The Cockatoos

by Patrick White

  At weekends her husband usually came in, and when she wasn’t needed in the shop, they lay on the bed in her upstairs room, listening to the corrugated iron and the warping whitewashed weatherboard. She would have loved to do something for him, but in his distress he complained about ‘wet kisses’. It surprised her. She had always been afraid he might find her a bit too dry in her show of affection.

  Those years at the ‘Dixie Cafe’ certainly dried her up. She got those freckly patches and seams in her skin in spite of the lotions used as directed. Not that it matters so much in anyone born plain. Perhaps her plainness helped her save. There was never a day when she didn’t study her savings-book, it became her favourite recreation.

  Royal, on the other hand, wasn’t the type that dries up, being fleshier, and dark. He even put on weight out at the grazing property, where they soon thought the world of him. When the young ladies were short of a man for tennis the book-keeper was often invited, and to a ball once at the homestead. He was earning good money, and he too saved a bit, though his instincts weren’t as mean as hers. For instance, he fancied a choice cigar. In his youth Royal was a natty dresser.

  Sometimes the young ladies, if they decided to inspect the latest at Ryan’s Emporium, or Mr Philup, if he felt like grogging up with the locals, would drive him in, and as he got out they would look funny at the book-keeper’s wife they had heard about, they must have, serving out the plates of frizzled steak and limp chips. Royal always waited to see his employers drive off before coming in.

  In spite of the savings, this might have gone on much longer than it did if old Mr Natwick hadn’t died. It appeared he had been a very prudent man. He left them a nice little legacy. The evening of the news, Royal was driven in by Mr Philup and they had a few at the Imperial. Afterwards the book-keeper was dropped off, because he proposed to spend the night with his wife and catch the early train to attend his father’s funeral.

  They lay in the hot little room and discussed the future. She had never felt so hectic. Royal got the idea he would like to develop a grocery business in one of the posh outer suburbs of Sydney. ‘Interest the monied residents in some of the luxury lines. Appeal to the imagination as well as the stomach.’

  She was impressed, of course, but not as much as she should have been. She wasn’t sure, but perhaps she was short on imagination. Certainly their prospects had made her downright feverish, but for no distinct, sufficient reason.

  ‘And have a baby.’ She heard her own unnatural voice.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘We could start a baby.’ Her voice grew word by word drier.

  ‘There’s no reason why we couldn’t have a baby. Or two.’ He laughed. ‘But starting a new life isn’t the time to start a baby.’ He dug her in the ribs. ‘And you the practical one!’

  She agreed it would be foolish, and presently Royal fell asleep.

  What could she do for him? As he lay there breathing she would have loved to stroke his nose she could see faintly in the light from the window. Again unpractical, she would have liked to kiss it. Or bite it suddenly off.

  She was so disgusted with herself she got creaking off the bed and walked flat across the boards to the washstand and swallowed a couple of Aspros to put her solidly to sleep.

  All their life together she had to try in some way to make amends to Royal, not only for her foolishness, but for some of the thoughts that got into her head. Because she hadn’t the imagination, the thoughts couldn’t have been her own. They must have been put into her.

  It was easier of course in later life, after he had cracked up, what with his hernia, and heart, and the artheritis taking over. Fortunately she was given the strength to help him into the wheel-chair, and later still, to lift, or drag him up on the pillows and over, to rub the bed-sores, and stick the pan under him. But even during the years at Sarsaparilla she could make amends in many little ways, though with him still in his prime, naturally he mustn’t know of them. So all her acts were mostly for her own self-gratification.

  The store at Sarsaparilla, if it didn’t exactly flourish, gave them a decent living. She had her problems, though. Some of the locals just couldn’t accept that Royal was a superior man. Perhaps she had been partly to blame, she hardly dared admit it, for showing one or two ‘friends’ the photo of the family home in Kent. She couldn’t resist telling the story of one of the aunts, Miss Ethel Natwick, who followed her brother to New South Wales. Ethel was persuaded to accept a situation at Government House, but didn’t like it and went back, in spite of the Governor’s lady insisting she valued Ethel as a close personal friend. When people began to laugh at Royal on account of his auntie and the family home, as you couldn’t help finding out in a place like Sarsaparilla, it was her, she knew, it was her to blame. It hurt her deeply.

  Of course Royal could be difficult. Said stockbrokers had no palate and less imagination. Royal said no Australian grocer could make a go of it if it wasn’t for flour, granulated sugar, and tomato sauce. Some of the customers turned nasty in retaliation. This was where she could help, and did, because Royal was out on delivery more often than not. It embarrassed her only when some of them took it for granted she was on their side. As if he wasn’t her husband. Once or twice she had gone out crying afterwards, amongst the wormy wattles and hens’ droppings. Anyone across the gully could have heard her blowing her nose behind the store, but she didn’t care. Poor Royal.

  There was that Mr Ogburn said, ‘A selfish, swollen-headed slob who’ll chew you up and swallow you down.’ She wouldn’t let herself hear any more of what he had to say. Mr Ogburn had a hare-lip, badly sewn, opening and closing. There was nothing frightened her so much as even a well-disguised harelip. She got the palpitations after the scene with Mr Ogburn.

  Not that there was anything wrong with her.

  She only hadn’t had the baby. It was her secret grief on black evenings as she walked slowly looking for the eggs a flighty hen might have hid in the bracken.

  Dr Bamforth said, looking at the nib of his fountain pen, ‘You know, don’t you, it’s sometimes the man?’

  She didn’t even want to hear, let alone think about it. In any case she wouldn’t tell Royal, because a man’s pride could be so easily hurt.

  After they had sold out at Sarsaparilla and come to live at what they called ‘Coota’ on the Parramatta Road, it was both easier and more difficult, because if they were not exactly elderly they were getting on. Royal used to potter about in the beginning, while taking care, on account of the hernia and his heart. There was the business of the lawn-mowing, not that you could call it lawn, but it was what she had. She loved her garden. In front certainly there was only the two square of rather sooty grass which she would keep in order with the push-mower. The lawn seemed to get on Royal’s nerves until the artheritis took hold of him. He had never liked mowing. He would lean against the veranda post, and shout, ‘Don’t know why we don’t do what they’ve done down the street. Root the stuff out. Put down a green concrete lawn.’

  ‘That would be copying,’ she answered back.

  She hoped it didn’t sound stubborn. As she pushed the mower she bent her head, and smiled, waiting for him to cool off. The scent of grass and a few clippings flew up through the traffic fumes reminding you of summer.

  While Royal shuffled along the veranda and leaned against another post. ‘Or pebbles. You can buy clean, river pebbles. A few plastic shrubs, and there’s the answer.’

  He only gave up when his trouble forced him into the chair. You couldn’t drive yourself up and down a veranda shouting at someone from a wheel-chair without the passers-by thinking you was a nut. So he quietened.

  He watched her, though. From under the peak of his cap. Because she felt he might still resent her mowing the lawn, she would try to reassure him as she pushed. ‘What’s wrong, eh? While I still have me health, me strength – I was always what they call wiry – why shouldn’t I cut the grass?’

  She would come and sit beside him, to keep
him company in watching the traffic, and invent games to amuse her invalid husband.

  ‘Isn’t that the feller we expect?’ she might ask. ‘The one that passes at five-twenty,’ looking at her watch, ‘in the old pink-and-brown Holden?’

  They enjoyed their snort of amusement all the better because no one else knew the reason for it.

  Once when the traffic was particularly dense, and that sort of chemical smell from one of the factories was thickening in the evening air, Royal drew her attention. ‘Looks like he’s got something on his mind.’

  Could have too. Or it might have been the traffic block. The way he held his hands curved listlessly around the inactive wheel reminded her of possums and monkeys she had seen in cages. She shifted a bit. Her squeaky old chair. She felt uneasy for ever having found the man, not a joke, but half of one.

  Royal’s chair moved so smoothly on its rubber-tyred wheels it was easy to push him, specially after her practice with the mower. There were ramps where necessary now, to cover steps, and she would sometimes wheel him out to the back, where she grew hollyhock and sunflower against the palings, and a vegetable or two on raised beds.

  Royal would sit not looking at the garden from under the peak of his cap.

  She never attempted to take him down the shady side, between them and Dolans, because the path was narrow from plants spilling over, and the shade might have lowered his spirits.

  She loved her garden.

  The shady side was where she kept her staghorn ferns, and fishbones, and the pots of maidenhair. The water lay sparkling on the maidenhair even in the middle of the day. In the blaze of summer the light at either end of the tunnel was like you were looking through a sheet of yellow cellophane, but as the days shortened, the light deepened to a cold, tingling green, which might have made a person nervous who didn’t know the tunnel by heart.

  Take Mrs Dolan the evening she came in to ask for the loan of a cupful of sugar. ‘You gave me a shock, Mrs Natwick. What ever are you up to?’

  ‘Looking at the plants,’ Mrs Natwick answered, whether Mrs Dolan would think it peculiar or not.

  It was the season of cinerarias, which she always planted on that side, it was sheltered and cold-green. The wind couldn’t bash the big spires and umbrellas of blue and purple. Visiting cats were the only danger, messing and pouncing. She disliked cats for the smell they left, but didn’t have the heart to disturb their elastic forms curled at the cineraria roots, exposing their colourless pads, and sometimes pink, swollen teats. Blushing only slightly for it, she would stand and examine the details of the sleeping cats.

  If Royal called she could hear his voice through the window. ‘Where’uv you got to, Ella?’

  After he was forced to take to his bed, his voice began to sort of dry up like his body. There were times when it sounded less like a voice than a breath of drowsiness or pain.

  ‘Ella?’ he was calling. ‘I dropped the paper. Where are yer all this time? You know I can’t pick up the paper.’

  She knew. Guilt sent her scuttling to him, deliberately composing her eyes and mouth so as to arrive looking cheerful.

  ‘I was in the garden,’ she confessed, ‘looking at the cinerarias.’

  ‘The what?’ It was a name Royal could never learn.

  The room was smelling of sickness and the bottles standing on odd plates.

  ‘It fell,’ he complained.

  She picked up the paper as quick as she could.

  ‘Want to go la-la first?’ she asked, because by now he depended on her to raise him and stick the pan under.

  But she couldn’t distract him from her shortcomings; he was shaking the paper at her. ‘Haven’t you lived with me long enough to know how to treat a newspaper?’

  He hit it with his set hand, and certainly the paper looked a mess, like an old white battered brolly.

  ‘Mucked up! You gotter keep the pages aligned. A paper’s not readable otherwise. Of course you wouldn’t understand because you don’t read it, without it’s to see who’s died.’ He began to cough.

  ‘Like me to bring you some Bovril?’ she asked him as tenderly as she knew.

  ‘Bovril’s the morning,’ he coughed.

  She knew that, but wanted to do something for him.

  After she had rearranged the paper she walked out so carefully it made her go lopsided, out to the front veranda. Nothing would halt the traffic, not sickness, not death even.

  She sat with her arms folded, realizing at last how they were aching.

  ‘He hasn’t been,’ she had to call after looking at her watch.

  ‘Who?’ she heard the voice rustling back.

  ‘The gentleman in the pink Holden.’

  She listened to the silence, wondering whether she had done right.

  When Royal called back, ‘Could’uv had a blow-out.’ Then he laughed. ‘Could’uv stopped to get grogged up.’ She heard the frail rustling of the paper. ‘Or taken an axe to somebody like they do nowadays.’

  She closed her eyes, whether for Royal, or what she remembered of the man sitting in the Holden.

  Although it was cold she continued watching after dark. Might have caught a chill, when she couldn’t afford to. She only went inside to make the bread-and-milk Royal fancied of an evening.

  She watched most attentively, always at the time, but he didn’t pass, and didn’t pass.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The gentleman in the Holden.’

  ‘Gone on holiday.’ Royal sighed, and she knew it was the point where a normal person would have turned over, so she went to turn him.

  One morning she said on going in, ‘Fancy, I had a dream, it was about that man! He was standing on the side path alongside the cinerarias. I know it was him because of his funny-shaped head.’

  ‘What happened in the dream?’ Royal hadn’t opened his eyes yet; she hadn’t helped him in with his teeth.

  ‘I dunno,’ she said, ‘it was just a dream.’

  That wasn’t strictly truthful, because the Holden gentleman had looked at her, she had seen his eyes. Nothing was spoken, though.

  ‘It was a sort of red and purple dream. That was the cinerarias,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t dream. You don’t when you don’t sleep. Pills aren’t sleep.’

  She was horrified at her reverberating dream. ‘Would you like a nice soft-boiled egg?’

  ‘Eggs all have a taste.’

  ‘But you gotter eat something!’

  On another morning she told him – she could have bitten off her tongue – she was stupid, stupid, ‘I had a dream.’

  ‘What sort of dream?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘a silly one. Not worth telling. I dreamed I dropped an egg on the side path, and it turned into two. Not two. A double-yolker.’

  She never realized Royal was so much like Mrs Natwick. It was as she raised him on his pillows. Or he had got like that in his sickness. Old men and old women were not unlike.

  ‘Wasn’t that a silly one?’ she coaxed.

  Every evening she sat on the front veranda and watched the traffic as though Royal had been beside her. Looked at her watch. And turned her face away from the steady-flowing stream. The way she bunched her small chest she could have had a sour breath mounting in her throat. Sometimes she had, it was nervousness.

  When she went inside she announced, ‘He didn’t pass.’

  Royal said – he had taken to speaking from behind his eyelids, ‘Something muster happened to ’im. He didn’t go on holiday. He went and died.’

  ‘Oh, no! He wasn’t of an age!’

  At once she saw how stupid she was, and went out to get the bread-and-milk.

  She would sit at the bedside, almost crouching against the edge of the mattress, because she wanted Royal to feel she was close, and he seemed to realize, though he mostly kept his eyelids down.

  Then one evening she came running, she felt silly, her calves felt silly, her voice, ‘He’s come! At five-twenty! In a new cream Holden!’


  Royal said without opening his eyes, ‘See? I said ’e’d gone on holiday.’

  More than ever she saw the look of Mrs Natwick.

  Now every evening Royal asked, ‘Has he been, Ella?’

  Trying not to make it sound irritable or superior, she would answer, ‘Not yet. It’s only five.’

  Every evening she sat watching, and sometimes would turn proud, arching her back, as she looked down from the veranda. The man was so small and ordinary.

  She went in on one occasion, into the more than electric light, lowering her eyelids against the dazzle. ‘You know, Royal, you could feel prouder of men when they rode horses. As they looked down at yer from under the brim of their hats. Remember that hat you used to wear? Riding in to Cootramundra?’

  Royal died quietly that same year before the cinerarias had folded, while the cold westerlies were still blowing; the back page of the Herald was full of those who had been carried off. She was left with his hand, already set, in her own. They hadn’t spoken, except about whether she had put out the garbage.

  Everybody was very kind. She wouldn’t have liked to admit it was enjoyable being a widow. She sat around for longer than she had ever sat, and let the dust gather. In the beginning acquaintances and neighbours brought her little presents of food: a billy-can of giblet soup, moulded veal with hard-boiled egg making a pattern in the jelly, cakes so dainty you couldn’t taste them. But when she was no longer a novelty they left off coming. She didn’t care any more than she cared about the dust. Sometimes she would catch sight of her face in the glass, and was surprised to see herself looking so calm and white.

  Of course she was calm. The feeling part of her had been removed. What remained was a slack, discardable eiderdown. Must have been the pills Doctor gave.