imbecile! She saw herself glance up from her meal; for that was what it had become: a feast of prime beef.

  But the unconscious man continued smiling back at her out of the photograph, the smile in which he had been set for ever, from above the inscription, in the language of executive chivalry,

  To Darl

  with love and nibbles

  from

  Harvey

  ‘You look a real Harvey,’ she muttered; while he continued smiling at each and every Darl.

  In the end she was forced to break the glass protecting the expertly shaven smile of all soft, fleshy, successful men. The smile she tore like pasteboard. All men were soft.

  And Darl: her most personal attributes, like brushes, scent-sprays, a half-open powder box, were easily scattered; the frilly skirt yanked off the dressing-table, gave away the bandy, reproduction legs.

  To hear the sound of your own breathing can breed a kind of lust.

  So she began to run hurtle down the thundering stairs might have crashed if she hadn’t been holding so tightly to the knife at her waist (What’s it for? That’s my shark-knife; I carry it for emergencies) the bone handle tightly clutched helped her recover her balance her scattered thoughts.

  On arrival at the bottom she walked firmly, soberly, in what must be the direction of the kitchen, to satisfy her next need. She came back. She began smearing Portrait of Darl: first the floury face with its twin patches of triumphant rouge, then the floral chiffon torso, then the face again, for luck – with raspberry jam. Darl was outrouged.

  Some of the flesh-coloured chairs she smeared. And Harvey’s tooled-leather desk-top; though here, crimson was lost on crimson. She would have liked – frankly – to smear Harvey’s desk with shit; only there wasn’t any.

  Instead she took her knife. The desk-top turned the blow: might have broken her raspberry-spattered bloody wrist. The chairs gave more easily: like the flesh of big soft smiling and finally frightened men. Darl’s skin in peach-toned satin was hardly worth the trouble; but the leather pretensions of men were a different matter.

  Riding their thick thighs, still slashing, jerking with her free hand at the reins, sawing at the mouth which held the bit, she was to some extent vindicated, if guiltily racked by the terrible spasms which finally took possession of her.

  She fell back in the leather arms, half expecting Mummy to walk through the door with that look on her face: Mummy wanting her own little girl whom not even Daddy must sponge.

  She lay there only half credulous of what was after its fashion a consummation.

  She had not been frightened the night the prowler, not really, not from the very beginning. Certainly the unexpectedness of it made her lie rigid; but she wasn’t afraid; she wouldn’t have been afraid if he had stuck the knife, as you read they do; but he didn’t.

  He climbed in clumsily, not to say noisily, almost tripped by his own shoe on the sill: like some amateur. There were bits of the performance where he showed himself to be more experienced: he was adept, for instance, at twitching back the sheet. Then he was getting down beside her. It was so natural. As it was what she had always been expecting, she now realized, she turned her face towards that side of the dark from which his eyes must be looking at her. She was ready to grapple with him in the glorious but exacting game in which she had never taken part, only rehearsed move by move in the most secret reaches of her mind, knuckles cracking, their legs plaited together into a single, strong rope. Then, according to the rules, she would dare him with her wordless mouth to plunge deeper. She would feel his strength depending on her, and whenever it hesitated, she would urge him on with her most pervasive kiss to scale other peaks of her choosing. It was she who would ordain the death thrust.

  So she kept her face turned towards her desired intruder; and waited for the first move; while h
is sandshoes, through which she could feel the shape of his toes, stubbed her naked feet, and the rather greasy surface of his jeans caught at Mummy’s present of a ‘lovely nightie’.

  It would only be a matter of instants before he opened the attack; but as she waited, a sick, sour, miserable smell, or suspicion, began to drift against her expectations: what if, after all, it wasn’t a trial of strength, but an outrage by impotence?

  She put out her hands. She took his arms: they had the feel of damp plumage over bones. Only then he began slobbering her mouth with taut lips which smelt of dripping. He bit into her cheek with what she visualized as little jagged decalcified teeth.

  She was so shocked she punched the mouth and his head dropped hissing on her pillow.

  It was such an intolerable situation she nearly upset the lamp reaching out to switch it on. It righted itself. It clicked.

  The head on the pillow was moaning. She saw a blue stubble, open on what she had rightly guessed were small, pointed, decalcified teeth. A smell of decay shot out of the open mouth.

  Her sense of dedication was affronted by such an unsavoury votary. ‘What do you expect to get?’ she hectored, ‘crawling in like some kind of insect – and so bloody clumsily!’

  He turned his face away from her, as though to suggest the glare from the lamp was too much for his eyes. Though she was addressing him in a louder than normal voice, he might have been pretending she didn’t exist.

  ‘What!’ It wasn’t a question. ‘Oh, I know you do get it. You savage some feeble hysterical creature, or frightened schoolgirl, or half-paralysed old woman. I shouldn’t be asking you: I read the papers.’

  Still he didn’t answer. In the silence they were making together she thought she heard the movements of his eyelids.

  ‘If one didn’t know, it would be difficult to believe.’ The recoiled intruder suddenly filled her with a great rage. ‘Even if I’d wanted you, you wouldn’t have been capable. You’re too – mingy!’